In which Our Henry badly bungles Laïcité in his usual pompous way, while Killer holds a kind of Konnor Kourt ...

The pond would like to claim its joining the boycott of Eurovision next year, but as the pond has never watched a single show, that would be a bit of a stretch.

Not that news of that kind troubled the lizard Oz reptiles this day, as the claims about EXCLUSIVES reached absurd, extravagant heights ...

EXCLUSIVE
High-stakes battle over skyrocketing doctors’ fees
‘All options on the table’: Labor takes on specialist doctors’ fees
Out-of-pocket costs for specialist doctors are crippling consumer budgets. Now Labor is declaring ‘all options are on the table’ as it contemplates unprecedented action.
By Natasha Robinson

In what bizarro alternative universe was that an EXCLUSIVE? 

The ABC read the same report, just to make sure it could continue its role as reptile little Sir Echo, Value of private health insurance 'eroding' as doctors urge reform

There were other EXCLUSIVES as well ...

EXCLUSIVE
‘Designed to defame me’: Judge’s stunning accusation against ODPP
Judge Penelope Wass’s stunning accusation against ODPP
A NSW judge has called for the potential removal of chief prosecutor Sally Dowling SC, alleging she orchestrated leaking confidential information about an Indigenous child to damage the judge’s reputation.
By Ellie Dudley

Call the pond a stunned mullet as the EXCLUSIVES went on and on:

EXCLUSIVE
Inside the Fox family’s secret development ambition for Melbourne’s Capital Golf Club
Speculation is swirling among Melbourne’s richest golfers over exclusive $1m memberships at the Fox family’s new golf course – and the massive profits that could flow from secret plans.
By Damon Johnston

The pond can EXCLUSIVELY report that these EXCLUSIVES hold absolutely no interest for the pond.

The more the reptiles disappear up their EXCLUSIVE fundaments early each day, the less inclined the pond is to pay attention.

Ditto this ongoing reptile jihad:

Labor damned by subterfuge on ISIS brides’ repatriation
The Albanese government is adopting a ‘repatriation by stealth’ approach to returning women and children.
By Rodger Shanahan

Just to vary the recipe a little, the reptiles stepped outside the tent and dragged in an author and Middle East analyst.

The pond also passed on this beat up ...

Migrants and nation pay for failure of skills recognition with productivity fail
No matter where you stand on migration numbers, creating a more affordable, efficient and fair system for recognising overseas skills and qualifications is the kind of reform that makes sense.
By Martin Parkinson

That was the work of another fellow traveller ...

Martin Parkinson is chancellor of Macquarie University. He served as Secretary of PM&C and Treasury...

...and he concluded with the sort of deadening blather that litters the rag ...

No matter where you stand on migration numbers, creating a more affordable, efficient and fair system for recognising overseas skills and qualifications is the kind of reform that just makes sense. It is a political no-brainer.

Unfortunately that meant the pond had to stand with the usual Friday suspects ...

The header: Furore over burka unmasks Senate’s lack of courage; The case against the burka must be discussed because difficult issues can only be addressed through frank and open debate.

The caption for the narcissistic clown attention seeker: Pauline Hanson parades herself in a burka in the Australian Senate in November. Picture: Getty Images

Yes, this day our Henry went Pauline, but don't worry, there will be the usual portentous array of pompous references to justify his allegiance to the fish and chips supplier ...

In an age that sacralises identity, the burka poses a stark paradox. It proclaims a highly distinctive religious identity; yet, by concealing the face it effaces the personal identity of its wearer, interposing an opaque barrier between the individual and the world.
But the Senate’s reaction to Pauline Hanson’s attention-grabbing gesture was no less paradoxical. One might have expected the Greens – who disdain religious freedom, vaunt their devotion to eradicating patriarchy and rarely encounter a prohibition they dislike – to leap to the barricades, excoriating the burka’s suppression of female individuality. Instead, masking hypocrisy beneath choreographed outrage, they responded with cries of indignation whose intensity would, in more decorous eras, have been reserved for the most revolting forms of public indecency.
Labor’s reaction, though more restrained, was no less at odds with the principles it incessantly espouses. As for the Liberals, the best they could muster was to murmur that the matter might be worth debating – while showing little appetite for engaging with its substance.
But it is hardly as if there is nothing to discuss. There is, after all, no part of the body more crucial in defining personal identity than the face. Far more significant to humans than to any other species, the face is so central to social interaction that an entire, biologically costly, region of the brain, located in the fusiform gyrus, is dedicated to recognising faces and deciphering the constantly changing signals their expressions convey.

Actually, if the pond might be so bold, whenever the pond is confronted by religious garb of any kind ...

... the first thing the pond sees isn't the face, it's the garb, which comes with a realisation that many people inhabit strange alternative worlds.

But more of that anon as Our Henry will try to wiggle out of his determination to ignore other religious garb while berating Islamics ...

The reptiles decided to soften the debate by having Susie have a chat with the dog botherer ...

News Corp’s National Education Editor Susie O’Brien voices her concerns about One Nation Leader Pauline Hanson’s recent political stunt, where she chose to wear a burqa. “I’m sure it plays right into the hands of her voters … as far as I’m concerned it’s a cheap and nasty political stunt at the expense of Muslim women,” Ms O’Brien told Sky News host Chris Kenny. “You can have that debate, but you don’t need to do that dressed as a Muslim woman with the face covered in the floor of parliament.”

Now on to the pompous references ...

Little wonder, then, that Dante called the face the “balcony of the soul”, “the lamp lit in the world” by the subject who stands behind it. And little wonder too that we “unmask” lies and deceptions, “face” facts and “face up” to responsibility: its uniqueness underpins our accountability as agents who think, decide and act. To be condemned to facelessness is to stand only a few steps short of social death.
That, of course, is precisely what the burka historically was – and remains – designed to achieve. By rendering the woman unidentifiable, it erases both her defining features and her public existence, reducing her to an object that is a mere extension of her husband. Moreover, in doing so, it imposes formidable costs, dramatically restricting the wearer’s social intercourse, narrowing or eliminating opportunities for gainful employment, and rendering many physical activities difficult or impossible.
To this, there is a standard liberal reply – one as intellectually lazy as it is misleading. If the woman consents to the submission, the argument goes, society has no more right to intervene than it does to impose the wearing of Mao jackets. The reality, however, is that liberalism is not only committed to personal autonomy; it is equally committed to preserving the conditions that make that autonomy possible.
That is why John Locke – who forged the modern liberal conceptions of personal identity, political equality and individual freedom – was the first philosopher to insist that one cannot renounce one’s moral standing by consenting to become another’s slave. The duty to take, and answer for, one’s own decisions is, Locke argued, an inalienable aspect of human agency. It follows, he concluded, that there must be limits to the scope of individual choice.
Liberal societies have therefore always intervened to restrain even voluntary acts that would destroy the autonomy they supposedly express – acts that damage the individual or erode the civic values and foundations on which freedom depends. Nor does the fact that the burka is worn for religious reasons exempt it from those limits, any more than it exempts polygamy, pubescent marriage or female genital mutilation from legal restriction.
The uncertainties and ambiguities surrounding “consent” only strengthen the case for prohibition. Feminists have long emphasised the ways in which entrenched social norms constrain the choices women make, especially when refusal to submit carries heavy personal or communal penalties. And the 658-page official report that preceded the French ban in 2010 highlights just how often the decision to wear the burka was shaped by intense pressure – including threats and actual violence – that stripped it of the essential elements of freely given consent.

