Late yesterday while doing a little browsing the pond was startled by this header in the Nine rags ...
‘Groundbreaking’: High Court quashes coal mine expansion over climate emissions (*intermittent archive link)
It seemed serious. Inter alia ...
Environment Minister Murray Watt said the government was still considering the 111-page judgment handed down on Wednesday, while casting doubt on whether the decision would set a national precedent.
But the federal opposition is demanding the Albanese government intervene should the NSW Labor government fail to urgently pass new laws. The Minerals Council echoed the call for new legislation, arguing that “this type of activist ‘lawfare’ conducted against approved mining projects creates uncertainty for workers, communities and those seeking to invest in NSW”.
The NSW government has been contacted for comment.
Anita Hart, a lawyer for the local environment group fighting the project, celebrated the victory, calling it “a groundbreaking decision for climate law in Australia” that would be studied closely by other countries.
The Greens’ new deputy federal leader Steph Hodgkins May said it would send a clear message to both government and business that “when Australian coal is burned overseas, the climate damage doesn’t magically disappear at the port”.
The case revolved around an open-cut coal mine at Mt Pleasant in the NSW Hunter region, a political battleground eyed by both the Coalition and One Nation.
Operator MACH Energy Australia won approval in 2022 to significantly expand the mine and extend its life by 22 years. It outlined measures to address domestic greenhouse gas emissions from the project.
But it also concluded that 98 per cent of the total emissions would be classed as “Scope Three”, a category for further use of a product, such as the burning of coal for energy after export.
The operator argued these emissions would be managed “in accordance with customer countries commitments under the Paris Agreement” and would not “contribute to Australian greenhouse gas emissions”.
Neither the NSW Department Planning and Environment or the ultimate decision maker, the Independent Planning Commission, took issue with the company’s position.
The pond immediately rushed over to the lizard Oz to see how the reptiles were coping, but they had a much different, completely reassuring headline.
This morning that yarn by reliably wretched Rosie was still hanging around like a bad smell ...
PM ‘gaslighting our Pacific neighbours on 2030 target’
Climate Change Authority boss says PM must roll out renewables ‘faster’ to hit 2030 target
Anthony Albanese has been accused of misleading Pacific nations on his renewable electricity target, as Matt Kean says the government must ‘go faster’ to reach the goal.
By Rosie Lewis
Jack the Insider was on the same page, and withering in his contempt. After all, why not make the drowning of Pacific Islanders a butt for a pool party joke?
Chris Bowen slugged Australia tens of millions hosting a global climate summit in Fiji – and almost every nation on earth chose to stay home.
By Jack the Insider
Columnist
Talk about a laugh...
But had the ground really been broken?
It turned out that the pond had no need to worry about coal. Good old Murray Watts - what's climate change? - soon appeared to pour bliss on troubled clean dinkum virginal Oz coal ...
“It doesn’t automatically transfer to commonwealth decisions or commonwealth legislation,” he told News24. (Graudian)
And to complete the job, valiant Lloydie of the Amazon rushed to the rescue ...
High Court’s coal mine decision is not the ‘victory’ that green lawfare claims
4 min
A compelling snap of what pleasures the hive mind: The Mount Pleasant coal mine near Muswellbrook, NSW. Picture: LinkedIn
A yearning to be at one with the logarithm: Make us preferred on Google
Lloydie was totally relaxed and confident as he surveyed the scene:
Cases have been launched in multiple states but failed the test. The arguments against stopping projects have included that Australian coal would simply be substituted for coal from somewhere else, often resulting in higher emissions. Alternatively, it has been argued that emissions are already dealt with internationally through the Paris Agreement and other laws and measures.
But green lawfare is claiming to have finally had a win in the High Court over an extension to a big coal mine in NSW. The High Court upheld an appeal that overturned approval for the Mount Pleasant coal mine extension because the authorities had not properly considered the climate change impact that burning the coal overseas would have on the area from which it was mined. Environment groups were quick to claim the High Court decision set a national precedent on Scope 3 emissions. Greenpeace hailed the decision as a “victory for communities that bear the brunt of the storms, bushfires and extreme weather fuelled by Australian fossil fuel corporations”.
“Coal and gas companies have claimed they are not responsible for their pollution because it happens overseas, but today Australia’s highest court sided with common sense and scientific evidence to find that every new coal and gas approval in this country could put us at risk, no matter where it is sold or burnt,” Greenpeace said.
Then came a totally relaxing billy goat butt, and the pond realised that the planet was still safe, and able to experience the joys of abundant sweet, dinkum virginal Oz coal ...
The High Court said its decision “does not raise for consideration any issue concerning climate change outside of the meaning and application of the EPA Act. Nor does it concern any aspect of the merits of the development, which are extraneous to the questions in the appeal.”
