Despite a flurry of lizard Oz teaser trailers, the good oil from the bromancer and Dame Groan is there to be found ...

 

First a housekeeping note: the pond must head off to the big smoke again, and so perforce will have to leave a place holder in place tomorrow, in lieu of proper lizard Oz herpetology studies. Hopefully the pond will escape a Sydney mugging and return to normal duties the following day.

Now carry on with wild abandon.

Lately the lizard Oz seems to have turned into the Geoff Chambers show.

There he was again early in the morning, top of the digital page ma, with an EXCLUSIVE and a Commentary...

Luckily the intermittent archive was to hand ...

EXCLUSIVE
Newspoll: Left-leaning voters not so spooked on China threat
Partisan divides are emerging in the electorate despite Beijing’s increasing aggression towards Australia.
By Geoff Chambers

Geoff was bitterly disappointed by this, so he chambered yet another round, what with the war with China by Xmas a long standing, highly prized and favoured reptile jihad:

COMMENTARY by Geoff Chambers
Apathy, ‘Beijing blindness’ are not options
The threat to Australia posed by Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party and People’s Liberation Army has never been greater.

Teaser trailers should entice correspondents into those reptile chambers, at least those with nothing better to do...

Splendid reptile stuff, and with the war on China taken care of, another favourite theme was given the Pike treatment ...

EXCLUSIVE
Bowen splurges $4.2m on five-star Fiji resorts for COP talks
Chris Bowen’s department sets aside $4.2m to reserve luxury Fiji resorts for COP delegates
Foreign bureaucrats attending the climate change meeting will be treated to beachfront resorts and golf courses – all on the Australian taxpayer’s tab.
By Elizabeth Pike

Liz piked him good and hard ...

So Pauline had dropped off the reptile jihad charts? The fixation might be failing?

What a pity...

All well and good, but the pond takes its foreign affairs and climate science advice from the bromancer. 

Sadly, in his welcome return he showed the same apathy as left-leaning and university educated voters by ignoring China and focusing on the couch molester who is inclined to be aroused by suggestive, provocative ice cream eating.

The header: Critics have misread JD Vance. Don’t rule him out in 2028;What an astonishing figure Vance is, surely the most unlikely and distinctive personality to be Veep since Theodore Roosevelt.
The caption for the snap: JD Vance speaks at the 128th Air Refueling Wing Hangar in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Picture: Scott Olson / Getty Images

Where some see an ambitious, deeply weird loon, the bromancer was entranced, bedazzled by the couch molester and his magnificent theology.

After all, if one can resort to Satan's site:

Let the bromancer help JD put that recalcitrant papal tyke in his place:

As the US-Iran war races up the escalation ladder, one thing that has failed is the peace deal Vice-President JD Vance negotiated. The memorandum of understanding was simple. Vance explains it much better than Donald Trump does. Iran was to open the Strait of Hormuz to all shipping in exchange for sanctions relief. Then Washington and Tehran would subsequently try to negotiate an agreement on nuclear issues.
The deal failed not because of Vance, but because Iran, instead of opening the Strait of Hormuz, fired on commercial shipping. Which makes it bizarre that in a three-hour podcast with Joe Rogan, Vance went out of his way to criticise America’s ally, Israel, for allegedly spending money on a public diplomacy/social media campaign to criticise the deal as too soft on Tehran. Incidentally, the lobbyist involved swears he never campaigned against the MOU, only against Iran.
In any event, any money Israel spends trying to influence US opinion is a drop in the ocean compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars Arab countries spend similarly.
Vance’s remarks are even more surprising given that in his new book, Communion, Vance records that his murdered Christian friend, Charlie Kirk, was gravely concerned that young American men were becoming anti-Israel and anti-Jewish.

There came a certification that established the couch molester as being one of the UFC people, always ready for a rumble in the heathen jungle...US vice president JD Vance has appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast. Picture: YouTube

Why he's a veritable young Ted, a sort of outdoor type for the ages, compelling if you happen to be a bromancing bro ...

But let’s leave Iran and remark what an astonishing, and oddly compelling, figure Vance is, surely the most unlikely, diverse and distinctive personality to be Veep since Theodore Roosevelt occupied that office more than a century ago. I’ve just finished reading Communion, which recounts how Vance lost the evangelical Christian faith of his childhood, was for some years atheist, and came back to Christianity through Catholicism. Oddly enough, Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence, charted an exactly parallel but opposite journey. Pence was brought up Catholic, lapsed into atheism and came back to belief as an evangelical Christian.

As a dedicated tyke, the bromancer is right behind JD, and might even be inclined to be a little Peter Thiel curious ...

I interviewed and profiled Pence at length in my book, How Christians Can Succeed Today, and have no doubt of the depth and sincerity of his Christianity. Having read Communion, I feel the same about Vance.
I can’t believe how vituperative many reviews of Communion have been. For this is a brilliant, absorbing and challenging book, with only one big flaw. It has very little politics (that’s not the flaw). Mostly, it’s the story of Vance’s struggle to get to belief, to possess an attitude of life’s biggest questions that is meaningful and sustainable, and to lead a decent life. Vance’s previous book, Hillbilly Elegy, was one of the great memoirs, as good as Barack Obama’s Dreams from my Father, but with deeper sociological insights.
Vance squarely faces the many times he hasn’t done the right thing. There’s nothing false or humble/brag in his self-accusations: “In my life, too, getting drunk and acting like a jerk had filled the void left by God.” Vance’s personal search for God is a quest for decency, and for understanding.
As he later observes: “Human nature is one of contradictions: of the animal merging with the divine … The secular view was that consciousness and civilisation were a sort of accident of evolution … The creation story (in Genesis) tells us that we are both animal and divine on purpose – a purpose, to be fair, we can’t fully understand.”
This is a rich book. Vance has read deeply in Christian scriptures, and especially in Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and the dazzling scholar Rene Girard, who unpacked the secrets of human desire and the need for a scapegoat in the context of the story of Jesus. And of course Vance is also influenced by CS Lewis and GK Chesterton. None of this is fake. Vance has clearly internalised so much of it.

Indeed, and if only the Catholic church wasn't so stupid, and had appointed a stupid pope, why JD himself might stand as a profound guide to Catholic theology, and Catholic school students be made to read the new JD bible, JD Vance has written a new book, Communion, about his path back to faith

JD has had his troubles ...not least the way he helped kill off one pope ...

Vance's new book published June 16, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, chronicles his conversion to Catholicism and his Easter 2025 meeting with Pope Francis is featured prominently. The Catholic vice president uses the story to open up his reflections on the perceived tensions between his views on migration and the Vatican's moral teaching. The pope died the following day of a stroke and cardiovascular collapse.
But while details of that meeting are sparse, the vice president is sharply critical of his meeting the previous day with Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican secretary of state, and other Vatican diplomats, describing their discussion of migration as "too abstract to be helpful."
After what he described as a "substantive" conversation on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Vance said the subsequent discussion on migration was "unsettling" because Vatican officials did not make any specific requests.
"Here I was, the most senior Catholic in the United States government, and the Vatican seemed unwilling to move its moral guidance past the point of trite platitudes," he wrote. (NCR here)

Speaking of trite platitudes, the bromancer had plenty of his own ...

