In which the pond slowly gets around to Our Henry and Killer of the IPA, but has to wade through a bigly amount of beefy boofhead first ...

 

The reptiles were full of it early in the morning this day ...

On and on they blathered in a state of hysteria, aided by hideous AI collages ..

But what was the point of all this fevered, fervid rambling?

It would only be later in the day that the matter would be resolved ...

The pond decided that the only reptile worth brownie points for hysteria was Brownie himself, who elevated the whole affair to an extinction level event...

Commentary by Greg Brown
Hit the ground running to avert Liberal extinction
The Liberal Party’s survival hangs in the balance as Angus Taylor prepares for Friday’s leadership ballot, with supporters warning he must prove personal transformation or face extinction.

Pull yourself and those supporters together man!

So the lettuce scores a win if Ley goes down, but it's not the end of the world. 

Think ahead to the next lettuce challenge, after the beefy boofhead has shown he's a complete nonce and a dropkick ...

The reptiles knew the real state of the game by providing Brownie's piece with a very silly photo ...

After a bigly cackle, the pond decided to ignore them all - the pond even cut "Ned" dead ... 

‘There’s no magic wand for the Liberal Party’ 
Paul Kelly, editor-at-large at The Australian, examines why leadership changes won’t fix the Liberal Party’s woes, and how the rise of One Nation is reshaping the political battlefield.

Be warned, be alert and alarmed, just like the beefy boofhead ...

The horror, the horror ...won't someone think of the children?

The thought of keeping "Ned" company for13 visual minutes was too much for a possum to bear... but the pond did think that Charlie Lewis in Crikey made a substantial contribution ... (sorry, paywall).

Charlie began by celebrating one likely contender ...

As a vote to stick with or switch current leader Sussan Ley gets closer, Senator Jane Hume has offered her assessment of what Taylor is:
"He is a very deep thinker and a great intellect in our party. He’s got incredible experience at a number of portfolios … He’s very good in city seats, but he comes from a country seat himself and is, naturally, a country boy …"
Of course, this is job interview talk: Hume is angling to be Taylor’s deputy, and as such her comments ring with the same clear, bright truth as someone conceding that “perfectionism” is their biggest weakness.

And then he celebrated the beefy prime Angus boofhead from down Goulburn way ...

Put it another way ...

There, the pond's coverage of the existential crisis is compleat, roll on the lettuce's celebrations, as it savours the smell of victory.

Meanwhile, as sure as the sun slowly rises on the end of the week, there was the hole in the bucket man, ready to play his role in the ongoing work of the Australian Daily Zionist News ...

The header: Anti-Israel violence an echo of ’60s radicalism; Modern protests are shaped by the radicalism of the 1960s, amplified by social media and alliances with extremists, turning peaceful demonstrations into a volatile challenge for authorities.

The caption for Our Henry's wander back into the past - sssh don't mention all the gay bashing back in the day: Police lead anti-Vietnam War protesters during the march through Sydney in 1971. Picture: News Ltd

Relax, for once Our Henry's Zionism took a back seat to an exploration of dangerous radicalism, as the hole in bucket spent a bigly five minutes sounding the alarm (and in the process entirely forgot to mention Thucydides) ...

Coming after anti-Israel protesters assaulted police in Melbourne late last year, the ugly scenes at Monday’s demonstration in Sydney point to a deeper crisis. Like many of our current pathologies, its roots lie in the heady days of the 1960s. And if the crisis has proved so hard to contain, it is because the ideas and attitudes forged in that period have continued to command allegiance long after the conditions that gave them plausibility fell away – turning inherited reflexes into instruments of chaos and disorder.
At the heart of the changes that shook Australia towards the close of the Menzies era was the emergence of protest movements incubated within rapidly expanding universities. Although multiple influences were at work, developments overseas were especially important.
That influence was reinforced through several channels. For the first time, youth travel occurred on a mass scale: in the 1960s, cheaper fares and rising incomes lifted overseas departure rates among those aged 20-24 more than six-fold.
Meanwhile, television became a primary source of nightly news, transforming political events – including those overseas – into vivid, broadly shared spectacles. Complementing both developments was the diffusion of a distinct youth culture that celebrated oppositional attitudes. It is consequently unsurprising that the earliest stirrings echoed the US civil rights movement: the “Freedom Rides” of early 1965 captured the nascent mood.
But it was, of course, the Vietnam War that transformed scattered nuclei of activism into a national phenomenon.
As in the US, the campaign against the war entrenched a new radicalism within Australian universities, marked by revolutionary rhetoric sharply at odds with the tone and posture of the peace movement of the 1950s. Dominated by communist fronts, that earlier movement had concentrated on attracting fellow travellers from the unions, the ALP and the churches. It was therefore shaped by a persistent quest for respectability that – although continually undermined by slavish adherence to the Soviet line – left a clear imprint on its leadership style. Consistent with that orientation, its rhetoric during the Vietnam era focused on securing the withdrawal of Australian troops and a negotiated settlement to the war.
By contrast, beginning with the Sydney University ALP Club in 1966, student activists cast the Vietcong as “model revolutionaries” and replaced the traditional peace movement’s imagery – designed to elicit sympathy through photographs of napalmed children and burning villages – with stylised portrayals of heroic guerillas. Rejecting calls for negotiation as “talk into thin air”, they embraced a Manichean worldview in which Australians confronted a stark choice between remaining “an outpost of imperialism” and supporting the forces of “progress” – that is, between their own soldiers and those they were fighting.

At this point, the reptiles introduced some hope, the chance of a distraction from the sight of Our Henry going all tricky Dick/Henry Kissinger, and bombing his way to world peace... Extinction Rebellion at Henley Beach, featuring people dressed as politicians burying their heads in the sand, representing their refusal to take meaningful action on climate change. Picture: Keryn Stevens

Climate change! 

There was reason to stick with the old fuddy duddy, the sort of man who no doubt thought that apartheid was well worth supporting (what with it currently being something the government of Israel has taken to with enthusiasm) ...

