In which the pond digs deep, to find only a bit of Bita and a splash of Dame Snap ...

 

Imagine the pond's despair.

Prattling Polonius has always been a reliable opener for the pond's Sunday meditation, but this weekend he went full Australian Daily Zionist News contributor, with tedious historical angle designed to send readers into a state of somnambulism ...

From 1967 to today: How the left abandoned Israel and fed Australia’s antisemitism crisis
Antisemitism in Australia did not begin on October 7. It is the culmination of a half-century shift that saw the left turn on the Jewish state.
By Gerard Henderson

The pond baulked, resisted opening the mouth to take the bit ...

About the only use the pond could find for it was as a springboard, a segue to Haaretz ... and Adla Alnazer's offering Australia, Don't Be Surprised. Israel Does This to Palestinians All the Time (*intermittent archive link)

Oh that's tasty, way more interesting than Polonius.

The pond will have another chunk, but not before reassuring Adla that the lizard Oz does  it all the time ...shielding Israel from accountability:

But with Polonius banished, along with all the other reptiles whom the pond winnowed out yesterday, like chaff in the wind, what was left provided slim pickings...

Oh sure there was a culture war issue that briefly landed on the top of the page later on the Saturday, a bit of Bita ...

It must be hugely important, it was top of the digital "news" ma, up there with Our Henry's contribution to the Australian Daily Zionist News (for those that missed it Our Henry was in the archive and so was "Ned's" contribution. So much fodder for the Zionist News on the weekend).

The splash featured a pompous git posed in classic arms crossed style ... and so did the yarn ...

The header: University students struggle to write after schools ditched cursive for screens;Reliance on digital devices and typing means many university students can’t write handwritten essays and notes, a former curriculum chief says.

The caption for the snap of the preening, posing git: Former vice-chancellor and chairman of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority Steven Schwartz. Picture: Britta Campion

Before enduring some four minutes of Bita blathering, the pond should declare an interest.

The pond hates doing anything using handwriting. 

Many years ago, a friend of the family gave the pond a cheap-as-chips portable typewriter, and the pond never looked back.

The pond did a self-taught crash course in touch typing, using a standard primer as a guide, and while never up to stenographer or transcriber standard, still managed a decent wpm rate (with only a modest error rate, mainly produced by the keys deciding to stick together. Damn you ancient keyboard).

Unless you happen to be an intense sort of Chinese calligrapher, devoted to the art of Hanzi, or some English nerd compelled by fonts, there's nothing useful or noble about affecting to think running writing or cursive is better than producing English that can be read.

BT, aka "before typing", the pond's handwriting looked like the proverbial tale of a drunk spider crawling through an inkwell ...

The pond isn't the only one.

Back in the day, a number of King Chuck's letters and annotations came to the attention of the press and were so notorious that they attracted a "spider" appellation.

Charles to send MORE spider letters: Supreme Court ruling to release 27 memos to ministers 'won't stop the prince writing more'
Attorney General made a final attempt to block release of Charles' letters 
High Court wanted release but Government appealed to Supreme Court
Known as 'black spider' memos because of royal's scrawled handwriting (Daily Snail link)

Marvel at the scribbled annotations:

Wow, who knew the pond would have an affinity with King Chuck? Those annotations are the royal bee's knees...

With that off the pond's chest, it was time to get down with it ...

University students are struggling to write essays or take notes by hand because schools stopped teaching cursive writing during a 15-year failed focus on digital ­devices, a former curriculum chief has warned.
Calling for a ban on laptops and iPads in primary school, Emeritus Professor Steven Schwartz said screens were “certainly damaging for children’’.
“It’s affecting their behaviour, their ability to interact with one another, to understand how people react to them,” he told The Australian.
Emeritus Professor Schwartz – a former chair of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) – said students needed to learn to take notes by hand, instead of typing on a laptop or relying on YouTube videos or AI summaries.
While cursive writing remains part of the national curriculum, he said “hardly any’’ schools taught the old-school skill of running writing because it was not part of the National Assessment Program, Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN).
“Now with AI cheating in university, they’re saying they all want to go back to written examinations – and they’ve got all these kids who can’t write, they can only print,’’ he said.
“They’re like monks illuminating a manuscript – it would take years for them to write all the things down. It’s hilarious, but it’s what’s happening.
“It’s just all been pushed over to screens and computers and a lot of what we expect or used to take for granted is now gone.”

There came another snap of the ponce prof, Professor Schwartz says students needed to learn to take notes by hand, instead of typing on a laptop or relying on YouTube videos or AI summaries.

Does this help explain why the reptiles refuse to admit that there's climate change, and climate science is real?

Perhaps it does ... after all, if they're so afraid of laptops and digital thingies and such like, they probably can't handle science either ...

A psychologist and former vice-chancellor of three universities, Emeritus Professor Schwartz chaired ACARA from 2015 to 2018 – just after then prime minister Kevin Rudd spent $2.4bn of taxpayer money to buy laptops and iPads for every student through Labor’s “digital education revolution’’.
“Most of the research that’s been done over the last 10 years has shown [that screen time] is damaging,’’ he said.
“It’s not as if they won’t get screen time out of school, so I think that at least within school it’s probably a good opportunity to have human time.’’

Did the ancient prof know that this claptrap would be saddled with a stock image that is utterly banal, the worst sort of digital drivel you could provide as an illustration? 

Even AI might have managed something a little less tawdry, cheap and pathetic: Children learn better when they write things down, says Professor Schwartz. Picture: iStock

Perhaps not, but that wretched image does rather undercut the prof's message, because if the pond contemplated it for more than a nanosecond, the pond might well pluck out an eye.

Then the bittish Bita went on to conflate reading with running writing ...

Federal Education Minister Jason Clare has also called for a “digital detox’’ in classrooms, citing evidence that children remember more when they take notes by hand.
The nation’s education ministers have asked ACARA to look at changing the laptop-based NAPLAN writing test to a pen-and-paper exam next year.
Almost 25,000 parents and teachers have signed a change.org petition, initiated by The Heads Up Alliance, demanding “device-free’’ primary schools and greater emphasis on books, handwriting, pen and paper and “human relationships’’ in high school.
“We must ensure that by the end of primary school Australian children are able to read and write fluently for sustained periods,’’ the petition states.
“One-to-one internet-connected devices such as laptops are an ever-present source of distraction for high school students, disrupting the focus needed to think deeply and learn new concepts.’’

Oh the hideousness of the full to overflowing intertubes and distracting devices.

Wouldn't you know it, it is just a bit of culture wars sh*t stirring, what with petulant Peta turning up to join battle ...

A report from the Centre for Independent Studies argues too many people are now going to university to study subjects that "neither broaden their minds, nor prepare them for work", says Sky News (sic) host Peta Credlin. “Too many people are essentially putting off life for three or four years and, in the process, incurring a substantial HECS debt, and often having their minds filled with left-wing propaganda into the bargain,” Ms Credlin said Ms Credlin said Professor Steven Schwartz’s report notes student numbers “increased 70 per cent” in the decade after the Gillard government dropped admissions quotas. "And that, coupled with perverse incentive in university funding, that has … 'blight(ed) the life chances of many members of the younger generation'."

Did some reptile loon have to read that tag in running writing?

How else to explain that they still hadn't caught up with Sky Noise down under having undergone a rebranding?

And so to the real reason for the entire exercise.

It was just a promo and the prof was flogging a service.

Before proceeding to the final gobbet, the pond headed off to the MindChamps site to check the pricing ... (the pond confesses to using the intertubes and a computer to do it)

Nice work if you can get it, and so to the penultimate gobbet, and a full-on plug ...

