In which the Caterist and Major Mitchell are on a war footing ...

 

The reptiles are intent on ignoring the real villains for the current world-wide crisis, King Donald and his minions, and those who encouraged him in his folly, such as the Emeritus Chairman ...

Instead there was the chance for a crowing amidst the carnage ...

The reptiles also dropped the pastie Hastie off the front page, and you had to head to another place to read the likes of Hastie’s truth bombs on tax and war will rattle the Liberal Party (*intermittent archive link)

...On foreign affairs, Hastie has gone where no major party politician has gone: admitting Donald Trump’s war in Iran represented a “huge miscalculation”. Hastie proves that one can hold this view at the same time as retaining a disdain for the theocratic butchers of Tehran.
The war would dent American prestige and cast doubt on the president’s judgment, Hastie said, plunging Australia into a new, truly multipolar era in which military and economic self-sufficiency will be crucial.
The effect of Hastie’s interview, which came after weeks of outspoken interventions, will accelerate the conversation about the potential upside of a Hastie-led Liberal Party.

Or you could turn to the source, the ABC, Andrew Hastie says Iran war a 'huge miscalculation' by Donald Trump

Or The Conversation, Andrew Hastie calls out Trump’s war strategy

Where's the bromancer when he's needed to repent and recalibrate? Where's Lord Downer, in his finery, high heels and stockings, ready to explain it all away?

What reptile dared to stand up with the hastie pasty, gone wild-eyed rogue?

None.

Instead it was left to hapless Geoff to chamber a round on the extreme far right ...

Anthony Albanese faces his worst year yet as Andrew Hastie looms as a future Liberal Party leader
There are two big questions that will be answered ahead of the 2028 election: will Anthony Albanese run for a historic third term and will Andrew Hastie make his move on Angus Taylor?
By Geoff Chambers

Sublimely, the chambering managed to avoid any mention of King Donald's war as he contemplated that rogue pasty Hastie...

...Taylor has done a solid job to date.
The Coalition’s primary vote in Newspoll is up, the Opposition Leader has narrowed the gap to an increasingly unpopular Prime Minister and the popular vote for One Nation appears to have plateaued.
The challenge for Taylor and his senior team is to keep out of their own way and ensure they don’t give Labor easy ways out.
The fuel excise policy intervention, which recycled one of Peter Dutton’s election losing ideas, was not needed.
While plenty of Australians would like cheaper petrol, the issue right now is finding fuel.
The Coalition needs to better understand when to intervene and when to not.
The Albanese government is under massive pressure.
Similar to the pandemic, the opposition should attack the government’s mistakes while not providing ammunition for Labor or One Nation.
Despite returning to shadow cabinet, Hastie on Sunday showed he will not be muzzled and will continue to speak his mind on whatever issue he chooses, even if it is contrary to formal Coalition policy.
Hastie’s intervention, which included being open to increasing taxes on the gas industry and clamping down on capital gains tax discounts and negative gearing, will be weaponised by Labor during the final parliamentary sitting week before the Easter break and the federal budget.
Taylor needs to keep his team on the same page.

The oil crisis has magically turned up out of nowhere - likely greenies are to blame - and the team just has to stay solid, and ssshh, don't mention the war.

This was the one disassociated mention of the war in that feeble Chambering ...

The Iran war and its associated impacts will fundamentally alter Treasury’s forecasts and the nation’s economic outlook.

You don't say, Sherlock ...

What a pity you were completely clueless about who caused it, and it was left to the pastie Hastie to bell that cat (yes, even broken clocks ...)

Naturally, the careening, cratering Crater was an astute diviner of the real reasons for the crisis, up there with his analysis of flood waters in quarries.

The header: Labor has turned its back on real victims of this oil shock; The party’s natural constituency is no longer those who drive the economy, but those who interpret it.

The caption for the opening snap? Sorry, there was none. Yet again the reptiles forgot to tag it, but no matter, the gesticulating man looks incredibly sinister and is likely a villain.

Ironies never cease, and reptile mischief makers abound, and so it was that prize blatherer, that "interpreter" braying about "those who interpret it", who spent four minutes blaming everyone but King Donald ...

A minister’s diary clash can tell us more about a government’s true priorities than a thousand scripted answers in question time. Last week, the Energy Minister assured the House that the government had been working tirelessly with state governments and industry to alleviate the effects of the fuel crisis.
Yet Chris Bowen’s decision to skip the last national cabinet to attend informal net-zero discussions with Pacific climate ministers suggests his mind is elsewhere. Bowen prioritised attending an open-ended talkfest about the energy system of the future over addressing the crisis in the energy system we actually have.
As we enter the fifth week of the war against Iran, Bowen maintains that all is quiet on the western front. He says fuel reserves remain strong and more is on the way. Australia’s two refineries “are working absolutely full pelt”, he told ABC Insiders last week. He insists we have the same, if not slightly more, petrol and diesel in Australia than before the crisis began.
Yet his narrative jars with the mood on the Metro filling station forecourt on Hoxton Park Rd in western Sydney, where motorists were lining up last week to top up their tanks at $2.50 a litre.
Bowen calls this panic buying. Yet, with fuel prices rising week by week, others might call it prudence. Motorists are doing exactly what rapid inflation encourages: buying earlier, buying more often and avoiding exposure to higher prices.

Just remember the advantages of EVs, and renewables, the pond suggests, as the reptiles did manage to tag the next snap, Anthony Albanese holds a press briefing about the fuel crisis with Chris Bowen in Sydney. Picture: Jeremy Piper

Inevitably the Caterist was all in on fomenting hysteria, and panic - that's what flood waters in quarries diviners do best ...

On Thursday afternoon in question time, the Energy Minister was challenged about the rising level of bowser anxiety by the member for Lindsay, Melissa McIntosh, who raised the plight of Shane from Penrith.
“The way things are going, I won’t be able to afford to go to work,” Shane said. “It’s either pay the bills and starve or eat and not pay the bills.”
Bowen appeared unmoved. He insisted the government could not be blamed for rising oil prices and referred Shane to the state government app that gives real-time service station prices.
Not for the first time, the Albanese government has fallen into the trap of mistaking the mood in inner-city coffee shops for that of the country as a whole.
In Erskineville, in Sydney’s inner west, for example, public transport and cycle paths are so plentiful that a quarter of households don’t bother to own a car.
Normal life is impossible in the outer suburbs without a car. That’s why three out of five households in Penrith go to the expense of owning two or more vehicles compared to one out of five households in Erskineville.
Nine out of 10 people who travel to work in Penrith use a car. On average, they travel further to work, and a few enjoy the luxury of paying for fuel with a company credit card. The effects of the fuel crisis are deeply regressive. It is punishing the working poor in outer-suburban districts far harder than households with higher incomes in more fashionable suburbs.
The government’s response to rising fuel prices has been to wash its hands of responsibility, blaming international markets and hinting at fuel company price gouging.
There is no evidence whatsoever of predatory behaviour by retailers, nor would there likely be in a fiercely competitive market where a range of independent companies competes aggressively on price.

Roll that one around on your tongue again, and enjoy the Menzies Research Centre flavour ...

There is no evidence whatsoever of predatory behaviour by retailers, nor would there likely be in a fiercely competitive market where a range of independent companies competes aggressively on price.

And so to the wretch himself, thankfully reduced to a screen cap, Menzies Research Centre Senior Fellow Nick Cater says Australians are seeing political figures as taking the public for “granted”. “These revelations about Anika Wells and others in the party,” Mr Cater said. “They think the political class are taking them for granted.”

Time to bash renewables and alternatives such as home batteries ...

Indeed, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s latest weekly survey shows retail margins have contracted strongly since February. In Melbourne, for example, the average retail price of 176.1 cents a litre for regular unleaded on February 20 was 24c a litre, more than the average terminal gate price. Last week, with the average price at 250.8, the retailer’s mark-up was just 2.3 cents per litre.
The biggest price component beyond the Singapore benchmark, which was around $1.07 on Friday, is fuel excise duty and GST.
Opposition Leader Angus Taylor’s proposal to halve fuel excise duty for three months would cut the pump price overnight by around 26c a litre. Taylor also announced a 50 per cent reduction in the Heavy Vehicle Road User Charge to assist the transport industry.
The Treasurer will be reluctant to cut revenue, but Taylor has helped him by identifying commensurate cuts: scrapping the electric vehicle fringe benefits tax exemption, slashing green hydrogen projects and freezing the home battery scheme, which offers consumers an attractive 30 per cent subsidy.
In a rational world, these cuts would be uncontroversial. The FBT exemption is transparently a tax cut for the rich, the kind of measure to which the Labor Party would once have been resolutely opposed.
The generosity of the home battery subsidy has made it wildly popular. The cost blew out to $7.2bn in less than six months, triple its initial budget. Once again, it is an example of government largesse to the already privileged: homeowners wealthy enough to install solar panels on their roofs and with enough spare capital or borrowing capacity to bear the upfront costs while amortising the returns over time.

Poor beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way, struggling to stay relevant as the pastie Hastie made his play ...Angus Taylor proposed to halve fuel excise duty for three months. Picture: Martin Ollman

And so to a rousing 'oils is oils' climax ...

