In which the swishing Switzer goes full Pauline, Killer of the IPA offers more Killernomics, and Our Henry, in being determinedly apolitical, ends up being fiercely political (go Israel) ...

 

It'd be a real tragedy for the pond if Lord Downer was dragooned into running the Liberal party.

Opening the week with his ancient bleats nicely bookends a week of reptile follies, with Our Henry's ruminations closing proceedings out on the Friday ...

Oh that's cruel ... please save His Lordship from that fate, for the sake of the pond and the lizard Oz hive mind.

The reptiles didn't seem to care. 

Instead it was onwards and upwards with the indefatigable Geoff celebrating the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way ...

It's always a relief to see signs that the reptiles still care ... and luckily the intermittent archive was working this morning ...

Angus Taylor’s not going to die wondering in fight with Pauline Hanson for centre-right voters
The Opposition Leader will use his first budget-in-reply speech to lay down economic and immigration gauntlets to Anthony Albanese, Jim Chalmers and Pauline Hanson.
By Geoff Chambers

Over on the extreme far right, Rodger took up the cause that was at the top of the lizard Oz "news" section (the pond uses the word loosely):

ISIS brides pose the mother of all political dilemmas
As another group of women and children returns from Syria, debate is intensifying over security risks, rehabilitation and political responsibility.
By Rodger Shanahan

The sandgropers also scored an outing, which the pond should note to boost its readership in that remote land from one to perhaps five:

Why Saffioti’s public service cuts barely touch WA’s growing debt
Western Australia’s $579m in belt-tightening sounds impressive until you realise the debt pile will grow 18 times faster than the savings.
By Paul Garvey
Senior Reporter

Meanwhile, the reptiles thought that roughing up the other Jimbo was jolly good fun and worthy of a whimsical headline:

Cor blimey, what a caper ...(and dig what friends of the rich and useful tools get to fly in) ...

Farrer by-election
Corflute blimey! Hanson ‘stands by her man’ in booth brouhaha
‘I’m going to shake his hand’: Pauline Hanson to meet volunteer who scuffled with James Paterson
Senator Hanson held a press conference beside the ‘sexy’ Cirrus G7 aircraft gifted to her by Gina Rinehart upon her arrival in Albury on Thursday afternoon, as the countdown begins for the high-stakes by-election.
By Elizabeth Pike

Perhaps it was the sight of the plane, and a fit of envy that brought out the swishing Switzer, and he celebrated Gina's new sock puppet in fine style:

The header: Why One Nation can no longer be dismissed as a protest sideshow; Pauline Hanson’s party has tapped into voter discontent ignored by the major parties — and the Farrer by-election may test its growing reach.

The caption for the jingoistic, flag-waving snap: Pauline Hanson’s One Nation continues to draw support from voters disillusioned with the major parties. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Whenever the pond sees a surfeit of flags, there's an immediate surge of nausea. If you grew up under empire, you had any number of reasons to avoid the Colonel Blimps wandering about, shoving flags up their rectums and those of others.

Not so with the swishing Switzer.

Still on his rehabilitation tour with the reptiles, those flags seemingly set him off, and he was all in on elevating Pauline to centre stage.

Apparently he just loves himself some fear of furriners, white Xian nationalism, and fossil fuels, or so it would seem from his bleating about "ordinary concerns":

Every so often, democratic politics is shaken by insurgent movements that give voice to grievances long ignored by the governing class. Sometimes such forces flare and fade. Occasionally they alter a nation’s political landscape.
Donald Trump did so with MAGA in the US; Nigel Farage did so in Britain through the UK Independence Party and now Reform UK. 

Um, be a little careful what you wish for?

In Australia, the most durable expression of this phenomenon has been Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. The instinct of the political establishment is usually to dismiss such movements as crude, backward and outrageous. They challenge assumptions long embedded in mainstream discourse and reopen questions elites would prefer closed.
For years, Hanson was treated in precisely this fashion. Much of the media and political class regarded her concerns about immigration, national cohesion and energy security as unworthy of serious debate. Yet Hanson’s appeal, including across (of all places) Victoria, has not been difficult to understand. She speaks for many Australians who believe politics has become managerial, remote and deaf to ordinary concerns. She gives voice to voters who feel looked down upon by those who govern them.
Many of those drawn to Hanson are lazily caricatured as racists and xenophobes. In truth, what often animates them is something different: the belief that the political class has become detached from the people, and that the nation is governed by men and women with little understanding of the concerns, interests or anxieties of Middle Australia.

Nah, in truth, it isn't lazy to caricature them as racists and xenophobes.

If you haven't worked out where Pauline is coming from, what she uses as rabble-rousing triggers, you haven't been paying attention.

Dressing her up in Switzer's fine words  - donning the MAGA cap like Dame Slap did - is exactly the sort of nonsense that gave the world King Donald.

Now back to that bigotry ...

For decades, polling has shown deep unease about high immigration, particularly in working-class suburbs and regional centres already under economic strain. Whether one agreed with their anxieties or not, they were genuine. Many felt no major party – not the Liberals, not Labor and certainly not the teals or Greens – represented them. One Nation does. Their concerns are practical and immediate: stagnant wages, scarce housing, overcrowded schools, energy dependency abroad, mounting pressure on hospitals and public services, and a sense that Australia is losing control of its borders and direction. Yet too much of Australia’s political and media classes have often shown scant interest in these anxieties.
Too many inhabit a comfortable bubble, seeing chiefly the benefits of globalisation and the energy transition while rarely confronting the social strains borne elsewhere. Politicians such as Anthony Albanese, along with much of the commentariat, can appear quick to condemn those who challenge elite orthodoxies, and slow to understand why such dissent arises. Nor is this uniquely Australian. In Britain, prominent liberal intellectual David Goodhart argued years ago that large-scale immigration risked weakening national solidarity and straining the welfare state. Though he plainly was no racial ideologue, many within London’s political and literary circles treated him as beyond respectable opinion.

David Goodhart?

The Road to Somewhere author argues that the liberating impact of feminism has harmed our children in a book shot through with claims that don’t stand up to scrutiny

So it's not just furriners ruining everything, it's those bloody feminists, and poor old Malware must also share the blame ...

That helps explain why One Nation evolved from a protest vehicle in the late 1990s into a broader symbol of revolt against an aloof political class. Founded in 1997, it surged at the 1998 Queensland state election before fading. Its revival came amid disenchantment with Malcolm Turnbull’s prime ministership and the mood of the 2016 federal election.
Rather than reaching out to those voters, Turnbull largely behaved as though they scarcely existed. The strategy failed badly and nearly cost the Coalition power after just one term. Indeed, Turnbull’s patrician and often condescending manner helped drive many working-class and lower-middle-class Liberal supporters into Hanson’s arms.
Voters disillusioned by professional politicians, broken promises, identity politics and cancel culture are turning instead to a figure whose greatest asset is unmistakeable authenticity. Hanson may be blunt, but she has restored passion, argument and consequence to a political culture that too often seems bloodless and stage-managed.
For this, she has paid a heavy price. Hanson has endured relentless hostility from sections of the press and broadcast media, frequently portrayed not merely as wrong but beyond the pale. She has been labelled racist and fascist, compared with Hitler and even served time in jail. She has endured even more hostile media coverage than anything encountered by Malcolm Fraser, John Howard or Tony Abbott.
The reason for such visceral contempt is plain enough: Hanson has reintroduced something increasingly scarce in Australian life – genuine political opposition. On immigration, climate policy, cultural identity and the failures of public institutions, she challenges the consensus views long treated as settled.

About this time in the martyrdom of St Pauline there's usually a billy goat butt needed, and sure enough, it came in the form of "none of this requires romanticising" ...

None of this requires romanticising One Nation or pretending it offers the answers to our nation’s productivity malaise and chronic debt. 

And as sure as night follows day, a token billy goat butt must be immediately followed by another than renders the first one pointless:

But protest parties need not be competent ministries to exert political importance. Their role is often to expose failures that established parties would rather ignore.
The Farrer by-election on Saturday may mark a milestone. Should One Nation perform strongly, it will become harder to dismiss the party as a ramshackle sideshow. It may instead claim its place as Australia’s principal insurgent force in a volatile political age.
Finally, a confession. I long underestimated both Hanson’s wider appeal and One Nation’s capacity to emerge as the principal vehicle of opposition to the Albanese government. I placed greater faith in the ability of the Coalition parties to recover and resume their traditional role as the country’s main alternative administration.
That may still happen. For now, however, circumstances are changing. Across much of the democratic world, established centre-right parties have weakened or splintered. As British journalist Andrew Neil has observed: “The mainstream right is out of kilter with the tenor of the times. In government, it often let conservatives down by not being very conservative.” No wonder insurgent populist movements have grown in strength. Australia may not prove immune to the same realignment. Hanson increasingly reflects that broader trend – one that could gather considerable momentum should One Nation capture Farrer this weekend.
Tom Switzer is presenter of the Switzerland podcast.

