Still with the comrade Dan obsession?
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
‘No more backroom deals’: Victorian Premier slams Andrews era in ‘big reset’
New Premier Ben Carroll attacks Daniel Andrews era in ‘big reset’ for Victoria
Ben Carroll says he will draw a line under the Andrews years with tougher cabinet processes, a more business-friendly agenda and a promise there will ‘never ever’ be another hotel-room deal.
‘No more backroom deals’: Victorian Premier slams Andrews era in ‘big reset’
New Premier Ben Carroll attacks Daniel Andrews era in ‘big reset’ for Victoria
Ben Carroll says he will draw a line under the Andrews years with tougher cabinet processes, a more business-friendly agenda and a promise there will ‘never ever’ be another hotel-room deal.
And how does Ben think he's going to win the punters over by appearing in the lizard oz looking like some drongo high above the masses in an undertaker's suit?
Really Ben? That's the hill you're going to die on, trashing the brand and pandering to the reptiles, while looking like a corporate hack peering out at the world from BHP's offices? (What a nice view that was).
Meanwhile, in that other place. Two very different leads:
What else? Still think mad King Donald and his minions offers protection?
Apparently, with a different Ben packing it twice, just below that other Ben early on Friday morn ...
EXCLUSIVE
US to deploy 2300 troops to WA under ‘base’ arrangement
US establishes military base framework in Western Australia for AUKUS submarines
The Albanese government insists it is not a US base, but defence experts say Washington’s new Naval Support Activity Stirling tells a very different story.
By Ben Packham
US to deploy 2300 troops to WA under ‘base’ arrangement
US establishes military base framework in Western Australia for AUKUS submarines
The Albanese government insists it is not a US base, but defence experts say Washington’s new Naval Support Activity Stirling tells a very different story.
By Ben Packham
COMMENTARY by BEN PACKHAM
A braver government would be more frank about nature of pact
Four US submarines and 2300 Americans are to be stationed in Western Australia, yet the government insists it will not be a base – a distinction critics say defies belief.
A braver government would be more frank about nature of pact
Four US submarines and 2300 Americans are to be stationed in Western Australia, yet the government insists it will not be a base – a distinction critics say defies belief.
...For Australia, this means gaining the experience of operating and maintaining nuclear submarines before we get our own, and enjoying the long-term deterrent effect provided by the close proximity of the US’s apex undersea predators.
The US, for its part, gains access to Australia’s prized strategic geography, placing its Submarine Squadron 3 at much safer distance from Chinese missiles than it would be if it were based in the Pacific Ocean at Hawaii or Guam.
Labor struggles to speak clearly about any of this because it is desperate to avoid a backlash over the submarine pact from within its own left faction, which has a strong anti-US streak.
A braver government would be open to a frank conversation about the need for a long-term US submarine presence in Australia, and the true nature of the agreement.
The US, for its part, gains access to Australia’s prized strategic geography, placing its Submarine Squadron 3 at much safer distance from Chinese missiles than it would be if it were based in the Pacific Ocean at Hawaii or Guam.
Labor struggles to speak clearly about any of this because it is desperate to avoid a backlash over the submarine pact from within its own left faction, which has a strong anti-US streak.
A braver government would be open to a frank conversation about the need for a long-term US submarine presence in Australia, and the true nature of the agreement.
A braver government would admit to thinking mad King Donald is a winner? And we're on board the AUKUS gravy train?
You mean we'll get all the stunning benefits on display in the ongoing war in Iran? And all the help offered to Ukraine up against Vlad the sociopathic invader? And a serve of the peace bequeathed to Gaza?
That's bravery Ben? Or just another form of madness?
Thanks, but no thanks, the pond will keep its distance ...
And if lizard Oz drivel is what's required, where's the bromancer when he's needed?
The pond then looked nervously over on the extreme far right and sadly the bromancer was nowhere to be found.
Sure the reptiles kept peddling the notion that Cape York was the solution to it all, as if a "one size fits all" routine would sort out diverse Aboriginal communities around the land ...