Not bad, from Dante to Locke, with a dash of Mao, and the reptiles helped out with a cheap snap from the archive ...John Locke.

The next set of references was a little more downbeat.

The tobacco-funded, fox-hunting Roger Scruton is definitely of the second rank ...

But the reality is grimmer still. The report found that permitting the burka not only made it harder for individual women to resist domestic pressure; it increased that pressure. Refusing to adopt the burka, in areas where burka-wearing prevailed, meant choosing to stand out: to reject what other women were conspicuously doing. As Patrick Weil, a member of the commission that later examined the headscarf ban, put it, the larger the number of women who conformed, the more those who did not were denounced as “ ‘whores’ who ought to follow the example of their sisters who respected Koranic prescriptions”.
Allowing the burka consequently enables coercion and involuntary submission. In making it possible for some to freely consent, it facilitates forcing others to do so against their will, just as would permitting polygamy, pubescent marriage and female genital mutilation in allegedly “consensual” cases.
The damage, however, does not end with the women themselves. As the European Court of Human Rights found when it upheld the French ban, concealing the face “call(s) into question the possibility of open interpersonal relationships, which form an indispensable element of community life”.
Roger Scruton once observed that “the ‘wealth’ of the ‘public life’ lies not in self-determination or collective action but in the multi-stranded liveliness and spontaneity arising from the ongoing intercourse of heterogeneous individuals and groups that can maintain a civilised coexistence”. Echoing that insight, the court concluded that “the barrier raised against others by a veil concealing the face” fundamentally violates “the right of others to live in that space of socialisation which makes living together easier”.

For no particular reason, Our Henry also dragged in Hannah Arendt.

Then came the worm wriggle:

In the end, the burka would be far less serious if its proponents were – like the Amish, the Mennonites, ultra-Orthodox Jews and nuns and monks in cloistered communities – quietists, whose goal is not to alter our way of life but to peacefully withdraw from it. 

Hang on, hang on, the pond is all for Laïcité, as much as the next baguette carrier, but if you're going to go down that path, it's not just one in, it's all in ...

Ban 'em all, or else you end up on the slippery relativist slop of favouring one bunch of fanatics over another ... and the next thing you know you're in a school molestation crisis.

Since when has the abortion-banning, hectoring, interfering, relentlessly campaigning Catholic church earned the label of quietest? And ditto the Zionists urging on the ethnic cleansing of Gaza?

The wretched nuns who smacked the pond across the chops and went around measuring skirt lengths on eight year olds wasn't in some cloistered community.

Sure they've been beaten back, but they can still be found in certain places in abundance. 

The pond remembers being surrounded by a pack of them in St Peter's square, inducing a dire case of PTNSD, a flashback to tortured Fellini films where black-robed crows scuttled across the screen ...

That's the debate Our Henry dares not have. 

Bashing Islamics is easy peasy, but bashing fundamentalist tykes and fundamentalist Jews in the same sentence is entirely outside the remit of the Australian Daily Catholic Zionist News ...

But Salafists are not retreating from the Earthly City to patiently await the City of God. Their radical separatism, of which the burka is the paradigmatic expression, aims to fracture and ultimately overthrow a society deemed terminally corrupt, while dismantling the liberal freedoms its proponents stridently invoke whenever their right to do so is questioned.
That is the shadow that falls across this debate – and which polite evasions cannot dispel. It must be discussed, as must the objections to the arguments set out here, because difficult issues can only be addressed through frank and open debate.
A warning Hannah Arendt drew from her experience in interwar Europe makes that debate all the more important. The demagogues, she noted, “possessed an unerring instinct” for the controversies elites sought to suppress. “Everything hidden in silence became of major significance; and the mob really believed that truth was whatever respectable society had hypocritically passed over.”
Yes, these are tough problems. And yes, the easy option is to stifle debate. But no Senate can bury the risks they create or the tensions they inflame. If senators don’t have the moral courage to face them, they should make way for those who do.

Pathetic really, and worse, there was again no chance to segue to other stories involving hypocrisy of a stunning kind ...

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is facing heat over a strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean, said in 2016 that he believed in “consequences for abject war crimes.”
“I do think there have to be consequences for abject war crimes. If you’re doing something that is just completely unlawful and ruthless, then there is a consequence for that,” Hegseth said during an event with the Liberty Forum of Silicon Valley in April 2016.
“That’s why the military said it won’t follow unlawful orders from their commander in chief. There’s a standard, there’s an ethos, there’s a belief that we are above what so many things that our enemies or others would do,” he added. (The Hill)

Sheesh, and the pond had just the 'toon for it ...

And where's that damned war on Xmas? 

Must it be left to King Donald to desecrate the holyday?

Deeply weird, fully sick ... what with Sleepy Don acting more demented by the day.

And what happened to the war on Bad Bunny?

And Crikey had a note that sent the pond into a deep cringe ...

Nauseating, and to crank up the nausea past 11, the pond turned to Killer for the Friday bonus ...

The header: Daniel Andrews and Jacinta Allan prove voters get what they deserve, Does a 1.7 per cent reduction over four years to a massively bloated state public service really sound like ‘slashing’ or ‘axing’ to you?

The caption: Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan in question time in Victorian Parliament. Picture: NewsWire / Luis Enrique Ascui

The pond immediately regretted it, as the pond always does with Killer, whether he's intent on Killernomics Argentine-style, or crusading about masks and jabs.

The lad has never recovered from his Covid obsessions, but this day there came a publishing distraction.

First the set-up, an attempt to exorcise the demonic comrade Dan, still buzzing around in the hive mind:

Any notion that Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan was governing more respectfully of taxpayers’ money than predecessor Daniel Andrews ended this week after her government revealed its pathetic response to a long-awaited review of its bloated public sector.
It was very disappointing to see words such as “slashed” and “axed” used in the media to describe a plan to trim the state’s bureaucracy headcount by 1000 people over four years. This is a government with consolidated state debts on track to exceed $230bn within a few years, and one that should be doubly frugal amid speculation interest rates could rise next year.
Victoria’s bureaucracy under Andrews and now Allan has swollen 51 per cent since 2015 to 57,345 last year. The broader public sector workforce has similarly grown at multiples of population growth, by 38 per cent, to 382,823. Over the same period the total cost of public sector wages and salaries has roughly doubled to $40bn. Almost one in 10 Victorians work directly for the government. Given all this background, does a 1.7 per cent reduction over four years sound like “slashing” or “axing” to you?
Indeed, the supposed “cuts” were even more paltry than the headline suggested after CPSU Victorian branch assistant secretary Mitch Vandewerdt-Holman told The Guardian that 619 of the 1055 jobs to be removed had already gone. Shockingly, even he, a public sector union chief, conceded there was “definitely more room” to cut the number of senior executives, whose ranks had tripled since 2014, when Andrews came to power.

The reptiles boldly featured some defacing of the street, though there seems to have been a little trouble with the shutter speed, Street artist Jarrod Grech’s new artwork near Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne. Picture: NewsWire / David Geraghty

Good to know that street art and graffiti and the like is now fully reptile approved, as Killer turned to doing a promo ...

