With the Islamic Republic of Japan posing a dire, terrifying threat to security, the lizards of Oz showed a stoic indifference this day, and instead did what they do best - put the preening narcissist known as the onion muncher at the top of the digital edition ...
That left the poor old beefy boofhead well down the page, and more of that anon, but first the pond must go with the flow of "Ned's" natter, a relentless promo for his latest tome (the only word to properly evoke his propensity for ponderous pomposity) ...
The header, which somehow managed to suggest that the onion muncher wanted to be sociopathic genocidal ethnic cleanser with a taste for giving South Africa some nukes: ‘Sometimes you’ve got to be a bit Mossad’: Tony Abbott’s bureaucracy battle over borders, MH17 and Barack Obama; The former PM has reveals explosive clashes with Barack Obama over MH17 and defence officials, with his Border Force chief telling him he had to go a ‘bit Mossad’ in his boat turnarounds policy.
The caption for a thankfully uncredited collage, because even AI would struggle if blamed for it: Tony Abbott has revealed his biggest conflicts while prime minister.
The pond has no idea how long this nauseating series of "Ned" book promotions will go on, but offers it as a way of pandering to those who will never fling a shekel in the tome's direction.
Speaking of pandering, this set of insights seems to spend an enormous amount of time contemplating the overweening pride, and self-acknowledged greatness of the onion muncher:
In his interviews for my book, The Twilight of Exceptionalism – the Liberal and Conservative Era 2013-2022, Mr Abbott said the first task facing his government was stopping asylum-seeker boats, but some senior officials were “completely defeatist” and alarmed that Australia would risk conflict with Indonesia.
Mr Abbott said: “At numerous stages, Operation Sovereign Borders could have floundered. The message was, you know, this risks conflict with Indonesia. And I said: ‘Well, so what? That is just the risk we have to run.’ But if that’s your concern, avoiding conflict, you can’t do anything.
Inevitably there had to be a huge shot of the tome's cover, here downsized, The Twilight of Exceptionalism by Paul Kelly.
The pond would have made it smaller if it could have. Won't someone think of the eyeballs!
Now on with the self-congratulations ...
Mr Abbott didn’t want war with Indonesia but he wanted the official mindset to shift in order to commit to his radical military-orientated policy, devised by Scott Morrison as shadow minister. Mr Abbott’s national security adviser, Andrew Shearer, said: “I think there was widespread scepticism whether the policy would work. In parts of the bureaucracy there was a more active level of resistance particularly among some of the government lawyers. For Abbott, this was an existential policy problem, nationally and politically.”
Once again the reptiles interrupted with the very same promotional video, as they kept up the job of separating punters from shekels ...
No apology: Howard fires up over Brittany Higgins in new Paul Kelly book
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As PM, Mr Abbott saw OSB as a test of his government’s viability. He wanted all organs of government – civilian, military and intelligence – active participants to achieve the goal. This is what Mr Morrison delivered as minister for immigration and border protection. It was an unorthodox policy with a military commander in charge – Lieutenant-General Angus Campbell – reporting direct to Mr Morrison with strict operational secrecy about events on the water and the boat turnarounds.
Mr Morrison said: “Operation Sovereign Borders was arguably the most compelling aspect of the change of government in 2013.”
In Mr Abbott’s view, he was faced with varying advice from senior officials. The chief of the Defence Force, General David Hurley, later governor-general, felt obliged to tell Mr Abbott the operation must be consistent with international law, provide for safety at sea and ensure that asylum-seeker boats could be safely turned on the water, as well as warning about ties with Indonesia.
“PM, we can do this, but it is not cost-free,” Mr Hurley said. “I cannot guarantee this can be done in a risk-free way.” That was responsible and prudent advice but frustrating for a PM determined to reverse the existing order.
Then came this startling confession ...
But the official who made the greatest positive impact on Mr Abbott was then Customs and Border Protection Force head Mike Pezzullo, who told Mr Abbott the policy could work, saying “sometimes you’ve got to be a bit Mossad”.
For those who came in late to the story, the disgraced Pezzullo was, in his hey day, a shocking piece of work.