Handing out any more green hydrogen subsidies would be plain silly when no one in the private sector has been able to assemble a viable business case.
Yet none of these cuts would be easy for Bowen, who remains fixated by the real energy crisis, not a shortage of fuel but an excess of emissions.
Labor once understood itself as a party of material interests: wages, prices, the universal provision of health and education. Its instincts were shaped by the pressures of everyday life, with particular concern for the downtrodden and dispossessed.
Those old-fashioned socialist instincts have dulled. In their place is a politics more concerned with systems than outcomes and the future rather than the present. Its natural constituency is no longer those who drive the economy, but those who interpret it.
The party has become remote – and not a little disdainful – of the people who grow things, make things, import and distribute things. All of which, inconveniently, require energy in real time, not 30 years hence.
The oil crisis gives the government a chance to recalibrate, to acknowledge the limits of current assumptions and the indispensability of hydrocarbons. It is an opportunity that will almost certainly be squandered.

Indeed, indeed ... but credit where credit is due ...

Major Mitchell was also on a war footing ...

The header: Outright hostility to Donald Trump and Israel colours media’s reporting of Iran war; Analysis of the war should not gloss over miscalculations by the US and Israel. Equally, the rush to doomsday pessimism undermines journalism’s credibility.

The caption: Bulk carriers sit anchored at Muscat anchorage in Oman. Picture: Getty Images

The Major spent a bigly five minutes filing and filling his report for the Australian Daily Zionist News, but before beginning, the pond did wonder if that correspondent's suggestion that he matched up with Colonel Blimp was in any way fair ...

Probably not, though that bird skewed the 'mo sample ...

And so to the Major doing his best to defend King Donald, his minions, and above all, the current government of Israel's quest for a greater Israel, and never mind a little ethnic cleansing...

Much of the world’s media seems happy to publish instant criticism of every statement by US President Donald Trump.
The Nine papers in Australia, most commercial broadcasters and the ABC last week reported Iran’s denials that it was negotiating with Trump, based on statements from Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and the speaker of its parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.
The Iranians would say that. Several layers of the regime have been eliminated and it is unlikely anyone privately talking to the US via intermediaries would admit to it given what the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps might do to them.
Journalists don’t realise the regime paranoia triggered by Trump’s claims Iran was “desperate for a deal” could actually help the US.
As Mehdi Parpanchi, executive editor at US-based Iran International TV, wrote on Tuesday on Substack, the US President’s statement “is already producing an outcome Trump wants: psychological pressure inside Tehran and calmer energy markets outside it”.
As The Wall Street Journal argued on Wednesday, Iran’s regime had plenty of incentive “to deny, deny, deny and keep markets roiled”.
Yet by Tuesday morning it was already clear Pakistan was involved in brokering a deal with Iran. Egypt and Turkey were helping.
The Gulf states were pressuring Iran. Saudi Arabia’s leader, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and the UAE said they wanted the war to continue.

At this point the reptiles slipped in a snap of a journalist butcher, just the sort of man the Major loves quoting, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman. Picture: AAP

The Major kept on with his padding ...

UAE ambassador to the US Yousef Al Otaiba wrote in the WSJ: “We need a decisive outcome that addresses the full spectrum of Iran’s threats: nuclear capabilities, missiles, drones, proxy networks and disruptions to international shipping routes.”
Nine Newspapers’ international editor Peter Hartcher on Tuesday wrote an opinion piece under the headline “Trump has no idea what he is doing”.

Now fair should be fair.

All the links in the next Major gobbet just kept reptile readers inside the lizard Oz hive mind.

There was no link to Hartcher, harumphing Trump has no idea what he's going. Now his hubris has put the world on edge... (*intermittent archive link)

It takes a lot for the pond to admit that the harping Hartcher had a point, but this is was his opening thrust ...

Great powers are prone to great delusions. Vladimir Putin thought he’d defeat Ukraine in three days. The Pentagon believed him. The war is now in its fifth year.
Donald Trump allowed a little extra time for his planned war on Iran. He was confident of defeating the Islamic Republic in four days, according to a credible expert. It’s now halfway through its fourth week.
The war is turning out to be full of surprises for the American president. First, before the war began, his administration assured anxious officials in Turkey that the US-Israeli assault on Iran would be over in four days, says Asli Aydintasbas, a Turkish scholar with the Brookings Institution in Washington.
The administration had convinced itself that if Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei were removed, the entire Iranian regime would collapse in short order: “Trump wanted to carry out a hit-and-run move, and now he is stuck in an open-ended war,” she says.
Trump should not have been surprised. His own peak intelligence adviser had told him not to expect the regime to fall: “A classified report by the National Intelligence Council found that even a large-scale assault on Iran launched by the US would be unlikely to oust the Islamic republic’s entrenched military and clerical establishment,” reports The Washington Post.
The intelligence assessment had been informed by a raft of government experts on Iran. It seems Trump consulted no Iran specialists anywhere inside or outside the government.
Bloomberg, however, reports that he was urged by the well-known authority on Iran, Rupert Murdoch, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to attack Iran. Should we be surprised that the president who advised his population to try injecting bleach to cure COVID also did no homework on going to war?

Nor did the Emeritus Chairman do his homework.

Naturally the Major couldn't mention that little tidbit in his summary ...

Hartcher’s points can be boiled down to Trump underestimating the Iranian regime’s military; Trump rejecting US defence warnings Iran could shut the Strait of Hormuz; and Trump treating with contempt US allies who were not keen to send ships to protect the vital waterway.
Hartcher saw the weekend’s revelation Iran had fired two long-range missiles at Diego Garcia, 4000km away in the Indian Ocean, as a reason the US should be cautious. This column reckons long-range missiles and 400kg of enriched uranium are reasons to hit Iran hard.
And what of the potential for success? What if Iran’s hard line speaker can become a leader the West can deal with?
What if the UK and NATO countries do end up patrolling the Persian Gulf, which they need but Trump does not because the US is self-sufficient in fossil fuels?

What if?

That's the best the Major has got while the world goes to hell in a handbasket, and it will take years for the world to recover from King Donald's deed?

What if the Major is a major twerp and a fool?

Fear always spooks markets, and oil shocks produce the most fear. Fear has been driving reporting about the war rather than action in the region, which was actually slowing before an uptick by Israel late last week when a truce looked possible.
The Jerusalem Post has examined the war’s progress and on Wednesday produced an assessment more sober than reporting in Australia and in the US.
Strikes by the US and Israel on Iranian targets have fallen dramatically, possibly to as few as 240 a day, compared with 1000 a day by both the US and Israel in week one.
There is separate evidence Iranian strikes against Israel, and against the Gulf states, have also fallen, probably because Iran’s launch capabilities have been severely degraded.

The way the reptiles work is always to toss in a billy goat butt ...

Analysis of the war should not gloss over miscalculations by the US and Israel.

But that's always so the butt can be refuted ...

Equally, the rush to doomsday pessimism undermines journalism’s credibility and ignores the plight of ordinary Iranians and the Sunni Gulf States.
If Trump derangement syndrome rules in much of the coverage, outright hostility to Israel’s right to defend itself dominates reporting of its war aims in Lebanon, where Benjamin Netanyahu is determined to drive Iran’s Hezbollah proxy from positions south of the Litani River, perhaps even occupying southern Lebanon.

Sadly the Major has a case of Trump delusion syndrome, accompanied by a severe dose of Zionism, and a seemingly endless devotion to Benji ... Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. speaks during a video released on social media. Picture: X

As always, it's the fault of the cardigan wearers ...

In Australia, much of the reporting treats Israel as an aggressor against Lebanon, even though the Lebanese would like nothing more than to be rid of Hezbollah.
The ABC, like Britain’s BBC, is always on the lookout for innocent Lebanese civilian victims but seems unable to find innocent Israelis affected by Hezbollah rockets across northern Israel.
Remember, 60,000 Israelis had to leave their homes in the country’s north for almost two years before the November 27 2024 truce.
Readers may have seen footage of a journalist being fired on near the Litani River on March 19. He claimed he was being deliberately targeted by the IDF as part of Israel’s war on journalists. It made compelling television.
The reporter, Steve Sweeney, is the Lebanon bureau chief of RT: Russia Today. Australian networks that aired the footage did not say the IDF had specifically warned in advance of that date that it would soon be targeting bridges across the Litani for destruction.

So to the Major's source, and here the pond must do a pre-emptive reference to a wiki for CAMERA...

CAMERA is known for its media monitoring and advocacy. It releases reports to counter what it calls "frequently inaccurate and skewed characterizations of Israel and of events in the Middle East" that it believes may fuel anti-Israel and anti-Jewish prejudice.The group mobilizes protests against what it deems unfair media coverage by issuing full-page ads in newspapers, organizing demonstrations,[and encouraging sponsors to withhold funds.
CAMERA's critics have called it an "extreme Israel advocacy group" and said it is aligned with hawkish right-wing viewpoints, pays stipended fellows to write anti-Palestinian articles, and employs smear and intimidation tactics, routinely targeting media and journalists critical of Israel and pro-Palestinian activists on campuses.

Well yes, you don't get more peak Zionist than the Major, so naturally he was all in ...

Camera, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, said on March 23 that a BBC Verify investigation defending the footage as real failed to mention Sweeney used to write for the pro-Hezbollah outlet Al Mayadeen or that cameraman Ali Rida Sbeity used to work for Hezbollah’s Al Manar TV network.
By last Wednesday, Lebanon had decided to expel the Iranian ambassador. Lebanon’s Prime Minister Nawaf Salam on March 2 demanded Hezbollah disarm.
While Al Jazeera sided with Hezbollah against the ban, Salam told Saudi television on March 22 that Hezbollah’s “rocket fire towards Israel had led to heavy damage in Lebanon and undermined the government’s credibility”, the Times of Israel reported.
Trump is no doubt the most mercurial president the US has ever had. Netanyahu certainly has used the latest conflict to build his domestic popularity ahead of an election later this year.
But these facts do not invalidate the desire of the Arab Gulf States, Israel, Lebanon and long-suffering Iranians for an end to the violence the country’s mullahs have spread throughout the Middle East.
Trump on Wednesday said Iran had offered a precious gift, related to oil and gas.
The Times of Israel on Thursday reported Arab and US sources saying Iran had let some tankers pass through the Strait of Hormuz as a sign of good faith.
As usual, Trump had made too much of a gesture that won’t alleviate high oil prices.

