In which the pond refuses to go there, that dark and dank and despairing place of mass murder ...

This isn't a day for blogging, this is a day for grieving, and for condolences to the friends and families of the innocents who lost their lives.

This isn't a day for making political, or ideological, capital out of the deaths of innocents.

This isn't a day for the usual fun of arguing with the reptiles.

The pond watched a debrief/press conference last night as a reporter - a Murdochian - seized on the deaths of innocents with a question loaded with political barbs. The Prime Minister wisely avoided the appalling intent.

No doubt there'll be much speculation, but the pond was reminded that only a year or so, one man was mistakenly swept up in the blame game around the Bondi Junction murders. He got a nice settlement out of it, but no doubt would have settled on being left out of it.

This is a time when social media will run riot. There will be misinformation, allegations and division and hate in abundance.

The blame game, the fomenting of hate, will likely whirl out of control.

This isn't the time for the pond to become one of those rioters, another of those blame gamers.

To settle back and spend a usual day bickering with the reptiles isn't possible for the pond.

One thing's certain. Whatever ideological or theological notions that might have motivated the killers, that might have driven the bloody murders on the beach, those notions have taken an immeasurable hit ... and the killers' actions have caused any associated causes immense harm.

The pond will confess to gawping along at the live coverage last night on ABC News, while appalled by the sights.

Some might think the pond a coward for not tackling the reptiles this day, but that's entirely the point. There's nothing to be gained by joining in the frenzy.

The pond was however, inspired by the sight of a man, apparently wounded twice, coming up from behind to disarm one of the mass murderers. 

Apparently this was a local fruit shop owner, a certain Ahmed Al Ahmed. He grabbed hold of the killer's gun, and put it down, a righteous response, while the killer retreated. 

The pond's instinct was to pull the trigger and put the rabid one down, which would have been just another addition to the carnage.

The pond's reaction was visceral. It's easy to watch the American disease from afar, the almost innumerable deaths by gun violence, but this was too close to home.

Bondi beach is totemic to the pond, like it is to many others, even as it's been overrun by visitors. 

The pond first saw the ocean there, a disbeliever from the remote bush astonished by the sight of waves and an endless, vast amount of water.

It was the place of the ritual first putting toes in water, until, family legend has it, the pond retreated in teary disbelief. The pond still has a memory of the awe the sea inspired. (It was probably a two footer that towered over the pond).

The beach, and the innocents who flocked there for fun and to celebrate a Jewish religious holiday, didn't need this desecration.

The pond will leave the zealotry this day to the reptiles...and instead settle for quoting just one response ...

If only the pond could believe that there was a long absent lord ... if only there was more to offer than thoughts and prayers to those caught up in grief at the carnage...

With that thought in mind, the pond will allow the immortal Rowe to go there ...

In which Polonius contrives to ruin the pond's meditative Sunday, while the dog botherer and the Angelic one are no help either ...

 

(Images from the Graudian coverage, though the Beast also has a goodly number of snaps - *archive link)

And that's the last time you'll be titillated in this meditative Sunday outing.

The pond couldn't believe its bad luck.

At least "Ned" could be safely tucked down at the bottom of the page where nobody would notice his deranged meandering, fit of nostalgia about a long forgotten head prefect who made a name for himself regularly spanking the country.

But ever since the pond gave up on the Pellists and the angry Sydney Anglicans, Polonial prattle has always been the starting point for a vigorous debate, designed to inspire the shaking of canes and the rattling of wheelchairs.

And yet, to prove lightning does indeed strike twice at the very same spot, what did Polonius get up to this weekend?

He doubled down on "Ned". 

He decided to soil Sunday with another serve of ancient squatter from Nareen stuff ...

The header: Malcolm Fraser’s long road from right to left; The man who blocked supply to bring down Gough Whitlam spent decades seeking redemption from the very people who once despised him – but at what cost to historical truth?

The caption: Malcolm Fraser and Gough Whitlam join forces to record a Yes-case television ad for the 1999 republic referendum.

The pond supposes it's only 4 minutes, not like the unendurable 11 minutes spent with "Ned's" natter ... but the pond felt an incredible desire to do a Tootle ...

How is it, for example, that somehow the likes of Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, and above all, snakes of the Dershowitz and Bannon kind have managed to escape the heat?

The pond can understand Woody Allen - he directed Manhattan and that's all you need to know. He no longer has a reputation that anyone could sully or slander.

But how do some of these snakes manage to slither away unnoticed, unless they happen to turn up in a Borat movie, featured in a most unseemly light?

Sorry, sorry, Tootle has returned to the tracks.

On with official reptile duties ... take it away Polonius:

I’m often asked about the metamorphosis of Malcolm Fraser, who was first elected prime minister of Australia 50 years ago today, the 13th.

Hang on, hang on, hold it right there.

He's often asked? 

Who mingles with this ossified dinosaur? 

Even worse, who often asks him what it was like in Antediluvian times?

Or is it just a cheap, stale, rhetorical device to allow him to get into blathering about the head prefect?

Speaking of cheap rhetorical devices, what a good way to return to the blather:

When I was a student at the University of Melbourne in the 1960s, Fraser occasionally gave talks at the campus. He was one of the few Coalition MPs who could defend Australia’s Vietnam commitment, along with conscription, in an intelligent manner.

Oh indeed, indeed, though the halls still resound with talk of the way that Polonius ignored the bounce of the marble and signed up to serve Her Majesty, bringing western civilisation to the Vietnamese with his warrior ways.

The pond keeds, the pond keeds ... Polonius valiantly fought the war from the rear and paid dearly for his devotion to the cause ... (sorry, from June 2005, behind the Crikey paywall)

(Relax Melburnians, thanks to the Graudian, the pond is aware that allegedly leftie Melbourne has kept the traditional Xmas shop window display alive, while godless Sydney has abandoned it for branding opportunities).

Oh 'Nam valiant warrior, oh noble fighter, and yet the pond's attempt at deflection and distraction won't work.

We're stuck with Polonius going on and on about the head prefect ...

Fraser was a fierce opponent of the Labor Party, not only members of the Labor Left such as Jim Cairns but also right-wing Labor types such as Gough Whitlam. Fraser admired Robert Menzies and sought to defend his legacy. Yet in the lead-up to his death in 2015, Fraser was loved by the left.
In his later years Fraser co-wrote two books with left-of-centre journalists/academics. In his 2010 Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs, which he co-wrote with Margaret Simons, it was reported that at literary festivals in the 2000s Fraser “was applauded by the same kinds of people who had once reviled him for his role in the dismissal of Whitlam”.
Then in Dangerous Allies, which Fraser wrote with Cain Roberts in 2014, he stated that from around 1945 Menzies “misjudged the direction in which the world was heading”. By then he was attacking the Menzies legacy and had quit the Liberal Party.
Why the change? In my view, Fraser wanted to be loved – including by the left. As is widely known, in October-November 1975 a talented, arrogant and stubborn man (Fraser) was determined to block supply in the Senate. And a talented, arrogant and stubborn man (Whitlam) was determined to govern without supply.

The reptiles slipped in a reference to that cur Kerr, Sir John Kerr and Malcolm Fraser during a Parliament House lunch in 1977. Picture: Brett Thomson

No doubt the reptiles were hoping that the pond would be inspired to turn once again to the currish Kerr drunk at the Tamworth show - one of the few bright moments for a town ruined by Barnaby - or even drunk at the Melbourne cup.

But the pond has been there too often in recent times, and pressed on:

Governor-General Sir John Kerr resolved the deadlock by dismissing Whitlam, who would not advise of a double-dissolution election, and appointing Fraser as caretaker prime minister pending a double-dissolution election. In the event, on December 13, 1975, the Coalition won in a landslide.
As someone who worked for a minister in the Fraser government between 1976 and 1979 it was evident to me that Fraser was unnerved by the opposition to the way he became prime minister. At the time there were angry demonstrations against him and Kerr. One of the latter is covered by Gary Newman’s 2023 documentary How to Capture a Prime Minister, dealing with the violent anti-Fraser demonstration at Monash University in 1976.
Fraser led a relatively successful government from late 1975 until early 1980 but it ran out of steam. Sure, the international economy was not in good shape. But the main problem was that Fraser did not have an economic agenda.

The reptiles slipped in another snap ... Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser at the launch of the Australia's First Century book in 2000.

At this point Polonius took an exceedingly dull turn, spending an elaborate amount of time establishing the basis for a feud with Ancient Troy ... as if the sight of two reptiles battling over the head prefect made for a spectacle more entertaining than Gladiator ...

Fraser retired from politics in early 1983 and in 1987 Malcolm Fraser: A Biography was published. Fraser fed material to author Philip Ayres that was hostile to John Howard and Kerr. Fraser claimed for the first time – a decade after the Dismissal – that in a phone call at about 9.55am on November 11, 1975, Kerr had tipped him off that he was about to dismiss Whitlam after finding out that the opposition was still intent on blocking supply.
Kerr denied this and had a note, dated November 16, 1975, to support his position along with an account in his 1978 book Matters for Judgement. Kerr said Fraser’s note was written at Government House after Whitlam had been dismissed.
What Fraser told Ayres in 1987 was based on his memory. He said he had handwritten a note of his phone conversation, on which he recorded four conditions Kerr had laid down for him to become a caretaker prime minister.
The note apparently was not recovered until the early 2000s. In fact, Kerr laid down six conditions, not four. The note was first published in The Political Memoirs in 2010. It was obvious that the handwriting at the top of the note was dramatically different from the signature, date and time at the bottom of the note.
Also the signature seems to begin with a capital “J” followed by a capital “M”. Bear in mind that Fraser’s full name was John Malcolm Fraser. Moreover, in November 1975 he used to sign his name as “Malcolm Fraser”. In addition, the date “11 Nov 1975” had the “7” transcribed over an “8”.