When it approved the mine extension, the Planning Commission of NSW acknowledged the mining of coal and its combustion was a major contributor to anthropogenic climate change, which had the potential to impact future generations. It acknowledged that although the project’s Scope 3 emissions would contribute to anthropogenic climate change, these were appropriately regulated and accounted for through broader national policies and international agreements (such as the Paris Agreement).
But the High Court found the commission had failed to consider whether to impose conditions to minimise to the greatest extent practicable Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions, which constituted 98 per cent of the project’s total greenhouse gas emissions.
The High Court said there was no basis upon which it may be inferred the commission considered that issue as it was expected to do.
But the High Court made it clear it was not undertaking any form of merits review on the bigger questions of Scope 3 emissions or climate impact.
“The court cannot and does not address what follows from the requirement for the commission to consider whether to impose conditions to minimise to the greatest extent practicable greenhouse gas emissions of the development, including Scope 3 emissions, and what conditions, if any, might be imposed,” the judgment said.
The bigger question about whether Scope 3 emissions had an impact in the area the coal was mined was not considered by the High Court. “Given the conclusions reached above, it is neither necessary nor appropriate to address this issue,” it said.
Credit where full credit will be due in due course when the planet goes down the tubes ...
The pond rarely visits the hive mind, but this day, thanks to Lloydie, Amazon saviour, it was ablaze with indignation ...
On and on they rabbited ... and how could the pond resist another sample? There'll be zillions more - the hive mind is strong - as the madness never ends ...
What could possibly go wrong?
With that done and dusted, the pond could turn its attention to other reptiles, with the swishing Switzer briefly at the top of the far right digital edition, ma ...
Why voters must be told a harsh truth about public spending
5 min
A splendid snap of a dour Jimbo, ravager and ruiner of the hive mind: Jim Chalmers shouldn’t take all the blame for cost-of-living pressures. Picture: Nikki Short
Surrender all to the G machine: Make us preferred on Google
That backhanded header was just a troll. Of course the swishing Switzer was going to join in the relentless whacking of Jimbo, a 24/7 lizard Oz jihad ...
For a government that is already struggling with its economic credibility, Chalmers has become something of a liability. Most Australians would be glad to see him shafted.
But the hostility towards Chalmers and Labor should not obscure a larger and more uncomfortable truth: politicians are responding to an electorate that has come to expect governments to cushion almost every economic pain with taxpayers’ money.
Nothing illustrated this better than a Newspoll published on the eve of the 2025 federal election. On March 10, the poll found that 83 per cent of Australians supported more government spending to help with cost-of-living pressures, against just 12 per cent who disagreed.
Voters were not merely saying governments should protect the most vulnerable. They were endorsing higher government spending as a general response to the rising cost of living. The partisan breakdown makes it even harder to portray this as simply a Labor problem. Ninety-two per cent of Labor voters supported more government spending; so did 77 per cent of Coalition voters.
Small wonder, then, that both major parties entered the 2025 election campaign with substantial spending commitments. Their promises ran into billions of dollars across health, housing, infrastructure and cost-of-living relief.
But then came some minor relief for Jimbo with a billy goat butt ...
But the problem here is not simply that politicians spend too much. It is that voters increasingly expect them to spend more – and politicians from both major parties have learned that resisting this demand can be politically hazardous.
The reptiles interrupted the billy goat with an image offering astonishing insights, and the pond awaits correspondent advice on what it exactly portended ...Voters want governments to ease cost-of-living pressures on basics like fuel … but there’s another price to pay. Picture: Getty Images
The swishing Switzer then provided his explanation, and in the process turned to Milt, reminding the pond that if Hayek is a little stale on the palate, there's always Milt ...
Of course, other forces help explain rising inflation: energy prices, the war in the Persian Gulf, global conditions, housing, wages, supply constraints, and a productivity drought.
But loose fiscal policy, which has been sadly a bipartisan enterprise, is the main culprit. When an economy is operating under capacity constraints, governments cannot keep adding to aggregate demand indefinitely without making the Reserve Bank’s job harder.
Voters have become participants in the fiscal problem. Our desire for relief from rising prices is entirely understandable. But collectively, voters can also demand policies that make the underlying problem harder to solve.
There is a broader intellectual failure here, too; in Canberra, and in public discourse generally. Who is prepared to tell Australians the truth about the trade-offs involved in government spending?
To find an answer, it is worth recalling a time when those trade-offs were made rather more explicit. One useful place to start is with Milton Friedman, the legendary monetarist and free marketeer, who was awarded the Nobel prize in economics 50 years ago this month.
Milt turned up in person to help with the analysis ...Milton Friedman had a relevant warning on inflation for Australians more than 50 years ago
That's exactly the sort of snap that inspires confidence in the analysis of the Miltdown man, and that inspired the swishing Switzer to a further burst of analysis.
