In which Rowan and Will tackle the rare earth dilemma for Gina ...

 

The pond had wondered when the reptiles would get into the rare earths game, and help Gina get even more filthy rich, and, belatedly, the answer came today ...

A full three reptiles - count 'em, 3 - were required on the "news" side ... (the pond uses the word loosely) 

TRUMP OWNERSHIP PUSH
Critical rare earth minerals risk: US digs into China trade
The Trump administration plans to buy into Australian rare earths projects as China’s dominance over critical minerals sparks fresh tensions between global powers.
By Brad Thompson, Ben Packham and Joe Kelly

The yarn, as at the archive link above, began with one of those inimitable collage indications of the complete failure of the reptile graphics department ...

Remarkably Gina only got a mention right at the very end ...

...United States Studies Centre economic security program director Hayley Channer said the US was concerned that Australia’s critical minerals exports to China were bolstering Beijing’s dominance over the sector, rather than helping to diversify global supplies. “The US’s main bugbear is that the majority of Australian minerals go to China for processing, and they’re annoyed about that because that just continues to strengthen China’s stranglehold,” she said.
“China buys 90 per cent of our lithium, for example. And the problem is that the US, Japan and others don’t come close to that. The US is trying to ramp up its purchasing but in the meantime, China will dominate offtake.”
Ms Channer said Australia was “stuck between a rock and a hard place”. “The US wants a coalition of countries to put tariffs on Chinese products with Chinese-sourced and processed minerals. But, at the same time, the US is still considering tariffing Australian goods under 232 national security tariffs.”
Gina Rinehart-backed Arafura and others are likely to welcome direct US investment, particularly in light of Australia’s crackdown on Chinese entities buying into the rare earths sector.
The flare up in the US-China trade war comes ahead of the APEC leaders’ summit in South Korea at the end of the month where Mr Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping are expected to have their first in-person meeting since 2019.
Mr Bessent, who met with the US President on Tuesday night local time, said he still expected the meeting to proceed.

The pond turned to Rowan, rowing away on the extreme far right of the lizard Oz, to see if he could make some sense of it all ...

Should we sell off the farm, or at least Gina's mines, to King Donald?

The header: Xi’s big gamble on rare earths can set Australia up as a winner, Australia – which has mostly watched from the sidelines during previous rounds of this economic war – now finds itself with a potentially major role.

The caption: President Donald Trump shakes hands with China's President Xi Jinping during a meeting on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan, June 29, 2019.

Sad to say, the pond didn't emerge much wiser by the end:

Xi Jinping is rolling the dice big-time in his epic tussle with Donald Trump and in his broader ambition for global domination. This time he’s deploying as his main assault weapon China’s core advantage – its control of rare earths production.
In 1992, Deng Xiaoping said presciently: “The Middle East has oil, China has rare earths.”
Beijing is now insisting on approving the export, from anywhere in the world, of any product – chiefly rare earth magnets and semiconductor materials – that contains as little as 0.1 per cent metals originating in China. This carries the implied threat of losing access to Chinese rare earth components. The Chinese Commerce Ministry says that from December 1, all such producers must provide it with technical drawings of every product, with full documentation in Chinese language, and gain its permission for the relevant sales.
Australia – which has mostly watched from the sidelines during previous rounds of this economic war – now finds itself with a potentially major role. If we play our cards well, we might extract a glittering prize: a central role in providing the future-facing metals that might form a chapter in a new edition of Geoffrey Blainey’s famous history of Australian mining, The Rush That Never Ended.

The Blainers reference was appreciated, as the reptiles inserted an obligatory snap of US President Donald Trump walks toward the East Room of the White House.

On with Rowan:

These won’t rival in bulk the iron ore, coal, gas and gold that together earn half Australia’s annual income, but will form the yeast essential for baking a modern economic cake. Rare earths create the magnets that enable artificial intelligence to become embodied, including in robots or drones.
Industry website Rare Earth Exchanges says that these 17 metals vital for the magnets required by electric vehicles, wind turbines, advanced electronics and modern defence systems “have become a cornerstone of geopolitical and economic power”.
And Australia contains a wide range of these rare earths.
Xi has also announced new export controls on high-performance lithium-ion batteries, used in EVs, energy storage and strategic weapons. Drones, for instance, require both magnets and batteries. Beijing controls 69 per cent of rare earth mining, 90 per cent of processing and about 75 per cent of global lithium-ion battery output.
This amounts to casting an extraordinary net for the intellectual property of almost the entire world’s new-tech output, though how or whether these requirements can be policed remain key questions. It attempts to replicate measures Washington has itself attempted to impose to restrict semiconductor exports to China.
In the past few years, as magnet and battery materials have soared in importance, they have not always soared commensurately in price. China has used its market domination and its political cohesion to drive down prices in waves, then moving at the bottom of such cycles to buy key stakes in relevant foreign, including Australian, companies.

Say what, is Rowan committing a reptile heresy, suggesting that EVs and batteries and Satanic solar and whale-killing windmills to fuel the batteries, have "soared in importance"?

The pond thought of stripping Rowan of his reptile commentary card, especially as the reptiles offered an AV distraction suggesting more soaring ... AMEC CEO Warren Pearce discusses the ongoing US-China trade war and the Trump administration calling on its allies to “decouple” from China. “We can be their provider outside of China for rare earths and critical minerals,” Mr Pearce told Sky News Australia. “They are starting to think the same way.”

What a grand dig, as Rowan saw a way for King Donald to take charge ...

This powerful position has been won by China’s preparedness to suffer the environmental challenges initially thrown up by earlier-generation processing, and by its research efforts in pioneering such production – which, for instance, can involve 800 chemical processes just to create oxides from the raw ores. Today, this work can be done here and in other Western jurisdictions, fully complying with environmental and labour requirements, adding to its supply-chain attractiveness.
But China has already positioned itself at the heart of the Internet of Things – of all items that are embedded with sensors and software that are responsive online, and are potentially “actionable” at the behest of their creator.
Xi is betting heavily on rushing to cement and extend its control of this whole sector by a panoply of measures including subsidies.
And to date, most of Australia’s output has been shipped directly to China. But the US has the capacity to use, in response, Section 232 of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act, that provides for reductions or exemptions in tariffs on national security grounds. As tariffs steadily rise, special deals can be made for key items from friendly powers such as Australia, that would help create price signals, stabilising markets.
Rare earths control first rang alarm bells 15 years ago when China banned for a time their export to Japan. That has resulted in many meetings and harried hand-wringing. International leaders have talked up the need for alternative sources, but with scant success. So far. Partly propelled by the patent ambition of Xi’s dice-rolling, alternative supply chains appear, at last, to be on the way. That means, inevitably, a shift towards formerly abandoned industry policy – including, here, the Albanese government’s Future Made in Australia.

Can former Chairman Rudd save us? Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Australian Ambassador to the United States Kevin Rudd.

Nah, not really, as Rowan turned political:

China’s technological know-how is not unique. Others are gaining the capacity to process rare earths, in Japan, in South Korea, in Europe, in the US, and here in Australia, where our supplies are local. We have a growing cohort of smart companies immersed in this crucial industry, including Lynas, which is already processing, and Iluka, which is on the way to doing so, while other miners’ orebodies encompass heavy rare earth elements especially needed for high-performance and defence magnets – such as Australian Rare Earths, whose Koppamurra deposit straddles South Australia and Victoria.
The US is of course the crucial market. And our ambassador, Kevin Rudd, is developing strategies to realise our potential through the creation of new supply chains. He recently helped organise a delegation from 20 Australian companies with the potential to become key links in such chains, who participated this month in meetings with top US policymakers. So much is at stake here. Timing is everything – we’re in a race before Beijing can grab full control. China aims to leverage its rare earths dominance to own future hi-tech and green technologies.
The answer to such an ominous authoritarian monopoly features Australia, prominently, if we take the right steps.
Rowan Callick is an industry fellow at Griffith University’s Asia Institute, and an expert associate at the ANU’s National Security College.