The reptiles decided to fling in a snap of King Donald looking a tad the worse for wear ... US President Donald Trump. Picture: AP

The pond seized the chance to slip in an matching 'toon referencing the old louche libertine...

The Major finally wrapped up ...

Don’t be surprised if Trump offers Iran continued oil sanctions relief, counterbalanced by the threat of 5000 US Marines being sent to take over the Kharg Island oil export facility 640km west of Hormuz if a deal is impossible.
On Friday, Trump extended the deadline on threats to destroy Iran’s energy system to April 6. He was trying to appease markets that on Thursday night (AEST) had their worst trading session since the start of the war.
No journalists know if a truce is possible. Negotiations are more difficult because the regime’s leaders are mainly dead.
The WSJ suggested on March 25 the way ahead may be a temporary truce that opens Hormuz but leaves the tough questions about Iran’s nuclear and missile programs and the longer-term arrangements in the Strait for future negotiation.

Don't be surprised?

The only time the pond will be surprised is if the Major ever stops sounding like the Australian Daily Zionist News.

Then we can turn back to other more gilt-edged and important matters...

And so to a few also rans, who should be noted as reptile contributors, not because the pond cares but because they were there on the Monday morning ...

One was Clive ...

Trump can still turn tide of war back in his favour
The coming weeks will clarify whether Tehran opts for de-escalation and survival or continued defiance.
By Clive Williams

The pond was happy to do a teaser trailer for that intermittent archive link ...

Clive counted as his credentials a role in two of the most astonishing US victories in recent times...

Clive Williams served with the US 173d Airborne Brigade in Vietnam, was an instructor at a US Army school, and was an adviser to the US commander in Afghanistan in 2009 and 2012.

Oh well, if it turns out as well as Afghanistan, Iranians will be sure to rejoice.

Clive was keen to see boots on the ground ...

...After weeks of sustained strikes, US forces hold overwhelming superiority in the air and at sea, and the island could be isolated from reinforcement. Timing appears favourable for rapid execution if ordered: Marine expeditionary forces are en route or arriving imminently.
Trump’s established pattern – issuing ultimatums, allowing brief pauses for negotiation or mediation, then escalating – suggests any decision window could arrive sooner rather than later, though recent extensions indicate diplomacy is still being tested.
Success in securing Kharg and its oil, and reopening the Strait of Hormuz under controlled conditions, could deliver a tangible strategic victory for US and allied interests. Importantly, this would not constitute an open-ended invasion or occupation of mainland Iran. It would represent a limited operation aimed at seizing a key economic chokepoint, protecting global commerce, and reasserting deterrence. Iran would retain the option to avert it through timely capitulation or a viable agreement.

Easy peasy ...

Simplistic Simon was also on hand ...

Forget the oil shock, the pond had a SloMo, liar from the shire shock at the next snap ...Scott Morrison was the last PM to cut the fuel excise in response to the oil supply shock of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Picture: Getty Images

Simplistic Simon quickly began to sound like one of those Monty Python sketches where old stagers tell young pups that things aren't so bad as the days when you got out of your bed at 4 am to enjoy a hearty breakfast of cheap tar. It was a bit of a surprise, given the way that the crackhead Caterist had tried to lather up a panic...

The oil price isn’t even close to the $US147 a barrel for benchmark Brent crude when it peaked in 2008 nor has it yet doubled as it did during the 1979 Iranian revolution in the second oil shock following the OPEC embargo of 1973.
But the context of today’s supply and price shock is different as it’s occurring during an ongoing cycle of pain for households and businesses.
The big story of the past four years that rarely rates a mention anymore is that the domestic economy has grown around 7.5 per cent. This is about the same level at which the population grew over the same period. In other words, GDP per capita has barely moved and GDP per capita has been virtually in recession for most of this period. The only reason GDP per person has stayed the same is because people are now working more hours to keep ahead of their declining standard of living.
The productivity shock across the economy has been profound. In effect, the response from the Albanese government has been to effectively transform a free-market economy to a government-directed one. While living standards have shown signs of finally beginning to lift again – marginally – few people will be feeling it. The current fuel price shock is set to put a torch to that.
It’s true Australia may have lifted slightly on this measure in the OECD rankings; its performance is still about a third of that experienced by comparatively wealthy countries. It is no wonder, then, that for many Australians the surge in fuel prices might feel like the straw that broke the camel’s back. While a temporary fuel price spike is not really a crisis in the same league as those we’ve recently witnessed, such as Covid and the global financial crisis, for many people it may feel like one.

The reptiles kept pumping the gas on the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way, Angus Taylor has called for a temporary cut to the fuel excise. Picture: Martin Ollman;Pauline Hanson was the missing element in the 2008 crisis. Picture: Martin Ollman

Simpleton Simon kept spreading oil on troubled waters ...

Unsurprisingly, Angus Taylor has thrown down the gauntlet of a temporary cut to the fuel excise. While Treasurer Jim Chalmers has said Labor won’t go down this route, Albanese has left the door open. There are plenty of reasons why this is a dumb idea economically but equally good reasons that it is smart politically. It’s a well-worn one by Liberal leaders, starting with John Howard, and an easy one to dust off, considering it was part of the Coalition’s failed policy platform at the last election.
Yet precedent alone is not enough because the underlying circumstances now are different. The opposition has the luxury of not having to deliver it, which makes this a political issue rather than a genuine economic one.
While Scott Morrison was the last to cut the fuel excise in response to the oil supply shock of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it seems we have forgotten the more acute episode just after Kevin Rudd was elected, when the Coalition – this time in opposition – was demanding the same action. There have been many comparisons with today’s experience and that of 1973. But the 2008 oil shock should stand out as the better and more proximate domestic comparison.
There are competing theories on the causes of the 2008 crisis, but the general consensus is that a combination of a cut in supply by Saudi Arabia, a spike in demand from China and rampant price speculation in the commodities futures market saw the price rise to what is still its highest on record, at close to $US150 a barrel.
The cause may differ, but the result is the same. Price shocks at the bowsers. It is estimated that the price rise added almost one percentage point to inflation at the time, which peaked at 4.5 per cent in 2008. A federal by-election was also under way in the seat of Gippsland, with Brendan Nelson leading a demoralised Coalition. Fuel prices were central to the campaign.
Nelson was demanding a cut to fuel excise and proclaiming that fuel prices would be a central issue at the next election. The political dynamic to today’s contest is eerily similar – a fuel price spike, rising inflation, a by-election and a Liberal Party struggling for relevance. With one exception: an absence of Pauline Hanson in 2008.

How dire was this trip down memory lane with the simplistic one? Brendan Nelson and Kevin Rudd had much to ponder in 2008.

That dire, but luckily that was the signal that the final gobbet was on us ...

In a vacuum, what Taylor is proposing and what Albanese is considering would be inflationary. You can almost hear the economists screaming through the double-glazed glass of the Treasury Building windows not to do it. Offsetting the cost with equal or greater spending cuts to other government programs, however, is not. And this is what Taylor is proposing. That those programs he has nominated for a haircut to pay for the $1.5bn cost are those that Labor would never contemplate – such as the EV subsidies – exposes the naked political wedge.
Shovelling money into the economy to favour one affected group, in this case motorists without electric vehicles, while taking money out for others is not an extraordinary concept.
What economists hate, though, is when it becomes so politically tribal that the economics becomes the victim. One side seeks to prop up its own constituency while taking from its opponent’s people.
Had it not been for One Nation, Taylor may not have decided to go down this path as he is now also seeking to get his own people back. Just as Nelson was facing a by-election with fuel as the local concern, so too now is Taylor facing the same battle with a May by-election in Farrer but with a very different opponent.
As economist Chris Richardson has said, Australia has become pretty good at dealing with crises when they arise but appallingly bad at dealing with the chronic problems that cause them.
Enough Australian motorists have seen this horror movie before to know better than to panic. The question is whether there are enough politicians who have learned anything from it.

Did this simplistic analysis have any purpose?

Yes, it served as an introduction to the immortal Rowe ...and the good, gassed-up times ahead ...

Good times down the road for the beefy boofhead, with the sort of grille any reptile would envy ...(the pond denies any resemblance to flying pigs whatsoever).

Meanwhile, in another country ... with a man who confesses he's recovering from a hangover.

By special request, hagiography to the max, Dame Slap grills Dame Beef ...

That shamelessly deceptive header?

t's a joke of course. 

Dame Slap doesn't grill Dame Beef, she waxes lyrical, she swoons at the sight of her, she shows all the passion you might expect in a Heathcliffian romance ...

She is the suck supreme ...

The header: She is Louise Clegg. He is Angus Taylor. She’s not the woman behind the man; Refusing to play the quiet political spouse to Liberal leader Angus Taylor, the constitutional lawyer has one rule: ‘I wasn’t going to shut up.’

The caption for the fetching snap: The wife of new Liberal leader Angus Taylor, Louise Clegg. She’s not the woman behind the man. Picture: Jane Dempster / The Australian

The pond usually likes to offer some critical or satirical commentary, as an add-on to the assorted offerings of reptile swill to herpetology students - a legitimate form of postgraduate study whereby all might earn their PhR's.