Emeritus Professor Schwartz, a former vice-chancellor of Macquarie University, Murdoch University and Brunel University in London, is now an education adviser to the private childcare and preschool provider MindChamps, which promotes literacy and numeracy instruction even before children start school.
He said handwriting helped build “muscle memory’’, compared to taking notes on a laptop or watching a recorded lecture on YouTube.
“The reason why writing means that you’ll retain more is that you can’t write fast enough to write down every word the lecturer said – you need to process it into ideas and then write those down,’’ he said.
“You’re already getting deeper learning, because you are deep in the ideas.
“Writing it down helps you remember it better because you had to put that effort into putting it down on paper.’’
Emeritus Professor Schwartz said children must be explicitly taught to read and write using phonics – the sounding out of letters and words – and criticised teacher unions for opposing the Year 1 phonics check now mandated by state and territory education ministers.
“There is no real substitute for explicit teaching,’’ he said.
“Universities pretty much told [trainee teachers] that these things were wrong.
“Leaving students to do whatever they want to do, [thinking] they’ll eventually learn what they’re supposed to learn, is a lot easier than trying to teach them.
“There is an actual science to it [teaching] and we just have to inculcate that into the universities, but it’s been hard.’’
MindChamps founder and chief executive David Chiem – a former Australian actor – uses theatre and music to teach children literacy from the age of 18 months. “It’s about pre-literacy – we don’t wait until they get to primary school and struggle,’’ he said.

But wait, there's more ... MindChamps founder and chief executive David Chiem was awarded a doctor of letters by Western Sydney University.

And so to the final plug, and please write the name down in long hand, or perhaps devise a sales ditty up there with Mr Plough ...(that name again is MindCamp, remember to call MindCamp)

“We nurture the mind to love literacy, to love the narrative world, and then teach the mechanics of reading.
“Until they love reading, they’re not going to enjoy writing.’’
Dr Chiem said children needed to learn a love of books, plays and music before they started school, otherwise “all of these gadgets and devices that are so obviously designed to get children addicted will win the war because we didn’t nurture literacy from the earliest years’’.
Western Sydney University has awarded Dr Chiem an honorary Doctor of Letters for his significant contributions to early childhood education, literacy and educational innovation.
UWS vice-chancellor George Williams said he was “impressed and inspired’’ by the MindChamps teaching techniques, which could be integrated into the university’s early childhood teaching degrees.
“The engagement of the kids, the joy of the educators it’s obviously a highly effective model,’’ Professor Williams said.

Time out, a 'toon please, and as climate science was mentioned...

That left the pond in search of a bonus, and the pond rifled through the detritus and trash that had been discarded yesterday in the archive.

There was nothing for it, Dame Slap had to be picked out of the rubbish, if only to confirm the pond's running thesis that the reptiles are on an extended campaign to promote Gina's pampered pet ...

The header: Permission to speak? Hanson’s fight is ours; Her battle with Mehreen Faruqi has forced Pauline Hanson to ask the High Court to be heard, and they should listen on principle alone.

The caption: Pauline Hanson has lodged an application with the High Court to seek leave to appeal against the recent decision of the Full Court of the Federal Court in her litigation against Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi, right.

Dame Slap spent a bigly six minutes dealing with the extraordinary suffering of Gina's pet, apparently because the poor thing's unable to rabbit on in the offensive way she somehow manages to do on a daily basis ...

Pauline Hanson’s rising popularity reflects our own growing disillusionment with many of our major institutions. Hanson is challenging the lacklustre two-party system that so often fails to reflect the values of ordinary Australians.
She has put the boringly biased ABC on notice. She echoes our frustrations with the woke and increasingly unskilled bureaucracies that we can no longer rely on to provide independent advice to government. It is only right that Hanson is now taking the fight up to our most senior courts.

Uh oh, that word again ...

So the reptiles are entirely on board with Gina's pet's agenda, but perhaps only because she's a mirror reflecting their world view back to them.

On with Dame Slap ...

On Friday Hanson lodged her application with the High Court to seek leave to appeal against the decision of the Full Court of the Federal Court in her litigation against Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi. Her case could – indeed, should – deliver one of the biggest shake-ups to laws that have stifled free speech in this country.

Quick, an AV distraction featuring the stifled one. 

Note to subs, please make sure the snap of Faruqi is suitably comical  ... One Nation Leader Pauline Hanson responds after she lost her bid to overturn a court ruling she racially discriminated Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi.

Did the pond mention that it has Irish antecedents and so bagging the dismal British empire is entirely right and proper:

The Full Court of the Federal Court (justices Melissa Perry, Geoffrey Kennett and Elizabeth Bennett) held that what Hanson said four years ago in a tweet in response to a tweet by Faruqi was illegal.
Less than 12 hours after Queen Elizabeth died on September 8, 2022, in Britain, Faruqi tweeted: “Condolences to those who knew the Queen. I cannot mourn the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonised peoples. We are reminded of the urgency of Treaty with First Nations, justice & reparations for British colonies & becoming a republic.”
About four hours later, Hanson tweeted her response: “Your attitude appalls [sic] and disgusts me. When you immigrated to Australia you took every advantage of this country. You took citizenship, bought multiple homes, and a job in a parliament. It’s clear you’re not happy, so pack your bags and piss off back to Pakistan.”

Charming.

The temptation is to respond in the same way as the troller did the trolling (she could at least piss off back to a fush and chup shop), but the pond again wasn't in a biting mood.

Luckily there followed a snap featuring the trolling charmer and her trolled victim ... One Nation leader Pauline Hanson during her Federal Court appeal against findings of racial discrimination. Picture: Jane Dempster/The Australian And Mehreen Faruqi.

  

Oh dear long absent lord, shades of the racist Bolter, we're back with 18C again. 

Why aren't the reptiles of the lizard Oz allowed to descend into a cesspit of abuse with Pauline? Why is life so unfair, why are all these minorities so unkind, can't they take a white supremacist joke?

What Faruqi said may well have offended millions of Australians. Too bad, says section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. If you are not a member of a minority, people may freely offend and insult you. In a democracy, that is as it should be, I say. But if you are a member of a racial or ethnic minority, you can use the law to shut someone up because you claim you have been offended and insulted.
Section 18C is bad law. It should have been repealed by the federal parliament long ago as an affront to a robust and healthy democracy. Plenty of courts have pointed out that political debates are not polite afternoon teas where people recite poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Why on earth, then, is Hanson muzzled from responding with political verve to a politically charged tweet by Faruqi? Sure, Hanson’s response was colourful, rude and perhaps wounding. If Faruqi wants to protect her glass jaw, she shouldn’t be dishing it out. Most Australians would say they each gave as good as they got and this should be left on X, not take centre stage in a courtroom.
As former High Court justice Michael Kirby said about political debates in this country: “One might wish for more rationality, less superficiality, diminished invective and increased logic and persuasion in political discourse. But those of that view must find another homeland.
“From its earliest history, Australian politics has regularly included insult and emotion, calumny and invective, in its armoury of persuasion. They are part and parcel of the struggle of ideas.”
We might lament that parliament has left 18C on the books. However, it’s not too late for the High Court to rule it is unconstitutional. Hanson argues, among other things, that parliament acted outside its powers when it enacted section18C in reliance on the external affairs power (also called the treaty power) in section 51 (xxix) of the Constitution.
Hanson’s legal team argues that section 18C goes much further than the treaty on which it relies, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (known as ICERD) and is therefore invalid.

Inevitably Kirby got dragged into the fuss...Former High Court justice Michael Kirby. Picture: John Feder

Strange, way back in 2015 Kirby was quoted as saying about the act which contains 18C:

As former High Court judge Michael Kirby has said, the act represented, "for the first time, a clear parliamentary instruction, enforceable by law, that racial bigotry against members of a particular race would not be tolerated in Australia". (here)

Never mind, the reptiles have always been exceptionally keen on their right to indulge in racist bigotry and bile ...