So we should be making plans with Nigel, King Donald and Pauline?

Oh come now, under the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way, the Liberal party is thriving and brand new guardians are standing by to usher in a new era...

And so to a rather short dose of Killernomics:

The header: Why Labor’s CGT reform plan looms as another bungle; Capital gains tax speculation has revived debate about inflation, housing affordability and whether Labor could accidentally lower tax revenue.

The caption for that snap of that dreadful Jimbo person, always pointing and harassing the reptiles: Treasurer Jim Chalmers faces growing debate over possible changes to capital gains tax settings. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Devotees of Killer will recall that he was very big on suggesting Australia follow Argentina and Milei.

The pond wondered how that was going and luckily a few days ago the Financial Times ran an update:

Argentina’s Javier Milei battered by scandals and slowing economy
President’s popularity falls as officials face graft allegations and unemployment climbs (*intermittent archive link)

There's lots of graphs and things, but the pond thought the wrap-up was an encouraging sign of the times:

We don't hate journalists enough? 

Lucky that Killer is from the IPA and so excluded from the cull?

And now, before plunging in, the pond should note that this day, for all the columnists noted herein, the reptiles provided absolutely no visual distractions, whether snaps or AVs.

The pond has no idea why, but will follow suit.

Stand by for a huge gobbet of Killernomics, IPA style ...

After last year’s federal election, I tried to look on the bright side: Perhaps a Labor government with a large majority might have the courage to simplify the tax system or slash federal spending, prioritising the nation’s long-term interests over the risk of losing a few far-left marginal seats in the capital cities.
Jim Chalmers’ fifth federal budget next week is likely to confirm, unfortunately, that nothing of the sort has or will happen any time soon, except in one intriguing case: capital gains tax.
It is possible that poor financial literacy among the left-wing commentariat could see the government actually improve the tax system, however modestly or accidentally. It appears poised to reform CGT in a way that could reduce rather than increase tax revenue.
For months Labor figures have been fuelling speculation the so-called CGT discount would be pared back, perhaps to 33 per cent from 50 per cent, as part of the government’s plan to “do something” about “intergenerational equity”.
Far from trimming an obviously unfair concession, such a policy would have led to a massive increase in tax, so it’s been pleasing to read speculation that the government won’t be doing that after all. It will instead, apparently, be reverting to an earlier method that taxed only real capital gains (after accounting for inflation) that was introduced by the Hawke government in 1985.
That would actually be an improvement over the prevailing and widely misunderstood CGT discount introduced by the Howard government in 1999, which has been accused of providing an unfair advantage to housing investors in particular.
Yet despite its name, the CGT discount is often not a discount at all compared to the previous indexation method, despite widespread perception that the earlier method was a tougher regime. Which is better depends on how well an investment has performed relative to the change in the CPI over the investment period. Obviously, the indexation strips out inflation, while the discount method taxes the entire nominal capital gain, albeit after applying a 50 per cent discount.
Intuitively, if inflation is high relative returns (specifically, if it makes up more than half the nominal gain), the previous 1985 system, which adjusted the purchase price for inflation, would offer the lower tax rate for investors. To be sure, the CGT discount represented a big reduction in tax for most investors when introduced in 1999. Back then, inflation hovered around 2 per cent, where it stayed until the Covid era. At the same time, major asset classes such as property and shares were belting out great returns, often above 10 per cent a year.
Even under those conditions, it wasn’t always better than indexation though, as IPA research recently illustrated. Consider the unfortunate investor who sold a typical investment property in late 2012 after holding it for five years, during which national dwelling prices gained 7.4 per cent while the CPI increased by 14.5 per cent. That seller would have made a significant real loss, yet still owed capital gains tax.
Under the indexation method, by contrast, he or she would have paid zero tax. Blue-chip ASX200 share investors who sold in June 2025 after four years would have faced a similar tax fate with stockmarket returns failing to keep pace with the CPI.
All this is why the speculation about a revival of indexation is puzzling, if promising. The sort of high-inflation environment we are entering would in fact make the prevailing “discount” more punishing than the old Hawke-Keating system. Moreover, asset prices are at record levels in many markets, potentially pointing to a period of weak nominal returns.
If the government is hoping to raise more revenue than it currently forecasts to raise from CGT, this is a very strange way to go about it. Whatever the theoretical merits of reviving a CGT that allows for inflation, doing so will do next to nothing to improve “housing affordability” or “intergenerational equity” – the two meaningless political goals of our age. Who wouldn’t want homes to be more affordable or generations to be treated more fairly?

Even the most partisan analyses suggest shifting the CGT rate would have a price impact on dwellings of a few per cent at most. New Zealand has had among the highest house price growth in the world in recent years without any capital gains tax at all. It is disappointing the government hasn’t adopted more creative tax reforms that could have increased revenue and housing supply, such as adopting a US-style step-up in basis.
In Australia, inheriting assets doesn’t trigger a change in the cost base to the time of the previous owner’s death, as it does in the US. This creates a capital gains “lock-in” effect at death that discourages families in Australia, for instance, from ever selling their assets, lest they trigger a CGT event that is massive.
Such a reform here could see a dramatic increase in the number of home sales that boosts housing supply and, in turn, possibly government revenues too. Alas, any such move would be seen as a sop to the rich, and so is unlikely to ever emerge.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

Trust the IPA to offer a sop to the rich in the guise of benevolence for all? Sure can.

The pond can't recall the last time that the pond presented a reptile without any visual (or verbal) interruptions, and felt an urgent need for some relief ...

That's better.

And now maestro, drum roll please, because it's the turn of the hole in bucket man to take the stage and rant into the ether in a decidedly political way about how politics should not apply to y'artz ...

The header: The Biennale of hate, folly and mediocrity; When politics takes over, artistic quality sinks into a stinking canal.

The caption for the stinking art: The Venice Biennale has been engulfed in controversy over politics, censorship and artistic freedom. Picture: AP

Anyone expecting any more illustrative snaps of the artworks on hand will be bitterly disappointed. Again the reptiles exercised their new "no distracting snaps" rule.

And those wondering what set Our Henry off - he hasn't ever shown signs of being bigly into the y'artz - should look no further than Israel's extensive efforts at ethnic cleansing, and the fuss that has caused in Venice. You don't have to scratch hard to find the politics lurking on the surface.

But Our Henry plays it cool and is relatively sotto voce about that aspect.

Instead he comes at it crab style, so Mussolini comes in handy ...

The Venice Biennale did not so much open this week as lurch into crisis after its jury – chaired by Brazil’s Solange Farkas – resigned on the eve of its launch.
Beneath the rhetoric lies a stark asymmetry. Farkas, a far-left activist with longstanding links to Russian cultural institutions, pressed for Russia’s return (it had withdrawn in 2022) and Israel’s exclusion. The Biennale’s leadership baulked; the European Union, backed by the Italian government, threatened to withdraw its €2m ($3.25m) subsidy. The jury walked out, invoking, as is now de rigueur, “artistic freedom”, while pursuing its own selective ban.
None of this is sudden. It is the culmination of years of encroaching politicisation, and it recalls something no less disquieting: the period in which the Biennale willingly served Benito Mussolini’s regime, its claim to universality enlisted in the service of ideological orthodoxy and vicious antisemitism.
Founded in 1895, the Biennale was brought under direct fascist control in 1930, when Antonio Maraini – secretary of the Fascist trade union of fine arts – was installed as its secretary-general. A 1938 decree completed what its architects hailed as the exhibition’s “genuinely Fascist” transformation, with prizes for “Maternity”, “the poetry of labour” and the “March on Rome” soon displacing aesthetic judgment altogether.
The 1938 laws excluding Jews from public life dealt the final blow. Having visited the 1937 Munich exhibition, Maraini urged Mussolini to impose a Nazi-style tightening of cultural discipline. He then purged Jewish artists and critics from the Biennale’s rolls, rendering it entirely “Judenfrei”. With the outbreak of war, the exhibition became a mere arm of Fascist propaganda.
The 1948 Biennale, the first post-war edition, set out to decisively turn the page. Its content was conspicuously non-political, dominated by Peggy Guggenheim’s collection – Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Piet Mondrian – and master retrospectives. Oversight was vested in brilliant Italian critics, including the recently returned Lionello Venturi, whose orientation was unapologetically aesthetic. And the prizes – Georges Braque (1948), Henri Matisse (1950), Raoul Dufy (1952) – honoured artists Fascism had despised.
However, two decades later, politics roared back. The immediate catalyst was the anti-American protests that convulsed the Biennale in 1968. But the underlying causes ran deeper than a reaction to Vietnam, civil rights or feminism.