Nor were these radicals especially committed to nonviolence at home. On the contrary, Maoist factions treated violence as revolutionary, particularly when directed at the police, and even more so at rival radical groups – producing brawls that culminated in 1978, when Maoists hurled an alleged Trotskyite through a plate-glass window.
Yet these groups remained numerically insignificant. In the tussles for control of the 1970 Moratorium, they were readily outplayed by the traditional peace organisations’ battle-hardened Communist cadres, whose overriding objective was to garner support within the labour movement and across the electorate.
At a time when the ALP Right remained a formidable force – particularly in the pivotal states of NSW and Victoria – and when institutions, including the police, still commanded broad respect on the left, assembling wide-ranging support required that demonstrations remain orderly. The prominence of the “give peace a chance” motif reinforced the insistence on nonviolence. The result was that the extremists were marginalised and restrained – physically so in Brisbane – allowing the massive nationwide demonstrations of May 8, 1970 to proceed almost entirely peacefully. That was less true of the subsequent Vietnam protests and of the highly confrontational attempts to impede the Springboks’ tour in 1971. Yet despite those blemishes, the May 1970 marches conferred on mass demonstrations an enduring legitimacy they had never previously possessed.
A momentous consequence of that legitimacy – and of the subsequent rise to power of the baby boomers, whose worldview had been shaped by the Moratorium – was a far-reaching transformation of the legal framework. Until then, regulations governing street protests had been squarely directed at maintaining public order: statutory offences legislation and municipal by-laws treated permission to occupy public spaces for rallies and marches as a privilege, granted subject to clear duties and constraints.
The report of the South Australian Royal Commission chaired by Justice Charles Hart Bright, and the Public Assemblies Act 1972 (SA) that followed, marked the advent of a different era, in which the authorities had to stringently justify any restrictions. Entrenching that shift was the High Court’s controversial decision in Brown v Tasmania (2017), which – drawing a very long bow from the already contentious implied freedom of political communication – appeared to elevate even highly disruptive protest into a constitutional entitlement.
However, as the Age of Aquarius gave way to the Age of Rage, the conditions that had once kept mass demonstrations peaceful ebbed away. Respect for Australian institutions, including the police, curdled into hostility towards a “settler colonial” state; in an era of political...

Say what, not this again, and what's worse interrupting Our Henry in mid-rant?

It really is deeply weird .... as our Henry returned to his rant ...

...fragmentation and rival echo chambers, the search for a broad base yielded to the imperative of seizing attention; the collapse of the ALP Right and the capture of taxpayer-funded institutions by the far left relaxed the normative and organisational constraints on extremism; and as an apocalyptic mindset – typified by the green left – eclipsed the hopeful, often utopian, spirit of the Vietnam years, violence came to seem not merely permissible but necessary, given the perceived enormity and urgency of the stakes.
As a result, the unrestrained aggressiveness of social media spilled from the screen into the street, its rhetorical assaults readily hardening, once enacted in the public square, into the real thing.
Already evident in Extinction Rebellion’s massively disruptive protests, those currents have, in the recent demonstrations, metastasised. Supercharging their force – and the threat they pose – is the alliance between the far left and radical Muslims whose virulent antisemitism, contempt for liberal democracy and repudiation of Australian institutions imports a jihadist logic that prizes confrontation over coexistence.

The pond seized the chance gratefully, walking past the usual Muslim bashing for a chance to note some recent news on climate science ... including the diligent work by King Donald in bringing the world closer to disaster ...

How he loves himself some coal, and the pond thinks it's passing strange that the reptiles of Oz have been very restrained in their celebrations ... though WaPo took notice:

Trump orders Pentagon to buy coal power as the polluting fuel struggles to survive
President Donald Trump signed an order directing the Defense Department to favor electricity derived from coal, expanding his campaign to prop up the fossil fuel.
By Evan Halper

WaPo also chipped in with ...

Scientists thought they understood global warming. Then the past three years happened.

Some of it evaded the intermittent archive, but the point was plain enough ...

Ah, the land down under, and ready to chunder ...

And again ...

And so on, and while noting that the archived version has some handy links, the pond should at least also note the latest Graudian contribution ...

Point of no return: a hellish ‘hothouse Earth’ getting closer, scientists say
Continued global heating could set irreversible course by triggering climate tipping points, but most people unaware
Damian Carrington Environment editor

There was more bigly, goodly news, and some handy links if you reverted to the original:

The world is closer than thought to a “point of no return” after which runaway global heating cannot be stopped, scientists have said.
Continued global heating could trigger climate tipping points, leading to a cascade of further tipping points and feedback loops, they said. This would lock the world into a new and hellish “hothouse Earth” climate far worse than the 2-3C temperature rise the world is on track to reach. The climate would also be very different to the benign conditions of the past 11,000 years, during which the whole of human civilisation developed.
At just 1.3C of global heating in recent years, extreme weather is already taking lives and destroying livelihoods across the globe. At 3-4C, “the economy and society will cease to function as we know it”, scientists said last week, but a hothouse Earth would be even more fiery.
The public and politicians were largely unaware of the risk of passing the point of no return, the researchers said. The group said they were issuing their warning because while rapid and immediate cuts to fossil fuel burning were challenging, reversing course was likely to be impossible once on the path to a hothouse Earth, even if emissions were eventually slashed.
It was difficult to predict when climate tipping points would be triggered, making precaution vital, said Dr Christopher Wolf, a scientist at Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Associates in the US. Wolf is a member of a study team that includes Prof Johan Rockström at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and Prof Hans Joachim Schellnhuber at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.
“Crossing even some of the thresholds could commit the planet to a hothouse trajectory,” said Wolf. “Policymakers and the public remain largely unaware of the risks posed by what would effectively be a point-of-no-return transition.
“It’s likely that global temperatures are [already] as warm as, or warmer than, at any point in the last 125,000 years and that climate change is advancing faster than many scientists predicted.”
It is also likely that carbon dioxide levels are the highest they have been in at least 2m years.
Prof Tim Lenton, an expert on tipping points at the University of Exeter in the UK, said: “We know we are running profound risks on the current climate trajectory, which we can’t rule out could turn into a trajectory towards a much less habitable state of the climate for us. However, we don’t need to be heading towards a hothouse Earth for there to be profound risks to humanity and our societies – these will already be upon us if we continue to 3C global warming.”
The assessment, which was published in the journal One Earth, synthesised recent scientific findings on climate feedback loops and 16 tipping elements. The tipping elements include the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, mountain glaciers, polar sea ice, sub-Arctic forests and permafrost, the Amazon rainforest and the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc), a system of ocean currents that strongly influences the global climate.
Tipping may already be happening in Greenland and west Antarctica, with permafrost, mountain glaciers and the Amazon rainforest appearing to be on the verge, the scientists said

Our Henry ignored all of that, and blithely concluded, in his determinedly pompous, but also pig ignorant, way ...

Caught between that reality, a commitment to an ill-defined, entirely ahistorical “right to protest”, and the High Court’s ever-changing jurisprudence, governments have struggled to respond. Although circumstances are nowhere near as dire, historian Detlev Peukert’s judgment of the Weimar Republic’s failure to master street violence rings shockingly true: “The republic oscillated between impotence and over-reaction: either constitutional scruples paralysed it, or emergency powers hollowed out its legitimacy.”
That is precisely where we now stand – for here too, as with the shibboleths of multiculturalism and of Indigenous “self-determination”, we remain in thrall to the spent inheritance of a vanished age.
In the end, every liberal democracy, if it is to endure, must give its enemies enough rope to hang themselves – but not enough to hang others. Striking that balance demands a cold, hard view of the world as it is. We have adamantly refused to take it. Unless we open our eyes, it is only a matter of time before we are swinging in the wind.

