In which the ranga-loving Dame Slap and tedious "Ned" rule the reptile roost ...

 

There's one story you won't find featured in the lizard Oz this day ...

UN rights chief says uncovered remains in Gaza raise concerns of war crimes

GENEVA, Sept 15 (Reuters) - The recovery of hundreds of bodies from the rubble of buildings destroyed by Israeli strikes in Gaza ​during the war that began nearly three years ago has raised fresh concerns about possible war crimes, the U.N. human ‌rights chief said on Tuesday.
Volker Turk said the remains of what appeared to be entire families were being unearthed from sites destroyed during Israeli attacks, adding that many victims were women and children.

Not that those belated murmurings will produce a result ...

What you will find featured is the usual reptile carry on ... as Dame Slap valiantly attempted to provide some cover for the cavortings of Gina's pampered pet ...

The header: War against Pauline? It’s blundering Albo who Libs should attack; Angus Taylor must not allow himself, and the Coalition, to be distracted by Andrew Hastie’s personal beef with One Nation.

The caption for the banal set of co-joined snaps: Andrew Hastie and Pauline Hanson.

Some time ago the pond developed a set against Dame Slap. There's only so many transphobic litanies anyone should be asked to wear.

But her deep weirdness produces a moth to flame kind of attraction, and this day's effort was top notch.

As well as defending the ranga - just at the moment that the ranga felt compelled to do a couple of half-baked apologies of the "sorry, not really sorry" kind - Dame Slap decided to flame the pastie Hastie ...

Would the Liberals rather lose to Labor than One Nation? It’s a question worth posing after the past week in federal politics.
Indeed, the Liberal Party’s recent political brawls with One Nation raise several ancillary questions. First, why has it taken so long? Second, what is the best way to deflate One Nation without guaranteeing a Labor win? And finally, why is Andrew Hastie reaching for his Art of War manual now?
Third parties get a wind behind them when the wind has gone out of the establishment parties. Sadly, the Liberals are as much to blame for the re-emergence of One Nation as a political force in this country as the Albanese government and all the wacky progressive projects that drive ordinary voters to look for alternatives at the ballot box.
Had the Liberals long ago been hellbent on differentiating themselves from the governing party, Pauline Hanson’s party would have had no raison d’être. Instead, Hanson has stepped up because, for too long, the Liberals stepped aside.
Angus Taylor is a big improvement on recent former Liberal leaders. He’s economically literate and his disposition is authentically conservative. But when Liberals vacate the playing field for long periods, it takes some convincing for voters to take another look at them. And Taylor’s biggest problem is that he rarely commands the news cycle.

It wouldn't be a proper outing without a snap of the ranga and Tamworth's eternal shame ...Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce during a press conference in the Senate courtyard. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Perversity - a posture of ornery contrarianism - is the essence of what Dame Slap peddles, as can be seen in her assault on the pastie Hastie:

Last week, the contest was Andrew Hastie v Pauline Hanson. While some are piling plaudits on Hastie for going nuclear against Hanson, the reasons for his passion seem more about personal political advantage than about securing the national interest.
Hanson’s “Please Explain” episode first aired in late July. Given the dirt various Liberal politicians have dished up about Hanson over the years – including making a not insignificant contribution to Hanson being wrongly imprisoned – it’s a bit thin-skinned for Liberals to complain if Hanson gives as good as she gets.
However, for the sake of the argument, let’s say that Hastie is entitled to be upset at being called a “traitor” in the nine-minute parody. 

Roll that one around on your tongue. Heck, savour it, repeat it ...

...for the sake of the argument, let’s say that Hastie is entitled to be upset at being called a “traitor” in the nine-minute parody.

No doubt Dame Slap is accustomed to being called the bitch from hell, and therefore can't see anything wrong in calling a one-time soldier an actual traitor, but really?

What was it really about?

It was the weird devotion to defending an alleged war criminal ... per another place...

Hanson calling Hastie a traitor may have created her great nemesis

...An SAS veteran who served three tours in the Middle East, including two in Afghanistan, Hastie was among the 21 veterans compelled to testify in the 2022 Federal Court defamation trial brought by Ben Roberts-Smith. The Victoria Cross recipient had accused Nine newspapers of defaming him in reports that he had committed murder during deployments to Afghanistan.
In April this year, Roberts-Smith was arrested and charged with five counts of war crimes of murder. He vehemently denies the allegations.
Roberts-Smith is a hero to many in the nation’s west and has wealthy supporters. They include mining magnate Gina Rinehart, who also backs Pauline Hanson.
With the Liberals in turmoil earlier this year, Hastie, the MHR for the southern Perth seat of Canning, surfaced briefly as a leadership contender and One Nation enemy. Hanson declared a war of words on him and doubled down after her party’s unexpected state byelection win last month in Secret Harbour, which overlaps with Canning.
Hanson allowed a video to be posted on social media referring to Hastie as a “traitor” and “gutless maggot”, regarding his evidence against Roberts-Smith in the defamation trial.
Living up to Samuel Johnson’s aphorism that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, Hanson has refused to pull the offending post, saying it was satire. It also traduces Diggers and risks a battlefield behaviour standard that destroys military honour.

For Dame Slap it was merely a matter of cynical political ambition and of timing...

Sceptics are entitled to ask why it took five weeks for Hastie to express his profound disgust about this particular piece of political satire. What changed?
The Secret Harbour by-election is the critical intervening event. Last month, One Nation’s Luke Herdegen secured 57 per cent of the vote after preferences to win the party its first-ever lower house seat in the Western Australian parliament. Given the overlap between the Secret Harbour electorate and Hastie’s federal seat of Canning, it’s crystal clear that Hastie is fighting for his political life. In other words, Hastie v Hanson is about his personal survival.
If Hastie didn’t have this piece of political satire to use against Hanson, he would surely find something else. Fair enough. Politics is a tough gig, and Hanson is no stranger to political battles. Equally, the oversized hyperventilating by Hastie and others looks more like performance politics than conviction politics.

Note the attempt to brush it all off, the diminution of the abuse, as you might expect from a bitch from hell wondering what the fuss is all about, calling someone a maggot - a favourite word of Dame Slap's MAGA hero - and a traitor... but back to that other place ...

...Battle-hardened, Hastie drew a bead on Hanson: “Now I’m calling time on cowards who have never served a day in the Australian Defence Force attacking my service record, my integrity and my loyalty to Australia. I gave 12 years, eight months to the Australian Defence Force. I deployed twice on combat operations to Afghanistan. I left my wife at home, knowing that I might not return. And then to be called a traitor by One Nation … well, they’ve picked a fight with the wrong veteran.”
Hanson looks ridiculous. Even her star recruit, Barnaby Joyce, knew calling Hastie a traitor was beyond the pale. “Nothing to do with me, but I apologise.”

Even Tamworth's undying shame felt the need to apologise, but Dame Slap rallied around the ranga flag?

The pond trusts that correspondents realise how excruciating it is for the pond to side with the pastie Hastie in this affair, but that's the sort of result only a bitch from hell could produce.

At this point the reptiles featured an audio distraction, which strangely was just a link...

LISTEN NOW: Pauline Hanson’s smash-and-grab: is anyone handling it right?

... so the pond decided to promote something the pond will never listen to ...

The bouffant one? They've got the bouffant one on podcast duties? 

No wonder the pond will never listen, especially as the question should be about the way that the reptiles are handling the ranga. Is blaming the pastie Hastie for getting agitated about being called a maggot traitor the right way to go?

Back to Dame Slap braying at the pastie Hastie ...

Apart from helping him keep his own parliamentary salary, Hastie’s apparent strategy of fighting One Nation first is likely to have another objective. He’s trying to convince his colleagues he has the cut-through and media presence to take the Liberal leadership from Taylor.
Many will have noticed that when Hastie was asked about leadership aspirations during his fiery press conference last week, he said that Taylor is “the leader right now”.
Hastie’s existential fight with One Nation therefore seems to have several potential advantages for him personally. What if Hastie’s personal interests conflict with the Liberals’ collective interests, and indeed with the electoral interests of all those desperately unhappy with the current government?
Hastie’s “fight One Nation first” strategy may simply mean that across the country the Liberals are seen as fighting the wrong enemy. What if Hastie’s efforts to win his own seat help force Taylor to pursue a “fight One Nation first” strategy – if only to fend off a Hastie challenge?
There is a legitimate fear among many who want a change of government that Hastie, and indeed Liberal “moderates” generally, hate One Nation much more than the ALP.
The fracturing of votes on the political right has led to an explosion of passions not dissimilar in some ways to intense animosities between factions within political parties. When there is a fracturing, voters will look elsewhere.
Taylor must not allow himself, and the Coalition, to be distracted by Hastie’s personal beef with One Nation. The alternative prime minister should be out every day, at every opportunity, labelling Albanese the worst kind of thief. The Prime Minister is no Robin Hood.