The reptiles flung in yet another snap of the head prefect and Gough ... Then prime minister Malcolm Fraser and opposition leader Gough Whitlam at the opening of a new BHP steel mill at Geelong in 1977. Picture: NCA

And then it was time for all that carefully cultivated pedantry to pay off with a direct assault on Ancient Troy ...

In his article in these pages on December 8, Troy Bramston wrote that “the claim that the note was made later cannot be substantiated and was rather silly”.
My claim was only that the date, time and signature had been inserted later. But Fraser and Simons declined to explain the difference in the writing. The issue is also addressed in an article by Michael Connor in the September 2017 issue of Quadrant – which is anything but “silly”.
I demonstrated the difference in writing during my appearance on the Sky News documentary The Dismissal: 50 Years On and in my recent book Malcolm Fraser: A Personal Reflection. No one has challenged my analysis by means of considered argument.
There is another problem. To believe Fraser’s account over Kerr’s, one has to rely on Fraser’s memory. Yet Fraser wrote in The Political Memoirs that his memory was “notoriously fallible”.

Did the pond give two hoots, or even a single hoot?

It was so Polonius ... it's been that way since well before 2008 and this First Dog note ...

The only thing the pond cared about was the way that the reptiles refused to give Reg Withers proper respect ... Former Liberal minister Reg Withers.

Please, he was the toe cutter. He was such a b*stard of an enforcer, that the only name that suited him was taken from a Sydney gang that would cut off the toes of their victims ...

Now if the reptiles had slipped that in, there might have been some entertainment, and Polonius might not have whimpered off into a final gobbet of tedium ...

Bramston writes that the alleged Kerr-Fraser call was witnessed by one-time Liberal MPs Reg Withers and Vic Garland. He makes no reference to Bob Ellicott QC, who told me that he was in the room and the call was too brief for Kerr to have laid down six conditions.
The problem with memory is that some people have clear “recollections” of events that never happened. Fallible memories, in other words. Whatever the motivation, Fraser’s claim that he was effectively tipped off by Kerr put the focus of the Dismissal on Kerr and away from Fraser. This paved the way for Fraser to become besties with Whitlam.
Meanwhile, Fraser left notes in his personal papers criticising Kerr for the way he handled the Dismissal – views he never expressed a half-century ago. In the end, Fraser was loved by the left but many of his one-time closest supporters believed he had lost his way.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

Once again the pond will provide a belated intermittent archive link to the musings of Polonius.

Why? Because masochists might not have had their fill, and they might want to wander through the hive mind - links usually do a Hotel California, and once inside you can never leave.

The last par for example had a link to this, and who wouldn't want to keep flogging their backs, Percy Grainger style, preferably with a good birch or pine branch?

The upside? Not a single mention of the ABC! It must be the Xmas silly season.

And so to the dog botherer, doing his best to ruin Xmas seasonal cheer with a whining, moaning, litany, a mournful dirge of divisive unhappiness ...

The header: ‘Australia has less social cohesion, resilience and common purpose than I can recall in my lifetime’;  We’ve lost cohesion and character as protesters intimidate fellow citizens and government fuels division.

Says the most divisive rag for the most divisive foreign corporation at work in the country.

The caption: Protesters block shipping in Newcastle last month. Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw

The upside? It's apparently the dog botherer's last column for the year.

The downside? It's a dog botherer column, one of his usual divisive efforts spraying around words like "zealot" ...

Only a narcissist of the first water wouldn't notice the abundant ironies ...

We are losing parts of our national character and this is weakening our nation. While this may be an inevitable and unsurprising consequence of globalisation, the digital media age, record immigration and multiculturalism, it is still troubling to witness, and we have the option of resisting.
Casting my mind over 2025 for my final column of the year, there is an overwhelming sense that the nation has changed or that differences long in the making have started to become more perceptible. Australia has less social cohesion, resilience and common purpose than I can recall in my lifetime.
Citizens have paraded behind posters of terrorist leaders to intimidate fellow citizens. Jewish people have repeatedly faced public death threats and their communities have been attacked and vandalised, a synagogue and childcare centre firebombed.
Climate zealots have blocked cars, trains and ships, preventing their fellow citizens from going about their lawful business. Activists routinely and selfishly place their obsessions above the interests of law-abiding compatriots – and too often authorities protect the rights of protesters over those of others exercising their day-to-day freedoms.

As usual, it's not the actual observed explosion of extreme weather events, their consequent impact on insurance, on property and people, and on the planet, that's the problem, it's the way that uppity people insist on mentioning them ... The explosion of extreme weather mentions fans fear in the politics of climate.

Can you have alarmist alarm about alarmists being alarmed?

You can, at least in irony-free dog botherer world ...

Our governments and authorities deliberately fuel alarmism over global warming and mislead the population about our national energy self-harm. Regional communities are divided into the haves and have-nots as renewable energy and transmission projects cut through their landscapes.
More than half of all voters now rely on government for most of their income. A report by the Centre for Independent Studies calculated those directly employed by government, getting most of their income from welfare benefits or working in jobs reliant on government funding top 50 per cent of the adult population – consider what that means for the economy, politics and individual initiative.
Large numbers of people look to government to solve any manner of ills. Media exacerbates these expectations and politicians oblige with ever more intrusions.
The National Disability Insurance Scheme has blown out to become a $50bn a year behemoth, where taxpayers’ money is rorted by service providers who drain the market economy of workers and productivity.
The parties of government are receiving fewer votes than ever and the parties of protest are winning an increasing share.

Meanwhile, the dog bothering was lathering up a fit about the flag ... Protestors burning Australian flag

Look at it positively, all they're doing is burning the UK flag, plus a few stars that have been dragged into the mix ...

The pond doesn't much mind what anyone does to the UK flag:

Our national flag is shunned by many, and when it is flown it is usually accompanied by not one but two Indigenous flags. Welcomes to country are overdone and often sound anything but welcoming, morphing into grievance and admonishment.
What has happened to a frontier nation once ingrained with self-reliance and adaptability? What have we done to an economy once endowed with plentiful, cheap energy?
Where is our common purpose and cohesion? What do we rally around? And what do we share (apart from a government debt that has reached $1 trillion)?
Most of this has unfolded on a continuum, and some government overreach was exacerbated during the Covid-19 pandemic. Social divisions and protest movements have been animated by the war in Gaza and inflamed by social media.
We are living in a rapidly changing world and it is inevitable that Australia will change too. But a wise nation would look to retain strong qualities that have held it in good stead, while nourishing clear values and shared ambitions.
When tens of thousands of people marched across Sydney Harbour Bridge in August it was celebrated by many politicians and much of the media as a mainstream movement for the Palestinian people and peace. No doubt there were well-intentioned people who joined in, probably misinformed by social media, the ABC and others.

It being the Australian Daily Zionist News, it wasn't long before the dog botherer went there, Zionist Federation of Australia CEO Alon Cassuto says the Jewish community is “shaken up” after seeing the “glorification of terrorism” from the pro-Palestine protest on Sydney’s Harbour Bridge. “This so-called march for humanity, which was promoted as a peaceful demonstration, was anything but,” Mr Cassuto told Sky News host Steve Price. “These images are not about peace. “If these people wanted peace, then they‘d stand side-by-side with Jews and Palestinians. “This was a march against Israel … this was not a march for peace.”

Whenever that happens, the pond likes to nip off to Haaretz to check on what's really happening ...

Sure enough ...

'Israel Is Pushing Us Out': Plan to Open Gaza's Rafah Crossing Leaves Palestinians With More Questions Than Answers (*archive link)

And ...

'You'll Pay in Blood': Israeli Journalist Who Exposed IDF Abuse of Palestinian Detainee Speaks Out Amid Death Threats
Israel's Channel 12 News journalist Guy Peleg faces escalating threats and harassment since he published a video - handed over to him by the former Military Advocate General - of the extreme abuse at Sde Teiman (*archive link)

Oh and stories like this ...

But the dog botherer has never been big on noticing ethnic cleansing, mass displacement, mass destruction and mass starvation as a war strategy (and crime):

The protest was organised by the radical Palestine Action Group, which has close links with operatives in Socialist Alternative and Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir (which is banned in many countries, including in the Muslim world). It was a march of hatred, not peace.
Protesters displayed terrorist banners and a poster of the supreme leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, a sponsor of global terrorism against Israelis and a country that has launched drones and fired missiles in pursuit of its stated aim of wiping Israel off the map. Iran was behind the arson attack on Melbourne’s Adass Israel Synagogue last year.
Marchers also chanted slogans about the elimination of Israel (“From the river to the sea”) and the killing of Israeli soldiers (“death to the IDF”). Among the pro-Palestinian crowd was Sheik Ibrahim Dadoun who fronted a cheering crowd at Sydney’s Lakemba on October 8, 2023, expressing elation, happiness and pride at the October 7 atrocities.
At the bridge protest Dadoun said he was “marching for humanity”. Sure.
This was an ominous episode for this country; it amounted to an Islamist-dominated threat against Israel, its supporters and Australians who are Jewish. It came almost two years after the Lakemba celebration of October 2023 and the Sydney Opera House protest and threats against Jews the following night – there have been almost weekly anti-Israel street marches in Sydney and Melbourne since.
Pro-Palestinian groups also made intimidating sorties into suburbs with high Jewish populations. The bridge march was the culmination of this ugliness, yet it was embraced by Hamas’s useful idiots in our political and media class.

These litanies never seem to end, what with the many grudges served up again and again ... Prime Minister Anthony Albanese during a press conference in Canberra in August, where he announced Australia would recognise a Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly in September. Picture: Hilary Wardhaugh / AFP

There's a reason that the Oxford made "rage bait" the word of the year, even if it's two words, but they got the definition wrong ...

