In which Lord Downer and Killer Creighton keep the reptile rage machine raging ...

 

A housekeeping note: the pond will have to get up at an unseemly, obscenely early time tomorrow morning to travel up to the big smoke.

As a result, the pond won't be able to look at the lizard Oz's Tuesday offerings, and instead will provide a place marker to keep the blog ticking over.

The pond has decided Major Mitchell can do the job, on the basis that the Major's stupidity is eternal, and his stupidity will sound just as fresh when reheated tomorrow as it would have sounded today.

Unfortunately, this leaves the pond rather short on reptiles for this morning's outing.

Luckily Lord Downer was on hand to distract from mad King Donald's latest feud with Benji ....

Displaced by the onion muncher from the Liberal party gig, Lord Downer was feeling very One Nation, appropriate for the lizard Oz's new status as the go to One Nation rag of choice.

The header: Why the consensus on multiculturalism is now at breaking point; The political class has spent decades celebrating multiculturalism while a flood of public discontent quietly built beneath their feet.

The caption for the AV distraction the reptiles decided to put at the start of His Lordship's outing: Sky News host James Morrow says multiculturalism is a “failed experiment’ in Australia.

The pond has no idea why the reptiles decided to start with a 6'36" minute long AV distraction, except perhaps to suggest that Lord Downer was only offering his usual feeble, impotent cluckings - 'observations' is too kind a term - and so he needed beefing up with a Sky Noise loon who could declare multiculturalism a failed experiment, much like the ongoing failure to Sky News to come up with a decent rebranding.

The pond immediately knew what was coming, the sort of futtering and fumbling which marked Lord Downer's time as a politician ...

The dramatic rise of populist political parties over the past few years in just about all Western countries has a common thread running through it: immigration.
It’s not inequality, as leftist commentators so often claim. While it’s true that core economic issues like declines in real living standards, persistent inflation, as well as increasing energy prices, have all contributed to a growing sense of exasperation with the political class, nothing compares with the issue of immigration.
The public expects the government to be the guardian of social cohesion. Of course everyone recognises that in any country there is a multiplicity of opinions about everything under the sun but they do not expect the government of whatever complexion to pursue policies which contribute to societal breakdown. It’s a radical thing to say, but a sizeable percentage of Western populations think they have done just that.
Let’s just look at the two countries I know best: the UK and Australia. In both cases there has been substantial immigration including from countries that have very different cultural traditions from our own. In both cases, governments have vigorously defended immigration policies which do not discriminate against people on the basis of their religion, ethnicity, race, or even sexual preference.

And what would Lord Downer propose? Discrimination based on religion, or ethnicity, or race, or even sexual preference?

Set an example of bigotry, fear and loathing, of the kind patented by King Donald, so that prejudice could run rampant and ruin the body politic?

What if someone had proposed that there should be discrimination that saw the banning of loons from the Adelaide hills?

The pond would find it hard to argue against such a proposition, but there'd probably be a few squawks from the reptiles.

Meanwhile, to continue to give the piece the sort of One Nation "rage machine" gloss that the reptiles now take as a standard coating, there came an example of a ratbag who is clearly off the planet and faraway in some little England universe: The dramatic rise of populist political parties over the past few years in just about all Western countries has a common thread running through it: immigration. Picture: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

That's where Lord Downer and the reptiles want to go?

Not to be distracted, His Lordship continued to wring his fingers, sigh at the sky and flutter his ankles. 

Frankly the pond has nothing against those inclined to a little cross-dressing, it adds a little spicy ambiguity to the country ...

... but here we are, with Lord Downer blathering on about the dangers of being tolerant and accepting diversity. 

It's the sort of thing that might score him a good bashing at a beat, or being tossed off a Sydney cliff ...

These principles have had widespread public support. So, too, has the concept of multiculturalism. The idea here, going back in Australia’s case to the 1970s, is that we encourage migrants to retain their historic cultural identities. Like all people, they value their timeworn traditions and conventions. They’re not going to be happy if those are diluted or taken away from them.
As a society, we tolerate and indeed, in many cases, celebrate the diversity of cultures that make up our country. This concept of multiculturalism has also been applied in the UK for many years.
In both countries, the consensus around non-discriminatory immigration policies and multiculturalism has now broken down. Elites in politics, the bureaucracy, and the professional classes don’t wish to accept this, and I can sympathise with their concerns, but it pays to face up to reality rather than dream of ideals.
The reason for that is quite clear: many people, though not all, think that immigration policies are now destroying our own cultural traditions and conventions and are destabilising society. This trend has been building for many years, but what was a trickle of concern has now become a flood.
Taking the UK, there has been a subliminal discomfort for decades about immigration. Immigrant groups are perceived to be taking over large sections of urban Britain. There are parts of Birmingham where English is barely spoken. Over 50 per cent of the population of the city of Leicester do not speak English at home.

In all that blather, the pond took exceptional pride in this Lord Downer sentence, as pure an example of distilled Adelaide Hills hogwash as anyone could hope to find ...

Elites in politics, the bureaucracy, and the professional classes don’t wish to accept this, and I can sympathise with their concerns, but it pays to face up to reality rather than dream of ideals.

The idea of Lord Downer as a grim realist, an adherent of realpolitiks, is so laughable a conceit, so risible that the pond had to bite down severely on thumb to prevent gales of hysterical laughter.

Only Lord Downer could swallow the notion that Lord Downer isn't a pampered member of the elite, a nepo baby born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and about as connected to reality as Bertie Wooster.

Inevitably the reptiles turned to the latest far right scandal to serve as meat for the hive mind... People attend a protest about the police's handling of the arrest of Henry Nowak at Southampton Central Police Station on June 2. The stabbing of Nowak by a Sikh was an instance of violence attributed to migrants. Picture: Finnbarr Webster/Getty Images

Lord Downer hastened to get there in a pale imitation of Tommy Robinson, but not before he performed a rhetorical trick worthy of his Victorian ancestors:

It’s not just the fact that immigrants are bringing different traditions and values to England; it is the fact that they have clustered in Bantustans, separating themselves from the mainstream of British society. 

Did you notice that? That word ...

A Bantustan (also known as a Bantu homeland, a black homeland, a black state or simply known as a homeland; Afrikaans: Bantoestan or tuisland) was a territory that the National Party administration of the Union of South Africa (1910–1961) and later the Republic of South Africa (1961–1994) set aside for black inhabitants of South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia), as a part of its policy of apartheid.
The term, first used in the late 1940s, was coined from Bantu (meaning "people" in some of the Bantu languages) and -stan (a suffix meaning "land" in Persian and other Persian-influenced languages). It subsequently came to be regarded as a disparaging term by some critics of the apartheid-era government's homelands. (Wiki and footnotes here).

It says everything you need to know about Lord Downer's colonial mindset and his ability to mangle apartheid into a new meaning.

Did he really need to go there, and do that? Of course he did ...

The British public have grumbled about this, but it hasn’t been a fierce political issue. On the whole, they are a pretty tolerant people, and having had an empire covering a third of the globe, they are very familiar with different races and cultures.
But this tolerance has recently been stretched to breaking point. First, since October 7, 2023, there have been almost weekly demonstrations against Israel in major British cities. The demonstrators have been aggressive. There have sometimes been acts of violence, and there have been frequent expressions of antisemitism. This has triggered a more widespread antisemitism in a country renowned for its liberal tolerance.
What has this got to do with immigration? Well, for many, there is a perception that these demonstrations and the rise of antisemitism have been driven by migrants. While that may not be entirely true, there are, after all, many from the far left of the political spectrum who share those antisemitic sentiments. There is a sense in the UK that migrants have brought their historic grievances to the streets of British cities.
Then there have been instances of violence and, in some cases, murder attributed to migrants. Most recently, there was the stabbing by a Sikh of Henry Nowak in Southampton, and as he lay dying, being handcuffed by the police for a false claim of racist language. A couple of weeks ago, there was the attempted murder of a young man in Belfast allegedly by a Sudanese refugee.
These are just two very recent incidents, but there are many more, including the notorious story of Pakistani grooming gangs in Yorkshire sexually assaulting and raping young white girls.

What the pond finds remarkable when the Lord Downers of the world begin their immigrant litanies is that they never ever note stories of other stories of sexual assault and misogynist abuse, of a kind which has reached up to the White House.