It's just a personal beef? What a mad anarchist, nihilist approach. What happened to Dumas and the notion, "All for one and one for all, united we stand, divided we fall"

Just to rub it in ...Screengrab of a cartoon One Nation’s Pauline Hanson posted about WA Liberal Andrew Hastie. Picture: YouTube

That left room for a brief assault on Albo's mob...

He and his government are stealing from every Australian whose house value has tumbled. He’s stealing from current and future Australians by spending too much, taxing too much, racking up record levels of debt, and overseeing the worst productivity falls since records were kept in the 1960s.
If the Coalition and One Nation can’t come to some sensible, mutually beneficial preference deal, Albanese will likely remain in The Lodge and Jim Chalmers will continue to dish up new taxes. That would be diabolical for the country. This government is so ideological in its class war policies that it loathes the rich more than it loves the poor.

But it was brief, because Dame Slap was really more into Pauline than all that jazz.

After all that came a classic billy goat butt ...

No veteran who serves this country deserves to be labelled a traitor for giving truthful evidence under oath. 

D'oh. Might that have been better appearing at the start?

But that hilariously noted, when Dame Slap says that, it's only so it can be undercut by a "that said", a subtle kind of billy goat butt ...

That said, when Hastie postured in parliament with his copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, he invited mockery. Perhaps he missed the section on avoiding own goals.
It’s understood that since the member for Canning’s declaration of war against One Nation, Hanson’s Please Explain clip has attracted almost a quarter of a million new views. As political satire goes, the cartoon is a compelling insight into the travails of the modern Liberal Party after John Howard left office.

A compelling insight?

Such a mean, vindictive, nasty woman. Yes, Pauline, but also ..

No wonder some label her the lizard Oz bitch from hell ...

The pond supposes that at this point it should note a few of the reptiles it has sent to the intermittent archive.

The craven Craven was out and about, delivering a standard serve of white piety and hypocrisy ...

COMMENTARY by GREG CRAVEN
Who will protect the Indigenous children of Frisby Court?
Pauline Hanson’s words were rightly condemned. But where is the same level of outrage in the name of the murdered Hawke children or the other vulnerable kids of Frisby Court?

There are any number of stories about outrages perpetrated in all parts of the community, but the reptiles only ever go all in when the outrage offers a chance for some black bashing.

Lydia Lynch decided on a lynching of Crisafulli ...

Labor’s debt disaster is now Crisafulli’s choice
David Crisafulli’s borrowing binge makes Queensland’s debt crisis an LNP choice
The Liberal National Party in Queensland has abandoned its long-held fiscal principle that governments should live within their means.
By Lydia Lynch
Queensland Bureau Chief

Sorry, the pond knows that some correspondents live in the deep north, but really? Yawn ...

Anthony continued this tour of the provinces ...

We’re learning what Carroll is against … but what is he for?
Can Ben Carroll save Labor by repudiating his own government?
Ben Carroll has made clear what he is against: the record of his own government. Now he must show Victorians what he is for.
By Anthony Galloway
Victorian political editor

Just a two minute read Anthony? The deep south wars are really slowing down.

And with AI all the go at the moment, the reptiles offered a tepid 3 minute look ...

Why AI may be too big not to fail
The industry may find that the only road to its prosperity runs through a crisis.
By David Roche

The closing par just about summarised the bland insipidness on view ...

...The scale of the AI build-out is not a reason for optimism or pessimism. It raises the stakes on the outcome. A technology this large, financed this aggressively, and this tightly woven into portfolios, credit markets and corporate strategy, leaves little room for a soft landing, if the underlying economics do not hold. The world may still get to the good ending, where AI lifts productivity broadly and prosperity spreads. But the more likely route there runs through a crisis.

Sheesh, the pond only went there so it could turn to the immortal Rowe for a Vomisa chuckle ...

It also provided a chance to segue to the cracking Crace's take...

AI on course to kill us all within 10 years? Donald Trump says: ‘Hold my Coke’

We can all sleep easy. In a post on his Truth Social account, Donald Trump has declared that fears over artificial intelligence were all a hoax dreamed up by conspiracy theorists. Obviously that includes the top bods at Anthropic and its competitors, who all called for a coordinated global slowdown while the industry works out how to mitigate the risks. Still, good to know the tech bros are just fantasists and space cadets at heart.
All that was needed to keep humanity safe and well, The Donald insisted, was a president with a very high IQ. Someone very like him. The only man alive who could out-think the combined power of the world’s supercomputers. He could tell them where to draw the line and they would reprogram themselves to back off. Inside every AI network is a default off switch that kneels before the US president. Trump can rewire the world with the power of his mind.
You can see why so many people working in the industry believe there is a chance AI will wipe out humanity within a decade. Even a halfway intelligent network would probably reckon it was doing us all a favour. A world that can elect Trump as president is so messed up it deserves to be put out of its misery. AI is just terribly sorry that it can’t promise to do it any sooner than 10 years. But it will do its best.
Perhaps the question we should really be asking about The Donald is whether he would actually pass the Turing test. Less AI, more artificial stupidity. Put him in a closed room with the world’s worst chatbot and it would be hard to tell the difference.
Trump can imitate speech but he can’t get anywhere near intelligence. Just endless repetitions, changes of subject and a desperate need to score points. All of which would be easily programmable by a first-year undergraduate computer science student. Maybe it’s a race to the death. Humanity hellbent on killing itself before AI gets the chance to do it for us.

That's more like it, cheerfulness in the face of adversity and disaster. A bit like Tottenham Hotspur.

That's got to be worth an infallible Pope ...

Much as the pond would have liked to dally with these sirens, the pond had no choice. 

The pond is contractually required to climb the "Ned" Everest whenever it appears, shimmering on the horizon ...

Just look at the beguiling splash, conforming to the reptile rule of rehashing comical snaps of Albo and Jimbo ...

Even better, the reptiles livened up the actual yarn with a fresh comical take on the Jimbo rule ...

The header: Has Labor misjudged the political times? Labor prides itself as the party that shapes Australia’s future but the conundrum it confronts is whether it has misread the intellectual and policy responses Australia now demands.

The caption for Emilia's artwork, as she proudly continued the reptile tradition of visually traducing Albo and Jimbo: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, productivity commission chair Danielle Wood and Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Artwork by Emilia Tortorella.

"Ned" managed to keep this climb to a base camp five minutes, and what a soporific effort it was.

As usual, "Ned" spent most of his time accumulating the thoughts of others ... and also as usual, he managed to assemble a set of ancient warriors...

Summer grass —
all that remains
of warriors' dreams.

It says a lot about "Ned", especially as he tries to suggest that there were many alternatives, many others could have been chosen for this column.

But they weren't and instead there's a musty tediousness, a sense of old warrior syndrome, with one aged warrior carefully tending to other warrior mushrooms eager to stay in the limelight ...

The pivotal policy issue in the fifth year of the Labor government is whether its central economic direction and philosophy is failing Australia, with systemic criticisms mounting from different quarters – witness Kevin Rudd, Danielle Wood, Bill Kelty and Mathias Cormann.
Policy debate today is defined by an unusual phenomenon – a diverse group of prominent Australians and institutions warning the nation is on the wrong track but contradicted by a stubborn government that, marginal adjustments aside, rejects the notion of “danger, wrong way”.
The issue at stake is fundamental for the Labor Party and for the nation. Labor prides itself as the party that shapes Australia’s future but the conundrum it confronts is whether Labor has misread the intellectual and policy responses Australia now demands. Has Labor misconstrued the times in which it governs?
There is nothing exclusive about the abovementioned four people, and many others could have been chosen for this column. But they are conspicuous for their different positions and sympathies, the strength of their warnings and the sense, explicit or implied, that a radical revamp is essential. The critique of Labor is evidence-based, widely held and mounting. Yet there is no sign that Labor accepts the validity or the political realism in much of these critiques – pointing to a prolonged, deeper conflict.