You do not have to be a learned High Court judge to see that the low-range conduct prohibited by section 18C – offensive or insulting remarks based on race etc – is not even close to the serious conduct that is the real target of the convention. Article 4(a) of ICERD is aimed at outlawing the “dissemination of ideas based on racial superiority or hatred, incitement to racial discrimination, as well as all acts of violence or incitement to such acts against any race or group of persons of another colour or ethnic origin, and also the provision of any assistance to racist activities, including the financing thereof”.
Anne Twomey is a constitutional guru and professor emerita at the University of Sydney’s law school. When she talks about constitutional law, it’s not just students who listen. So do judges.
Twomey’s recent episode of her YouTube Constitutional Clarion series raises similar concerns about the constitutional validity of section 18C. Twomey said article 4 of ICERD was clearly aimed at “criminal offences, and it involves action of a very serious nature”. Article 4 is also subject to article 5 of the convention, which includes the right of people to freely express their opinions.
“What is odd about the Full Federal Court’s reasoning in the Hanson case is that it doesn’t interpret that treaty obligation in the context of freedom of speech,” Twomey said.
“The judgment … sets out articles 4, 6 and 7 of CERD, but it leaves out the critical article 5.”
Twomey dismissed the Federal Court’s claim in the Hanson case that 18C validly catches low-range conduct to try to “nip in the bud” conduct that might become of the more serious kind that is the subject of treaty. The court’s reasoning is right up there with saying a cigarette is a gateway drug to heroin.
Hanson’s second ground of appeal is that section 18C of the RDA breaches the implied freedom of political communication. Now we get to the hot mess created by our courts.
The Federal Court said section 18C didn’t breach the implied freedom because this part of the RDA was enacted for a legitimate purpose of enhancing the free flow of speech by shutting down speech that was offensive and insulting. Hanson says the court’s reasoning is wrong. Incredibly, as Hanson’s appeal application notes, the Full Court of the Federal Court ignored the two most recent cases on the implied freedom.

And as a reminder that it's more culture wars fodder, petulant Peta turned up again, though this time the reptiles realised Faux Noise down under had indeed been rebranded ...

One Nation Chief of Staff James Ashby responds to the court upholding the finding One Nation Leader Pauline Hanson racially vilified Mahreen Faruqi. “I received a phone call today from a former federal court judge who said the outcome of today’s decision was intellectually dishonest and lazy," Mr Ashby told News24 host Peta Credlin. “We’re not happy with the decision.”

And so to Dame Slap's final gobbet, wherein she maintained the Ashby rage ...

The Federal Court made no mention of Farmer v Minister for Home Affairs where, as Hanson’s application notes, the High Court said that “a purpose of ‘curbing political disagreement and debate inside Australia’ is not legitimate. It does not become legitimate because it is done to protect ‘the feelings or sensitivities of the Australian community or a segment of the community (against) hurt.’ ”
The Federal Court also ignored Jarrett v NSW, where the NSW Court of Appeal said the Constitution entailed “acceptance of the potential for disharmony, incivility and disruption that is part and parcel of democratic intercourse”.
The legal niceties are, of course, important. However, the core problem is that our senior courts have made a dog’s breakfast of free speech in this country over many years. Scrap that. I know what’s in my dog’s breakfast. But I cannot for the life of me understand the slippery legal inventions made by judges to empower judges to decide what can and cannot be said in this country.
Plenty of lawyers more learned than me, and even a few judges, agree the High Court has made a mash of free speech. Some of them will be at the annual Samuel Griffith Society conference in Sydney this weekend, where judicial meddling will be front and centre of a robust debate about free speech.
The High Court’s invention of an implied freedom of political communication and further inventions of entirely subjective tests that apparently determine when the implied freedom applies, make the whole area harder to decipher than the Voynich Manuscript. At least the Voynich Manuscript has some pictures. This uncertainty means we, the people, have no real clue as to what we can and cannot say – until a High Court cryptographer tells us so.

Just to tie that joke in with the blather about calligraphy, the Voynich Manuscript is perfectly readable, because it's handwritten, it's not any of that dreadful digital nonsense ...

See The New Yorker ...

The Unsolvable Mysteries of the Voynich Manuscript
By Jo Livingstone
November 30, 2016 (*intermitten archive link)

Clear as a bell, there's the joy of handwriting for you in a nutshell ...

And so to the final whine ...

Hanson is forced, then, in this case to ask the High Court for permission to talk. This is policymaking, not law. Each case is the equivalent of tossing a coin by reference to previous cases that were coin tosses too. Heads, you win. Tails, you lose. Or shall we make it best of three?
This is untenable. Hanson supporters may not be reading Federal Court and High Court judgments, but their instinct to distrust the tendencies of a small group of elites to think they know better than the rest of us is entirely rational.
It would be a travesty and a sign of cowardice, or perhaps hubris, if the High Court refuses to hear Hanson’s appeal.
It is high time the nation’s most senior court took a long and considered look at the mess they have created and the uncertainly (sic) they have foisted on Australians.

The AI at the lizard Oz is beyond sloppy, but there's a cartoon designed to help tease out the hidden messages buried in that Dame Slap piece ...

Speaking of the uncertainly that Faux Noise has foisted on the entire world, here's a few more 'toons explaining all the uncertainly ...

Elbows up Canada ...

The weekly debrief is back, and whatever you do, don't ask about the forty trillion dollar debt bomb which is going to explode the United States economy (YouTube link), and any economy standing near by ...

In which the pond is left with the dog botherer, until the Angelic one comes to the rescue with a tykeathon ...

 

Shameful.

But what use is it invoking "shame" when dealing with the brazen and the shameless?

If the reptiles had any sense of shame, they wouldn't have allowed the lizard Oz to decline in to a propaganda sheet of the basest kind.

Why should the pond bother to recycle the reptiles shamelessly recycling Mathias, as if he's a disinterested observer? 

And worse, at the top of the digital "news", draped in a distorted graphic of the Australian flag, what with patriotism being the lowest kind of rhetoric ...

EXCLUSIVE
Quiet drift to economic decline: Cormann’s stark warning
Australia ‘drifting’ towards decline as reform gains are surrendered, Mathias Cormann warns
OECD secretary-general Mathias Cormann has warned Australia risks slow economic decline, saying creeping protectionism and falling productivity are surrendering hard-won gains.
By Simon Benson

Shameful, dragging an ancient political warrior back on to home turf, and dressing it up as economic analysis.

Enough already, simpleton Simon, off to the intermittent archive wit ye ...closely followed by the next item ...

EXCLUSIVE
Rent rises up to 20pc: developer
Rent rises up to 20pc, warns residential property developer Nigel Satterley
Australia’s largest private residential land developer has warned rents could surge up to 20 per cent and first homebuyer inquiries have already dropped 50 per cent following Labor’s budget tax changes.
By Matthew Cranston

Enough already canny Cranston, giving property developers undue respect, when they should be treated in the manner of used car salesmen and journalists.

And just who should appear below the canny Cranston?

Himself, served up again ...

POLITICAL GAMBLE
Labor bets house on tax reform, but may wreck the economy
The jury’s out among economists on the bid to win the political narrative of fixing so-called intergenerational inequality with improved first-home buyer numbers.
By Matthew Cranston

This is how the weekend "news" looked early on the Saturday morning, squeezed up to make a point about the rag being an unrelenting propaganda sheet...

Crude propaganda graphics matching the crude propaganda.

It wasn't just the flag, it was another of those meaningless graphs and punters looking like they'd just stepped out of an Orwellian nightmare...

Enough already, but over on the extreme far right things were no better.

Dame Slap leading off proceedings pleading for Gina's pampered pet?

Pauline Hanson takes free speech fight to the High Court
Her battle with Faruqi has forced Hanson to ask the High Court for ‘permission to talk’, and they should listen on principle alone.
By Janet Albrechtsen

The pond would rather tear out its tongue than give space to the pitiful, sanctimonious verbiage. A link to the intermittent archive is being more than generous ...

The Lynch mob attending a lynching?