The pond recently noted Heidi Blake's coverage of Andrew Tate in The New Yorker in Andrew Tate’s Empire of Abuse; How the defining figure of the manosphere built a fortune—and became a political force—by systematically exploiting women. (*intermittent archive link)

And what's Tate's background? 

Let Blake start with the father ...

...Emory was brilliant, charismatic, and mercurial. In 1992, he was discharged from the Air Force after being diagnosed as having conditions that “interfere with military service,” including narcissistic personality disorder. Back in civilian life, he was convinced that he was being monitored by the C.I.A., that the family car was being tailed, and that he was under attack by assailants from Eastern Europe. “The world he lived in was a scary world,” Andrew has said. He remembered Emory telling him, “You’re a Tate. They’re going to come for you like they came for me.”
The family relocated to Elkhart, Indiana, to be close to Emory’s mother. The brothers spent hours playing around their grandmother’s house—climbing trees, building forts, and racing through cornfields—but their home life was fraught. Emory drank heavily and was prone to terrifying rages. Tristan told me that if he stepped out of line his father beat him with a belt, sometimes whipping him until his skin was striped red. Andrew has described lying awake at night in terror. “I must have been the most awake child on earth,” he said in one video. “I was so afraid of the beatdown.” In his telling, this violence was an essential part of becoming a man. “I can’t wait to kick my kid’s ass if he gets fresh,” he has said.
In Indiana, Emory worked low-wage jobs—at McDonald’s, a car wash, a park—but funnelled his ferocious intellect into chess, often staying up all night drinking and practicing variations. He started leaving the family to play in tournaments around the country. He would arrive by bus, wearing his trademark trilby, and hustle for spare dollars in chess parks. A dazzling attacking player, he became a folk hero on the circuit—bringing “the flair and swagger to chess often seen on the basketball courts,” the chess writer Daaim Shabazz noted—but he lacked the discipline to reach grandmaster level, where serious winnings kick in. “As smart as my father was, chess doesn’t pay,” Andrew has said. “He also loved gambling, women, and booze. So you add all that up, we were very, very poor.”
When Emory returned to the family after an eight-week absence, Eileen confronted him over an infidelity, and he walked out again. “When you’re older, you’ll understand,” he told Andrew. “Your mother won’t shut up.” As the marriage broke down, Andrew rationalized his father’s abandonment. “You’re a better role model to your son if you barely see him and live life on your own terms,” he later wrote. “A dad is a super hero. Not a full time carer. Don’t sit and become a Bitch like the woman wants.”
In 1997, the year Andrew turned eleven, Eileen moved the children to her home town of Luton, an impoverished and overcrowded municipality north of London. They stayed in a hostel for homeless women and children. “It was a horrible place to live,” Tristan told me. Eileen got a job washing dishes in a school cafeteria, and he remembered that “her hands were always bleeding and cracked.”
Eventually, they moved to the Marsh Farm estate, a housing project plagued by crime and violent riots. The Tates went to a failing school, where they were bullied for their American accents and shabby clothes. Emory occasionally sent money, and the brothers would walk to a pay phone to call him. “My father raised me over the phone,” Andrew has written. “I was STILL AFRAID of him, 3000 miles away.”
As a teen-ager, Andrew was dogged by a feeling of unease. “I always had this sense that something wasn’t quite right about the way the world functioned,” he has said. He thought of himself like the character Neo in “The Matrix,” restlessly searching without knowing what for. When the brothers walked to school together, they sometimes saw a Ferrari drive by, and Andrew became furious. “He’s hacked the Matrix!” he said. “How does he have four hundred grand for a car? He knows something we don’t know!”

So there's migrants and migration in that seedy, wretched mix, but not exactly the sort that Lord Downer is blathering about ...

And at this point the reptiles decided to drag in their standard bout of Zionism ...A Rally For A Free Palestine protest saw the burning of the Israeli flag on the forecourt of the Sydney Opera House on October 9, 2023. Picture: NewsWire/Jeremy Piper

The pond should note that it's not just Islamics that are disturbed by the Zionist project, the attempts at a greater Israel, and the accompanying ethnic cleansing. There are Jews of the Haaretz kind who happen to find it disturbing, and there are many others.

The pond happens to be of Celtic origin, and can see something of the barbarity being doled out to the Palestinians as roughly equivalent to the sort of barbarity inflicted on the Irish by the English in the nineteenth century (the pond won't mention Cromwell).

And that's why the pond finds this next bit of Downerism contemptible:

In Australia, we have likewise seen demonstrations against Israel and Jews, most notoriously on October 9, 2023, at the Sydney Opera House.
These persistent demonstrations and the spread of antisemitism have, in the minds of many, been attributed to migrants ­bringing their hatreds from the other side of the world to our own streets. Then there was the Bondi massacre of the Jews on December 14 last year. I think for many Australians, this was pretty much the last straw.
For a migrant and his Australian-born son to massacre people on an iconic Australian beach had a deeper impact on Australian society than commentators who flip from issue to issue, day by day, realise. For many Australians, for right or for wrong (and I’m not ­debating that), they just think enough is enough.
There’s one other thing to say about the public. They feel they cannot talk about these things without being condemned in the most vicious and vigorous of ways as being racist or fascist.
If you abuse people often enough and if those claims against them are false, then that too is going to generate a very negative reaction. People do not, in the main, regard themselves as racist; rather, those who are concerned about immigration take pride in our way of life, in our traditions, and in our values. They do not want people coming into our country to undermine those things.
There is very much the same sentiment in continental Europe and parts of the United States.
Of course, populist political parties are dangerous because in government they would create chaos but nevertheless the challenge for traditional parties is to make sure they address the issue of immigration and the integration of migrants with vigour and not worry too much about the rock throwing from elements of the media.

Here's a starting point. Send people from the Adelaide hills back to where they came from. Only then can this country know peace ...

Have a break, but not a Kit-kat, to celebrate the birthday boy ...

The pond realises that - should Dame Groan arrive tomorrow to announce that the end is nigh, and we'll all be rooned long before Xmas - the pond will miss the chance to provide a fresh baked, hot out of the oven report to correspondents.

The pond promises it will at least manage to reheat it and serve it up on the Wednesday, no matter how stale it sounds, or how long it makes the day's post.

In the interim, please have a serve of simpleton Simon ...who offers his own version of "we'll all be rooned":

Productivity neglect means generations of crisis and decline
Considering productivity is a key to rising living standards, it would appear to lie at the heart of the intergenerational inequity problem the government says it is trying to solve.
By Simon Benson
Political analyst

The pond offered that link - personally saved by the pond - because it thinks a teaser trailer will be enough to send correspondents scuttling off to the intermittent archive to finish the read, so that they can spend the rest of the day in a gloomy reptile fog of despair...

And so to the bonus, but first a little nipplegate mood and scene setting ... because treatment of women seems to start at the top in the disunited states ...

The pond confesses that Killer Creighton only makes this appearance because it's been yonks since Killer has graced these pages, and not because Killer was doing his own impression of the manosphere ...

The header: Do we really need a women’s budget statement? If any large group warranted a special budget ‘statement’, wouldn’t you think it might be young men and boys, whose socio-economic circumstances have been reversing at a rapid rate.

The caption for a woman who looks decidedly bossy and who should have known her place: Finance Minister Katy Gallagher holds a pre-Budget press conference in the Blue Room at Parliament House. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman.