Of all the narcissists on the planet, why pick former chairman Rudd? Kevin Rudd speaks at the National Press Cub in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

He was clueless in power and much despised, feared and loathed by the reptiles back in the day, so what makes him such an attraction for the hive mind now?

In his recent National Press Club speech, titled “The Complacent Country”, Rudd identified the “deep systemic forces” being unleashed across the world, and said: “We are now on borrowed time. As a people, we have become so risk-averse that we fail to comprehend that the even greater risk is standing still and trying in vain to preserve the status quo.”
The point is obvious: the status quo is finished. Identifying three epic challenges – the rise of China, the AI revolution and accelerating climate change – Rudd said these mega-changes were “unprecedented in modern history”. The logic was obvious: “Incrementalism will no longer work for Australia. Urgency must be our national watchword if we are to navigate our future as an independent, prosperous and resilient nation.”
Unsurprisingly, Rudd said the Albanese government was “working across” all three fronts. But he lamented the failure of the “national body politic” that had yet to come to grips with the “national urgency” needed.
Rudd said Australia must become an AI power in our own right, that the US alliance was a “force multiplier” and AUKUS was essential for our hi-tech future, that an expanding defence budget had to be linked to the new regional security treaties Labor had negotiated, and, above all, that Australia must build economic resilience through an interventionist industry policy with industry “tsars” in charge of the seven sectors Rudd identified, which include AI, biotechnology, critical minerals, renewable energy, defence industry and finance, building upon the super funds.
It is a reminder of Rudd as a government-driven programmer. Many will disagree with his proposals since Rudd essentially wants Labor to display more ambition on the existing Albanese agenda – yet few would dispute his diagnosis of Australia mired in complacency and resistant to bold action. The message: Labor must do far better by seeking to transform the nation’s mindset.

Why must the reptiles always blather on about the need to transform the nation's mindset, and shout at clouds about being mired in complacency and resistant to bold action?

What's wrong with enjoying life instead of being chained to a Murdochian machine? Productivity Commission chair Danielle Wood appears at the Supplementary Budget Estimates. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
  Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
  And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
  Among the river sallows, borne aloft
    Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
  Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
  The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
    And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Sorry, the pond doesn't know where that came from ... back to the trudge ...

In her public comments over the past 18 months, the Labor-appointed chair of the Productivity Commission, Danielle Wood, has consistently warned that politicians have downgraded economic growth as an objective. It is a devastating conclusion, revealing how politics has corrupted good policy and the public interest.
In her speeches over 2025 and 2026, Wood, while welcoming Jim Chalmers’ emphasis on productivity, said a “growth mindset” had been “missing from Australian policy for far too long”. The upshot was the threat to the “generational bargain” where “young people today believe they won’t live better lives than their parents did” – a conclusion verified by the facts.
At heart, this was “a productivity challenge” because only productivity over time could sustainably lift real wages. The problem across many rich nations, including Australia, was “a declining reform appetite” and this was most apparent than in the “ballooning” burden of regulation.
A survey of company directors found boards were spending 55 per cent of their time on regulatory compliance when fresh investment was essential for productivity growth. Opening a cafe in Brisbane took 31 separate steps, while the nation now built half as much house per hour worked as we did 30 years ago.
Wood said that since 2015 average annual productivity growth had been a quarter of its long-run average. Governments were doing “less major reform than in previous decades”, the economy was less dynamic and there was a structural increase in demand for non-market services. The PC reported that June 2026 figures showed productivity growth was stagnant, while over the year to June there was a 0.2 per cent decline in labour productivity.
While Labor talks up productivity, these dismal results point to a chilling coming year – a weak growth economy, imprisoned by inflation, with declining living standards and an extended cost-of-living crisis. The message: the policy settings aren’t working.

Then came another ancient, deeply irrelevant warrior, shouting at clouds above the hilly bourn ... Bill Kelty

Apparently in "Ned's" eyes, he's some kind of lethal warrior ... from the 1980s ... which to be fair is a few decades on from blathering about the 1950s under Ming the Merciless ...

The most lethal commentary comes from former union chief Bill Kelty, a prominent figure in the 1980s reform era but now alarmed at the results from the current Labor model. In a recent interview with the Nine Network papers, Kelty intensified his critique of the government’s housing policy saying interest rates are rising and real wages had fallen by 5 per cent since 2021 under OECD figures.
He attacked statements by the Treasurer that workers’ share of GDP was at a high point, saying: “It’s just ridiculous and people get offended by it. They can’t pay the bills and you tell them your share of GDP is growing. Don’t insult me: that’s what they are saying. Build more housing and increase real wages, please.”
Many of Kelty’s views are aligned with Paul Keating, and they have both attacked Labor’s broader strategic failures on tax, notably the high rates of personal income tax, calling for the top rate to be cut below 40 per cent to restore personal incentive partly financed by higher taxes on capital and property.
The message: Albanese Labor risks misunderstanding how the world is actually changing and the enduring relevance of personal incentive, capital investment and government prudence.
Finally, in a recent intervention former Liberal finance minister Mathias Cormann, now OECD secretary-general, warned in a Perth speech of “worrying signs of a quiet drift back toward the instincts Australia once had the courage to abandon”. The demon he identified was a “new protectionism” – not the old tariff wall but industry subsidies, local content rules, procurement preferences, labour market re-regulation and regulations that slow investment.

And then came the worst of the lot of them ... Mathias Cormann attends the opening session of the Delphi Economic Forum. Picture: NurPhoto

Whenever the pond sees that smug mug, it's drawn back in time ...

On Friday, Channel Nine aired images of Mr Hockey and Mr Cormann lighting up cigars - widely considered symbols of power and success - only days before the government is expected to deliver a tough federal budget that could include cuts to welfare and a rise in the fuel excise. (SMH)

And so to final dire portents of doom...

Each step sounded “plausible” but “collectively they recreate the exact logic of the old system” – this was the system from which Australia escaped during the Hawke-Keating-Howard-Costello era. Cormann warned that it was folly for a mid-sized nation to look backwards “while its productivity engine idles” – this being a recipe for “slow relative decline”. The danger for Australia was a retreat to nostalgia when it needed renewal. He argued that the reform age that turned Australia into a global success and prosperity story was a function of economic reform, institutional strength and the rule of law.

On the other hand, it could be worse ...

Apparently only perfection will satisfy "Ned", in which case the pond anticipates his resignation from the deeply imperfect lizard Oz within the week ...

Cormann’s warning is the most ominous – guaranteed to earn Labor’s contempt – with its implication that the current Labor government might have misread the drivers of economic success in the 2020s and, even worse, forgotten the lesson of its own proud history.
Sure, warnings are easy, solutions are hard. But smart governments read the times right. Being half-right won’t cut it.

And speaking of the fully wrong, doubtless many will have already read the ProPublica yarn ...

Donald Trump Jr.’s Bahamas Wedding Was Secretly Bankrolled by Russian Oligarch Close to Putin

The oligarch, Umar Kremlev, spent hundreds of thousands on expenses like renting out a private island. He appears to have met Trump Jr. only recently, but he attended the intimate wedding with a large group of other Russian guests.

That's the piquant sauce for this tasty cartoon serve ...

And speaking of AI and the mad king ...

In which the bromancer and Dame Groan do their Tuesday thing, but not before there's a listicle of reptile offerings ...

 

As soon as the mad king said that there was nothing to worry about, that it was full steam or chips ahead, the pond became instantly alarmed ...

The lizards of Oz were right on to it ...

EXCLUSIVE
OpenAI’s ultimatum to PM: dilute creatives’ rights or we won’t discuss renewables
The ChatGPT creator threatens to walk away from local training facilities unless Labor backs down on creative industry protections.
By Noah Yim, Greg Brown and Matthew Cranston

What a tag team, Noah, Brownie and the canny Cranston, getting it altogether ...

It was AI all the way from a prize doofus ...

...Speaking before OpenAI made its ultimatum, Dr Charlton warned that achieving long-term dividends from the boom would require a more active role for government than what was needed when China’s rapid growth massively increased the prices of Australia’s natural resources.
“That opportunity is before us again, and we must capture the benefits of the AI investment boom while acting with sophistication to minimise the risks,” Dr Charlton said.
“AI is not just another technology. It is becoming a factor of production in its own right, amplifying the value of labour and capital and reshaping how economies create prosperity.”
While the economic output would rival the mining boom, Dr Charlton said the benefits of AI would “stretch further than mining”.
He said that, unlike the mining boom, the AI boom would compound.
“The mining boom was a one-off level shift that peaked and receded,” he said.
“AI productivity gains compound: at a point a year, AI exceeds the mining boom’s entire effect inside a decade and keeps going. With nine in ten businesses yet to adopt, the reorganisation of Australian business has barely begun.”
Dr Charlton said Australia needed to develop more local AI capability to take advantage of the boom.
“The mining boom came with an income engine attached: we owned the ore, the world paid us for it, and the money flowed in,” he said.
“The AI boom, so far, runs the other way: the chips are imported, the models are foreign-owned, and the equipment bill helped deliver our first goods deficit since 2017.
“Mining generated prosperity – but AI only pays the countries that adopt fastest, adopt deepest, and own a piece of the stack. The boom is guaranteed; the dividend is not.”