As I say, I can’t understand the determined, vicious hostility with which the book has been so much received. I’d recommend the first 200 pages without hesitation. Vance links his beliefs to the culture around him, and the breakdown of key institutions, but his religious belief is not essentially a matter of the culture wars.
Vance honours all the Christian denominations. But he’s found his home in the Catholic Church: “The Christian tradition was so rich, the Bible so big and difficult to master, that I began to see the structure of Catholicism as a benefit, not a burden. That the Church spoke with literally thousands of years of tradition behind it, that it had long-established processes for evolving doctrine and responding to new realities …”
He explores the role of doubt in faith: “No matter what we see, we are all tempted by doubt. The Peter whom Jesus pulled out of the sea is the same Peter who denied Christ three times shortly before His crucifixion.”
Most of the last third of the book is about politics but only in a very general way. Vance is inspired by Catholic social teaching, especially the balanced view of the social reality of humanity described in Rerum Novarum (Of New Things), the historic encyclical written by Pope Leo XIII in 1891.
Vance relates this all to his own life. The therapeutic idea that he could blame his own shortcomings on childhood abuse and dislocation was profoundly unappealing. It robbed him of agency and denied his own moral responsibility. His gratitude to his grandmother, his love of his wife, radiate from the page. He embraces the Catholic practice of confession – it offers him reflection on his own shortcomings, genuine personal responsibility for them, and forgiveness. This is certainly not for everyone, but it’s not nothing.

Inspired by social teachings? The ones about shooting all furriners on sight?

Not nothing? Comes a fly in the bromancer ointment, Donald Trump and JD Vance salute during a ceremony at Memorial Amphitheater at Arlington National Cemetery. Picture: Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images

There's simply no avoiding him ...

Finally the bromancer had to bite the mad King Donald bullet with a mild remonstrance, a gentle billy goat butt, only to provide a masterly retort, a JD supporting epic billy goat butt ...

The one glaring omission in Vance’s book is how he reconciles this genuine Christianity with serving in the Trump administration. There is a reasonable defence of this, I think. Democrats, at least as much as Republicans, have made a mess of America. There was a solid case for thinking Trump a less bad alternative than Kamala Harris at the last election. Therefore, trying to make the best of Trump is an ethically reasonable response.
Nonetheless, Vance certainly sometimes goes too far down the Trump road. Yet his versatility is astonishing. In his podcast with Rogan half an hour is spent on the niceties of caged fighting, half an hour on Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theories, half an hour on whether aliens are demons, and so on. Lots of four-letter words. Yet mostly Vance is moderating Rogan, jovially pointing him to reality. Vance is quite different in his appearance on The View, responding politely, patiently, reasonably and convincingly to five vocal, hostile women.
But to see the best of Vance, watch his hour-long conversation with Bishop Robert Barron of Word on Fire. A brilliant, subtle, hopeful dialogue on faith, purpose and society.
Is it a strength or a weakness that Vance is so at home in such contradictory environments? He’s presently unpopular. But he may yet resemble his boss in being protean, persistent, limitlessly energetic, easily underestimated, always formidable. Don’t rule Vance of out for 2028 just yet.

Strangely the bromancer ignored not just the war with China by Xmas, but the coming of Andy ...

That was left to the malignant Magnay, sounding very Iron Lady Margie about idle munificence...

Time to put up, now Mancunian is in Downing Street
Scaring away businesses won’t help prop up the extraordinary welfare situation, where large families on benefits have more disposable income than schoolteachers.
By Jacquelin Magnay
Europe Correspondent

Day 1 and the rats were in the street ...

Sadly the pond had to pass by, but the intermittent archive abided and that's surely enough.

The intermittent archive also took care of ancient Troy ...

Breaking with history: why this ALP conference will be different
Labor’s national conference will be a highly stage-managed event with little debate, even less dissent, and an emphasis on unity.
By Troy Bramston
Senior Writer

Keeping to teaser trailers left just enough room for Dame Groan, present to remind Australians that they were deeply stupid...

 ...and would certainly be rooned by Xmas ...

The header: End of an era: How we fell from exceptional nation to outpost of mediocrity; All those years of hard-fought reforms, of accepting the important trade-offs, were simply forgotten.

The caption for the uncredited collage showing a gaggle of Tory heroes: Former Liberal leaders Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison and John Howard.

Sheesh, the pond couldn't believe it.

There the pond was thinking that all the promotional work for nattering "Ned's" tome had been done and dusted, and straight up front the old biddy put in a plug for it ...

I have been reading the excerpts of Paul Kelly’s new book, The Twilight of Exceptionalism, with great interest. But it did occur to me that instead of using the noun “twilight”, I might have been inclined to use “end”.
Kelly’s book covers the period of the federal Coalition government between 2013 and 2022. In that time, we had three prime ministers, each very different from the other. It was a time of monumental lost opportunity, of parties that couldn’t quite figure out their common mission.
It’s worth outlining what Australia’s exceptionalism involved. Both the Hawke-Keating and Howard-Costello governments take the credit for this outcome. By and large, it was a long period of outstanding policy, of careful economic management and unparalleled outcomes. Annual economic growth rates in the high 3s and into the 4s were common. Productivity growth averaged above 2 per cent per year. The change to per capita incomes moved Australia up the world league ladder, with Australia’s GDP per person exceeding all the G7 countries apart from the US by the middle of the 2000s.
When it came to budgetary policy, the results were truly remarkable. As Peter Costello points out: “By 2004, after seven cash surplus budgets, the commonwealth government was debt-free in net terms. No other comparable Western country got anywhere near that, not the US, the UK, the Europeans, the Japanese.”

To match Dame Groan's carry on, the reptiles slipped in another reminder to buy the book before it hits the remainder shelves, Paul Kelly speak at the book launch for The Twilight of Exceptionalism in Sydney. Picture: John Feder / The Australian

Now on with the important business of revising history and explaining why we're all rooned ...

In August 2006, the Financial Times editorial concluded: “Australia continues to live up to its much overused sobriquet, the lucky country. But as the OECD observes, a big reason for its good fortune is that it has been adept at making its own luck.” The fact Australia was feted at international economic forums was no surprise.
The election of the Abbott government came after the chaotic years of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government. Plenty of poison pills were left by Labor, representing a real challenge for any incoming government. Some of these pills were dealt with – abolishing the absurd mining tax and bringing illegal migration under control by turning back the boats. But when it came to economic policy, the outcomes were extremely disappointing.
Promises not to cut spending in key program areas stymied the Abbott government from the start. It was a time that spending on the misconceived Gonski school funding model and the NDIS could have been reined in, with future expenditures locked into sustainable trajectories. We are now paying a very high price.
The fact Joe Hockey as treasurer pushed for the abolition of the debt ceiling – and succeeded – was more than passing strange. Having promised fiscal restraint, this action made no sense. It has relieved future treasurers from the worry of having to argue the case for expanding the debt ceiling.

The reptiles spared no expense and wheeled out some lavish artwork by Emilia, which the pond had mistaken as a tonal AI rendering, John Howard and Peter Costello. Artwork by Emilia Tortorella.

What an excellent evocation of a lying rodent and a man without the ticker.

End times devotees then got exactly what they wanted, so they could embark on their day knowing that it was all futile ...with all that nonsense about climate science central to the ruination ...

Twenty years on from zero net debt, we are now on the hook for $600bn of net government debt, with gross debt fast approaching the trillion-dollar mark. It is surely ironic that the commonwealth’s biggest asset is the Future Fund.
After the disaster of the 2014 budget – the only “achievement” was a temporary income tax surcharge on the highest earners – the Coalition simply dropped the ball on fiscal management.
Some key ministers began to argue debt and deficits didn’t matter, and the voting public quickly absorbed the new messaging. With inflation seemingly under control – this had a great deal to do with the goods deflation associated with expanding exports from China – the old trade-offs seemed to have vanished.
Measures to deal with climate change took a central role, with Abbott being the prime minister when Australia signed on to the Paris climate agreement. Under Malcolm Turnbull, climate change assumed an even higher priority, with a series of interventions put in place. They included the commissioning of the disastrous Snowy 2.0, which was seen as a giant battery that could underpin the shift to renewable energy. Note also that it was the Coalition government that first introduced the Safeguard Mechanism, which is effectively a carbon tax on our largest industrial emitters.
To be sure, there was some pushback to the attention being given to climate change – who can forget Scott Morrison bringing a lump of coal into parliament?