Killer got stuck straight into a little womyn bashing, mixed with "poor pitiful me" rhetoric:

For evidence federal budgets have become little more than rhetorical spin, look no further than the Women’s Budget Statement that now accompanies the four traditional budget papers pertaining to federal revenue expenses and economic projections.
Because the policy changes in the government’s latest budget have been so bad, the latest WBS, almost 80 pages of divisive, ideological nonsense, has been spared the ridicule it deserves.
After decades of improving socio-economic circumstances relative to men – which had nothing to do with the federal government – it’s far from clear that 51 per cent of the population should be insulted with taxpayer-funded programs that cast them as virtuous, downtrodden victims requiring special assistance. Indeed, if any large group warranted a special budget “statement” each year, wouldn’t you think it might be young men and boys, whose socio-economic circumstances have been reversing at a rapid rate?
“Young men are disengaging from mainstream Australia, from work, from education, and from relationships,” the Page Research Centre said in a recent research paper. They make up a shrinking minority, 40 per cent in 2024, of university graduates, which points to declining fortunes later.
The share of male youth, aged 20 to 24, not in education, employment or training was 13.7 per cent in 2021, according to the OECD, more than three percentage points higher than for similarly aged women. Moreover, women increasingly out earn men too, especially at younger ages as the female-dominated “care economy”, professional services, health, education and the bureaucracy boom, while traditionally male occupations shrivel.
Yes, men are more likely to fill the tiny absolute number of lucrative, top leadership roles in the private sector; but this is such a vanishingly small figure. Really, who cares? As the statement itself shows, women make up almost 55 per cent of the similarly well remunerated senior executive roles in the public sector, and more than half of all Australian government board positions.
“The 48th parliament is the most gender-balanced on record, with women comprising 49.6 per cent of parliamentarians at its opening,” the government trumpets. “When women are involved in decision making and policy design, outcomes are better for everyone,” the statement added – perhaps its most ridiculous, unsubstantiated claim. Finance and Women’s Minister Katy Gallagher didn’t inspire much confidence in this claim when she didn’t appear to care for the difference between gross and net savings at a recent Senate estimates hearing.

Killer then flung in a line finely attuned to the rabble rousing the hive mind requires ...

Seriously, though, women have intellects, talents and personalities everywhere near as diverse as men.

That was followed by a snap reminding the hive mind of what was wrong with the world: Anthony Albanese, Jim Chalmers, and Katy Gallagher. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman.

Killer then delivered his killer blow. It turns out that women can be just as corrupt as men:

Only last, week a large new statistical study by French and American economists concluded female leadership didn’t make a jot of difference in Brazil. “Over the 2000-2020 and across six corruption measures (and thousands of municipalities), electing a woman mayor ha(d) no detectable effect on corruption,” the two authors wrote in a study that is unlikely to be referenced in next year’s Women’s Statement.

Don't cry for me Argentina.

And then Killer got his knickers in a knot ...

“For too long, women’s health policy wasn’t taken seriously. The government has changed that,” the statement also claimed, ludicrously.

It's ludicrous that women's health policy wasn't taken seriously for a long time? Or is it just the notion that the government has changed that, and instead it still wasn't being taken seriously?

Whatever, what about men, Killer cried, it isn't fair, as he stood in the corner store, and a little girl snatched all the lollies before he could get his share ...

Last time I checked, men still die on average a full four years earlier than women – a gap that has narrowed slightly in recently years after male smoking rates collapsed, a factor perhaps likely to reverse as the government’s tobacco excise policy supercharges smoking across the nation.
I couldn’t find any policies to encourage women to become truck drivers, garbage collectors, miners or general labourers.
Males account for almost all workplace fatalities, are twice as likely to be murdered, commit suicide at in far greater numbers, and are more likely to be called on to die in war. They dominate the ­prison population too. No doubt almost all of them deserve to be there, but other men don’t deserve blame for sharing their sex.
Yet in the statement we read how “men’s violence against women remains a distressing and unacceptable reality”. Shouldn’t that be “some men’s violence”, or is every mother’s son part of the problem?

What a cunning riff, up there with that disarming of "black lives matter" with "white lives matter" and "all lives matter".

Perhaps recognising he'd gone a little too far, Killer tried to walk back a little, flinging in a billy goat butt in the form of an "obviously" ...

Obviously, domestic violence, committed overwhelmingly by a tiny sliver of men, is pathetic, contemptible and should be punished. 

A tiny sliver? 

(Here for more data)

Some sliver!

Such a sublime form of reductionism, and so much for violence against women (and men for that matter), and Killer had an even better follow up, a generality that made sure that violence specifically directed against women disappeared into a generalist void:

All violence is wrong and illegal and has been for a very long time.

The lad has a genuine talent for self-serving platitudes ... as the wailing and the litany of grievances continued, worthy of an incel or Clavicular himself ...

Throughout the document, men appear largely as perpetrators, potential perpetrators, or subjects of behavioural correction. Boys only get a mention four times in the document that casts them as problems in need of “education and awareness programs”, such as The Healthy Masculinities Trial and Evaluation (Healthy MaTE) scheme to “encourage healthy expressions of masculinity among school-aged boys and young men”.
“Gender responsive budgeting was reintroduced in the 2022-23 October budget to put gender equality at the centre of budget ­decision-making,” the statement reminds readers, without explaining how such a method is appropriate, possible or justified.
Pity the smart Treasury graduate who thought joining what was once a rigorous, respected institution might entail actual economics and public policy, rather than contributing to an absurd ­annual document replete with ­selective outrage and cherry-picked statistics.
If such a highly political, contestable document ever warranted routine inclusion in the federal budget, it was decades ago when women faced significant discrimination in the workplace, were a minority at university and female politicians were a rarity. These days, it simply highlights how unserious and simplistic a federal government we have.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

Credit where credit is due. Killer is not so far apart from the world infested by influencers and Andrew Tates ...

And speaking of prize misogynists, the lizard Oz editorialist had a tribute to King Donald on his birthday, and the pond found it irresistible, what with its UFC themes fitting Killer's mood exactly ...

That deserves an immortal Rowe ...

And speaking of manly men, this turned up on The Bulwark's channel to celebrate Pete Kegsbreath.

Generally speaking, the pond and the gym have been two for a very long time, but the pond knows enough to know that what Hogsbreath is doing here is pathetic and performative, and injurious to health. 

He seems to know as little about weight training as he does about everything else, and the result is as comical as that diminutive weight lifter who dresses as a cleaner and takes down beefy boofheads in YouTube videos which seem to haunt the pond's logarithms ...

In which prattling Polonius and the bromancer provide the soporifics for a meditative Sunday ...

 

The pond doesn't like constantly featuring the reptiles' obsession with elevating the Hansonite tribe in the hive mind, but must live with the cards that are being dealt.

The pond had been hoping it would be just another meditative Sunday, and that spot has been reserved for prattling Polonius for quite some time, so it was his turn, and wouldn't you know... Hansonite alert, as Polonius fantasised that Pauline would help in his endless jihad to take down the ABC ...

The header: Pauline Hanson’s surge puts the ABC on notice; Pauline Hanson may succeed where five Coalition prime ministers failed in forcing the ABC to change its editorial culture.

The caption, containing a cunning dog whistle: Pauline Hanson ... no one should be surprised that One Nation’s popularity increased markedly after the Bondi Beach massacre. Picture: supplied

The Polonial take wasn't that surprising, deploying the Hansonites as a boogeyperson to threaten the ABC, make them see the errors of their ways, and turn to the righteous Polonial path.

Those familiar with Polonius might wonder when his favourite term, "conservative-free zone" turns up, and the pond promises they won't have to wait long ...

Does increasing support for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party, evident in the opinion polls, present long-term problems for the ABC? Obviously, it’s too early to say. But there is reason for uncritical supporters of the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster to be concerned.
In the past, some opponents of the lack of viewpoint diversity on the ABC have wondered why Coalition governments, led by Malcolm Fraser, John Howard, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison, have not been able to encourage the ABC board to break the left’s domination of what is a conservative-free zone.
Sure, in various ways, Fraser, Howard, Abbott and Morrison tried. Not so Turnbull, who has been almost an uncritical ABC supporter. Especially nowadays when he has ready access to ABC studios to attack the Liberal Party in the capacity of one of its former leaders. ABC journalists just love this. And they rarely if ever ask him about losing 14 seats to Labor in the 2016 election or the blowout in costs to his fave Snowy Hydro 2.0 project.
As to the others, there was never the determination to do so. Traditionally, there has been strong support for the ABC from Nationals parliamentarians and regional and rural Liberal Party MPs. The ABC is more politically balanced in rural and regional areas. Moreover, Coalition MPs outside the major cities can get ready access to the ABC in their electorates.
Hanson is of a different stock. She appears to detest the ABC in the Melbourne-Canberra-Sydney axis and could act against it. This, after all, is where the ABC most readily demonstrates its support for left-wing causes.

At this point, the reptiles interrupted with extremely large photos displayed in linear order of ABC people the hive mind must hate.

It reminded the pond of this poster for enemies of the five year plan.