The rise of Arday and the death of ideological diversity
The tragic downfall of a disgraced Cambridge professor exposes a crisis at academe’s heart.
By Timothy Lynch
Contributor

Much like when the reptiles decide to get rolling on a transphobia jihad, the pond had resolved to have nothing to do with Arday's persecution and suicide, so the pond can't add to the disgrace of the University of Melbourne each time the Lynch mob appears by adding this piece to the queue. (Speaking of transphobia, there was Parker Molloy urging people not to feed the logarithm, but struggling with the disease).

And there was no way that the pond could cope with"Ned" scribbling away for the Australian Daily Zionist News:

Why a ‘softly-softly’ Commission can’t cure antisemitism

Hopes and fears: The task for Virginia Bell as Royal Commission risks falling short on antisemitism
Denied an extension, the antisemitism inquiry winds down leaving Commissioner Bell with a mammoth task. With key witnesses uncalled does it risk failure because of ‘unfinished business’.
By Paul Kelly
Editor-At-Large

Eleven minutes of "Ned" pandering to the Zionists when there's other news afoot?!

It's deeply offensive ...

And with that winnowing, that's how the pond was left with just the dog botherer ...and if the pond had had its druthers, it would have sent him to the intermittent archive as well.

But needs must - the pond needs a little spacing between cartoons ...

The header: How Pauline’s party of one is powering the protest vote: One Nation’s strength is Pauline Hanson, and may also be its weakness. She holds a power most political leaders could only dream of – and she has no intention of revealing who inherits it.

The caption for the truly awful artwork for which Debbie decided to take credit: Pauline Hanson won’t shed any light on who will succeed her. She smply says she’s not going naywhere (sic, sic) for a while. Pictures: News Corp/iStock. Artwork: Debbie Schipp

Don't take this personally Debbie, but your artwork is smply terrible, though it does prepare the hive mind for what is to follow, as they head off on their journey to naywhere ...

You see, the dog botherer purports to offer a critical examination of Gina's pet, but in the process he offers a hagiographic profile making her as useful as a chess queen ...

One remarkable aspect of One Nation is that one person controls the succession of the party’s leadership, and that person is the one and only Pauline Hanson. So much for internal democracy.
“The President of the Party is Pauline Lee Hanson,” says rule 4.3.2 of the One Nation constitution. Rule 4.3.2.1 says; “Upon resigning from the position of President, Pauline Lee Hanson shall appoint her successor to become the next President of the Party.”
Hanson, 72, is campaigning to form national government, leaving open the option of switching to a lower house seat so she can serve as prime minister. Just who she views as her successor is a pertinent question.
“Oh god, I can’t tell you because I haven’t chosen, Chris, I’m not going anywhere for a while, so just wait and see,” Hanson said when I interviewed her for my upcoming News24 documentary, The Fight for the Right. Then I proffered a couple of names: her daughter Lee and star recruit Barnaby Joyce.
“The media have alluded to my daughter, and I’ll tell you what, that’s not the case,” retorted Hanson. “She has to prove herself, her ability to be able to do it, she’s not even a member of parliament, Chris. Barnaby’s only been with the party for eight months, so why would I say, give it to Barnaby?”
Given the current One Nation leadership caucus has a membership of one, I expect only kindness and light from One Nation politicians and candidates towards their party’s founder. This is the sort of power and deference that Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull craved.
Hanson claims that as the party expands its membership across the country its level of internal democracy will increase (the other direction would take her into Kim Jong-un territory). I suggested Hanson write down her choice to be stored in a safe in case she is hit by a bus, but she declined.

Up came a portrait of a pose llama - alpaca if you will - which pretty much illustrates the aspirations of this cultural 'leet ...Senator Pauline Hanson with One Nation’s lead Senate candidate, her daughter, Lee Hanson on the campaign trail in Tasmania. Picture: Facebook

You didn't have to look far to see how the reptiles were just recycling propaganda ...

Straight from the Zuck's mouth, helping explain why Facebook has ruined a generation or three.

Imagine having that in your daily feed, but then the pond has the lizard Oz in its daily feeding, and has been driven not so quietly insane by the intake of soma ...

There is something vaguely surreal about conducting serious political interviews with Hanson in the current climate. It reminds me of a John Lennon song: “Nobody told me there’d be days like these, strange days indeed.”
In search of explanations over the past few months I have travelled across the electorate of Farrer (where One Nation turned the tables on the Coalition to win its first House of Representatives seat at the May by-election), the South Australian seat of Hammond (an electorate One Nation took from the Liberals in the March state election) and around Melbourne where the Victorian election in November looms as the next big test for the Coalition and One Nation.

Now for the bit where the dog botherer explains to the hive mind why Pauline and her policies are pretty okay, especially as they reflect the positions of the lizard Oz ...

When I spoke to former Coalition voters who already made the switch to One Nation, the core drivers became clear.
While the main policy issues have long been obvious – cost of living, especially driven by immigration and net-zero policies – the recurring theme from voters is that while the Coalition has waxed and waned on immigration and net zero, Hanson has been solid as a rock.
“I think she’s a woman who has stood her ground for 30 years and never wavered and hasn’t flip-flopped on policy,” Griffith citrus grower Joanna Barnard said.
Michael Pfitzner, a dryland farmer north of Griffith, said: “Pauline Hanson hasn’t wavered one iota in the 30 years she’s been in parliament.”
A bloke on the street summed up the mood by saying he voted One Nation because “I’m sick of the other bloody idiots.”
On her family farm in SA’s Eden Valley, the state’s Liberal leader, Ashton Hurn, had a couple of key insights. “I think a part of the reason we are seeing a bit of a rise in One Nation is a sense of complacency that people feel in their politicians,” Hurn said, insisting all major parties had taken voters for granted.

Just to back that up, the reptiles wheeled in a snap of Tamworth's enduring, ineradicable shame ...One Nation’s star recruit, Barnaby Joyce. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

See how the dog botherer keeps pumping up the volume for Gina's pet and her policies ...

She's a bloody feenomin ...

The Liberals in SA now have five lower house MPs, a single seat more than One Nation. Going back a few months, Hurn was the first person I heard focus on the Bondi Beach terror attack as a turning point.
“I think that really was the first event that was a catalyst, I suppose, to really accelerate the surge of One Nation,” the SA Opposition Leader said. “It really put in focus the concern that Australians, including South Australians, had on immigration.”
Like most observers, Hurn reckons the issue driving Hanson’s rise, “above all else”, is immigration.
Back in Griffith, a town built on immigration and still reliant on immigrant labour, this still rings true. Local baker John Bertoldo helps run a proud migrant family business employing many immigrants, yet he cites immigration as the main reason he voted One Nation: “I think it’s because there’s too many coming in and I think it’s putting the pressure on everyone.”
I have seen Asian Australians, Indigenous Australians and even a Sikh Australian resplendent in a One Nation-orange turban mob Hanson or sing her praises. This is more than a political realignment; it is a phenomenon.
Voters did not leave the Coalition, the Coalition left them. By adopting net zero, going soft on immigration and failing to resist the overwhelming reach of big government and the woke agenda, the Coalition left the mainstream right-of-centre field vacant, and One Nation did not need to march in, it was just left standing there, where it had always been.

There you go, there's the dog botherer approving Gina's pet and her policies, blathering on about climate change and the woke agenda in a way worthy of Malcolm Roberts.

Now compound the adoration with another snap ...The Paulinbe (sic) factor: Hanson signs seven-year-old Noah Reynolds’ t-shirt at the One Nation South Australian election night event earlier this week. Picture: NewsWire/ Emma Brasier

Diminish the beefy boofhead? Rabbit on about a lack of trust for a man who looks shifty from the moment he gets out of bed?

An easy task on any day of the week ...

Making corrections under Angus Taylor, the Coalition has ditched net zero and toughened up on immigration. But as Mannum Baptist pastor Colin Nieass warns, after switching from the Coalition to One Nation: “Trust is easily lost, it’s very had to get back again.”