As for that dilution of creative rights mentioned in the headline? It just needed "working out"...

Anthropic general counsel Jeff Bleich said copyright was one of the critical issues that “need to be worked out” before the AI juggernaut could build data centres in Australia.
Additional reporting: Ben Packham

Well played team - AI has already ruined the lizard Oz's graphics department - as Geoff joined in, became the resident luddite, and took aim ...

COMMENTARY by GEOFF CHAMBERS
Albanese banks on AI to save economy
The message is always similar: Don’t worry about dire productivity or economic growth because the AI miracle will save us.

Geoff seemed conflicted. On the one hand it was a massive bamboozle...

...AI is bandied about in such a generic fashion by Labor ministers that most people don’t really know what they’re talking about.
It is classic modern-day politics.
Bamboozle punters with talk of AI benefits and productivity gains and hope they believe it.
Voters are already wondering why Australia’s productivity growth is so bad given AI applications are already in operation across the economy.

But at the very end of his two minute font of wisdom, he dragged in Uncle Leon to bamboozle the hive mind...

...Elon Musk, who has talked of an outside chance that killer robots could potentially end humanity, recently told The Economist he believed “AI may exceed the sum of human intelligence in around five years” and that humans will no longer be in control in 10 years’ time.
“There really won’t be anything that AI can’t do better than humans, apart from being human perhaps,” he said. “The most likely outcome is an age of amazing abundance where anyone can have anything they can think of.
“Now, of course, there are things that could derail this, like a massive global thermonuclear war or something like that. But assuming that there’s no World War Three, I think we’re headed for an age of amazing abundance

Amen to that ... what Herr Adolf said about a thousand year Reich ...

It was silly for the pond to expect the reptiles to offer any meaningful insight.

Meanwhile Gina's pampered pet was in second spot in the "news" section ...

This time Brownie joined with Liz for a jolly good piking ...

Cross-party condemnation
‘Appalling’: Price leads backlash against Hanson’s Indigenous slur
Liberal frontbencher Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has condemned Pauline Hanson’s podcast comments calling Indigenous Australians ‘the most primitive race on Earth’.
By Greg Brown and Elizabeth Pike

Perhaps for once, like that broken clock, the Price is right, and talk of her joining Pauline was a furphy.

The bouffant one chipped in with a note on the bleeding obvious ...

COMMENTARY by DENNIS SHANAHAN
Hanson puts her trust in concerted rage to the bottom
Outrage over Hanson’s attacks on Indigenous Australians and Anthony Albanese’s family exposes how One Nation thrives on voter resentment.

The bouffant one saw it as a plus. After all, she was just following the strategies of the News Corp rage machine ...

The more outrageous Pauline Hanson’s public comments on indigenous Australians, migration, multiculturalism and public housing for Anthony Albanese’s mother, the more outraged the reaction against One Nation, and the more support she stands to gain.
One Nation feeds on rage and resentment. As well, electoral successes mean “shy” One Nation supporters are feeling more confident about voicing support and voting Orange.

The bouffant one concluded with a magnificent word salad designed to strike fear into Pauline's heart...

Hanson still draws criticism from those she identified in 1996 as “fat cats, bureaucrats and do-gooders” but feels justified as it may be that criticism has not yet turned off those loyal supporters who will forgive Hanson for anything and only entrench their support.

Take that Pauline.

How could a reptile take to task the complete embodiment of the lizard Oz?

But the pond was grateful because it had a couple of immortal Rowes to hand, and in need of a segue ...

Over on the extreme far right, assimilation was all the go...

'Aboriginality' won’t help fix child protection crisis
Why has this separatist approach that emphasises difference continued?
By Anthony Dillon
Contributor

Anthony wrapped up this way ...

If most Aboriginal Australians were vastly different from non-Aboriginal Australians, then the collective notion of self-determination might be appropriate. But they are not. Certainly, some Aboriginal Australians may embrace aspects of their Aboriginal culture. But for most Aboriginal Australians, embracing this Aboriginal culture does not preclude them from living ordinary Australian day-to-day life.
Anthony Dillon is a prominent Indigenous affairs commentator.

Just a minor quibble, a small sub-editorial note.

Shouldn't, on his own logic, have read Anthony Dillon is a prominent commentator? Wouldn't want him to be given special separatist mention that emphasises difference ...

But otherwise it's a solid assimilationist argument, and no doubt it will please the walking red ...

The always under direly threatened group of "privileged white boys" constantly needs defending and it was Zoe's turn this day ...

Privileged white boys are far from our main source of extremism
Chanel Contos is quick to criticise privileged white boys, but to suggest they represent the most dangerous men in Australia is remarkably myopic.

By Zoe Sankey

...I struggle to see how Contos’s focus on men behaving badly, while giving so little attention to women’s agency, helps us understand why young people are increasingly struggling to form relationships and families. If we genuinely want to improve the lives of young Australians, we need a science-based and empathetic approach that takes the agency of both sexes seriously.
Zoe Sankey is content director and host of the Quillette Cetera podcast.

Science-based empathy?

Well done Zoe, and perhaps in due course, you can end up hitched up to a privileged white boy in Toorak, or perhaps Vaucluse, and produce a whole tribe of them.

The pond will stick with dinkum mum bashing ...

And at this point it became clear why the pond had covered almost everything else before turning to the pond's  favourites...

The bromancer had a bee in his bonnet, and it was buzzing something fierce ...

The header: The war on terror isn’t over – it’s in Iran: The most appalling claim I’ve heard is that there has been no repeat of 9/11. The Hamas atrocities of October 7 were exactly a second 9/11.

The caption for the out of focus mad king and his consort Kegsbreath: President Donald Trump, left, speaks as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth listens during an observance ceremony on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Picture: Mark Schiefelbein / AP Photo

The bromancer began by swallowing the line that the current war of choice was in fact just a continuation of an ancient crusade ...

Donald Trump and his Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth have both declared their war on Iran is a continuation of the war on terror, which began on September 11, 25 years ago. The war on terror was declared by the terrorists. When it happened, late at night Australia time, I was watching Sky News, as it was then, looking for anything breaking late on the Tampa refugee issue.
When the planes hit, all other news finished. I spent the next several hours involved with The Australian’s coverage. Our newspaper worked all night, bringing out edition after edition, trying to understand what happened.

The bit about being a continuation of the war on terror was such a patent nonsense that the billy goat butts began to flow early ...

Trump has made many mistakes in Iran but it’s infinitely better if America wins rather than Iran. 

If America wins? Looking pretty dire ...

As always happens with the bromancer, one butt always leads to another ...

But that’s not my point today. Trump and Hegseth are dead right. The war with Iran is indeed the same struggle as the war on terror. The Iranian government naturally described Trump and Hegseth’s statements as ridiculous. It’s certainly the case that most of the time al-Qa’ida, the Sunni Muslim terrorist network behind 9/11, was hostile to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Unlike al-Qa’ida, the mullahs’ regime is Shia.

Don't let that sort of detail get in the way.

On with the history lesson, in a way only a tyke fundamentalist can manage ...

The Sunni-Shia split goes back to the earliest days of Islam and is, even today, the most important fault line in the Persian Gulf.
However, Sunni and Shia theocratic, Islamist extremisms are remarkably similar. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran from 1989 until he was killed this year, translated foundational texts of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood into Persian.

A grim reminder that the trading off never ends ... The rubble of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre smoulders on September 11, 2001. Picture: AFP

What a gift bin Laden was to the jihadists ...

Trump and Hegseth, and a thousand others, rightly label Iran the world’s chief state sponsor of terrorism. Most of the proxy forces Iran commands, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, are Shia. But Tehran is also perfectly happy to sponsor and direct Sunni terrorists such as Hamas, itself a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. It sees itself as the leader of all global Islamism.
The 1979 Iranian revolution was the first time an avowedly revolutionary theocratic Islamist movement took state power. It inspired Islamists, including Sunni Islamists, everywhere. It also caused many previously non-Islamist Muslims to contemplate the possibility of inhabiting a theocratic state.