The reptiles hadn't organised this vile bunch in the proper way, so the pond took the opportunity to make the images and show the reptiles how to do it ... Laura Tingle. Picture: X; John Lyons. Picture: supplied; David Marr. Picture: supplied; Sarah Ferguson. Picture: ABC

Put that in a poster and those rogues would grace a Stalinist "most wanted" list.

Polonius naturally deemed this unruly crew "controversial", which surely is a bit of a stretch, but then it's likely that Polonius would find an overcooked egg "controversial" ...

A One Nation government could reduce funding for that part of the ABC public broadcaster where its most controversial “stars” are based. Namely, Linton Besser, Melissa Clarke, Raf Epstein, Sarah Ferguson, Patricia Karvelas, Fran Kelly, John Lyons, Hamish Macdonald, David Marr, Louise Milligan, Sally Sara, David Speers and Laura Tingle.
Needless to say, a government cannot, and should not, run a public broadcaster. Nor can a board. That’s the role of the ABC’s managing director and editor-in-chief (currently Hugh Marks). The role of the board – under its chairman (currently Kim Williams) – is to ensure that the functions of the corporation are performed effectively with the maximum benefit to the people of Australia.
It is sometimes said that ABC journalists must abide by the corporation’s charter. That’s a somewhat benign document. What’s important is section eight of the Australian Broadcasting Act 1983. It sets out the duties of the board including ensuring “that the gathering and presentation” by the ABC “of news and information is accurate and impartial according to the recognised standards of objective journalism”.
The federal government appoints the ABC board, including the ABC chair, except for the staff-elected board member (currently Tingle). And the board appoints the managing director. A One Nation government could appoint as many board members as it would be legally entitled to.

Speak loudly and carry a big One Nation stick, but Polonius realised he might have gone too far, he might have joined the reptile bandwagon, hooked up with the craze for Pauline...

I am not advocating a vote for One Nation. 

He is, he is!

The lust for revenge, the chance to dish it out to those wretched cardigan-wearers, got too much for him, and he jumped the shark so he could nuke the ABC fridge ...

However, I am saying that such an administration could affect the ABC by financial cuts and the like.

Yes, take that cardigan-wearers and remember, whatever the "however", keep in mind that a vote for Pauline could wreak righteous havoc on the miscreants.

Now back to that disgraceful mob, with not one of them worthy of being employed on Sky Noise down under (still no rebrand?)

Followers of the ABC are getting a clearer view of the organisation under new management. It appears that Williams was influential in the appointment of Marks. Recent public appearances by the pair suggest that the ABC is likely to remain a conservative-free zone under their watch.
On May 24, on a visit to Tasmania, Williams appeared on the Poll Position podcast where he was interviewed by Brad Stansfield and Alex Johnston. The following exchange took place. Williams: “The ABC is not an especially left-wing or right-wing organisation and, in fact, the majority of ABC journalists – I would defy anyone to know how they vote.” Stansfield: “Oh, I reckon I could guess.”
Quite so. Clearly, Williams is in denial. ABC management cannot name one conservative among the television, radio or online outlets who are presenters, producers or editors. Little wonder that Stansfield queried Williams. The public broadcaster is replete with apparent Greens and teal supporters in prominent positions.

And after that litany of failures, it was time to tame any hint of an inner Tame: Shadow Home Affairs Minister Jonathon Duniam claims the ABC has made a “terrible error of Judgement” in selecting Grace Tame for a new podcast.

That sent Polonius right off ...

Interviewed on Radio National Breakfast on June 10, Marks was asked about the ABC’s decision to appoint Grace Tame, who presents as a functioning adult, to present a four-part podcast on autism. In a soft and content-light interview, Marks declared, with respect to Tame, that “everybody can relate to what she really believes in”.
Really? Does “everybody” believe in Tame’s comment, as told to Hamish Macdonald on ABC Radio Sydney on March 16, that the evidence that Hamas murdered Israeli women and children and raped women was mere “propaganda”?

And what did the Ombudsman say about that interview?

Whilst the Ombudsman appreciates that some members of the audience consider this reference antisemitic, the Ombudsman does not consider the way in which it was presented condoned or encouraged prejudice.
Taking into account what was said in the program during the interview, and the continuing references to the interview from callers ringing in and providing their views and perspectives, the Ombudsman considers that the interview was conducted professionally, claims were appropriately challenged and in keeping with the editorial standards for a live radio program. (In full here)

Bloody ABC, the fix is always in ...

Also, under questioning from Liberal Party senator Sarah Henderson in Senate estimates on May 28, Marks refused to engage with the fact that Simon Robinson (the ABC’s soon to be head of news) had reposted a lengthy article titled “The Shoah after Gaza” by Pankaj Mishra. This was profoundly hostile to Israel. There is no evidence that Robinson has reposted an article supportive of contemporary Israel.

Supportive of ethnic cleansing, and a plan to make good a greater Israel? Only in the world of Benji lovers ...

It’s early days. However, Wil­liams and Marks do not seem to be conscious of the validity of the critique that the ABC is replete with left-of-centre individuals who regard themselves as “progressives”. Until they and other board members cease being in denial on this issue, hostility towards the ABC within sections of Australia is likely to remain.

The real problem? Polonial pique. 

Polonius has always fancied himself as the inventor of the real Media Watch, and considers it an outrage and a tragedy that the ABC never gave him any sort of gig, except for sparring on a couch with Marr, until tedium forced him off the air. 

Now poseurs and preening pretenders hold his ordained spot, and it's just so unfair. Polonius was made for the ABC, not to play some dogsbody on Sky Noise.

But now he turns up like a soporific on Sky Noise down under (still no rebrand?), dressed up as a "Media Watch Dog", wherein he imagines he's some sort of furry ... (do they have doggy stuff in the studio?) Sky News Media Watch Dog Columnist Gerard Henderson says ABC Media Watch host Linton Besser has conceded Pauline Hanson must be taken seriously after One Nation’s surge in the polls.

They didn't even feature Polonius doing his thing?

Pauline must be taken seriously?

Actually no matter what happens the pond reserves the right to treat her and Barners, Tamworth's eternal disgrace, as clowns in a clown car heading for a cliff, in much the same way as the pond finds King Donald first class entertainment.

It might be serious for those living under the King, but surely they can enjoy the comedy ... the late Roman empire specrtacle.

It's never boring ... provided you know how to baa along ...

And so to Polonius 'fessing up that the Hansonites are beloved by Murdochian media ...

It may be that some ABC journalists are more alert to a possibility of a future government that wants the ABC Act implemented by management. Last Monday on Media Watch, Besser dropped his previous sneering of Hanson.
Besser believes that One Nation’s evident increasing support has come despite shunning sections of the media. This is true in part. But other sections of the media have effectively “cancelled” Hanson in recent times.
Meanwhile, Hanson appears frequently on Sky News and One Nation has run a very effective social media campaign. Besser and the like should not be surprised that One Nation’s popularity increased markedly after the Bondi Beach massacre.
It will be interesting to see what case the ABC will put about its Middle East coverage when it and other outlets appear before the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion in the coming weeks.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

And it will be interesting to see if the Jewish lobby manages to hide the ethnic cleansing currently going down in Gaza and the West Bank:

And so to the bromancer.

The pond didn't mean to offend by putting him in second spot.

Rather, think of him as the glorious conclusion to the parade of reptiles, down there with an elephant attending a Texas GOP convention.

The header: Albanese government is using AUKUS to conceal shameful defence reality; Albanese and Marles dissemble and deceive over Australia’s military weakness. Labor’s security performance is pure spin mixed with moonshine.

The caption for a frankly appalling collage, the only upside being that it can't be blamed on AI: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Defence Minister Richard Marles, and other cabinet ministers, have not rid the broader Labor movement of its anti-nuclear superstitions. Artwork: Frank Ling.

The bromancer spent five minutes indulging in his usual emotional display of rage and impotence.

What was behind it this time?

Most likely the sinking realisation that AUKUS was turning into a compleat dud, and so his war with China by Xmas would have to be postponed for yet another year, especially as King Donald had shown all the skills of a wet lettuce in his war on Iran.
Britain’s Defence Secretary, John Healey, resigned because he couldn’t get his Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, to spend anything like what’s necessary for Britain’s defence. Healey, no show pony, showed his guest at the time, Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles, what an honourable man does in circumstances Healey and Marles both face.
If Marles were a serious figure, he’d secure a much bigger defence budget or resign to demonstrate the seriousness of our situation. Britain is a much bigger military power than Australia, with a much bigger defence budget. Healey was offered between £10bn ($19bn) and £13bn extra over the next four years, vastly more than the puny increase Canberra’s planning.