At long last the dog botherer decided to throw in a crumb of doubt, offer up a morsel of a billy goat butt, dressed up as an "all the same", as some kind of pathetic attempt at balance ...

All the same, the critical question of the moment is whether the One Nation surge has peaked. As I discovered when I asked new member for Hammond Robert Roylance about his policy prescription (“I’m fumbling for words here, if you would just give me a moment”), some One Nation candidates and politicians face a steep learning curve.
Even Hanson failed to name the President of Indonesia or Prime Minister of Japan, connections that are second nature for any politician abreast of our regional priorities. With at least 128 candidates to be run in the Victorian election and 160 or more federally, the One Nation talent pool soon may suffer from water restrictions – or see some painful belly-flops.
Victoria will tell us much in November. If the Coalition wins a majority it will tell us One Nation has peaked, but if a change of government relies on support from Hanson’s team, the surge may have some way to go.
Many voters want the Coalition and One Nation to work collaboratively against Labor. When I challenged De Bortoli Wines managing director Darren De Bortoli on whether the shift to One Nation might keep Labor in power, he said: “Well, if they keep going at each other’s throats it will – they’ve both gotta get their acts sorted out.”
The fight for the right-of-centre vote is a high-stakes battle being fought in different ways by a variety of players.
Thirty years after being disendorsed by the Liberals Hanson is forcing them to re-examine their core principles and, ironically, this may help them reform and revive.
There can be no question that the red-headed firebrand from Ipswich has proven to be a durable and consistent lightning rod for voter dissatisfaction. But beyond that, what is One Nation’s function? And beyond Hanson, what is its future?

You see? Gina's pet is there to help the beefy boofhead's mob reform and revive by making them even more extreme far right, more in line with the dog botherer and the lizard Oz hive mind.

And that is Gina's pet's function, and her future for some considerable time in this wretched, tawdry rag ... in much the same way that Faux Noise has helped make the world safer for authoritarian dictators ...

For a bonus, the pond could have wheeled out Our Henry ...but it's just another contribution to the Australian Daily Zionist News ...

Court’s ruling gives antisemitism a free pass
A Supreme Court ruling on a young Sydney vandal reveals how judicial overreach, selective context, and faulty definitions threaten the fight against antisemitism.
By Henry Ergas

Even worse, the references were very low rent, e.g. ...

The “bad man”, as American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said, cares only for where the line falls: draw that boundary too precisely and the Jew-hater will simply operate immediately inside it. 

St Paul distinguished the true Jew from the merely outward one. Joseph Stalin and his successors relied on cringing statements by anti-Zionist Jews to shield the Soviet empire’s vicious antisemitism from criticism. 

He really is off his oats ...

Luckily the pond did a deep dive, and discovered the Angelic one trying to cope with mad king Donald and his minions:

The header: Trump’s men put faith in America’s Christian nationalism revivalThe US President’s three most influential offsiders are expressing different views about Christianity in secular political life.

The caption for the snap of mad king Donald and some of his supine courtiers: US President Donald Trump is flanked by Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth. Picture: AFP

Now it would be optimistic to expect the Angelic one to entertain as much as the stories about troubles in Tyke town that are to be found in other places ...

Catholic Schools NSW CEO Dallas McInerney sacked after fronting anti-corruption commission

But the pond must make do with what's at hand ...

What is Christian nationalism? This ill-defined term loosely refers to the identification of Christianity with the American sense of identity. Three members of the Trump administration personify the idea to greater or lesser degrees: Vice-President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and liberally tattooed and bellicose Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Initially Hegseth set out to rid the military of “woke” and to reinstate a warrior ethic. Vance and Rubio have a larger project of civilisational renewal but for Vance, as a convert, Catholicism is paramount and of a different character to Rubio’s.
Vance has been described as “suspiciously devout”, but in the MAGA movement he was given a free pass as a Catholic because he is one of them, and in some intellectual circles Vance’s conversion has given him a philosophical credibility the rest of the movement doesn’t have.
Vance and Rubio convey the Trump administration’s conviction that the West suffers from civilisational malaise. Restoring confidence in our shared Western inheritance is of foundational importance.

Suspiciously devout? JD is both amoral and barking mad:

JD Vance Is the Loyal Convert in Chief
Vice president JD Vance is everywhere—and he’s the highest point of contact, Trumpworld sources say, for tech billionaires who went all-in on Donald Trump.

And again ...

The Real Stakes, and Real Story, of Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Obsession
Thirty years ago, a peace-loving Austrian theologian spoke to Peter Thiel about the apocalyptic theories of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. They’ve been a road map for the billionaire ever since.

And that sort of guff is supposed to restore confidence in our shared Western inheritance is of foundational importance?

But the reptiles insisted on "suspiciously devout": Mr Vance has been described as “suspiciously devout”. Picture: Getty Images via AFP

The Angelic one did her best to cope, but was way out of her depth.

Not those 'leets, oh not the bloody European 'leets again...

Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in February was about civilisational renewal: to reindustrialise, enforce borders and place the international order on a more modest and realistic foundation.
But the most important element of civilisational renewal was the aspect European elites won’t, or can’t, acknowledge.
Rubio emphasised that the central element of Western civilisation was the “sacred inheritance” of “Christian faith”. ­He suggested that we must overcome the animus against engaging in religiously motivated political and civic action. Men did not have faith so they could do great things; they did great things because they had faith. Our civilisational future will depend on those whose eyes are turned toward something greater than restoration of confidence in the West.
The desire to reinstate Christian principles in civic and political life is the form of Christian nationalism that characterises Rubio and Vance. However, Vance’s background and journey to conversion have given him a broader perspective. He is regarded as the flag-bearer for young conservatives and he has more intellectual heft. His was a conversion of the rational mind as well as the heart.
This dovetails into the new conservatism and is reflected in Vance’s politics. He is more interested in the social project than the hardcore individualism of the liberals and Reaganite monetarist conservatives.

All that in praise of JD and liddle Marco and JD's "broader perspective"? 

The pond didn't know whether to weep or to laugh, and had a similar reaction to the man who made the Pentagon home for warriors's wives and aircraft carriers the suppliers of bad rations ... Mr Hegseth characterises the militant version of Christian nationalism. Picture: Getty Images via AFP

Vance says Catholicism reflects a broader political spectrum than the old right. From the right he sees the emphasis on personal responsibility but on the left he sees the emphasis on the social good, especially the option for the poor, which means fewer barriers to economic flourishing.

It's easy to see where the Angelic one is going here. JD, as tyke, is inclined to the good, while Hogsbreath, being more evangelical, is a tad weird ...

‘It’s Bonkers’: Jennifer Hegseth’s Hands-On Role in Her Husband’s Pentagon
After an 18-year career at Fox News, she is now her husband’s most influential adviser and de facto producer, shaping the job as no Pentagon spouse has before. (*intermittent archive link)

The pond digresses, on with the Angelic one trying to cope by splitting hairs in favour of one crazy over another...

The more extreme aspect of Christian nationalism is the militant version characterised by Hegseth. With Deus Vult and the Jerusalem cross tattooed on his arms, Hegseth seems to fancy himself as a modern-day crusader.
Hence Christian national­ism has taken on a one-dimensional, slightly warped bellicosity under his auspices. Hegseth spent his first nine months as Defence Secretary reshaping the Pentagon, hosting monthly worship ser­vices, overlaying scripture on images of fighter jets and missile systems, and telling assembled troops the country needed to be “on bended knee, recognising the providence of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ”.
From the beginning of the campaign against Iran the voluble Hegseth and the sense of moral authority provided by his Christianity have been frequently cited.
But what is the value of Hegseth continuously invoking his faith, expressed in the rather narrow terms of his own brand of evangelical Christianity?
At a Pentagon press briefing, Hegseth closed his remarks by reading from the Book of Psalms: “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle.” Not a few journalists, here and in the US, are asking: How far does this go? What happens when Christianity isn’t just present in the military, it becomes part of the military? When the pressroom lectern goes from being a podium to a pulpit?