Oh we've got more than enough rope to hang ourselves, and enough coal to make sure the planet turns into a hellish landscape ... all so we can replicate a bizarre kind of AI which allows the reptiles to do wretched collages ...

And so, with that cheery 1950 Addams thought in mind, it's off to Killer of the IPA's outing ...

The header: No one blames the migrants – it’s the pollies who fail us, A surge of temporary immigrants, many from low-income nations, has created a growing underclass in Australia, fuelling competition for jobs, housing and political tensions.

The caption for the cluster of flag waving ratbags, no doubt the sort favoured by Our Henry: Anti-immigration protesters gather outside State Parliament on September 13, 2025 in Melbourne. Australians rallied in multiple cities in a call for unity after right-wing protesters staged marches through Australian CBDs. Picture: Getty Images

Killer spent a bigly four minutes explaining that absurd bit of trolling...

No one blames the migrants

He did it by proceeding to explain the how and why and the wherefore of blaming the migrants ...

In the late 19th century, about 60,000 Pacific islanders, pejoratively called Kanakas, toiled away on cotton and sugar plantations in Queensland. At that time about 10 per cent of the state’s population – rich landowners – fought bitterly to keep them after Federation, when a racist White Australia policy promptly deported most of them.
History doesn’t repeat but often rhymes. About 10 per cent of Australia’s population is once again in an economically highly disadvantaged position after an unprecedented influx of 1.2 million immigrants since 2022 doubled the population on temporary visas to more than two million, up from one million in 2015.
Largely from low-income, non-English-speaking nations, they have come to constitute a “vast underclass”, write Bob Birrell, Katharine Betts and Ernest Healy, from The Australian Population Research Institute, in a new research paper that lays bare the nation’s risky, high-speed socio-economic transformation.
“Their stay in Australia is precarious, with little access to Australia’s welfare benefits and they are vulnerable to exploitation by employers,” the researchers write, noting the vast bulk of them work in low-skilled jobs despite their university and vocational qualifications.
Migrants who didn’t speak English well faced a 28 per cent income penalty and were less than half as likely to report an income “over $20,000”, according to a 2024 research paper published by economists at ANU.
Remarkably, about 60 per cent of the 180,000 permanent residencies awarded last year were to temporary visa holders already in Australia, ensuring a vast and growing pool of hundreds of thousands of mainly student new arrivals who will be compelled to jump from visa to visa as they seek to stay permanently.
The number of bridging visas (which include full work rights), allocated to those waiting for other categories of visas or appealing the rejection of visas has jumped to 400,000 this year from a little over 200,000 in 2019.
Just like the Queensland farmers in the 1900s, high-income Australians benefit from this underclass, enjoying much cheaper transport, cleaners and immigrant-staffed restaurants, for instance, without enduring the social disruption caused by an influx of migrants to outer suburbs, than they otherwise would.

Not this again ...

It didn't halt Killer, always ready to celebrate some dinkum bashing of pesky, uppity furriners ...

It’s been a gold rush for the higher education sector too, selling the increasingly elusive prospect of permanent residency.
For most new and native-born Australian citizens, especially the young, the economic impact of migrants, however, is becoming severe, supercharging rents amid ferocious competition for low-skilled work.
“For others, they are adding to urban congestion and competition for urban services and, for some, a disturbing transformation of the ethnic makeup of the city,” Birrell and his colleagues write.
After three years of steady decline in real incomes, the electorate has woken up to the impact.
Support for One Nation, a party known for its consistent stand arguing for lower immigration, has soared to almost 30 per cent of the primary vote in the latest YouGov Poll, foreshadowing the greatest political realignment since the Labor Party split 70 years ago.
The deafness of the Labor and Liberal parties to the rising anger throughout last year has been extraordinary. According to TAPRI’s survey of more than 3000 people in late 2024, 80 per cent of Australians want lower immigration, and more than half want it to be drastically lower.
Yet not a single, concrete change to immigration settings of any note has been proposed by either party. Despite a brief and modest reduction in 2024 in visas for international students, who already make up about half the total university population, the federal government in August 2025 increased the allocation for 2026 by 25,000 to 295,000 to “provide stability and certainty for the international education sector”.
No doubt the higher education sector is enjoying a gold rush, but many younger Australians are not enjoying the same stability and certainty.
The ABS on Thursday said net permanent and long-term arrivals had increased to 480,520 in 2025 – the highest such calendar year figure on record. A different measure from the most widely quoted “net overseas migration”, to be sure, but it hardly points to a radical reduction in immigration in keeping with community concern.
Yes, the level of net immigration has been falling to a “mere” 305,000 over the 12 months to September last year. But is a level more than three times that permitted during the early 1990s enough to mollify the public?
The left of politics has always been much better at sloganeering than its opponents. But its opponents have finally scored a win with “mass migration”: the phrase has become entrenched, it resonates and, while subtly pejorative, is more or less accurate to any fair-minded observer.

Killer finally got around to explaining that trolling headline, with a sublime amendment...

No one rationally blames immigrants for this situation...

Ah you see, Killer, in his alarmist bigotry, and cultivated hysteria about stranger danger, and wild-eyed agitation about furriners  is just being rational ...

It's rational to be alarmed about being hysterical by an invading horde swamping the ethos of the IPA ...
No one rationally blames immigrants for this situation – they understandably would prefer to stay in this beautiful country for good. If Switzerland had immigration rules like ours, it would be swamped within months, potentially undermining its very high standard of living and social cohesion.
Especially for an island such as Australia, immigration is a choice, as the pandemic illustrated starkly.
In a shameful episode in our history, the Kanakas were forced to come here but many ultimately didn’t want to go home. The racism that drove their expulsion has mercifully dissipated in what self-evidently has become a very welcoming nation.
But if the concerns of ordinary Australians continue to be so flagrantly ignored, we risk an ugly political response.
Only half of the migrants who arrived in Australia between 1951 and 2021 obtained citizenship, Birrell points out, and “for arrivals since then the share obtaining citizenship has contracted sharply”.
Whoever wins the Liberal leadership on Friday should resist the mistaken elite opinion that significant reductions in immigration won’t appeal to voters.
The multimillion-strong temporary immigrant wave has transformed Australian society – but none of them can vote.

The pond checked a couple of times to make sure and so it was - there was no mention of Killer's job at the IPA, no hint that he worked for a braying, barking mad lobbying group that did its best to argue cigarettes were good, coal was great and climate science a mass delusion.

In short, just another day in the hive mind's deadly obfuscation of their grinding away at rationalism... to be replaced by paranoia and a wilful confusing of real extinction events with the triumph of a humble lettuce.

Meanwhile, the band plays on ...

What was that Truffaut film? Tirez sur le pianiste ...

Nah, cancel that thought, it's going to be a great gig, an entirely different level of piano playing...

In which the reptiles drop the Presidential visit bundle, and anarchy and chaos equivalent to a Liberal leadership challenge reigns supreme ...