Powerful Home Affairs boss Mike Pezzullo sacked after investigation into backchannel lobbying
Here, have a snap of the miscreant ... Former Customs and Border Protection Force head Mike Pezzullo. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman
Apparently under the Pezzullo "positive impact" and influence, the onion muncher stomped around like an ill-tempered loon...as "Ned's" final gobbet ran on at great length, and the pond decided it would be best left uninterrupted, so other business might eventually get a look in ...
Recalling his visit to Indonesia and meeting with president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Mr Abbott said: “I said to him ‘you know, we are going to turn boats around’, and he didn’t respond one way or the other. He just gave me a benign look, as if to say ‘Well, you do what you must’.” Obviously, Indonesia’s president did not give Australia the green light.
Referring to the boat turnbacks, Mr Morrison said: “Angus Campbell’s advice had been, ‘Once you start this, you can’t stop and you need to get it right; if the first test doesn’t work, it’s over.”
Insiders told the author the covert operations by the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, headed by Nick Warner, involving the disruption of the people-smugglers in Indonesia were as effective as the boat turnarounds in halting the trade. In June 2013, before the change of government, Mr Abbott met Mr Warner and raised the issue of what he called “the black arts” – with Mr Warner explaining ASIS did not do assassinations since such activity was outside its defined scope. ASIS was not Mossad. As PM, Mr Abbott raised with officials the capability for final resort action to “take out” the people-smugglers if policy on the water had failed and this was the only means left. Such discussion became academic once the boats were stopped, but Mr Abbott had been interested in a power that ASIS did not possess.
Our intelligence agencies monitored the Indonesian military closely. An official said: “We watched the Indonesian military. At no stage did Indonesia take any military action to counter what we were doing. They never came near the drop-offs for boat turnbacks.” By February 2014 the asylum-seeker boat trade had ended.
But Mr Abbott’s most intense clash with defence and security advisers came after the shooting down over Ukraine of a Malaysia Airlines plane by pro-Russian rebels, with the loss of everyone on board including 38 Australian citizens or residents. Mr Abbott was determined to recover the bodies and soon demanded that Australian troops be sent to the crash site in a joint mission with the Dutch, given a majority of passengers were from the Netherlands.
Three days after the attack Mr Abbott said: “The site is chaotic, it’s absolutely chaotic. The Ukrainian government does not control the location.” During his head of government phone calls, Mr Abbott was frustrated by President Obama, who gave him a briefing.
Mr Abbott said: “I said: ‘Well that is great, Barack, but what is going to happen? A Russian missile has shot down a civilian plane.’ And he said they were following it closely. I couldn’t accept this. I said: ‘This is not good enough, this is an atrocity and what you’re giving me is a whole lot of excuses.’ He got quite miffed and said: ‘No, no, we are doing stuff.’ And I said: ‘Well come on, you know this is just outrageous.’ ”
The bodies were being treated with indifference. Mr Abbott regarded the defiance of the pro-Russian rebels as intolerable: “I kept saying to the National Security Committee: ‘You know, if they were American what would be happening? And they would say: ‘Oh well, the 82nd Airborne would be there by now’.”
When Mr Abbott made his case in the NSC for a Dutch and Australian troop commitment, he met strong resistance from both the new defence force chief, Mark Binskin, and veteran Defence boss Dennis Richardson. Mr Abbott said: “But to me these bureaucrats in uniform, they are not warriors. He (Binskin) was very, very unhappy about the whole thing.”
Air Chief Marshall Binskin had reason to be unhappy since NATO was telling him: “Don’t do anything silly and don’t escalate.” Yet he was facing a PM determined to escalate, saying: “I need a military plan and a military option.” Mr Abbott found it intolerable being told by the defence chiefs there was little Australia could do. An impatient Mr Abbott challenged Air Chief Marshall Binskin directly. Mr Abbott said: “If hostile forces are preventing the recovery of your dead, you have got to go and take them back by force.” Mr Abbott complained in his office about spending $30bn annually on a military budget for no impact when it mattered. At the heart of this dispute was Mr Abbott’s conviction that the defence force must be used more readily and more effectively when faced with a strategic or moral crisis. Describing Mr Abbott, Mr Richardson said: “Tony Abbott was very much a person of action. His first instinct was: What can I do? He was not inclined to stand on the sidelines. That sometimes led him to jumping to a conclusion that was unrealistic.”