At this point the hole in bucket man's theories about y'artz really kicks into gear ...helped by the delusion that somehow art  can be tidily cleaved from politics and never the twain should mix, and what you need is "beauty, expression and formal mastery", because, you know, an exquisite portrait of Marie Antoinette has absolutely no political meaning. 

Nor do any portraits of clerics or royalty or nobility, they're just more examples of beauty and formal mastery ...

Repudiating the past and binding itself to the imperative of incessant novelty, a new generation of radical artists dismissed beauty, expression and formal mastery as inherently reactionary.
Emptied of intrinsic interest and stripped of aesthetic moorings, the art object required a new substrate. Leftist politics – emancipation, anti-capitalism, identity – supplied it, offering inexhaustible content, a standing warrant for novelty, and a claim to relevance that aesthetic judgment alone could not sustain.
Where religious art once served the church, secular art would now serve a political theology, with quasi-sacred authority transferred from revelation to revolution. And the more transgressive the works, the keener the market proved to be.
The 1973 reform of the Biennale’s governing statute did not arrest the radicalisation; it ratified it by granting artists, curators and arts administrators an unprecedented degree of control.
The reform’s underlying assumption was that the arts community would champion quality, variety and creativity. Yet artists are no less susceptible than anyone else to the impulse to impose their convictions on those who disagree. Once the arts-curatorial complex accepted the claim that the idea of an art world “isolated from broader social and political issues” was, as feminist art historian Whitney Chadwick put it, “a fiction” – and that refusing engagement endorsed an imperialist, patriarchal and racist status quo – space for deviant opinion rapidly disappeared.
The consequence is that rather than being the victims of political repression, artists, curators and arts administrators have become its most zealous enforcers. Operating as agents of exclusion, they ruthlessly police orthodoxy through grant denial, no-platforming and reputational ruin. And when challenged, the art-curatorial-bureaucratic ensemble hypocritically cloaks the demand for unswerving ideological alignment in the language of freedom of expression.
The damage is first to the social fabric. It is utter nonsense to claim, as so many do, that “art has always been political.” Until recently, no more than 5-10 per cent of leading works carried an explicit political message, even at the Venice Biennale.

Butt, billy goat butt, explicit political messages are entirely beside the point when any artist worth their salt can load up a work with implicit messages.

While Picasso might paint a Guernica in protest, his allegedly apolitical works can be read as containing loaded political meanings.

Whatever an artist might think they're doing, the viewer (or the reader) will come to their own viewpoint on the meaning of a work.

You don't have to go the full Godard:

The problem is not to make political films, but to make films politically. (here)

That way lies meretricious nonsense and full-flown Maoism.

But in its day Breathless was determinedly political too, embracing a desire to sweep away the old order, conjure up a filmic revolution, and embrace a peculiarly French form of nihilism.

And speaking of that, the pond recently caught up with a traditional French gangster offering made just before Breathless, starring Belmondo in a supporting role, Claude Sautet's Classe Tous Risques

It too offered a form of gangster nihilism, and apart from a desultory, off hand ending, it made sense by having a start, a middle and an end, and in that order.

 It made the pond realise that much was lost as fools and the pond blindly rushed to embrace the Godardian revolution.

Whether politics is implicit or explicit, it's always present.

The pond digresses, but the same can be said for Our Henry, because embedded in this tirade, this rant, aka this celebration of the allegedly apolitical, is a deeply political wail about Israel and the persecution of Jews (damn you Islamics):

Ostracism was rarer still: Pablo Picasso the Communist and Georges Braque the apolitical formalist not only coexisted but collaborated, readily participating in a broader, politically diverse, artistic world. The exclusion of Jewish artists, now spreading in the West, was confined to Muslim countries, where intolerance prevailed.
For the visitor, politics was incidental. Exhibitions offered instead a rare republic of taste – a space in which citizens of irreconcilable convictions could find themselves momentarily united in their response to beauty, the sublime, or formal achievement, sustaining what Alexis de Tocqueville called a sinew of freedom: a realm of non-political sociability that holds a liberal society together against the centrifugal pull of identity and interest.
But once exhibitions become another arena of contest – in which works are judged by alignment rather than achievement – that function is inverted. Art generates division where it once dissolved it.
The cost to aesthetic quality is just as severe. Conformity, unlike excellence, requires no talent; it is more reliably produced without it. The result is that the young artist is now rewarded not for mastery but for the right claim of ancestry, the correct opinions and, most of all, self-asserted victimhood; the curator for the outrage a work proclaims and provokes; and the arts bureaucrat for disguising favouritism as fairness while directing public funds to kitsch tarted up as subversion.
The effects are evident at this year’s Biennale. Spain’s display presents a montage of old postcards that supposedly constitutes an “act of resistance that challenges traditional modes of cultural legitimation”. Mexico’s pavilion purports to dramatise “urgent issues such as ancestral memory, epistemic justice, decolonisation and relational ecology” by treating “indigenous cosmogonies as living matrices of thought”, while the UK’s “addresses race, history, feminism, cultural memory and identity to challenge dominant Eurocentric narratives”.
Denmark alone provides inadvertent light relief: a pavilion devoted to “activism” centred on “a large-scale video work featuring porn star Nicolette Shea as a laboratory scientist in a sperm bank”. Amid the nonsense, the US pavilion is one of the few that strikes a sober, unambiguously aesthetic, note – and it is being angrily boycotted by anti-Trump “artivists”.

At this point some readers might be starting to miss the usual bigly array of pompous, portentous references, showing off Our Henry's astonishing ability to misread the point of texts.

Please hold the hole in bucket man's beer...

From Giorgio Vasari’s Accademia del Disegno (1563), which freed artists from the guilds, to Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790), which grounded contemporary aesthetics, securing the autonomy of art from politics was the hard-won work of centuries.
Max Weber and Theodor Adorno regarded this as an extraordinary civilisational achievement: by allowing art to flourish on its own terms of aesthetic judgment and technical mastery, it produced the unparalleled succession from Impressionism, through Cubism, Expressionism and Surrealism, to Abstraction – a flowering no era of political control has rivalled.
Now, at what Lionel Trilling called the “bloody crossroads where art and politics meet”, that autonomy lies in ruins. And, with its appallingly mediocre pavilion, Creative Australia has not used your money and mine to defend art; it has used it to hasten art’s destruction.

Gibberish and nonsense. 

Just because Jackson Pollock urinated in Peggy Guggenhim's fireplace didn't mean he didn't appreciate the advantages of a filthy rich patron advance his causes... (here)

As for hastening art's destruction, the pond has noted such cries over the centuries, and yet somehow art in some form or other has managed to survive. What it does suggest is that Our Henry's doom-saying millenarian streak is now a mile wide and rapidly expanding, an old codger attempting to hold back the tide, incapable of understanding the old, while resolutely rejecting the new ...

And so to close celebrating another sublime supporter of y'artz and architecture ...

Warning: there is absolutely no politics in this clip. 

Any mention of a pending civil war should be treated as clickbait. 

Instead admire the "beauty, expression and formal mastery" and the wan aestheticism of dying on a battlefield ... and be outraged at the temerity of the curator suggesting that the clothes in the painting actually have political signs and meanings ...

In which Cameron explains the war, and the onion muncher hovers like a foul stench in the reptile air ...

 

What was that all about? 

Two ships allegedly rescued, only 1,600 to go, then Operation Project Freedom gets suspended, but not before Kegsbreath delivers yet another jut-jawed speech ... and peace is near, but shots fired and too soon to sit down to negotiate, yet negotiations are going astonishingly well and it'll all be sorted in two weeks or so.

The pond could only make sense of it all if the bromancer had been to hand, but instead the reptiles sent in Cameron ...

The header: Donald Trump pushes for new negotiations with Iran as US halts Strait of Hormuz operation; Donald Trump has paused military operations against Iran and softened US rhetoric to revive stalled peace negotiations ahead of his Beijing meeting with Xi Jinping.

The caption: A woman waves an Iranian flag in front of an anti-US billboard in Tehran referring to President Trump and the Strait of Hormuz. Picture: AFP

Cameron could only summon up a three minute read, which seemed a tad short to sort it all out ...

America is pushing hard for a quick exit from the war against Iran. Donald Trump’s decision to pause Project Freedom in the Strait of Hormuz just a day after it began and Marco Rubio’s claim that the combat operation against Iran has ended are both aimed at giving diplomacy another chance.
Trump would love nothing more than to strike a deal with Iran to end the war in the coming days, ahead of his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing next week.