Allan clearly wasn’t fibbing when she revealed last month in an interview that she regularly sought advice from Andrews. He may have resigned as premier in 2023 but his governing philosophy, including a thriving contempt for taxpayers’ money, lives on.

Ah, and so to the real point of the Killer exercise:

A new book, launched this week in Melbourne, The Dark Legacy of Daniel Andrews, is a timely reminder of just how socially and economically destructive Andrews has been, and clearly, continues to be. Andrews became deservedly infamous around Australia and the world for his draconian response to Covid, which must figure as the biggest peacetime policy disaster in Australian history once all the costs are appropriately accounted for.

Yes, Comrade Dan still lives rent free in Killer's head ... apparently almost as bad as a nun torturing school kids ... l'horreur, l'horreur, quelle horreur ...

Who can forget the rubber bullets fired at Victorians protesting against lockdowns and vaccine mandates, the pregnant woman arrested for her Facebook posts, or the absurd daily press conferences where “doughnut days” were the only thing that mattered?
But the book’s nine chapters, including one by me on fiscal policy and one by Peter Jennings on foreign policy, make clear how damaging Andrews’s impact has been across practically every dimension of public life.
Former Public Service commissioner John Lloyd in his chapter outlines how the once impartial Victorian public sector became politicised and divorced from economic reality.
Its 2020 enterprise agreement, for instance, included 27 different types of paid leave: gender transition (four weeks paid), cultural and ceremonial leave (four days paid) and (separately) First People’s Assembly attendance leave (10 days paid). No wonder the number of Australians claiming Aboriginality has exploded! And naturally this comes on top of the right to work at home two days a week for Victorian bureaucrats.

The reptiles helped out with another distraction, featuring the sort of witch no five hour Hollywood musical could redeem in Killer's mind ...Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan has spoken to the media ahead of the introduction of new crime laws in the state.

That sent Killer off on his favourite topics - union bashing and Covid and climate science denialism ...

Meanwhile, the union movement has become so powerful within the government that the Victorian Trades Hall Council was approving government contracts to security firms, as revealed in the Covid-19 Hotel Quarantine Inquiry. Andrews’s energy policy has been a disaster too and provided a taste of what was to come nationally once Labor returned to power federally in 2022.
Victoria once enjoyed among the cheapest electricity prices in the world, thanks to its plentiful reserves of brown coal, but that natural advantage has been squandered. The sudden decommissioning of the Hazelwood coal-fired power station in 2017 triggered an 85 per cent surge in wholesale electricity prices and permanently higher price volatility. The Andrews government also brought forward the closure of the giant Yallourn power station from 2032 to 2022, and Loy Yang A from 2045 to 2035, both of which could easily have been extended to provide many more years of relatively cheap power.
These closures are meant to pave the way for the scientifically and economically unattainable goal of “net zero” emissions in Victoria by 2045. There is even a state plan for 95 per cent of electricity to be generated by “renewables” by 2035 – that won’t happen but the damage caused in trying will surely be significant.
Andrews’s war on gas included dumping in 2022 the requirement for new dwellings to be connected to the state’s gas network, which had been introduced years earlier to ensure households could avail themselves of the state’s large, accessible gas reserves.

At this point the reptiles made even clearer the real point of the exercise with an actual snap:

Couldn't they have noted that Killer was flogging a Connor Court tome?

What a motley crew!

Sorry, no link, if you want to p*ss thirty bucks up against a Connor Court wall, you'll have to do it on your own time and dime ...

Satisfied he'd one his policy duties for Connor Court, Killer wrapped up proceedings, with a nod to petulant Peta's generous participation ...

Indeed, his government also introduced a constitutional ban on fracking in a state with extremely plentiful gas reserves – enough to power every home in Australia for 94 years, according to separate IPA research, not to mention generate much-needed royalties for a heavily indebted state. The book, edited by Morgan Begg and launched by Peta Credlin on Wednesday, catalogues Andrews’s pernicious influence in law and order and education too.
It can’t be denied that Andrews won three elections, but his political success serves as a reminder that destructive policies can be wildly popular. Political observers have often declared something like “voters get it right in the end”. Well, they certainly didn’t in Argentina, where voters for decades supported big-spending socialist governments that destroyed their nation’s prosperity.
They clearly haven’t in Victoria either, and if Andrews’s legacy isn’t retired to the history books at the next state election in a year’s time they will have erred again. A better aphorism is voters get the governments they deserve.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

They never give anything a rest ...and they never provide the sort of real entertainment on hand in the disunited states and celebrated by the immortal Rowe this day.

There's nothing like extrajudicial killings, bloody murders and war crimes as a way of pandering to the new Nero ...

In which the pond draws a compleat reptile blank and only valiant Louise saves the day ...

 

The day had to come, and Thursday was always the most likely day.

The day that finally came is the day that the pond had not the slightest interest in reading or presenting portions of the lizard Oz.

The absence of petulant Peta didn't help. 

In the event of a total bust, the pond would have dared to go there. Except there was no there there and visible this day.

The lead story had all the appeal of a sighting of Pauline in a burqa ...

EXCLUSIVE
Revealed: Tony Burke’s secret talks over returning ISIS brides
The Home Affairs Minister held secret talks with Save the Children and asked a public servant to leave for ‘frank’ discussions, leaked meeting notes reveal | READ THE SECRET MEETING NOTES
By Greg Brown and Liam Mendes

The pond realises that the reptiles were doing their best kind of eggbeater - EXCLUSIVE, SECRET - but the pond had not the slightest interest in the resulting omelet.

Over on the extreme far right, Dame Slap finally abandoned her Linda obsession, only to descend into an Orwellian abyss, with her usual misogynist routine ... (can a reptile female scribbler hate women? You betcha):

It’s business as usual for the Big Sister racket
This target-setting exercise is little more than a vast social science experiment whose only certain outcome will be to drown productivity in paperwork.
By Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist

She really has become an unreadable pile of bile.

The pond will grudgingly do a litany of all the try hards and losers and dropkicks trying to summon attention, compleat with intermittent archive links, so that those outside the lizard Oz paywall can share the pond's gruntlement, or not, as the case may be.

The economy was one routine.

One angle was the "we'll all be rooned" routine ...