Air Chief Marshall Binskin’s caution was warranted. The crash site was controlled by pro-Russian forces located near the border and Mr Abbott was proposing a military intervention in a potentially hostile situation. Mr Shearer said: “There was one meeting where Abbott made it clear he felt he was being stonewalled and was not taken seriously by the defence and military chiefs.”
The proposal was for an Australian-Dutch light armoured brigade to enter the conflict zone and secure the site for the removal of the bodies. The debate within the NSC extended over three days.
But Mr Abbott faced resistance from virtually all defence and military advisers. Throughout the process Mr Richardson systematically outlined the problems with the military option and provided sustained advocacy for Mr Abbott to pull back. At the peak of the debate Mr Abbott rang former defence force chief Angus Houston, whom he had appointed as the government’s envoy in Ukraine. As dawn was breaking over Kyiv, Air Chief Marshall Houston strongly advised Mr Abbott against a troop commitment: “I said a better option is a police commitment – it would be acceptable to all parties and would be able to recover the bodies. I said it was important to eliminate the risk of a miscalculation. We had a long discussion; it was robust but respectable. I was very concerned the Russians would see it as provocative by Australia while a police contingent would be non-threatening. At the end of a long conversation, Tony said ‘okay, Angus, we’ll go with the police option’.”
Mr Abbott was relieved. He said the trauma led to his “most difficult night” as PM. He said: “I kept thinking: Do I really want 1000 Australians to be within 25 miles of the Russian artillery? Thank God, the bodies started moving the next day.”
The pond felt its strength failing ...
Onwards and upwards, but as noted at the start, where did all that onion muncher narcissism leave the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way?
Almost as a lizard Oz side note, a curiosity, what with his toothless attack on Pauline not nearly as grand as the onion muncher demolishing of Indonesia and the Kenyan socialist ...
‘Eternity of pain’: Taylor takes on Hanson in major speech
Opposition Leader Angus Taylor says One Nation is a ‘column of smoke’ that will send the country broke, in his biggest attack yet on Pauline Hanson.
By Greg Brown
Oh they tried to make up to him by giving him a slot on the extreme far right, but even here he was at the bottom of the page, what with Killer Creighton top dog...
If you’re considering supporting One Nation, there are at least three reasons to think again.
By Angus Taylor
Contributor
It was just a rehash of a gig at Polonius's palace ...
Angus Taylor is Leader of the Opposition. This is an edited extract from a speech he delivered at The Sydney Institute on Thursday evening.
The speech was constructed in the manner of a school essay, with the beefy boofhead plodding his way through three key points.
As it's in the intermittent archive, the pond contented itself with a teaser trailer ...
By golly, it's not just a hatred of windmills, he's keen to let horses f*ck up the country (*google bot sentient).
No wonder that lettuce is keen to get back in the game ...
What else? Well there was a bog standard contribution to the never ending jihad against the ABC...
ABC editorial director Gavin Fang dropped every buzzword in the book at the royal commission into antisemitism – but one candid admission cut through the corporate spin.
By James Madden
Media Editor
And Ben was packing it in his usual way, with Albo at last scoring a reptile nod for doing the dance with an authoritarian Hindu nationalist ...
Anthony Albanese is all the way with Narendra Modi, as the PM puts faith in Indian leader
Australia needs all the friends it can get right now in a more uncertain and dangerous world. The same goes for India.
By Ben Packham
Foreign affairs and defence correspondent
The immortal Rowe had some thoughts on that one ...
But the pond didn't have the time for any of that because Killer was on the loose, and he wasn't having any of that furriner nonsense, whether curry eater or otherwise ...
The header: How Labor exploits the economic myth of skilled migrants; The greatest mystery is why this economically damaging system, built on the myth of skills, has carried on for so long.
The caption: Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Killer could only manage three minutes but he was at his devastating IPA best.
All the current talk of the joys of having an Indian diaspora in the country clearly sent Killer right off, and he went full nativist, as if born to become member of the Know Nothing party ...