Drop the pilots: make Cape York reform agenda standard framework
Education key to converting reform policies into real change for Indigenous communities
We have learned enough to know that if family responsibility is backed by real opportunity, the gap can close within a generation.
By Fiona Jose and Kirstyne Davis
Education key to converting reform policies into real change for Indigenous communities
We have learned enough to know that if family responsibility is backed by real opportunity, the gap can close within a generation.
By Fiona Jose and Kirstyne Davis
A Voice bringing diverse groups together might have helped, but if the pond learned anything from its time in Alice Springs, peddling the Cape York mob as the solution would sink in Todd river sand like a stone.
Oh, and the meretricious Merritt bobbed up to join a pretty standard jihad bashing the cardigan wearers...
ABC apology exposes a media watchdog that fails ordinary people
Gina’s win over ABC highlights untouchable nature of the national broadcaster to everyone else
After weeks of vacillation, the ABC mea culpa to Gina Rinehart over an offensive segment highlights that only those with financial clout can achieve what ACMA should have the power to do.
By Chris Merritt
Legal Affairs Contributor
Gina’s win over ABC highlights untouchable nature of the national broadcaster to everyone else
After weeks of vacillation, the ABC mea culpa to Gina Rinehart over an offensive segment highlights that only those with financial clout can achieve what ACMA should have the power to do.
By Chris Merritt
Legal Affairs Contributor
It takes some fair cheek for the reptiles to berate ACMA, what with that completely useless body, that toothless tiger, routinely giving the Murdochians a free pass, but whatever ...
Speaking of the ABC, the pond rarely notes their contributions, but just knew this clip would drive the reptiles into a frenzy ...(there are graphs!)
And that was backed up by the infallible Pope...
Why save all that up for the next bout of climate science denialism?
Some days when the lizard Oz is fully in the pits the pond has to make its own fun.
Things then took a turn for the worse when the pond discovered that the pond's usual Friday outings were both dismal
Killer took to Victoria and sheesh, there was comrade Dan again, this time imitating a startled rabbit ...
The header: New Premier Ben Carroll confronts legacy of waste and debt left by his predecessors
Victoria’s public sector executive ranks have nearly tripled in a decade, with a new $400,000-salary role emblematic of the waste Premier Ben Carroll must now confront.
The caption for the uncredited collage, and oh noes, there's the comrade and Jacinta too, and that shameless spiv is in the middle ... Jacinta Allan, Ben Carroll and Dan Andrews.
Sure, it was only a three minute read, but the pond got the sulks, especially as the pond couldn't help wondering if Killer ever worked from home?
And did his definition of productivity include wankers scribbling propaganda for the IPA and getting it into the lizard Oz?
Sitting on the Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet’s website is a job advertisement for a Multicultural Co-ordinator General with a salary of $344,616- $400,741, excluding superannuation.
The new Premier, Ben Carroll, deserves credit for slimming down the number of minister jobs by two to 20 and announcing a royal commission into the state’s corrupt construction sector.
He’s even flagged scaling back his predecessor’s productivity-destroying working-from-home laws and the monstrously wasteful Suburban Rail Loop – about the only infrastructure project whose ultimate cost would put Snowy 2.0 to shame.
The reptiles flung a bit of artwork which strangely looked quite good ...An artist’s impression of the Suburban Rail Loop’s Box Hill station.
Killer then took to bashing all his pet peeves, a bog standard jihad against multiculturals and pesky, difficult, uppity blacks ...
Whoever becomes multicultural co-ordinator won’t be short of colleagues: the number of Victorian public sector “executives”, on between around $250,000 and $800,000 a year has almost tripled from 691 a decade ago, two years into Dan Andrews’ first term, to 1902 last year, during which time the state’s population rose 18 per cent. No wonder annual employee costs of the Victorian public sector, which now employs one in 10 Victorians, have jumped from $26bn in the year to June 2020 to $41bn this financial year.