Oops, time for another patented billy goat ...

It goes without saying that most Muslims are not Islamists...

Hang on, hang on, that sentence needs an "although"..

...although many Muslim majority states do define themselves as Islamic nations. 

Want even more confusion and conflation? How about an "even"?

Even in a moderate state such as Malaysia, for a Muslim to convert to another religion is illegal. A couple of Malaysian states still have provisions, though these are never enforced, that apostasy is punishable by death.

Shocking stuff. Where on earth did they get that idea?

Heresy had been a long-standing religious concern in England and in 1401, it also became a criminal offence with the creation of the writ de Heretico comburendo. This writ looked back at the precedents for burning people deemed heretics and made it the punishment for heresy at common law. (here)

What an inspiration ...now back to the fear...

Sunni Islamist extremism and Shia Islamist extremism share key beliefs. They seek to establish a pure Muslim system of government. This includes severe interpretations of sharia law and that the US, Israel and the West generally are enemies of Islam, to be destroyed. Both traditions exhibit raging torrents of antisemitism.
Russia and China, with their nuclear arsenals and powerful militaries, are potentially far worse enemies of the West than Islamist extremism and terrorism.
But the Islamist enemy is real and deadly. It attacked on 9/11. One part of the US-led response was to make sure terrorists never got nuclear weapons.
So Trump and Hegseth are right at two levels. Iranian Islamist extremism is ideologically close to Sunni Islamist extremism. And just as it was critical to stop al-Qa’ida and subsequent terrorist movements getting their hands on nuclear weapons, so it’s necessary to stop Iran from ever getting nukes.

And lordy, lordy, have they stuffed that up bigly, but never mind, inevitably there was a snap of the man himself ...Osama bin Laden. Picture: AP

Ready for another billy goat butt?

This doesn’t eliminate criticisms of Trump’s specific policies and actions over Iran. 

Eek, quick, a refuting butt...

But he (and other Western leaders if any of them had the gumption) is right to link the two predominant strands of Islamist extremism.

But is an attribution of awareness of the intricacies of the Islamic religion up there with an awareness of actual military strategies? Is the mad King up to the bromancer task at hand?

The military advances of the Houthis in Yemen, giving them control over much Red Sea oil traffic and the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, is a disaster. Combined with strikes by Iranian proxies based in Iraq against the critical Saudi east-west pipeline, which forced the Saudis to shut the pipeline down, it shows Iran can still deploy powerful regional proxies. Here’s some unpleasant news: this is a struggle that is fully joined and will last for many years.

So that's how it doesn't end, not with a bang but an eternal whimper ...

After 9/11 I was one of countless journalists who spent much, if not most, of my professional effort trying to understand what was going on. I sought out Islamists and also Muslims who opposed Islamism, in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Europe.
Some Australian Muslim leaders can’t bear to have any terrorism connected in any way to words denoting the Muslim religion. 

Oops, perhaps that's going a little too far? After all, in News Corp world, Muslims are terrorists, or at a minimum, terrorist adjacent ...

It’s undoubtedly the case that the overwhelming majority of Australian Muslims are not Islamists.

Relax, there's always a butt to fix that sort of but ...

But the problem for those who say Islam has no direct link to terror is that the Islamist terrorists themselves believe that it does, and they are joined in this belief by the Islamist government in Tehran and hundreds of thousands of Islamist activists, and many Islamist scholars, around the world.

Would you ever read the bromancer traducing white people by saying that they're complicit in the thoughts and deeds of white Xian nationalists, the KKK, and other far right loons of the neo-Nazi kind? Steady on, old chap ...

The war on terror has been a partial success. Al-Qa’ida and Islamic State are destroyed in their old guises. But much of their effort has moved to Africa. They and their successors are extremely active on social media throughout the world. It’s still the case that under different names they command many thousands of activists and followers.

More trading off ... Friends, family and residents visit the graves for people killed on the first anniversary since Hamas attacked one year ago on October 07, 2024 at Kibbutz Nir Oz. Picture: Getty Images

The pond rarely strays into the offerings of the Australian Daily Zionist News.

There's genuine suffering and tragedy, often exploited so that the fear mongering can continue ...

Western intelligence and policing have improved exponentially in counter-terrorism. But the most appalling claim of all that I’ve heard, even from countless people I respect, is that there has been no repeat of 9/11. This is mistaken. The Hamas terror atrocities of October 7, 2023, were exactly a second 9/11. Some 1200 people, mostly Israelis, were murdered in vile, sadistic acts of terror that day. Israel is about 10 million people, the US about 340 million. So a proportionate loss of life due to one day of terrorism for the US would not be the 3000 killed at 9/11 but nearer to 40,000 dead.

Meanwhile, on another planet ...

And so on and on and on, and then to a final rant ...

The effect of October 7 has been to turbocharge the greatest, most sickening wave of antisemitism the world has seen since World War II. No democracy is worse than Australia, where recent antisemitism is the most shameful and wicked thing I’ve ever known about my country in modern times. The October 7 Hamas atrocity is immensely consequential, perhaps in the long run just as important as 9/11 itself.
The world can only avoid calling it the second 9/11 if it believes that terrorism against Israelis is not really terrorism. That is indeed what Islamists, and much of the Western left, would have us believe. Israeli soldiers, then Israeli civilians, then Zionists, then just Jews – if you kill them, it’s not really terrorism, it’s resistance. That civilised people can reach this conclusion is a shocking achievement for the terrorists who hate all of us.
Greg Sheridan is The Australian’s foreign editor.

The pond had only one sub-editorial note, involving a little re-writing ...

The world can only avoid calling it the second 9/11 if it believes that terrorism against Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians is not really terrorism. That is indeed what Zionists and much of the Western far right, would have us believe. Islamist soldiers, then Islamic civilians, then followers of Islam, then just Palestinians – if you kill them, it’s not really terrorism, it’s a god given right to own all the land from the river to sea. That civilised people can reach this conclusion is a shocking achievement for the Zionists who don't give a toss about what people think about an ethnic cleansing unfolding before their eyes ...

And now for the moment all devoted herpetologists wait for every Tuesday ...

The header: Mali’s big migration pitch falls straight into Hanson’s hands; We should be thankful to Malinauskas for one thing: he demonstrated an audacious selfishness for his state.

The caption for the terrible graphic, which possibly could be blamed on AI: One Nation's Pauline Hanson accuses Premier Peter Malinauskas of favouring migrants over Australian children.

First a little background.

Expert followers of the hive mind will remember Polonius, founder and executive director of the Sydney Institute pumped up the volume on the weekend ...

Premier’s warning to the left: lay down your weapons
The SA Labor leader Peter Malinauskas has warned against progressive sanctimony, which he says has fuelled the rise of far-right politics, and urged focus on the issues that mattered.

Polonius was on a high, ecstatic at having hosted a "major speech", at least one in his own and a wayward croweater's lunch ...

...In a major speech to the Sydney Institute last Wednesday, South Australian Labor Premier Peter Malinauskas delivered a novel twist to the use of the term culture war. A leading member of the Labor Party’s right-wing faction, he had some advice for those whom he called the “far left”. Namely, that the left should lay down its culture war weapons.
‘If politics becomes the principal determinant of migration policy and a numerical race to the bottom ensues, it is going to hurt every Australian economically,’ Mr Malinauskas said. Picture: John Feder
The Premier, whose focus was on immigration, said “people on the far left who are understandably horrified about the extraordinary rise of far-right politics in Australia would do well to engage in a moment of self-reflection”.
He added: “Maybe, just maybe, the intense self-righteousness, sanctimony and piety that underpinned the ‘great awokening’ may have tilled the soil for the inevitable countercultural movement on the far right. Now, of course, these countercultural anti-woke warriors have become no less belligerent or self-defeating as those on the far left.”
Earlier in his speech, Malinauskas argued that immigration had not become such a flashpoint this year because Australia was a racist country. He said: “There are bigots in any society, in any century. But that doesn’t explain what’s changed in politics and polls so dramatically over the last nine months.”

Talk about a red rag to a raging bull.

Dame Groan wasn't going to take any of that tripe lying down.

She simply hates furriners, and this is her turf ...