But sometimes nausea intervenes, and during the course of this 12 minute read - so the reptiles clocked it - the pond had to rush off to the toilet to upchuck a Technicolor yawn so many times that sensible comment entirely fled the mind ...

The pond even struggled to find the right sort of descriptor. Might it be called a great example of fawning sycophantic scribbling?

Did those few inadequate words sufficiently evoke the experience?

Whatever, no more splendid example of a hagiographic fawning and simpering has found its way into the pond in a long time, and all because a correspondent pleaded for Dame Slap to be given special treatment - and incidentally proving that Dame Slap has a heart as soft and as vulnerable as a marshmallow.

So sweet and tender and caring ... 

There is a Bogan River in Australia, of course. It’s in central NSW. On the banks of that river, just before Easter 37 years ago, a couple of country kids shared their first kiss. Not quite kids; she was 20, he was 22. But still, young.
She grew up on a farm near Tottenham, a small town in deep National Party country, west of Sydney, population back then of about 200 to 300 people.
He grew up on a farm near the small town of Nimmitabel, on the Great Dividing Range.
Her mother and father left school before they were 15. The first in her family to go to university, apart from an uncle, she was the eldest of six children, raised in a rowdy Anglican country family not shy about showing emotion.
He was one of four boys, both his parents were university-educated, and family life on their much larger country property was more reserved but equally unaffected.
She is Louise Clegg.
He is Angus Taylor.
Which means the man who wants to turf out the Albanese government is married to Clegg. She’s not the woman behind the man, as the outdated might say of spouses of men in big political jobs. Put it this way, if Taylor has a chance, it will help that he is married to Clegg.
The entire country knows the Liberals and Taylor, 59, elected leader in mid-February, have a gargantuan task on their hands. The Liberal Party copped more than a bloody nose from South Australian voters last weekend. The party lost limbs, recording their worst result. Taylor must confront not just the incumbent federal Labor government but also a nationally resurgent One Nation.

There was an abundance of splendid visual distractions, Louise Clegg and husband Angus Taylor with two of their four children.

The pond was still struggling for the right sort of descriptor.

Would servile obsequiousness do?

And whatever had happened to that much loved character, always determined to instil awe and respect into naughty children?

Sadly MIA, and even worse, the pond discovered in the latest movie adaptation, she was again disappeared and turned into Dame Snap (and even weirder, Kermode liked the movie).

Will anyone remember the grand, lost days of a jolly good slapping?

Never mind ... settle in, remember, this is a bigly 12 minutes, never to be recovered ...

“I’m not very interesting,” Clegg, 57, says a few times before we settle in for her first interview.
Nonsense.
Clegg is fascinating and funny, warm and smart, an astute political observer, thinker and writer. Clegg is also a no-nonsense mother of four, a highly respected former barrister and writer specialising in constitutional and administrative law. She is also a passionate campaigner for grassroots issues in the country.
A fine mind
Clegg speaks her mind – and it is a fine mind – even if that means stirring up the centre right of Australian politics. Last year she took on the so-called national conservatives who, she says, are copying and pasting right-wing American political trends.
“Conservatives in Australia have spent too long being deferential to the left’s cultural fashions. But the answer is not to imitate the left by building our own moralising state. We don’t need American nat-con cosplay – we need confident Australian conservatism: freedom, responsibility, pluralism, thrift, respect for institutions and confidence in ordinary Australians to build their own lives,” Clegg wrote in this newspaper in December last year.
Clegg also took aim at the hankering for tariff-driven protectionism: “The same one-size-fits-all nat-con posture extends to economics, where fawning over America First protectionism does not inspire confidence.”
Taylor read her piece for the first time the day it was published.
“Gus walked in the door and said, ‘That’ll ruffle a few feathers,’ ” Clegg tells Inquirer.
Whose feathers? Taylor didn’t say – and she won’t either. But it’s not hard to imagine.
It was early December, leadership rumblings were reaching fever pitch and some Coalition politicians appeared to be enamoured by American nativist politics, including tariffs and protectionism.
“Then he said, ‘I thought the economic part of it was strong.’ ”
Taylor knows more than your average political leader – including the current Treasurer and Prime Minister – about economics. His background is no secret: awarded the University of Sydney medal in economics, went to the University of Oxford as a Rhodes scholar doing a postgraduate degree in economics, a highly successful businessman, the youngest person globally to be appointed partner at McKinsey.
It’s Clegg we want to know more about. Did she feel the need to run the piece by her politician husband before publishing?
“No,” she says.
Does she ever run pieces by him?
No, she says, just as fast.
Taylor had responded to only one other of her many published pieces.
“What are you doing?” Taylor said to his wife, after her first piece on the voice was published in August 2022. “It wasn’t accusatory. It was more like: what are you trying to achieve?” Clegg recalls.
‘I wasn’t going to shut up’: Going out on a limb for the voice
Clegg is unusual for many reasons, not least for her courage. She was the first barrister in the country to publicly buck the suffocating consensus of the nation’s legal community that supported the voice. Not many followed her.
“I said to Angus, you’re the politician. You do your thing. I’m a lawyer, I’ll do mine.”

Clegg went out on a limb because she was blown away by the radical nature of the model put forward by Indigenous activists and a small group of self-styled “conservative constitutional lawyers” whose proposal Clegg believed was anything but conservative. It would have entrenched, she says, “inequality of citizenship” in the nation’s founding document.

Another visual distraction ... Louise Clegg at Parkes District Court in 2017. She would later buck the legal community’s suffocating consensus on the Voice. Picture: Supplied

It reminded the pond in a nostalgic way of that onetime severe and stern character, here gone MIA ...

Such a sweet, kindly girl. It must have softened the old grouch's heart.

And yet the pond still struggled for the right sort of descriptor to evoke the experience.

Subservient, deferential, grovelling, toadying?

“I felt if I was to have any credibility within my profession, I had to put up an alternative model. I was totally swamped by people, by lawyers, saying: ‘Louise, keep going.’ ”
The former barrister did just that, continuing to propose a genuinely modest model in stark contrast to the radical one being put forward to Australians in the referendum.
Clegg does a wickedly good impersonation of Tony Abbott as she recalls the former prime minister ringing her to say the choice was binary, yes or no. That’s it.
She and Frank Brennan, a supporter of the voice, became great friends, engaging in entirely civil debates in churches and at other forums. She spoke at her old law firm Clayton Utz – one of the few law firms to accommodate both sides of a referendum debate that involved important legal changes to the nation’s Constitution.
“I managed to get traction,” she says. “But not with the NSW Bar Association. I offered that Frank and I would go to the Bar common room and give alternative views. I didn’t get a response. It was like they (barristers) were all told to shut up. That’s my view. And I wasn’t going to shut up.”
Meeting Angus: ‘He was good looking and worked hard’
Clegg’s feisty intellect was clear early on, even if her parents did not see university as her natural path after school.
“My father was a fundamentalist Christian and he still is. He thought that I’d become an atheist if I went to uni. He said: ‘Why don’t you go to TAFE in Dubbo,’ ” she says. “Until I got my HSC mark, and then he said: ‘Oh maybe you should go to uni.’ ”
The former altar girl did not become an atheist at university but she did meet a man with deep religious convictions. Clegg was in her freshman year when she first met Taylor one night at a pub near Sydney University.
He was more interested in a pretty friend of hers. But the young law student noticed him. “He was completely country,” Clegg says. “From the way he stood that night, to the clothes he wore and the crappy Baxter boots.”

So many visual treasures ... Angus Taylor, 19, on horseback in the Snowy Mountains near Kiandra, leading a group on a five-day horse ride. Picture: Supplied

And while Dame Slap had gone MIA, naughty children were roaming, wild-eyed and excited, and without the hint of a reprimand ...

What grotesque creature had turned up in Dame Slap's place, replacing severity and discipline with wild abandon?

Still the pond struggled to describe this new school.

Ingratiating, cringing, unctuous, oily, slimy?

Would "alkaline" conjure up the texture of wet fingers feeling all soapy and sudsy and greasy?

City boys – including city-born politicians – like to channel a country vibe with their smart RM Williams boots. Not Taylor.
“He was just all country and I was a hardcore country girl. He was good-looking. And he worked hard.”
Both from the country, their respective family lives were different. “We weren’t well-to-do. We didn’t have a big garden, we had a farm, we had a house, and the sofas creaked.”
The Taylors caught trout at their big dam on their sheep and cattle property at Nimmitabel. They weren’t establishment though, Clegg says, laughing as she recalls her husband’s father keeping a gun in the kitchen, daring the police to come for it after John Howard’s gun law reforms. But the Taylors were wealthy, their farms dated back to the early 20th century. Taylor’s maternal grandfather was a senior engineer on the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme. His parents were university-educated and dinners at the Taylors might include a retired professor of economics.
“That was not your usual country story,” she says. “All the (Taylor) boys went to university, too.”
But Clegg says any notion of the Taylors being toffs is misguided. Most of the boys earned scholarships to attend the elite and expensive King’s School in their later years in Sydney. Their mother, Anne, taught the boys to read and write before they went to the local public school along with 50 other children. Clegg learned early that education and a hard Protestant work ethic drove the Taylors.
“On university holidays, everyone worked, it was straight out to the paddock where we went mustering,” she says. “You didn’t sit around reading books or lounge around doing nothing.”

Oh it was full Wuthering Heights... From country roots to a Sydney pub meeting, a young Louise Clegg and Angus Taylor began their story, united by their rural upbringing. Picture: Supplied

Or maybe full Woman's Day or the Women's Weekly or New Idea?

And still the pond struggled. 

Creepy crawly?