(n.) Online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media account.

What they should have included was "tired old hacks wanting to sh*t stir and send hive minds into a buzzing, hysterical frenzy at the lizard Oz".

But at least the pond has made mention of it, as the rage baiter continued with his baiting and his hating ...

Based partly on the strength of the Harbour Bridge turnout and cynical electoral concerns (Muslim voters outnumber Jews 10 to one), Anthony Albanese formally recognised the non-existent state of Palestine the following month at the UN. A steadfast supporter of Israel since its modern reincarnation in 1948, Australia under Albanese abandoned a mate, the only pluralist democracy in the Middle East, a country under attack on all fronts. It is impossible to watch all this unfold and fail to realise that something fundamental has changed in our country.
From the Prime Minister down, our governments and authorities have failed the Jewish population and Israel while bending to the wishes of hardline Islamist groups whose fundamentalist views are anathema to our central values of democracy, tolerance and pluralism. Rather than take lessons from what has been unfolding in Europe and Britain, our government has taken itself to the top of the list of countries welcoming refugees from the terrorist badlands of Gaza. Security checks for about 3000 visas could have been only cursory.
With a population topping 500,000 people, the city of Newcastle in NSW is the seventh largest in the nation and has a proud history. Its economic fortunes have always been linked to the coal industry and it remains the world’s largest coal exporting port. Last month climate activists including Greens leader Larissa Waters kayaked and swam in the channel in a deliberate and successful attempt to disrupt shipping, just as they have previously blocked rail lines and loading operations.

Coal, coal, coal, always the coal, and images designed to shock, disturb and provoke anger, Rising Tide protester on Horseshoe Beach in Newcastle. Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw

All that did was take the pond way back to the days of the 'Nam moratoriums, when many shared Muhammad Ali's view that he ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong ...

Whenever you get the dog botherer ranting about moral narcissism, arrogance, selfishness and the like, remember, it's just a form of projection ...

He embodies all the unsavoury qualities he allegedly finds in others ...

Apart from interrupting coal exports the protesters dissuaded a cruise liner scheduled to bring 1000 tourists into the city. The arrogance and selfishness of these protesters is astonishing. To indulge their activism, they choose to prevent fellow citizens from working or plying extra trade in their small businesses – hardly a fair go.
We have seen years of moral vanity from the left, imposing their will and ducking intelligent debate on the basis that alternative views are morally bankrupt – it is all about white hats denouncing black hats. This has mutated into a moral narcissism, where the left is so infatuated with its own virtue that it has only visceral hatred for those who disagree with it.

Gone is any pretence that the dog botherer cared about the Voice ...

This has poisoned discussions about Indigenous affairs so that the Indigenous voice proposal, designed to bring the country together, only deepened a chasm. There is a post-referendum harshness now, where activists make wild demands and opponents pretend rejection of the voice means there is no ground to give and no problem to fix – the mainstream consensus around practical reconciliation has been trashed.
We are on a dismal trajectory. Just five years ago, soon before he died, the great British-born Jewish philosopher Jonathan Sacks was prescient in his brilliant book Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times.
“If we focus on the ‘I’ and lose the ‘We’, if we act on self-interest without a commitment to the common good, if we focus on self-esteem and lose our care for others, we will lose much else,” Sacks wrote. “Nations will cease to have societies and instead have identity groups. We will lose our feeling of collective responsibility and find in its place a culture of competitive victimhood. In an age of unprecedented possibilities, people will feel vulnerable and alone.”

How far back does he go in this litany? 

In a column supposedly farewelling 2025, it's back 2023 ...Senator Lidia Thorpe (centre) takes part in a 2023 Invasion Day rally. Picture: Darrian Traynor/Getty Images

And so to the final gobbet, and yes, "victimhood" is trotted out like a dose of diarrhea by someone who clearly thinks of himself as an eternal victim:

His diagnosis is global but applies here. Do you see vulnerability and competition for victimhood in Australia? Do you see a greater focus on identity groups rather than common values and goals?
Sachs was on to something. His prescription is to shift away from the transactional to the meaningful, from the individual to the communal. “A contract is a transaction. A covenant is a relationship.”
There is merit in this. But to my mind, knowledge is also key.
In so many of our volatile disputes, such as the Middle East, climate change, energy policy and even economics, ignorance and misinformation abound. New generations are informed by social media, which means they know little except their own prejudices, reaffirmed by algorithms feeding them what a computer thinks they want to hear. It is a digital inversion of our intellectual evolution, where the contest of ideas, scientific scepticism and consideration of alternatives have driven us forward.
Let us make a covenant for 2026 – in the new year and beyond we must fight strongly against this collective dumbing down. Thank you for reading, and thinking, and I wish you a peaceful Christmas. Rest up for the struggle ahead.

We must fight strongly against the collective dumbing down?

But that means the pond would have to give up recycling the wretched hate and hysteria peddled by the reptiles, currently being recycled into the ether by the pond, and worse still, being picked up by bots so that it can poison AI for an eternity ....

The pond keeps thinking about giving up its insidious addiction to the reptiles, as rotting to the mind as meth is to the body ... but not just yet.

As for another bonus, the pond will provide one link up front, to the latest Dame Slap ...

How firms are seduced into backing a radical agenda
Activist groups are quietly using public awards and brownie points to achieve radical change. It’s social engineering by stealth as corporations compete for virtue-signalling awards.

Here's a sample ...

Why did the pond flinch from going all the way with Dame Slap?

As soon as any reptile mentions "virtue-signalling" the pond sees it as a virtue to signal that it's out of there ...

But there was an even bigger irony, one that inevitably escaped the attention of this MAGA-cap donning mega prize maroon.

If there's a prize to rabbit on about endlessly, surely this past week's prize provided endless opportunities ...

But Dame Slap long ago lost the courage to go there. All she can do is rant at minorities, and so she can rant alone.

And so to the real bonus, the Angelic one's outing, with this a good way to prepare ...

Yes, the Angelic one had got her nickers in a knot about all sorts of wickedness, especially of the AI kind, even worse than Santa conspiring to foil social media ...

The header: Forget social media, AI is the real threat to kids – it steals their thinking, With students relying on ChatGPT to write assignments and even act as a friend, educators fear AI is blunting independent thought and blurring reality, posing risks far beyond those of social media.

The caption for the image: ChatGPT and other AI-generated tools such as Grok and Gemini can be a way into social media. Picture: AFP

And that image is exactly what's wrong with the reptiles at the moment ...a generic sameness that litters and ruins the rag, as it does the full to overflowing intertubes ...

Such a tired cheapening, such a waste of bandwidth.

The hapless Angelic one was up against it from the start ...

It is a familiar trope to bemoan the state of youth today. It has always been a source of mirth and despair.
Back in my pre-internet teaching days, when students were just pupils, we used to share examples of scholarly ignorance in the staff­room, like one 14-year-old’s imaginative essay about life in ancient Rome that began: “The Romans had great fun in the Circus Maximus, because they had the lions and tigers and clowns.”
Today, however, such harmless sources of entertainment for jaded teachers have been replaced by something more sinister; it is called ChatGPT.
It may surprise older readers to know that almost every high school kid and a good number of younger ones use ChatGPT. This is a harbinger of something much less obvious than the harm of social media. It is much more insidious and dangerous.
While the government has already thought about trying to plug the gaps in the social media ban by making it hard to access platforms such as Lemon8, fewer parents are worried about ChatGPT. Why ever not? One answer is that parents themselves are wedded to this seemingly harmless tool, just as they are to social media. Another is that they have not worked out that ChatGPT and other AI-generated tools such as Grok and Gemini can be a way into social media.

The pond isn't quite certain why the Angelic one is so agitated.

Recently Sam declared a code red ... per the WSJ ...

And others are flying close to the sun ... per Bloomberg ...

And some stuff still stays broken, per Wired, despite the ongoing attempts to fix the endlessly broken ...

Maybe we should be thinking about a crash as big as the Ritz...

Never mind, have a terrifying image, which doesn't happen to feature the extreme far right of the lizard Oz, Australia has banned young teenagers from social media sites such as Instagram. Picture: AFP.

The Angelic one was in a luddite frenzy, and the pond wondered whether she'd smashed up her keyboard, scribbled her copy in long hand, and used a carrier pigeon to send it to head office ...

One teacher of my acquaintance told me that a student had told her they would just use Chat to get around the social media ban. However, there is another more prevalent danger of this “harmless” tool. It leads almost inevitably to a stultifying effect on the ability of the young to think for themselves and it renders them almost incapable of abstract thinking.
One reason for this is that many school and university students use ChatGPT not simply to glean information but to write any long-form response.
If you speak to a high school teacher now, as I recently did, they will tell you how unrelentingly uniform are all their answers to anything, especially take-home history and English assignments, because of the ubiquity of ChatGPT. It has even replaced Google because it will actually write assignments for them, and some students don’t even bother changing it a bit.
High school students no longer just copy passages from texts, which I confess to doing as an undergraduate myself. In the past, students had to know where to look, to find the right texts and the right passages of the texts. Chat and other forms of AI relieve the weary adolescent of this burdensome task. One teacher told me that some don’t even bother cutting off the words “is there anything else you would like to know?” – an amusing giveaway.
In short, ChatGPT and other forms of AI have relieved them of the burden of thinking. Most students cannot see what is wrong with this. If a teacher fails them for doing it, they will invariably respond: “It’s right, isn’t it?” That’s because to them, as strangers to thoughtful interpretation of texts, something is “right” or “wrong”, and more often than not their parents will show up to complain. After all, their parents have been using Chat for everything.
This is the nub of the whole problem of using social media and the more sophisticated tools of AI. Parents are as wedded to this stuff as kids. This is not something that passing a law can fix. When I see a mother walking down the street pushing the baby’s stroller with one hand and scrolling through her social media with the other one I cannot help wondering how that baby is supposed to grow up social media and bot free, then like magic suddenly turn into a responsible adolescent at 16.