Businesses, workers caught in the eye of an economic storm
When you get under the hood of the fragile national economy, there is a chasm between the Albanese government’s rhetoric and real world experience for millions of Australians.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

On the other hand, news that the GDP was growing produced a different angle on the "we'll all be rooned" routine, so it's either an economic storm of no growth or an economic storm of too much growth:

ECONOMIC GROWTH
‘Spend and grow’ raises rates fears as GDP jump fastest in two years
Australia has recorded its fastest economic growth in two years, but economists warn excessive government spending could trigger inflation and force interest rate rises.
By Matthew Cranston

There was also Jack the Insider, complaining about there not being enough policing of internet sharks, an odd angle given the way that the tired old sharks in News Corp are always circling, and the only policing they've ever copped is the occasional slap with a warm lettuce leaf (here no taxes, no taxes here):

Hopes hosed down on child social media ban
Anika Wells declared ‘we can’t control the ocean, we can police the sharks’, which is odd given that some platforms have been exempted where there are a lot of dorsal fins circling.
By Jack the Insider
Columnist

At least that allowed the pond to do a segue to the infallible Pope:

A certain Langford was wheeled in to tackle defence:

Make-or-break moment for Defence reform
We risk repeating history unless the government confronts a simple truth: capability is delivered by the military, not the bureaucracy.
By Ian Langford

Just to prove that the pond read to the end of this word salad:

...Transition is complex. Bureaucracies resist change. New structures can obscure accountability just as easily as they can clarify it. And if capability ownership and delivery responsibility are not aligned and publicly visible, Australia will be no better off than it was under the DMO.
The truth is this: these reforms can work, and they may be the last chance to get acquisition right before the strategic environment forces our hand. But success will depend not on structure alone but on whether Defence finally accepts that accountability cannot be shared into insignificance. Someone must own the requirement. Someone must own the delivery. Someone must answer when it fails. If this reform accomplishes that, it will be remembered as a turning point. If not, it will join the long list of inquiries, reviews and restructures that changed everything and fixed nothing.
Ian Langford is executive director of Security & Defence PLuS.

The truth is this sir. 

You are no bromancer. 

The bromancer would never have scribbled The truth is this: these reforms can work.

Hang your head in shame sir.

Or perhaps good luck in your quest to be that someone.

The pond realised it had to make some kind of effort, and so settled on Louise as a token offering:

The header: One-size American political philosophy is wrong fit for us, Parts of the NatCon agenda feels less like a home-grown evolution and more like a shiny import from an American intellectual subculture.

The caption showing a King Donald in catchy gear: Some of the NatCon nat-con agenda feels less like a homegrown evolution and more like a shiny new import from an American intellectual subculture. Picture: Angela Weiss/AFP

Now Louise is no petulant Peta, and some might ask, why Louise?

Well there's a clue in this profile, where you can also see the changes she personally made to the beefy boofhead's wiki listing ...

Marrying Angus Taylor in about 1994/5 Louise went to New Zealand with her new husband while he sorted out the New Zealand dairy industry. When the family returned to Australia she had a family of four between 1998 and 2005. The children were, conveniently, ‘boy-girl-boy-girl’. At the same time, she continued her legal career and the family lived in Sydney. 
When Angus was recommended to the Party apparatchiks by John Howard and approached to stand for Parliament in 2013, the family moved to a farm near Goldburn and Louise seems to have been left at a loose end. 
In 2014 Louise ceased her legal life and became a full time press secretary and campaign aide for her husband.

There's a whole lot more there in that listing - the wiki war is particular fun:

Delicious, and that's just a sample.

There's way more, and there are footnotes as well, and her diligent work for the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way surely makes her thoughts worthy of a savouring.

The pond thinks what Louise has to say, if not part of the sinister Big Sister movement, at least fits into the Big Brother cause.

Louise shows particular skill deploring the disunited states way, while expertly cherry picking all that's currently roiling King Donald's reign:

There is a new tendency on the right – popular in the US – that brands itself as “post-liberal” or “national conservative”.
Some of this is appearing in Australian political discourse through the efforts of the new National Conservative Institute led by my friend Dan Ryan. Good on the nat cons; fresh thinking about the centre-right’s future is essential at this existential moment.
But the adoption of nat-con thinking – without careful consideration of its origins and objectives – means the time has come for genuine debate, in good faith.
The nat-con impulse to kill off some excesses of our liberal (that is, progressive) society is one I share. Just for starters, diversity, equity and inclusion and identity politics are a scourge; the chemical mutilation of children will go down in history as an unfathomable tragedy; and the ideologically driven energy transition inflicted on rural Australia by the most authoritarian and incompetent government in the nation’s history must be exposed and reconsidered. But we don’t need a nat-con switcheroo to address this and more.
Some of the nat-con agenda feels less like a homegrown evolution and more like a shiny new import from an American intellectual subculture. 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.

You see? Louise deplores those bloody Yank furriners, but happily berates TG folk, DEI, and climate science.

It's kinda King Donald lite.

To help Louise, the reptiles dragged in talk of Marge and a sighting of Sleepy Don in drooping eyelids mode, no doubt after a five hour truthing binge: Sky News US Analyst Michael Ware claims Marjorie Taylor Greene’s resignation symbolises a fracture between Trump and the MAGA movement’s “core principles.” “She represents the MAGA drive for affordability, which President Trump, in all the polling, is completely underwater on,” Mr Ware told Sky News Australia. “His polling is so underwater; a snorkel wouldn’t help him right now.”

Having Louise on board at the pond at least provided some spacing for a 'toon cavalcade, starting with yesterday's infallible Pope ...

Of course if you relied on the lizard Oz for information, you wouldn't have the foggiest clue what that 'toon joke was all about ...

Back to Louise, arguing her case with the skill of a barrister:

Real conservatism begins in gratitude: for political inheritance, institutions that evolved rather than erupted and freedoms exercised quietly. The conservative is wary of the grand project. Edmund Burke reminds us society is too complex to be redesigned by rational abstraction; too precious to be engineered through ideology.
Most famously he said: “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.” But then: “A state without the means of conservation is without means of its change.”
The nat-con instinct runs in the opposite direction, in the US at least. They correctly lament the modern liberal (that is, progressive) order as hollow and corrosive but wrongly conclude that the remedy is a state willing to assert a single moral and cultural vision. That’s a radical idea for any liberal (in the good sense) democracy.

By golly, a reference worthy of our Henry, and to help, the reptiles showed an actual portrait of the man ... Edmund Burke reminds us society is too complex to be redesigned by rational abstraction; too precious to be engineered through ideology.

The pond isn't saying that it's genuine, certifiable Our Henry - Friday is only a sleep away - but it's good imitation Our Henry, a sort of philosophical fairy floss version ...

Now marvel at the way Louise manages to disavow King Donald, Marge heresy-lite:

The irony is that nat cons accuse progressives of indulging identity politics yet they manufacture their own: a thumping new politics of national identity, cultural identity, masculine identity, religious identity. Where the left confects its categories out of race, sexuality, gender, indigeneity and grievance, the “post-liberal right” confects its categories out of heritage, a claim to moral purity and cultural conformity. The polarities change; the logic remains. Identity politics in a different guise is still identity politics.
Likewise with cancel culture. Many of us have spent years pointing to the left’s illiberal policing of dissent. Yet on the American new right we see loyalty tests, purges of rhetorical deviation and shutting down of inconvenient speech. What was once pilloried by conservatives is now mimicked. We’re also seeing the factions splintering and hijacked by currents of anti-Semitism. That’s what happens when you attempt ex post facto to build a new political philosophy around a single person such as Donald Trump, who doesn’t have one.
The same one-size-fits-all nat-con posture extends to economics, where fawning over America First protectionism does not inspire confidence. Trump’s tariffs have seriously raised grocery prices, smashed US farmers and achieved none of the promised industrial revival. And that is in an economy of continental scale with 110 million households. Australia – a small, outward-facing trading nation – would be crippled by such policies.
If the centre-right party in Australia becomes a party of big government, interventionism and picking winners, we end up on Labor’s turf – and Labor will always outbid us in that game. The result is a soft-socialist equilibrium, not a liberal-democratic one. Australia’s prosperity has always come from openness: selling what we are good at, importing what others do better, and letting private players, not governments, allocate capital. By definition the nat-con agenda would trounce this.
There is another point: the political and cultural objectives of the MAGA right – including the nat cons – are deeply American in temperament. As Laura Field shows in Furious Minds, the movement draws on the elitist Straussian tradition in US academe, the Christian-integralist tradition of pre-Vatican II theology and an American instinct towards heroic “virtuous” statecraft coupled with a romantic notion that a strong yet passive nation can somehow withdraw from strategic obligations.
There is an elitist, undemocratic and highly prescriptive streak in all of this. None of these currents translates to Australian soil. Our political traditions are modest, secular, highly democratic, pragmatic and suspicious of grand ideological crusades. We do not – and could never – build political identity around belief systems.
Young Australians need economic hope and personal freedom, not ideological policing from left or right. They need the ability to work, create, choose, compete and thrive without being dragooned by any faction. They do not want a 1950s restoration.