No doubt her confidence was also boosted by the sight of some 40,000 Indian-Australians – a lot of potential and actual marginal seat voters – who packed into Melbourne’s Marvel Stadium on Thursday evening. As one of Labor’s most prominent political strategists, Kos Samaras, pointed out this week, in Victoria “birthplace has become one of the sharpest predictors of the Labor vote”.
“Among Australian-born voters, Labor sits on 24 (per cent). Among voters born overseas, it’s 35. That 11-point gap is Labor’s firewall. Note, that’s 35 with the UK included, which means it’s higher within non-English-speaking background cohorts,” he explained.
It’s no wonder the Premier boasted of how proud she was that Victoria is home to the largest Indian diaspora in the country, at 370,000 strong. Last September she spent a week in China reportedly to demonstrate her solidarity with the similarly electorally powerful Chinese community.
Damn you, you bloody furriners, don't imagine you're welcome, Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan's original post welcoming the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi misspelled his name.
Killer decided he'd offer a nativist cold shower, an IPA braying of the first water ...
“Economically, we need immigration. We need the skills,” Immigration Minister Tony Burke said in May, while extolling the nation’s “well-targeted immigration program”. It turns out this oft-repeated claim has been a gigantic misconception for years.
Of 2.4 million permanent visas issued between the 2012 and 2025 financial years, fewer than 779,000 (32 per cent) were actually allocated to skilled migrants, according to new Institute of Public Affairs research, published this week.
That’s because around half of the so-called “skilled” intake – which is around two-thirds of the total – is made up of the spouses, partners and children of the skilled immigrants themselves. In other words, the vast bulk of immigrants coming to Australia were never chosen for their skills beyond choosing dependency wisely.
Job vacancies were 45 per cent higher in May than before the pandemic, according to ABS data out earlier this week, suggesting the massive influx of non-skilled labour over the past few years has done little to plug alleged shortages. Vacancies were 90 per cent higher in healthcare and social assistance than before the pandemic, making a mockery of South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas’s claim immigrants were necessary to “wipe your bum”. That logic would be news to Japan, of course, whose elderly population is doing just fine.
Say what, the elderly in the Islamic Republic of Japan are doing just fine?
The pond had to reach back some considerable time for Norimitsu Onishi's poignant, award-winning story in the both siderest NY Times ... A Generation in Japan Faces a Lonely Death (*intermittent archive link)
Talk about bleak ...
Sheesh, the pond would settle for a foreign born carer every day of the week, in much the same way that the pond's mother discovered that an Islamic from the Philippines came in mighty handy, and was a nice person to boot, in her hour of need.
Quick, a distracting snap ... Immigration Minister Tony Burke addresses the House of Representatives. Picture: Hilary Wardhaugh / Getty Images
Killer carried on with the No Nothing vibe ...
Is it any wonder, then, that Australian living standards have begun to rapidly decline? It’s entirely possible a significant chunk of Australia’s non-skilled immigration is a net drain on local taxpayers.
The OECD’s International Migration Outlook from 2021, which included Australia, found the economic contribution of immigrants was “persistently small during the 2006‑18 period … for most countries” and could be negative.
About half a dozen European nations, including Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland, have introduced voluntary financial incentives for some migrants to return home.
“It would be highly unlikely” Australians would ever have agreed to an immigration system that’s led to more than 10 per cent of the population living here indefinitely on temporary visas, Parkinson added.
The idea bureaucrats in Canberra can determine “shortages” of various occupations at all let alone in a timely manner is ludicrous. Auctioneers are on the current immigration “skilled occupation” list, while home building trades are not, despite the supposed housing supply crisis. Only half of skilled immigrants were still working in the occupation they nominated one year after they applied for their visa, according to 2024 Grattan Institute research.
The reptiles slipped in a snap of said Martin Parkinson ...
...but the pond would have much preferred something visual in line with the Killer's No Nothing vibe, such as an 1854 Boston poster found here...
That's more like it, and it was downhill for the Killer after that, with those bloody pesky, difficult, uppity furriners sent packing...
To borrow from outgoing British Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer, native-born Australians, especially in the capital cities, appear to feel increasingly like strangers in their own country at the same time as record inflation saps their purchasing power.