Who could forget it? Was there ever a better example of a profound insight into climate science?

Strangely the reptiles decided to ignore that as a visual illustration, and decided to go full boring...Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull at the conclusion of Question Time in the House of Representatives. Picture: Sam Mooy / AAP Image

Dame Groan seemed to be showing weird signs of a yearning for the clap happy SloMo ...

But come 2021, Morrison had become convinced the Coalition would lose the election unless his government adopted the position of net zero by 2050. Coupled with some debatable arguments that Australia would face high tariffs imposed by climate-compliant countries and be starved of international capital, the cabinet went along with the change. The Nationals, whose instincts were to oppose the motion, were rewarded with the promise of billions of dollars of compensation.
At the same time, Covid played havoc with the budget as government spending went from $478bn in 2018-19 (24.5 per cent of GDP) to $654bn (31.3 per cent of GDP) in 2020-21. Of course, a great deal of this spending was unavoidable given the uncertainties surrounding the severity and course of the pandemic. The decisions by some of the states to impose prolonged lockdowns also forced the hand of the federal government.
But having grown accustomed to very low rates of inflation, the Coalition massively underestimated the danger of igniting inflationary pressures, particularly in the context of frozen supply chains. Many of the programs that were initiated at that time were both badly designed and badly implemented.
The HomeBuilder program, for instance, led to a surge in building costs that continued well after the pandemic had ceased to be a problem. The JobKeeper program was far too generous and allowed firms that didn’t meet the criteria to keep the assistance.

Oh dear, so it was actually the clap happy one that set the country on the road to ruin? That surely deserves a snap ...Scott Morrison speaks during a press conference.

Tears streaked down Dame Groan's weathered visage - bonjour tristesse - as she pounded out her last gobbet of doom ...

There was never any indication given by the government that the temporary financial assistance given to households and businesses would need to be repaid. Research undertaken by world-renowned economist Greg Kaplan has established that this failure to foreshadow repayment in the US contributed to the price level rising by some 16 per cent. There is every reason to think a similar conclusion applies here.
Exceptionalism was replaced by sloppy thinking and mediocrity. Handing out favours, spending more on programs, putting everything on the tab – this was the modus operandi of the Coalition government when it was voted out in 2022. All those years of hard-fought reforms, of accepting the important trade-offs in managing the budget and the ever-looming threat of inflation, which is the ultimate tax – they were simply forgotten.
The Labor government is arguably much worse as it focuses almost entirely on redistributing our shrinking wealth. But the rot had set in when it won the 2022 election. Productivity growth is barely above zero and real wages are where they were in 2012. From top of the pops to clear laggard in less than 20 years – it is a very sad story.

So sad, such tristesse ...

If only Dame Groan could look on the bright side, and the opportunities all around us, as Wilcox showed her how to do it ...

It turns out that everything is currently an odyssey ...

So why haven't the reptiles gone all in on the fully woke show that's ruining the planet?

In which the flood water whisperer shows signs of fearing bottle red heads, while Killer Creighton cheerfully goes on nuking the country...

 

Doom and gloom.

It's the daily diet the reptiles offer the hive mind.

Geoff was top of the digital doom machine this early morning, as he chambered yet another round ...

Thank the long absent lord the intermittent archive was working ...

EXCLUSIVE
Mining royalties, tax payments crash by $25bn
$25bn mining plunge leaves Labor and state governments in jeopardy
The figures revealed in new modelling come as Labor mulls a push to increase taxes on the resources sector at this week’s national conference.

And what a busy possum he is. 

After Gina's pet's problematic overseas junket, palling around with felons and far right loons (not to mention exquisite fashions), Geoff did his best to restore faith in Pauline...

EXCLUSIVE
Newspoll: Hanson, Taylor climb as Labor’s support sinks
Newspoll: Pauline Hanson regains ground and Liberals rise, as Labor falls to equal lowest point since 2022
Core support for Labor fell to 30 per cent, which reflects the ALP’s lowest point since the Gillard government.

More EXCLUSIVES than a possum could shake a stick at.

It felt like Geoff was the primo reptile peddler of doom and gloom ...

COMMENTARY by Geoff Chambers
Reports of One Nation’s demise are greatly exaggerated
One Nation is not dead yet: Labor and the Coalition cannot write off Pauline Hanson
Senior Labor and Coalition sources say the idea One Nation’s support will drop off or fade quickly are wrong.

Hang on, hang on, hold Geoff's beer, because the Caterist is also in town and the header suggested he was smitten by the bottle red head ... what with Gina's puppet filling a gap in the political landscape, in much the same way as you might celebrate a mad King Donald or even a Mussolini...

The header: How Pauline Hanson fills the gap in our political landscape; A Hanson-led conservative government in which the Liberal and National parties are the junior partners is an absurd proposition.
The caption for the snap which suggests some reptiles spend too much time on social media with a screen capper: One Nation leader Senator Pauline Hanson speaks at the 2026 CPAC Conference in London. Picture: YouTube

Relax, the pond was just teasing, a little trolling, as a way of beguiling correspondents into suffering along with the Caterist.

The Caterist was alert, but also somewhat alarmed, as he began by reluctantly admitting it wasn't Gough wot done it ...

Some Australians will agree with Pauline Hanson that Australia’s immigration policy turned bad in 1973 when Gough Whitlam scrapped the White Australia policy and opened the doors to all comers. More informed readers know the policy was abolished six years earlier by the Liberal Party, but let’s not quibble on detail.

For a "let's not quibble" outing, the flood whispering Caterist had a lot of quivering quibbles, as he did his best to stand by the beefy boofhead:

Whether “some” voters constitute a majority of 50 per cent plus one is doubtful. Many may agree with Hanson that immigration is out of control but will reject her ugly allusions to skin colour and religion. They will be repelled by her clumsy attempts to scapegoat Muslims as the chief rorters of the National Disability Insurance Scheme and her refusal to distinguish the many patriotic Muslim Australians who like the country how it is and the radicalised few who want to change it.

Sheesh, it's like the reptile hive mind has turned full bizarro, compleat topsy turvy? 

Has the pond wasted an entire clumsy lizard Oz lifetime learning how Islamics were ruining the country and lazy, uppity, difficult blacks didn't deserve a Voice?

Seems so, sounds like the quarry whisperer has gone a little bit woke ...

Which is why Angus Taylor was expressing the views of two-thirds of the country and possibly more when he told The Australian recently that One Nation is unfit to govern.
One Nation may one day eclipse the Liberal-National Coalition as the principal force on the centre right but it will never form government while Hanson remains its leader. Not while its internal structure remains nebulous and immature and the mechanism for the leader’s removal is entirely in her own hands. Not when the party’s future as a parliamentary force lies in the hands of inexperienced MPs and senators.

The reptiles didn't help by pumping up the visual volume, Pauline Hanson meets up with Nigel Farage. Picture: Facebook/ Pauline Hanson

Even Nige found her meeting up with felon Tommy a tad too far, though no doubt he otherwise agreed with Gina's pet, refused to apologise for being white, and thought Australians were stupid, and fell into line with the lizards of Oz and Pauline that the country was way too woke ...

The Caterist did his best to cope and suggest solutions ... (though the unfortunate reptile habit of blathering on about the woke wasn't one needing reform)...