What a relief. It seems we can avoid "one ominous authoritarian monopoly", one where the President's enemies fall out of windows, by getting into bed with another "ominous authoritarian monopoly"... one where comedians are routinely cancelled and the President's enemies are hauled off before the courts, hopefully to spend some time in the clink...

Cue the infallible Pope of the day, saved especially for this late arvo post ...

As always, it's in the detail, with King Donald seemingly lost in a re-boot of Fallout, or perhaps a sequel to The Book of Eli ...

And so to Will, coming at the same story from a slightly different angle:

The header: Enough grumbling, the West has to fix this China problem, Australia faces a delicate balancing act as US Treasury Secretary pushes for economic decoupling from China ahead of Albanese’s crucial Washington visit.

The caption for the unfortunate snap of an unfortunate man: US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Picture: AFP

The last the pond had thought about Scottie B. was in relation to Argentina, as featured in the Fortune story,  Scott Bessent working on another $20 billion of Argentina financing with private banks, sovereign funds, ‘more focused on the debt market’.

40 billion smackeroos in bail-out money for Killer-approved economic management!

Excellent, just the sort of stout-hearted, lip-puckered fellow we need to fix the Australian economy...

Former President Cristina Fernández, who is under house arrest after a corruption conviction, wrote on social media: “Trump to Milei in the United States: ‘Our agreements depend on who wins election.’ Argentines … you already know what to do!”
Martín Lousteau, president of the centrist Radical Civic Union, said “Trump doesn’t want to help a country — he only wants to save Milei,” and that “nothing good can come of this.”

At this point the pond should add a house keeping note.

For some obscure reason, the reptiles only offered Will that opening snap. There were no other distractions, not snaps nor AV extracted from Sky Noise.

So Will had to be downed straight, no chaser:

Remember the national panic that broke out following reports that Beijing had blacklisted iron ore from BHP?
That took place all of a fortnight ago. Anthony Albanese, you will remember, even weighed in, asking for China to let the market ”operate properly”.
The Trump administration is not going to find any supporters in the Albanese government to join an allied effort to decouple from China, as canvassed by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent overnight.
Had Peter Dutton won the May election, his Coalition would not be supporting such a policy ­either. Let’s not forget, he went into that campaign pledging to double Australia’s trade with China.
Decoupling from China would be economic suicide for Australia.
For all its well known difficulties, China buys more from Australia than our next five markets combined.
Australia’s $100bn iron ore trade with China alone accounts for one-fifth of our exports to the entire world.
It is a co-decency* that makes both Canberra and Beijing uneasy, but economic complementaries have linked the two.

(* sic, so and thus. Did Will mean co-dependency? As in Codependency is a dysfunctional relationship dynamic where one person assumes the role of “the giver,” sacrificing their own needs and well-being for the sake of the other, “the taker.” Psychology Today

Who knows, the pond thought the Chinese were takers, but they were also givers, and while Australia was also a Gina-style giver, we were also a Gina-style taker of cash in the paw ...)

Apologies for the detour, as Will carried on...

Australia’s economic partnership with China is as natural as its security partnership with the US.
It is no insight to point out that tension, but managing it is the perennial task of Australian foreign policy.
To be fair to Bessent, even he spoke of decoupling as a last ­resort. “The world does not want to decouple. We want to de-risk. But signals like this are signs of ­decoupling, which we don’t believe China wants,” he said.
So what should the Prime ­Minister do, as he prepares to ­travel to Washington next week for his much anticipated first ­formal meeting with Donald Trump?
America’s current outrage about China’s decades-long efforts to establish dominance of the world’s rare earths trade ­certainly creates opportunities for Australia.
Albanese will find a White House eager to demonstrate it can create a non-Chinese rare earths supply chain. That’s a happy backdrop as Mr Albanese seeks American investment for Australian miners.
It should also help the Prime Minister as he seeks support from Trump for the AUKUS agreement. After all, the worst affected by Beijing’s sweeping new rare earths restrictions are America’s weapons manufacturers. Is the American President ­really going to renege on a China-focused defence technology partnership as he and his officials huff about Xi Jinping’s rare earths ­attack?

Renege? Why would will use that sort of talk? King Donald is a generous giver ...

Or maybe a taker, as Will carried on ...

Tool to ‘strangle’ US
The view from China is of an ­entitled America having a ­tantrum after not getting what it wanted.
Across the Chinese internet, commentators are cheering on the Chinese President’s tough guy approach and revelling in the public upset of the Trump administration. The mood is much the same in the real world.
There is widespread glee about Bessent’s declaration that, in the face of Chinese dominance, America would have to increase its own industrial policy.
To Chinese ears, that sounds a lot like an admission that China’s command and control system has triumphed over America’s capitalist model.

Much of the national mood is hubristic.
“If China cuts off its rare earth supply, the US will halt F-35 ­fighter production in as little as six months,” declared one ­influencer in a widely shared piece.
“The ‘rare earth’ card is truly a ‘trump card’. It allows China to strangle the US,” the influencer continued.
Best of all, Chinese experts ­believe their country is decades ahead of America in the industry.
It is easy to dismiss all of this as Chinese boosterism, but I would caution against that. I am writing this after a reporting trip to Ganzhou, the world’s heavy rare earths capital, in the Chinese province of Jiangxi.
I will be writing more about the rude health of China’s secretive rare earths industry in The ­Australian in the coming days, but for now I’ll just share a key ­takeaway: China intends to ­dominate this trade for decades to come.
The investment in upgrading the industry I have seen in ­Ganzhou this week is either stunning or terrifying, depending on what passport you carry.
As America has been speaking about co-ordinating with its allies to create a non-China supply chain, Chinese cranes are building new processing plants and centres of excellence for the world’s leading rare earths researchers.

This started to sound alarming, but luckily Will came up with an alternative ...

Non-Chinese option
Perhaps the most troubling part of the White House’s response is the claim of surprise. For Canberra, which has such a huge stake in a competent America, that’s a great worry.
Trump and his officials are claiming to have been taken ­entirely off guard by Beijing’s new regime.
This despite China’s success in using chokeholds against America all year (not to mention the country’s decades-long effort to establish its dominance of the industry).
Suggestions by Bessent and US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer that perhaps it was the work of a rogue, “disrespectful” ­official in Xi’s Leninist machine are absurd.
Canberra will hope that was an attempt at mind games with Xi rather than sloppy analysis from the Trump administration.
There is nothing magical about China’s rare earths dominance. It should not be beyond America and its allies and partners to create an alternative supply chain.
There is an obvious role for Australia to play in this, but to have any useful effect it will need to be part of a bigger American-led effort – one with a clear strategy, close co-ordination and patience.
Troublingly for Australia and other American allies, that’s not a trifecta many would use to describe the first nine months of Trump’s second “America first” experiment.
But enough grumbling. The essential task now is fixing this problem, not complaining about it.

What a relief. Once again, it seems we can avoid "one ominous authoritarian monopoly" by getting into bed with another "ominous authoritarian monopoly"...

Trump’s Purge of Enemies Triggers Menacing Memories of Saddam Hussein
OPERATION DC STORM
The president’s campaign of retribution has disturbing echoes of the Iraqi strongman.

Add Bolton to the list, and in that spirit, the pond closes with the immortal Rowe ...

Rowe really does catch the likeness of the reptiles' preferred carriage ...

In which the disingenuous Killer and the deflecting Our Henry disappoint ...

The federal government is going to experience an enormous amount of pain come December, come its half-baked rolling out of its social media activism.