O the cunning wiles that creep 
In thy little heart asleep! 
When thy little heart doth wake
Then the dreadful night shall break.

When Taylor wasn’t on the farm, he was a volunteer ski patroller in the winter or taking groups of riders out on horseback in the summer.
“I was a bit of a party girl. I had been pretty slack. I didn’t even know what a postgraduate degree was when Angus was talking about doing economic honours and he was applying for the Rhodes (scholarship to Oxford).
“I was like, what is that even about?”
Clegg came from a world of different expectations. “I didn’t have an underprivileged background,” she adds quickly. “In fact, it was very privileged because I was surrounded by love.” The boy from Nimmitabel noticed. On a visit to her parents’ home, Clegg and Taylor went for a drive towards a hill on their property.
“We used to drive to the bottom sometimes and walk up. So that day we jumped in the ute.
“Suddenly half my siblings jumped in the back of the ute too. The labrador was there too, along with a kangaroo.
“I don’t think I said much just, ‘Oh, sorry.’ But he knew I was embarrassed.
“He turned to me and said, ‘I have never met a family that love each other so much.’ ”
Clegg says their family looked Catholic, acted Catholic. “We had that feisty Irish republican thing going on.” Taylor’s family was more serious, more cerebral, more conservative.
“That explains one of the differences between us.”
‘A lot of talk about God’
Clegg was drawn to Taylor’s love of religion, too, she says, recalling their early conversations.
“There was a lot of talk about God and what God meant,” Clegg says. “I had never met anyone who was so interested in what it meant to be alive. Angus definitely has a relationship with God; he is a believer. I think it was partly driven by the fact that Gus had just lost his mother. She died at the age of 47 from breast cancer,” Clegg says, leaving behind a husband and four sons. Taylor was just 22.

By now the pond was well past the TMFI stage, both verbal and visual ... Angus Taylor's parents. His mother died at 47 from breast cancer when Angus was 22. Picture: Supplied

And still the pond struggled.

What was better? Gushing or slavish bootlicking?

Not long after, he embraced and was embraced by Clegg and her rambunctious family.
It wasn’t an issue that Clegg had a different relationship with religion. “I love going to church, I love talking about religion and God … but it’s hard for me to get there, to have a relationship with God. I can’t quite get there.”
When Clegg and Taylor were on the cusp of their careers – he was off to consulting firm McKinsey, she was headed to law firm Clayton Utz – Taylor suggested a seven-day horse trek, each of them on a horse, with another horse carrying their packs, through the Snowy Mountains. At night they pitched a tent or bedded down in one of the small huts scattered across the region, crossing rising rivers, trying to stay dry. Though it was late December, there was a bizarre snowstorm.
Was she being tested? No. Her country credentials were established. “He didn’t want to marry a princess,” she says, “and I certainly wasn’t one.
“I cried when we got back to Adaminaby and pulled in to get petrol on the way home because I thought, ‘That’ll never happen again.’ ”
Clegg gets teary only once, for a second, over many hours speaking with Inquirer. She is describing the support Taylor has always given her. “He changed me,” she says, laughing at her tears.
“He was really good for me academically. I worked harder at uni after I met him. He would never take credit for any of it, but he did change me.”
After they married, Clegg, by then the mother of a toddler, decided she wanted to be a barrister. Their families thought it was crazy. “This woman has a young child, she wants more children, why would she go to the Bar?” Clegg recalls.
“Angus was the one who said: ‘You should do that if that’s what you want.’ ”
And she did, topping the state Bar exams in mid-2000 when she was eight months pregnant with their second child.
One of Clegg’s friends said their children must have been the result of immaculate conception. Taylor’s career at McKinsey took him overseas for months at a time. Clegg says she can’t recall him having a single Sydney client.
Even as she was carving out her own stellar new career in administrative law, Clegg decided to do something out of left field. A woman who went to school with Clegg in Tottenham had been convicted for assaulting a man in the local hospital. The community, including her father, was convinced it was a stitch-up. The woman was a fabulously good nurse, Clegg says.
“My father rang me and said, Mary* (not her real name) needs you. I thought, ‘I can’t do this, I can’t get a judge to agree to retry the case.’ I rang my criminal lawyer friends in Sydney and they all said they won’t allow you to retry the case.”
Clegg convinced a judge at the Parkes local court, in central west NSW, to do just that. Months later, the case was retried in a court, in the big smoke, in Dubbo.
Clegg retells the day the verdict was delivered in favour of the nurse. “People I grew up with, friends of my mum and dad, from my class, were sitting in the gallery of the Dubbo court and they were crying. She (the nurse) was crying because she could practise again.”
Four years earlier, Clegg’s husband had entered federal politics. Busy with her own career, and family, Clegg was – and is – an eager campaigner for her husband. Not every political spouse enjoys campaigning. She does.

Still the visual distractions kept coming ... Reflecting on Taylor’s unwavering support, Clegg says, ‘He changed me.’ Picture: Supplied

And still the pond struggled...

Smarmy, wheedling?

Still, families of politicians do suffer. Clegg says she found the early attacks on Taylor tough, especially the ones by Liberal politicians. Taylor was nonplussed. “Now I see them as a badge of honour,” Clegg says, understanding the attackers felt threatened by Taylor’s intellect and business experience.
Around this time, Clegg was also observing the emerging great divide in Western democracies, including Australia, between what English writer David Goodhart called the “somewheres” – people grounded by where they live, tied to their local communities through work and family – versus the “anywheres”: more well-to-do, educated people who work anywhere, their outlook borderless.
Clegg says it was clear that Abbott was channelling the “somewheres” while Malcolm Turnbull was firmly in the “anywheres” camp.
Clegg and Taylor straddled both, but she says they left Sydney’s eastern suburbs, moving back to Goulburn in late 2011, because they are, at heart, country people. She says some of their friends told them not to move their kids back to country public schools. “Angus said: ‘Our kids will be more privileged if they go to Goulburn West Public School.’ ”

A final snap, Angus, Louise and their four children at home on their property near Goulburn. Picture: Supplied

The pond realised it had no alternative.

Only vulgarity could begin to conjure up the experience. 

Either soft core, "brown-nosing", or a little harder, "*rse-kissing" (*google bot aware).

And yet even vulgarity was not enough ...

I am in tedious, unctuous verbiage
Stepped in so far, that, should I wade no more, 
Returning were as tedious as go o'er

Clegg’s political antennae are sharp so Inquirer fired some quick questions at her: What’s the answer for the Liberal Party? “Liberals need to stand up for liberal values,” she says.
“We’re running away from them, shy about them, but liberalism is the only thing that’s going to stop the country going the same way as Venezuela.”
Can the Liberals win back seats held by the so-called teals? “Yes, we can, it’s tough, but we shouldn’t pander to them. Tim Wilson did it in Goldstein,” she says adding that economics is the key, as living standards continue to decline.
Does the Liberal Party have a problem with women? “Absolutely not.” Clegg is adamant that gender politics is overcooked.
“It’s time to restore some balance. Any professional woman like me who’s been raising children will know that when the boys go into the workforce, the young women are better off, they are getting the jobs, they are being promoted before men. Even some teal voters are waking up to this,” Clegg says.
What does she make of the rise of One Nation? “One Nation voters are not ideological. They are grassroots Australians,” she says, returning to her theme of “somewheres”. “They want authenticity and consistency.”
What should the Liberals do about Turnbull when he launches another tirade against his own party? That’s easy, she says: “Simply write him off as being Labor now. He’s no longer a Liberal.”
One final question: why didn’t Clegg go into politics?
“I would have been just another lawyer in federal parliament,” she says. “And the country needs Angus.”
Fair enough. But Clegg is not just another lawyer. Not by a long shot.

Did the pond mention it's been re-reading Vonnegut of late, and is currently on Cat's Cradle as a toilet companion?

“I don't know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves "Our Lady of the Perpetual Astonishment”

And with quiet thanks for being perpetually astonished by the reptiles, a quiet prayer of thanks ...

“God made mud.

God got lonesome.

So God said to some of the mud, "Sit up!"

"See all I've made," said God, "the hills, the sea, the

sky, the stars."

And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look

around.

Lucky me, lucky mud.

I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.

Nice going, God.

Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly

couldn't have.

I feel very unimportant compared to You.

The only way I can feel the least bit important is to

think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and

look around.

I got so much, and most mud got so little.

Thank you for the honor!

Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.

What memories for mud to have!

What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!

I loved everything I saw!

Good night.

I will go to heaven now.

I can hardly wait...

To find out for certain what my wampeter was...

And who was in my karass...

And all the good things our karass did for you.

Amen.”

And speaking of sycophants and weirdness and strangeness ...

In which nattering "Ned" and pedantic prattling Polonius give Pauline a go, with sundry other reptiles as supporting acts ...

Yesterday's session was probably as heavy as its ever got for the pond ... the bromancer dancing with Pauline, the dog botherer gone snowflake, the Ughmann deep in Marist land ...

And yet any hopes the pond had for a quiet Sunday meditation were dashed by the leftovers that hovered into view, because the song of Pauline continued.

Pauline, Pauline, Pauline
Your beauty is beyond compare
With flaming locks of red-dyed (died?) hair
With fish and chips skin and eyes of emerald green
Your smile is like a breath of outrage
Your voice is grating like summer hail damage
And I cannot compete with you, Pauline.

Well it's not Kez - where's the rhyming? - but it is free.

It turned out that prattling Polonius, most ponderous, pompous pundit of all, was all in on Pauline ...

The header: One Nation surge shakes up both sides of politics; Rising support, security fears and shifting voter loyalties signal a deeper realignment that both major parties can no longer ignore.