Stirring stuff, and for a minute there, the pond thought that Louise might be berating the much loved Australian Daily Catholic News (alternating with the Australian Daily Zionist News);

...the movement draws on the elitist Straussian tradition in US academe, the Christian-integralist tradition of pre-Vatican II theology

Take that bromancer and onion muncher... no Latin mass for you lot.

To help stir the pot a little more, the reptiles dragged in the Bolter ... Sky News host Andrew Bolt is joined by ‘Triggered with Samara Gill’ host Samara Gill to underline the political right shaking up global politics. “Donald Trump in the US, Nigel Farage in Britain,” Mr Bolt said. “The latest polls show a big drop in support for Farage’s Reform Party … but the Conservatives have now got off the floor and nearly caught up with Labour.”

Making plans for Nigel?

Shaken but not stirred, though perhaps a little triggered, and what a good chance to catch up with TT and sleepy Don ...

Now it's true that the reptiles this day completely missed out on the real excitement currently going down in the disunited states, the argument about war criminals doing war criminal business, and so did Louise, but for that there are the 'toons ...

And so to the wrap up, and aw, shucks, look, at the very end Louise manages to invoke the holy trinity of Burke, Mills and Ming the Merciless ...

Nat cons wish to restore faith and cohesion. We would all hope for this. But this can come only from our own little platoons, not the impulse for prescription. The left wants an interfering moral-administrative state. National conservatism proposes another version of it. The nat-con project doesn’t liberate, it substitutes one form of top-down cultural management for another.
The Liberals’ Burke-Mill-Menzies inheritance provides all we need and more to campaign to dismantle a fantastical energy and climate regime that is destroying our economy, reduce immigration heavily in the national interest, revitalise defence and national security – with new policies to support families and social cohesion. Rather than throwing out the baby with the bathwater for a wobbling US intellectual fad, we should have the courage to know we can and will win the arguments if we remain focused on and actually fight for the core values of the inheritance we have been given, in our own Australian way.
Louise Clegg worked as a barrister specialising in public law and employment law.

All that was missing was a 1950s picket fence, or perhaps a sojourn in Victorian England.

Say what you will, but after reading Louise, the pond is aware that the lettuce felt empowered, could sense a sudden surge in its chances.

If this can be taken as a sample of what the beefy boofhead down Goulburn way is offering the nation, why it's surely going to be a leafy word salad by Xmas?

Unfortunately Louise didn't seem too wired on all the best that's going down in foreign diplomacy at the moment, but that's what the 'toons are for, with the immortal Rowe standing by to fill in the gaps ...

Such a fine portrait ...

... and so many details ...

... and if you made it to the end, feel free to inhale a free Diet Coke ...

In which assorted reptile jihads means there's no escaping "Ned's" natter or a bout of Killernomics from the IPA ...

 

A very rare UPDATE:

In the lizard Oz:

And also in the Nine rags:

Sadly the archive versions were before the judgement came through, but this is the nub of in the Nine rags:

Court’s damning comments as Lehrmann fails in high-stakes appeal
Lee found the interview in 2021 on the now defunct The Project program suggested that Lehrmann, who was not named but was identifiable to some viewers, raped Higgins in Parliament House in 2019. However, Lee said that Ten and Wilkinson could rely on the defence of truth.
On Wednesday, the Full Court of the Federal Court – Justices Michael Wigney, Craig Colvin and Wendy Abraham – dismissed Lehrmann’s appeal and ordered him to pay his opponents’ legal costs.
The court went further than Lee and made a significant finding that Lehrmann was not reckless about whether Higgins was consenting to sex, but was aware she did not consent and went ahead anyway.
In a summary of the decision, read in court by Wigney, the court said the “only reasonable inference to be drawn from the facts, known and observable to Mr Lehrmann at the time he had sexual intercourse with Ms Higgins, is that Mr Lehrmann did turn his mind to whether Ms Higgins consented to sex, was aware that she was not consenting, but proceeded nonetheless”.
This provided another basis for upholding Lee’s finding that Lehrmann raped Higgins, the summary said.
Lehrmann’s lawyer, Zali Burrows, had argued in court that Lee had insufficient evidence to find the former federal Liberal staffer was a rapist.

Now will Dame Slap give it all a rest? Or will she keep on with her jihad, with Linda cosplaying for Bruce?

Will she insist on endlessly traumatising the hive mind?

The real trauma?

Being bludgeoned on the head repeatedly by Dame Slap, blunt force trauma by repeated violent blows with a heavy instrument, the pond made brain dead by her endless jihad ...

Only trauma is Labor’s for being caught out in Linda Reynolds and Fiona Brown cases
The Albanese government’s justification for hiring $25,000-a-day barristers to crush two legal claims has been branded ‘risible’ by critics who question the real motives.
By Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist

And just to add to the trauma, a couple more blunt instruments ...

SENATE ESTIMATES
Taxpayers’ exceptional bill to fund counsel of war on Reynolds
The Albanese government has paid a barrister more than $5000 a day to fight compensation claims from Linda Reynolds, while Finance Minister Katy Gallagher admits reading court rulings that demolished Labor’s cover-up allegations.
By Elizabeth Pike and Noah Yim

And by the way, the reptiles produced a blatant lie by claiming that Dame Slap's yarn went up at 5.22 am. The archived version was dated 2nd December at 8.55 pm.

Why lie on such a trivial matter? Why the window re-dressing?

Whatever, won't someone make her stop, please dear long absent lord, make her stop, or persuade a lizard Oz editor to make her stop ...

And while we're at it, make him stop, please dear long absent lord, return and make him stop ... 

Donald Trump Melts Down in Unhinged Late-Night Posting Spree

Trump, 79, Reposts Unhinged Typo-Filled Late-Night Rant

Can the pond just have a moment of peace and quiet?

Of course not, it's Wednesday with the reptiles, and the task is to choose the reptile who can be titillating without being utterly jihad tedious ...

First let's get the "news" that batters out of the way ...

EXCLUSIVE
Former Japan envoy slams Labor’s silence on China bullying
Japan’s former ambassador has accused Australia of abandoning its closest Asian ally after failing to condemn China’s vicious threats against the Japanese Prime Minister.
By Ben Packham

Ah, in the archive version that became Japan slams Labor’s silence on China bullying, with the former ambassador given "whole of country, whole of nation, whole of government" status.

That was backed up by an "opinion" piece ...