Cue a shot of the pair Defence Minister Richard Marles with British Defence Secretary John Healey. Picture: Getty Images

That led the bromancer in to his usual state of panic, paranoia and hysteria. Yes, he seems to fancy himself as a "serious person"...

Healey and Marles recently agreed at a joint press conference that the global strategic environment has become more dangerous in the past year. For years the Albanese government has described the strategic outlook as the worst since World War II. It’s now even worse than that, yet still we do almost nothing.
Healey wrote to Starmer: “You have been unable, and the Treasury has been unwilling, to commit the resources the nation needs to defend the country at this time of rising threats.”
The same is true, 10 times over, of Albanese and Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Unlike Healey, our politicians are not, essentially, serious people.
The Albanese government routinely refuses to disclose basic information or tell the truth about national security, especially what it’s doing in defence. This feeds Australia’s version of the disillusionment, cynicism and alienation people across Western societies increasingly feel towards mainstream politics.
The government apparently believes voters are now so fractured, and follow policy debates so little, that it can say almost anything and get away with it, so long as it repeats it often enough, loud enough, backs it with allied lobby groups and runs a good social media campaign. Sadly, sometimes that’s true. But reality has a way of ultimately seeping into public consciousness.
Those commentators who dismiss the significance of broken promises – a different category of deception, I acknowledge – have effectively lost faith in democracy. The Albanese government would have us believe it seriously intended to implement stage three tax cuts last term, then seriously intended not to change capital and property taxes this term, but was forced by circumstances to reverse itself before going to an election first. Who are they kidding?
The government routinely misleads on defence, but also does more than any government in our history to conceal basic facts. It also embodies contradictions it neither addresses nor resolves.

Contradictions? This from the bromancer, who routinely contains so many contradictions he sounds like Walt Whitman.

Who was all in on Japanese subs?

Buy your submarines from Japan, says US

Who once thought AUKUS was a flop?

This from a man who, way back when, knew it was a turkey ...

Bitter truth is we will likely never get any nuclear subs

And for those who read beyond that teaser trailer in the intermittent archive, they'll come across this dismissal of the Brits by the bromancer ...

...It is impossible to understand why the Brits are in the mix, apart from PR. If we choose the British Astute sub and don’t modify it, that means ditching the jewel of our defence technology, the US combat system that we have on the Collins, as well as most of the US weapons we use on the Collins. So the US, at the end of all this, would be getting billions of dollars less work from us and our navies would be less integrated.
Alternatively, there is talk of choosing the Astute but putting a US combat system, US weapons and even US propulsion system into it. Dear God in heaven, if we embrace the insanity of designing a new nuclear sub just for Australia, even 2060 will be optimistic for the first boat.
Or if we choose the Virginia, as we must, the Brits get nothing, yet Boris Johnson was assuring the British public that AUKUS meant hundreds and hundreds of well-paid jobs in Britain’s north. We made a mistake choosing the British Type 26 frigate, which still is not in service even in Britain and is two years behind schedule and counting. Just imagine a Brit submarine saga.
A cynical interpretation might be that the Liberals never explained, championed or campaigned for their own choice of the French sub. Choosing Marise Payne and then Linda Reynolds as defence ministers was grotesque, by Turnbull and Morrison respectively, as neither could carry the debate or the portfolio
So the government has solved only the problem that its own incompetent, lazy and inexplicable failure to champion its own defence programs brought about, but so far has substituted nothing concrete for it.
The result is likely no submarine capability for us at all, except museum piece Collins boats and whatever submarine visits the Americans or Brits send along. We should have kept the French subs going, perhaps at a reduced number of six or even three, then gone nuclear in an orderly way.

So it's impossibly quaint and impossible to understand why the British have returned in this bro outing, British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper and Richard Marles at Lancaster House for AUKMIN meetings. Picture: Jacquelin Magnay

The bromancer decided to get emotional, perhaps because he's scribbled about it over the years in a way that manages to make even completely incoherent government policies sound rational:

The AUKUS debate drives me mad at times because it comprehensively ensures we don’t debate our wretched defence unpreparedness over the coming two decades. As so often in Australia, the nation is obsessed with performative, ritualised symbols that have little bearing on reality in any time­frame we can actually affect.
We won’t have our fleet of eight nuclear-powered submarines until the 2050s, assuming by some astonishing miracle the ever-changing plan proceeds flawlessly. By then our worst nightmares with China will have been realised or disappeared. I suspect the government is delighted with this because it means, without increasing the actual defence budget, it can pretend it’s doing something while actually doing nothing.
It’s happy doing nothing because, underneath, it doesn’t want a serious defence capability. If push comes to shove the Americans will deal with China, or not, so this view goes, and if we have no real capability we’ll have no real responsibility. And we won’t have any capability to speak of for decades.
The government is riddled with contradictions. Albanese, Marles and other cabinet ministers have not rid the broader Labor movement of its anti-nuclear superstitions. The government validates those superstitions by maintaining its commitment to keeping nuclear energy illegal in Australia.
This means Labor can’t embrace AUKUS emotionally. So nuclear reactors under the ocean surface, manoeuvring at high speed, surrounded by weapons, seeking out combat, are perfectly safe, yet reactors stationary on dry land in the most geologically stable continent on Earth are a menace to life.

As for being geologically stable, given the pond a craton every day of the week ...

And why on earth would anyone want to embrace defence policies or defence strategies emotionally? 

Did Sir John Monash wander through the first world war in an emotional dither, plucking hankies out of pocket to hide his tears?

Famously ...

...He held the view that warfare was essentially a problem in engineering, of mobilizing resources, like the conduct of a large industrial undertaking; in 1918 the men in the line knew that all was right behind them. He eagerly made use of the most recent innovations. He took the view that an energetic offensive policy, 'feeding the troops on victory', was the short way to end the slaughter and misery. He was of the new scientific breed of generals, did not attempt to hob-nob with the troops and seek their popularity, and so was often criticized by the traditional 'inspirational' school of thought. (ADB)

Better to serve under Monash than an emotional Sheridan.

But the pond digresses.

Shouldn't matters of defence be dealt with in a calm, logical, rational and rigorous way, while recognising that there are always black swans on the horizon coming to upset the applecart, especially for generals wanting to fight the next war like the last one. Or bromancers inclined to emotion and madness ...

The pond should forgive the bromancer, he's always been emotionally unstable, always willing to hurl a petulant "that's nuts" at anyone or anything he finds disagreeable, and of course he's going to be driven mad ...

Defence Minister Richard Marles has played down concerns from Labor MPs over AUKUS, declaring the government remains “unambiguously supportive” of the landmark defence pact with the US and UK. Speaking at The Australian’s 2026 Defending Australia summit, Mr Marles said Australia had always preferred to receive in-service Virginia-class submarines rather than newly built boats, arguing the revised plan would simplify the transition, reduce costs and deliver a “really good outcome” for the nation’s military capability.

Instead of going his beloved "it's nuts", this time the bromancer's hysteria led to "bonkers".

Almost everything the government says about defence is misleading, preposterous or bonkers. Marles says that as an island nation dependent on trade of course Australia will have cutting-edge submarine capability. How come that’s urgent in the 2050s but not urgent today? No one could claim we have any naval cutting-edge capability now. The public ultim­ately registers the bulldust.

As a seller of prime BS, the bromancer knows a lot about bulldust, and perhaps recognising that he'd gone too far, he decided to throw in a billy goat butt ...

Don’t get me wrong. I’m in favour of AUKUS in principle, and nuclear subs. 

But that "butt" was just a nonsense. He's not, really he's not ..."in principle" is just another classic bromancer fudge.

In principle he's as despondent as ever ...