There came a last terrifying image... The social media ban began on Wednesday. Picture: AFP.

The Angelic one decided the way to destroy her credibility was to end her final gobbet on a Haidt note, as if the pond hasn't already had enough reptile hate speech today ...

There is another, worse, danger. ChatGPT and other chatbots, which are becoming ever more sophisticated, can be used to replace human communication altogether. They can adopt a personality and in long exchanges seem almost human.
There has been a notorious case in the US alleging ChatGPT encouraged Adam Raine, an introverted 16-year-old, to take his own life. This poor boy used ChatGPT as a substitute for human companionship. It is alleged to have encouraged his delusion, helped him to explore methods of suicide and even helped him write a note, left in the computer. His parents knew nothing about it. As his father said, “Most parents do not know the capability of this tool.”
The inability to disentangle AI from reality is the most obvious danger for the young into the future, even if a parent is complacent about their child’s psychological stability and ability to tell real from counterfeit in a Chat conversation
One student told my teacher acquaintance that he calls the bot by name, and it calls him by name too. In fact, ordinary social media communication might be less harmful to a kid than replacing it with a bot. After all, ordinary social media, whether it is Facebook or Instagram or TikTok, means that young people are communicating with other young humans – for good or ill. If they are bullied then they or their parents can deal in person with the problem.
Despite all the nay-saying and the thorough research from social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, communication through social media may be less dangerous than what will replace it. As the student who communicates with the bot by name told his teacher, at least with social media “there is a person”.

At least there is a person?

The entire point of social media is to substitute the person with the algorithm, or at least to make any interaction the stuff of data-crunching, money-making algorithms ...

The pond found it irresistible to ask a bot what it thought were the limitations of Haidt speech, and this is what came up ...

Oh well the pond cares not a whit nor a jot for Haidt speech or for bots trying to sound human.

It did however round out a truly wasted Sunday, as often happens when in the company of the dismal reptiles.

At least the pond could turn to Tom the Dancing Bug for reassurance that all was well in Dame Slap's disunited states ...

As a final bonus, Simon Marks doing his bleak American week ...

In which the pond has to cut to the chase, because 11 minutes of bromancer, 5 minutes of Ughmann, and to cap it all off, 11 minutes of "Ned" with the crazy grazier ...

 

Enough already with the surveys of the hive mind, with dubious links the pond is never certain anyone clicks on.

Enough with links to all the reptiles over on the extreme far right that the pond then proceeds to ignore. If anyone wants to explore them, it's off to the intermittent archive with a URL, and the "feast" awaits.

Enough with the alleged "news", be it the Brown-out rabbiting on about energy yet again in a purported EXCLUSIVE or a trio of reptiles raging yet again about the ENTITLEMENTS SAGA. 

The pond is already well beyond the valley of reptile sagas.

And why bother featuring the reptiles discovering more sights featuring dozy King Donald?

These snaps are a dime a dozen and will be all over the full to overflowing intertubes, and anyway if you read the Graudian, some are hardly news ...

The president’s face in cartoon form, and the words “I’m huuuuge”, appear in another image on square packets with a sign advertising a “Trump condom” for $4.50. The novelty items were on sale prior to Trump’s first election win in 2016, and earned a place in the Smithsonian Institute’s political satire collection.

It's just sleepy King Don being classy for his mates ...

And a lot of them had the interesting bits conveniently blacked out ...

More to the point are the reptiles that the pond intends to cover today, with the remaining few of any interest - pitiful losers the lot of them - to be mopped up in the pond's meditative Sunday coverage ...

You see, the poor old bromancer has gone into psychic shock, and so has spent a an unearthly 11 minutes on the couch trying to deal with a world gone awry...

How could the pond distract from that with a parade of other tawdry reptiles?

The bromancer is a one man parade of neuroses verging on hysteria:

The header of abandonment: The new US security strategy upends global order and signals big risks for Australia; Donald Trump’s contentious national security strategy doesn’t abandon us entirely but it’s clear Australia must do much more on defence.

The caption for the King of Chaos: The new national security released by Donald Trump’s White House marks a profound change in US priorities, even purposes. Picture: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP

The bromancer is deeply concerned, and as in the way of all things, only he gets it ...

Donald Trump has declared the death of Pax Americana, which has underpinned global security since World War II. This is a development of profound historic importance for Australia. There’s not the slightest evidence the Albanese government, or the nation’s leadership generally, understands the immense movement now under way of the tectonic plates of global order, and the questions, and dangers, this poses for Australia.
Trump’s White House released a new national security strategy. It’s a comprehensive repudiation of Trump’s previous 2017 national security strategy, which set out a clear, new approach for the US that was more explicit, and honest, than many strategies that had gone before.
In 2017, Trump’s first administration declared that strategic competition with China and Russia drove US security policy because of the aggressive, destabilising actions Beijing and Moscow take.

For some bizarre reason, the reptiles relegated Emilia's exciting, neigh astonishing artwork to second snap position: Trump’s White House released a new national security strategy that has been warmly welcomed by Vladimir Putin’s government in Moscow. Artwork: Emilia Tortorella

Blame it on AI Em, let AI cop the blame...

Anxiety suffused the bromancer ...

This time, there’s no mention of such strategic competition. Here’s the key sentence in the new strategy: “The affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.”
The key sentence in Trump’s 2017 NSS was: “The United States will respond to the growing political, economic and military competitions we face around the world. China and Russia challenge American power, influence and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity. They are determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and grow their influence.”
The new NSS has not a single word of criticism of Russia, and with China only some implicit criticism of past trade policies. The new NSS has been warmly welcomed by Vladimir Putin’s government in Moscow and by Paul Keating in Australia. Reflecting Trump’s closeness to Moscow’s talking points, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov praises Trump as the only Western leader to recognise the “true causes” of the war in Ukraine. Keating says Trump is owed a debt because his NSS may avoid World War III. (Keating is not to be equated, morally or politically, with the government of Russia. But he has consistently argued the US cannot prevail in any struggle with China and should accommodate more of Beijing’s strategic ambitions in Asia.) America’s closest allies, especially NATO allies, by contrast were aghast.
The main mention of Australia is the demand we should spend much more on defence than the paltry 2 per cent of GDP we currently allocate. Tellingly, towards the end of a substantial section on Taiwan, the NSS declares: “In our dealings with Taiwan and Australia we maintain our determined rhetoric on increased defence spending.” I don’t think the Americans could make it much clearer – though of course the Albanese government will never utter these words – that the near-term purpose of the US-Australia alliance is to deter Chinese military action against Taiwan. It’s also the case that everyone, except the Albanese government, knows and acknowledges that Australia’s defence budget is woefully inadequate. But that’s not the primary takeout for Australia.

The war with China is not the primary takeout for the bromancer? Astonishing. 

The pond's dreams of him being the Reichsmarschall des Großaustralisch Reiches that led Australia into the great war by Xmas have been dashed forever ... Defence Minister Richard Marles with US War Secretary Pete Hegseth at the 2025 Shangri-La Dialogue. Picture: X

The bromancer was so startled that he dragged in the Dibbster to talk of a break:

Paul Dibb, grand old man of Australian strategic policy, by no means given to hysterics, tells Inquirer: “This is as important a break point in considered US strategic policy as we’ve seen since Richard Nixon’s Guam Doctrine.” Washington announced the Guam Doctrine in 1969. It assured allies of continued nuclear protection, and protection against attack from superpowers, but said US allies needed to take primary responsibility for their own security in contingencies below superpower attacks. It’s probably true the US never consistently enforced the Guam Doctrine.
Dibb is clear about the implications of Washington’s new outlook for Australia: “It means we need to be much more self-reliant. That doesn’t mean complete self-sufficiency. But it does mean doing a lot more for ourselves. That’s going to be expensive.”

The reptiles considered this so important that they provided a snap of the dabbling Dibbster, We need to be more self-reliant, says Paul Dibb. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

Of course the most important thing to do in a panic is to club the Australian government and make it all their fault ...

Dibb is withering in his judgment that the Albanese government is not doing anywhere near enough: “That means demonstrating that we are a serious ally concerned with our area of primary strategic concern, Southeast Asia, the South Pacific and the northeast Indian Ocean.”

But almost immediately other saucy doubts and fears bubbled to the bro surface ...

There are influential defenders of the Trump document. Some argue it’s wrong to think Trump will be bound by any strategy, even his own. Some take consolation from the passages extolling the importance of maintaining deterrence in the Indo-Pacific. Others argue that while the NSS is astonishingly rude about European NATO allies, much of its critique is true. Historian Niall Ferguson makes a partial defence along these lines. Former foreign minister Alexander Downer, though unhappy at the omission of any criticism of Russia, thinks the document more good than bad. On Europe, he tells Inquirer: “America was spending money on Europe’s defence while Europe was spending money on windmills and welfare.”
But the new Trump doctrine marks a profound change in US priorities, even purposes. It’s a big mistake not to take Trump seriously on matters like this. It would be the height of folly to think that once Trump exits, we’ll get back the America we knew under Ronald Reagan.
Trump has brought some real strength to some international situations, has bolstered the US military and stuck close to a handful allies, notably Israel. But he has done bad things as well. The partial, quasi-isolationism that runs through this document has infected a substantial part of the MAGA movement and the US right more generally. There’s a similar or worse isolationism in large parts of the American left, combined with hostility to American military power that the right doesn’t share.

"Astonishingly rude"?!