The caption: Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has surged in support amid voter discontent and security concerns. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Some might object to the pond joking about Pauline's hair colour, but the pond can confirm from personal experience that at her age, the colour comes from a bottle or similar delivery system.

As for Polonius's piece, it had one upside. 

That opening snap was the one illustration the reptiles had deigned to offer to break up the text.

And that's about it.

The pond decided to match the style, and let Polonius ramble on until his four minutes had expired, and the pond could reclaim its time:

The South Australian election last Saturday confirms that there has been a dramatic change in Australian national politics during the past six months. This partly reflects a sense of disillusionment in the electorate with the cost of living and security concerns.
Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party increased its support throughout 2025. As measured by Newspoll, One Nation’s support was at 15 per cent on October 27-30 and it remained so in late November. By January 12-15, support had risen to 22 per cent and by February 23-26 it was at 27 per cent.
This is a dramatic increase over the holiday season, explainable only by the Islamist terrorist attack on the Australian Jewish community at Sydney’s Bondi Beach on December 14, 2025.
As Gemma Tognini pointed out in her address to The Sydney Institute on antisemitism in Australia earlier this year, what is different about December 14 turned on the fact the attack occurred at a popular public place. Previously, antisemitic attacks in Australia had targeted synagogues, Jewish schools, Jewish-owned businesses and the like.

(No, the pond won't interrupt to note that sly plug for garrulous Gemma and the Sydney Institute, nor comment on Polonial praise for Minns and Malinauskas, which in an alternative world might have made the two state humbugs pause and reflect on their assorted follies).

NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns performed extremely well after the massacre, as did NSW Liberal Party leader Kellie Sloane (who was present at the scene of the crime and assisted in helping some victims). Hanson and One Nation’s recruit Barnaby Joyce made a prominent visit to Bondi in the aftermath of the murders.
As Minns has pointed out, the two young members of NSW Police who were present when the attack started acted courageously and walked towards the alleged gunmen. But there were only two police officers. Many others came later and the gunmen were put down.
When 80-something broadcaster Alan Jones was arrested for historical sexual assault in November 2024, it was reported that 12 police cars attended. In recent times, Jones’s charges have been downgraded from the District Court to the Magistrates’ Court.
The NSW Police Force initially underestimated the risk to the Jewish community on December 14. Many other Australians did likewise. This is no longer the case.
At times Hanson has made intolerant statements about Muslim Australians. But her message about radical Islam has got through to both sides of politics.
It is not clear what will be the final count of the South Australian election. But with around 70 per cent of votes counted, the Labor primary vote is at 38 per cent compared with One Nation (22 per cent), Liberal Party (19 per cent), Greens (10 per cent) and others at 11 per cent.
The Peter Malinauskas-led Labor Party has won an estimated 33 seats compared with the Liberals four, One Nation two, independents four and four in doubt.
The outcome is a stunning success for Malinauskas and Labor, but not without problems. For its part, the Liberal Party remains the official opposition despite some predictions that it would lose all its seats. So, it has a base of support from which to recover.
Writing in the Australian Financial Review on March 23, John Black (a former Labor senator for Queensland) commented: “One Nation candidates with a few weeks’ campaign experience ripped the heart out of the traditional South Australian Labor Party demographic base vote of battlers.” Black added: “One Nation candidates did even more damage to the middle-class urban base vote of traditional Liberal voters, leaving Labor likely winners of every Adelaide seat except Bragg.”
One problem for the Liberals is that they did not receive One Nation preferences. Nationals leader Matt Canavan criticised One Nation for requesting preferences from the Liberal Party (which it received) while declining to do likewise with respect to the Liberals. It’s called a double standard.

In the lead-up to the South Australian election, One Nation SA leader Cory Bernardi said his party wanted to make preference deals a thing of the past. Bernardi (who was a Liberal senator before he quit and established the Australian Conservatives, which failed to take off) should know better. Any decision of One Nation not to preference the Liberal Party or the Nationals above Labor is of assistance to Labor.
Some commentators say a significant number of former Coalition voters (the Liberal Party plus the Nationals) have parked their votes with One Nation due to disillusionment with the Coalition. This may be the case. Certainly the new leadership team of Angus Taylor and Canavan has improved the Coalition’s performance. Nevertheless, One Nation’s support base is not going to shrink any time soon.
After all, One Nation voters have reason to feel alienated from contemporary politics as their standard of living declines. Moreover, many support Hanson’s call for a substantial reduction of immigration and her determination to junk any commitment to net-zero emissions by 2050. And then there is her public condemnation of radical Islam.
On the basis of current polls, it would appear to be disastrous for the Coalition parties if One Nation fails to preference them ahead of Labor. It seems Hanson recognises that such a decision would be counter-productive for her party.
Addressing the Minerals Council of Australia in Canberra last Monday, Hanson said she would be “very happy” to help elect a Coali­tion government at the next election. She said she would not join a Coalition government but would agree to support it in votes of confidence motions and the granting of supply.
Meanwhile, former Victorian Liberal Party premier Jeff Kennett told Sky News’ The Kenny Report last Monday that he wanted all Liberal, Nationals, One Nation and independent voters who wished to defeat Labor at the election in November “to get together and put the interests of Victoria first”. That is, to defeat Jacinta Allan’s government.
Kennett said, “I am less Liberal than I am a Victorian.”
Already One Nation’s growing support has changed Australian politics, for the moment at least. In federal parliament last Tuesday, Taylor warned that “Islamic extremism” was a threat to Australia, while in Adelaide Malinauskas warned Labor supporters to put the question of “are you for Australia” ahead of appealing to the left wing, many of whom sneer at One Nation voters. Australia is different in 2026 from what it was in 2025.

That was exceptionally tedious, even by Polonius's unceasing quest for banality and for titillating himself by veering off into the thickets of Islamophobia and climate science denialism and furriner bashing..

Even worse, there was not a single mention of the ABC, or its strike, and the shocking way the reptiles had been deprived of ABC content for a day.

At least the dog botherer whined about how he was deprived of his much loved ABC shows.

It's getting so that the old dotard is even forgetting his favourite shortcuts on the keyboard ...

What he needs is a plan ...

What else? Well the pond was facing a dire overload, so it sent the usual flourishes of transphobia off to the intermittent archive, currently working, but who knows when it might next collapse.

There were two offerings, with a serve of garrulous, grating Gemma to go...

Hands off our female experience: Why the unique suffering of women is not ‘up for grabs’
As women’s unique biological experiences are co-opted for the gender diverse, I’m defending science, not fighting a culture war.
By Gemma Tognini

The second offering was even more offensive, purporting to be caring, but making clear that there was not the slightest interest in what had motivated the sibling...

The cost of silencing medical debate on gender
Witnessing a sibling’s transition, I’ve found that medical institutions are narrowing compassion by stifling honest discussion.
By Elizabeth C*

The pond has always given the reptiles' transphobia a pass, and there was nothing in that drivel to change the pond's mind.

The pond prefers to see real men in action, caught in a phallic thrust ...

As usual, the pond seized the chance to avoid Nick ...

We are witnessing the unmaking of class politics itself
As Australia marks 125 years since its first election, the forces that once built the two-party system now appear to be pulling it apart.
By Nick Dyrenfurth
Contributor

A small sample will explain why ...

...Figures such as Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce capture the insurgent mood, but both are products of the existing political class rather than architects of a new one. The question is who – if anyone – can translate insurgent energy into a coherent, durable political project. In other democracies, figures such as National Rally’s Jordan Bardella in France and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni hint at what that next phase may look like.
It is why I have argued that Andrew Hastie – drawn from outside the traditional political class, unencumbered by ideological dogma and possessing a measure of outsider credibility – may offer the Liberals their best chance of resisting displacement on the centre right.
The question is no longer whether the system will change. It already has. The question is whether a new alignment – a modern equivalent of the Fusion – will emerge, or whether fragmentation will persist, leaving Labor dominant by default rather than design.
Nick Dyrenfurth is executive director of the John Curtin Research Centre.

The pastie Hastie is what we need, or maybe a Bardella or Meloni?

John Curtin is likely rolling in his grave.

Similarly the pond avoided these offerings, from Brownie and snappy Tom...

Libs give Labor green light for big spend on fuel excise
Angus Taylor has made it easier for Labor to avoid tough choices with a sugar hit that will ultimately make Australians poorer.
By Greg Brown
Chief political correspondent

From oil bump to slump when grave expectations bite
Rising fuel costs and fragile confidence collide, raising the stakes for policymakers as global conflict feeds inflation fears at home.
By Tom Dusevic
Contributor

Relax chaps, it's an Emeritus Chairman approved and encouraged excursion, what could possibly go wrong?

Just get on board with the ship of fools and sail off to the klown karnival ... (is there an Iranian hacker in the haus for the kache of hockey Olympic medallist Kash's klassics?)

The pond also dodged and weaved its way around Cameron's piece...

Two problematic options for Trump as Iran holds global economy to ransom,
Caught in a no-man’s land, the US President is faced with some unpalatable choices. Wisely, he’s leaving his options open.
By Cameron Stewart

The pond did catch a teaser trailer ...

... but then, spoiler alert, skipped to the end of the show ...