Where is Australia in Japan’s moment of need?
A Chinese diplomat’s death threat against Japan’s Prime Minister has escalated into economic warfare, with Beijing now questioning Japanese sovereignty over Okinawa itself.
By Shingo Yamagami
Contributor

Relax, Mr Yamagami, the pond understands that the government is sending a load of pig iron your way. Use it wisely and well.

And the Australian Daily Zionist News was at it again...

EXCLUSIVE
Jews’ nightmare with no end: two years of hate, violence as anti-Semitism takes root
Australian Jews have endured 1654 anti-Semitic incidents in the past year as hate attacks reach five times pre-October 7 levels.
By Cameron Stewart

That was turned into an "opinion" piece too, on the basis of want not ...

Party leaders need to prevent racist hate becoming the new normal
The report on anti-Semitic attacks in Australia is a wake-up call for leaders around the country to stop the normalisation of hatred.
By Cameron Stewart
Chief International Correspondent

Sure beats having to write about a far right government, led by a corrupt, pardon-seeking PM, intent on the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the claiming of the West Bank.

Belatedly, the pond realised the intent of the reptiles' cunning plans.

All that jihad carry-on was designed to make supping on "Ned's" natter seem like a real treat ...

The header: Recover economic clout or Liberals risk wilderness; The more the analysis, the more astonishing is the 2025 election outcome. The damage to the Liberal Party brand is deep and wide – it has run everywhere including into the party’s once strongest suit.

The caption for poor old Susssan: Leader of the Opposition Sussan Ley addresses the House. Picture: NewsWire / David Beach

As a bonus, this "Ned" climb was no Everest climb, more like a 5 minute Mount Kosciuszko stroll, and at least the lettuce read it with interest ...

The more the analysis, the more astonishing is the 2025 election outcome. It has empowered Labor and demoralised the Coalition. The most astonishing aspect is that at a time of punishing cost-of-living pressures and rising interest rates Labor replaced the Liberal Party as the superior economic manager.
At face value this makes no sense. Its only logic lies in an economic perception tied to a deeper view about the credibility and conviction of Labor and Liberal as governing parties. The damage to the Liberal Party brand is deep and wide – it has run everywhere including into the party’s once strongest suit.
It is a reminder that democratic politics is relative. The Albanese government might be seen as an uninspiring and ineffective bunch but, compared with the Liberals, it was united, diligent, with a superior leader and a brilliant communicator as Treasurer. That reversed decades of electoral history on the economic ratings test.
Unless the centre-right grasps where it went wrong in 2025, it won’t recover. Two big features of the election campaign stand out, policy credentials and leadership perceptions. Labor was totally dominant on both tests and they were the tests that mattered.
These are the conclusions from the recently released 2025 Australian Election Study conducted by the Australian National University and Griffith University, its central thesis being the vote reflected a nexus of short-term and long-term factors that, unless checked, “point to Labor dominating federal politics for the foreseeable future”.

The reptiles were determined to remind the hive mind of how we got here ...Peter Dutton visits Mount Sheridan in the electorate of Leichhardt during the 2025 election. Picture: Richard Dobson

This endless contemplation of the runes, this relentless return to considering the entrails, this feckless ferreting through the tea leaves, must make the lettuce extremely pleased ...

Our political culture is changing in fundamental ways. There is voter dealignment from the main parties – Labor and Liberal – yet the country overall is moving to the left in this dealignment story, which means Labor wins office through the preference system. Unless the centre-right understands this decisive phenomenon it cannot recover.
The study identifies the unprecedented aspect of the 2025 election (in the context of its surveys dating back to 1987), notably that Labor prevailed on nine out of the 10 policy issues. The study called this a “significant departure” from the historical trend. Labor won on every economic issue: on economic management 32-28 per cent; on cost of living 37-22 per cent; on tax 31-23 per cent; and on housing affordability 34-16 per cent. This was despite a sustained fall in living standards, though Labor argued pre-election the economy was picking up after the Reserve Bank began to cut interest rates.
The survey makes clear that economic issues dominated the campaign. Two-thirds of voters said an economic issue was their top concern. This should have given the Coalition a critical advantage but that didn’t happen.
Moreover, voters were pessimistic about the economy, with 42 per cent feeling the economy would be worse in a year compared with only 24 per cent who believed it would be better.
There was no great confidence in Labor’s economic management but even less confidence about Liberal management on inflation, tax and housing. The explanatory factor is Liberal weakness, not Labor strength.
The study’s co-author, ANU political science professor Ian McAllister, said: “The Coalition has been losing ground on those economic issues for at least the last two elections.”
The study shows that at the 2016 election the Coalition led on the economy by 27 percentage points, falling to 12 percentage points at the 2022 poll and collapsing into negative territory in 2025. This was the weakest Liberal economic perception at an election in the party’s history. Yet the decline has deep roots. Unless it is reversed the Liberals cannot win an election.

Economic issues? 

Lucky Killer was on hand to sort those out, as the reptiles inserted a snap of triumphant Sauron, Anthony Albanese gestures with his partner Jodie Haydon and son Nathan after winning the 2025 election.

"Ned" carried on with his woulda, coulda, shoulda dance ...

This should have led to a post-election priority Liberal strategy: to regain ascendancy on the economic agenda, to reclaim this traditional Liberal strength, a tactic that would have been assisted because Labor’s economic lead was always fragile and as 2025 advanced the government’s economic vulnerability only intensified; witness the recent increase in inflation.
This tactic was a no-brainer. Progress would have been readily available on the single most vital policy priority. But the Coalition did the opposite.
It waged instead a huge public brawl against the net-zero concept based largely on the notion the Coalition had to move sharply to the right, maximise differences with Labor and prove its economic credentials by spearheading an assault on Labor’s high energy prices. Whether this gives the Liberals more credibility on economic management in this term remains to be seen.
How the Coalition’s policy delivers cheaper energy prices is not yet apparent. And this follows the flawed nuclear power plant policy at the election with the study finding public opinion narrowly split 38-37 per cent in favour with distinctly low support among ALP voters.
On the issue of leadership the Liberals have a serious problem. The study found that since Anthony Albanese became leader “Labor has attracted a greater share of votes based on leadership”. On a scale of 0 to 10, the study found Peter Dutton rated at 3.2 compared with Albanese at 5.1. Dutton’s popularity rating was the lowest of any political leader in the survey’s history back to 1987, with Scott Morrison’s 2022 rating making him the second most unpopular leader. Albanese had ranked 13th out of the 28 party leaders contesting elections since 1987. The biggest Albanese-Dutton gap on traits came on compassion, with the study concluding there was a “consistent pattern” whereby Labor leaders “are perceived as being more compassionate” than Liberal leaders.

Want more salt rubbed into the wounds? Why not beam up the liar from the Shire? Scott Morrison

"Ned" failed to feel the rapture, but did sound like he believed in end times:

All of the above results must be seen in context – the nation over 2022 and 2025 has been moving to the political left, in both substance and style, with the centre-left primary votes accruing from Labor, the Greens, the teals and a range of independents. Dealignment from the major parties has taken the nation to the left.
While Labor’s primary vote was weak in 2025 at 34.56 per cent, Labor is a big winner on prefer­ences as smaller pro-left parties and independents preference Liberals below Labor as people vote down the card. The study concludes that “independent voters tend to be left of centre”.
The Liberals lose because a majority of voters dislike them more than they dislike Labor. If the country is moving culturally left and the Coalition is moving to the right, how can the Coalition attract the preferences it needs?
The forces driving this shift to the left run deep. The study shows the Coalition is losing the votes of people aged under 40 years: in 2022 it won just 25 per cent of this group while in 2025 that fell to 23 per cent. The study shows that younger voters are moving left and millennials are defying the orthodoxy that people will change and vote more conservative as they age.