Discipline! Whips and chains, and a jolly good lashing for all, except perhaps privileged reptiles and their preferred pets ...
The problem, he argued, was not simply that governments might spend too much. It was that voters could demand more government spending while resisting the taxes required to pay for it.
“If the people of Australia wish the government sector to expand at the expense of the private sector,” Friedman said, “that is of course their right.” But if that was what Australians wanted, he argued, governments should make the cost explicit rather than allowing inflation to become a hidden tax.
Friedman went further. “The great defect in much of our policies in my country and yours,” he said, “is not because bad people want to do bad things … it’s good people who want to do good things, who produce harm by accepting what is a fallacious principle – namely, that you can do good by spending somebody else’s money.”
There could hardly be a more pertinent warning for today’s debate.
The responsibility for fiscal discipline does not rest with just politicians like Chalmers. Governments respond to the demands placed upon them by voters. If we want governments to spend more whenever living costs rise, politicians will inevitably compete to oblige them.
But there is no magic pudding. The money must come from somewhere. It can come through higher taxes, larger public debt or – when monetary policy responds to inflationary pressures – higher interest rates.
The uncomfortable truth is that a government cannot permanently spend its way out of a cost-of-living crisis. Nor can voters demand ever more government assistance while imagining that the cost will somehow be borne by somebody else.
Tom Switzer is presenter of the Switzerland YouTube podcast and a former executive director of the Centre for independent Studies.
As well as that tag, the reptiles offered another credit ...
All bow to the Switzer, ready to tackle the world today with an attack of the Goughs.
What else? There was a certain Thrupp pulsating with alarm ...
A decade after Britain voted to leave the EU, Prime Minister Andy Burnham has indicated he will hand Europhiles the chance to reverse the democratic verdict of 2016.
By Jake Thrupp ...
The pond had to personally save it to the intermittent archive, because global vision!
You know, the bright new global vision offered by mad King Donald ... Trump warns US-UK trade deal ‘can always be changed’ with relations in ‘sad state’; President says he gave Britain ‘better deal than I had to’ but ally was ‘not there when we needed them’ on Iran
And then there's the global vision offered by China, India, and Vlad the sociopath's Russia. Or maybe Canada? Anything and anybody other than those debilitating, devious Europeans.
The pond would rather read a cracking Crace... All hail the Death Kult of Kemi – captain, coach and owner of the Conservatives
There was just time for Kemi to pay tribute to Jeffrey Archer – the Tories have a soft spot for a convicted conman who ruined several lives – and then came the extended standing ovations. An echo chamber is going to echo.
Ah Jeffrey, we'll not see his like again anytime soon. Oh wait, there's conman Donald on stage ...
The pond should also note that the Australian Daily Zionist News was still running hot ...
Three years on, one devastating reality … activists are still ‘siding with Hamas’
Pro-Palestine activists refused to let Australia’s Jewish community have the day to themselves to honour the 1200 victims, mounting ugly protests in Sydney and Melbourne.
By Lachlan Leeming, Will Seitam and Aris Schuler-Shah
And what about the 74k plus Palestinians dead, Gaza demolished and the ethnic cleansing that continues apace? Is noting that devastating reality "siding with Hamas"?
Cue a balancing Haaretz read ...
October 7 forces us to ask what kind of Israel can exist. The answer, however much Israelis deny it, depends on Palestinians being able to exist too (*intermittent archive link)
On October 7, Benjamin Netanyahu promised Israelis peace with the Palestinians.
The year was 1996. Netanyahu was in his 40s, months into his first term as prime minister. Yitzhak Rabin had been assassinated less than a year earlier for pursuing peace through the Oslo Accords. That year alone, terror bombings on buses and at shopping malls inside Israel had killed 76 people. Israel was not yet 50, the occupation not yet 30. I just turned one year old.
"We truly want peace and will always want peace. We are not enemies of the Arab nation, nor of the Palestinians, nor of Islam," Netanyahu told the Knesset, calling negotiations for a permanent agreement "the principal task before us."
He was no dove. But even as he warned against Oslo and Palestinian leaders, he said: "Most of the public wants, as we do, to see the Palestinians living and prospering alongside us."
Exactly 27 years later, Netanyahu was again prime minister when Israelis woke to the worst day in their country's history. Some 1,200 people were killed in the Hamas-led massacre – in their homes, at a music festival. Whole families erased. Hundreds abducted.
That evening, he promised to "strike them mercilessly and exact a powerful revenge," vowing to turn Hamas' hiding places in the "city of evil" into "ruins."
That time, he kept his promise. Tens of thousands of Palestinians were killed in Gaza.
On that October day at the Knesset in 1996, Shimon Peres had challenged the man who defeated him in the election to turn his "nice and poetic" words about peace into action.