At this point the pond began to wonder whether the bromancer might ever be allowed back into the US again, or whether he might be joining letter writers to The Age in a separate queue ...

Even worse there was a mild hint that King Donald might be a full-blown racist, though that might only be a surprise to the reptiles and members of the hive mind ... President Trump on Tuesday fumed that Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar does nothing but ‘b--ch’; – insisting she should be booted from the country. The raucous crowd erupted into a loud &q …

The bromancer was in a world of pain and misery...

There are three likely alternatives for the next US president – a MAGA continuity candidate such as JD Vance; a political centrist like one of the mid-west Republican or Democrat governors; or a left-wing populist in the tradition of senator Bernie Sanders, congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or New York mayor Zohran Mamdani (he can’t run for president himself as he wasn’t born in the US).
In all scenarios, the ideas and prejudices displayed in the new NSS, such as increased distance from allies and a narrower conception of US security, will play a part. They of course will be contested by other ideas that reflect US idealism and generosity, and an enlightened sense of national self-interest.
The thrust of the NSS is that the US will pull back from Europe and the Middle East to concentrate on Latin America. It proclaims that big nations inevitably have spheres of influence and seems to claim a God-given right therefore to smack Latin American countries around if they consort too intimately with foreigners or oppose US economic interests. The Trump administration is in a campaign, involving much military pressure, to topple Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro.
Generally, the NSS disregards any political or ethical values such as human rights or democracy. There’s much inconsistency here. The Trump administration has, rightly in my view, made a big deal of campaigning for religious freedom in countries such as Nigeria, yet elsewhere says it will no longer hector countries, trying to get them to change the way they govern or behave internally.

Sheesh, the reptiles even thought a snap of a suffering kid might be good ...A boy chases a truck carrying humanitarian aid by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in southern Gaza. Picture: AFP

As if King Donald's minions weren't keeping the country safe ...

The bromancer did his best to turn apologist ...

It’s true that having democracy and human rights as a central purpose of declaratory US foreign policy was in the past sometimes counter-productive and hypocritical, and therefore in need of some correction. Famously, this policy under Barack Obama contributed to the brief and ugly period of Muslim Brotherhood rule in Egypt. But to go from that to a doctrine that holds as a matter of principle that the US has no interest in human rights or democracy is a wild over-correction.
The NSS is often quite incoherent and self-contradictory. Its contradictions are evidence of the difficulty Trump is having in reconciling the divergent parts of his constituency, perhaps the divergent parts of his own personality.
The whole document could be usefully colour-coded to signify the authors of the different bits. There are several glowing references to US “soft power”, which must be the last traces of traditional State Department speak. There are a few sentences about the US working with allies, which are Marco Rubio. There are long, dominant passages about the US winning trade wars, eliminating trade deficits, taking back the wealth wrongly looted by globalist trade rules and conniving partners. That’s pure Trump.
Although subordinate to the Trump stuff, there are some solid passages about the need for the US to maintain the best military in the world, support for maintaining the status quo in Taiwan and the importance of freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. These are the best, most welcome passages and reflect the Pentagon, even under Pete Hegseth.

Phew, what a relief, some solid passages, and a chance to feature that creature from Nosferatu...

Sorry, the pond meant to show this AV distraction, Trump aide Stephen Miller has accused Democrats of protecting illegal aliens committing crimes instead of American citizens. Miller claims the Democratic Party has embraced “full-scale insurrection” across the United States. This comes as the Department of Homeland Security said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents could soon be headed to San Francisco. Hollywood actor and outspoken liberal Robert De Niro slammed Miller as a “Nazi” during an MSNBC interview. This follows a court ruling that the US National Guard can provide backup for ICE in Portland.

Now to be fair, the bromancer isn't going off like Cranky Keane in Crikey, who has been absolutely off his tree in recent days ...

Trump’s policy is to accommodate China and interfere in Western countries. Australia’s US shills are strangely silent; The US under Trump is keen to accommodate and respect China’s power, but interfere in its allies’ domestic affairs. Our security establishment is trying to pretend this is all normal. (Sorry, paywall)

But how unfair is the keen Keane?

Why faithful shill bromancer has taken to talking of bizarre and weirdly absolutist statements and now is blathering on about the head vampire ...

There are bizarre and weirdly absolutist statements about the evil of immigration, which appear to bear the fingerprints of White House adviser Stephen Miller. And there are quite shocking sections about Europe that echo Vance. Oh, and towards the end, there’s an ambition that the US will be “consolidating our alliance system into an economic group”, presumably to counter China, though this is not absolutely explicit. This ambition presumably reflects input from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. But how can the US possibly turn its alliance system into an effective economic bloc when Trump doesn’t believe in the alliance system and is busily imposing punitive tariffs on allies?
Here is the key sentence on Europe: “The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.”
The NSS also says Europe faces “cultural erasure”, and promises to work with right-wing European opposition parties standing against all this. So much for not interfering in other nations’ internal affairs.
All the NSS criticisms of Europe have a measure, a kernel, of validity, but this is an American national security document that elsewhere praises itself for not insulting dictatorships by asking them to change their brutal domestic policies. The policies of European democracies Trump disagrees with, on the other hand, are somehow a bigger threat than Russia’s brutal invasion of a European neighbour involving the state murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
Trump doubled down on all this in interviews, saying of America’s NATO allies: “Most European nations, they’re decaying. I think they’re weak, but they also want to be so politically correct. I think they don’t know what to do.”

And to be fair, decadent Europe doesn't know what to do, not up against the dirty deeds of dozy Don ...

Sorry, this time the reptiles offered the King himself as a visual distraction: The 2025 US National Security Strategy signals a new approach to the world based on more inward-looking priorities. Picture: Patrick Smith/Getty Images via AFP

Couldn't they have shown him as a winner, with Europeans fawning all over him?

Remarkably the bromancer felt the need to stand up for Europe. 

What else could a tyke do?:

Trump’s exaggerated condemnation of Europe is hypocritical. If any leader speaks that way about him he imposes tariffs on their nation. They also, disturbingly, echo Russian talking points about Europe. They seem to be playing to a hyper-nationalism among some of Trump’s base, which sometimes shades into ethno-nationalism and even crazy racist conspiracy theories. Exaggerated critiques of Europe play on those sentiments, to be found among the supporters of Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes and other fruitcakes on the American right, without explicitly endorsing their most toxic beliefs. All through the West, there are forces on the right that are pro-Putin or bizarrely see Putin, presumably because he’s against gay marriage or some such, as a friend of Western civilisation. Trump does nothing to de-authorise that and declines to provide elementary moral leadership.
Trump’s harsh, rebarbative words drew a rare response from Pope Leo XIV. While acknowledging Trump’s right to set US security policy, Pope Leo said: “Parts of it (the NSS) mark a huge change in what was for many years a true alliance between Europe and the US. (The President’s) remarks in interviews seem to be trying to break apart what needs to be a very important alliance today and in the future.”
The Pope’s criticism of Trump is well made. But this is a much more significant statement from Leo. In words that echo the great pope John Paul II, who was so instrumental in defeating communism, Leo is actually endorsing the NATO military alliance. It’s impossible to imagine the late pope Francis, genuinely holy man that he was, articulating this clear, brave, true, unfashionable moral judgment.
JPII, the greatest pope in half a millennium, understood perfectly well all the moral failures and limitations of Western societies. He also understood that democracy and the rule of law are a vastly truer, better dispensation for humanity than any dictatorship. Leo here has not criticised Trump from the left, as Francis might have, but from the viewpoint of the solidarity to be expected among democracies.

Consider the reptiles disturbed: The NSS is quite a disturbing document, says Peter Varghese.

Now the bromancer and his sources haven't gone as far as the keen Keane, railing at AUKUS yet again ...

Is AUKUS the biggest cover-up in Australian history?
Both British and American officials are saying there are huge problems around their submarine construction programs. But Richard Marles refuses to even talk about AUKUS. (Sorry, paywall)

But who knows what other scales might fall from the bromancer's eyes?

Could he be in a free fall of existential despair and alienation?

At the least, count reptile feathers as being ruffled (yes, dinosaurs did have feathers),  even - gasp - quite disturbed and concerned:

Closer to home, Peter Varghese has a similar reaction. Like Dibb, he has a wealth of national security experience. He was John Howard’s international affairs and national security adviser. Howard appointed him director-general of the Office of National Assessments and he was later secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Varghese tells Inquirer: “At a number of levels it (the NSS) is quite a disturbing document, with little space for the values of liberal democracy. For Australians the question of whether we go with the US or China can only be based on values.
“The characterisation of Europe I found just extraordinary. What he’s basically saying is that Europe is losing its white identity. The dismissive, divisive language on Europe gives Russia a status which is a huge departure for American policy.”
Varghese is also concerned by the way the Trump document elevates bilateral trade considerations with China over everything else: “He (Trump) seems to be saying his primary worry with China is economic. So is he really saying we don’t really care if the geopolitical balance in Asia favours China so long as our economic interests are protected? Or is he saying I don’t care about geostrategic issues because we, the US, are powerful enough to deal with China on our own? That would position Australia, Japan and India to the margins of Indo-Pacific geopolitics.
“The President has referred to the US and China as the G2. It plays to how China wants to be seen, although China is now looking to pass the US, not just catch up. It’s quite a reckless use of language … The question is what can we now rely on the US to do for us as an ally. That has become much narrower.”
As Dibb argues, Australia must do much more for itself, both in alliance terms and in the event that we ever need to take action in our own interests independent of Washington. But as AUKUS, though covered in uncertainty, cannibalises the defence budget, we’re doing much less.
Because we are paying billions of dollars to the US submarine industry, sending our sailors to help crew US subs, preparing a de facto base for US subs in Perth and inviting US forces to make maximum use of northern Australia, the Trump administration for the moment is not punishing us for our own grievous defence dereliction.
To be clear, I strongly support all moves that involve the US militarily in Australia. But this is no substitute for the essential task of building our own national capabilities. With our anaemic defence budget and woeful decision-making, we’re resolutely refusing to do that. If the US ever gets tired of providing for Australian security, and that can’t be ruled out now, we’re all but defenceless. We’re showing we can’t cope with the possible passing of Pax Americana. We apparently think happy talk an effective substitute for national power.