The interests of big business and the higher education sector (which profit from ever larger immigration) appear to have overwhelmed the national interest. But mass immigration changes political incentives too.
Brisbane City Council, the largest in the country, has come under pressure from Canberra in recent months to speed up citizenship ceremonies, according to a very well-placed source. Let’s hope that has nothing remotely to do with locking in votes.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.
Exactly so ...
That left the pond with just one final duty, it being, as every herpetology student and Molesworth knos, Our Henry day.
Unfortunately this day the hole in bucket man went for Jew v. Jew action, which while entirely suited to the Australian Daily Zionist News, left the pond indifferent, with the chance of references to Thucydides much reduced ...
The header: Louise Adler distorts history and betrays the Jewish cause; Adler recycles Soviet lies, misrepresents her own father’s work and replaces historical truth with crude left wing ideology.
The caption: Louise Adler appearing on 7.30 following her resignation from Adelaide Writers' Week. Picture: ABC
Ah, it's the old Commie swine Soviet slur ...
Our Henry indulged in a furious five minute fulmination, which might well have pleased Benji and the far right fundamentalists currently in charge of the government of Israel, and which served as a most excellent distraction from the ethnic cleansing currently going down ...
Adler clearly believes she is dealing with ignorant fools. But historical reality is less accommodating. For what Adler advances is not a stray remark; it is a categorical claim, stated as settled fact – one serious historians of the Holocaust have spent decades investigating. Their conclusion is unequivocal: Adler’s assertions of “Zionist collaboration and collusion with Nazis” are demonstrably false.
It is undoubtedly true that Jewish organisations, including those of the Zionist movement, had contacts with the German authorities throughout the 1930s, and even during the war, some of which produced formal agreements.
The best known is the 1933 Haavara Agreement, under which German Jews emigrating to Palestine could transfer part of their assets in the form of German export goods.
The reptiles stirred up Our Henry ... A social media post by Louise Adler. Picture: Instagram
The hole in bucket man went historical, but as for Thucydides, forget it, not this time ...
The alternative was to leave them in a situation where all of their rights were being removed, their livelihoods shattered and their magnificent cultural heritage demolished.
Those negotiations always took place under conditions of overwhelming coercion. The Jewish organisations had no bargaining power: they confronted a regime that could confiscate their property, imprison their leaders and destroy their communities at will. As Nicosia puts it, “to suppose that any Jewish organisation in Hitler’s Germany prior to the ‘final solution’ had the option of refusing to work on some level with the state is fantasy”.
That is why Adler’s language of “collaboration” is not simply inflammatory but analytically incorrect. As historians have repeatedly argued, accommodation – concessions extracted under duress, in the hope of limiting catastrophe – is one thing; collaboration, which presupposes a measure of freedom, a shared objective, or an anticipated benefit, entirely another.
The arrangements Jewish organisations reached were “an avoidance response to threat”, wrote Helen Fein in her classic study of the determinants of Jewish survival during the Holocaust; they were, in that sense, quite different from collaboration, which requires “reward, incentive, or mutuality of goals”. To negotiate with a gunman threatening your life is not to be his accomplice.
Whatever moral anguish those negotiations entailed – and the Zionists involved repeatedly recorded the torment of bargaining with their persecutors – the plain historical fact is that they saved lives. The Haavara Agreement enabled some 60,000 German Jews to leave the Reich, taking with them at least part of their assets, in the years before escape became all but impossible. Likewise, the Kasztner-Becher negotiations, Raoul Wallenberg’s protective passports and the international pressure that halted the Budapest deportations in July 1944 are widely credited with saving tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews.
The reptiles slipped in an AV distraction which continued Our Henry's pogrom (and which offered another chance to add to the reptiles' never ending ABC jihad): Former ambassador to Israel Dave Sharma says he thought the ABC’s interview with Adelaide Writers’ Week Director Louise Adler was “one-sided”. Ms Adler – a Jewish woman herself – discussed Israel’s military operation against Hamas in Gaza on the ABC, saying it is “incumbent upon humanity” to look at what’s happening in Gaza and to say, “we will not accept this, we will say no, not in our name”. “It didn’t present different perspectives on this conflict,” Mr Sharma told Sky News host Sharri Markson. “I thought the analogy of the Holocaust was incredibly distasteful and entirely wrong, factually. “There is one party to this conflict who does want to commit genocide, and that is Hamas.”