...Trump seems to be moving ever closer to what would be a mixed outcome from this war. If he chooses to end it in the next few weeks, he, along with Israel, will have dealt a severe blow to the 47-year-old Islamic regime, weakening its ability to spread terror and to threaten its neighbours. That is a good outcome for the Middle East.
Some will argue that this alone has justified the conflict while others will argue that the damage to the global economy has been too high.
But the president will have failed in his initial aim of toppling the regime or bending it to his will.
He may have set back Iran’s nuclear ambitions but not ended them. And the regime still will be able to repress those millions of brave Iranians inside Iran who oppose it.
What’s more, Iran will have demonstrated its ability to close the Strait of Hormuz whenever it wants to rattle the global economy. And then there is the longer-term economic fallout from the energy price shocks of the past month.
It is too early to say how many of these outcomes will come to pass, but that is the direction in which it is heading. For now, Trump has to make the critical decision about whether to further escalate and lengthen this war through the introduction of ground troops or end it by seeking a negotiated ceasefire that is unlikely to contain all that he wants.
It’s a big decision. And one that will shape his legacy.

Legacy? 

Truth to tell, a completely dysfunctional United States is already his legacy to the world, and that legacy was in place the moment he took the throne.

Deep inside the hive mind, Cameron doesn't have a clue, but this is his chance to hit fury road:

Besides, it will all change by tomorrow, as quick as two shakes of a lamb's tail or one King Donald brain cell creating a shower of sparks by accidentally rubbing up against another one ... (man, woman, TV, camel, elephunt)

All that intermittent archiving cleared some room for the lizard Oz editorialist.

As noted yesterday, the reptiles were heavily into their new angle for their climate denialism, which is to pretend that they're caring environmentalists, and these two offerings can be viewed in that light.

The world will never be weaned off coal and gas if the reptiles of Oz have their way, and be damned to the climate and the planet ...

There was also an Oz ed note on Pauline:

All she's doing is touting the sort of white Xian nationalism you could expect from the bromancer, together with the lizard Oz's campaign against furriners, its Islamophobia, its disdain for climate science, and its love of coal, oil and gas.

But at least it serves as a cue for "Ned" nattering on about Pauline ...

The header: One Nation is shaking the system amid volatile new political dynamic; Establishment politics is under massive assault in a nation that is losing its way — but don’t be misled by Hanson’s ‘consistency’ myth.

The caption, which at last gave a credit, to the mighty Emilia and her mighty collage artwork: The ascent of Pauline Hanson, centre, might make One Nation the popular alternative to Anthony Albanese’s Labor in terms of voting strength. Artwork: Emilia Tortorella

Stand back. Where Polonius had only one snap, "Ned" was given many visual distractions, and laboured long and hard for ten minutes to produce a mouse, whereas Polonius had managed the feat in just four:

Establishment politics is under assault in Australia. The two-party model and the political class are on notice. The Pauline Hanson One Nation success at the South Australian election has convulsed the Liberal Party but also made inroads into the Labor Party despite its landmark victory.
At a time of living standards stagnation, rising prices and cultural division Hanson has emerged as an iconic champion for an Australia disappearing in the rear-view mirror. She falls outside an increasingly discredited political class, taps into a “feelings” vibe that Australia is on the wrong track, exploits the generational alarm that younger people will be worse off than their parents and channels anxiety around housing, energy and a “lost nation” nostalgia.

Didn't "Ned" read the bromancer's celebration of Pauline?

 ...it may be that the new duo-leadership of Hanson plus Barnaby Joyce just about gets there. Hanson’s stuttering delivery and Joyce’s many misadventures confirm their anti-politics “authenticity”.
Commentators completely misunderstand much of this. Sean Kelly, an often insightful writer in the Nine newspapers, listed racism as a core appeal of One Nation. With respect to Kelly, I think that’s dead wrong.

Sheesh, instead the reptiles flung in the bouffant one in an AV distraction, The Australian’s National Editor Dennis Shanahan on Pauline Hanson’s decades-long political transformation.

This was a tough "Ned" Everest to climb, with the Chicken Little clucking at clouds exceptionally strong ...

Above all, Hanson constitutes the most potent backlash from the crisis of the Australian system – where both recent Liberal and Labor governments have failed to deliver substantial increases in living standards to wide sections of the public. There is a sense of system failure. The latest Newspoll shows support for the major parties – Labor and Coalition – at a dismal 52 per cent, proof of Hanson’s massive assault.
“The other two political parties have not delivered,” Hanson told The Australian after the SA result. “All they’ve delivered to them (the people) is hurt and pain, instability, no vision for the future, and the people don’t want any more of that.”
Don’t be misled by the ‘consistency’ line
Hanson upends our political model. Who is the real opposition, the Coalition or Hanson? The Liberal Party must urgently wind back her primary vote – yet the better Hanson polls, the more the media elevates One Nation. Don’t be misled by the line that Hanson’s popular surge is because she has been consistent for 30 years. The truth is that Hanson is more formidable today because our nation’s tribulations play far more powerfully into her grievance mantra.
Most of the population has been under economic and price pressures for too long; the urban-rural divide in Australia now runs into a “two cultures” dilemma; immigration is too high and social cohesion is being eroded; the nation is more divided over what constitutes Australian identity; and there is a potent backlash against progressive values, from climate action to identity politics to the assault on traditional Christian-oriented morality.
As One Nation steals votes from the Coalition and guarantees the election of Labor governments, the Liberal Party is mired in tactical confusion: how best to resist Hanson yet work to maximise her preferences.

Note this caption ...Pauline Hanson’s core propaganda line is that Australia is losing its way and she is its saviour.

Now see how that caption is transformed into a bald statement of fact in "Ned's" text ...

Hanson is now winning a degree of legitimacy she didn’t enjoy during 1998, her previous high tide. Among much of the cultural right in this country Hanson is depicted as a cultural heroine, a cult figure known as “Pauline”, an old-fashioned Australian and a battler for her causes. She benefits from the intellectual and political crisis that afflicts Australian conservatism. And the old rules still apply: attacks on her as a racist don’t work, they merely fuel her standing.
“The public have now caught up with me,” Hanson said earlier this week. “They trust me. They trust the fact that I’m passionate about my country. I’m a patriotic Australian and the way the country’s gone and going is not what they want.”
Australia is losing its way
Her core propaganda line cannot be missed – Australia is losing its way and Hanson is its saviour. The economic and cultural tensions vest Hanson with far more traction than at any time in the past generation. Hanson’s success exposes Australia as a fractured nation with its politics being atomised. The trend will not be confined to the centre-right. The two-party model is eroding.
RedBridge director of strategy Kos Samaras told Inquirer: “The post-war political order is dead. The stable system that got established in Australia and many Western countries is now fragmenting. We are seeing politics reverting to a pre-Second World War period, with multiple conflicts, where new movements arise and where the urban-rural divide hardens into incompatible political cultures.”

But it must be true we're losing our way, because the lizard Oz highlighted the way Australia is losing its way

Quick, an AV distraction featuring Tamworth's endless, ineradicable shame ... looking decidedly sleazy, in a way only certain New England men can manage ...

One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce outlines One Nation’s policies. “We’d get rid of the climate change department,” Mr Joyce told Sky News host Andrew Bolt. “In removing the climate change department, we remove so many of the regulations that are a direct impediment to the construction of new oil refineries. “We believe in the construction of new coal-fired power plants. We believe in the construction of new oil refineries. “Part of our national security is having fuel security.”

You see? Tamworth's shame is just repeating lizard Oz editorial policies to the Bolter, himself a firm climate science denialist man ...

This is the monster these reptile Frankensteins have created and now urge on ... while "Ned" clucks away at clouds in his Chicken Little way ...

Samaras says while the Liberals have succumbed to centre-right fragmentation, the Labor Party will soon be under pressure from centre-left fragmentation. He envis­ages the rise of parallel and competing populist movements on the right and the left but united by a common bond: a burn-down-the-system mentality.
He says: “There’s a large number of people who want significant change in the country, in excess of 60 per cent of all voters. About a third of One Nation voters have this ‘burn the place down’ view.
“When you speak to people who have moved from the Liberal Party to One Nation – they tend to have a trade qualification and live in the outer suburbs or the regions – the No.1 reason they give is rejection of the two-party system. They believe the two-party system has failed them economically.
“For the Liberals to rebuild trust, I think it will take as long to rebuild as it has taken things to fall apart.
“Many of these people now in their 50s were the Howard battlers. When Howard was around they were in their 30s and 40s and felt the Liberals managed the economy in a way that rewarded their hard work. Their thinking was: I work hard, pay my taxes, accumulate wealth and allow my family to prosper – but that contract is now broken. These people feel they have been going backwards and this goes back to the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison period.
“There is an emerging problem on the Labor side, it’s just taking a little bit longer. There are definite signs of a growing appetite for an alternative on the left side of politics. All our surveys show that among Gen Z the green vote is around 30 per cent and among women of that age it’s in the mid-40s across the entire country. In the UK nearly half of 18 to 24-year-olds are open to voting Green.”

And why do vulgar youff think about voting Green? Well they have to try to live on the planet a lot longer than "Ned", or for that matter, Tamworth's enduring shame.

Strategist Kos Samaras warns that Labor is better placed to manage the coming fragmentation; Zohran Mamdani’s victory is seen as a pointer to the potential disruptive power of the youthful left

The pond did appreciate "Ned's" attempt to seem vaguely relevant by dragging Zohran into the mix. The pond had thought he was some bloody socialist from Kenya, or maybe the middle east:

A golden opportunity for populist disrupters of the right
The populist disrupters of the right and left have a golden opportunity because living standards face further attrition. Examine the outlook for the coming 12 months: it is a deadly mixture of foreign wars, a global energy meltdown, higher petrol prices along with higher infla­tion, rising interest rates, weak productivity, punishing income tax and a housing market locking out younger aspirants, a climate made for assaults on the existing political system.
But Samaras warns that Labor is better placed to manage the coming fragmentation. “Australian Labor has a strong and diverse support base,” he says. “As the political base of the country has moved towards the big cities Labor has been able to secure Bennelong, Reid, Menzies, Deakin and Parramatta off the back of a new working-class and middle-class constituency. The university-educated constituency votes for parties of the left, the Millennials are strong Labor supporters, and the professional working class, teachers, nurses, public servants, is basically Labor’s Praetorian Guard.”