Those home truths aside, however, it is a fantasy to suggest Hanson’s ill-considered decision to hang out with Tommy Robinson in London is the beginning of the end for One Nation. The groundswell of support for Hanson cannot be explained by reductionist this-leads-to-that explanations.
The populist wave overturning business-as-usual politics around the world is driven by demand, not supply. A gaping hole has opened up in the centre of the political landscape which, this being a democracy, would sooner or later be occupied.
Hanson’s One Nation didn’t create this space, nor did it appear to be the natural candidate to fill it after the last election, when it emerged with a primary vote of 6 per cent.
Yet One Nation has scooped up the none-of-the-above votes scattered like confetti in 2025 and pushed the boundaries still further by becoming the home for a substantial subsection of the disgruntled Liberal base as well as the working-class voters Anthony Albanese has shaken off as Labor reinvents itself as the party of the technocratic elite.
For Hanson’s accidental army, One Nation is as much an emotional home as a serious political choice. A survey of the comments on any article in The Australian remotely critical of One Nation (including most probably this one) reveals how passionately supportive they are. Former Liberal voters who switch allegiance to One Nation are not simply changing their votes. They are changing tribes. Their internal narrative changes from “I support the Liberal Party” to “I’m one of the people who finally woke up”.
If Hanson reveals her weaknesses as a prospective national leader, they can resolve any internal contradictions by (a) admitting they were wrong or (b) persuading themselves that Taylor is worse.

Sheesh, is the Caterist suggesting it's a cult? Is he also suggesting that the lizard Oz hive mind is a cult, but Gina's pet has attracted some of its cult membership to its very own cult tribe?

Whatever, it seems times are tough for the reptiles who've devoted so much time encouraging their cult, and the beefy boofhead they'd like their cult to love, if only he was remotely loveable, what with some not infatuated with one of the duller knives in the drawer, Opposition Leader Angus Taylor speaking at the LNP conference in Brisbane. Picture: John Gass

How the reptiles love the beefy boofhead, mouth open and in full gesticulation mode.

At last it was time to take down Gina's pet so that the beefy boofhead might shine like a 20 watt bulb ...

Option (b) is the psychologically cheaper choice since admitting error imposes a high cost on self-esteem. It requires acknowledging not only Hanson’s flaws, but also personal poor judgment, and in an era when one’s political opinions are broadcast on social media that is an awkward pill to swallow.
Politically engaged voters are inclined towards what social psychologists call motivated reasoning, selectively assimilating evidence that reinforces prior beliefs and discounting discordant evidence. Perversely, as Hanson reveals her imperfections, hostility towards Taylor – and by extension the Liberal Party – hardens.
Hanson need not become more impressive to retain these voters. She simply has to remain less unacceptable than the Liberal alternative. Taylor must overcome this asymmetry if the Liberal Party is to recover its position as an effective political force.
Taylor must also overcome the uniparty narrative that One Nation employs to great effect. When the political and philosophical divide between the Coalition and Labor is at its widest point for at least half a century, Liberal and National supporters feel an understandable sense of indignation at this slur, which was imported from the US.
Yet the uniparty slander remains powerful as an encapsulation of the new political divide between the governing establishment and those who feel their values are not respected by the graduate elite.
In his 2022 book Values, Voice and Virtue, British political scientist Matthew Goodwin makes a strong case that the exposure of this fault line in Britain predates the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. The speed of Farage’s ascendancy, like the sudden rise of populist movements in other European democracies, owes less to his political attributes than the gap in the market for a movement that respects the view of the non-graduate majority.
Reform was the result rather than the cause of the populist mood, fuelled by resentment over the pursuit of pet projects such as multiculturalism and the mitigation of climate change that diverted government attention from the everyday problems of working families, small businesses and retirees.

And there in a nutshell is the Caterist and the reptile problem. 

All Gina's pet has done is take on board the policies espoused by them - the climate science denialism, the fear of furriners, and so on - and the notion that a messiah might come along to save them. 

Faux Noise and mad King Donald for example, though perhaps not the beefy boofhead or Kemi ...Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch delivers a speech on the economy at the Victory Services Club. Picture: Dan Kitwood / Getty Images

After all, the reptiles were dedicated to Brexit, and had a splendid time stripping the Voice of its capitalisation, and lathered themselves up into a fever pitch of outrage and indignation.

What could possibly have gone wrong with the rage machine?

In Britain, the populist revolt manifested itself most clearly in the Brexit vote. In Australia it was the voice referendum. 

There you go, that's what the pond's talking about. The reptiles might offer a capital V for Goodwin's Values, Voice and Virtue, but damned if they'll offer a V for that pesky, difficult, uppity black Voice.

Why they created the policies Gina's pampered pet is promoting, but where's the respect, where's the acknowledgement, where's the capital V for their long standing voice for bigotry and prejudice?

In both countries the established conservative parties seemed at first to be on the right side of the argument. Peter Dutton’s Liberal Party appeared to gain ground, just as the Conservatives did in Boris Johnson’s landslide election win in 2019. In both cases, the alignment with anti-establishment voters was short-lived. Neither Johnson nor Dutton could overcome the tensions in their own party.
For Taylor and British Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, the solution is not as simple as many commentators suggest. The seemingly contradictory solutions of moving to the right or recovering the vacant centre ground understate the challenge.
The task is to relearn the language and recover the trust of the disillusioned voters attracted to Hanson or Farage simply because they represent the least imperfect candidates among the none-of-the-above.
Whether Hanson’s European misadventures put a ceiling on One Nation’s vote at about 30 per cent or, as is equally probable, it begins testing the high 30s hardly matters.
A Hanson-led conservative government in which the Liberal and National parties are the junior partners is an absurd proposition. Eighteen months out from an election, with Albanese’s support in some polls in the high 20s, arguments about whether Taylor or Hanson would make a better prime minister are entirely theoretical. Unless something breaks this stalemate, and breaks it quickly, neither will be given a chance.

Sheesh, the pond had promised doom and gloom, but somehow ended up with the Caterist prophesying doom and gloom for Gina's pet, all in aid of the struggling beefy boofhead?

The infallible Pope had just the cartoon to celebrate on the weekend ...

And so to send the Major to the intermittent archive, because some days the pond baulks at the relentless serves of Zionism offered up by the Australian Daily Zionist News ...

Social media the tool of Hamas spreading hatred about Jews
How Hamas’s disinformation campaign is fuelling a global surge in antisemitism
Content posted online found a community here and around the world already conditioned by Hamas’s propaganda from the day its fighters invaded Israel.
By Chris Mitchell
Columnist

The pond just didn't feel up to yapping about Zionism yet again.

Correspondents have read it all before, and are free to read it again - relax, things are going tremendously well in Gaza if you follow the Major - and for Benji too ...

Okay, apparently it might have been for the wrong reason, it might have been to get more barking mad fundamentalists into the IDF, but what the heck, enjoy the moment all the same ...

And have a 'toon to celebrate ...

But what to do for a bonus?

The pond was over AI, so sent simpleton Simon off to the cornfield, even though only the pond cared enough to do the saving...

We need to sort AI’s moral risks before it’s too late

The speed of the race appears to be overtaking the foundational rules that must accompany such a technology.

By Simon Benson

Political analyst

A 'toon would suffice for that ...

Luckily Killer Creighton was to hand, doing what the IPA does best ... fuming and fulminating about renewables, and matching AI at devising ways to do over the planet ...

The header: Fudging language of energy transition won’t stop its political reckoning; ‘Involuntary load shedding’ is the new blackout: the deliberate disconnection of customers to keep the grid functional.

The caption for the terrifying snap: Miners taking part in wind turbine operation training listen to an instructor next to one of the wind turbines at the Gorzyca Wind Farm. Picture: Wojtek Radwanski / AFP

Killer only took three minutes, but surely that shocking snap of a windmill dominating the landscape and ruining mad King Donald's day - not to mention the beefy boofhead's fear of the infernal machines down Goulburn way - as a tremendous kick starter for the standard serve of rage ...