There have already been rumblings...which will only get louder. Try the keen Keane in Crikey yesterday, savaging the enormous stupidity of the AFR ...

If you want brain rot, read the Financial Review (and leave gen Z out of it), Young people are suffering from ‘brain rot’, claims the AFR, and it’s all due to social media. But there’s another reason why young people are so unhappy. (sorry, paywall)

“The social media ban could cure gen Z’s brain rot,” opined the Financial Review’s anonymous editorial today, arguing that the government’s asinine and privacy-eroding social media ban for children would address “the corrosive toll aspects of social media have taken on entire generations — particularly young people”.
Peddling the discredited claims of Jonathan Haidt, the AFR pins the blame for “anxiety, depression and self-harm among teenagers” on social media, which “actively cannibalises young people’s time in developing essential skills”, stops kids from going out and kicking a footy around and “handed tech titans free rein to exploit the impressionable nature of young people”.
(Those are the same tech titans that the AFR’s owner, Nine Entertainment, has been lobbying against for years, but let’s leave aside the AFR’s blatant conflict of interest for the moment.)
As I’ve argued elsewhere, there are respectable arguments, from people far better credentialed than Haidt, that the availability of social media has played some role, as well as merely being correlative, with the onset of what appears to be a global decline in the mental health of younger people.
But how bizarre to assert that social media is uniquely damaging to young people. Spend five minutes on Facebook and you can see how crazed many boomers are as they swap conspiracy theories, recycle misinformation and amplify lies. Who voted for Trump in huge numbers? Older Americans, especially men. Who hates immigration? Older people, especially boomers. Research shows older people are uniquely susceptible to fake news.
And there are other, and likely more significant, factors in young people’s mental health that social media has served to amplify, rather than itself being a cause. At the core of those factors is intergenerational inequity, and the extent to which boomers and gen Xers (like me) have, across Western and especially Anglophone countries, tilted the scales against, made life harder for, and immiserated young people.
We’ve inflicted massive tuition debt on them when we got educated for free. We’ve skewed the tax system so that wealth and assets are taxed more lightly than income, and favoured investors over young people trying to enter the housing market. We’ve given seniors more and more benefits and showered more and more spending on them via the health and caring systems, while we’ve nickel-and-dimed the education system and imposed far greater precarity on young workers, who are prime targets for employers to exploit and abuse. We’ve allowed large companies to grow ever more dominant, giving them more and more market power to abuse and giving them ever-greater margins, forcing up prices and interest rates.
And most of all, we’re burning the planet, heedless of the massive costs that the climate crisis is already inflicting and which will continue to grow rapidly, making the lives of young people in the future markedly poorer than if we’d taken the relatively straightforward and cost-effective decisions to decarbonise our economy.
You want to know why young people have anxiety, depression and self-harm? Because older people are fucking them over pretty much every way they can.
And who champions that comprehensive fucking over? The Financial Review. The AFR isn’t the same as News Corp, the entire business model of which is to divide people, foster rage and hate and undermine social cohesion...

Stop right there, the pond can't quote all the keen Keane, there has to be some left for Crikey, and besides what better way to segue into the reptiles this Friday than with that nod to climate science denialism division, rage, hate and the undermining of social cohesion?

The pond has no idea how the reptiles will play the December roll out. 

They love to peddle Haidt (it sort of rhymes with Hate), and they too like to savage their rivals in the social media space.

But what of libertarians of the Killer Creighton kind? What of the alleged free thinkers, who think they're freely thinking while lurking inside the hive mind? What of the loons that rail at big government and government interference?

It's going to be difficult times not just for the government but for the reptiles, who will have to decide whether to walk with the molly-coddling politically correct woke mob, or who will have to take a line popular with their arch-enemies, if only so they can bash the government.

All that sport can be saved for later. 

But why did the pond start that way, by going there?

Well today is a by the numbers outing. 

There's very little in the headlines worth noting, with mean girl Linda leading the way ...

Mean girl Linda is completely clueless, apparently unaware that she too plays a mean 'mean girl' game, and the pond thought so little of all the stories that punters will have to head off to the archive themselves...

Over on the extreme far right, the results were equally dismal ...

More of Rowan, Will and minerals anon in a late arvo post.

As for the two Friday regulars, Killer and Our Henry, what a disappointment they were.

Killer himself was well below form.

The header: Australian citizenship worth tougher test – and greater reward, The embarrassingly easy nature of Australia’s citizenship test, and the shockingly low pass rates, suggests Australian citizenship isn’t worth as much as it should be.

The typo-blessed caption for the truly pathetic illustration: Australia’s citizenship tshould  (sic) be laughably simple for new arrivals, based on the 20-question, multiple choice practice exam available on the Department of Home Affairs website.

The pond gets it. Attacking difficult, uppity, wretchedly ignorant furriners, unworthy as potential Oz citizens, lazy scum who want to pollute dinkum Oz soil, is an easy, somewhat disingenuous way to maintain the rage, fear and loathing, with Killer cunningly parading his own ignorance as a way to start the dissembling...

Having lived in Britain for a few years I thought I’d ace the country’s 24-question, multiple choice citizenship test: not so. I wrongly thought habeas corpus emerged in 1685, not 1679; Catherine Howard was Anne Boleyn’s sister, not cousin. The blind, not the deaf, receive a 50 per cent discount on their TV licence. Farmers arrived in Britain 6000 not 8000 years ago. And the monarch can still make hereditary but not life peers without the advice of the prime minister.
Fortunately, I knew Robert Walpole’s term as prime minister ended in 1742, Edward Elgar didn’t write The Planets, and it was the Jutes not the Normans who invaded Britain first after the Romans left. I could still scrape above the 75 per cent pass in two of the practice quizzes I tried provided by Britizen.uk for wannabe British subjects, but it wasn’t easy.
Australia’s test by contrast should be laughably simple for new arrivals, based on the 20-question, multiple choice practice exam available on the Department of Home Affairs website. Given a 75 per cent pass mark – and an easier three, rather than four, response choices – it’s hard to see how anyone could fail it.

The reptiles showed the real game by introducing the lesser Leeser having a chat with the dog botherer, replete with obligatory flag-waving ... Shadow Education Minister Julian Leeser discusses the risks which should be considered in immigration. “The key fundamentals of the citizenship pledge is that you have some loyalty to Australia, that you respect our laws and abide by them, and that you respect the rights and liberties of other people,” Mr Lesser told Sky News host Chris Kenny. “That’s been the problem in the last two years, there’ve been too many people here who haven’t respected the rights and liberties of other people or accepted the laws of this country. “We’re seeing governments who have failed to enforce those laws.”

So Killer of the IPA was just filing a party line post ...

What are the colours of the Australian Aboriginal flag? Are men and woman equal under the law? What’s the capital? Is volunteering important because it “strengthens the community” or “is required”? Did Australia become a nation in 1901 or 2001? You get the idea.
Yet incredibly, pass rates on the first attempt have fallen to around 65 per cent since 2022, from 80 per cent in the late 2010s, according to departmental data released last year. I could understand citizens having a tougher time.

Killer cunningly worked his climate science denialism into the screed.

I was tempted to answer that the government “tells people which religion to follow” (climate change) rather than the desired “is separate from any religion”. 

Ho, ho, ho, a certifiable Xmas cracker joke ... but the pond felt very disappointed by this outing ...

Similarly, I think answering that freedom of speech “is not an Australian value” is more accurate than “underpins Australia’s democratic system”, given the massive crackdown on free speech in NSW and Victoria since last year, where even “severe ridicule” of politically favoured groups is now illegal.

But what of December? Killer was silent, surprisingly evasive ...settling on other feeble comedy routines:

And given much of the bureaucracy can’t even define what a woman is, selecting “men have more rights than women” instead of “are equal” would be understandable. As for “Who can deliver a welcome to country?”, typical price tags well above $1000 (including smoking) might prompt some to answer they are performed by a “master of ceremonies” rather than traditional Aboriginal custodians.