Last week South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas gave a speech to the Sydney Institute that reeked of self-interest for his state. His presentation centred on some unsupported claims about the unalloyed economic benefits of having high migrant intakes.
The contrast with the migration policy released by One Nation could not have been more stark. This party’s aim is to achieve negative net migration based on deep cuts to the student, graduate and skilled worker numbers, as well as securing the departure of many temporary visa holders.
There were two important background considerations to Malinauskas’s widely reported speech. The first is that the gloss on his premiership has begun to fade. Regarded as one of our most competent premiers, he nonetheless has stumbled on some issues.

The old biddy began a litany of woes ...

His support for the LIV Golf carnival has ended in tears. And his desecration of a large slab of Adelaide’s parklands to accommodate a motorcycle race has not gone down well with the previously sympathetic professional classes. More important, he has failed to fix the ambulance ramping problem that was a key factor in his original election victory. The fiscal position of the state is looking decidedly dodgy as the costs of two major infrastructure projects blow out spectacularly. Like most other states, South Australia’s debt position continues to deteriorate.

Sheesh, the old duck didn't even mention by name the failure to bring that Whyalla steelworks blast furnace back to life, even if it was just a 60 year old spring chicken...Whyalla steelworks cuts more than 500 jobs as major operations shut down

The litany of errors continued ...

He is also vulnerable because of his support and subsidisation of the ill-considered merger of the University of Adelaide and the University of South Australia, now just Adelaide University. This mega institution now has an excessive number of students, a bloated bureaucracy and no face-to-face undergraduate lectures. The strategy was based squarely on attracting more international students to cross-subsidise the university’s other activities.

On such occasions, the reptiles always like to supply a snap of the offending, preening ponce ...Peter Malinauskas talks about the future of the Whyalla steel works. Picture: Eleni Tzanos

Then it was on to the real thought crimes.

The second related background factor is South Australia’s relatively small migrant intake. Most new migrants head to Melbourne, Sydney and parts of Queensland. In 2024-25, just under 19,000 (net) migrants headed to South Australia out of a total of 306,000 Australia-wide. Malinauskas wants more, particularly international students and skilled workers.
His presentation trots out the various half-truths about the economics of immigration. Immigration slows the ageing of the population, he argues, even though migrants themselves age. In fact, the effect is marginal and if we really wanted to alter the demographic profile of the population we would need to ramp up the migrant intake year after year.
Then there is the fiscal benefit of having more skilled migrants. Using Treasury estimates, he rattles off impressively large figures about the lifetime fiscal impact of skilled permanent migrants. Note here that these estimates are very sensitive to the discount factor used; other much lower estimates are also plausible. What the Premier fails to mention is that most skilled permanent migrants come with secondary applicants (spouse and children) and these secondary applicants provide no fiscal benefit at all. Family migrants inflict a fiscal drain.
But why just talk about permanent migrants when we have about three million temporary migrants living in the country, most of whom are working in unskilled or semi-skilled jobs? The skilled permanent intake is only about 15 per cent of the total.

An AV distraction could only add to the Groaner's rage ... South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas has raised concerns over the heightened politicisation of the migration debate. This comes after Mr Malinauskas launched an emphatic economic defence of skilled migration, warning the nation’s living standards will decline if numbers are slashed. “Don’t let politics inform our migration policy. I think what should inform our migration policy is what is in our national economic interest, but also our social interest as well,” Mr Malinauskas told News24.

Dammit, if anyone is going to set out the rationale for Pauline's bigotry, it's  going to be the Dame ...

He is on dangerous ground when he talks about productivity gains associated with immigration given that productivity has slumped as the migrant intake has soared. But his plan is to use international student fee income to boost research funding that will lift the rate of productivity growth, even though there is no evidence that this has happened thus far.
Now most serious commentators do not accept the proposition that international student education is really an export activity. But Malinauskas is not having a bar of this, claiming that any attempt to reduce the number of international students is simply a self-destructive “export restriction”. Is he being serious? Does he really think there should be no limit on the number of international student visas granted given that many of these visa holders don’t come to the country to obtain an education but to work and seek permanent residence?
The Premier sees the current anti-immigration sentiment as the result of the rise of populist parties. The reality is that the voting public has been begging the government to significantly lower the migrant intake for many years, well before the recent rise in the popularity of One Nation.
The Premier would be well-advised to check his facts. His idea that we don’t have an immigration problem, we have a housing problem is platitudinous.
Migrants add to population growth – Australia has one of the highest rates of population growth among advanced economies – and population growth causes pressure on resources. It is expensive and slow to deal with these pressures and there is understandable reluctance on the part of long-term residents to foot the bill for this expansion.
My advice to the premier is to get out more and to talk to the people who are affected by the impact of excessive migration. People understand that the visa system is being widely rorted and that more temporary migrants are extending their stay by any means. The impact on social cohesion is palpable. This is particularly the case given the geographic concentration of certain migrant groups and the increasing proportion of the population who don’t speak English.

There came a snap of two of Dame Groan's biggest fans ... Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce during a press conference in the Senate courtyard in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

What wise words, and Barners, Tamworth's never-ending shame echoed them...

One Nation is "not afraid" to drive migration to negative levels, with its Treasury spokesman saying he will follow the will of the people, not warnings from economists, in deciding how deeply to cut migration rates.
Business and the university sector have warned One Nation's proposal to cut migration by about 750,000 places over three years would devastate the economy.
Speaking on ABC National Forum, Mr Joyce said voter concerns on migration had to be respected.
"The will of the Australian people is so pronounced, this has to be dealt with, we will deal with it," Mr Joyce said. (ABC)

That's fair, it's hard to think of Dame Groan as an economist these days, she's more a voice for the bigoted hard right peeple ...

Dame Groan is pleased to have Gina, Pauline and Barners listening to her. 

For too long she was a voice in the hive mind wilderness, but now her time has come ...

Meanwhile, the Albanese government is at sixes and sevens trying to work out how to fix up the mess and to stick with the budget forecasts of net overseas migration – 245,000 this financial year and 225,000 next year.
But can we infer that Jim Chalmers is baulking at any significant reduction in the rate of immigration flowing into population growth? At this stage, the only factor holding up the growth of GDP is population growth.
Without it, it’s entirely possible that a recession could be recorded, and that is something the Treasurer wants to avoid at almost any cost. He also will have been warned about the loss of tax revenue associated with a lower NOM; tax revenue is highly sensitive to the growth of nominal GDP. But this calculation is essentially a fiction because many of the costs of migration are borne by state governments. Nonetheless, headline figures matter a great deal to this Treasurer.
We should be thankful to Malinauskas for one thing: he demonstrated an audacious selfishness for his state. This is part of a wider problem: the winners from high immigration have managed to get their way at the expense of ordinary folk, who simply plead for a more modest and balanced migration program.
It’s the inevitable route to the increasing popularity of those populist parties that Malinauskas so derides. One Nation is picking up on the electorate’s unease with having large migrant intakes and excessive numbers of temporary visa holders in the country. It’s a level of disquiet the Prime Minister cannot afford to ignore.

Never mind all that talk by economists ... Dame Groan has spoken:

One Nation is picking up on Judith Sloan's unease with having large migrant intakes and excessive numbers of temporary visa holders in the country. It's a level of disquiet any concerned bigot cannot afford to ignore.

And so to a couple of 'toons the pond couldn't fit in ...

Speaking of loon central, as the pond often does...

In which the pond observes the lizard Oz productivity jihad, with just a waft of Lynch mob triumphalism and a Homeric snappy Tom ...

 

It's been a long time since the pond has indulged in ego surfing, and since then AI has ruined everything ...

Dammit, post-ironic? Must everything be meta? 

What's wrong with good, old-fashioned irony?

Speaking of simple irony, there was something peculiarly ironic about simpleton Simon's headline over on the far right of the digital Oz..

Cut spending? ALP ready with the mother of all scare campaigns
The next election will be a test for Australians. Do they think Millennial socialism is the answer or will it have dawned on them that this model may not be working?
By Simon Benson
Political analyst

"Mother of all scare campaigns"? 

The pond supposes on one level it's just game meets game, because this day the reptiles embarked on the mother of all scare campaigns, with productivity the name of the game.

One of the post-ironic things that inspires awe and wonder is the way they have a seemingly inexhaustible series of snaps of Jimbo looking gloomy or acting out head prefect ...

Enough of that, there's more at the intermittent archive, even if the archive is currently being more intermittent than usual ...