The program as constructed has little chance of delivering its promise but, more important, it’s being used to avoid taking serious decisions now. Nuclear subs, even distant, pretend ones, cost a lot of money. You must fund both a conventional force and nuclear subs simultaneously. Pretending to do both, the government does neither.
Marles often claims he’s making record defence expenditure increases. This is moonshine. Despite our per capita living standard declining, population increase means GDP rises in dollar terms each year. Also, we’ve had sustained bouts of inflation. That means virtually every government activity is spending record amounts of dollars. It’s an utterly meaningless boast. As a percentage of national effort, the Marles boast is, even more transparently, pure baloney. In this coming financial year, 2026-27, the defence budget will decline, absolutely, in dollar terms and as a percentage of GDP. In 2026-27 the government will spend 2.02 per cent of GDP on defence, almost exactly the same as the level it inherited more than four years ago.
Last year the government breathlessly announced that, if measured by NATO standards, Australia actually already spends 2.8 per cent of GDP on defence. But in a telling sign of the government’s abiding arrogance, its absolute disinclination to allow debate or furnish even the most basic information, it didn’t tell us what this 2.8 per cent consisted of. There’s nothing classified in that information. Refusing to release it revealed Marles as an inferior Joh Bjelke-Petersen of a defence minister – “Don’t you worry about that!”

It's usual for reptiles to slip in a snap of something tantalising in these stories, and here it comes ...The Virginia-class fast-attack submarine USS Vermont (SSN 792) arrives at HMAS Stirling in Western Australia for a scheduled Submarine Maintenance Period (SMP). Picture: Department of Defence

Sob, and all we got is a snap ...

And so to a final unhappy gobbet ...

What actually made up the 2.8 per cent came to light only because of sustained Freedom of Information requests by my colleague, Ben Packham. What kind of government keeps such basic information secret? What possible justification is there for it? It turned out, of course, that to get to the ropy 2.8 per cent figure, the government included numerous expenditures NATO nations don’t normally include.
Marles claims he’s got $14bn extra for defence over the next four years. Again, a misleading claim. It turns out only $6bn is new government money. The rest is a heroic assumption about “novel finance” methods, basically private money, and even more heroic estimates of the proceeds of selling Defence property. It’s worse even than that. Defence also has to make various economies. The real extra money is vanishingly small.
The government is doing everything it can to conceal information. At Senate defence estimates, the opposition’s James Paterson asked the Vice Chief of the Defence Force, Air Marshal Robert Chipman, what were the 22 defence programs the government had said would be cut, delayed or reprioritised over the forward estimates. Chipman, a good man forced to look stupid by government diktat, claimed he didn’t know.
The government is working hard to prevent Senate estimates undertaking meaningful scrutiny of the defence budget. This is an affront to democracy. When a government announces it has cut or changed $5bn worth of 22 programs but won’t say what they are, it treats voters with contempt.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute in its book-length analysis of the defence budget concludes it goes nowhere near meeting even the (extremely) modest ambitions in the government’s own National Defence Strategy.
Given this stark, unyielding reality, I think the government’s happy to have the nation’s attention misdirected, debating nuclear subs in the 2050s. The dereliction and dishonesty in our national security policy are ruinous. And shameful.

Might not it be better to declare AUKUS a dead turkey? 

Cut losses and run? Explore the sort of technologies currently making life difficult for Vlad the Sociopath?

Sadly the Murdochians wouldn't wear it and would kick up an unholy fuss, and so this dead carcass will litter the lizard Oz for years to come, its only benefit and use being that the bromancer can get a goodly amount of column inches out of it.

It would be so much easier if we just enjoyed these assorted follies as a kind of entertainment ... especially as it's been a long time between drinks at the pond for the two Toms ...

Now about that astonishingly rich loon ready to head off to Mars (how soon can it happen?)

In which "Ned" and the Ughmann show how to bore the socks off the weekend ...

Anyone doubting that the Murdochians are more than One Nation curious, and are in fact swinging behind the party that supports the reptile agenda, should take a refresher course with the venerable Meade's outing yesterday ... As One Nation seeks donations to ‘fire the liar’, News Corp gives it front-page billing.

...Full-page coverage of the fundraising continued throughout the week, with headlines including: “Orange flood of cash as Pauline’s People rise up.”
The prime minister had the same reaction to the tabloid’s front page as we did, saying on Thursday that One Nation “had an ad for their fundraising campaign, effectively, free ad in one of the mainstream publications”.

That might have been in the Daily Terror, with the terrorists notorious for their wayward far right ways, but take a squiz at the celebratory tone in the lizard Oz, top of the world ma, splash this weekend ...

That header is meaningless nonsense. 

We're still in Canberra, and the entire point is that it's politics as usual, what with Hanson having been at the politics game since she first became an MP for Oxley way back in 1996.

What it does do is show how determined the reptiles are to celebrate the way that the Hansonists are on a triumphal march ... because what other party embraces the reptile agenda in such a comprehensive, devoted way?

Of course it's also an alarmist, hysterical troll, with nattering "Ned" sent in to numb the senses with an interminable ten minute bout of blather ...

The header: A nation divided as Hanson splits the right, harries the left; Anthony Albanese and Angus Taylor are scrambling to halt One Nation’s rise. It’s the relics versus the unconventional.

And sorry, the reptiles didn't provide a caption or a credit for that evocative piece of artwork, which featured Pauline clutching what might have been a pizza while "Ned" hit the highway to lightning central, so AI should probably take the blame.

It means about as much as "Ned's" seemingly endless tosh.

"Ned" spends his time posing as a non-Hansonite, but at the same time he spends a bigly amount of time dressing up the perils that Pauline poses...

Even that phrasing, that talk of "relics", is remarkable for a full-blown, card-carrying relic who seems to think he might have some understanding of the "unconventional"...
‘It’s the economy, stupid, it’s always the economy,” Anthony Albanese declared this week when One Nation sailed past Labor in the polls. But who is stupid? The voters defecting to One Nation or the Albanese government whose unconvincing economic policies have facilitated the flight?
The Albanese government and Australia have entered a new zone where a once marginal and renegade party under Pauline Hanson now heads both Labor and the Coalition as the most popular party.
Explaining the rot, Albanese said: “Many people feel the system isn’t working for them. They’re working hard, struggling to save, can’t get their own roof over their head.” Reverting to a diagnosis he has used since the 2022 election, Albanese said people felt “they’re working for the economy, not the economy working for them”.
This leads to his main pitch, virtually the essence of his leadership: that his job as Prime Minister is to improve the lot of people, to make life better. It’s mundane, nothing heroic, nothing inspiring, just getting the job done. But are his policies working?
Same message, same agenda
This is a conventional pitch. But it comes in an unconventional time. In his fifth year as Prime Minister, Albanese, while championing his reform budget, essentially has the same message selling the same agenda. Sitting on a massive 94 parliamentary seats, Albanese isn’t panicking about Hanson, who has two seats, but presents himself as the only centrist leader still left, calling Labor “the only mainstream party” in Australia. “I’m convinced that we will continue to be successful,” he told the ABC. The message: stick with Mr Reliable and Mr Conventional.

At this point, "Ned" decided to prove his relic status, by turning to a narcissist of the first water ... celebrated by John Crace a little time ago ...

...Politics is about power. And since I left No 10, the UK has become a second-class global power. So we need to stick close to the US. We need to be partners, not in opposition. Donald Trump is a great guy when you get to know him. Probably the best president since George W Bush. Someone who will be fully worthy of his Nobel peace prize. Just as I treasure the replica one I awarded myself. No one has done more to stop the wars he started.

Have I mentioned that I am the only Labour prime minister to have won a full second term? Not that I am in any way needy.

I am deeply honoured to be a member of Trump’s Board of Peace along with many others from the world’s most eminent list. Keir made a huge mistake by not joining the US in bombing Iran, because it can never be wrong not to go to war along with the US. Can it? There were weapons of mass destruction. I’m sure of it. There has to have been, we just haven’t found them yet.

And so on, and it's always fun to discover someone else who harbours even greater contempt for Tony Bleagh than the pond does... but not "Ned", not on your nelly ...

Listen, however, to Tony Blair in his recent manifesto to the beleaguered Keir Starmer government in Britain, delivering a big message: the conventional doesn’t work any more: “The people don’t want politics as usual. The real reason behind the rise of the leaders from Donald Trump to Giorgia Meloni to Javier Milei is that they answered this call. You can like them or dislike them, but their chief characteristic is they appear to be unbound, not constrained by conventional thinking.”
People in Western democracies these days think “anything is better than the agonising irritation of incremental change that never seems to deliver real change”.
Blair said the unconventional leaders “appear to have the ballast many conventional politicians lack – they have an attitude, a tribe and a project. They’re prepared to raise the middle finger to the part of the media which opposes them. And for protection they build a tribe – a core of support which will follow them, sometimes almost blindly.”