Ah, a tidy bit of black bashing there, but at this point in the low comedy came a billy goat butt, in the form of a "more seriously", which suggests that those bloody difficult, uppity furriners should lift their game ...

More seriously, the embarrassingly easy nature of Australia’s citizenship test, and the shockingly low pass rates, suggests Australian citizenship isn’t worth as much as it should be. It’s relatively easy to obtain once a permanent resident, yet census data suggest more than a fifth of permanent residents don’t bother becoming citizens after even a decade. Around 11 per cent of Australia’s population is on a temporary visa (2.88 million as of December last year), a massively higher share than in Canada, the US or the UK, and approximately another 5 per cent are permanent residents.
This week the ABS reported more than 467,400 permanent or long-term arrivals, in net terms, for the 12 months to August, the highest-ever level over any 12-month period to August. A big share of these arrivals would be international students, temporary workers and their families eager to obtain not citizenship but permanent residency, which provides the bulk of the benefits of living and working in Australia.
In the 12 months to June, 165,193 people became Australian citizens, including over 33,000 from New Zealand, more than any other nation. Fewer than 5200 mainland Chinese, for instance, became citizens, although more than 655,000 live in Australia. This is understandable given China doesn’t recognise dual citizenship, but to which nation does this very large group owe its allegiance? Were a geopolitical crisis ever to arise in the Indo-Pacific, this would be nice to know.
India similarly doesn’t allow dual citizenship but over 23,000 of around 900,000 Indian residents took up citizenship. The ability to vote is the main difference in rights between citizens and permanent residents, and any rational voter knows his or her vote makes no difference to the outcome. In fact, permanent residency is even better for those residents who don’t want to be fined for not voting.

At this point the reptiles upped the mockery ... Migrants practice for the citizenship test by playing a form of Snakes and Ladders.

In the end, it was just another Oz rant on "Australian values", though Killer spared the hive mind a rant explaining that "Australian values" were in reality Anglo-Celtic values, or perhaps "Western Civilisation" values, or Judaeo-Xian values, or perhaps the lingering thought that we might be best off with "British empire values" ... and being Killer, punitive measures were contemplated to enforce the right mindset ...

Australia would be a stronger nation if more of the people living here permanently had signed up properly to Australian values. Indefinite free-riding as a permanent resident shouldn’t be allowed after, say, a decade. HECS loans are not available to permanent residents, but this precedent could be extended much further. Public housing and even Medicare could be restricted only to citizens, saving billions of dollars a year; or permanent residents could pay a higher Medicare Levy. Only citizens should be able to have a say in local planning and to vote in local elections.
Permanent residents and temporary visa holders should be deported to their home countries if convicted of violent crimes. A new probationary citizenship visa could be created: break the law and tumble automatically back to permanent residency. And Australia’s citizenship test could easily be as difficult as the UK’s too; we might not be as old, but we have a rich, complex history, replete with achievements, from the Snowy Mountains Scheme to the early adoption of civil rights for women, at least when we could define them. And we could swap out the question on welcomes to country with one that inculcates the correct understanding of the 1967 referendum.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

There is much King Donald in this one ...

Our Henry was also a disappointment, offered an easy chance to deflect, and seizing it with sanctimonious, righteous glee ...

The header: Exploiting the Holocaust is an idiot’s game, Phillip Adams joins a long line that stretches from neo-Nazis to Islamists in using the Holocaust to make cheap anti-Israel points.

The caption: Jews being led for deportation in the Warsaw Ghetto, during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943.

It's easy enough to see why Our Henry took the easy low road. 

The pond has always had a particular dislike for the indefensible Adams, purporting to be the resident ABC cardigan-wearing leftie when he was really just a rich advertising man in disguise, with far too much sense of self-importance, regularly on parade in the lizard Oz, and avoided by the pond like the plague.

Even worse, this time he allowed Our Henry to play the Holocaust card, thereby allowing Our Henry an easy rhetorical way out of the wretched recent genocidal, ethnic cleansing, mass starvation and mass punishment ways of the current government of Israel ...

Earlier this week, as Israelis celebrated the return of hostages who had been beaten, starved and terrorised by their captors, Phillip Adams marked the day by posting that “7000 Jews died in the Warsaw Ghetto. 68,000 Palestinians have died in Gaza”.

Surely not. 

Surely even the deeply pathetic Adams wouldn't have been such a doofus, and in the reptile way, there was no link to check ... 

And yet when the pond did a search, even X, deep that sewer pit, deeply mired in hate speech, had to add a "context" to the post ...

Adams is now old, but senility is no excuse, and it gave Our Henry an easy way to deflect ...

It may be that Adams, like so many of his acolytes, has discarded the entire notion of facts as mere right-wing nonsense. It is, however, a fact that the Warsaw Ghetto held some 450,000 Jews, of whom barely 30,000 survived, with at least 80,000 dying in the Ghetto itself and 340,000 being murdered during the successive deportations or in the concentration camps.
Adams has, in other words, simply confected his numbers. But even putting aside the Holocaust denialism, what his claim reveals is a complete misunderstanding of the nature of moral judgment.
Good and evil are not measured by counting bodies. No person who has any grasp of what those terms mean would think it better to let one innocent child die so that two murderers can live than to kill two murderers so as to save that child’s life.

The reptiles followed up the angle with a snap, Young Jewish men being carted off in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941.

The Adams flub allowed Our Henry to get on a Domain soap box, and set forth a stream of righteous indignation and moralising...

Rather, every moral judgment involves the application of moral principles to a real or conjectured fact situation. And the reality is that the horror of the Holocaust lies precisely in the fact that its victims’ only crime was that of existing.
Not even Adams could claim that the men, women and children who were rounded up from all ends of Europe and shipped to the gas chambers had invaded Germany, raped, abducted and tortured innocent Germans, and planned the systematic extermination of the German people. Nor could anyone seriously contend that the death of Europe’s Jews was functional to, or the unintended consequence of, Germany’s war effort.
It is, on the contrary, the abyss that separates the absolute innocence, and pitiful defencelessness, of its victims from the murderous, coolly deliberate cruelty of its all-powerful perpetrators that has made the Holocaust the defining symbol of evil.
And it is precisely the Holocaust’s symbolic role as the epitome of inhumanity – and as the epitome, in particular, of inhumanity towards Jews – that has made comparing Israel’s conduct to that of the Nazis so attractive to anti-Semites, including the Islamists and their fellow travellers.
Those comparisons, which parasitically derive their emotive force from the sheer horror the Holocaust evokes, are hardly new. Less than six months after Israel’s declaration of independence, Arnold Leese, a Nazi sympathiser in the UK, and Francis Parker Yockey, an influential American neo-Nazi, started the process. Zionism, said Leese, was “the new fascism”, to which Yockey added that Israel was “a racial tyranny that surpasses anything the West has known”.
By 1952, the leading American neo-Nazi paper was accusing Israel of “committing genocide against Arabs”, with that accusation becoming a standard trope of former Nazis and Nazi sympathisers worldwide.

You see?

What an excellent distraction, what a way to cast Adams as marching in step with neo-Nazis, and just to remember this lickspittle fellow traveller with the lizard Oz, the reptiles provided a snap, Broadcaster and journalist Phillip Adams. Picture: Max Mason-Hubers

That set off Our Henry on fresh ways to avoid mentioning the past few years of ethnic cleansing and wanton physical destruction in Gaza, the enormity of which is just being confirmed, as in this BBC report, 'Worse than starting from scratch': How big is the task of rebuilding Gaza?

There was some astonishing footage and astonishing sights - the pond dragged the button a little to show more of the destruction ...