Carroll must know how offensive these highly paid, pointless public sector jobs would be to the sort of people he grew up with in working-class Melbourne and worked with at Kmart for eight years, while he was a high school and university student.
But he’s unlikely to make much progress given what he’s up against. The shameless, brazen waste of public money right under the new Premier’s nose signals just how extreme and arrogant the public sector, especially at the top, has become.
Carroll has exceeded expectations in his first fortnight only because they had plumbed to such low depths. His predecessor, Jacinta Allan, couldn’t even bring herself to accept Helen Silver’s review last year to trim 2000 bureaucratic positions from a total public sector headcount of around 393,000 last year.
The longer Carroll remains silent on public sector bloat and the vast array of other destructive policies Andrews and Allan have saddled the state with, the more disappointing he’ll become, and the bigger political opportunities he’ll present to the Coalition and One Nation.
Dumping the costly and divisive First Nations Assembly known as Gellng Warl (which no one even knows how to pronounce) should be a no-brainer for two powerful reasons at least.
There you go, a sort of smarmy condescension and wilful ignorance of the kind that typifies Killer's contributions (no one knows how to say the less than admirable Crichton)... and pause for an image of actual black people designed to shock the hive mind ...Chairs of the First Peoples Assembly of Victoria, Premier Jacinta Allan and Treaty Minister Natalie Hutchins and cabinet ministers gather for a day of ceremony and celebration of the start of Treaty negotiations. Picture: Justin McManus
Killer was outraged, and promptly went into a litany ... and yes, he took to brooding about Covid for the umpteenth time...
Around 60 per cent of Victorians voted specifically against such a racially divisive body only a few years ago in the voice referendum. Moreover, it’s expected to cost more than $70m a year in a state where even net debts are approaching $200bn and annual interest payments are about to soak up a quarter of the state’s own tax revenue by 2030.
Cutting taxes in our most heavily taxed state should be as sensible politically as it is economically. Why are Victorian businesses still being forced to pay an annual Covid levy? Why must they also pay a mental health levy, which no other state has?
Dumping the Andrews Gas Substitution road map, which will ultimately prevent Victorians using the energy form in which their own state is most rich, should be another easy one. Allan herself had to back down on forcing dwellings to replace their gas stoves and hot water heaters from next year.
But all new dwellings must not use gas – which many households prefer to cook with – in any way from January 2027. Carroll should go further and dump the whole thing, giving Victorians and developers with foresight the option to use gas if they want.
The policy is so stupid the government isn’t even following its own road map, having approved two LNG import terminals at Geelong and Vopak while simultaneously trying to reduce long-term gas demand. It’s also walked back from an earlier blanket state ban on all gas exploration, allowing the conventional onshore type once again since 2021. There are quite a few low fiscal cost actions Carroll should ponder too, such as apologising for Labor’s treatment of Victorians during Covid.
Most numerate and intelligent people now understand what happened in Victoria for hundreds of days in 2020-21 was an obscene and immensely destructive violation of fundamental human rights with no scientific basis, which also wrecked Melbourne’s international reputation, perhaps forever. A sorry, even without compensation, would be nice.
Privately assuring the police they had the government’s full backing to aggressively enforce the law – in a state enduring an obvious increase in theft and youth lawlessness – would be a cheap way to score a political win.
The Liberal, National and One Nation parties would have been privately disappointed Labor’s new Premier promptly called a by now obviously worthy royal commission last week. But they shouldn’t be too worried. So far it seems Carroll doesn’t have the skill or power to dump the entirety of Allan’s economically insane policy of giving workers the right to work from home two days a week at their employers’ cost.
If he can’t do that, then the rest of the recommendations in this column are theirs for the taking!
Adam Creighton is the chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.
Remember, dying from a virus is a fundamental human right.
Made it through that? Have a 'toon.
Talk about setting a tone Ms Wilcox, because things then got even worser (the pond even felt the need to abuse the English language)...