 

Amazing scenes. 

It was talk of a Chinese spy that swept the Australian Zionist Daily News away from its primary task ...

The pond had half expected that the C.F.M.E.U. yarn or the machinations and treachery of the beefy prime Angus boofhead down Goulburn way might have provided a distraction, but there's nothing like a Chinese spy to send the hive mind into overdrive, and take out the top of the digital page ma ...

Remember Petrov!

EXCLUSIVE
Canberra bakery assistant faces court charged as an alleged Chinese spy
Zheng Siru presents as a hard-working bakery assistant serving busy Canberrans. But federal authorities allege the ‘peaceful life’ Ms Zheng insists she leads is a facade. (older version of the story before the beat up at the archive)
By Liam Mendes, Ben Packham and Elizabeth Pike

To be fair, the reptiles did give the beefy boofhead plenty of attention, because just below the alleged Chinese spy came this motley crew ...

Petulant Peta, a wretched cartoon, a hideous AI gif featuring figures moving like they'reon a shipwreck, with a flag waving behind them as the sun seems to slowly sink! 

Game on!

There was a hearty promo presented as an EXPLAINER ...

EXPLAINER
Who is Liberal Party leadership aspirant Angus Taylor?
Ten years after entering parliament as a ‘man to watch’ in the Coalition, Angus Taylor looks to be mounting his second run at the Liberal leadership. 

For those who care there was a happy snap atop the EXPLAINER showing the beefy prime Angus in his native setting ...

That's as much as the pond could take of the C.V. 

"Prize dingbat" or "delusional doofus" would have sufficed, though to be fair, the lettuce did a little skip, thinking that after much waiting there might be a victory parade on Friday. 

And then the lettuce could return for the next contest, the beefy boofhead v. the pastie Hastie, with a good chance that might take place before Xmas...

As for petulant Peta's peevish question, Can Angus Taylor fix a broken Liberal Party?

That's as much as the pond could take, but to answer the question .... first the hive mind had to wallow through a bout of tedious self-congratulation ...

...Peter Dutton’s problem was that a conservative man was not a conservative leader; nor was there any real attempt at a broad policy agenda, let alone a conservative one. And Ley’s the same: nine months in and, other than moving against net zero, there’s nothing on the table.
Contrast that with Abbott who, eight months after winning the leadership by one vote, put out a full policy manifesto and, through relentless campaigning, achieved a hung parliament in 2010.

If the onion mucher's style is the answer, forget the question, but there was a sort of answer, if you could get past the relentless promotion of one of the country's worst leaders as a role model ...

Enough already ... the pond was reminded why correspondents get agitated when the pond gives any room to petulant Peta,.

The pond should probably have followed US style and done a sensible redaction ...

(Look it up)

On the upside, the petulant, peevish one was already handing away the next election, so the Black Knight syndrome remains an inspiration for the lettuce.

Meanwhile, over on the extreme far right, the bouffant weighed in, and he was in a state of depression about the beefy boofhead and his challenge...

The pond apologises for not caring enough to offer a transcription, but surely the nattering negativity of this nabob is plain enough, especially when he turns from talk of self-destruction to talk of poorly-executed challenges ...

As Jimbo was mentioned, it would be remiss of the pond not to mention his one liner, which called to mind memories of the French clock devotee...

The reason the opposition are divided is that half support the Member for Hume (beefy Angus) and the other half have met him ...

What else?

Over on the extreme far right, the pond paused to note a piece that would shock Polonius and his prattle to the core.

Everyone knows there's not a single conservative bone in the ABC's body, but there was this cringey upstart rabbiting on about Bluey ...

Thanks ABC: Why Bluey is a global triumph for conservative values
Bluey is the most conservative show on TV
Australia’s hottest export, America’s most-streamed show and the biggest children’s series in the world proves it’s still possible to make an old-fashioned, family friendly program.
By Louise Perry

The pond's heart shattered. Tears clouded the pond and forced the pond to stop reading.

Had the reptiles lost all care for Polonius? How could they so callously, blatantly betray his mantra?

Only last week the pond faithfully recorded that Polonius had yet again trotted out his favourite line, one the pond has read at least a squillion times...

The ABC is a conservative-free zone and is all but devoid of viewpoint diversity.

Now some shameless hussy was gloating that the ABC was running the most conservative show on TV?

Words must be spoken, words surely will be spoken, and the pond awaits Polonius's response.

The pond reeled away from the melee, past Jack the Insider...

The serial protester who now wants your vote
Josh Lees, the professional activist behind Sydney’s perennial Palestine Action Group protests has registered a socialist party that could split the left-wing vote. It mightn’t be the doddle he thinks.
By Jack the Insider
Columnist

Jack wasn't much interested in Gaza or such like and ended this way ...

...Rarely discussed is the ideological buffer the Greens have created for Labor. Labor not only benefits from Greens’ preferences, which flowed to it at a record 88.19 per cent at the last federal election (the figure has grown from 67 per cent in 1996 at every federal election since, breaking the 80 per cent threshold in 2013), but the Australian Greens have become a halfway house for the hard left.
Gone are the days of “Baghdad” Bill Hartley, John Halfpenny and the Victorian Trades Hall Council that became his own fiefdom along with Albert Langer’s Maoist Monash Labor Club.
The hard left now infests the Greens, leaving Labor’s Socialist Left faction (of which the Prime Minister is a member) restricted to socialists of the champagne-sipping variety. The loony left has left the Labor building. Premier Minns will not lose any sleep should Lees or one of his socialist buddies take a seat in the Legislative Council in 2027. But there are signs, embryonic certainly, that voters on the left have become disenchanted with centrism and frustrated at how often and easily the Greens bend the knee to Labor.
What we can say is that pluralism in Australian politics is on life support and the patient is not expected to recover.

Speaking of Minns, the pond should note the special tribute paid to him by John Hanscombe in The Echnida.

After recalling the infamous visit by LBJ and Bob "brown paper bag" Askin's famous line "Run over the bastards", Hanscombe celebrated Minns' incredible skills as a leader...