Just as grandfathering has been rebranded as grandparenting by Jim Chalmers so as not to offend, blackouts appear to have been excised from the official vocabulary.

Absent an obvious replacement colour, the Australian Energy Market Operator’s latest grand plan for achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 comes up with a variety of obscure phrases to describe how to deal with insufficient electricity in our largely sun and wind-dependent grid.

It all sounds almost fun. Consumers will be playing “an increasingly active role” in ensuring the power system remains stable, AEMO chief executive Daniel Westerman writes in the foreword to the latest Integrated System Plan released on June 25. “First Nations” communities will be “empowered”.

“Involuntary load shedding” is the new blackout: the deliberate disconnection of customers to keep the grid functional. This may arise in times of “unserved energy”, when the power system simply cannot meet the electricity demanded.

About 1 per cent of the national electricity market is expected to depend on “demand-side participation” by 2050, where households or businesses agree in advance to have their power turned down or switched off in exchange for financial compensation. The old electricity grid once served households; now households and businesses increasingly serve the grid.

Consumers are supposed to be “virtual power plants”, handing control of their home batteries and electric vehicles to third parties that can draw on them when required. Rather than generating more reliable power, the system increasingly seeks to “reduce the total energy drawn” from the grid.

The pond smugly set its EV to trickle charge - it being a sunny day and the solar standing by to kick in - while the reptiles served up a snap of that diabolical wretch Jimbo, looking just as smug in a quizzical way, Jim Chalmers during Question Time at Parliament House. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

No doubt haunted by Jimbo, Killer was in a foul IPA mood ... though perhaps it was tinged with a fear of impending hellfire, with shades of a Canadian wildfire...

Nah, a cartoon wasn't going to stop Killer.

He had a Killer IPA job to do, and the lizard Oz was a perfect IPA propaganda machine, and dammit, he was going to do it ...

The huge strides in living standards across the past century have been predicated on using more energy, not less. In any case, none of this is likely to happen.

AEMO’s latest ISP is solving a problem created by unrealistic political targets.

Increasingly – and laughably – it continues to assume Australia will achieve an 82 per cent renewable electricity grid by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2050. The plan is described as the “least cost” pathway, but only in the sense that the genuinely low-cost alternatives have been ruled out.

The 36 per cent of suitable Australian dwellings that have installed rooftop solar did so largely because governments showered households with billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded subsidies across the past two decades.

Those subsidies, largely taken up by higher-income households, are barely acknowledged in the ISP’s cost estimates. The same applies to the nation’s roughly 600,000 household batteries.

Importantly, such subsidies are also unlikely to continue indefinitely given the rapidly deteriorating fiscal position of state and federal governments.

Does anyone seriously think Victoria’s Yallourn coal-fired power station, which still supplies about 15 per cent of the state’s electricity and helps insulate South Australia against disaster on cloudy, still days, will close in less than two years as the ISP assumes?

Moreover, about 120 gigawatts of additional large-scale wind and solar capacity must be constructed by 2050, roughly five times today’s installed level in less than 25 years.

Construction has not begun on even one of the 83 offshore wind projects slated for completion across coming decades, according to online tracker TGS, and investment has collapsed globally.

Another 6000km of transmission lines also must be built to connect remote wind and solar developments to existing cities, which is certain to invite fierce community opposition.

It's doom and gloom all the way, and yet there's a solution to all this, a way to save the planet, though everyone knows that the planet doesn't need saving, what with Killer having demolished many times all that nonsense that's scribbled about climate change by alleged climate scientists entirely lacking Killer's scientific credentials.

Correspondents will already know the solution, can chant it by heart.

If only we'd nuke the country ...

Curiously, nuclear energy is not mentioned once in the ISP’s 141 pages, despite the fact the Liberal Party, the Nationals and One Nation all support the one proven technology capable of delivering reliable, dispatchable, low-emissions electricity at scale.

Amazingly in response to this klarion Killer kall,  the reptiles didn't deploy one of their much loved snaps of a nucklear plant nuking away, and instead settled for a man at a gabfest ...Daniel Westerman speaking at the Energy Nation 2025 forum in Sydney. Picture: Nikki Short

It was on to an impassioned Killer spiel for the urgent need to nuke the country, even if the planet didn't actually need saving ...

We’ll will happily dig up uranium, put it on a ship to India and congratulate itself when it produces reliable zero-emissions electricity there. The only place we apparently can’t use Australian uranium is, of course, Australia.

The Coalition should be making hay with the rank hypocrisy and absurdity of the targets but has barely said boo about dumping net zero since last year’s recantation through gritted teeth.

Countries such as South Korea and China have demonstrated that modern nuclear plants can be built relatively cheaply. A genuine planning exercise at least would model it alongside the alternatives rather than pretend it does not exist. More fundamentally, the whole exercise rests on an extraordinary assumption: that anyone can accurately map Australia’s electricity system a quarter of a century into the future.

A decade ago almost nobody foresaw the explosion of artificial intelligence and the demand for data centres, or the shale gas revolution. Who knows what technologies will emerge during the next 25 years? The ISP increasingly resembles less an engineering blueprint than a work of central planning, complete with heroic assumptions about consumer behaviour, technological progress, political consensus and construction timetables extending all the way to 2050.

At least the latest CSIRO GenCost report, released alongside the ISP, acknowledges what was once heresy, conceding that net zero costs 5 per cent to 39 per cent more than abandoning the target altogether.

Rebranding blackouts as “involuntary load shedding” and power shortages as “demand-side participation” may delay the political reckoning but it will not prevent it. Physics and economics have an inconvenient habit of ignoring government communications strategies.

Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

Haven't had enough? 

Perhaps you should visit the IPA and read Killer exposing the way that climate science is just a religion ...The moral imperative that doesn’t ring true ... and then you might want to nuke something ...

Just gotta love a little beneficial warming. Why there's nothing like a Canadian wildfire to gladden a Killer heart, not to mention splendid South American super charged El Niño inspired floods.

And so on and so forth and Killer fun and Killer times for all ...

Shouldn't that read "welcome to a white Australian climate science denying fear of furriners" reptile hive mind?

Never mind, what an inspiration little England is for bottle red heads and bin men ...

In which Polonius's prattle sets the pace, and bellyaching Bella joins in, but there's also much more by way of hive mind coverage ...

With the intermittent archive a headache, the pond looked elsewhere for entertainment, and fell like a famished wolf on Marina Hyde's The White House’s guide to manhood: pop some T, restart a war and do WHAT with a corn dog?

The pond could have done the Weekly Beast, and Tommy and Gina's pet living the reptile dream, and garrulous Gemma of the lizard Oz - a whole 10 minutes late - but some things are beyond satire.

The lizard Oz reptiles, and so the had studiously avoided Pete Kegsbreath's latest folly, but not the marinating Marina ...

...in a competitive field, the most eye-catching reaction to the new testosterone initiative came from Fox News anchor Jesse Watters. Do you know Jesse? He presents as the guy who missed out on the Cialis ad booking – he simply looks too beaten inside – but talks like a real man’s man of the world. “You know what’s going to happen?” chortled Watters of Hegseth’s military testosterone rollout. “The guys that DON’T need it are going to take it. Triple boost! And then they’re going to get out there, and, women on base – you guys better be careful!” Wow. OK. “Port calls, women in Asia – you better be careful. Because these guys are going to be WILD ANIMALS, and you better WATCH OUT!” Well now. I allow myself just one thousand-yard stare a day about the United States of America, and that clip has just produced today’s.

A reminder: that's the Emeritus Chairman's Faux Noise she's cracking jokes about, and who could resist her crack at JD, as the couch molester went full Freudian yet again ...