Our Henry returned to his favourite jihad like a Tamworth dog seeking out its vomit.
The header: Islamism has exploited our culture of political confusion; Our aim should be social cohesion, secured by effectively preventing the importation or perpetuation of ancient hatreds and forging common bonds strong enough to sustain diversity.
The caption for the artwork, which is frankly appalling, even more appalling than Frank's usual rank offerings: The clash of ideologies has resulted in a perceived failure of Australia's multicultural society. Art: Frank Ling
Frankly execrable Frank, but the pond does look forward to you doing the same for barking mad Jewish fundamentalists some day (and throw in some white nationalist Xians on another day while you're at it).
Frank aside, imagine if you will a headline that proposed "Judaism has exploited our culture of political confusion".
There'd be an uproar in the lizard Oz, and wild-eyed talk of anti-Semitism ...
Our Henry might disingenuously propose that his slur wasn't directed at Islam or Islamics, but instead at "Islamism", but in reality it's cultivating a standard kind of Islamophobia.
And yet if you dared to mention another sort of word ...
Enough already and for a moment the pond thought the hole in bucket man might have been distracted from his jihad because he began by rabbiting on about Pauline and monoculturalism, and in classic style, managed to show another facet of his endless bigotry ...
When Pauline Hanson told the National Press Club in June that Australia “cannot be a multicultural society. We must be monocultural. Australians must live under the one cultural umbrella”, she sparked a political bushfire.
Anthony Albanese answered emphatically: “Modern Australia is not a monoculture, and it never has been … It’s really a nonsense argument to go back to (a monoculture) that was actually never there.” He offered the Socceroos – a 26-man World Cup squad from 15 cultural backgrounds – as proof of Australia’s “rich culture”.
But Hanson reached for the same example to prove the opposite: “When we actually go to the Olympics, we represent our nation, like the Socceroos. It’s all under one flag.”
Meanwhile, the Coalition was at sixes and sevens. Angus Taylor said he did not know what “monoculture” meant, then called it “vague” and conceded he believed in “a version of multiculturalism”.
Nationals leader Matt Canavan admitted he had never heard the word “monoculturalism” before Hanson used it, and reached instead for “a common culture that unites us all”.
Liberal MP Garth Hamilton denounced monoculturalism outright: “I celebrate the cultural divide of my Irish Catholic side as much as my Scottish Protestant side. I will not deny either.”
Yet none of the warring parties paused to define the word on which the whole argument depended: culture. That matters because every position in the dispute shares one buried assumption: that culture is a fixed object – something a society can possess in the singular or plural, count, add or subtract.
At this point the reptiles interrupted with a snap seemingly designed to help Our Henry's cause ...The Socceroos were cited as a prime example of multiculturalism.
The hole in bucket man avoided Thucydides but reverted to Latin and Arendt, as only this kind of pompous pedant does, anything but admit that team was a fine example of multicultural players coming together in common purpose...
Hanson wants one cultural object for everybody. Albanese counts 15 on a football roster and calls the result “rich”. Hamilton finds two within his own inheritance and celebrates them both. Taylor and Canavan cannot say what kind of object they mean at all, which is at least honest.
Nobody in this argument is wrong to think culture matters. But everybody is wrong about what culture is.
The correction is embedded in the word itself. “Culture” descends from the Latin colere – to cultivate – and Hannah Arendt pointed out that cultivation was traditionally understood as the opposite of “fabrication”. A carpenter fabricates a table according to a fixed design. A farmer cultivates a field in accordance with its capacity to grow, and the process is never complete. What is cultivated grows; it is not manufactured.
The pond had to interrupt. That's monstrously absurd, a kind of perverse twist on Rousseau's desire to organise society justly ...
Forget all that "the answer lies in the cultivated soil" nonsense.
Culture can be manufactured, in fact culture, as Brian Eno is alleged to have said, is anything you can get away with, or is what you tolerate, or what you love or embrace, orwhat you can manufacture, as artists and entrepreneurs do on a daily basis ...