...Fast forward to this week and another NSW premier made an equally silly comment in the wake of ugly scenes at a protest over another visiting president. Don't judge the actions of NSW police on a few 10-second videos on social media, he told a media conference. In other words, don't believe what you just saw.
Video of an officer's fists working like pistons on a protester already pinned to the ground. Another of an officer repeatedly punching a bloke in a shirt and tie, his arms raised in surrender. Yet another, taken after the crowd had dispersed, of officers manhandling Muslim worshippers prostrate in prayer - for which the police commissioner apologised yesterday.
It was Chris Minns' Minnesota moment, with the same Orwellian undertone of US federal authorities in the immediate aftermath of the fatal shooting by ICE officers of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. They, too, suggested the American public should not believe what they saw.
None of this is to say protesters massed outside Sydney Town Hall on Monday night were blameless. Other videos showed some ignoring protest organiser Josh Lees' pleas not to march and others captured protesters clearly being aggressive towards police. Like the clips of the officers punching protesters, I know what I saw. No AI concoction, just ugly, raw footage.
Minns was foolish to ask people not to judge police on the videos they saw but the Bob Askin award for bullet-headed machismo must go to Tony Abbott, who suggested police filmed punching protesters should be commended, not investigated.
"I think we need to see tear gas and rubber bullets if need be - these people who are trying to intimidate the Australian community need to know that it is the forces of law and order who are in charge," he said on talkback radio.
You have to hand it to Teargas Tones - always ready with a jerry can when the temperature needs to be dialled down. But the pugilist former PM in no longer in office while Chris Minns is. No amount of the context he asks the public to consider when making judgment on the police operation excuses repeated kidney punches on a man already restrained on the ground.
Minns is correct in saying police should not be punching bags. Nor should protesters.

What there was of the Australian Daily Zionist News was well down the page...

Perhaps the reptiles were heading the plea ...

Whatever ...

PRESIDENT’S VISIT
Herzog, Albanese united over Iran
Israeli President Isaac Herzog and Anthony Albanese have attacked Iran and discussed a ‘new beginning’ for relations between their countries amid protests and security concerns.
By Thomas Henry and Elizabeth Pike

That's got to be worth a cartoon celebrating the Minnisimisation of the temperature ...

The reptiles seem to have turned their take on the visit into the sort of royal coverage and news from the doings in the Gee Gee's house that was once a feature of the SMH in its Fairfax days.

As for the news that they're going to re-open dialogue?

Could the pond make a suggestion as to topics, and recycle a few items the pond had prepared in expectation the tour would stay top of the hive mind?

There was this in Haaretz ...

Haaretz Today EU's West Bank Warning Highlights What Israel Stands to Lose if It Proceeds With Annexation; After the Gaza cease-fire went into effect, the EU's threat to suspend its Association Agreement with Israel faded. With Israel now announcing expanded West Bank control, the EU made clear it still remains on the table (*archive link)

The Israeli government's decision this week to strip the Palestinian Authority of some of its powers and ease the sale of Palestinian land to Jewish settlers has drawn condemnations from Arab countries and Western allies.
In a statement, eight Arab and Muslim countries slammed the decision as illegal and a "dangerous escalation." A German diplomat said the government's move to allow Israeli law enforcement in Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank contravenes Israel's obligations under international law, calling it a "further obstacle on the path to a two-state solution."
The German government considers the West Bank an integral part of a future Palestinian state, the diplomat added, and Germany would continue to advocate a negotiated two-state solution.
In Israel, this talk of the two-state solution increasingly feels delusional, as the Netanyahu government has spent the past two years actively dismantling the concept through actions on the ground, with ministers making no secret of their intentions.
"We will continue to kill the idea of a Palestinian state," Israel's far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said (yet again) in a statement shortly after the cabinet meeting on Sunday, during which the measures to expand control over the West Bank were approved.

And so on, and there was this in The Atlantic ...

Trump’s Gaza Plans Are Profoundly Unserious, Conditions on the ground call for immediate humanitarian relief, not gauzy real-estate fantasies. (*intermittent archive link)
By Hussein Ibish

President Trump has extravagant plans for the Gaza Strip. The only problem is that they bear no connection to the grim realities on the ground—nor is there much prospect that the two will align in the foreseeable future.

Trump has declared that the cease-fire in Gaza—such as it is, given that Hamas continues to attack Israeli forces, and Israeli strikes continue to kill Palestinians—has now entered Phase 2. But the only sign of progress has been Israel’s agreement to reopen the small crossing between Gaza and Egypt for individual Palestinians seeking medical care or other necessities. And that development came mainly in response to the recovery of the body of the final Israeli hostage held in Gaza, rather than from any plan of Trump’s.

Washington has, in fact, unveiled an elaborate “master plan” for the reconstruction of Gaza. It is profoundly unserious. It promises industrial parks, educational centers, residential zones, and beach resorts, likely inspired by cities such as Dubai and Singapore. But those cities evolved through decades of careful urban planning. Gaza is, at the moment, a rubbled wasteland. Approximately 80 percent of all structures have been badly damaged or destroyed, and Gazans have nowhere to live except in squalid tents or the ruins of former homes.

Any serious reconstruction plan would have to begin by providing for the urgent needs of more than 2 million Palestinians, which include housing, food, and potable water, as well as basic health and education services. Instead, the Trump plan imagines “coastal tourism” towers; “industrial complex data centers” and “advanced manufacturing,” an airport, a port, trains, parks, and “agriculture and sports facilities.”

The fantasy is beguiling, and its realization would be a magnificent accomplishment—if it weren’t so unimaginably absurd. Trump’s master plan treats Gaza as if it were a greenfield site rather than a partitioned pile of wreckage populated by destitute, hungry, unsheltered people. The plan also totally disregards the historical and religious sites in the Strip. If it all sounds like a real-estate developer’s fantasy run amok, that’s because it is. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who has assumed a major role in the project, has breezily conceded that the plan presumes conditions contrary to fact—a demilitarized Hamas and an end to the Strip’s parition—but that “we do not have a Plan B.” In other words, reconstruction in Gaza will remain a cruel diplomatic pantomime, while millions of people huddle in tents waiting for the next humanitarian aid box.

In addition to being physically destroyed, Gaza is now partitioned between two hostile, armed entities. The Israeli military officially controls 53 percent of the Strip, and unofficially a bit more, and a resurgent Hamas runs the rest. The eastern, Israeli-controlled side of the dividing “yellow line” is now virtually unpopulated and contains most of Gaza’s arable land. The western, Hamas-controlled area consists mainly of demolished cities and towns and sandy beaches—as well as almost the entire Palestinian population....

And so on, and speaking of genocide, couch molester JD was at it again...

That sent the WSJ right off ...

For all those hoping for the death of King Donald, it's important to remember that this is what you get in his place ... even as the Armenian genocide provides an excellent role model for Benji's ethnic cleansing mob ...

Poor Usha, migrant turned into Stepford wife...

And so, after this sketchy Thursday, a chance  to close with the immortal Rowe, and a chance to mention the C.F.M.E.U.

The pond looks forward to a report in a similar vein on the cavortings of Sydney property developers, and not just an aside, as in The trail of destruction left by two of Sydney's infamous property figures...(*intermittent archive link).

As the ADJN cranks into gear yet again, there's no relief, not even "Ned" brooding about the ginger one yet again ...

 

The Australian Daily Jewish News was in full flight this day, as a mob of reptiles took to the digital ether to squawk...

The pond couldn't be bothered doing the links. Correspondents know the url/intermittent archive drill by now.

Over on the extreme far right, Mick joined in the braying ...