Samaras says these rival movements have “a shared destructive impulse that makes the current moment so volatile and so reminiscent of the 1930s”. He warns that Gen Z is concentrated in the inner cities, among youthful and diverse communities, and that the victory of democratic socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani in New York is a pointer to the potential disruptive power of the youthful left that is digitally connected and comfortable with diversity.

Next up was a man who couldn't even manage a writers' festival:

South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas has urged Australians to be “proud” of who they are and has called for every leader to be “patriotic”. “I don’t like the idea of patriotism and pride in our country being adopted or co-opted by only one segment of the political spectrum – it belongs to all of us, all of us as a country,” Mr Malinauskas told Sky News Australia. “I don’t like it when progressives sneer at One Nation voters wrapping themselves in the flag anymore than I like it One Nation voters wrapping themselves in a flag and sneering at a group of people from another ethnicity or faith background. “We should be proud of who we are as a country. I’m patriotic for our country. I think every leader should be.”

Every day the pond says a little prayer to the long absent lord offering thanks for having escaped croweater land, only to then realise it landed in Minns land, and he couldn't manage a writers' festival either ...

Now stand back, more worry about the sky falling, and not because of all the CO₂ ...

In response to Hanson, both governing parties are plunging into reassessment. Victorious SA Premier Peter Malinauskas invoked patriotism and the flag in his novel victory speech as necessary steps to check Hanson’s momentum. “The cultural question must be top of mind,” Malinauskas said. “It comes down to: are you for Australia?” Echoes of this pitch trickled out of the Albanese government during the week.
Malinauskas, a symbol of the once all-powerful Labor Right, warned progressives against “sneering at those who wave the flag or wrap themselves in the flag”. He said patriotism did not belong to any political ideology and that the task today – to combat Hanson – was to get both the economics and the culture right. This is the task of the Coalition under Angus Taylor and Matt Canavan.
As the South Australian election revealed, One Nation cannot command many seats because the preference system works against it. But the actual vote shows One Nation at 22.5 per cent and the Liberal Party at 19 per cent.
Devastating damage looms
Hanson’s lead over the Liberals constitutes a threat to centre-right politics unprecedented since World War II: that Hanson might become the strongest party on the right of politics. That would locate Hanson as the popular alternative to Albanese Labor in terms of voting strength, an outcome for Australia that would do devastating damage to our public policies.
Hanson shakes the cage in which we have consigned our history. She exploits the contemporary division over Australia’s identity, notably the progressive mantra that Australia is a morally flawed project, the product of a 1788 invasion, blighted by racism, sexism and patriarchy, legacies yet to be fully purged and that contaminate our national icons from Anzac Day to Australia Day. Such thinking is now deep-seated in our cultural institutions and deeply resented by many people.
There was always going to be a fierce backlash against this progressive moralism. The tragedy is that it seems to be centred on Hanson. For years the Liberals have failed to mount a broadbased persuasive view on Australian identity, apparently uninterested in the task.

At this point the reptiles tried to sucker the pond into a premium price point ...

PREMIUM
Former Australian of the year leads controversial chant at protests
Become a member to access our premium video content

Pay to watch the reptiles bash Tame when the pond can watch Benji perform ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank for free?

Nah ...

Meanwhile, the independent Scanlon Foundation Research Institute’s findings in the latest 2025 report make chilling reading. It finds only 34 per cent or one-third of people take “great pride in the Australian way of life and culture”, that only 42 per cent “strongly agree that maintaining the Australian way of life and culture is important”, and that only 46 per cent have “a sense of belonging in Australia to a great extent”. The results show that generational differences are widening; younger people have less sense of belonging in Australia and show less support or pride in the Australian way of life.
Australia increasingly cannot get things done because it cannot agree on issues and cannot agree on its national narrative.
What the Liberals must do now
The Liberals need to project a more relevant and vibrant view of Australian identity – a patriotism both strong and inclusive, as distinct from their episodic forays into this endeavour. They should adopt the formulation championed over the years by Indigenous leader Noel Pearson and developed in his 2022 Boyer Lectures.
Addressing the question of who we are and who we can be, Pearson saw our identity in three stories. First, the spiritual inheritance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples over 65 millennia, the First Nations of this continent. Second, the British institutional inheritance arising from January 26, 1788, in terms of the rule of law, parliamentary government, the English language, British and Irish people, convict and free, leading to Federation. Third, the “diversity in unity” from the migration program showing that people with different roots can live together, making Australia an example to the world.
For Pearson: “These three stories will make us one: Australians.”

Pearson's willingness to perform humbug for the reptiles never fails to astonish the pond, but then he's either a glutton for Voice punishment, or he likes to see his snap in a "Ned" column ... The formulation championed by Indigenous leader Noel Pearson brings together the past, present and future. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

The pond just had to separate this next line out because it might be good for anyone wanting to have a go at stand up, as celebrated in Is This Thing On?

Over the years Labor has shown no interest in this formula. Liberals have periodically engaged, notably Tony Abbott. 

Killer line. It could help generate laughs if you could put this up on the screen behind you ... (warning, you'll be confronted by a shameless plug for his book by the shameless hustler)

There you go Noel, that's the company you keep. 

To get any closer you'd have to be Viktor Orbán and have a healthy budget for wandering indigent former PMs ...

And so to a toad hack who can never be persuaded to shut up ...

But the Liberal Party has never formalised its commitment. It should embark on that process, unless the party is now so broken it cannot agree. The Pearson formula has three immense merits – it is a true account of our story; it is readily understood by most people; and it offers a strong and inclusive Australian identity. It brings together the past, the present and the future.
Putting One Nation into a governing frame
Former Queensland premier Peter Beattie, who fought Hanson during the peak of her powers in Queensland, told Inquirer: “This situation today is totally different to 1998 when I faced her. There’s now a movement on preferences. The Liberal Party is courting her gently, and if they enter a deal to exchange preferences that will be an entirely new political dynamic.”
Beattie highlights Hanson’s statement this week that she would be “very happy” to use her numbers to help elect a Coalition government, that she would always preference the Coalition before Labor but would not be part of any Coalition government.
This is a potentially critical statement, if it sticks. It puts a vote for One Nation into a governing frame. It has the potential to promote One Nation as more than just a protest vote. Hanson, in a cunning move, is saying that a vote for One Nation can assist a change of government – a statement that is contrary to the arithmetic and political reality since votes for One Nation weaken the Coalition vote and therefore assist Anthony Albanese to get re-elected.
Beattie says: “This is a major change for her. She’s usually hated the Coalition almost as much as she hates Labor. But if she is prepared to say this, I think psychologically that makes a difference – people could vote for her with more confidence they might actually change the government.”

Good one, tedious, tiresome toad. 

Keep talking her up, and soon all your wishes and desires will be consummated...Former Queensland premier Peter Beattie says the movement on preferences makes today’s situation very different to 1998. Picture David Clark

Luckily, after that, the Everest peak was in sight ...

That would be an illusion. But it would serve the Coalition in an important way – to maximise the preference flow from One Nation to the Coalition, and that is a vital requirement. Beattie is pessimistic about the ability of a Liberal Party revival in its own right. “The teal seats are gone and any chance of getting them back is delusional,” he says. “I can’t see the Liberal Party coming back under its own force. Its credibility is too low.”
How Labor could exploit this
But Albanese Labor is ready and waiting to exploit any closer ties between the Liberals and One Nation. That would gift Labor’s election campaign with the slogan: “A vote for the Liberals is a vote for One Nation.” This pitch would be powerful in urban seats, threatening the Liberals, and it would offer the teals the chance to expand their numbers.
Meanwhile, the Labor-Greens preference model is stronger than ever. Voting analyst Antony Green in his election blog shows that at the 2025 federal election Greens party preferences went to Labor at an extraordinary 88 per cent – a Greens vote is almost equivalent to a Labor two-party preferred vote. There is no way One Nation preferences to the Coalition will come anywhere near this level.
The Hanson party polled 6.4 per cent at the 2025 election but this had erupted to more than 25 per cent in the latest Newspolls. Hanson was elected to the Senate in 2016, re-elected in 2022 and in 2025 secured a team of four senators. Whether Taylor and Canavan can cut back her high primary vote remains to be seen.
But economic pressures, cultural divisions and the tactical skills of Barnaby Joyce mean One Nation’s vote will remain far above its 2025 election level.

Barners, Tamworth's enduring shame, is the answer?

B*gger it, the pond entirely forgot the question ... (*google bot friendly)

The revolt against the two-party system has deep roots – but looking at its beneficiaries only a foolhardy optimist would think this is good for Australia.

So the lizard Oz is full of foolhardy optimists? A whole pack of them titillated and tempted by the shift to the far right, wherein they have always resided.

And somehow that's a turn up for the"Ned" books?

But it will be be a boon for their climate science denying agenda and they can cluck away about Pauline while assiduously recording and reporting all her talking points, which she gleaned from reading the lizard Oz, and the Murdochian tabloids and watching Sky Noise down under (still no rebranding?) ...

Luckily, no matter how often the pond returns for a kicking, it can never forget that first kick ...

And so to news from America, a day old, but surrealism never ages as a genre ...