Yesterday’s came courtesy of JD Vance, who is out on the promo circuit pushing his latest memoir. This week he went on Joe Rogan’s show, where he explained that the thing he couldn’t get over about Joe Biden was the way the former president ate ice-cream. “It’s like they would get him eating ice-cream in the most ridiculous, suggestive way imaginable,” revealed Vance. Is it? Mate, I’m not sure it is. I’m looking at various clips of it and he seems to always use his teeth. I mean, I don’t mean to kink-shame, but … Biden’s a biter, JD. Do you … find that suggestive? Anyway, there was more. Vance also revealed he would never eat a corn dog in public. Rogan showily didn’t care about doing that for all to see; in fact, he thought it was sad people were “so afraid of anything that looks like a dick”. Over to you, Mr Vice -President. “I try, I try to eat my corn dogs …” floundered Vance. “That’s – that’s between me and my kitchen.” Oh, OK. JD Vance sucks off corn dogs in his kitchen. Tell your friends.

How could the pond resist? Of course it was going to remind its correspondent friends of the fun to be had marinating with Marina. There's nothing like JD 69, way better than than JD 6-7.

And now down to business with the local Murdochians, close kissing cousins with the Faux Noise mob, compliant munchers on their own kind of corn dogs.

The pond has already updated yesterday's post with intermittent archive links, and was determined to keep on ignoring them for today's Sunday meditation, but for those who missed the update ...

EXCLUSIVE
Islam ‘based on terror’: Hanson sparks concern inside One Nation
Pauline Hanson says a lot of Islam is ‘based on terrorism’ in one of her biggest attacks yet on the religion, prompting Barnaby Joyce to disagree with his leader 
By Greg Brown

EXCLUSIVE
‘At what cost?’: Green energy project threatens 66 species
NSW renewable energy project could hasten 66 species to extinction, scientists warn
The agency tasked with delivering NSW’s renewable energy future has been accused of bulldozing the very ecosystems the clean energy transition is meant to protect.
By Christine Middap

DEFAMATION VOW
‘Demonisation’: JK Rowling hits back at Amnesty report
JK Rowling vows to fund lawsuits against Amnesty over trans ‘hate’ report
Even John Cleese has taken aim at Amnesty International which once pitted itself against tyrants over trans rights.
By Stephen Rice

Mr Williams, tear down this stonewalling partisanship
All credit to the ABC chairman for fronting up to my Sky News show but his denial of Aunty’s biased, error-ridden coverage was astonishing.
By Chris Kenny
Associate Editor (National Affairs)

And while on that theme, there was more Gawenda, an interminable six minutes ...

As campus life turned ‘hellish’ for Jewish students, uni leaders did nothing
Vice-chancellors facing the royal commission still could not agree on what antisemitism means, almost three years after October 7.
By Michael Gawenda

The Australian Daily Zionist News never rests, and sothere was this one to add to that list, which the pond personally archived because where would the lizard Oz be without a Islamic jihad to add to its taste for TG jihads?

SOCIAL COHESION
PM says no to ‘anti-Palestine’ probe in Islamophobia response
The Prime Minister’s response follows questions about the need for an Islamophobia envoy, with critics saying the issue is not as intense as the antisemitism surge that led to the Bondi massacre.
By Richard Ferguson and James Dowling

Want that decoded? You can never get social cohesion with difficult, uppity Islamics. And you can't mention Gaza or Palestine because they're "less intense".

Or so it seems so, if this teaser trailer is any guide ...

And snappy Tom, doing his ersatz Dame Groan impression, with relevant filmic reference:

Our budget delusions for a perilous odyssey
This post-budget season has been different because a handful of measures ran into a populist insurgency.
Tom Dusevic
Columnist

After all that reading, some herpetology students might want a break ...

And so to Polonius, still holding top dog pride of place - what with him being something of a furry - in the pond's Sunday meditation.

Such is the importance of the reptiles to stay in touch with Gina's pampered pet that Polonius took up the challenge with his prattle:

The header: One Nation’s most educated politician could become its weakest link; The more important One Nation becomes, the more of a problem Senator Malcolm Roberts will become.

The caption for the snap: Senator Malcolm Roberts has a history of making over-the-top statements. Picture: Martin Ollman

The pond doesn't mind Polonius spending a bigly four minutes taking down the barking mad Roberts, but before that unfolds, the pond confesses to having dipped back into the Graudian's The Australian's environment editor, Graham Lloyd, sued over Peruvian eco-retreat; A former partner in an Amazonian conservation project with Lloyd and his partner Vanessa Hunter is claiming more than $600,000 in damages and costs

It's an old yarn, sordid, unseemly but also funny, and incidentally therein you will find ...

...According to the Australian, Lloyd is a “fearless reporter of all sides of the environment debate”. He has had a long career with the Australian as an editorial writer, among other senior roles, and has been championed by the former editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell.
Mitchell called him the smartest environment writer in the country “by light years” and said he could “run rings around clowns like Tim Flannery in any forum on knowledge of the science”.
He has been named by the Queensland One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts as one of the journalists who “show the courage to research the evidence” for climate change, alongside Alan Jones, News Corp and the Sky News commentator Andrew Bolt, and his colleague Chris Kenny at the Australian.

Yes, in the old days, mad Malcolm and the reptiles of Oz were all a happy bunch of Vegemite climate science denialists ...

Sure enough if you head off to the aph.gov.au site (pdf), you discover a 2017 report put together by assorted Senate loons, including Roberts ...

The pond wanted to remind correspondents that these birds of a feather frequently flocked together, because you might otherwise read Polonius as doing a straightforward hatchet job, when really he's in two minds about one of the hive mind's own ...

It remains to be seen whether Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has peaked. In any event, it is still a long time to the next election.
But, clearly, One Nation is under some pressure that it did not experience before Christmas last year. And before the Bondi Beach massacre aimed at the Australian Jewish community on the Jewish festival of Hanukkah – which was also an attack on Australian society.
The small One Nation frontline is well known to those who follow Australian politics – Hanson, the MP for New England Barnaby Joyce (formerly of the Nationals) and James Ashby (who is one of the best-known staffers in Australian political history).
Then there is Queensland senator Malcolm Roberts, plus the new MP for Farrer, David Farley, who scored a significant victory at the by-election on May 9. One Nation senators Sean Bell (NSW) and Tyron Whitten (Western Australia) are not yet well-known public figures.
Writing in The Sydney Morning Herald on July 1, economics editor Ross Gittins asked readers whether anything struck them about the Hanson-Joyce pair. He added: “They’re not the sharpest tools in the drawer. It’s hard to imagine how anyone who’d completed high school could be stupid enough to just wave away all the scientific evidence that global warming is real.”

Read that sentence again ...

It’s hard to imagine how anyone who’d completed high school could be stupid enough to just wave away all the scientific evidence that global warming is real.”

Come on Ross. It's not hard to imagine at all, leastwise if you imagine the likes of the Bolter, the dog botherer, Lloydie of the Amazon, the Riddster, and many others who turn up regularly in the lizard Oz...

Spend years reading the reptiles and you get ... Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce enjoy a laugh at a June 12 fundraiser in South Melbourne. Picture: David Crosling

Naturally Polonius was indignant at Ross, targeting One Nation types and braying in intellectual snobby mode.

Polonius had to cede that when it came to climate science denialism, the One Nation mob were great climate scientists, and they were right on the money ...