The demonstrators who don’t give a damn about rule of law
The chaos on Monday night was considerable but it’s clear why the pro-Palestinian demonstration turned ugly
By Mick Keelty

The pond seized the chance to indulge in its usual visual reminders ...

It was also a chance to note the scribblings of David Leser in another place ... I’m Jewish. I live in Bondi. But I take no comfort from Herzog’s visit (* archive link)

Inter alia ...

...As a Jewish man, I’d like to say that I draw no comfort from Herzog’s presence in Australia, and not because I am not grieving, like every Jewish person, what happened in Bondi, the suburb where I live.
I am not comforted because Isaac Herzog is the president of a country currently defending charges of genocide before the International Criminal Court. I am not comforted because, in the aftermath of October 7, Herzog made comments about “an entire nation” of Palestinians being responsible for the Hamas attacks, comments which a United Nations Special Commission has found “may reasonably be interpreted as incitement to genocide”. (Herzog insists these comments were taken out of context and that there is “no excuse for murdering innocent civilians”.)
I am also not comforted by the fact that Herzog previously posed to sign an artillery shell destined for Gaza with the words, “I rely on you”. (Herzog later admitted this was “lacking taste”, but said the bomb was a “smokescreen shell”.)
You see, here’s the problem. Jewish people are not a monolith. Among us are ardent Zionists, fierce anti-Zionists, religious fundamentalists, rationalists, secularists, humanists, agnostics, atheists, conservatives, progressives and everything in between.
And since the aftermath of October 7, a growing number of us have found it increasingly difficult – make that nigh on impossible – to support Israel and its actions.
That doesn’t make Jewish Australians who oppose Herzog’s visit “the servile lackeys of Hamas”, as Israeli Opposition Leader Yair Lapid asserted scurrilously last week. It makes us people who believe the very essence of Jewishness is to engage in robust debate and oppose injustice, including the ongoing slaughter and occupation of a desperate people by a state purporting to act in our name.
October 7 and its aftermath created an unprecedented catastrophe for the Palestinian nation-in-waiting, but it also created a moral and spiritual catastrophe for the Jewish people in terms of our relationship to Israel … and to each other. It also created social upheaval in terms of how Jewish pain is being exploited to the benefit of those who do – and don’t – have Jewish people’s interests at heart.

The pond is always comforted by the awareness that Jewish people shouldn't be collectively blamed for the war crimes of the current government of Israel.

As for Minns' sturmtruppen, they sent the cranky Keane in Crikey right off ...

Nothing says cohesion like a punch in the head: Violence of Minns’ goons exposes the lie of ‘social cohesion’; NSW Police’s actions against protesters in in Sydney was about the powerful dictating the terms of free speech — through state-sanctioned violence if necessary. (sorry, paywall)

The furious violence directed toward protesters against the visit of Israel’s head of state, by the police of the increasingly Bjelke-esque Minns government in NSW, has in one evening comprehensively demolished the lie of “social cohesion”.
Banned from protesting, kettled, surveilled, attacked, blockaded by an effort to close the CBD, denounced and delegitimised by police and politicians — the protests were “un-Australian” according to the NSW assistant police commissioner — protesters objecting to the presence on Australian soil of Israeli president Isaac Herzog have faced the full force of the state apparatus in scenes similar to those of the actions of ICE agents in the United States. And this was hardly the first time NSW Police have used extraordinary and wholly unjustified violence against protesters opposing genocide.
Herzog has signed artillery shells to be used against Gazans, and declared there are no civilians among Palestinians, rather “it’s an entire nation out there that is responsible” — words that clearly incite and are designed to justify the kind of horrific violence meted out to Palestinians witnessed over the past two and a half years. More to the point, he is the head of state of a country engaged in genocide and ethnic cleansing. To ban protests against his visit, to inflict violence on those who choose to protest anyway, is a de facto endorsement of Israel’s actions, regardless of what rhetoric politicians like Minns engage in.
Minns and his ministers, and Anthony Albanese and ministers like Penny Wong, Jim Chalmers and Richard Marles, continue to insist they are pursuing “social cohesion”. If not before — but certainly after last night in Sydney — it is time to retire that phrase. Social cohesion is a scam, a strategy employed by the powerful to delegitimise and suppress the voices of the less powerful. Only the powerful and those deemed worthy by them benefit from “social cohesion”. If you are othered by powerful groups, you become the victim of cohesion, not the beneficiary; what you get from social cohesion is a punch from an armed official of the state, not protection.
Calls for “social cohesion” are a form of power speech, in which the powerful attempt to dictate what those with less power can legitimately say. Labor’s insistence on “social cohesion” has all along been targeted at those who oppose genocide: protesters, the many Jewish critics of Israel, Senator Fatima Payman, pro-Palestinian authors, the Greens. We saw the true nature of “social cohesion” after an attempted terrorist massacre at an Invasion Day gathering in Perth on January 26, which governments and the media remained almost completely silent on until goaded into a reluctant acknowledgement that it was an attempt at another mass-casualty terrorist atrocity.
When governments use power speech, however, it comes with the backing of state-sanctioned violence. The NSW Council for Civil Liberties said in 2023 about previous attacks by Minns on free speech: “NSW cannot be prosecuted into social cohesion.” We’ve not moved beyond that: the NSW government isn’t merely prosecuting protesters, it is inflicting “social cohesion” through brute force and violence against people engaged in free speech.
“Social cohesion” really only became a persistent feature of the vocabulary of Labor in mid-2024, when the government became the focus of persistent attacks from both the left and the right about its stance on the Gaza genocide: from the right came criticism that the government was failing to do enough to address growing antisemitism; from the left, that it was staying silent while Israel perpetrated atrocities and war crimes. “Social cohesion” was thus always a political tactic designed to protect the government from criticism and delegitimise its critics who, it charged, wanted to import foreign conflicts here.
Labor believes its mammoth election win over both the Coalition and the Greens last May demonstrated the wisdom of the tactic. The Bondi atrocity — the result of failures by intelligence and security agencies under both sides of politics — only redoubled Labor’s employment of the tactic as a defence against renewed charges it had failed on antisemitism.
But the violence in Sydney has stripped the tactic bare: social cohesion is ultimately about the powerful dictating the terms of free speech to the less powerful, through state-sanctioned violence if necessary. And in NSW, it is employed in protecting from criticism a state that is perpetrating genocide.

Well yes ...

As for paying attention to the other reptiles, the pond has had more than enough ...

Enough! It’s time for NSW’s A-G to take action in the Sally Dowling saga
Maintaining trust in the justice system is critical - and a prosecutor must be seen to be always acting in the interests of the proper administration of justice.
By Janet Albrechtsen

These days the pond is content to note Dame Slap's ongoing obsessions, a never ending saga, and let the intermittent archive take care of them...

Speaking of sagas ...

As soon as the reptiles make visual comparison of hapless Sussssan to Malware, surely it's game over?