The reptiles decided the best way to help was to load it up with AV distractions ... U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday (May 5) he would briefly pause an operation to help ships escape the Strait of Hormuz, citing progress toward a comprehensive agreement with Iran. Syakir Jasnee reports.

Cameron struggled to make sense of it all, just like the pond. 

If only the bromancer had been on hand to help, but Cameron battled on alone..

Trump has overseen an abrupt softening in both US rhetoric and actions towards Iran in recent days in order to breathe life back into the stalled negotiations with the Iranian regime.
The great unknown is whether Iran will take this olive branch provided by the US to also concede some ground in its own excessive demands which might pave the way to end the 10-week conflict.
The motivation for Trump to end the war is growing with each week as the global energy crisis triggered by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz continues to hold world markets to ransom and eat into his political standing in the US, where fuel prices have risen by 50 per cent since the war began. Iran’s economy is also suffering as it is robbed of oil revenue by the US blockade of its ports, but Iran has so far gambled that it can outlast the US in an economic game of chicken.
Trump’s decision to temporarily halt the so-called Project Freedom for the US to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz and Rubio’s claim that combat operations have ended were the latest in an endless series of rhetorical U-turns by the President and his officials on the war.
Trump claims that the decision to suspend Project Freedom for now is aimed at giving negotiations with Iran another chance.
The move has been accompanied by a pronounced dial-down in rhetoric from both Rubio and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Who could trust a word the head of the clown carnival says?

US President Donald Trump claims Iran should wave the “white flag of surrender” and make a deal with America to end the war in the Middle East. “They should wave the white flag, the white flag of surrender,” he said. “When are they going to cry uncle?”

Cry uncle? Oh the late night comedians ran with that one - every day's another field day - but the pond must cry nuncle like the Fool in Lear, and move on ...

Rubio now claims that any US efforts to reopen the Strait of Hormuz are “defensive” in nature and that the US is not seeking to attack Iran and would do so only if attacked.
Rubio says Operation Epic Fury is now concluded, although such claims are also part of an effort to avoid the need for the President to seek formal approval from congress for war activities 60 days after beginning military action.
Hegseth, whose over-the-top muscular rhetoric has been a constant during the war, now claims the US is “not looking for a fight” over the Strait of Hormuz.
Importantly, the US has chosen not to interpret Iran firing several missiles and drones at US ships in the strait this week or its strikes against oil facilities in the UAE as constituting a breach of the existing ceasefire.
Iran has so far responded to the moves with its usual rhetorical belligerence, with Iran’s parliamentary Speaker and chief negotiator Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf saying “the status quo is intolerable for America; while we have not even begun yet”.

To add to the sense of confusion and chaos, the reptiles flung in Liddle Marco ...

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke on the proceedings of the war in Iran as the US transition from Project Epic Fury to Project Freedom. “We told you guys from the very beginning, and we are very consistent in this messaging, the operation that has concluded was going to destroy their navy, they have no navy left,” Mr Rubio said. “Their ability to build their shield behind which they could hide their nuclear program was wiped out … that was the purpose of this operation from day one. “The operation is over, Epic Fury, as the president notified Congress, we are done with that stage of it.”

By the end of Cameron's short survey the pond remained completely clueless...

But what Iran says publicly and what it does behind the scenes are often very different.
If Iran were willing to come back to the negotiating table with a half-decent proposal on suspending its uranium enrichment for its nuclear program, then the Trump administration might be tempted to grab at such a deal.
At least publicly, both sides give the impression of being a long way from an acceptable peace deal. Iran has refused Trump’s demand that it surrender its stockpile of highly enriched uranium and end all enrichment inside the country. Iran has also rejected US attempts to persuade it to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
But Trump’s good cop/bad cop routine with Iran is back into “good cop” mode. The question is whether Iran will take this chance to end the war now or prolong the uneasy ceasefire in the belief it has the upper hand and time on its side.

All is clear as mud, though the brilliant Golding did make some sense...

Talk about a lot of tail-chasing ...

As for the rest, it was the usual disappointing reptile parade, with petulant Peta leading the way ...

Look out: Labor has revived its old class war instincts
Labor has broken its election promise by preparing negative gearing changes for the budget despite Anthony Albanese saying such policies were ‘off the table’.
By Peta Credlin
Columnist

She would say that, and the pond is on a winning streak with the intermittent archive of late, but this morning the "save" function seems to have broken yet again ...

So here's the url for possible future use ...

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary%2Flook-out-labor-has-revived-its-old-class-war-instincts%2Fnews-story%2F7926b8131432548c55751ebb6e41c853?amp

No matter how many times the pond tried, PP simply couldn't be saved - perhaps she was beyond redemption - so here's a teaser trailer explaining why the pond couldn't be bothered going the whole ten yards ...

Just straight political blather of an extremely dull kind.

The pond has been over that sort of reptile one-eyed jihad for such a long time.

All the pond will note is that the reptiles were surprisingly quiet this morning about the petulant one's old sock puppet, the onion muncher, jostling for the top job of El Presidente Supremo with Lord Downer ...

For any of that gossip, noted by correspondents in the comments section, you had to head off to the AFR, and at least the intermittent archive had recorded that ...

The pond should note that the onion muncher was out and about in the hive mind, in his usual sensitive, deeply narcissistic, attention-seeking way, allowing the families involved to grieve without making any political capital ..

COMMENTARY by Tony Abbott
Culture? An innocent girl is dead. Let’s have some truth
Life on the ground often fails to conform to the Dark Emu romance of deeply spiritual people.

Unpopular figure? That computes.

The stench was too much for the pond, so it was a relief that the intermittent archive had caught that one...

As for the rest the diligent Geoff kept firing away, and he too made it into the archive ...

Roll up, roll up for the great Albanese ‘Trust me’ show
After breaking promises on superannuation tax concessions and stage three tax cuts and being re-elected, the PM would feel confident he can breach the trust of voters and get away with it.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

One of his efforts sent the lettuce into a teary, sodden trip down memory lane ...

Vacant Ley or valiantly: Libs headed for historic defeat
One Nation stands poised to claim its first lower-house seat in Farrer as former Liberal leader Sussan Ley remains conspicuously absent on a six-week overseas holiday.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

Just to keep the lettuce happy, the pond slipped in a teaser trailer ...

Ah memories ...

It's all a go, and the immortal Rowe was on hand to help celebrate the bulls ...

Some might think it a relief that Jennings of the fifth form couldn't be saved into the archive by the pond ...

ISIS families’ return expose limits of counter-terror
As women and children linked to Islamic State return, questions mount over arrests, monitoring and the long-term risks of radicalisation.
By Peter Jennings
Contributor

The pond wouldn't have gone there, but here's the url in case it comes in handy ...

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary%2Fisis-families-return-expose-limits-of-counterterror%2Fnews-story%2F22abee3ff53baef9645411479b1e6cea?amp

All the pond wonders is why Syria was expected to do all the dirty work in relation to Australian citizens? 

If they had passports, they had the right to return and then let the chips fall as they may ...

And so to close by celebrating the sympathy and empathy shown by both sides in all matters rectitudinous...

At least someone thinks of the children, especially, it turns out, King Donald ...

In which "Ned" at last returns for a natter, and Dame Groan demolishes the sparrows of the south ...

 

It's been a considerable time since the pond heard from "Ned", and frankly the pond hasn't much missed his patented bland of pomposity and the borrowing of the thoughts of others.

He was last sighted way back on 27th March offering Burn-down-the-house mentality that has splintered the right is coming for the left too; Establishment politics is under massive assault in a nation that is losing its way — but don’t be misled by Hanson’s ‘consistency’ myth. (*intermittent archive link).

That was an interminable ten minutes of humbuggery, but on his return "Ned" could only manage a more seemly five minutes of his natter.

All the same, climbing any "Ned" Everest is part of any sensible herpetology student's warm up routine, so it was off to base camp:

The header, which immediately made the pond wonder why anyone in their right minds would want to keep up with King Donald: Xi Jinping and Donald Trump have remade the world - can Australia keep up? Whether the nation possesses the political and bureaucratic brain power to create a new economic model remains in grave doubt.

The caption for the collage which was unwisely given a credit. (Sometimes, Frank, discretion is the better part of AI slop valour): Artwork depicting Xi Jinping alongside Anthony Albanese and Donald Trump. Artwork by Frank Ling.

"Ned" has some bizarre ideas about "transforming the world".