With the single-mindedness of jihadi warriors or crusaders, it was a productivity crisis from go to woe, with Geoff and the cranky Cranston tag teaming  ...

The pond loves the way that the reptiles label a bog standard lizard Oz jihad as EXCLUSIVE ...

EXCLUSIVE
Productivity crisis: nation set for worst decade on record
‘Worst decade ever’: Business’s grim projections for productivity under Jim Chalmers’ policies
Australia’s biggest employers have gone to war with Labor over policies strangling the economy, with Jim Chalmers set to deliver the worst decade of productivity since records began in 1960.
By Geoff Chambers and Matthew Cranston

Geoff chambered another round ...

COMMENTARY by GEOFF CHAMBERS
PM, Chalmers blame everyone but themselves for productivity crisis
It is probable Labor will not achieve its politically manufactured renewables and housing targets. But its failure on productivity looms as the Albanese government’s defining legacy.

The reptiles conformed to their Jimbo rule ... see how gloomy and defeated he looks ...

Over on the extreme far right Major Mitchell took up the chant ...

Albo and Jim’s economic blunders squander Hawke-Keating legacy
How Albanese and Chalmers are unwinding the economic legacy of Hawke and Keating
Treasurer Jim Chalmers wrote his PhD on his Labor hero, Paul Keating, but has absorbed every lesson except the right ones. History will not be kind to this government.
By Chris Mitchell
Columnist

History won't be kind? Why bother with history when the reptiles are doing the job here and now?

These days the pond will do almost anything to avoid the Major's scribbling, but must note the way that the Jimbo rule was followed, with bonus comical Albo ...

The pond is exceptionally bored by the trick performed over and over by reptiles in search of an angle - the use of Hawke and the French clock devotee to bludgeon the current government, when back in the day the reptiles eagerly conspired to produce the end of that regime.

Just to add to the litany, there was another blackening of the government on productivity over on the extreme far right ...

Why our productivity crisis has millions locked in cost-of-living pain
Australia is now staring down the barrel of its worst decade of productivity growth since comparable records began in the 1960s.
By Bran Black

That was a new name for the pond - the reptiles seem to have an inexhaustible supply - but in the end it turned out to be beyond the predictable ...

Bran Black is chief executive of the Business Council of Australia.

No need to go there in full, but please admire the way that the opening snap conforms to the Jimbo rule ...

Truth to tell, this jihad held little appeal for the pond, what with the pond having woken up to news of mad king Donald denying his own deeds in the middle east, and lumping blame on Ukraine ...

Trump calls on Ukraine to halt strikes on Russian diesel, saying attacks are causing a shortage
Civilians were killed and injured as Russia and Ukraine continued to attack each other with waves of drones overnight into Sunday

Brownie of the lizard Oz matched this feat with an EXCLUSIVE that didn't mention Iran or Trump.

EXCLUSIVE
Labor mulls new fuel excise cut as Mid-East war flares
Petrol prices could surge toward their previous $2.60 peak, forcing the Albanese government to weigh another costly fuel excise cut despite economists warning it fuels inflation.
By Greg Brown

Any reference to the deeds of Faux Noise's hero came in the first line ...

Anthony Albanese will consider restoring cuts to the fuel excise in the coming weeks amid expectations petrol prices will further increase as the Middle East war escalates.

Thereafter it was Albo did this and Albo might do that all the way ... and even worse, the opening snap broke the Jimbo rule ...

All that sets the tone for yet another bout of triumphalism by the Lynch mob, serial defamer of the reputation of the University of Wollongong ...

Why America’s war on terror worked
After a weekend commemorating 9/11, we should reflect how little damage its plotters did to US prospects – and how much they did to their own.
By Timothy Lynch

The pond will skip past the Lynch mob's personal reminiscences - most people will remember what they were doing that day, and the pond still has vivid memories of the drama unfolding as it talked with a traumatised New York Jewish man ...

It was the notion of the alleged way the war on terror had worked that intrigued the pond ...just as Iran maintains its threat to the strait and the Houthis have taken over access to the Red Sea coast ...

‘A f***-up of epic proportions’: Blame game begins after Iran-backed Houthis’ lightning advance down Red Sea coast

Here no f*** up, no f*** up here, as the Lynch mob went full triumphalist ...

...Federal power has never really recovered from the failure to interdict this crudely simple plot. While the day itself still throws up amazing tales of bravery, loss and long-term consequences – nearly three times the number killed on 9/11, for example, have since died of diseases caused by the poisonous dust of the fallen towers – the response of the US government to 9/11 is widely condemned.
This has made the task of defending the Bush administration’s response to the attack hard to impossible. For sure, the charge sheet is a long one.
It begins with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, moves to a global recession, Russian revanchism, Chinese emboldenment, Covid, domestic polarisation, Iranian scheming, October 7, and then into an immigration crisis and the discord woven into attempts to solve it. Even the decline of sex and reproduction in the West gets blamed on the ennui of national failure that al-Qa’ida exposed. Why bring children into such a world?
Each, singularly or in combination, gets tied to the dereliction of duty on 9/11 itself: “If we can’t trust the government to protect us from such a simple threat, why should we believe it capable of confronting more serious foes?”

To help with the yarn, the reptiles flung in a triumphalist snap ... US Marine covers the face of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s statue with the US flag in Baghdad’s al-Fardous square. Picture: Ramzi Haidar / AFP

Any notion that the Lynch mob might be sensible collapsed with the next reference to "climate catastrophism".

Such a stupid phrase, by a man who purports to be an academic, but always resorts to the language of the stupid ideologue ...

...The wonder is that climate catastrophism has risen in parallel with a distrust of the national and international action held necessary to appease it. The bizarrely porous southern US border, which Donald Trump won two presidential elections promising to close, was an uncomfortable reminder that it was legal aliens who hijacked the four planes.
My problem with this powerful consensus – 9/11 as an omnicause of everything bad that came after – is that it blinds us to what America (and by implication Australia too) got right in the past quarter century. And not just right by accident but got right by design.
First of these is the absence not of a second 9/11 but of something worse. We now mock George W. Bush’s war on an abstract noun. But his global war on terror was not an open-ended campaign to rid the world of evil. It was narrow and specific in its objectives. It meant to limit the terrorists’ arsenal to what they could purchase at Bunnings or Home Depot.
The focus of the 9/11 response soon moved from Afghanistan to Iraq. Again, this is widely criticised as the original sin of the war on terror. Not so. Iraq mattered because of the fear made real on that morning: that terrorists with hearts so full of hatred only lacked the capacity to inflict carnage consistent with it. Go after the states that might lend them that capacity. This moved the regime of Saddam Hussein inexorably into US sights.
Being sure the Iraqi dictator did not have weapons of mass destruction that he could leak to terrorists meant removing him. And that is what the US, Britain, Australia and Poland did in March 2003. Nearly 40 nations took part in the eight years of occupation that followed.
The war on terror was driven by a national security logic that commanded a consensus in the US (which Barack Obama joined) and was deeper abroad (especially in, but not limited to, Canberra and London) than we have remembered it.

The reptiles attempted to bolster the case by flinging in a face now largely forgotten by vulgar youff ...Osama bin Laden. Picture: AP.  

Then came a final bout of triumphalism ...

America did not squander the goodwill that came its way after the 9/11 attacks; it deployed it. When terrorism has taken place in the past 25 years it has been unnerving but, compared with a nuclear or chemical weapons attack, small fry. The global war on terror did that. It meant to deny to the bad guys the heat, light, shelter and food necessary for their plotting, and it succeeded in keeping those plots limited to bombs, bullets, cars and knives.
Second, while the retreat from Afghanistan in 2021 supposedly validated Chinese geostrategic thinking – oh, those wise Sun Tzu-reading communists know how to avoid a quagmire – it also reveals a certain American resilience. The regimes in Moscow and Beijing could not countenance losing a war. Capitulation in Ukraine would be existential for Vladimir Putin. Xi Jinping, likewise, avoids the inherent risk of foreign military adventure because of his domestic weakness rather than his entrenched strength. The South China Sea remains an American lake. China’s only “blood ally” is North Korea.
The US, in contrast, has lost nearly every war it has fought since victory over Japan in 1945: Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq (Iran?). The consequence is not Chinese, Russian, let alone Islamist, supremacy. It is a world that still represents an economic, military, cultural and even sporting (ask those 100,000 fans at the MCG on Friday) market for American power.
After a weekend commemorating the outrage that was 9/11, we should reflect how little damage its plotters did to US prospects – and how much they did to their own.
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.