At this point the reptiles flung in a snap of the relic Bleagh...Former British prime minister Tony Blair. Picture: Getty Images

The pond much prefers this version ...

Now that captures the sinister malevolence... and now back to relic "Ned", managing to mangle Bleagh and Starmer, as if somehow all that fits down under ...

Unconventional versus relics
It’s easy to translate this diagnosis to Australia. Albanese and Angus Taylor are conventional leaders while Hanson is unconventional. This is the vital difference. The unconventional leader assails the status quo as discredited and attacks the conventional leaders tied to a conventional system. Albanese and Taylor are depicted as relics to be cast aside.
Blair says the unconventional leader must have a project – this vests them with “strength and purpose”. Hanson’s project is not defined. But its essence, grasped by many people, lies in the pledge: I’ll give you back the country you love that is being stolen from you.
That’s powerful. It resonates and it’s inclusive because most people will focus on something they think their country and their life is losing. What is Albanese’s project? He calls it improving the lives of Australians – it’s what prime ministers mostly say. But it doesn’t resonate much these days.
What is Taylor’s project? It has many dimensions: making life affordable, cheap and abundant energy, restoring aspiration, lower taxes, rejecting net zero and an immigration intake that puts Australians first. Yet these messages haven’t cut through; the Taylor project still awaits ultimate definition.
Blair says Starmer’s mistake before his victory was refusing to clarify Labour’s identity: was it New Labour, Old Labour, Blue Labour? The upshot is his government drifted and defaulted into the “party’s comfort zone”. It looks old-fashioned and leftist, unable to renew Britain. Blair warns that in these unconventional times the party that wins the next British election will run on a radical agenda.

Bleagh is the answer to it all? 

Then we're doomed, as the reptiles resorted to a reminder that the graphics department wasn't entirely dead, and that Emilia could stick it to AI ... As the One Nation wave gathers force, Anthony Albanese, left, and Jim Chalmers risk being seen as political relics. Artwork: Emilia Tortorella

Classic, Emilia, you could take that to the bank.

Now note how "Ned" manages to gloss over Pauline's flaws, and those of womanising drunk Barners, Tamworth's eternal shame, and the absence of useful policies, to portray the Hansonists as big winners, and even biglier dangers...

Boldness is the order of the day in Western politics – the culture of the unconventional translates into radical policy prescriptions. The people who criticise Taylor for moving right are clueless, totally uncomprehending what is happening to our politics.
Hanson’s rise constitutes a historic challenge to contemporary Labor’s successful electoral model – its three-way synthesis of tertiary educated, progressive-oriented, high-income earners; female and young voters; and traditional lower-income ALP voters with a class consciousness.
As Labor’s primary vote sinks to 30 per cent the critical question becomes: can Albanese hold this voting alliance together for the 2028 election? He probably can, but it is eroding and Hanson will erode it further. So expect more class consciousness messages from Albanese and Jim Chalmers.
Give Albanese his due. He decided six months before the budget that status quo politics in Australia wasn’t working. He saw that events were moving fast, that his government had to embrace new policies to keep setting the agenda for 2028. Hence the budget’s initiatives restricting future negative gearing to new builds, imposing an inflation indexation system for capital gains tax along with a 30 per cent minimum rate on assets and trusts, jus­tified by economic theory and equity.
The big danger for PM
Albanese presents himself as a reformer for the times, taking the tough decisions and recruiting intergenerational equity as his sell. “Hard decisions cannot be put on hold for easier times,” he says. “The challenges confronting Australia are too urgent to hang back.”
But the danger is obvious: that Albanese called the politics right but has got the economics wrong. Can his government deliver the economic gains for people to keep the One Nation wolf from the door?
It isn’t going well. The tax changes – a point of Labor conviction – are attacked as anti-aspirational, anti-investment and anti-entrepreneurial, enabling critics to brand Labor not as a government of renewal but as a redistributional, high tax, high spending, deficit obsessed, workplace regulation, weak productivity government presiding over weak economic growth.
At this point Albanese’s economic and social vision comes together. He wants to fight One Nation on “the economy, stupid” but the risk is that Labor’s grand economic vision is misconceived, that it looks a study in old-fashioned Labor convention, an ideology from the past, not a Hawke-Keating growth agenda but a return to big government and state intervention.
Polls show Hanson is the big winner from an unpopular budget. She will exploit every economic grievance for the next two years. And if the economy enters a further economic growth and living standards slump this will only prolong Hanson’s momentum.
How much of Blair’s critique of Starmer applies to Australia? He says Starmer won office not by election acclaim but as the “default option” to a discredited conservative government. He says British Labour came to office without any proper plan to address how the world was being transformed. He says Starmer is governing “from an essentially traditional Labour ‘soft left’ position” that gravely mis­judges the times.

Still harping on Bleagh, still implying that Pauline is Nige down under? No wonder the reptiles felt the need for an audio break ...

Does relic "Ned" have the first clue how his framing, how his ponderous, pompous discourse elevates Pauline?

Probably not. In the manner of Tony Bleagh, these relics aren't inclined to self-examination ...

Albanese and Chalmers may yet be vindicated with their budget and economic policies – and Albanese is a far superior political leader to Starmer – yet the economic omens aren’t looking too good at present.
While One Nation’s rise reflects mainly on the failures of the Coalition, Albanese cannot escape any responsibility. The Hanson eruption occurred on his watch, under his government and his government’s economic policies. The risk Labor faces with its current rhetoric – there’s plenty of good economic news from low unemployment, stronger living standards than in most OECD nations, the success of renewables driving 43 per cent of our electricity and tax reform to address the housing crisis – is that such assurances are not heard or only anger potential One Nation voters.
Have no doubt, the culture is changing. Policy debates seem less important. Our society is split into competing bubbles, separate tribes though sometimes overlapping, each morally convinced about its version of truth, possessing its own view of the world – the Hanson tribe, the progressive tribe, the conservative tribe, the climate change tribe, the disenfranchised tribe, then feeding into chaotic voting patterns. The broad-based, widely shared Australian culture is eroding – and that’s the opening for a substantial campaign from the right.
Fed up voters
The torment of our age is obvious: people want change, they’re fed up, they want relief and improvement, but there’s no consensus, no agreement, no shared understanding of what sort of change. The gulf between voters in the up-market urban teal seats and voters in regional Australia has never been greater. Growing tribalism means a fractured community but a community that cannot resolve its way forward. This is Australia’s dilemma.
Albanese’s approach to One Nation is to avoid personal criticism of Hanson, avoid criticism of One Nation voters but hammer the idea that Hanson’s policies don’t help the battlers, that she is tied to Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart, and that his opposition now comprises “three right-wing parties” increasingly bound together and fatally compromised by Hanson.
But Albanese and Taylor are jointly handicapped by the personalisation of our politics. The more politics is shaped by culture, the deeper are the divisions and the more difficult to find common ground. The rise of social media reinforces the cultural fracture.
People these days are expected to speak their minds. The old days of personal restraint and self-discipline as a virtue are fading. Politics is being driven more by emotion and sentiment, it’s about how you feel, what you like and what you don’t like, what makes you angry and how the political class has let you down. Venting your views often makes the individual feel good, gives them standing and is often seen as justified morality.

Say what? Isn't that exactly what Faux Noise has done, and the News Corp tabloids down under do, and so do the reptiles at the lizard Oz?

Isn't the entire point of the reptiles to make readers angry and generate a venting rage machine?

Now pause for another pumping up of the Pauline volume ...Having turned up the heat on the Coalition, Pauline Hanson is now taking the blowtorch to the Albanese government. Picture: Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman.

Must they keep reminding the pond of her uncanny resemblance to Martin Luther?

Uncanny. 

Thank you Ughmann, the pond will treasure that comparison for all eternity ...

And now, exhausted by "Ned", a final humungous gobbet ...