Time to wheel in a figure guaranteed to make the average tyke seem relatively normal and harmless ... Pastor Doug Wilson is at the forefront of the controversial Christian nationalism movement, which is moving mainstream under Trump.

And so to a final tyke take, which pretty much entirely misses the point, because not once did she mention Natalie, as pretty weird an infatuation with an adoring youngling as any mad king has indulged in, making Bill Clinton seem like a rank amateur ...

There have been queries about the constitutionality of Hegseth’s public Christian pronouncements. Some members of congress are calling for a Department of Defence investigation over claims related to military officers allegedly invoking the Bible in pursuit of the Iran war. The question at the centre of this has become unavoidable: What does it mean to anoint the most powerful military on Earth in the language of Christianity and then go to war?
These three important people have different views about Christianity in secular political life. Non-denominational churches of the type that holds Hegseth’s allegiance, though numerous, do not have a unified public voice except for Hegseth. But the most interesting development in the story of Christian cultural revival and nationalism is the input of the two Catholics in a country that for many years did not welcome Catholics in high office.
Matthew Schmitz, in an essay in influential journal First Things, calls it “our strange Catholic moment”. Catholic ideas, terms and figures have increasing prominence in US civil and political life. Never before have three cardinals appeared on TV arguing against Donald Trump’s draconian immigration rules. Catholic terms have come up in discussions of just war. Vance even got people googling Ordo Amoris (the order of love).
Then we got an American Pope, Leo XIV, with whom Trump fought, but people were on the Pope’s side. And not only that, his encyclical was read by people in Silicon Valley. Even in secular terms something of a triumph.

Oh yes, a real triumph ...

And speaking of JD ...

Need the pond offer more? A Killer time, and with Our Henry too ...

 

The pond leapt on Our Henry like a starving wolf or hound in urgent need of nourishment, with a serve of the best of Western Civilisation.

Sure, the pond hadn't paused to do a survey of this day's lizard Oz offerings, sure the headline ominously warned of a treatise on Gina's pampered pet ...but Thucydides!

The header: Authenticity of Pauline Hanson to keep Labor in power; One Nation’s permanent fixture is eating into the Coalition’s core vote – proving that enduring authenticity beats policy depth.

The caption for the bog standard snap of Gina's pet looking smug and supercilious, if only someone would explain what that word meant: Thirty years after entering parliament, Pauline Hanson’s brand of unabashed authenticity continues to reshape the right side of Australian politics. Picture: Tony Gough

The pond drooled in anticipation. 

A bigly five minutes of Our Henry using the very best references from his dictionary of quotes to demolish the bottle-bred ranga:

Thirty years after she rose in parliament to warn that Australia was “in danger of being swamped by Asians”, Pauline Hanson has finally succeeded in swamping someone herself: the Liberal Party.
Newspoll’s August 9 survey has One Nation level with Labor on 29 per cent of the primary vote, with the Coalition sunk to just 18 per cent, its lowest primary vote on record. Roy Morgan a day later had One Nation ahead of Labor, 26 to 25.5 per cent, with the Coalition on 22. Pollsters disagree on who is running second; they all agree that a party founded in an Ipswich fish-and-chip shop is now contesting the lead in the national polls.
In part, Hanson’s rise reflects the old adage: persistence beats resistance. She has been a fixture of Australian politics for three decades, and longevity of that kind converts a personality into a well-known brand.
Familiarity, in turn, provides resilience – not least by undermining the demonisation tactics so effectively deployed against her years ago. A figure who has survived three decades in politics, including a wrongful imprisonment, cannot credibly be portrayed to the electorate as a wild and dangerous quantity; she has already been tried, in every sense of the word, and outlasted the verdict.
Meanwhile, her policies – and One Nation has plenty of them – remain what they have long been: vague in places, ill-judged in others, and sometimes simply unworkable. But it is far from clear how much that now counts against her.
The Australian Election Study asks, at each federal election, whether the major parties “keep their promises”; since 2019, neither party has ever convinced more than 23 per cent of voters that it does. Were the question put today – after changes to capital gains tax and negative gearing that Anthony Albanese had ruled out “for the 50th time” barely a year before – that proportion would surely be lower still.
Little wonder then that no one believes Labor’s National Platform, adopted barely three weeks ago, provides a reliable guide to what Labor will actually do. As for the opposition, try asking Liberal voters what their own party truly stands for.
But it isn’t only policy credibility that has collapsed; party attachment has weakened even more dramatically. In 1990, 4 per cent of Australians said they felt close to no political party; by 2025 that figure had reached an unprecedented 25 per cent, while just 34 per cent said they always voted the same way, a record low. As voters become less attached to party labels, the leader’s own persona plays an ever-increasing role in the political battle.
That factor may be the one that matters most. That Australians are disillusioned with political elites is hardly news: of the 28 major-party leader ratings at elections since 1987, three of the four lowest were recorded in the last three elections. As faith in politicians’ promises has collapsed, so has confidence that they hold any settled convictions at all.
There is, in contrast, no doubt that Hanson has steadfastly remained herself. She has kept raising the same uncomfortable subjects – immigration, multiculturalism, national sovereignty – others chose to ignore. That hardly means she offers good answers. But she at least has the courage to address good questions – and to do so without equivocating.

Well that was disappointing. A kind back-handed approval of Gina's pet for asking good questions, and not a single example of astonishing insights from Western Civilisation.

Even worse, the caption for the sole snap to break up Our Henry's text suggested a dire turn ... Unlike France’s Marine Le Pen, who built a disciplined party machine, Pauline Hanson’s movement remains dependent on a single figure. Picture: AFP

Not Le Pen?!

Is there no one Our Henry might invoke?

Outspokenness and consistency have given her something even rarer in Australian public life than competence: the ring of authenticity. Lionel Trilling brilliantly identified the mechanism more than half a century ago. Sincerity, he argued, asks whether what you say matches what you believe; but once society itself comes to be seen as a stage on which everyone is merely “playing the role of being ourselves”, sincerity no longer guarantees very much at all.

Lionel's a good first step. 

The pond immediately rushed off to its book of quotes to be reminded of a thrilling Trilling:

“Insanity is a direct and appropriate response to the coercive inauthenticity of society ... it is an act, expressing the intention of the insane person to meet and overcome to coercive situation; and whether or not it succeed in this intention, it is at least an act of criticism which exposes the true nature of society” ― Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity 

And again:

“In any genre it may happen that the first great example contains the whole potentiality of the genre. It has been said that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato. It can be said that all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote.”

It could be said that all lizard Oz columns are but a variation on the theme of Our Henry ... but will there be more astonishing insights from Western Civilisation?