This would suggest that, in recent weeks, Gittins must have come to regard at least some of his readers as dumb. After all, last Monday his newspaper published a Resolve Political Monitor poll. It revealed that 39 per cent of Australians agreed that “net zero should be dropped, with a focus on fossil fuels over renewables in the future”. Thirty three per cent were undecided or neutral and only 27 per cent disagreed.
What Gittins, in intellectual snobbery mode, declines to accept is that there is no direct correlation between education and intelligence. Moreover, any fair assessment of Hanson and Joyce would not regard either as unintelligent. By the way, Joyce has a degree in accounting.
Meanwhile, it has come to pass that many of One Nation’s current problems begin with Roberts. I met Roberts once when I was a panellist on the ABC TV Insiders program some years ago. He did not appear unintelligent.
Moreover, Roberts has tertiary degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of Queensland and an MBA from the University of Chicago.
On January 28 this year, Nine columnist Peter FitzSimons threw the switch to sneering. He posted on X: “Would you trust Malcolm Roberts to change a light bulb, let alone come up with a coherent energy policy?” Well, mechanical engineers can change light bulbs.
Moreover, what a coherent energy policy amounts to at a time of rising power bills affecting homes and businesses alike is very much in the eye of the beholder.

Yes, yes, he can change light bulbs and do mechanical engineering, and if that doesn't say "expert climate scientist", what on earth does?

Speaking of the eye of the beholder, at this point the reptiles flipped a switch and decided to go all personal in an attack on Gina's pet performing seals...

Polonius also flipped a switch.

While mad Malcolm might be right on the money when it came to climate science - you know a mechanical engineering degree makes for top notchc limate scientists - there were luckily a few other ways to have a go at him ... especially when he refused to accept the guidance of the Australian Daily Zionist News...

Despite his high-level education and training in the energy industry, Roberts expresses with confidence some untenable beliefs while occasionally going into denial about current and historical events. To rework a prevailing cliche, Roberts has seldom come across an extreme right-wing conspiracy theory that he did not embrace. Or at the very least consider it to be plausible. This is proving politically dangerous to One Nation now that there is talk that it could get close to, or even be in, government at some time.
Roberts has a history of making over-the-top statements. In recent times, they have been noticed increasingly as One Nation’s profile develops and extends beyond Hanson. Some recent examples illustrate the point.
I believe that (writing in these pages on May 9) I was the first to reveal that, in an interview with comedian Lisa Jane Spencer, Roberts said he did not have the evidence as to whether the Bondi Beach massacre was a false-flag event. My attention to this was drawn by a young friend.
The idea that Jewish agents were involved in murdering Jews and some others at Bondi Beach in December last year is preposterous. Yet Roberts told Spencer: “I haven’t got the evidence. I doubt whether it’s a false flag but it could be.” Not long after, Hanson had to clean up the mess and emphatically deny the false-flag fantasy.

So it's one thing to blather inanely about a global climate change conspiracy, and yet entirely insane to take up an anti-Semitic conspiracy? 

And Gina's pet had to clean one of these messes, but not the other, the one that accorded with reptile thinking? The One Nation leader has had to clean up the mess. Picture: Martin Ollman

Polonius followed up with other examples of mad Malcolm's loonacy, but remember when it comes to climate science, in the Polonial universe, even a broken loon clock might be capable of getting it right:

On July 13, Nine newspapers journalist Rob Harris reported that Roberts had been interviewed by notorious extreme-right American conspiracist Alex Jones in October 2024. Roberts told Jones that his (Jones) credibility was “very, very high”. Jones is the man who claimed the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut was a false-flag event or staged by actors. The attacker murdered 20 children and six adults.
In the interview, Roberts referred to “globalists” who were “unelected parasites”. An apparent antisemitic slur, concerning which Roberts may or may not be aware.
Writing in The Australian on July 16, Jack Quail reported that Roberts had said in a video that it was “highly likely” the US Air Force was spraying chemtrails. This conspiracy maintains that the US military is releasing deadly toxins as a means of depopulating the planet. Really.
And there’s more. Roberts told Efrat Fenigson’s You’re the Voice podcast in May 2024 that the United States was “the world’s greatest terrorist organisation now”. He said the US government “has been hijacked by the global parasites since 1913, and probably before”. Another implied allegation that the Jews dominate the world. Despite the fact there is not a skerrick of evidence that the US was responsible for the two world wars – concerning which it was neutral when the guns started firing on both occasions.
Roberts has also praised Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, who graduated to President of Russia from the ranks of the Soviet Union’s secret police – the KGB. Roberts regards Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky as another “globalist”. Zelensky happens to be Jewish, you see.
Hanson has distanced herself from some of Roberts’ statements. What’s more, in an interview on Radio National Breakfast on Thursday, Joyce demonstrated evident unease when asked to discuss Roberts’ political views.
The more important One Nation becomes, the more of a One Nation problem Roberts will become. He is a real difficulty for the Hanson-Joyce duo – and for Australia if he ever gains a significant office. How ironic that One Nation’s most educated politician is its weakest link.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

Climate change right on, chemtrails, globalists of the lizard Oz kind, and Vlad the impaler a step too far!

How many times have how many reptiles moaned and whined about the way that Australia has gone woke? And yet there's Pauline in London rabbiting on to a small London audience, even smaller than the hive mind, about the woke. 

As with Dame Slap and her kind, so with Gina's pet.

At a loose end, the pond noticed at the bottom of Polonius's offering a proposal for additional reading, and why not? The pond likes to set additional assignments for diligent herpetologists ... and some displayed canny reptile behaviour worth noting.

More Coverage

For once I agree with Pauline Hanson. I don’t want to live in Luton either
Pauline Hanson zeroes in on ‘super diverse’ UK town Luton for campaign to ‘protect’ Australia
Inside the ‘super diverse’ British town that the One Nation leader chose as the centrepiece of an anti-immigration campaign, the reality is more complicated.

The trick about this one is for the tinkling Trinca to make it all about the town of Luton, and not so much Gina's pampered pet spending time with a far right bigot ...

What a devoted follower the tinkling Trinka is ...

HANSON UK TOUR
Hanson speaks at London CPAC following controversial UK tour
The One Nation leader addressed the conservative conference amid domestic backlash over her comments on Islam and immigration.
By Helen Trinca

Oh that diversity rag, so insufferable ...

In a separate podcast recorded in April in Australia, Hanson declared that a lot of Islam is “based on terrorism”. It prompted Barnaby Joyce to disagree with his leader in an ­escalation of the chaos within One Nation.
Hanson has also courted controversy by breaking her tour and attending a Dolce & Gabbana fashion show in Sicily with billionaire backer Gina Rinehart. She also took a private tour of Blenheim Palace with former Neighbours actor Holly Vallance before visiting the satellite town of Luton with Robinson as part of a documentary to be shown on Australian TV on Sunday night. In the documentary, she says she was “gobsmacked” because Luton – which has a big population of British Asians and Blacks, did not look like Great Britain.

Also in that Polonial "more coverage" reading list?

Geoff chambering another shot ...

‘Do you slowly’: Labor’s plan to crush One Nation
Gearing up for a 2028 election, the PM takes a leaf from Paul Keating’s script in his plan to wrest votes from One Nation as support for Pauline Hanson’s party surges to a record high.

And the trick here is to pump up the perils provided by Gina's pampered pet by turning to crusader Joel, a man at the heart of the action...

Lessons our leaders must embrace to halt the One Nation juggernaut
One Nation won’t go away – here’s why that matters
Populism is not the problem. The real threat is much closer to home.

But the best trick in the "more coverage" read is to remind the hive mind just how much Polonius repeats himself these days.

Hop into the hive mind time machine:

Malcolm Roberts’ dangerous equivocation on Bondi conspiracy theory

A senator’s refusal to firmly reject a ‘false flag’ claim raises fresh concerns about antisemitism, political judgment and media failure.

That "more coverage" routine is a heck of away to keep punters deep inside the hive mind ...

Here, have a break.
 

After all that, the pond had neither the stomach nor the room for a bonus, but dammit, whenever the pond hears the siren song of Bella and the cry of Western Civilisation, room must be made ...