Or this, While the eyes of the world are on Gaza, Israeli settlers in the West Bank still behave with impunity.

And so on, and thanks to the doofus Adams, Our Henry could avoid dealing with any of this ...

The tactic they used bears more than a passing resemblance to Adams’s: they minimised, when they did not entirely deny, the scale of the Holocaust, while implying or contending that whatever that scale may have been, Israel’s conduct was 10 times worse.
Given the dense linkages between neo- and former Nazis and the Arab regimes, it did not take long for those regimes to follow suit, with the Egyptian government declaring in 1952 that “Israel has carried out the same acts as the Nazis against Palestine”.

See how easy the smear works? Nazi and even worse Egyptian and Commie thinking ...

The bitterly anti-Semitic Soviet bloc also promptly joined in. Although the first instances date to the early 1950s, it was during the Six Day War that the Soviet efforts rose to global prominence.
On June 1, 1967, just as the war was about to get under way, Ahmed Shukeiri, the first leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, confidently asserted that “after this war, there will hardly be any Jewish survivors”. At the same time, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser announced “this will be total war: our aim will be to destroy Israel”. And the Voice of Palestine, broadcasting from Cairo, vowed that the “Arab forces” would show “no mercy to (Jewish) women and children”.
But none of that stopped Soviet ambassador to the UN Nikolai Fedorenko from declaring on June 9, 1967, when Israel had decisively prevented another holocaust, that Israel’s “methods” were a mere copy of “fascist aggression”. “Israel’s leaders,” Fedorenko told the Security Council, should, like their Nazi role models, “be put in the dock for crimes against peace and humanity”.
It was, however, another declaration made on June 9, 1967 that proved especially consequential. The head of East Germany’s propaganda department decreed that the key aim of Communist agitation, including in the West German student movement it had extensively infiltrated, should be to disseminate the claim that “the Israeli imperialists have exactly imitated Hitler’s illegal methods”.
Immediately picked up by the German far left, the contention spread internationally with the speed of a pandemic – and despite the collapse of the Communist bloc, the tarring of Israel with the brush of Nazism has only become ever more widespread.
The sin that involves, as even stalwart but intelligent leftists, such as Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Jurgen Habermas, immediately pointed out, did not merely lie in its grotesque distortion of historical reality. Nor was the risk it posed simply that by assimilating Israelis to Nazis, it justified every violence committed against them and, soon enough, against Jews – a risk that quickly became a reality.

Throw in a snap of Hannah Arendt, and you've confirmed your deep philosophical credentials ...

So much easier to romp in the past than to confront current realities, or even graphs ...

And so on, and so thanks to the doofus Adams, Our Henry could rage on in righteous indignation without having to deal with current realities. 

Instead he's able to go all biblical in his denunciation ...

Rather, the immense danger lay in what it betrayed: a complete loss of the faculty of moral judgment by young people trapped in what Adorno called the “neue Dummheit” (new stupidity) of “Halbbildung” (a half education).
In effect, the very essence of moral judgment is the capacity to make distinctions: judging, as Hannah Arendt put it, “is one of the fundamental activities of the human mind by which we affirm that something is this and not that”. It relies, more than any other activity, on “the capacity for discrimination – seeing particulars in their specificity”, which is the basic intellectual and moral act that keeps the world intelligible.
The refusal to face reality in all of its immediacy, particularity and complexity, rather than conveniently “explaining it away” through comparisons as mendacious as they are simplistic, is, Arendt argued, a “refusal to think”.
And nothing more surely eliminates the “only safeguard” that “may prevent catastrophes”, such as a recurrence of totalitarianism, than that “utter thoughtlessness”.
That is why anyone who accepts the biblical warning that “with the judgment you make, you will be judged” knows that moral judgments have to be made in fear and trembling: because unlike God, we suffer from systemic defects in our moral imagination and from intellectual defects in our knowledge of facts; and because when passing judgment degenerates into fanatical righteousness, it becomes a source of evil rather than a force for good.
That is the tragedy of our age: we have raised and educated a generation that is largely ignorant of the caveats, the care and the caution an understanding of human fallibility instils. I thought Phillip Adams knew better. That he has now stooped so low is far worse than a pity. It is a disgrace.

Actually there's two disgraces at work here. 

Adams has always been a fellow-travelling Murdochian disgrace, littering the lizard Oz with his droppings, and the other disgrace is Our Henry, taking such a cheap and easy and deeply humbug way out of avoiding what's been happening in Gaza ...

What a relief to turn to Horsey, celebrating that famous ghetto Portland ...littered with dangerous radicals of the frog and unicorn kind ...

In which the pond dedicates a late arvo post to fatuous Phil and ancient Troy ...

 

One of the peculiarities of the lizard Oz is the way these climate science denialists are determined content recyclers, on a waste not, want not basis. If everybody was so canny, it's likely the planet would be cooling.

They really do like to use every scrap of every pig that comes their way.

Some hapless reptile is assigned to do a re-versioning of an opinion piece, while over on the extreme far right the opinion piece can also be viewed.

This doubling down is also a reminder that endless repetition is the modus operandi for the hive mind.

This day sorry Sarah draw the short straw.

Usually this sort of EXCLUSIVE rewrite would feature prominently in the "news" section, but Sarah came in well down the page ...

The war on China had suddenly swooped back on to the reptile radar, and sorry Sarah was one of the casualties ...

Lesser member of the Kelly gang, Joe, was on the case, as was Max, agonising yet again in the reptile way about AUKUS ... (apologies in advance, some days the archive is worse than having no archive at all)

The pond reckons when it comes to Gina being able to make massive amounts of moola flogging rare earths to China, the reptiles will quickly come to their senses.

Meanwhile, the pond was stuck with unsavvy Sarah ...

EXCLUSIVE
Former Liberal minister Philip Ruddock, left, and Opposition Leader Sussan Ley.
Ruddock urges Libs not to surrender to ALP on multiculturalism
by Sarah Ison

Sarah did her best with the flimsy material to make an omelette out of the sow's ear ...

The header: Philip Ruddock urges Libs not to surrender multiculturalism to Labor, Liberal luminary Philip Ruddock has issued a plea to the Coalition not to allow the concerns of MPs like Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Andrew Hastie to unfairly colour migration policy.

The caption: Former Liberal minister Philip Ruddock. Picture: Jason Edwards

Sarah struggled to turn it into a three minute read:

Liberal luminary Philip Ruddock has issued a plea to the Coalition not to allow concerns of MPs such as Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Andrew Hastie to colour migration policy, as Sussan Ley indicates she will soon unveil her party’s revamped policy platform.
The stark warning from the former attorney-general followed senior Liberal frontbencher James Paterson on Tuesday night urging the party against following the populism of conservative movements ofin the UK and the US, while arguing against surrendering the culture wars to Labor.
Senator Paterson insisted his intervention during the fractious period of Liberal Party introspection was aimed at “ideas, not personalities”. However, his language was seen as a clear rebuke of Mr Hastie and Senator Price for divisive comments while serving on Ms Ley’s frontbench.
Both Liberal MPs raised concern with the level of immigration, with Senator Price later back-pedalling on comments that suggested the intake of Indian migrants was beneficial to the government because the demographic tended to vote for Labor.
Writing in The Australian, Mr Ruddock said disagreements over multiculturalism needed to take place “within the bounds of respect and a shared commitment to Australia’s democratic institutions”.
“To my friends in the Coalition, I would say this: never forget that multiculturalism is not a Labor invention. It is rooted in the Liberal tradition of individual freedom and opportunity,” Mr Ruddock writes.
“From (Harold) Holt’s dismantling of the White Australia policy to (Michael) MacKellar’s principles of non-discrimination, inclusion has always been part of our story. When we retreat into fear or suspicion, we betray that inheritance.”