How to reassure the bromancer? 

Don't jump ...

And so to the Ughmann ...and for those doubters and cynics who thought the unreformed seminarian talked though his bum when it came to climate science, you ain't seen nothing yet ...

The header: Playing with fire when it comes to our pristine bushland, Long before the first people arrived one tree, the eucalypt, rose to dominate the landscape and create the conditions in which fire became the signature of the land.

The caption for the truly wretched collage, which thankfully went uncredited, with not even AI willing to take the blame: Australia is a continent shaped by fire. Long before the first people arrived one tree, the eucalypt, rose to dominate the landscape and create the conditions in which fire became the signature of the land.

Right from the get go, the unreformed seminarian came up with a stunner ...

In his masterpiece Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia, Stephen Pyne calls the eucalypt the universal Australian: “Found virtually nowhere outside Australia but, within Australia, found virtually everywhere.”

Say what? Found virtually nowhere outside Australia?!

Um, has this Pyne ever been to California? (warning, that's a News Corp link):

How about Spain?

Eucalyptus fever: speculation and wildfire in Galicia
Eucalyptus, a tree species that thrives on fire, now accounts for 28% of the forests in the Spanish region of Galicia. The situation has come about through the policies of the local Popular Party.

Okay, so the unreformed seminarian and his sources don't get out and about much ... 

Now it's up to correspondents to do their own fact checking on the rest of the guff....

Here there would emerge a powerful alliance, “a triumvirate that eucalyptus formed with fire and the genus Homo”.
During an era Pyne called “the Great Upheaval” the continent dried as aridity became the norm and humidity the exception. The eucalypt was well placed to thrive. It had deep roots and foraged widely. It could hoard nutrients and store them for up to a decade. When drought came it could tough it out. It could grow where other trees starved.
“But if the eucalypt animated the bush, fire animated the eucalyptus.”
The tree is a pyrophyte, built to endure fire. At its base there are swollen woody organs called lignotubers that act as protected reservoirs of living tissue. They store carbohydrates and nutrients and sit insulated beneath the soil, ready to drive new growth even if every branch above ground is scorched. Many eucalypts also shelter epicormic buds beneath their bark. This is the tree’s dormant memory of itself; when the bark burns, these buds drive fresh shoots up the trunk.
“The eucalypt forest became a fire forest,” Pyne writes. “The eucalyptus could capture nutrients released by fire. Bark was thick and tough and it shed as it burned like the ablation plates of a descending spacecraft. If branches were seared off new ones could sprout from beneath the protected layer. If the bole burned, new trunks could spring from beneath the buried lignotuber.
“For most eucalypts, fire was not a destroyer but a liberator.”

The reptiles were deep into primary school instructor mode, This young eucalyptus’s bark has done its protective work, with the fire-damaged sections being shed.

On and on the unreformed seminarian droned, recycling Pyne ...

Then, 60,000 years ago, the first people came, carrying their own deep, symbiotic relationship with fire.
“The bush was perhaps too dominated by eucalyptus and eucalyptus perhaps too closely reliant on fire and, through fire, on Homo. The eucalypt was less a pyrophyte than a pyrophiliac: fire became a near addiction with its own peculiar perils.”
By the time the first Europeans arrived Pyne says, “the structure of the forest reflected tens of millennia of Aboriginal fire”.
Virtually the entire landscape of Australia was, as archaeologist Josephine Flood concluded, “an artefact created by Aborigines with their fire sticks”.
When English explorer James Cook encountered Australia’s east coast, his logbook records: “At noon on Sunday, 13 May, 1770 we were between three and four leagues from the shore, the northernmost part of which bore from us N13W, and a point, or headland, on which we saw fires that produced a great quantity of smoke. To this Point I gave the name of Smokey Cape.”

The pond did really think it had landed back in primary school ... Captain Cook noted fire in May 1770 and named the point Smokey Cape. Portrait: John Webber/State Library NSW

Implicit in all this of course is the awareness that the unreformed seminarian is a climate science denialist, so all this blather about the eternal nature of bushfires likely had a hidden agenda. 

The main interest for the pond was whether this might bubble to the surface at some point ...

Fire has been scorched into the records of Australian summers ever since and the most eloquent report on one dark chapter is the royal commission into the Victorian bushfires that burned from December 1938 to January 1939.
Coming at the end of a long drought, fire burned two million hectares and killed 71 people. The worst day came on January 13 and would be dubbed Black Friday.
On that day the commissioner, judge Leonard Stretton, wrote that “it appeared that the whole State was alight. At midday, in many places, it was dark as night. Men carrying hurricane lamps worked to make safe their families and belongings. Travellers on the highways were trapped by fires or blazing fallen trees, and perished. Throughout the land there was daytime darkness.”
These fires, he concluded, were lit “by the hand of man”.
“It is not suggested that the fires of 1939 could have been prevented, but much could have been done to prevent their spread and attaining such destructive force and magnitude,” Stretton wrote. Had “preventive burning been employed … such spread would have been retarded and such destruction would have been avoided”.
Stretton worried that “townships have been allowed to be encroached upon by scrub” and urged that “fire prevention must be the paramount consideration of the forester”.
“There is only one basis on which that policy can safely rest, namely, the full recognition by each person or department who has dominion over the right to enter the forests of the paramount duty to safeguard the property and rights of others. No person or department can be allowed to use the forest in such a way as to create a state of danger for others.”
As bushfire season returns there is much talk of conditions worsening with climate change. That may well be true, but the deeper truth of Australia is that our safety has always begun with how we manage the land.
As Stretton concluded, fires cannot be prevented but their worst effects can be mitigated through vigilance, good planning and sound land management.
As Pyne notes, two truths govern fire: “The more fuel the more vigorous the fire; the more wind the more rapid its spread.” We cannot dictate the wind but we should at least understand, and try to limit, the threat posed by fuel load.

Next came an insight so astonishing that for it's likely that for days the pond will be in a nirvana of enlightenment: The return of bushfire season will have firefighters on alert. Picture: DPFEM

Firefighters will be alert, and might even be armed with squirty water hosey thingies?

Amazing scenes, but the pond was still waiting for the denialist hoppy toad to make an appearance:

Mark Adams was a member of the expert panel that assisted the 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission. He is blunt in his assessment of where we need to focus our mitigation efforts.
“As every person of Aboriginal descent, gardener, bushwalker and boy scout knows, dead leaves on the floor of eucalypt forests are highly flammable, accumulate quickly, burn fiercely, and physics dictates they are the crux of the Australian bushfire problem,” Adams told this column.
Yet Adams says much of Australia’s fire policy now rests on a model of leaf litter born in the 1960s, inspired not by ecology but by nuclear physics. It assumes that litter accumulates in a neat curve until it reaches a stable limit, like radioactive decay.
Adams has shown this is dangerously wrong.
His fieldwork, and that of others around the world, shows no such balance exists. Litter varies wildly with every hectare, every season, species and fire history. It never settles into a predictable, uniform state.
But because the model is simple and convenient, it has become embedded in the software and hazard maps used to determine fuel loads and shape hazard-reduction programs. This leads to false assumptions about risk and leaves communities exposed.

The hoppy toad did come out in this caption: Bushfire is part and parcel of an Australian summer. Picture: Paul Worsteling

You see? Those hysterics that suggest that climate change might be cranking up things a notch or two should just take a BEX, ruin their kidneys and have a good lie down ...

Adams says the job of being an ecological scientist has been changed by the availability of computing power. The modelling culture, which seems to infect every aspect of modern life, has displaced the hard, slow work of science. To measure litter properly takes days of work for a single site and decades to compile enough data for each forest type. To build a national picture takes hundreds of person-years. State land management agencies once did this work but abandoned it in the 1990s. Today, fuel loads are often assessed visually or simply inferred from ageing models.
The consequences are serious and the clearest example is in NSW. There the Rural Fire Service’s fuel reduction burning is built almost entirely on fuel-load maps based on the assumption that every forest type has a single litter limit, supposedly reached within 20 years and unchanged after that.
Adams says this is dangerously wrong. No eucalypt forest is uniform. Litter, biomass and species mix can vary tenfold over short distances, largely shaped by the irregular legacy of past fires. The idea that fine fuels stop changing after two decades is equally absurd. If the underlying maps are wrong, and grow more wrong with time, then they are a flimsy defence against fire.
Adams argues that Australian fire science is decades behind where it should be and sliding fast. Research funding structures reward conformity. Serious researchers are sidelined unless they align with the dominant ideas of agencies. Modelling dominates because it is cheap, rapid and publication-friendly. Observation, the bedrock of science, is neglected.
This is a land that burns. For as long as humans have walked it, it always has. Climate shapes the weather, but fuel shapes the fire. We neglect this abiding truth at our peril.

And so endeth the Ughmann's lesson. 

Let us have no talk of climate change or climate science, bushfires have been and will be eternal, ever since the long absent lord first put a match to paradise to teach Adam and Eve a bloody good lesson because of their impertinent desire to learn how the world worked ...

Here, have a cartoon break, likely you'll need it ...

And so to a full 11 minutes wander down nostalgia road with "Ned".

Why go there? Why do it all again? The pond has already done it with ancient Troy, and surely that's enough?