The header: Ramsay’s $35m to fund courses where students will be taught to resent the very civilisation the fund was created to celebrate; In a betrayal of legacy, tens of millions of dollars earmarked to champion a cultural inheritance under fire will now pay for courses that actively do the opposite.

The caption for the cheap as chips illustration from the archives, showing an astonishingly accurate and true portrait taken from real life: William Page's Shakespeare Reading (1873-74). In Melbourne University’s Shakespeare in Performance course, the Bard is framed through, among other things, ‘issues of cultural politics and power’. Picture: Smithsonian Art Museum

Crusader Bella spent a bigly four minutes in agonising, agonised turmoil ...and the pond suffered with her ...

This week, university academics began the final phase of appropriating a significantly large bequeathment intended to finance the study of Western civilisation and spending it on indoctrinating students with the usual leftist dogma instead.
The money is from the $3bn estate of health industry doyen Paul Ramsay, who died in 2014, part of which he wanted to be spent on studying and promoting Western civilisation, arts and humanities.
The Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation was created in 2016, promising solid financial support for any university that adopted courses focusing on the Western canon. For its first seven years, the centre flourished under chief executive Simon Haines, a genuine humanities scholar who had spent decades teaching and thinking about literature, culture and human values.
Haines established courses at three universities – Australian Catholic University, the University of Wollongong and the University of Queensland – where newly hired departments of largely early-career lecturers and their students followed a classic great books style liberal arts curriculum, in stark contrast to the “politically correct” mindset that increasingly had been consuming humanities faculties since the late 1960s.

There has to be a villain in any lizard Oz column, and here he is, Martin Fahy, formerly the CEO of Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia.

What a sinister sort, and as for that blue tie, here no Western Civilisation, no Western Civilisation here. Efstoons, whatever happened to a taste for pantaloons?

Then came the despair, the outrage ...

However, his successor, Martin Fahy, announced this week that $35m of the centre’s funds soon will be directed to the University of Melbourne in the form of scholarships. This appears to be a good thing until you read the fine print: “All elements of the scholarship program will be administered and delivered by the University of Melbourne and no new degrees or majors will be developed,” the university announced.
In other words, the money will go chiefly to the Ramsay scholars, who will be funnelled into courses run by the usual suspects, teaching all-too-familiar tendentious material such as: Decolonising Art and Its Histories; Race and Gender: Philosophical Issues; and Britain’s Empire: Power and Resistance.
Could any one of these staff possibly deliver a lecture about the timelessness of Homer, the power of Shakespeare’s language or the complexity of Dostoyevsky’s thought? Or will they simply see and present Western civilisation through the same lenses as everything else: white colonial guilt, First Nations nobility, identity politics and environmental catastrophism?

Indeed, indeed.

The pond knew what was going down here, thanks to Dr Emily Hauser in the Graudian ...

A classicist’s verdict on Nolan’s Odyssey: a soulful hero flatters our times as women and nuance pushed overboard; Matt Damon’s sensitive and repentant Odysseus might come as a surprise to Homer, likewise some significant omissions concerning the poem’s female characters

...Turning the Odyssey into Odysseus’s troubled journey to become an empathic leader of men and a reluctant agent of the onward march of history isn’t just a Hollywood reorientation to the kind of flawed genius we’ve seen in Oppenheimer – it fundamentally tells us what Nolan sees, and wants us to see, as a hero. For audiences who are looking for a box-office smash with stunning visual action, epic proportions and a hero at the heart of it all, they will get it. Every reworking of Homer says what it wants to the people it is speaking to.
In the gap between the sung verses of Homer and Matt Damon declaiming to an Imax camera, what this Odyssey offers us, by way of a hero and the grandiloquent experience of epic cinema, is a man who seeks redemption and solidarity among men, recognition from women, and absolution for a civilisation’s fall. Make of that, in the current climate, what you will.

Dammit, another serve of white imperial guilt coming from a minor king ...

The pond was reminded of other heroes, representing all that's decent, dinkum and right in Western Civilisation ...

 

Carry on bellyaching Bella ...

The English and theatre studies courses reveal the prevailing dogmatism of the university’s humanities curriculum. In Literary Canons: Then and Now, students are to “critically engage with the framework of the literary canon” and encouraged to understand the canon as a “hotly contested container for values, tastes, and traditions”, subject to “radical reorganisation and revaluation with time”.
Students expecting relief from critical theory will not find it in Romanticism, Feminism, Revolution, where they must read Byron, Blake, Bronte and Shelley through the prism of the “construction of modern notions of literature, culture, sexuality, emancipation and revolution”. In Shakespeare in Performance, the Bard is framed through, among other things, “issues of cultural politics and power”.

The pond was startled to learn that Melbourne University’s faculty of arts has long been dominated by an intellectual culture hostile to the West. Picture: University of Melbourne

This will surely come as a surprise to the Lynch mob, a noble member of Melbourne Uni's faculty of arts, but perhaps he is just an impotent wretch munching silently on corn dogs in some forgotten closet ...

And so to the final gobbet of despair ... the Anglosphere done down again, what with the Anglosphere full of contributions from the likes of Homer and Dostoyevsky, genuine Anglophiles, full of Anglish-ness ...

If this is the future that Fahy and his board are plotting for the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation then we must start preparing ourselves for its slow demise, at least in its current form. The consequences of this are profound. Any society that despises its own cultural heritage as much as our universities do, and as they teach their students to, is surely doomed.
Nothing in the Ramsay Centre’s published biography of Fahy suggests any scholarly background in Western civilisation, the Western canon, history, philosophy or the humanities in general.
Before Fahy took over the centre in 2024, his executive career was spent at Accenture, the Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia and KPMG. His academic career was in accountancy-related fields far removed from the great books tradition the centre was established to defend. He may be exceptionally well qualified to oversee a technology transformation or implementation of an enterprise resource planning system, but it is difficult to see what in his background prepared him for the rather different task of inculcating in young Australians a love and understanding of their Western heritage.
No single student will walk away from Melbourne University’s Western civilisation scholarship program with a love or true understanding of Western civilisation.
What they will walk away with is a deep suspicion, resentment and even loathing of it. Like all humanities faculties across Australia, and indeed across the Anglosphere, the University of Melbourne’s faculty of arts has long been dominated by an intellectual culture hostile to the West, one that regards much of its legacy as oppressive and its inherited knowledge as illegitimate.
One of Ramsay’s major preoccupations, and the reason his executors allocated a portion of his $3bn endowment to establish the centre, was his belief that the humanities had been hijacked by academics who did not love the West.
And here we are, handing over tens of millions of dollars to the academic establishment that Ramsay understood to be part of the destructive apparatus eroding the civilisation he loved so much.
This is a betrayal of Ramsay’s legacy and of the spirit in which his extraordinary gift was made. But most tragically it is a betrayal of the young Australians for whom that gift was intended. They have already been deprived of so much of their cultural inheritance by an education system embarrassed by, or openly hostile to, the civilisation that formed them. Ramsay wanted to give some of that inheritance back. To take his fortune and use it to fund the intellectual culture he sought to counter would be the most bitter irony of all.

There came a reminder of Bella's taste for apocalyptic end times ...

Bella d’Abrera is the author of Mindless: How the Education System is Indoctrinating Children and Destroying Our Civilisation (Wyborn Press, 2026).

Lost, rooned and only the Murdochians to hand to save the planet, climate change excepted.

And so to a couple of bonuses to the bonus, because the pond contends that the lizard Oz editorialist is the best guide to the heart of the hive mind ...

Poor beefy boofhead, how the reptiles hound him. And if not him, mad King Donald remains a Faux Noise marvel ...

And with that time for a few final 'toons celebrating the very best in Western Civilisation, worthy of a course run by the Lynch mob ...

What a lark, what a grift ...

And again ...