As a distraction, the reptiles dragged in hapless Susssan yet again, Opposition Leader Sussan Ley. Picture: NewsWire / Andrew Henshaw

Go lettuce ... 

Go Sarah, already bored with Phil, and so turning to the shameless Sharma for another Lib to summarise ...

The Coalition’s policy under Peter Dutton’s leadership was predicated on a promise to cut back permanent migration by 25 per cent, from 185,000 to 140,000, as part of the opposition leader’s 2024 budget reply. Ms Ley has maintained the position of her predecessor that the migration program is being mishandled by the ALP government, but is yet to release her policy plan.
In a speech to the Sydney Institute on Wednesday, moderate Liberal MP Dave Sharma warned “the only thing keeping our headline GDP in positive territory is high migration”.
“We are confusing population growth with prosperity – they are not the same thing,” he said in his speech, seen by The Australian.
“Our national pie is getting slightly bigger, but everyone’s slice is getting smaller.”
In his analysis of where the Coalition must focus its energy, Senator Sharma said the opposition needed to address the “competition deficit” facing Australia.
“We need a new wave of bold, structural reform, just like in the 90s and 2000s,” he said.
“We must cut the regulatory dead weight that is holding business back …. We must rein in out-of-control government spending that is starving the private sector of resources.
“We must roll out the red carpet for international investment, not the red tape (and) … we must champion new technology like AI, not shun it.”

At least that meant the shameless Sharma scored a snap, borrowed from the cardigan wearers, Dave Sharma. Picture: ABC

It turned out that was it for Phil, as Sarah tried every angle to add some fizz to her chore, from Jimbo to the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way...

Senator Sharma, who returned to parliament this year after being ousted in the 2022 teal wave. declared that “the role of government is not to preside over a managed national decline”.
“We have time and the national will to act,” he said. “But it must be action, not just talk of future abundance, and endless government sponsored roundtables.”
While the Liberal Party’s election review is not due for months, Senator Paterson’s urging for the opposition’s “apology tour” to come to an end was met with a commitment by Ms Ley to unveil policies in coming weeks. “I can reassure everyone that we are, across my team, working on policy development,” she said in Melbourne.
“My shadow ministers are reviewing the policies, yes, but also bringing forward new ones and they’re going through all the processes that they should. Watch closely in the next few weeks, and there’ll be more policy announcements.”
Ms Ley said she was given a copy of Senator Paterson’s address to an audience in Sydney before it was delivered, remarking that it was an “excellent speech”. It follows Ms Ley bringing Senator Paterson back into the leadership group, having carved him out of the inner circle.
Ms Ley this week unveiled her third frontbench line-up since winning the battle for leadership against Angus Taylor, with newly appointed education spokesman Julian Leeser on Wednesday saying it was time to “listen more deeply” to Australians.
“Australia today is more educated, more urbanised, and more diverse than it was a generation ago,” he said in a speech to the Menzies Institute.
Mr Leeser, who quit Mr Dutton’s frontbench over disagreements on the party’s position on the Indigenous voice to parliament, argued that the “forgotten people” or quiet Australians had shifted in recent decades.
In comments suggesting the Coalition broaden its view on which voters to recapture, Mr Leeser said “the new forgotten people” included lawyers, accountants, aged care workers, pharmacists and public servants.
The Coalition came under fire for a policy unveiled ahead of the May 3 election that would have forced public servants back into the office, in a move that was quickly seized upon by Labor in its campaigning.

What a tragic exercise.

Might not Sarah have at least mentioned a key reason for the current reptile jihad on furriners and multiculturalism? You know, the devotion to Nigel, busy making plans, and King Donald, carrying out raids, persecuting people in the way Xians love to do ...

And so to Phil himself, and what a dismal outing it was ...

Couldn't someone in the retirement home have taken away the old duffer's keyboard?

The hapless, hopeless header: Don’t let division tear apart nation’s social compact, Each generation must decide whether multiculturalism will remain a living compact as our society becomes more complex and our global connections deepen.

Tear us apart? The pond was reminded immediately of the Joyless Division lyrics ...

When routine bites hard and ambitions are low
And resentment rides high, but emotions won't grow
And we're changing our ways, taking different roads
Then love, love will tear us apart again
Love, love will tear us apart again
Why is the bedroom so cold? You've turned away on your side
Is my timing that flawed? Our respect runs so dry
Yet there's still this appeal that we've kept through our lives
But love, love will tear us apart again
Love, love will tear us apart again

And so on, as the reptiles dragged in a snap: A citizenship ceremony at the Perth Convention Centre last February. Picture: Colin Murty

It was only a three minute read, so the reptiles said, but the reptiles decided they were was bored as the pond was, and loaded up Phil with endless AV distractions and promotions...

Australia has long prided itself on being one of the world’s most successful multicultural nations. But in recent years, that confidence has been tested. Conflicts overseas have echoed on our streets. Communities that once lived side-by-side now find themselves divided by events thousands of kilometres away.
I have seen this cycle before. Each generation of Australians must decide whether multiculturalism will remain a living compact or become an empty slogan.
When I first entered parliament in the 1970s, the word multiculturalism was still contentious. Many saw it as a challenge to the idea of a single Australian identity.
The policy that evolved, under both Liberal and Labor governments, was never about fragmenting the nation. It was about strengthening it through inclusion, shared responsibility, and respect for the institutions that hold us together.

Boring, and with a boring snap of Phil, always gormless, even in his hey day ... Then immigration minister Philip Ruddock welcomes new citizens during a Harmony Day citizenship ceremony outside Parliament House in Canberra in 2002. Picture: Ray Strange

The thing is, Phil is the sort of straw dog, the token wet, dragged in to keep the fuss, the jihad, the mindless crusade alive ...

As minister for immigration and multicultural affairs under John Howard, I came to see multiculturalism not as a statement of diversity but as a compact of citizenship, an understanding that newcomers share the rights of Australians and also the obligations: respect for law, parliamentary democracy, equality between men and women, freedom of religion and speech, and the peaceful resolution of differences.
Those principles served us well. They allowed Australia to absorb large numbers of migrants and refugees without the social fractures that have troubled other nations. But compacts endure only when both sides keep faith. Governments must set clear expectations and defend the rule of law; communities must ensure that cultural expression never slips into exclusion or antagonism.

How shameless did the reptile distractions get? 

They seized the chance to shove in the onion muncher, monarchist, Pom, blatherer about Anglo-Celts, the glories of the British empire, the importance of the Judaeo-Xian tradition, staunch defender of Western Civilisation, and all that jazz... Explore Australia's history is a landmark three-part Sky News documentary presented by former Prime Minister Tony Abbott. From the ancient traditions of Arnhem Land to the bustling streets of modern Cabramatta, the series traces the pivotal moments that shaped Australia’s identity. Abbott embarks on a deeply personal journey, exploring the triumphs, struggles, and transformations that forged our nation, from Sydney Cove to the Eureka Stockade, and from early settlement to a thriving multicultural democracy. Spanning over three nights, this special event provides a powerful reflection on Australia’s past, its current challenges, and its vision for the future.

Sheesh, must it come to this?

And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.
And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.

Speaking of that messiah, did correspondents catch up with Charlie Lewis in Crikey?

The enduring cult of Tony Abbott is in the archive, but it's a fun read, worth celebrating...

Catnip, bring on the messiah, the new Jesus, or is he just a naughty boy being pandered to by the Murdochians?

Sorry, any different port in a storm, especially when stuck in said storm with some more blather from wet philosopher Phil ...