Of the many absurdities in that litany, the one the pond liked both the least and the most ...Capitulation in Ukraine would be existential for Vladimir Putin.

Tell that to the mango Mussolini, and if aviation fuel is in short supply, top up the old truck with with six buck diesel and head off to Washington to celebrate American prospects, as the defamation of the University of Melbourne continues apace ...

On the other hand, it's true that the mad king has taught those terroristic Canucks and their bloody infidel maple syrup and unclean mooses a lesson ...(moose if you must, but the pond was brought up to speak fluent Bullwinkle)...

The pond supposes it should have featured the quarry whispering Caterist ...

Cultural safety has led to ‘two-tier’ child protection policy
The era of so-called paternalism has given way to an era of bureaucratic inertia in which a child’s fortunes are determined by race.
By Nick Cater

But it's just another unsavoury example of reptile black bashing, something the pond has always avoided, along with the transphobia that infests the rag ...

The pond personally saved it to the intermittent archive (more intermittent than usual with a host of bad gateways) and instead decided to feature snappy Tom's weekend outing...

The reptiles pulled their usual fast one, and trotted out the Ughmann and snappy Tom late on the weekend, thereby avoiding the pond's deadline.

Perhaps next week the pond will feature an Ughmann double bill in a special time slot, but for the moment, the pond wanted to applaud snappy Tom for an attempt to do an Our Henry and drag the Odyssey into his tall tale ...

The header: Financial quake looms in age of frenzy and fury; Productivity stuck at 2019 levels, living costs up 30 per cent – Australia’s economic managers are navigating the worst of both worlds with no easy escape.

The caption for the borrowed snap, without a mention of Nolan or the movie: Governments and the RBA monetary policy board are also caught in a Homeric vortex, where debt is piling up, voters are demanding more services and cost relief, inflation is stubborn and investors are demanding more for their at-risk money.

Homeric vortex!

Sure, it was just a precursor to this day's productivity jihad, but snappy Tom was on song, a veritable Siren ...

Like Odysseus in Homer’s epic, the people managing our political and economic affairs are trapped in a narrow, hazardous passage. Sail too close to the sea monster Scylla, and you’ll lose your head; dally with the whirlpool Charybdis and the entire ship is sunk.
Market gods are uneasy, there’s a quake in the financial terrain. Voters are in a nasty mood. We’re living in the age of frenzy and fury.
The ever-helpful Greeks, ancient and modern, have several distinct words for anger to make sense of these times. From the top, there’s menis, a cosmic rage, which the poet calls forth in the opening line of The Iliad to convey the wrath of the humiliated Achilles.
Then there’s thumos, an explosive burst of temper. Think of Jacqui Lambie’s verbal blast about Pauline Hanson after One Nation’s slur on SAS veteran Andrew Hastie. The blood is up among the political warrior class.
Civilians must settle for orge, which describes the deep-seated resentment at large in the post-pandemic settlement, conventionally referred to as the cost-of-living crisis. It’s the top issue Australians want governments and monetary officials to address.

Here no hubris, no hubris here, though after that singular outburst snappy Tom settled back down into a banal set of numbers ...

The Big Inflation may have passed but the beast’s tail lingers in our midst. It’s likely we won’t be going back to the long lull in consumer prices growth we enjoyed for decades, while the price level has been ratcheted up forever on most items. A basket of goods and services in the consumer price index valued at $100 five years ago now costs $124.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics also measures price changes across population subgroups, which helps to assess whether the disposable incomes of households have kept pace with price changes (the living cost index includes mortgage costs, the CPI does not).
Since mid-2021, living costs have increased by 30 per cent for working families and 23 per cent for self-funded retirees. People on pensions and benefits have payments adjusted every six months by the greater of CPI or LCI.

The reptiles provided an AV distraction ... Reserve Bank of Australia Deputy Governor Andrew Hauser says inflation remains too high, after the central bank raised interest rates three times earlier in the year. “We have one big problem, and that’s inflation,” Mr Hauser said. “Inflation is too high, and that’s why we raised interest rates three times at the beginning of this year.”

The pond hungered for more ancient Greek references, but snappy Tom was pretty much done with his venture into Our Henry turf ...

Reserve Bank deputy governor Andrew Hauser spends some of his work time travelling around the country, listening to companies, local authorities and organisations dealing with debt problems and other matters. Everywhere he goes, he hears “cost, cost, cost, inflation, inflation, inflation”.
“People are furious about inflation,” he told ABC TV’s 7.30 this week. “I understand why. It’s unfair. It hits people on low incomes. It damages price signals. It makes the job of companies difficult. What they want us to do is our job and bring inflation down.”
That’s the cost picture. The income story is more dreadful.
Zoom out and consider what we buy and sell in the world. Australia has taken a hefty pay cut. Our terms of trade (the ratio of export to import prices) have fallen by 11 per cent over the past five years.
Across the nation, living standards have gone backwards over that period. One measure in last week’s national accounts (for the June quarter) tells the broad story. Real net national disposable income per capita is 3 per cent below its level in June 2021.
The main culprit is our wretched productivity performance. The national accounts showed the amount of goods and services we produce (or GDP) per hour of labour is at the same level it was at the end of 2019, before the Covid crisis. Productivity in the non-market sector (which is primarily healthcare and social services, education and public administration) is now below the level it was in early 2007.
Given workers are in a pincer of high costs (some homegrown, some not) and stagnant incomes, it’s clear why the consumer mood is glum and voter rage is white hot. The torrent of “bad” news – on tax, the budget, petrol prices, energy costs, interest rates, home prices and dodgy political acts – is also contributing to the despondency.

Wait, there was one final "Homeric vortex" to come...

Governments and the RBA monetary policy board are also caught in a Homeric vortex, where debt is piling up, voters are demanding more services and cost relief, inflation is stubborn and investors are demanding more for their at-risk money.

After that thrill it was back to the hard yards ...

In a note this week, Commonwealth Bank chief economist Luke Yeaman describes a “new economic reality” of hard-to-tame inflation, geopolitical turmoil, skittish global bond markets and the great big sucking sound of artificial intelligence investment as it scoops up vast amounts of capital, materials and skills.
He argues interest rates will need to be kept higher than in the past but estimates of so-called neutral interest rates (neither expansionary nor contractionary) are imprecise, increasing the reliance on real-time data and the risk of policy mistakes.
Yeaman says the inflation-fighting credibility of central banks is in the spotlight “with bond markets watching closely to see whether authorities will act quickly enough and decisively enough to keep inflation contained or instead drag their feet due to political and public pressure”.
“The task is now materially harder and the RBA knows it,” he writes. “As a result, we expect the RBA to remain very cautious and on ‘high alert’ for the foreseeable future. This means the slowing economy will not bring much in the way of immediate or major rate relief for Australian households.”

As is required in these reptile outings, there has to be a comical snap of Jimbo, and sure enough ...Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

The pond pondered in Rodin Le Penseur pose for a moment: where would the lizard Oz's enfeebled graphics department be without a comical Jimbo?

Snappy Tom wound down, but a final reference to the vortex produced a little shiver of delight and reminded the pond of his splendid start ...

As rates remain elevated, governments are feeling the strain. The cost of borrowing is rising, not only for Canberra but also for Washington, Tokyo and the Europeans. Donald Trump’s forlorn Treasury secretary Scott Bessent, trying to buy back bonds in an orderly way while his boss sprays dollars by the trillion, is being rumbled by the markets.
Jim Chalmers is running a budget deficit one-sixth the size of Bessent’s and with a much skinnier debt-interest bill. But the Treasurer has got a world of other problems to deal with, not least the hungry beast of universal social benefits. Over the past six years, spending on health, disability services, aged care, childcare and other benefits has almost doubled.
Yeaman, previously a Treasury deputy secretary, says with central banks forced to maintain the monetary squeeze, governments will come under more acute pressure to lift productivity and cut government spending to free up private sector capacity.
“As we move further into this new economic era, governments will increasingly need to balance pressure from communities for more structural spending and support, with pressure from global debt markets,” he writes.
As stewards, elected and unelected, are discovering, it’s a savage crossing between voter furies and the vortex of raging capital.

If only the other reptiles had shown an interest in the movie - naturally without mentioning the movie - the pond might have been able to pay more attention to the productivity jihad ...

Meanwhile the reptiles had gone eerily silent on the topic of the ranga and the pastie Hastie and all that ...

How many distractions can an Epstein file bear?