Neither role model on offer seemed particularly beguiling, but remember this is "Ned", so he's determined to compete, bung on a do, and in the process, it won't belong before the borrowings start to appear:

Two men have transformed the world. China’s Xi Jinping and America’s Donald Trump in their global rivalry have created a new world that affects every democracy and feeds into the challenges and policies that Jim Chalmers will unveil next week.
Strategic competition now spills into economic and technological warfare. It is all-encompassing. In their relentless competition Xi and Trump have retreated from the era of market-based interdependence – the age of globalisation and liberal free trade – and embraced a fusion of economics and security, creating what many call the “economic security state”.
This trend has been on display for a decade. As China expert Elizabeth Economy has identified, Xi has repudiated liberal reforms in favour of supply-side controls, maximising security capabilities, huge government subsidies and promoting a fusion between the civilian economy and military prowess. Beijing runs the globe’s most ambitious industry policy.
In the US, Trump and his predecessor, Joe Biden, have rejected the previous “neoliberal economic philosophy of the past 40 years” – to quote former national security adviser Jake Sullivan – with Trump using tariffs as a strategic weapon and deploying protection, reindustrialisation, support for hi-tech and artificial intelligence in an economic and security rivalry with China set to last for decades.

The pond does appreciate the way that "Ned"conformed to GOP talking points and dragged poor old Scranton Joe into the current mess, and the reptiles helped him out with a snap... Joe Biden speaks at the International African American museum, January 2025.

Jake Sullivan?

He's certainly one of the worst of the Biden era for entirely missing the point:

In May 2024, Sullivan expressed concern at the Irish, Norwegian, and Spanish recognition of Palestine and Israel's growing diplomatic isolation, saying that "we certainly have seen a growing chorus of voices, including voices that had previously been in support of Israel, drift in another direction. That is of concern to us because we do not believe that that contributes to Israel's long-term security or vitality."

And that fog of words could be found in a Foreign Affairs piece...

History is again knocking. The growing competition with China and shifts in the international political and economic order should provoke a similar instinct within the contemporary foreign-policy establishment. Today’s national security experts need to move beyond the prevailing neoliberal economic philosophy of the past 40 years. This philosophy can be summarized as reflexive confidence in competitive markets as the surest route to maximizing both individual liberty and economic growth and a corresponding belief that the role of government is best confined to securing those competitive markets through enforcing property rights, only intervening in the supposedly rare instance of market failure.
The foreign-policy establishment need not come up with the next economic philosophy; the task is more limited—to contribute a geopolitical perspective to the unfolding debate on what should follow neoliberalism and then to make the national security case for a new approach as it emerges.

That ship has sailed, or perhaps not, just sat somewhere in the strait of Hormuz ...

But the pond digresses, because it was then on to the gnashing of teeth and wailing into the ether, and running about clucking that the sky was falling down, a genre in which "Ned" is as adept as Dame Groan is in her "we'll all be rooned" carry ons ...

Australia has no option but to live in the world being created by Xi and Trump. But that’s a more complex, dangerous and uncertain world – like other nations, we struggle to grasp what it means. There are two certainties – the vast prosperity Australia enjoyed from the age of globalisation won’t be repeated, and whether the nation possesses the political and bureaucratic brain power to create a new economic model remains in grave doubt.
In this new world false prophets and fraudulent ideas are everywhere. The most penetrating analysis of the epic challenge facing this country comes from John Kunkel in his monograph for the United States Studies Centre titled Paradigm Shift: The End of the Washington Consensus and the Future of Australian Economic Statecraft.

Yet again the reptiles shamelessly refused to provide a link to "Ned's" borrowings, but anyone wanting the original Kunkel can head here.

Others will have to be content with "Ned's" shameless borrowings as he attempts to come up with his own version of a paradigm shift:

Kunkel says: “In the coming years, whether willingly or not, Australia will be forced to construct our own variant of an economic security state. This will be a demanding task. It will require enhanced state capacity to distinguish between essential economic security needs and non-strategic transactions.” The Albanese government now wrestles with this task – beneath the politically driven cost-of-living issue in the budget, it constitutes the long-run foundational challenge for policymakers that will run for decades.
Recently Anthony Albanese has become far more open about the sweeping strategic change in Labor’s framework, telling the National Press Club we cannot “continue to rely on an economic model designed in a different time and built for a more predictable world”. His message: the nation must become “more self-sufficient and less vulnerable”.
The Prime Minister pledges to deploy state power to make Australia “more resilient” because in the new world “economic policy and national security are bound together”. He says global supply chains are now “instruments of economic power and strategic competition”. The Iran war reinforces the message, with Albanese desperate to secure vital fuel supplies, the lesson being that we cannot rely on “somewhere else because it’s cheaper” – a direct repudiation of the economic law of the globalised age that helped to make Australia a rich, high-income country.

Actually there are some countries, European ones and Asian ones too, that still cling to the notions of a globalised world, what with it bleeding obvious that we're all in the mess together, and must cope with rogue nations of the King Donald kind by forming new alliances.

Never mind, have a snap of Jimbo ...Treasurer Jim Chalmers addresses the media at Parliament House. Picture: Martin Ollman

Stuck back in Hawke/Keating and fossil fuels days, "Ned" was startled by the shock of direct repudiation.

He didn't seem to know where local oil might be coming from, though his fellow reptiles had suggested down under was rich in oil just waiting to flow.

Perhaps there might have to be an appeal to globalised sources ...

While he respected the reforms of the Hawke and Keating governments, Albanese said we now live in “a very different world”. He said “building and strengthening” national resilience will be a “key focus” of the budget – think prioritising fuel supply, strengthening supply chains and making more things in Australia.
But the sobering insight has been the government’s estimate that providing 90 days’ fuel supply would cost $20bn or $230 per adult a year or nearly $500 annually for an average family. And that’s just the fuel supply story.
Herein lies the hard truth: resilience comes at a higher cost. The Australian people will pay more for having to inject the security paradigm into economic policy, just as the people of China and the US will pay. The revolution in global economic policy may sound thrilling, but it comes with a hefty price tag.

Um, don't blame the world for this "revolution". 

Perhaps instead blame the Emeritus Chairman and his Faux Noise chums, who helped guide the United States into rogue banana republic status?

The Treasurer says the budget is about reform and resilience. That’s a sound message, but how does it play out? Our efforts so far are weak on reform-based productivity to deliver a more competitive economic and our promotion of resilience is burdened by truckloads of defects.
Albanese boasts about his government’s new agenda; witness its Future Made in Australia policy, its National Reconstruction Fund, its Critical Minerals Strategic Reserve, its strengthening of defence manufacturing and its 82 per cent renewables target by 2030 – some are justified and worthwhile but many of these state-driven investments and subsidies are flawed and highly dubious; witness the serial bailing out of smelters.
Productivity Commission chief Danielle Wood, in The Australian Financial Review, has delivered a lethal warning about the pitfalls of resilience, saying our politicians and advisers must separate the support that makes our economy stronger from those “costly follies for taxpayers and consumers”.
Wood said that while insuring for essential products made sense, beware falling for local production as the default position since co-operative deals with trading partners might be more cost-effective. She warned of the latest political con job: “old-fashioned industry assistance arguments for bailouts of copper and aluminium smelters dressed up in shiny supply chain security and economic sovereignty wrappers”.

Once again the pond had to check out the source of "Ned's" borrowings, and luckily Wood could be found in the intermittent archive.

But by this point the pond hadn't a clue what "Ned" was on about. 

He seemed to start off in the resilience camp, and then he ended up suggesting that reverting to co-operative deals in a still globalised economy might be a better bet.

The reptiles didn't help out by throwing in a snap of comrade Ablo, Anthony Albanese holds a press conference at Parliament House. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

"Ned" kept up his borrowings, and then emerged triumphantly to blame the victims:

Wood then delivered the killer blow: scattergun industry policy actually reduces resilience. Think about that message. It goes to the heart of Australia’s policy reset. Wood captured its essence: “any productivity package in the budget is also a resilience package”. But such truism is not accepted by much of the political class, both Labor and Coalition, now resurrecting the failed ghosts of our protectionist past with a new rhetorical spin.
Kunkel said: “Australia’s economic policy settings remain ill-prepared for this new era. The task of making our economy more resilient is multidimensional, necessarily bound up, for example, with fostering economic growth, improving budget discipline and pursuing pro-productivity structural reform. Resources will remain scarce and Australian governments will need to set priorities in a way that is both uncomfortable and outside current policy mindsets.”
He said the task ahead is the “need to forge a new marriage between economic rationalism and state capacity” that equips Australia to succeed in the “more fractured and contested world” bequeathed by Xi and Trump.
Conceptually, this is new territory. Yet our efforts so far seem uncoordinated, piecemeal, a mishmash of different initiatives largely driven by politics. Who in the Albanese government is supposed to be devising what constitutes a new economic model for Australia? Do we have these days a political and bureaucratic class capable of meeting the challenge? Not on the evidence so far. We await a judgment on the budget.