In recent years, that balance has begun to fray. The tone of public debate has hardened. Social media has amplified division and rewarded outrage.
Identity has become a weapon rather than a bridge. And at times, governments have responded with hesitation, reluctant to restate the basic truths that multiculturalism is built upon.
Amid these tensions, there are some who wish to politicise the ­debate by suggesting Australians have a fear of becoming strangers in their own country. We, as a ­nation, must resist this flawed ­sentiment.
Australia’s multiculturalism did not arrive in the post-war decades; it dates back to colonisation, to a time when Indigenous Australians encountered waves of settlers, convicts, migrants and refugees who each added to the nation’s complex story. We have always been, in truth, a nation of others.
It is this diversity, not homogeneity, that has given us our strength, kept us young, and made us prosperous. Our openness to the world has been the source of our renewal.

How much worse could it get? 

Well, when reptiles get to sounding the depths, you will likely encounter simpleton Sharri - full disrespect - talking with the lying rodent... Former prime minister John Howard weighs in on the hot topic of immigration in Australia. “I’m strongly in favour of immigration, I think immigration has done wonderful things for this country,” Mr Howard told Sky News host Sharri Markson. “But when somebody comes to Australia, they’ve got to embrace Australian values. “I do think that we have made the mistake of emphasising the tribalism of multiculturalism, rather than the benefits of … an inclusive integrated society.”

Says the man who won an election by shamelessly fear mongering about furriners ...

Remember the glory days, AJN, 28th September 2001, Trove with better version ...

Those were the days ...AJN 16th April 1999 ...

Immigration on the Run
Prime Minister John Howard is getting tough with his ministers over immigration, both legal and illegal.
First there was the business last week of Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock’s failure to open Australia’s doors to refugees from Kosovo on humanitarian grounds — a lack of action which prompted protests from many quarters, including the Jewish community. This week Mr Howard again stepped in, setting set up a Prime Ministerial Task Force to override the authority of Justice and Customs Minister Amanda Vanstone, whose portfolio includes customs and border control and therefore responsibility for stopping the embarrassing arrivals of Chinese illegal immigrants in north Queensland, New South Wales and off the West Australian coast.
We had the spectacle of Mr Ruddock having to stand alongside Mr Howard at a specially-called media conference while the PM announced that, against Mr Ruddock’s advice, Cabinet had decided to give 4000 Kosovars temporary asylum in Australia. The day before, Mr Ruddock had announced what he described as “a generous and appropriate response” to the crisis. Visitors to Australia from the former Yugoslav republic would, after consideration on a case-by-case basis, be allowed to stay until it was safe to go home.
The Prime Minister announced he was changing immigration policy to allow refugees in temporarily, with special legislation to ensure that they could not obtain permanent sanctuary. He said that what Mr Ruddock had previously announced was “utterly consistent with the government’s position and policy”; but what he was now announcing was a special response to a special situation, separate from the normal refugee and humanitarian program. Mr Ruddock, he said, would “no doubt say something about that”. Mr Ruddock said nothing.
Unpublicised and untelevised was the Prime Minister’s tetchy response to questioning about what prompted the reversal. It was as if he considered journalists were spoiling a glorious occasion to display his humanity by probing for details of the government’s change of mind, the planning of the operation and possible consequences of allowing the refugees in only temporarily.
When a journalist said: “Mr Ruddock argued that people on temporary status were unlikely to go back”, Mr Howard responded: “Well, I haven’t read every single thing Mr Ruddock has said and
Mr Ruddock will speak for himself”. Mr Ruddock remained silent. “I completely endorse in every way his [Mr Ruddock’s] handling of the situation,” Mr Howard said. “We had a discussion about it, we thought about it long and hard, and we decided that this was the right thing to do. If you want to spend the next half-hour asking questions about what
Mr Ruddock said, or thought, or did before today, go ahead. But I won’t be here to answer them because I think the quality of the decision and the appropriateness of the decision that has been taken is the right thing.”
Negative responses to questions about the time the refugees would be allowed to stay in Australia — initially three months, but renewable, depending on developments in Kosovo — revealed how much the decision had been taken on the run. “Let’s take one thing at a time,” the PM said when asked what would happen if the Balkan situation was not resolved quickly. “I’m not prepared to speculate what the situation will be in three weeks, let alone three months.”
Mr Ruddock never got to say a word. Instead, he issued a one page statement which by then was old news.
Three days later, when UN High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata called a suspension to plans for Australia, the US and Canada to accept refugees while the UN reconsidered the need to send refugees away from Europe, it was left to Mr
In Mr Ruddock’s department, where the refugee crisis had diverted officials from normal duties into a turmoil of hurried meetings, there was a collective sigh of relief at Ms Ogata’s decision. Nevertheless, a team of immigration officials, interpreters and UNHCR representatives is on standby to fly to Skopje in Macedonia if the UN decides to resume evacuation to countries outside Europe.
Meanwhile, immigration and customs officials have had to face the increasingly embarrassing problem of unwelcome people stepping ashore from rusty ships, fishing boats and other vessels, evading those responsible for surveillance of Australia’s 37,000 km of coastline.
This was not an occasion for a prime ministerial media conference, and Senator Vanstone, who is overseas, did not have to stand by while the PM damned with faint praise. The undetected landing closer to home, at Nambucca Heads, on the NSW coast, rather than the more distant happenings over the past 10 years in the Northern Territory, north-west Western Australia and north Queensland, required action. The Prime Minister put out a five paragraph statement saying the NSW landing raised “serious issues regarding Australia’s coastal surveillance arrangements which require a prompt response”.
He put his top public servant, secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Max Moore-Wilton (known as “Max the Axe”), in charge of a high-powered task force, including defence, immigration, customs and intelligence heads, to report by June on the ability of the 14 specially-equipped Coastwatch aircraft to cover Australia’s coastline and the interaction between Coastwatch, defence and intelligence.
FOOTNOTE: Mr Ruddock, in an “open letter to all media outlets” this week, called for more precise use of the word “refugee”. The Kosovars should be called “asylum seekers, not refugees, he said. The UN defines a refugee as someone outside their country and unwilling or unable to return because of a “well-founded” fear of persecution. The Chinese clandestinely arriving in Australia were “unlawful arrivals”.

Meanwhile, back in the present, the always dithering Phil dithered on ...

Today, more than half of Australians (51.5 per cent) are migrants themselves or children of migrants. That is an extraordinary statistic and a truly remarkable achievement. Nowhere else on earth can claim a multicultural nation of such scale and cohesion. Our success is not accidental; it is the product of deliberate policy, grounded in fairness, equality and shared purpose.
It is not enough to say that diversity is our strength. Diversity becomes strength only when it is anchored in shared values. Those values are not abstract. They are the product of generations who believed that freedom, fairness, and civic duty define what it means to be Australian.

The reptiles produced another snap of the lying rodent, Then prime minister John Howard watches Aboriginal dancers during an Australia Day citizenship ceremony in Canberra in 2006. His wife Janette is partly obscured at right. Picture: AAP

Phil returned to his glory days... you know the aforementioned communication and confidence...

During my time as minister, I saw multiculturalism tested by moments of international tension: the Kosovo crisis, conflicts in the Middle East, debates over asylum seekers. Each time, the key was communication and confidence. We worked directly with community leaders, listened to concerns, and made clear that loyalty to Australia was never in conflict with pride in one’s heritage.
That approach still holds. Governments today must speak to all Australians with candour, affirming that our strength lies in unity under one rule of law. The temptation to politicise culture, to seek short-term advantage from division, is corrosive.
Multiculturalism also requires institutional support. That means investing in English-language learning, citizenship education, and programs that bring communities together in practical ways in schools, local councils, and workplaces. It is in these ordinary settings, not on social media or at rallies, that cohesion is built.