LIBERAL CHAOS
Ley urged to follow Turnbull’s spill playbook, as Taylor set to quit
With Angus Taylor’s backers expecting him to call for a special party room meeting, leading moderates are endorsing the need for a petition so there is ‘transparency’ around who wants to remove Sussan Ley.
By Greg Brown and Sarah Ison

The link is to a now out of date archive record, but what does it matter, tracking the behaviour of the 'will he-won't he' beefy prime Angus boofhead is a tedious task at the best of times ...

The bouffant one managed to draw it all together and conflate and confuse the leadership struggle with the relentless Zionism to be found in the ADJN ...

The reptiles followed that first gobbet with one of their classic AI framings, which just managed to fit in the mouth and tie ...

What a sorry sight, with the reptiles reduced to AI caricatures.

How strange is it that the bouffant one should be able to use Albo as a scourge to lash Susssan and her tribe.

Does Albo even begin to wonder where his pandering might have taken him?

Just to rub it in, the reptiles flung in a snap of Susssan looking spotlesss...

The bouffant one concluded with a plea for Susssan to maintain the Zionist rage ...

Ley and the Coalition had actually benefited from Albanese being caught flat-footed on the calling of a royal commission after the Bondi killings.
Yet in the past month they have let Labor off the hook on Israel: Ley got caught unprepared for the special sitting of parliament on antisemitism; Nationals leader David Littleproud launched a Coalition split on the day of national mourning for the Bondi victims; Tuesday’s chance of bipartisanship was missed; and Angus Taylor has pushed himself to a point where he has to announce a leadership challenge against Ley on the day of Herzog’s visit.
Although Albanese is a cunning political operator, he does make mistakes. But Ley, Littleproud and Taylor are not cunning and make even bigger mistakes.

While the pond's wandering a bit, the pond should note John Hanscombe in The Echnida newsletter attempting to bring back the lettuce ...

Surely, we're at the lettuce stage, probably well beyond it. Back in October 2022, British tabloid the Daily Star livestreamed an iceberg lettuce next to a photo of then UK PM Liz Truss in an experiment to see which would last the longest. The lettuce won.
Truss quit as PM six days into the Daily Star's live stream, before the lettuce had even begun to wilt. Sussan Ley has outlasted Truss as Liberal leader by months. Truss only managed 49 days in the top job; Ley has clung on for nine months.

It's true, Susssan has seen a couple of lettuces off, and the daughter of lettuce now in the saga is wilting at the way that prime boofhead Angus beef has shown a remarkable lack of ticker...

It seems he's worried about ending up like Hume highway roadkill, the kind slaughtered by those whale-killing wind machines down Goulburn away ...

Hanscombe looked for other vegetables - call any vegetable by name and they'll respond to you ...

...I'm not a betting man, especially when it comes to politics, which can throw up the totally unexpected - souffles that rise twice and Lazarus with a triple bypass come to mind.
But I can't help thinking Angus Taylor, given his woeful performance as shadow treasurer and his missteps in government, might also be an interim stand-in while the other conservative waiting in the wings, Andrew Hastie, shores up his leadership credentials. With such disastrous polling at the moment, Hastie's dodged a bullet by ruling himself out of the contest. For now.
For Hastie, cold storage might be the way to a longer shelf life.
As for Taylor, we need a different sort of vegetable. Can't be a potato because we only recently saw off one of those. A pumpkin perhaps. Properly cured and kept in a cool, dry, well-ventilated place, checked on regularly for signs of rot, they can last for months. But, if we're honest, they're never the tastiest part of the meal.
Sadly, it is beyond The Echidna 's technical ability to livestream a lettuce. But we'll be thinking of Sussan Ley at dinner time every night as we tuck into a fresh, crisp salad.

They even flung in a lettuce in the illustrated credit ...

Surely there's still hope for the lettuce? Keep it in the fridge for just a little longer?

Surely someone will put a stop to "Ned's" endless brooding about the redhead?

Just to crank "Ned" up to eleven, the reptiles flung in a snap, One Nation leader Senator Pauline Hanson and One Nation SA leader Cory Bernardi, with supporters. Picture: Dean Martin

Sure enough, "Ned"went off bigly ...

The trend is not absolute. But it is clear and identifiable, verified in polls, Australian National University election surveys and the life experiences of so many people. It punishes the Coalition at the ballot box but has the damaging consequence of undermining its confidence, seeding intellectual confusion and creating pivotal splits about what the centre-right stands for and believes.
At the risk of simplification, it has led to two apparent responses. Much of the moderate wing of the Liberal Party wants to move with the times, adopt a more progressive outlook and appeal to the voters lost to the left, a message that resounds amid seats lost to the teals. Yet the conservative wing has drawn the opposite conclusion – it sees the mounting backlash against progressivism, so virulent in the US and Britain, the impact of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, it grasps Labor’s vulnerability on energy policy, its flawed immigration agenda, its inclination towards identity politics and its equivocations on national security and social cohesion.
This internal conflict came to a head after the dismal May 2025 election result. The scale of the defeat was a shock. It provoked an agitated response as the conservatives took the initiative reversing Scott Morrison’s policy of net zero at 2050 and demanding more action against what they called “mass migration”.
The narrow election of a moderate, Sussan Ley, as leader triggered only more division, with conservative agitators pledged to her destruction from the start while others merely said just let the polls do the job. Ley has made many mistakes but, as the first woman to lead the party, she has not been given a fair go, a perception Labor will have no trouble turning into an election issue against the Liberals depending on Ley’s fate.
The centre-right has been trapped in two battles since the election – there is the fight against Anthony Albanese about who governs Australia and there is the more exciting contest of ideas about who dominates in the centre-right – with the populist conservatives demanding a decisive shift to the right.
But the problem is obvious: if you are fighting among yourselves about what you believe, you have no hope of being an effective opposition against Labor. This truism has ruined the Coalition for the past nine months.
Its origins date back to the previous Coalition government when the internal tensions over ideology were factors undermining, in different ways, each of the three PMs, Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and Morrison. With the discipline of government gone, the battle is given fresh licence, reinforced by the notion that Peter Dutton blew the last election because he wasn’t true to conservative policies.

The reptiles flung in another snap of a spotlesss Susssan ...Nobody watching the Sussan Ley-David Littleproud patch-up media conference announcing the revival of the Coalition could have much confidence. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Say it again...

The Liberal Party is now alienated from the new centres of power in Australia, the public and private elites and much of the shifting opinion-making brokers in the country. Over a generation this constitutes a near revolutionary shift to the left in values, if not always in policy. It has many dimensions.

That's got to be worth a Golding ...

What gets the pond is the peculiar out of body experience that "Ned" seems to have whenever he tries to think about the way that the Murdochians have ruined the country ...