Is anyone capable of meeting the challenge of mad King Donald and his mob of minions? Is it possible to reverse the damage done by the Emeritus Chairman in his lust for money and power?

Perhaps we need to retreat to a bunker until the storm blows over, or somehow works out how to do better potty training for dragons ...

The pond always gets a tad disturbed when the immortal Rowe goes into anal mode, but that 'Trump in Iran' turd is a pretty big one.

As usual there were any number of reptiles the pond chose to overlook this day, but the pond did personally supervise their storage in the intermittent archive, so those who might care could check them out. 

Amongst them ...

From Omelas to Alice: this is our cruel bargain
Without major changes, the country will find itself repeating this trauma and too many of our children will remain powerless.
By Denise Bowden

The cranky Cranston was bold enough to support the RBA - as big a reptile heresy as going the round - but the pond made sure he was in the intermittent archive for anyone who might care:

Tough news but Bullock had integrity to deliver it
Michele Bullock makes the right rate call for the nation
The two things might have sent a shiver down the spine of consumers and businesses on Tuesday were the effectiveness of interest rates and the brief talk of the ‘r’ word.
By Matthew Cranston
Economics Correspondent

The pond routinely ignores the lizard Oz's pearls of wisdom, on the basis of predictability, and there was no sign in the header that things would be different this day:

Bullock sends Jim a message – but Labor’s budget will undo the work
The budget the Treasurer is set to deliver next week is likely to deepen, not lessen, our economic predicament.
By David Pearl

The indefatigable Geoff was also at it (the pond is tired of joking about him chambering another round, yet this day more shots were heard, with an exceptionally inflamed header):

COMMENTARY by Geoff Chambers
Budget bonfire as inflation inferno engulfs Reserve Bank
A week out from Jim Chalmers handing down his fifth budget, RBA governor Michele Bullock stated the bleeding obvious in warning governments (again) to stop spending and driving up demand.

Dimitri also lurked below the fold, but why settle for a B lister, when you can have a main woman to do the hatchet job ...

Victoria is the sick man of the Anti­podes – and the disease is advanced
Jacinta Allan’s sleight-of-hand budget ‘surplus’ is just the latest deception from Victorian Labor.
By Dimitri Burshtein

That should keep herpetology students busy, but f the pond wanted a 'toon to summarise the reptiles in a budget frenzy, this one by Fiona K. seemed to do the job ...

Speaking of a main woman, the pond had to abandon all those reptiles because in a rare outing Dame Groan immediately followed news of the scuppering of a rail link to nowhere:

The pond couldn't immediately see a connection, but ignoring a Dame Groan offering would be like rejecting some of St Paul's letters because they were written by someone else. 

They're all infused by the holy spirit, right, and so infallibly correct ...(cf. Adam Gopnink in The New Yorker on St Paul)

Similarly groaning must always command the pond's attention, because Dame Groan cultists salivate at any sighting of her.

The header: Fiscal fiction: Why Victoria’s economy is basically buggered; The rate of deterioration in Victoria’s fiscal position is quite extraordinary. It is the nation’s biggest basket-case state.

The caption for what looks like a rare find, an actual reptile visual gotcha: Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan on state budget day. Picture: NewsWire / David Crosling

It was only a three minute excursion, but this time Dame Groan did for Jacinta what she'd usually do to Jimbo:

Victoria is Australia’s worst fiscal basket case. The state of its public finances is shambolic even though the economically naive Premier Jacinta Allan and Treasurer Jaclyn Symes are trying to convince the voters this is not the case.
Michael Brennan, the CEO of e61 Institute, has described Victoria’s budget position as “boxed in”. I wouldn’t be as kind: it’s basically buggered.
For those who don’t live in Victoria, you might think this doesn’t matter. But at the end of the day, the commonwealth will make sure the state doesn’t become insolvent. Short of the big bailout, the feds will play a role in funnelling additional grants and more GST payments to the state – it has already begun this – to keep it afloat.

There was only one AV distraction for the excursion, which named and shamed Jacinta, but on the evidence, it seemed to point the finger at that arch villain, comrade Dan, though the framing was so weird and wild, who can say? Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan will try to sell a budget littered with billions of dollars in extra spending.

What a reprehensible way to treat an always recurring reptile shibboleth.

As usual, just as Dame Groan refuses to make any allowance for the current dire straits the world is in, this time the steely Groaner refused to allow any attempt to buck pass on Covid.

If you can't handle the plague and emerge with a booming economy, you must be in charge of a cruise liner suffused with rats ...

While putting Victoria on watch, the ratings agencies clearly believe the commonwealth would rescue any state in dire circumstances. This partly explains why the yields on government bonds don’t vary a great deal between the states – say, Victoria versus NSW.
Let’s be clear here: the Victorian public finances began to deteriorate before Covid. To be sure, spending went through the roof during Covid, in part because of the excessive periods of lockdown the state endured.
The rate of deterioration in Victoria’s fiscal position is quite extraordinary. When Dan Andrews came to power in December 2014, the state’s net debt was a tad over $20bn. It is now heading towards $200bn at the end of the decade.
(The quoted figure in the budget of $199bn in net debt for 2029-30 is essentially fictitious, made to come in under $200bn for political reasons. It’s what economists call spurious precision.)
It’s worth recalling here that state budgets are divided into two parts: the recurrent and the capital. Typically, but not always, states will run a net operating surplus while accounting for capital spending in the other account. (The Victorian government will run a trivial operating surplus of $1bn next financial year.)
But there is some fudging that can go on in relation to the operating balance. Grants are part of the revenue recorded for the operating balance, but some of these are essentially for capital purposes. Some grants from the federal government are routed through the recurrent account and recorded there, but they are just capital spending.
Allan and Symes have been making a great deal of the possibility that the ratio of net debt to gross state product may fall over the forward estimates. Again, this is a contrived figure made up of overly optimistic forecasts of GSP as well as an underestimation of future expenses.
Real GSP growth is expected to be 2.5 per cent in 2027-28, for instance. These forecasts contrast with the more sombre (but more accurate) ones of the Reserve Bank.

Dame Groan was feeling her oats, with a b*gger here, and a b*llocks there ...

It’s also bollocks that the only thing that counts is the ratio of debt to GSP. The servicing costs relate to the total size of the debt, and these costs have been rising substantially. They are about to jump sharply as the cheap debt, secured during Covid and before, expires, and the debt needs to be rolled over. You can see this in the budget figures on interest expense. Last financial year, interest expenses were $7.7bn; in 2029-30, the figure is expected to be nearly $12bn.
The fact is that over the course of the past decade or so in Victoria, state government spending has ratcheted up by around two percentage points of GSP and there is no indication the Allan government is capable of – or is of a mind to – reducing this proportion. The Victorian Labor government has a lot in common with the Albanese government in this respect.
Unsurprisingly in an election year, the Allan government is looking to offer up some sweeteners notwithstanding the fact that the budgetary position should prevent it from doing so. Free public transport, discounted motor registration, meeting the teachers’ pay demand to avoid strikes, additional healthcare services – and this is just for starters.
The argument is that these benefits will simply be paid for by transferring some of the future operating surpluses to 2026-27 and there will be no net change in the budget settings. The trouble with this argument is that when those future years come around, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to make those savings.
There is no indication in this state budget that the political leaders are prepared to acknowledge the fiscal hole they have dug or to think about means of paying down debt. It will probably blow up at some stage, but Jacinta Allan is likely to be gone by then, sitting on a few well-paid government boards.

Ah, the bitterness. 

What chance of a place for Dame Groan these days on a well-paid government board? Instead she must pocket a few pitiful shekels from the Emeritus Chairman for her regular "we'll all be rooned" groans...

Meanwhile, back in that notorious banana republic and speaking of dragons ...

And this is for those who've heard of Alex Jones or InfoWars or The Onion. 

Perhaps skip to the last four minutes, wherein there's a little transubstantiation involving human blood?

In which the bromancer goes gaga over Takaichi and correspondents in the cult can line up for a serve of the Tuesday groaning ...

 

The news that the world continues in dire straits made the pond want to pull up the covers and do an ostrich routine.

The next best thing was to plunge into the hive mind, where the only fear to be found was in the form of the federal Labor government.

Luckily the bromancer was to hand to provide that kind of distraction, coupled with a remarkable infatuation for the Japanese PM:

The header: Japan’s ‘Iron Lady’ shows up our feeble PM; Mark Carney was treated as though he were a world statesman. Yet Japan’s dazzling new PM has been treated in a very low-key manner. Only a nation as dumb as us could fail to fully see her significance.

The caption for a snap ruined by that preening mug standing alongside her: Prime Minister of Japan, Her Excellency Ms Sanae Takaichi, visits the Canberra Nara Peace Park at Lennox Gardens alongside Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman.