But in his usual perverse way, the pompous pedant will have none of it ...
Yet political argument has increasingly made “culture” mean almost the reverse: a thing, complete on arrival, to be protected beneath a single umbrella or arranged, item by item, in an ever-expanding exhibition – in the Prime Minister’s image, tallied on a roster. Each is a picture of fabrication masquerading as cultivation.
That is what makes the Socceroos such a good example – just not for the reason either side supposes. The team does not vindicate Hanson’s umbrella, clamped over everyone regardless of what lies beneath it; still less does it vindicate Albanese’s tally of 15 backgrounds. A roster is merely a list until its members train together, submit to common rules and disciplines, and, without losing their individuality, unite around a shared goal. Only then does co-operation become second nature.
The roster can be assembled; the team must be cultivated. Nor is the result ever final. Without ceasing to be that team, the team changes as it encounters new opponents and as new members learn to work and strive together respecting the rules they have inherited.
First you do the multicultural thing. Then you get the team together.
And there's the heart of that thing.
At no point does Our Henry pause to consider that this team was made up of people coming from different cultures, and also consisted of many people who were of a different colour - the kind that suffer abuse from the mob on the hill - and the usual suspects wouldn't even turn up to speak - though that collage clearly showed it, and in a way that made talk of a "monoculture" a patent absurdity, and required Gina's pet to attempt all kinds of obfuscations.
How does Our Henry try to get out of that dilemma, that pretence that he's colour blind in a dinkum way? In the usual way, by parading a couple of big names...
Tocqueville, asking what sustained American self-government, found the same pattern at the level of an entire nation. It rested not on a possession but on “the whole moral and intellectual state of a people”: its “habits of the heart”, absorbed rather than proclaimed. Ludwig Wittgenstein, asking what makes shared understanding possible at all, called it a form of life – the “bedrock” guiding the flow of a people’s myriad purposes, yet one that slowly but incessantly shifts, like a riverbed beneath the current.
The nearest word for the process by which such a bedrock takes shape among people who did not all inherit it is neither monoculturalism nor multiculturalism. It is acculturation: the reciprocal adjustment of habits and expectations that sustains a cohesive, diverse society.
That process, rather than any official doctrine, is what built modern Australia.
Nah, sorry, multiculturalism might have been peddled by politicians, but it was always more than an official policy.
You only have to look at ancient notions peddled by the pond's old history prof, a certain Russell Ward ...
...The findings of revisionist historians present a strong argument in favour of a reconsideration of the Australian Bush Legend. Richard Waterhouse comments that despite being one of the most multicultural countries in the world, ethnic diversity is not featured. Likewise, women are not represented by the image of the Bushman. On the contrary, the Bushman’s values are ‘explicitly defined in opposition to a feminine domesticity’. Grimshaw traces these ‘feminine’ values back to the writers of the nineteenth century initially responsible for the creation of the Bush Legend, asserting that women represented conservatism and respectability ‘which the young bohemians condemned.’ Aborigines too were excluded from the concept of Australian nationalism. Jeannie Gunn’s autobiography, We of the Never Never, a recommended school text until the 1960s, portrayed aborigines as loveable and entertaining, ‘but outside the real story of Australia – the romance of pioneering.’ Thus despite the contribution of various groups to the development of Australia’s history, the Bush Legend is characterized by a single human image which reflects a narrow strand of white, rural men. Such an image is undeniably incomprehensive and out of touch with any contemporary understanding of egalitarianism. (here)
"Incomprehensive"?
Never mind, the point is that many origin stories carefully exclude certain minorities, or even half the population, in the case of women.
Our Henry went on to commit the same thought crime ...
The English, Scots and Irish, and later successive waves of migrants, did not automatically become a people who could plausibly say “we”.
Hang on, hang on, what about the Welsh?
He scribbles glibly, in a tripping but deeply exclusionist way.