"War exacts a heavy price, and so does peace," Peres told the Knesset. "But if we want to give the next generation a world without war, our generation must bear the agonies of war and make real decisions."
I am part of the generation those leaders promised to spare from war. My adult life is still being defined by it.
A deep and dark abyss separates the Israel of 1996 from the Israel of 2026, with 2023 as the lowest point between them. Its leaders no longer debate how to turn peace from words into action. They agree not even to utter the word. Most Israelis do not challenge this.
What is harder and more painful is to think about the wasted years and the blood spilled along the way. Peace lies buried in the graves of the families murdered on October 7, under Gaza's rubble and beneath decades of broken promises. Promises that have become so unrealistic and unpopular that they ceased to be made at all.
October 7 tested, and continues to test, Israel's viability. Netanyahu invoked an existential threat to conceal his unforgivable failure and justify his war of destruction. Yet Israel demonstrated that its power as a Jewish state faces no existential threat. That power has itself become the threat.
The path to and from October 7 demands that we ask what kind of existence is possible in Israel. It depends, however much Israelis deny it, on Palestinians' ability to exist too.
Well yes, just don't expect them to exist in the lizard Oz hive mind ...
And while on the topic of alternative reads to the lizard Oz, this recently turned up in The New Yorker ...
For decades, the Heritage Foundation was a conservative powerhouse. Can it stay relevant in the influencer age? (*intermittent archive link)
By Emma Green
Green attempted to discern the future for GOPsters:
For decades, a very specific kind of right-wing kid has dreamed about working at Heritage. “I would look at the building in awe,” a former member of the management team told me. The organization has an annual budget of about a hundred million dollars, and more than four hundred million in reserves. Its properties take up an entire city block on the Senate side of the Capitol. Heritage is the undisputed giant of the conservative-think-tank world—less a tank than an aircraft carrier.
When Roberts took over as leader, five years ago, he was eager to adopt an aggressive posture. Suddenly, managers were speaking in sports metaphors (We’re going to move the football!) or martial ones (We’re here to do battle!). A longtime Heritage scholar named Mike Gonzalez told me, earnestly, “What I say about Kevin—it’s kind of like watching ‘Braveheart’ every morning.”
Roberts is tall and bald, with the permanently gregarious manner of someone who, in another life, could have been a politician. Several people described him to me as a man’s man: he drives a black diesel pickup and wears cowboy boots to formal functions. When the Guardian reported old allegations that he had killed a neighbor’s noisy dog, he took to making jokes about knowing how to use a shovel (though he denies killing the dog). He is skilled at selling Heritage to donors, and also at cultivating right-wing staffers in Washington. Lately, however, the latter crowd has been causing him trouble.
As one former Heritage executive put it, the young people who came to D.C. used to be the good kids—teachers’ pets, class presidents, suck-ups. Now the right-wing dreamers deride their elders as “Reagan Zombies” and “BoomerCons.” They’re sick of the establishment program of forever wars and free trade, open borders and kowtowing to China. Their movement—known as the New Right, or sometimes as the Realignment—is virulently antiwar, eager for mass deportations, and less interested in lowering corporate taxes than in helping families afford houses and cars and kids. “It’s Elizabeth Warren in the streets, economic nationalism and strong Christianity in the sheets,” one D.C. think-tanker told me. The kids these days don’t watch Hannity; they follow Tucker, or maybe Nick Fuentes, the young white nationalist who mocks women and calls Hitler “cool.” “Everyone in the mainstream on the right is puzzled about what to do about the angry young men,” a former Heritage scholar told me. “It creates nasty fractures in the coalition.”
What a relief. Nazis 'R Us!
And Parker Molloy, who's been going through a hard time of late, offered this reminder of mad King Donald's triumphant rise to power on the back of pussy groping ...
The "Access Hollywood Tape," 10 Years Later; A decade under Trump's influence
Pussy grope on reptiles, it's the seemly way forward for Nazi loving GOPsters, and evangelical Xians ...
Cowards all, and what a craven Hall of Shame, and the pond was reminded that there's always a new word to learn every day ...
A little more than four years later, Trump would once again find his political fate in the hands of the Republican Party after he tried and failed to carry out an autogolpe. Twice, the party had the opportunity to end Trump’s reign. Twice, it failed to do so, condemning and then welcoming him back with open arms.
First recorded in 1970–75; from Spanish auto- auto- 1 ( def. ) + golpe “a hit” (from Latin colaphus, from Greek kólaphos ); cf. coup
Sometimes the pond thinks that attending to herpetology studies sees a ten point drop in brain power each day, such that the pond's IQ is now somewhere about -129.
And so to the immortal Rowe, still mired in the beefy boofhead's fight for a decent chup ...
Speaking of autogolpes, it's way past time for another one ...