Spoiler alert, the pond was shattered to discover that Our Henry had banished the ancient Greeks and Romans, and any thought of a medieval sage ...not even a Locke or a Burke disturbed the text:

What steps into that vacuum is authenticity. The issue is no longer whether you say what you mean. It is whether you are who you say you are, so that voters know what they are getting. An unabashed rogue, such as Donald Trump, can then seem preferable to a dishonest priest – and it is worth recalling that Hanson, unlike most alleged crooks, was actually exonerated.
But Hanson is not only unmistakably authentic. As elites drift ever further from everyday Australians, she appears closer than her political rivals to their concerns, their fears and even their hopes. With only a small minority of voters telling the 2025 election study that “people like them” have much influence on government, that makes her authenticity an extraordinarily valuable asset: she seems “something like me” and at least she is not pretending to be anything else.
There is, in that, a striking resemblance to Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s right-wing Rassemblement National (National Rally) party. Like Hanson, she has drawn strength from decades of visible continuity, deployed with systematic discipline to shed a truly demonic image: Le Pen’s own father, the party’s founder, was a Holocaust-denying antisemite with documented links to former Nazis, leaving a political inheritance so toxic that Hanson’s pales beside it.
And Le Pen too offers a clear, stable and unquestionably authentic political identity against leaders the electorate no longer trusts. At a moment when confidence in personal political efficacy has collapsed, voting for her seems the only way to secure the real change other politicians promise but never provide.
The result is that despite a recently upheld conviction, voters have flocked to the RN, placing Le Pen ahead of her rivals for the 2027 presidential election.
There is, nonetheless, a crucial difference. Le Pen did not merely outlast her demonisers. Brick by brick, she built an actual political machine: succession planning well advanced around Jordan Bardella, a leadership team based on tested, long-serving lieutenants, a thorough policy development process, regional strongholds underpinned by ubiquitous local branches.
Reinforced by effective party discipline – “ultras” whose outbursts tarnish the party’s respectability are swiftly shown the door – that machine has made the RN the most cohesive grouping in the National Assembly, bolstering its standing as a potential party of government.
It is that patiently built apparatus that has let Le Pen push deep into the electorate of Les Républicains, turning an insurgency on the centre-right’s flank into a formidable bid to supplant it.
That transformation of periodic outbursts of electoral discontent into a disciplined, ongoing party machine is the whole difference between a mere disrupter and a genuine political force – and it is the one test Hanson has never passed. Thirty years in, One Nation still has no comparable depth of leadership talent, no equivalent network of trusted lieutenants, no plausible provision for a post-Hanson succession, and nothing resembling RN-style control over its own candidates.
Familiarity and authenticity have made Hanson a permanent feature of the landscape; they have not made her a government-in-waiting.
And with little sign that the Liberals have gotten their act together, she may well do to an unreformed Coalition exactly what the polls suggest – hollow it out, seat by seat, without posing a serious threat to Labor’s hold on office.
The real risk is therefore not that Pauline Hanson wins. It is that her rise simply guarantees Australians three more years of misery – a misery we now know so very well, and need so very little. 

Sheesh, what a dismal, mediocre offering, with nary a hint of Plato or Socrates. Not a word about aspiring tyrannos? Couldn't Our Henry have spared a word for Cypselus of Corinth?

Instead the hole in bucket man sounded as if he'd overdosed on a dozen reptile offerings of the "Ned" kind.

Perhaps the pond should have begun by doing that survey of lizard Oz offerings ... but alas and alack, the lizard Oz "ticking clock" routine had been merely to announce the arrival of yet another bog standard true crime piece ...

The pond's YouTube logarithms are saturated with True Crime, so the pond only dipped in to the one piece of prose available on the matter:

How key witness in Rosslyn McQueen murder broke her 40-year silence on case
On a cold winter’s afternoon, two journalists knock on Donna’s door to ask about a decades-old murder mystery. She was ready to break her silence.
By Hedley Thomas

The pond did its best to stifle a yawn. 

This is the way the lizard Oz is going to save itself?

On the other hand, perhaps that was more interesting than the reptiles indulging in their basic "news" jihad at the top of the digital page, ma...

For the record the reptiles had cunningly contrived to avoid having their lead story archived, but it contained a compelling message from the beefy boofhead, and so that at least needed to be clipped ...

How could the pond miss that opening image, and at least a little of the copy that followed?

The rag really is state opposition media in waiting ... and so it was something of a tragedy that the devilish reptiles had tricked the intermittent archive into a "page not found" routine.

When a page could be found in the archive, the pond quailed in misery...

EXPERT WARNS
Bailouts and welfare ‘drag us down’, say top economists
Former top Treasury officials and leading economists have urged Labor to tighten its fiscal rules as Australia’s gross federal debt briefly surpassed $1 trillion for the first time.
By Jack Quail

Strange, the reptiles routinely warn the hive mind of dangerous 'leets and so-called experts.

Lo, after the pond had quivered and quailed, there came the mug punter's friend, as the indefatigable Geoff, chambered away ...

COMMENTARY by Geoff Chambers
Jim shouts at the clouds, as Labor’s economic narrative falters
The Treasurer is a walking, talking propaganda machine who Labor colleagues and business leaders fear is losing control.

A reptile who could invoke "shouting at clouds" deserves a spot at the pond, even if it's just a link to the archive.

For entertainment purposes only, the reptiles even resorted to dragging out a moth-eaten relic ...

EXCLUSIVE

‘Deplorable’: John Howard blasts Anthony Albanese and Scott Morrison over treatment of Fiona Brown
John Howard has condemned Labor’s attacks on former Liberal staffer Fiona Brown and noted the ‘inexcusable contradiction’ that then-PM Scott Morrison apologised to Brittany Higgins.
By Janet Albrechtsen and Stephen Rice

Of course, it had to be Dame Slap and a rather gluggy Rice keeping that ancient jihad going. 

This is one of the sturdiest reptile jihads, a never ending story, and it served only to distract from a more recent jihad, melongate ...

Six weeks on, PM admits his appearance on racy podcast was an error.

Over on the extreme far right, the meretricious Merritt turned up with a bog standard contribution to the Australian Daily Zionist News:

Ruling provides rare insight into judge’s thinking
How one judge perceives the great public policy issue of our time: antisemitism and hatred of Israel.
By Chris Merritt
Legal Affairs Contributor

Note the cunning way that the malicious Merritt's headline had managed to confuse and conflate anti-Semitism with a hatred of Israel, as if the sight of ethnic cleansing could be sneezed away. 

A fine example of pedantry would follow, but the pond was immediately disturbed and distracted by a hint of heresy in Cameron's offering ...

Israel needed to go the extra mile on Frankcom killing
Australia right to call out Israel over refusal to launch criminal probe into aid worker deaths
Israel’s military has cleared its own soldiers of a crime over the killing of seven aid workers, including Australian Zomi Frankcom. Australia is correct to say that is not good enough.
By Cameron Stewart
Chief International Correspondent

The pond was so astonished it saved Cameron to the archive and clipped him as well ...

Cameron had questions to ask, and while they were just about a single Australian, and while abuses of this kind happen on a daily basis in Gaza and the West Bank, it was a baby step that deserved some encouragement. 

Ask away Cameron ...

The wrong mindset? But what if ethnic cleansing and genocide is the mindset?

Even so, it was remarkable, a deploring of the IDF and support for Wong and Albo. It was as if the pond had stumbled into an alternative universe.

There was an immortal Rowe to help Cameron with that ...

And so to the real bonus, and of course it had to be Killer Creighton.

The pond can hear the whining. What happened to the big fuss about the Swans? Sorry, down the page.

Why do I have to head over to another place for a beguiling tale about cultists in action?

Exclusive Brethren secretly paid far-right activists to perform stunts disrupting the federal election

Moan away. You can't expect the lizard Oz cultists to cover another cult.

What about the latest from ICAC?

Sorry, the reptiles love to bury that well down the page. You have to go elsewhere ...

‘You have got to go’: former NSW minister tells Icac ‘something strange at play’ when she was sacked by Perrottet

What about the Emeritus Chairman, who had entranced the ABC this morning?