Finally came the coup de grâce, a shot of hapless Susssan herself, Sussan Ley, looking a little odd:

The lettuce rubbed leaves with glee ...

The generational trend is reinforced by the gender trend. At the 2025 election 37 per cent of men voted Coalition but only 28 per cent of women, revealing the modern gender gap allocates women significantly to the left of men. McAllister highlights the role of education: “The electorate is becoming progressively more left. That’s being driven by the ‘big three’ – gender, generation and university education. If you know somebody’s age, their gender and their university education, you can predict with a degree of certainty how they are going to vote.”
Two forces shape politics – what politicians do and the lens the public uses to view politicians. Because more Australians view politics with a leftist cultural lens they will be less sympathetic to leaders such as Dutton and Morrison, less impressed by Liberal economics when their bias is to Labor’s government spending and state intervention.
The so-called new conservatism wants the Liberals to follow Donald Trump and move to the right on energy and immigration along with ditching liberal economics as so yesterday. But it needs to explain how that delivers a 50 per cent plus vote via the preference system in our Australian democracy.

And that was it, "Ned" done and dusted, but for determined masochists, this is the archive link to "Ned's" outing.

That way lies access to links in "Ned's" piece, and to more madness.

For example, that late-breaking reference to so-called new conservatism contained a link to a barking mad piece, though still naturally within the hive mind ...

Why Australia’s legacy Liberals don’t get the ‘new right’
The Liberal Party does not need cosmetic changes, more attractive candidates or better rhetoric. The problem is it clings to a stale consensus that is out of step with successful centre-right parties across the rest of the world.
Dan Ryan

This Dan was hot to trot on all things Nige and King Donald ...

Poor old "Ned":

...Instead, they continue to want to run on a platform that resembles something Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, John McCain or David Cameron or Paul Kelly would approve of – cutting taxes and regulations, budget repair, rolling back DEI, more flag waving patriotism, increase in defence spending and the like. There is nothing inherently wrong with these positions. But they are not new, nor are they sufficient to win.

The pond keeds, it keeds, there was no mention in that par of "Ned", though there coulda and shoulda been.

Just like Dame Groan this rogue Ryan was keen on bashing furriners ...

...The tragedy of Peter Dutton’s election campaign was that it embraced some second order MAGA issues, but ignored the far more important and popular ones. For example, there was much enthusiasm for Elon Musk’s cost cutting program, DOGE. Yet the program was only announced after the US President was re-elected. Similarly, the slogan “Drill baby, drill!” was not used at all until 2024 and was a rehash of a line first popularised by Sarah Palin. Trump was broadly supportive of nuclear power, but did not lead with it.
The Dutton campaign thus managed to attract all the opprobrium of the Trump brand but got none of the upside of his more salient core policies.
Trade policy was not mentioned in any significant way by Dutton. Yet it was the first thing Trump mentioned when he launched his initial campaign, and this ultimately proved crucial in electorally significant blue collar industrial Midwest seats and elsewhere. Now there is a bipartisan position in Washington for at least some level of tariffs on China and many other countries.
In Australia, by contrast, the centre-right continues to support an agreement, signed by Tony Abbott’s government (on almost the same day Trump first came down the escalators in 2015), that allows 100 per cent of Chinese manufactured goods to come into Australia duty-free. If that stays in place we will largely remain, in Andrew Hastie’s words, “a nation of flat white makers” and never have any sort of substantial industry in Australia ever again.
Scepticism about past foreign policy was also a key factor of Trump’s appeal. His harsh criticisms of Iraq and other interventions were a direct repudiation past Republican administrations. These were popular with the public who had grown tired of the misguided and pointless “forever wars”. Yet there has been no real evidence of reflection or contrition in this area from the Howard era right, which appears stuck in the age of George W. Bush.
Hastie seems to get change is required. Other Middle East war veterans who now occupy senior positions in the White House, such as Vance, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth and Jamieson Greer, certainly recognise that a new prudence and realism is needed compared to the last 25 plus years.
Immigration is another area that is central to the rise of the “new right” across the Western world. But it is a subject that has moved well beyond “stopping the boats” of the Howard era. Back then there was an oft-repeated mantra that because our government was able to control illegal immigration Australians welcomed higher levels of legal immigration. If that was ever actually true, it is not true now. Now the far bigger issue is legal immigration numbers.
“Mass migration poses an existential threat to Western civilisation and undermines the stability of key American allies”, Rubio’s state department recently announced. Yet the shadow Immigration Minister Paul Scarr refuses to even use the term “mass immigration” and reprimands people like Hastie for their language when they try to talk seriously but sensibly about it.
The Liberal Party does not need cosmetic changes, more attractive candidates or better rhetoric. The problem is it continues to cling to a stale consensus which is increasingly out of step with successful centre-right political parties across the rest of the world.
Dan Ryan is executive director of the National Conservative Institute of Australia.

Why that would have been much more fun. 

The pond could have linked to tales of Hogsbreath the war criminal, an economy being wrecked by tariffs, the increasingly demented madness of King Donald, the war on Venezuela, assorted interventions in foreign lands, while seeing just how much division and hate can be generated on the streets by roving bands of masked thugs ...

All that, and still the pond wouldn't have been able to segue to the Wilcox of the day ...

Speaking of rampaging gorillas, it's on to Killernomics from the IPA ...

The header: The real reason inflation is high, While politicians blame external forces for inflation, a staggering truth emerges: Australian housing prices have risen almost exactly in line with the creation of new money since 2015.

The caption for the wisely uncredited collage, featuring coins (perhaps King Donald's crypto crash coins were difficult to visualise), and a genuinely meaningless graph which would shock an ABC finance report: RBA governor Michele Bullock and Treasurer Jim Chalmers are under pressure as inflation surges.

Killer was in his usual feisty mood:

The real surprise isn’t that inflation is increasing but that it isn’t higher still. More than a quarter of all the Australian dollars in existence were created in the past five years.
The consumer price index rose 3.8 per cent across the year to October, triggering a fresh round of debate about the cause, but one huge factor is almost never discussed.
Our economy is drowning in dollars as new home loans and government borrowing supercharge the money supply faster than the economy can absorb it.
In just 10 years to the end of September what economists call M3, the sum of all cash and deposits at banks, soared from $1.8 trillion to $3.3 trillion.
Yes, the Australian economy has grown since 2015 – mainly as a result of a nearly 16 per cent increase in the population – but nothing else relevant has grown anywhere nearly as fast.
And what did all that new money do?