The achievement was partly the spontaneous result of mixing. But it was also deliberate: equal rights were extended and enforced, common institutions built and defended, a shared national story taught and sectarian provocations contained. It demanded hard, reciprocal work, and it succeeded.
Yet the present debate has ceased even to acknowledge that work, for two equally damaging reasons.
Our Henry's slur became the caption for a snap, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese abandoned the expectation that a shared civic life must be cultivated and sustained. Picture: Matt Turner
The pond paused to wonder yet again.
Has there ever been a more divisive, a more fracturing, a more destructive force in Australian life than News Corp?
It's hard to think of one.
And then to prove the point, Our Henry turned to stoning the Islamics ...
The first is a multiculturalism that measures its success as the Prime Minister measured the Socceroos – by the length of the list – while quietly abandoning the older expectation that a shared civic life must be cultivated and sustained, not merely tallied.
The second is an intellectually incoherent cultural relativism. If stoning adulterers and amputating thieves’ hands are barbaric, then a culture that has abandoned those practices is, in that respect, better than one that retains them.
He does realise that stonings were a stock in trade for Jews and Xians, as memorably celebrated in Life of Brian?
He does realise that a good hand cutting was also a part of the bible?
When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one draweth near for to deliver her husband out of the hand of him that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand, and taketh him by the secrets:
Then thou shalt cut off her hand, thine eye shall not pity her. (KJV, Deuteronomy 25:11-12)
Don't get the pond wrong. The pond is all for telling the Jews and the Xians (and the Islamics) to piss off, but does Our Henry realise what he's traducing?
Nah ... it's just nonsense out of the Baden-Powell playbook ...
To deny even that turns humility in judging other cultures into a prohibition on moral judgment – and therefore on moral progress, which necessarily implies that some ways of life are preferable to those they supersede.
Relativism exacts a further, even steeper, cost. Reflecting on French society, Lucien Febvre observed that successful acculturation requires a “complicity of sentiment” – an aspiration by newcomers to belong. But a society trained to claim no more for its own way of life than that it is one option among equally valid others has little with which to attract that aspiration. It can still compel obedience to its laws. It cannot credibly ask to be joined. And now that the “tyranny of distance” no longer forces newcomers to adapt, joining must be chosen – and choice requires compelling reasons.
Yet instead of providing those reasons, multiculturalism has supplied powerful incentives to remain apart: subsidising organisations devoted to preserving separateness and then hailing its persistence as evidence of the policy’s success. The result is utterly predictable: the roster Albanese glorifies masquerading as a team, increasingly at war with itself.
That is the ground on which Islamism has become entrenched: present in Australia’s largest cities in the census sense, but resident in Beirut in every sense that matters, and organised around social norms that reject acculturation as a matter of principle. It is a way of life deliberately constructed to keep its adherents at odds with the wider society while drawing on that society’s welfare state.
Our aim, in the end, should be not stifling uniformity but social cohesion, secured by effectively preventing the importation or perpetuation of ancient hatreds and forging common bonds strong enough to sustain diversity. Achieving that requires an exit from the mono/multi argument, not a new position within it: a return to vigorously promoting, rather than undermining, acculturation and the civic habits that once turned arrivals from everywhere into a nation. Culture was never something Australia could own or count. It has always been, and remains, something Australians have to do.
So long as the reptiles keep on with this pompous pedant, there will never be any kind of social cohesion in the land ...
Meanwhile, the Australian soccer team should count the blessings that allowed skilled players of all kinds in country, in much the same way that many other countries like to build a team and make life grand for the error-laden Infantino
And now as Our Henry began by talking of Gina's pampered pet, a few 'toons ...
The immortal Rowe doubled down ...
Quite possibly ... Threskiornis Strictipennis. White Ibis John Gould (1804 - 1881)
Some days doing herpetological studies really gets the pond down. Some might think this some kind of metaphor for difficulties in life, but it perfectly encapsulates the difficulties of being a herpetology student ...