Of course the bromancer has been infatuated with Japan before.

Remember this?

Japan building Australian submarines is a match made in heaven

The pond couldn't resist a plunge back into ancient times, and besides inducting the piece into the intermittent archive, decided to offer a teaser trailer reminder of the good old days ...

What glory days there could have been. 

Instead the bromancer cheered on AUKUS, and the nuking of the submarines, a phenomenon never to be seen in the pond's lifetime, and now here we are.

But the bromancer has always been fickle, moody, changeable, and with the memory and consistency of a gnat.

It's way too late to revive any thoughts of what might have been, and instead we have the spectacle of the bromancer dissing the Canadians to creepily crawl up to Takaichi:

If you want to get a glimpse of just how badly Australian intellectual life, and very often the Albanese government, exist in a foreign policy make-believe land, consider this astounding contrast.
Mark Carney, the Canadian Prime Minister, a figure of almost no consequence to Australia at all, and whose international policy proposals are based on bad analysis and would generally be disastrous for Australia, was an honoured guest, as though he were a world statesman, and gave an address to a joint sitting of the Australian parliament in March.
Yet Japan’s dazzling new Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi, who has recently won a landslide election victory in her nation, was given no such honour in her visit to Australia, and in fact has been treated in a very low-key manner by the Albanese government.
Takaichi recently won a huge super majority in Japan’s parliament. She stands in the tradition of strong Japanese leaders like Yasuhiro Nakasone, Junichiro Koizumi and Shinzo Abe. Only a nation as dumb as us could fail to fully see her significance.
The visit is good and useful. No international visitor today could be more important. But this should be a very big deal in our national life, not a minor bit of routine Canberra falderal.
The visit’s formal agreements – on economic security, critical minerals and defence co-operation – were good, marginal, incremental steps on existing agreements many times announced and rehearsed previously. Agreements with Japan tend to be substantial. Japan is the only one of our many critical minerals partners that really seems to want things to happen in a relevant time frame.

Elbows up Canada, because this is the only flourish you'll get: Canada’s Mark Carney listens to Anthony Albanese speak during a press conference at Parliament House. Picture: David Gray / AFP

The bromancer carried on with his almost uxorious scribbling, and never mind the way that the Japanese currently make a motza out of onselling Australian gas purloined from the rubes down under.

Instead, inevitably, the bromancer reverted to his war with China, possibly in alliance with Japan, and hopefully by Xmas:

For reasons of Japanese politics and protocol, visits by Japan’s PM to Australia are rare. It’s in our interest to make them big. Abe in 2014 was the only Japanese PM ever to address the Australian parliament. I covered that speech and wrote then that it was one of the greatest speeches ever delivered in our parliament.
That happened when Tony Abbott was PM, and was the high point of Australia-Japan relations.
Parliament’s not sitting this week. The government should have recalled it for a day to hear from Japan’s first female leader. Takaichi is the most popular political leader in Asia (except in China). The China dimension probably explains why Albanese took such a lame, low-key approach to what should have been an important national moment.
Japan is the world’s third-largest economy, after the US and China. It’s a member of the G7. It’s America’s most important ally in Asia. US Studies Centre polling two years ago showed 60 per cent of Australians would like a formal defence treaty with Japan. Tokyo is now more forward-leaning on this than Canberra.
Japan’s Sanae Takaichi has won a resounding victory in Sunday’s snap election
Tokyo is doubling and more its defence budget. It remains, with South Korea, one of few US allies that is still a huge manufacturing power. It operates at the highest level of technology. Increasingly it’s investing in defence technology and, in a development of profound historic consequence, becoming a defence exporter.
The Albanese government’s decision to buy Japan’s advanced Mogami general purpose frigate for our navy, and to get the first few built in Japan, may be the single best decision (to be frank, there aren’t many) it’s made in defence.
In the Japanese parliament some months ago, Takaichi was asked if a Chinese military attack on Taiwan would endanger Japan. At its closest point, Taiwan is only 100km from Japanese territory, so the answer is, naturally, yes. Nonetheless, many national leaders would have fudged an answer to such a question. Albanese surely would have done so in similar circumstances. Takaichi answered the obvious truth; yes, it would be a danger to Japan.
This is important because the designation of such danger would trigger the legal justification for Japan to engage in collective defence efforts. As a result, Beijing went bananas in trying to intimidate Japan, and Takaichi specifically. One Chinese diplomat in Japan crudely said Takaichi should have her head cut off. Beijing imposed coercive trade embargoes on Japan.

The reptiles decided it was time for the bromancer's heroine to feature, though sadly with that disgrace by her side: Sanae Takaichi, visits the Canberra Nara Peace Park at Lennox Gardens alongside Anthony Albanese. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman.

The bromancer continued his rant, determined to find a conspiracy of cowardice in the matter of his war with China:

But Takaichi is a tough woman. She didn’t fold. She made some mollifying remarks but neither retracted nor apologised for her answer.
Here’s another curious element to the Albanese government’s management of her visit. The two prime ministers made joint remarks, but there was no joint press conference. The Canberra press gallery was led to believe this was because Canberra didn’t want to answer questions about gas.
But the Albanese government has decided not to impose any new taxes on gas exports. This is in part to avoid sovereign risk and to underline our reliability as a supplier, and because at a time when the world desperately needs more fossil fuels of all kinds, it would be barking mad, an act of grievous national self-harm, to put new disincentives on production. It’s such a ridiculous proposal that naturally the Greens and some crossbenchers are all in favour of it.
But that may not have been the problem with a joint press conference at all. Had the two PMs held a press conference, Albanese would have been asked about Taiwan and Beijing’s crude efforts to bully and coerce Takaichi and Japan. He would have had no alternative but to express solidarity with Japan. But Albanese doesn’t much do that sort of thing. Defence Minister Richard Marles has a mandate to say, two or three times a year, mildly disobliging things about China. The rest of the government has the courage of a sleeping kitten with a bad valium habit. Albanese never says boo to a goose on Beijing’s behaviour.

At this point the reptiles decided to provide yet further visual evidence of the pond's thesis that the reptiles are determined to live in some ancient glorious past, at least until the current mob are swept aside by the reptiles' never-ending jihad. 

How else to explain the return of the onion muncher, from 2014? Tony Abbott and Shinzo Abe shake hands during a trilateral meeting at the G20 Summit on November 16, 2014 in Brisbane, Australia. Picture: Ian Waldie / Getty Images

Why do they do it? Why do they dwell so much in the past?

It turns out it's much like the bromancer's memory of the past:

Takaichi is visiting to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the historic post-war trade treaty the Menzies government signed with Japan. Like most big Australian moves into Asia, this was carried out by a Coalition government with the support of Washington. The Coalition has an infinitely better record than Labor on both the Japan and India relationships, but is strangely incapable of telling this story.
Albanese seems so attached to the narrative that he’s stabilised relations with Beijing that it puts a severe political limit on what he does with Japan, and to some extent India. One tragic lost opportunity was when internal Liberal Party instability prevented Tony Abbott from going ahead with a submarine deal with Japan. We would now probably have the first Japanese sub and it would be world class. This would have solidified a quasi alliance between us, and deepened the strategic intimacy of both nations with Washington.
But as a nation, we seldom miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, as now.

Say what?

The Coalition has an infinitely better record than Labor on both the Japan and India relationships...

Oh then the first of those Japanese submarines, spawn of the bromancer-Japan alliance, should be arriving in Sydney by Xmas. 

Or is that why the bromancer is strangely incapable of telling this story.

To be fair, that outing has to be worth a couple of Goldings ...

Or perhaps an ancient Wilcox?

And so to other reptile contributors, assigned by the pond to the intermittent archive.

There was John Curtin's shame, at last acknowledging Pauline's problem:

Billionaires or the battlers? Pauline Hanson’s dilemma
One Nation: a populist movement railing against elites, financed by the country’s wealthiest individual
Precisely when One Nation is becoming the vehicle for battlers, it is becoming something else: the beneficiary of a growing network of elite patronage.
By Nick Dyrenfurth
Contributor

That has to be worth at least one Golding ...

And early on the budget was top of the lizard Oz:

The reptiles have a remarkable capacity for showing meaningless graphs, with snaps showing Jimbo looking like a smirking, gibbering idiot, and this was peak reptile graphics department (there was no credit for the image, which perhaps was just as well).

Following on, the remarkably diligent Geoff chambered yet another round ...

COMMENTARY by Geoff Chambers
Labor ignores Reserve Bank warnings to deliver a multi-billion-dollar cash splash
At a time of soaring inflation, higher interest rates and increasing housing market pressures, the lures of populist tax changes and cost-of-living sweeteners appear to have won the day.