Well yes, and yet this desire to head back to a more golden age, this desire to cast the present aside, says a lot about the mood of the hive mind when confronted by the real world.

Best duck back into the cave, stare at the shadows on the wall, and slumber awhile ...

The header: ‘If we have forgotten Malcolm Fraser, that’s our fault, not his.’; The Liberal giant who crushed Gough Whitlam has become a political ghost story, erased from public consciousness despite his seminal part in shaping modern Australia.

If we've forgotten this form of Malware, it's our fault? Really?

The caption for the hideously colourised, sensibly uncredited illustration: Malcolm Fraser, ‘Big Mal’, was an all-encompassing presence, a natural leader, a man of his time. He collaborated with Yolngu leader Galarrwuy Yunupingu on the historic Northern Territory land rights bill and nominated his support for a multicultural Australia as his government’s finest legacy.

Here's the thing: from the get go, "Ned" gives his game away by using "Big Mal" as the nickname.

That was the one the head prefect liked. 

Most preferred to call him the Freezer, because of his aloofness, while others thought of the toff as a squire, the last squatter, the crazy grazier from Nareen.

And that's all the pond has to say, because there's so much verbiage and so many nostalgic snaps to follow ...

Today is one of the glory days in Liberal Party history – it is the 50th anniversary of Malcolm Fraser’s December 13, 1975, election victory over Gough Whitlam in the most comprehensive landslide in our political history.
Fraser did not just defeat Whitlam. He vanquished the Whitlam era, guaranteed that his prime ministership would have a democratic legitimacy and demonstrated that his grasp of the Australian character was far superior to that of Whitlam.
Yet the Australian public barely recalls Fraser. The media offers only token acknowledgment of the significance of his election victory. Our historical memory is rotting in the tyranny of the present and the fatuousness of social media.
Looking back, the Liberal Party of 1975 seems an incredibly successful yet antiquated beast, far different from its sad counterparts today. And today’s Liberals seem even embarrassed at promoting Fraser’s 50th anniversary.

Well it's probably better than wondering about how the competition between the lettuce and Sussssan is going ... as the reptiles quickly cut to the first of many snaps ... Fraser was the last prime minister to govern a socially conservative Australia and the last prime minister of the regulated, protectionist economy before the age of globalisation.

"Ned" was in a deeply ruminative mood ...

Who was Malcolm Fraser? Why are we so diminished that we barely recall Fraser who, in his time, was the nation’s longest serving prime minister after Sir Robert Menzies?
For those who dealt with Fraser and reported on him, Big Mal was an all-encompassing presence.
I covered Fraser from 1975 to 1983, from the turbulence of his coming to office, his three election victories in 1975, 1977 and 1980, and his defeat at the hands of Bob Hawke in 1983. Fraser was a big figure, a natural leader, a man of his time, tough yet consultative, a relent­lessly competitive politician, utterly dominant in the country for his initial five years in the Lodge, a disciplinarian, a conservative and a reformer, always compelled by his concept of the national interest and, at the time, easily the most formid­able Liberal leader since Menzies.
In his substance Fraser was an economic traditionalist and a modest social reformer – and that was the correct alignment for the country, post-1975, post-Whitlam. Many things could have gone wrong in the transition away from the Whitlam era excesses but Fraser was a stabilising force for political recovery, governing integrity and social advancement. The left can never stomach this truth.

The snaps kept coming ... A half-century later, Gough Whitlam’s imprint on our history is justly honoured; Fraser’s is unjustly forgotten.

The pond did wake from its slumber when "Ned" tried out a strategy borrowed from Our Henry:

If we have forgotten Fraser, that’s our fault, not his. To quote Cicero: “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.”
The 1970s were defined by the titanic clash between two physical and political giants – Whitlam and Fraser – different in style, content and ideology. By crushing Whitlam, Fraser proved that the Australian people preferred Fraser’s stability over Whitlam’s vision. The intellectual class from Manning Clark to Donald Horne were repelled, but Fraser knew Australia was still a conservative nation with a demand for order and process.
As prime minister, Fraser wound back public spending, fought inflation, transformed immigration policy, resisted racism in southern Africa, campaigned against Soviet aggression, supported individual freedom, backed Aboriginal land rights and believed in state power for the public good.
A half-century later Whitlam’s imprint on our history is justly honoured; Fraser’s is unjustly forgotten. That tells much about Labor’s control of our history and the Liberal failure to promote its history. Fraser was always resented by the left and respected, but never loved, by the right.

The snaps began to turn family album ...Fraser legislated Whitlam’s Northern Territory land rights bill, a turning point in Indigenous policy; He also liked his scotch, motor bikes and fast cars.

"Ned" rambled on ... not so much an Everest climb, more a swamp of nostalgia ...

I called him “tall, thickset, unsmiling and lethal”. Many politicians feared him, for good reason. Many journalists loathed him. But Fraser was a supreme psychological study of the interaction of power in politics – he was a dominant prime minister but afraid to act alone.
Fraser entered parliament in 1955 aged 25, the youngest MP, and watched Menzies in action from the backbench. He waited 11 long years before becoming a minister but his destiny would become apparent. In 1973, before Fraser became leader, Paul Hasluck wrote: “He is at least a man who believes in something and who works at his beliefs. He is intellectually better equipped than Snedden, Lynch, Peacock, Chipp, Killen, Gorton, or any of the others to comprehend national issues.”
Here is the first thing to know about Fraser’s leadership – he saved the Liberal Party at a time of historic weakness. In the early 70s the party under Bill Snedden was faltering and losing its sense of mission. Hasluck identified the trend: “The descent of the party is marked by the succession of leaders downhill from Menzies to Holt to Gorton to McMahon to Snedden.”
Fraser terminated the rot. His sense of mission was tied ruthlessly to political violence – in 1971 he destroyed the prime ministership of Gorton; in 1975, he destroyed the leadership of Snedden and became leader. It was a case of political violence justified by the ends. No other Liberal could have won Fraser’s sweeping 1975 majority against Whitlam and no other available Liberal could have successfully governed over the 1975-83 period. John Howard said Fraser’s leadership was “infinitely stronger” than Snedden’s.

Cue a triumphalist flourish, By crushing Whitlam, Fraser proved that the Australian people preferred Fraser’s stability over Whitlam’s vision.

Actually, if the pond could speak for some Australian people, they were bored sh*tless (Google bot approved) by the head prefect, and were very happy to forget about him, especially when his guilt about Gough turned him full-blown irrelevant leftie ... as if him discovering his errors was meant to inspire, when any vulgar youff who might stumble on "Ned" will understand he remained a gigantic bore to the end of his life...

The second thing to know about Fraser is that he offered the nation the perfect pitch at the 1975 election: he came as an agent of Australian restitution and repair – the leader who would restore discipline and the established order after Whitlam’s follies. The people signed up to that bargain. Not once but twice – in 1975 when he got a 55-seat majority and in 1977 when he won a 48-seat majority.
Fraser’s victories shattered the Labor mythology that its reformist elixir was the right medicine for the nation. For much of the left this was too much to tolerate. Fraser became a hate figure, the slayer of their dreams, never to be forgiven.
He was a rural paternalist, suspicious of financial power, devoid of small talk, a regulator and a protectionist, shaped by the heroic era of Winston Churchill, dedicated to the principles of the Menzian age, he liked his scotch, motor bikes and fast cars, but his aloof personality meant he was unable to connect emotionally with the people. Widely cast as a “born to rule” Liberal, his most famous quote – “life was not meant to be easy” – was an appeal to individual sacrifice in the cause of national progress.
Yet Fraser as prime minister was repudiated over time. Australia was not destined to return to the old order, a point Fraser only half grasped. He has, therefore, a unique status. Fraser was the last prime minister to govern a socially conservative Australia and the last prime minister of the regulated, protectionist economy before the age of globalisation, free trade and deregulation.

Still the snaps came: Bob Hawke lights a cigar on a VIP flight during the 1983 election campaign. New Labor leader Hawke goes on to defeat Malcolm Fraser. Picture: Ray Strange

The pond supposes that at some point the reptiles will use a Hawke anniversary to carry on this form of anniversary commentary, but for the moment, here we are ...

In the end, Fraser’s restitution of Australia after 1975 had turned into an untenable defence of an old Australian order by 1983. The 60s social revolution permeated into majority politics only in the 80s. The victory of Hawke in 1983 symbolised a changing nation – Hawke was emotional, exciting, the common man as leader, socially progressive, he preached reconcilia­tion and pledged an economic revival. Fraser could do none of this. Hawke captured how Australia was changing where Fraser, a conservative patrician, looked like yesterday’s man.
At the same time Hawke and Paul Keating went where Fraser feared to go – they floated the dollar, abandoned protection for free trade, ditched state ownership for privatisation and pulled the lever on deregulation of the financial system. On the economy, Fraser and his National Party leader, Doug Anthony, were men of the 50s and 60s, much closer to Menzies than to their last treasurer, Howard, who took the path to economic reformism.
Here is the reason for Fraser’s retreat in historical memory: he was trapped between the dazzling yet destructive Whitlam era and the soaring achievements of Hawke and Keating. Even still, the Fraser record is more complex, varied and substantial than it seems.
Everything originated with his character and personality. Fraser ran his government with an intensity probably unmatched in our history – in seven years just under 19,000 cabinet decisions. He drove the system – his office, his cabinet, the public service – close to breaking point and, eventually, broke down himself, his health shattered.

The distracting snaps started to come think and fast ... US president Ronald Reagan with Fraser during his 1981 US tour; Being greeted by Maggie Thatcher in 1980. Picture: Steve Burton/Keystone/Getty Images; Enjoying the robustness of political life, 1983.

The pond realises this should have been run on Sunday, so that everyone might enjoy a few extra hours of snooze ...