Jimbo was served up, if only so he could be knocked down ... Australian Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers addresses the media on the monthly inflation data out today. Picture: NewsWire/ Glenn Campbell

Eventually Killer got into economic history, doing his own version of Our Henry:

Most of it went straight into the housing market where, lo and behold, prices have soared.
Strikingly, capital city dwelling prices have increased about 80 per cent since 2015, according to a series kept by SQM Research – almost precisely the same as the increase in the money supply.
Houses and apartments haven’t become more expensive so much as the buying power of the currency, and unfortunately all the wages and salaries denominated in it, has collapsed.
In terms of things the financial system can’t create out of thin air, the big returns in property have been illusory. When valued in ounces of gold, long considered by many the only timeless, universal currency, Australian property has lost significant value.
It’s fashionable to complain about how expensive things have become since the Covid pandemic, as if inflation were some unfortunate act of God, but it’s a choice.
Governments around the world have pumped in trillions of new units of currency into their economies while banks have created credit like there’s no tomorrow. The value of owner-occupier and housing investment loans outstanding in Australia, for instance, has increased by $1 trillion since 2015 to $2.5 trillion, according to Reserve Bank statistics. The more than $300bn handed out to households and businesses during Covid lockdowns were all freshly created dollars.
The official inflation figures based on CPI are artificially low, excluding asset prices which is where inflation typically shows up first. New money doesn’t increase prices uniformly at the same time, a too often forgotten insight of French economist Richard Cantillon in the early 18th century.
“The increase of money will first be felt in the channels where it enters; and so gradually it will spread to other channels and raise the price of goods and products in the whole state,” he wrote in his classic 1734 essay on monetary policy.

Just to add to the misery: Last week’s shock inflation number killed off any chance of an interest rate cut in 2025 and likely for 2026. The latest economic growth numbers this week will be a test as government spending fuels inflation. Non-productive elements of Australian government spending has prevented the economy from drifting into recession.

Killer turned arcane in a way which should satisfy correspondents:

What’s known as the Cantillon effect describes how those who receive the new money first, such as the recipients of new loans, benefit the most as they are able to spend the money before it seeps into the rest of the economy and increases the overall price level.
Cantillon’s belief in an inextricable link between money and prices was popularised last century by American economist Milton Friedman, who famously argued “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon”.
But central bankers and politicians junked this idea in the 1980s in favour of so-called neo-Keynesian economic models that ascribe inflation to excessive aggregate demand. Inflation arises when unemployment is too low and the economy overheats, they argue, or when workers and employers trigger a wage-price spiral.
It turns out Friedman’s and Cantillon’s ideas have at least as much to offer. The past few years have illustrated how shockingly useless these new theories have become.
In May 2021 the brightest minds at Treasury and the Reserve Bank, using the latest economic models, forecast inflation would never exceed 2.25 per cent across the next three years.
As readers know, within 12 months it had jumped to 6.6 per cent before peaking at 7.8 per cent in late 2023.
It wasn’t only Australian economists with mud on their faces. US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen later was mocked routinely for claiming inflation would be small – and later transitory – in early 2021.
All these forecasts from the first half of 2021 were made well after governments had pumped Covid stimulus into their economies. Indeed, they were made after inflation had already begun to rise rapidly and they occurred well before Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022 (an event that politicians, laughably, would blame later for high inflation). It should be obvious now that the increase in the quantity of money was having a significant impact on prices.

Come on down Milt, help Killer out: Milton Friedman

Now the pond endured all of that burst of downbeat Killernomics, safe in the knowledge that Killer had the right answer all along ...

There you go, follow Killernomics and a $40 billion bail-out will see you right.

Oh there were doubters, but the pond reckons a $40 billion bail out should just about fix everything wrong with Argentina ... and Australia ...

Or would it?

...The Trump administration’s financial and political interventions in Argentina have been declared a success, but the consequences of these actions are still unknown and remain quite risky. In late September, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the Treasury Department’s commitment to lend up to $20 billion to Argentina’s central bank and directly purchase Argentine pesos in an effort to stabilize Argentina’s currency markets. Word then leaked that Treasury was seeking to organize a consortium of private financial institutions to invest another $20 billion in Argentine sovereign debt—although the prospective lenders were not comfortable taking on such risks absent a guarantee from U.S. taxpayers. Bessent first justified the actions on the grounds that Argentina is a “systemically important” economy and argued that the peso was “undervalued.” Later, however, he acknowledged that the Trump administration was seeking to provide its political ally Javier Milei, and his right-wing political party, a “bridge to the election” being held on Oct. 26, in the hopes the government might pull out a victory. Shortly thereafter, Trump undermined his own economic support program by stating that the disruptions in Argentina were “not going to make a big difference for our country.” Rather than an unconditional “whatever it takes”-type commitment, the United States was signaling it would only continue supporting the peso market if Milei’s right-wing party emerged victorious. This undermined market participants’ confidence in the peso’s prospects, causing it to decline again and triggering additional purchases by the Treasury. (Treasury ultimately purchased an estimated $2 billion worth of pesos.)
The fact that Milei’s party ultimately prevailed in the elections might create the impression that this episode was a successful use of financial statecraft, meaning the U.S. government’s channeling of money and capital to influence geopolitics paid off. But looks can be deceiving. It remains unclear whether these measures will stabilize the Argentine currency for the long term, as the peso experienced a brief post-election rally but soon fell back near its pre-election levels. Milei has subsequently rejected calls to let the peso float in order to rebuild the currency’s credibility. And Argentina owes the International Monetary Fund $56 billion for loans made before the U.S. intervention. All these factors mean there are still risks that the Treasury, international financial institutions, and any private U.S. lenders enlisted in this effort could end up losing money on their investments. These actions have also implicated other domestic economic policies. For example, the financial assistance benefited Argentine beef and soy exporters who compete against the U.S. agricultural sector at a time when China in particular is looking for alternatives that are not subject to Trump’s onerous tariffs. It is dangerous to prematurely declare this episode a success. When a U.S. administration lacks a sufficient appreciation for the role finance plays in geopolitics, it risks mismanaging its responsibilities—and in the process creating economic and political instability.

And so to Killer of the IPA's wrap-up - relax, that $40 billion bail out is pending ...

In economics I was taught good money should be three things: a store of value, a medium of exchange and a unit of account. Modern currencies are obviously no longer stores of value. That’s why highly leveraged purchases of things governments and banks can’t reproduce, such as land, tend to be winning investment strategies. Accelerating money creation almost guarantees their appreciation in nominal terms.
Tightening the screws on lending is one way to limit this phenomenon, but don’t hold your breath. M3 increased 7.3 per cent in the past 12 months alone.
The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority rolled out new mortgage rules last week – only a fifth of new loans can be to borrowers with a debt of greater than six times their income from February – that were akin to imposing a 300km/h road speed limit.
“These new limits won’t be binding on most banks so will have little impact on the aggregate flow of credit to either owner-occupiers or investors,” chairman John Lonsdale said.
The Australian dollar tap isn’t about to be turned off anytime soon.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

The pond also promises not to hold its breath or cry for Argentina, or for that matter shed a tear for King Donald's economic policies. After all, FA and FO ...

As King Donald has been mentioned a few times, the pond should and will end with the immortal Rowe, featuring war criminal Hogsbreath and King Donald ...

Forget the gung ho war criminal, and the victims of war crimes on the high seas, instead note the uncanny way that the immortal Rowe catches King Donald in all his glory ...

And this is for those who might have missed it ... more King Donald ...