Then it was off to the dog botherer, having a chat with philosopher Phil, making his Sophie's choice ... Former immigration minister Philip Ruddock warns the abolishing of temporary protection visas will embolden people smugglers. A group of people, reportedly Chinese nationals, were located in remote Western Australia on the weekend. The group has since been sent to Nauru. The boat's arrival is understood to be the third illegal maritime landing on Australian soil in under six months. “In my view, we need to be recognising that there are 130 million or so people displaced around the world; we can’t take them all,” Mr Ruddock told Sky News host Chris Kenny. “The places should be available to those who need help most, not to those who have got the money to pay a smuggler.”

And that, small mercy, just about did it ...

To my former colleagues on the Labor side, I would say: remember that tolerance without expectation is fragility. Multi­cultural policy must be grounded in civic responsibility, not in symbolism alone.
And to my friends in the Coalition, I would say this: never forget that multiculturalism is not a Labor invention. It is rooted in the Liberal tradition of individual freedom and opportunity. From Holt’s dismantling of the White Australia policy to Mackellar’s principles of non-discrimination, inclusion has always been part of our story. When we retreat into fear or suspicion, we betray that inheritance.
Multiculturalism does not mean we all agree, or that differences disappear. It means that disagreement happens within the bounds of respect and a shared commitment to Australia’s democratic institutions. It is a living compact, renewed by every generation that chooses to call this country home.
As our society becomes more complex and our global connections deepen, we must protect that compact more fiercely than ever. It is what allows us to be a nation of many stories but one future. Our success has never been measured by how many cultures we can count, but by how well we live those values together.
Philip Ruddock is Australia’s longest-serving former federal minister for immigration and multicultural affairs.

Let's not forget he also held the portfolio for supreme windbagger, and jabbering gasbagger supreme ...

Finally the pond just had to know why ancient Troy clambered back into his time machine, and offered yet another example of the reptiles' Gough fixation, and why the reptiles had excitedly dubbed it an EXCLUSIVE in their news splash ... so and thus ...

EXCLUSIVE
US alliance was never at risk: Kissinger
By Troy Bramston

This the reptiles are getting excited about?

It didn't take long to work out, it being just another three minute read, so the reptiles said, meaning that all this really should only involve in reptile total terms, a waste of a late arvo nine minutes ...

The header: US alliance never in danger despite Whitlam-Nixon spat, Kissinger revealed, In an interview before his death, Henry Kissinger downplayed suggestions the US-Australia alliance was ever materially at risk during Gough Whitlam’s government.

The caption for the only snap in the entire piece: Gough Whitlam meets then US president Gerald Ford and secretary of state Henry Kissinger in October 1974.

Outside Watergate and 'Nam, the pond has never had much interest in what war criminals of the Kissinger kind did, and this was no different ...

Perhaps in an idle moment it might be possible to wonder if some reptile took to scribbling in the year 2525 "US alliance never in danger despite the madness of King Donald, and despite reptile hysteria about same", but even sci fi - usually a comfort - failed to excite the pond. 

Perhaps it was the nagging, distracting thought that there had to be something else behind this ancient Troy venture, a feeling that lingered through the whole piece ...

The Australia-US alliance was never at serious risk during the Whitlam government, revealed former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, and disagreements with Gough Whitlam were as much a factor of personality differences as they were about policy.
In one of his last interviews in the year before his death, Kissinger said differences such as that over the bombing of Vietnam and outbursts from Whitlam and his ministers caused concern in the White House but there was never any concerted move to cease ­military co-operation or end intelligence sharing.
“It’s conceivable (that) people said, ‘This kind of rhetoric should be penalised’,” Kissinger recalled in mid-2022. “It never reached an operational point. And I think it is inconceivable today.”
The interview with Kissinger is disclosed in a new biography of Whitlam that also includes newly declassified records regarding Australia-US relations and a further interview with his special assistant, Winston Lord, who served as US ambassador to China.
It comes as Anthony Albanese prepares to meet Donald Trump at the White House on Monday, with the future of the AUKUS nuclear submarine agreement, the punitive tariff regime imposed by the US, and access to critical rare-earth minerals all on the agenda.
The Nixon and Ford administrations, in which Kissinger also served as national security adviser, were more concerned about “extreme left” ministers such as treasurer Jim Cairns and attorney-general Lionel Murphy than about Whitlam and defence minister Lance Barnard.
In the 1950s and ’60s, Whitlam had defended the alliance within the Labor Party, and newly available State Department and CIA records show they believed he was a “moderate” and could be relied upon to maintain intelligence ­facilities such as Pine Gap, despite his desire for a more “independent” foreign policy.
However, Kissinger did note that Whitlam “expressed the need to challenge the US on overall strategic issues” which caused some consternation in the White House, and was “heavily influenced by European left-wing opinions” which led to “some hostility” in relations.
Kissinger emphasised that his and Nixon’s verbal assaults on Whitlam recorded on secret tapes and contained in memos should not be misunderstood as literal threats given he often spoke figuratively to blow off steam.
Kissinger said he routinely ­ignored Nixon’s tirades.
“(I) tried to discuss these disagreements to see whether there could be found some way (Whitlam) could stick by his positions and Nixon would continue with his,” Kissinger said.
“There were some situations where we thought we were coming close to a kind of consensus, but it would always blow up again. But this was as much a question of personality as it was a question of specific issues.”
Mr Lord was on the National Security Council staff and later director of policy planning at the State Department. He could not recall any discussions with Kissinger or Nixon about downgrading or ending the alliance with Australia and would be “astounded” if it were ever seriously contemplated.
“Australia was regarded as a close ally and partner in the ­Pacific despite differences on some issues,” Mr Lord said. “For Nixon, issues and national interests were much more important than personal chemistry.” He added: “Nixon and Kissinger acted on national security interests, not personal pique.”
In July 1974, Kissinger approved National Security Study Memorandum 204 regarding policy towards Australia. That memo, first revealed by The Australian in December 1995, directed a study into whether to continue but also expand defence facilities in Australia. It underscored concerns about the Whitlam government.
NSSMs were routine, with 206 initiated by the Nixon White House, and an earlier memo in May 1971 during Billy McMahon’s government also directed a review be undertaken into treaty arrangements and defence facilities in Australia and New Zealand.
When NSSM 204 was completed, no department or agency recommended removing defence facilities or ending intelligence sharing. The view of National Security Council staff, working closely with Kissinger and Lord, was to actually “expand” defence co-operation with Australia.
The study found: “Despite some rhetorical excesses, the Whitlam government’s foreign policy behaviour has been more in accord with US policy than otherwise.” A memo earlier that year referencing “US bases in Australia” concluded Whitlam and Barnard “could be counted upon to defend their existence strongly”.

Oh sorry, the pond nodded off there.

Ancient Troy also dragged in the lying rodent, who rarely hit the pitch, and the French clock devotee, a sun god to some ...

Luckily that was about it ...

Former prime ministers Paul Keating and John Howard, MPs during the Whitlam government, rejected suggestions the Australia-US alliance was ever seriously at risk.
Mr Keating, also a minister in the Whitlam government, said the defence facilities in Australia were of critical importance to the US during the Cold War.
“The alliance was never materially in danger in the Whitlam government,” he said.
“They regarded Gough as a sort of friendly local stamping his foot on some matters – to be somewhat abhorred, but not to be worried (about).”
Mr Howard agreed. “I never saw any evidence that they seriously put the alliance under review and I don’t think they ever would have,” he said.
“We were close and there’s a whole history to the alliance.”

So it was all a mindless reptile fuss back in the day?

Is it all a mindless reptile fuss now?

Who knows?

Who cares, what the pond really wanted to know was what was this rehashing was really all about?

Quelle surprise.

It was just a chance for ancient Troy to do an onion muncher, and promote his new book ...and wouldn't you know it, he's a HarperCollins man ...

Troy Bramston’s Gough Whitlam: The Vista of the New is published by HarperCollins on October 28.

Oh just give the pond a Luckovich to round out the day ...