The populist conservative media is fundamental in the battle over the future of the centre-right and has promoted Pauline Hanson as symbolic of conservative values, from upholding patriotism, attacking radical Islam, smashing mass immigration, defending fossil fuels, repudiating multiculturalism and opposing progressive wokism in all its forms.

Sheesh, does he ever read the lizard Oz? 

Is he entirely unaware that the "populist conservative media" is largely in thrall to the Murdochians?

The pond thinks that shrinks call this condition a depersonalization-derealization disorder...

Depersonalization is described as feeling disconnected or detached from one's Murdochian employer and one's fellow Murdochian hacks. Individuals may report feeling as if they are an outside observer of their own thoughts or the hive mind body, and often report feeling a loss of control over the thoughts or actions of their employer.  Derealization is described as detachment from one's hive mind surroundings. Individuals experiencing derealization may report perceiving their fellow scribblers and the hive mind world around them as foggy, dreamlike, surreal, and/or visually distorted.

Deeply weird, but then "Ned's" natter always veers off into the bog swamp of weirdness ...

The trouble with promoting Hanson was always obvious – it undermines the Coalition in its other, more important battle: the fight against Albanese Labor. Many conservatives love Hanson, but more mainstream voters loathe her. The evidence is irrefutable: the stronger Hanson’s vote, the bigger Albanese’s margin. Incredibly, some conservatives champion Hanson as the most consistent and purist exponent of true conservative values.
Indeed, Hanson has been given respectability by much of the conservative movement in Australia – a narrative of self-inflicted harm. This week’s Newspoll has Hanson’s party on 27 per cent, heading the parties of the centre-right, but history reveals One Nation is a barometer of grievance, its fortunes are volatile and Hanson can’t hold a parliamentary team together.
The dilemma many conservatives face is they want to move the Coalition in Hanson’s direction but that is a high-risk venture that risks permanent alienation of many centrist voters. History reveals that Hanson can both undermine and destroy Coalition governments. Witness the Queensland state election of June 1998 when Hanson polled 22.7 per cent compared with the Liberals on 16.1 per cent and the Nationals on 15.1 per cent. The conservative government of Rob Borbidge was defeated – just – and Labor’s Peter Beattie became premier with One Nation being decisive in up-ending traditional politics. As Beattie said in last weekend’s Inquirer, if Borbidge had survived Queensland would have had a conservative government propped up by Hanson.
The Queensland election showed One Nation could destroy a conservative government. The upshot was a cataclysm with John Howard under pressure to review his stand on tax reform, a concession he was never going to make.

At this point the reptiles interrupted with an eternal mystery ...

The pond carried on supping on "Ned's" tears, perhaps too much salt for the diet, but delicious all the same ...

But, as Howard said, he had a “near-death experience” at his October 1998 re-election, four months after the Queensland debacle. Howard said: “As well as the GST, Pauline Hanson and One Nation contributed significantly to our big loss of seats in 1998.” His majority was cut from 44 to 12 seats. Hanson won 8.4 per cent of the primary vote and the Coalition lost 7.4 per cent of its primary vote. One Nation played a tangible role in lifting Labor’s vote and exposing Howard to the risk of defeat by Labor – a loss that would have terminated him as a one-term PM.
The moral: when One Nation soars, that guarantees convulsion within the centre-right. A strong Hanson makes the prospect of a coherent centre-right able to win an electoral majority only more remote. Conservatives need to differentiate their pitch from Hanson, not chase Hanson across the political spectrum.
Hanson is strong on brand and weak on policy. Her anti-immigration profile is critical to her current success given justified community alarm about Labor’s immigration policy. The prospect that economic issues will re-emerge as the frontline test for most of this parliamentary term is likely to limit Hanson’s ongoing appeal.
Everything depends on the Coalition parties offering a coherent front and delivering meaningful policy. But nobody watching the Ley-David Littleproud patch-up media conference announcing the revival of the Coalition could have much confidence. What did Littleproud think he was doing? He spent most of his time defending the National Party’s folly in blowing up the Coalition in the first place.
Former Liberal frontbencher Jane Hume said after the News­poll: “Unless something changes, we will be wiped out” – a reference to leadership. In truth, lots of things must change. The centre-right is riven with competing cultural and ideological agendas. It needs to strike an internal settlement to have any chance of becoming a viable opposition in the Australia of 2026.

Indeed, indeed...

Here's the real downer (and not His Lordship).

The pond had half-hoped to be able to open this day with reference to the ongoing attempts to sell Ukraine down the river ...

But the reptiles are now so steeped in Zionism that much else happening in the world passes by the ADJN hive mind digital edition.

Others do pay attention.

Timothy Snyder, for example, was encouraging attention and if possible help, for Ukraine in The Long Ukrainian Winter, How You Can Help, Russia’s full-scale of invasion began four years ago. It began in winter, and so this winter is the fifth. And, for civilians, the worst.

Together with the Gaza ethnic cleansing, the Ukraine atrocity is in a desperate phase ...

The Russian war effort is struggling in the field. Territorial gains are minimal and come at huge cost. What Russia can do is launch ballistic missiles and drones at Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in order to force Ukrainians to endure the freezing cold. Russia also simply targets Ukrainian workers at their factories and Ukrainians generally in their homes.

Sadly, we in North America and Europe share some responsibility in this. The Ukrainians are fighting well enough that we do not have to fight. And so it is all too easy to accept this war, the bloodiest since 1945, as simply part of the status quo.

And so we -- the EU and the US alike -- have taken far too long to cut off Russian gas and oil from world markets. The US government has stopped all military aid to Ukraine -- what continues are shipments of US arms to Ukraine that are purchased by Europeans, as well as European arms shipments. Even though the Ukrainian need is great and the Europeans are paying for everything, the United States has been slow to make deliveries.

We are not sending the Ukrainians the air defense they need to protect themselves. This is one reason millions of people are in the cold, and why civilians die almost every day.

The major policy of the Trump administration has been to use the word “peace.” Peace comes when an aggressor ceases to aggress and the country that is attacked can rebuild. But Trump has been unable to muster a policy that would change Russia’s incentives. He has difficulty even presenting the war as a war, rather than as a misunderstanding about real estate; his administration issues official statements that praise Russia for its desire for peace, even as the offensives continue missiles fall. Trump has put pressure on Ukrainians, who, unlike the Russians, have to fight. For Russia, this is an ego war, a war by a dictator for his own legacy. For Ukraine, this is a war of national sovereignty and physical survival.

Anne Applebaum also paid attention.

Back in the day, the pond never imagined it would be quoting Applebaum in an approving way, yet here we are ... (as the bromancer continues to be MIA) ...

The Ukraine War Grows Deadlier

More civilians are dying now than when Biden was president

Just a taster, with a graph ...

Desperate times ... and now it's time to wrap up proceedings with an immortal Rowe noting the sorry state of Australian politics ...

It's always in the details, what's on the boil, and what's stuffed in the oven ...

Not to worry, here's a little belated Bad Bunny light relief ...