Murdoch family succession drama laid bare in unsealed court documents

...James's ever-souring relationship with his elder brother and father has been well reported, but Commissioner Gorman points to Rupert's suspicion of his son as a key reason Project Family Harmony got the green light.
"Rupert Murdoch was brought into the plan … under the false assumption that James Murdoch was 'making trouble' by fuelling press speculation about governance of the [Murdoch Family Trust] after Rupert Murdoch's passing," he wrote.
But Commissioner Gorman said Rupert's beliefs about James's dealings with the press were "unsubstantiated".
In one example, the commissioner said Lachlan and others within the company believed James, or someone acting on his behalf, had leaked information to Financial Times journalist Alex Barker about the details of the family trust.
But Commissioner Gorman wrote: "At trial, Lachlan Murdoch admitted that he did not have any proof that James Murdoch or his associates had briefed Alex Barker."
A similar suspicion arose around a book published around that time called The Successor, an unauthorised biography of Lachlan written by Australian journalist Paddy Manning, now an investigative reporter at the ABC.
But the evidence in Reno pointed elsewhere. Commissioner Gorman found that for Manning's book, Lachlan's own adviser, Ms McKenna, had been a significant source, giving more than 14 hours of interviews plus follow-up correspondence.
"The evidence demonstrates that Lachlan Murdoch falsely told his father, without proof, that James Murdoch or his associates were sources for The Successor," the commissioner wrote.
"He did not tell his father that Siobhan McKenna had been involved, with his authorisation."
Commissioner Gorman also described Rupert's concern that his younger son would vehemently oppose Project Family Harmony.
"They assumed James Murdoch would be 'very hostile to this and would basically pull out the stops to block it,'" he wrote.

Forget it Jake, it's reptile town, we all know it's a Succession snake pit, and Lachy's one of the most poisonous snakes.

Spare a thought for Killer.

Everyone knows that the poor lad has never been the same since someone demanded he wear a mask during Covid ... so attention must be paid.

The header: States, Canberra to go over Covid cliff ‘all in debt together’; Ultra-low interest bonds issued during the pandemic are set to expire from 2030, threatening to add billions in interest burdens.

The caption for a splendid piece of art by Frank that lifted Killer's piece into distinguished, rarefied MOMA territory: Federal and state debts are set to pass $2 trillion as ultra-low pandemic bond rates expire post-2030. Sources: Supplied and iStock. Artwork by Frank Ling

Killer used Covid as a metaphor for an "we're all rooned" outing that put Dame Groan firmly in her place as a rank amateur:

Remember Long Covid? Medical experts still debate its provenance and prevalence, but when it comes to state and federal governments the affliction is very real, albeit mercifully in remission.

Trust Killer for expert medical advice, and know that we'll all be rooned by Xmas:

Come 2030 and beyond, though, it’s guaranteed to flare up with a vengeance. Our governments borrowed like there was no tomorrow during the Covid pandemic, issuing hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of bonds during 2020 and 2021 at ultra-low interest rates to “keep us safe”.
The full price of that dubious safety is yet to be paid, years after anyone who was “saved” has long passed away.
The federal government’s gross liabilities this week bobbed above $1 trillion for the first time, but that’s only the tip of the growing debt iceberg.
For a start, state governments’ non-financial public sector balance sheets reveal another $706bn as of June, and those debts are no less “public” than Canberra’s.
But even those figures underplay the challenge ahead, obscuring the great Covid debt refinancing cliff that awaits beyond the customary four-year budget forecast period.
The four biggest states have almost $277bn of bonds outstanding, with coupons, or interest costs, averaging around 2 per cent, according to new research by the Institute of Public Affairs, released this week.
When those sweet deals progressively expire from 2031, they’ll need to be refinanced at current long-term borrowing rates, which for state governments are around 5.5 per cent for 10 years, adding well over $8bn a year to their annual interest costs.
Each of NSW and Victoria, for instance, will be up for an extra $2.7bn a year from 2030 onwards, even if they decided to abruptly become fiscal saints and never run a cash deficit again.
This will amount to around a 25 per cent jump over and above the $11bn of interest costs they’ve each budgeted for the 2030 financial year.
To put that in perspective, the entirety of Victoria’s payroll and insurance taxes will be just about enough to cover the state’s annual interest bill.
South Australia’s annual interest burden would be able to fund its police force more than twice over.
The commonwealth faces the same problem, too, having around $280bn of cheap Covid-era debt on the books at a coupon of 3 per cent or less.
Toby Johnston, former chief economist of the Future Fund, estimates those bonds will cost an extra $9.5bn a year from 2030 on, assuming the federal government faces today’s prevailing 10-year yield of 5 per cent.
Of course, interest rates could well be higher still, given grim forecasts embedded in practically every government balance sheet in the developed world.
“The global bond market is sending a clear signal to all governments – get your house in order or face much higher debt service costs,” Johnston, now director of Westwood Strategic Advisers, tells me.
“Every additional dollar spent servicing past debt is a dollar that cannot be used to fund services, reduce taxes or invest in the national’s future,” he adds.
Even before the great Covid refinancing cliff begins to ratchet up, combined state and federal debts will push past $2 trillion, according to forecasts by the Parliamentary Budget Office released this week.
Almost certainly this will understate the actual fiscal deterioration, given the “degree of systematic optimism” built into budget forecasts, as PBO chief Sam Reinhardt put it in a speech last month.

The reptiles interrupted with a terrifying snap, showing exactly why Killer had suffered so, way back when, a suffering that had left an ineradicable scar: Signs and tape baring (sic) people from an empty Bondi Beach in March 2020. Picture: Damian Shaw

No doubt some wag thought the pond might have had some fun with "baring", but this is serious people. 

Killer is in pain, and suffering from a rare kind of long Covid dementia:

Budget forecasts assume no new spending, which “rarely eventuate(s) in full because governments later announce new programs, extend existing ones, or respond to emerging pressures”, she added.
One good example is the National Disability Insurance Scheme, which was meant to have around 300,000 participants, rather than the 780,000 it had as of June.
Apologists for Australia’s soaring public debt often point to its supposedly low level as a share of GDP compared to other countries (about 50 per cent including the six states). Yet the stock of debt matters little. Canada has gross debts the equivalent to well over 100 per cent of its GDP yet enjoys a 10-year bond yield of 3.7 per cent, well below Canberra’s. New Zealand has been borrowing at a cheaper interest rate than Australia too for some time.
The world keeps Australia on a tighter fiscal leash, and for good reason: we’re a smaller, remote economy, whose economic viability would be torn asunder by a clash between China and the US in the Pacific.
Our biggest export customer is the number one geopolitical enemy of our most important military ally.
The Australian dollar isn’t a reserve currency, and we have a chronic inflation problem that predates the US-Iran war too.
A cursory look at state and federal budget management reveals appalling levels of waste and stupidity, best illustrated by the massive increases in public sector headcount and pay, at state and federal levels. Indeed practically all economic growth has been in the public sector, and in particular the highly regulated and relatively unproductive “care economy”.
The treatment for financial Long Covid will be painful, and it won’t be optional: significant cuts in spending along the lines Australia hasn’t seen before.

Why chose this sort of painful metaphor and hammer it to death?

It's the masks, Killer has never recovered from the masks or the need to talk about vaccines ...

At least we know it will work. New Zealand in the 1980s and Canada in the 1990s offer past examples of chronically mismanaged nations that had to make radical cuts and soon returned to fiscal health.
State and federal governments have planned bond issuance this year of some $235bn, the highest amount since the 12 months to June 2021.
Back then the Reserve Bank was helping keep borrowing costs down by creating billions of dollars of new money. That will be much harder to do in coming years, given the growing loss of faith in the monetary system throughout the developed world.
At least more economic commentators are coming to realise that the nation’s real public-debt burden extends far beyond Canberra to the states. What more need to realise is that Canberra is ultimately on the hook for the lot of it.

And so to the wringing of that metaphor's chicken neck:

“We’re all on this together” might have been an irritating, nonsense slogan during Covid, but it certainly applies to public debt, given the implicit guarantee the states enjoy.
Adam Creighton is IPA chief economist.

Strange, the pond seems to remember that we were all in a Covid mask-wearing mess back in the day, but never mind, there's an infallible Pope to hand to help with the cure ...

You see Killer, if you have just the right mindset, the memory fades and it all becomes a blur, a killing field of lost ghosts.

Speaking of forgetting, or not being aware, this is a true story.

The pond's partner had to ask who Natalie was. No idea. As clueless as Alicia Silverstone.

The pond won't harp on it, but such bliss, to live so far away from the doings of the court of mad King Donald...