The pond consigned him to the archive with a note that it much preferred the earlier original headline, preserved in the archive: 2026 budget: Armed and dangerous: ‘hunting’ squad to fire populist scattergun

Now that's a pack of metaphors, but why this cruel despatch of Geoff?

Regular correspondents know the reason: this is Dame Groan day, and what a groaning and a sighing and a grieving and beating of breasts there was to be seen:

The header: The budget myth Labor is using for its big tax grab; Don’t believe the Treasurer’s untested platitudes when mooted tax changes use disputed claims about intergenerational inequity and ignore overseas failures on similar reforms.

The caption for that pair of misery makers, the ruination of Dame Groan's life: Finance Minister Katy Gallagher and Treasurer Jim Chalmers, ‘who is very good at rattling off unbelievable cliches in the hope they make sense’. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Correspondents in the Dame Groan cult - you know who you are - already know the format.

"We'll all be rooned", in a four minute read, with the only interest the way that the attack is launched.

You have to hand it to the Albanese government: ministers don’t bother to let facts get in the way of their arguments. This is particularly the case for Jim Chalmers, who is very good at rattling off unbelievable cliches in the hope they make sense.
We hear a lot about intergenerational inequity as a rationale for policy changes even though all the serious analysis suggests there is no such thing. Older people have always held more wealth than younger folk. It has always been the case, and it will be in the future.
But identity politics is a potent force. Suggest that Baby Boomers had it easy and are now ripping off their children and grandchildren, and an argument is made that the privileges the Baby Boomers have enjoyed over their lives – forget the hard work and sacrifices – need to be pared back.
Wrap the argument in terms of the difficulty of home ownership and Chalmers suddenly becomes confident that the major tax changes to be announced in the budget are saleable. The press gallery will love them.

So far so good, but at this point, the lizard Oz graphics department decided to make it deeply weird:  ‘Older people will rightly feel some of the wealth accumulated from years of hard work and saving will be confiscated, simply to be thrown on to the bonfire of wasteful spending.’

It turns out that this was an image culled from one of those wretched stock footage libraries, though these days it might also be a form of AI slop that litters the full to overflowing interubes and can be found with an image search. (Click on to enlarge, the pond doesn't mean to insult eyeballs).

Why do the reptiles do it?

Because they're cheap as, and they need to shove some form of visual distraction into the groaning as a way of breaking up the indigestible crap.

Why was the pond distracted?

Well it already knows the main message, we'll all be rooned before the year is out ...

It’s worth summarising the analysis undertaken by e61 Institute on the issue of intergenerational inequity. The argument made is that we have “a fiscal system that was designed for a higher productivity growth economy than the one we are in”.
“Seen this way, many of the issues look less like an intergenerational divide and more like two different problems: a system that is front-loading costs on to young people’s lowest-earning years, and a windfall that will largely flow to those who inherit.”
Without productivity growth – something the Boomer generation enjoyed for several decades during their working lives – the economic compact is beginning to disintegrate. Excessive government spending has meant that bracket creep is the only reliable way to increase revenue, leaving aside the lucky break of high commodity prices. The effect has been to increase the proportion of total government revenue derived from income tax. This has a much bigger impact on those who are working rather than the retired.
There is also the issue that an impost of a 12 per cent superannuation contribution charge on younger people is far too high when lifetime earnings and needs are considered. It’s impossible to see a Labor government deciding to reduce this figure for younger folk, even if this makes perfect sense. When you are in your 20s and 30s, buying a home is a much bigger imperative than saving for retirement. Mind you, if the younger generation does have a legitimate beef about anything, it’s the run-up in government debt that they will have to pay off down the track. That’s real intergenerational inequity.

The reptiles decided at this point that they needed a Little Sir Echo, so they sent in Freedumb boy, but all that did was remind the pond that Sky Noise down under still hadn't undergone a rebrand: Shadow Treasurer Tim Wilson claims the Labor government is pouring “debt petrol on the inflation fire”. “They’ve decided to continue pouring debt petrol on the inflation fire,” Mr Wilson told Sky News Australia. “Australians will continue to pay a price for that.”

What an odd way to talk about petrol in these straitened times.

And why was Jimbo featured in the thumb? Sure, he looked suitably sly and sinister, but what have the reptiles got against Freedumb boy?

No matter, back to the 'rooning ... which began to take on the eerily prophetic tone of a shining ...

So, what are the likely contents in the budget that will be justified by intergenerational inequity? One of the most likely candidates for change is capital gains tax. There is leaked chatter about moving back to the indexation method implemented by Paul Keating, which was replaced in 1999 with the far simpler 50 per cent discount rule.
What is not frequently mentioned is the scope to average capital gains over five years under the Keating method, which can significantly reduce the amount of tax payable. This facet of the arrangement is not expected to be part of the new package.
While there is some vague reference to grandfathering the new policy, this is not locked in. There is also talk of partial grandfathering, a concept that defies both logic and practical implementation. For instance, there are currently 2.5 million investment properties. The very idea they would all have to be revalued on a particular date is fanciful.

At this point the reptiles decided to really lower the visual bar: It’s not clear how a minimum rate of tax on trusts would impact on intergenerational inequity because many beneficiaries of trust income are young people.

It's not clear? What's clear is that these days the reptiles have entirely given up on the graphics game and much prefer the sort of slop that can be found all over the place:

Hey, AI, show cash and locks and coins, we need some slop to fill up the hive mind trough.

As for Dame Groan, why was the pond surprised to find she was a lover of trusts? (Truth to tell, the pond wasn't that surprised):

It’s interesting to observe what has happened recently in Canada under the normally canny Prime Minister, Mark Carney. A decision was taken to reduce the capital gains tax discount, and a date was set for the changeover. Bedlam descended because of the sheer impracticality of the proposal and the flood of assets on the market seeking liquidation before the cut-off date. In the end, the Canadian Liberal government – read Labor – was forced to back down and the change has been put on hold.
There is also a great deal of chatter here about imposing a minimum rate of tax on trusts, although there is likely to be an exemption for farmers. It’s not entirely clear how this would impact on intergenerational inequity because many beneficiaries of trust income are young people.
There is also a great deal of misinformation about trusts, with comparisons made with salary income splitting. In most cases, trust income must be distributed annually to the beneficiaries who then pay income tax at their top marginal rates. For the wealthiest, this change will not affect them. And note that trusts are, in part, a device to preserve assets.

At this point, the pond couldn't be bothered pointing out the banality of the farm illustration: Farmers are demanding the nation’s 80,000 family farms be exempt from any capital gains tax changes.

What would the world do without a drone POV?

And that led to the final gobbet of the current 'rooning ...

Having said this, many small businesses are set up as trusts and this change could adversely affect many owners who are struggling to survive in the current environment. Negative gearing has been part of the tax code for over a century. Being able to deduct the cost of investment from tax payable is a completely unexceptional feature of the tax system. It’s also impossible to sustain the argument that negative gearing (and capital gains tax) is to blame for recent high house prices since the former arrangements have not changed.
Again, it’s worth looking at what has been done on this front overseas. Several countries have pared back the generosity of negative gearing – it’s not called that in other countries. Both the UK and New Zealand changed their rules to reduce house prices and to widen the scope for home ownership.
The short- to medium-term impacts were extremely modest, with a multitude of other interventions creating chaotic housing markets – very much like here.
So, my advice as always is to hang on to your hat. Don’t believe the untested platitudes of the Treasurer or have any confidence in the advice being given to him by the commercially naive Treasury officials. Older people will rightly feel that some of the wealth they have accumulated from years of hard work and saving will be confiscated, simply to be thrown on to the bonfire of wasteful spending. But the government is not seeking their approval or their votes.
It’s all about the vibe.

That's the best Dame Groan could do for a closer? A reference to The Castle?

The pond would prefer to drag in a Wilcox ...

As for the rest, the pond will leave that to correspondents embedded in the cult, pausing only to note the singular way that Dame Groan manages to think it's all business as usual, and that a bit of demonising Jimbo and his mob is more than enough.

The world is in dire straits, and it's getting direr by the day, and yet there's no reptile in the lizard Oz willing to tackle the enormity of what mad King Donald and the mad Mullahs are managing to do to the world economy each day.

There was only one decent point to be made in favour of a war - that it might provide some relief for the Iranian people from a cruel regime.

That was never likely, it was more just an excuse dreamt up by the sociopathic Benji to sell King Donald on the war ...

Meanwhile, the sociopathy never seems to end...

Israeli minister served golden death penalty noose birthday cake

It's not just the Iranian regime that specialises in cruelty.

And so to a note from the fringes as the both siderist NY Times decided that Tucker needed help with his platform ...