Actually Hamas is too inept, too incapable to put together a decent genocide.
As for the highly esteemed, full disrespect Sharri?
Isn't she better off peddling nonsense in relation to restaurant stings?
What to say? All the pond can note is that Jew on Jew action is much more virulent than the average bout of anti-Semitism ...
So where does the accusation of “a long history of Zionist collaboration and collusion with Nazis” come from, if not from the historical record? It comes from the Soviet campaign to delegitimise Zionism.
That campaign began in the early 1950s, but, as William Korey and Izabella Tabarovsky each meticulously documented, it gained fresh momentum as the 40th anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany approached. It had a clear purpose: to neutralise the inconvenient fact of Stalin’s pact with Hitler, divert attention from Soviet antisemitism and strengthen the Soviet links with the violently antisemitic Arab states.
Spearheaded by the USSR’s Anti-Zionist Committee, the campaign – which featured pamphlets with titles such as The Criminal Alliance of Zionism and Nazism – was conceived, financed and exported by Moscow through allied organisations across the West, including Australia. Robert Wistrich described the resulting propaganda for what it was: “grotesque Soviet libels”.
It is no accident that one of the campaign’s most prominent advocates was Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority. His 1983 doctoral thesis, submitted in Moscow under Soviet auspices, advanced the claim that Zionist leaders had encouraged the Holocaust for their own political ends – a central theme of Soviet propaganda that he helped transform into an integral part of Palestinian rhetoric.
Adler is therefore once again repeating falsehoods manufactured by the Kremlin, transmitted internationally through the Soviet anti-Zionist apparatus and, from there, infused into the zeitgeist of contemporary leftism.
What makes this grotesque, however, is that Adler’s claims are contradicted by her own father. Jacques Adler’s scholarly account of the Jews of wartime Paris shows that Zionist responses to the Nazi occupation ranged from Hashomer Hatzair’s determination to fight alongside the Resistance to Kadmi Cohen’s attempt to secure legal recognition from the Germans.
Cue a distracting snap, A picture taken just after the liberation by the Soviet army in January, 1945 shows a group of children wearing concentration camp uniforms. Picture: AP Photo
Cue a final blast ...
That Adler would misrepresent her father’s overall finding – which bears no relationship to the sweeping indictment of Zionism that his daughter now advances in his name – is truly extraordinary.
Yet it is no accident. For what this charade exposes is not Zionism. It is a habit of mind. Adler accuses others of distorting Holocaust history. But she does precisely that herself. She flattens those trapped in the machinery of destruction into ideological caricatures, instead of recognising them as human beings desperately improvising under a gun. Hers is judgment delivered from an armchair upon people in a furnace, by someone who will never have to discover, as Conrad’s Lord Jim puts it, what “can be wrung out of us only by some cruel catastrophe”.
Nor is this an isolated lapse. It is a recurring feature of the left-wing political culture Adler epitomises: the reduction of history to moral theatre, in which what actually happened matters only insofar as it can be mobilised in today’s ideological struggles. History, in this mindset, ceases to be a factual inquiry into the past and becomes a weapon in the politics of the present.
The Holocaust – the greatest catastrophe ever to befall the Jewish people – deserves better. Its realities must be confronted, not conscripted, remembered, not rewritten. That is the obligation its horrors impose on us all. In choosing to ignore it, Louise Adler has not merely devalued her own father’s lifework; she has betrayed the ideals she so loudly purports to embrace.
The pond realises that once Our Henry, a devoted Zionist, gets on his hobby horse for the Australian Daily Zionist News, there's no stopping him.
Sure, it makes risible his blather about being keen on factual inquiry, but whatever ...
Meanwhile, the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank goes on, a new genocide is being conducted, and the Greater Israel project continues unmolested, and Our Henry shows an almost infinite taste for the sort of splintering schismatics that made for a great Monty Python sketch ... and all the pond can do is mourn the way that yet another chance for genuine entertainment has gone missing in the lizard Oz:
And now, in the search for mindless, meaningless entertainment, this ...