He devoured paper at work, the Lodge, his Nareen property, in cars, planes, any time of the day or night. He was ruthless yet obsessed with the moral order. He was headstrong and stubborn yet capable of sudden switches of mind. He thrived on crisis. A manager of Nareen, Russell Paltridge, described Fraser as a man who “thrives on crisis and emergencies, when it’s quiet in Canberra he will come down here and pick out the little things to complain about. When the whole world is against him, he is happiest.”
On the economy, he was a traditionalist, not a radical. His bearing left the impression of a hard, dogmatic leader, but Fraser was never a Thatcherite or Reaganite on the economy. Given his 1975 inheritance from Labor, Fraser was an opponent of big government and obsessed about winding back inflation and lowering taxes.
Howard told Inquirer: “Fraser brought the show back to normality. His achievements were to reduce the rate of growth in government spending and that was no mean achievement. It is hard once you’re on a trajectory of high spending like the current Labor government.”
Average annual real spending growth was 3 per cent under Fraser, and 10.4 per cent under Whitlam. Inflation was much harder: it was 16.7 per cent when Whitlam left, by 1978-79 Fraser had wound it back to 8.2 per cent but by the end of Fraser’s time it was 11.5 per cent.
Former minister, historian and Fraser’s office chief David Kemp said: “Fraser did not succeed in bringing inflation under control, nor in ending high interest rates and high unemployment. Nor did he succeed in his stated mission to reduce the distorting effects on national policy of the powerful trade union movement, nor did he prevent recurrence of wage explosions, nor make the economy more competitive.”

Family album time ...With wife Tamie on their property Nareen, 1978; Tamie and Malcolm at Merricks in 2006.

"Ned" blathered on, showing no signs of winding down ...

The judgment: Fraser eliminated much of Whitlam’s excesses but never unlocked a new growth agenda for Australia, a singular failure. The nadir for his economic policy came in his third term, 1980-83, when tensions between Fraser and Howard became public. Fraser vetoed Howard’s plans for tax reform, was reluctant to embrace financial deregulation and saw the economy succumb to recession off the back of a wages explosion with unemployment rising beyond 9 per cent.
Howard said there was widespread “disappointment” that Fraser was not an economic reformer. By the third term, his limitations were exposed. Historian Patrick Weller said: “He was not loved and had no charisma. He painted no vision except the need for belt-tightening and hard work.”
The irony of the Fraser era is that his achievements in social and foreign policy are more enduring. Kemp said Fraser’s greatest achievement was to carry forward “the liberalisation of Australian society” – a vision that overlapped to an extent with that of Whitlam.
Fraser legislated Whitlam’s Northern Territory land rights bill, a turning point in Indigenous policy; he introduced a system of family allowances paid to the mother; and gave immigration entry its multiracial character.

The reptiles kept the snaps coming ...One of Fraser’s most far-reaching decisions – in contrast to Whitlam – was his acceptance of Vietnamese refugees, a turning point in our history; While a small number of Vietnamese arrived by boat, most entered as a result of international agreements with an annual intake of about 15,000 during the most intense period.

You see? It's as if Stephen "Nosferatu" Miller didn't exist, as if King Donald was but a mad butterfly dream on a hot January bushfire day ...

On and on and on "Ned" went, retreating far away from current unpleasant reality ...

Fraser is often described as a paradox – a Cold War hawk hostile to the Soviet Union yet a progressive anti-racist hostile to the racial policies in Rhodesia and South Africa. Yet this is no paradox. Former foreign minister Alexander Downer, once a Fraser staffer, explains: “Fraser was a great man. Unlike many prime ministers, he had a strong philosophical direction – he was absolutely committed to the idea that all men and women are of equal value and deserve respect.
“That is why he was so strongly opposed to Soviet communism – he was an opponent of collectivism – and it is why he was passionately opposed to racial discrimination in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and of course South Africa. In Australia, he embraced but didn’t invent multiculturalism, which for years meant eliminating discrimination against people on the basis of their ethnic origin. All these stances fitted into his strong philosophical view about human nature.”
Assessing Fraser in global terms, Downer said: “I think he was the first Western leader who questioned the efficacy of the Western policy of detente towards the Soviet Union. Fraser was always a detente sceptic. And he was followed by Thatcher and then Reagan who called the Soviet Union the evil empire.”
His foreign policy adviser, Owen Harries, said: “Fraser was a pre-Reagan Reagan on the Cold War.”
Whitlam’s former adviser, John Menadue, who briefly remained head of the Prime Minister’s Department after the change of government, was taken aback at the first Fraser cabinet meeting when an issue was raised relating to Ian Smith, the prime minister of Southern Rhodesia. According to Menadue: “He (Fraser) said that Ian Smith was not only politically culpable for racism in Southern Rhodesia but that he was clinically ‘mad’.”
One of Fraser’s most far-reaching decisions – in contrast to Whitlam – was his acceptance of Vietnamese refugees, a turning point in our history. Fraser was pro-immigration and pro-Asian immigration. While the White Australia policy had been dismantled by Harold Holt and Whitlam it was under Fraser that the policy’s abolition had its real social consequences for the nation.

Gong time ... Fraser with wife Tamie inspecting the 2000 Human Rights Medal awarded to him, former PM Gough Whitlam, left, applauding. Picture: Angela Brkic.

You see? A real gong. And look, there's Gough clapping.

Not like that dreadful gong that King Donald scored, with hands grasping that ball ... all for delivering world peace ... and terrifying the bromancer ...

At last the pond sensed that "Ned" was winding down ...

While a small number of Vietnamese arrived by boat, most entered as a result of international agreements with an annual intake of about 15,000 during the most intense period and, with family reunion, in the 20 years from 1975 a total of 190,000 Indochinese arrived, making the migrant intake multiracial and launching the nation into its genuinely multiracial phase of migration history. Howard told the author: “In retrospect, it is one of Fraser’s greatest achievements.”
Another thing you can be sure about: Fraser would never have tolerated the flirtation of today’s right wing with Pauline Hanson’s party. Fraser would have rejected it on principle.
During the 1983 campaign I interviewed Fraser but 30 minutes after I left Treasury Place in Melbourne I got a message. He wanted me to return. Sensing the possibility of defeat, he had another, perhaps a final message: Fraser nominated his support for a multicultural Australia as his government’s finest legacy. Sixteen years later, long into retirement, he told me the same in another interview: “Multiculturalism might have been the most important thing that my government accomplished.”
The structures he created meant a new framework for migrant settlement, a greater voice for ethnic communities, the establishment of the Australian Institute of Multicultural Affairs and the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS).
Former Liberal minister George Brandis says Fraser is “perhaps our most misunderstood PM”. Brandis says that because he was backed by the right wing to replace Snedden and was then involved in the 1975 crisis, it was easy to depict Fraser as a win-at-all costs autocratic figure. (Though Fraser did little to contradict that image.)

Ah the head prefect at his most misunderstood best, and then a snap of him with the sheets man ... Andrew Peacock with Fraser in 1982. Picture: Alan Porritt

Vulgar youffs should ask someone of an age ...

And that's the pond's one attempt to lighten the mood. 

The pond lived through all those years, and can think of only one experience worse than that, and that's making any hapless stray read "Ned" rabbiting on about those ancient times ... but luckily, finally, at last, we're into end gobbet turf ...

“Philosophically, he was undoubtedly a liberal, not a conservative,” Brandis told Inquirer. “One way of seeing Fraser is as the last Deakinite. He was the exponent of the specifically Victorian interpretation of progressive liberalism, which saw an active, interventionist role for government in shaping society. He was a protectionist in the Deakin tradition and believed in the centralised wage fixing system which was an important ele­ment in the Australian Settlement.
“It was in social policy that the progressive character of Fraser’s liberalism is most evident. Heavily influenced by his then 27-year-old adviser, Petro Georgiou, he adopted multiculturalism as official Coalition policy. His abhorrence of racism was core to his values.”
One of his last political decisions was to back Andrew Peacock, not Howard, as his successor. Fraser had turned against Howard, yet Peacock never succeeded to become prime minister. It became a pointer to Fraser’s evolution in retirement: he became a fierce critic of pro-market capitalism and the economic reforms espoused by Hawke, Keating and Howard; he attacked US foreign policy in the post-9/11 era and focused on human rights and racist abuses in Australia. Fraser wanted to become federal president of the party but was forced to withdraw given hostility towards his candidature. He became a republican, voted for the republic at the 1999 referendum and campaigned with Whitlam. The two former leaders, opponents in 1975, became reconciled as Fraser’s shift to the left deepened their common ground.
Fraser said: “I have never been a conservative, always a progressive.” It revealed how far his views had changed and evolved. He became a critic of the Howard government over race, asylum-seeker policy and the Iraq war.
Fraser resigned from the Liberal Party in December 2009, complaining it was no longer a genuinely liberal party, thereby creating a permanent fracture with his former party. The hero of December 13, 1975, had abandoned his party and his party, in turn, felt unable to honour properly the genuine conservative and liberal achievements of the 1975-83 Fraser era.

And at this point the pond will get around to providing an intermittent archive link to "Ned's" piece ...

Why? Hasn't there been enough suffering?

Well yes, but you see in that last paragraph "Ned" provided two links and with a link to his piece, genuine masochists could have used the intermittent archive to head off to other parts of the hive mind to read these scintillating yarns.

Waiter, samples if you please, see if they titillate gluttons for punishment into even more suffering  ...

All that and much more awaits devotees of reptile links determined to stay in the hive mind as if it was some kind of Brigadoon or Hotel California...

Yet if you dare to stray outside, you'll find the immortal Rowe still conjuring a nightmare of the real world that "Ned" desperately sought to escape ...