The Hanson voters are invariably presented in terms of what they oppose. But what does Hanson really represent? That seems mired in confusion. Does One Nation actually aspire to form a government under Hanson, a remote possibility for a political movement with a set of disconnected policy positions that in no way constitutes a viable governing agenda?
The more likely meaning of One Nation is obvious from the polls – it wages a revolutionary culture war within the right, its real purpose being to expose and replace the Coalition parties that it dismisses as historic failures. The polls document this reality, the latest Newspoll showing One Nation on 31 per cent and the Coalition on 18 per cent. The internal voting transfer within the right is massive. Unless the Liberals can reverse this trend and claw back voters, One Nation will become the official opposition at the 2028 election.
In this sense, the eruption of Hanson’s party remains a winning ace for Albanese.
Last week Hanson turned her blowtorch on the Albanese government, anxious to deflect the truth about her spectacular explosion – that One Nation will damage the Coalition far more than it will damage Labor. The creation of division and chaos on the centre-right becomes a permanent gift to the Albanese government. Indeed, Albanese pointed out that despite One Nation leading the field, Labor would still win an election on these polling numbers.
The tragedy of the right is apparent from Newspoll. The total right vote (One Nation plus Coalition) is 49 per cent while the total left vote (Labor and Greens) is 41 per cent. In theory that means the right can win. In practice it means the opposite since the right is locked into two wars – trying to defeat Labor and an internal survival war over which party will dominate the centre-right of politics. Remember: “Disunity is death.”
Pains big call
This situation creates panic among Coalition MPs; witness the statement this week from frontbencher and South Australian Tony Pasin, who broke ranks to say the Liberals should sit down with Hanson to negotiate the seats in which Liberals and One Nation should run so they didn’t compete against each other. This was a declaration of Liberal surrender: giving up its claim on seats to Hanson’s party.
An exasperated Taylor dismissed it: “We’re not going to be doing that.” Frontbencher James Paterson was equally emphatic. If such defeatism penetrates the Liberals, their future as a governing party is finished. Albanese didn’t miss, saying the Liberals were becoming “a fringe party”.
Yet many deluded commentators on the right are filled with “surrender” plans, usually taking the form of the Coalition and One Nation working together. It’s truly weird: asking to Liberals to co-operate with the party that openly seeks the destruction of their entire purpose over the past 80 years and ambition to govern the country.
Paterson also warned that talk of preference deals was premature. Who on earth would be the One Nation candidates? However, recent comments by the new federal president of the Liberals, Tony Abbott, about preferences have raised concerns; namely, that Abbott is learning too far towards an accommodation with One Nation. This is treacherous political terrain.
The conundrum on the centre right is whether policy matters anymore. Consider Taylor: he has supported the radical reform of tax indexation, denounces Labor’s higher taxes on assets, promises lower immigration by tying the intake to built houses, opposes net zero, supports more fossil fuels and will end tax breaks for electric vehicles, rejects Labor’s big government, pledges to reserve future welfare for Australian citizens, will savagely cut the National Construction Code, abolish the safeguard mechanism, reform migra­tion to fit Australian values and lift defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP. None of this so far has made the slightest difference to One Nation’s momentum.
Taylor cannot be cast as a sellout or running a Labor-lite agenda. Those days are over. The policy differences between Albanese and Taylor are immense and growing. The battlelines over a conviction-based Labor-Coalition policy contest reflecting radically different visions of Australia are now being drawn. Nobody following politics could doubt this.
What is the problem? Maybe it’s Taylor’s lack of media cut-through and weak electoral impact. Are One Nation voters aware of such Liberal policies or do they even care? Perhaps they don’t. Maybe the cultural Zeitgeist has prevailed over policy assessment in today’s world. Maybe Blair was right saying the conventional political leader gets no traction in our longing for the unconventional leader. If so, Western democracies are heading into big trouble.

What's the problem with the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way?

He's a dropkick, and now he has the onion muncher roaming around, determined to make sure that he's the biggest relic on the block ...

Meanwhile, Snappy Tom was also present pumping up the joys of rage ...

Fed-up Aussies are embracing the joy of rage
Voters feeling held back or left behind swing to populists
Politicians are copping it right now, but big business shouldn’t be let off the hook — corporate Australia has been missing in action, too.
By Tom Dusevic
Columnist

Given that the intermittent archive is currently working, the pond thought that a teaser trailer would suffice ...

They really won't stop until they lodge Pauline in the Lodge ...

Some reptiles apparently aren't aware of the ways that they're pumping up the volume, but it seems the ones held back and left behind are swinging to populists, hence snappy Tom's rousing closing line ...

...consenting adults will swing with the joy of rage.

And the reptiles know all about the joy of rage, what with it having been their business model for decades.

Speaking of consenting adults, the pond then went looking for a closing contribution, but the ongoing transphobia jihad ruled out several contenders ...

Court redefines what ‘woman’ means
In the highly contentious Giggle vs Tickle case, it is regrettable that judges adopted the terms used by one side.
By Catherine Carew

The always boiling Rice joined in with an EXCLUSIVE ...

EXCLUSIVE
Court ‘overreach’ in ruling on ‘a woman’
‘Extraordinary overreach’: Former judge slams gender ruling as case set for High Court
Sall Grover was punished for saying a man cannot become a woman. Now she’s appealing to the High Court — and a top former judge says she might just win.
By Stephen Rice

And Dame Slap, being a standard MAGA-cap-donning ravager of the law, decided to expand on failing judges with a piece proposing a pox on the lot of them:

Commentary by Janet Albrechtsen
‘Ashamed’: lifting the veil on the conduct of our judges
Federal Court judge Ian Jackman just lifted the veil on the conduct of judges
We are all too familiar with Australian judges falling for the cheap smell of their own self-importance. This week, we got a glimpse at something far darker.

But where was a reptile truly out there, like the Ughmann last week comparing Pauline to Martin Luther?

Where was the Ughmann?

Sadly the reptiles had allowed him to slip out a day earlier, and all he offered was a standard bit of renewables bashing, not nearly up to his eccentric seminarian-wrecked standards, but wotthehell wotthehell, Archy, i m toujours gai toujours gai, i know that i am bound for a journey down the sound with the bromancer and prattling Polonius tomorrow, so the Ughmann will have to do ...

The header: Australia’s renewables push creates a new China dependency and fails to cut costs; Labor promised cuts to power bills but Chris Bowen’s latest slogan masks the same broken pledge.

The caption for the two villains designed to ruin a reptile day: COP 31 President-Designate Murat Kurum of Türkiye, greets COP 31 President-Designate of Negotiations Chris Bowen in Bonn, Germany. Picture: X

A new China dependency? As opposed to the old China dependency that made Gina great again?

The Ughmann spent a bigly six minutes denouncing renewables and celebrating ongoing hydrocarbon sovereignty - where would the hive mind be without sweet, virginal, dinkum, decent clean Oz coal? - but it was standard reptile jihad fare, entirely lacking the flair of his last outing.

Perhaps he should have compared devotion to renewables to the Spanish Jesuits devotion to the Inquisition?

On with the torture ...

A new term has entered the political lexicon: sovereign renewables.
It may not have been manufactured in the slogan factory that is the office of Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen but he is its chief salesman.
“We’ve got the best sun and wind in the world, and we’re using sovereign renewables to shield our grid from global energy volatility and bring down your energy bills,” the minister said in a statement in early June.
At the time of writing, Bowen was in the German city of Bonn, filling his role as president of negotiations in the run-up to this year’s global climate jamboree. For those who came in late, this job is a recent innovation. It was given to Australia as a consolation prize for the tragedy of missing out on hosting the event to Turkey.
Bowen has confirmed this role will cost taxpayers $50m and likes to make spurious comparisons to massive international events Australia actually hosted to pitch it as a bargain. Only someone marinated in the culture of waste that is Canberra could find this argument compelling.
For the benefit of delegates in Bonn, Bowen deployed his rhetorical gifts to create a verbal tableau of how renewables deliver electricity sovereignty.
“Solar energy must travel 150 million kilometres from the sun to the Earth, but it does not have to travel the 150km through the Strait of Hormuz,” he said. “The wind cannot be sanctioned.”
The observant will have already noted that the rotation of the Earth interrupts sunshine every single night. Doldrums still the wind. You could cover the continent in solar panels, and several trillion of them harvesting zero sunshine at midnight still would add up to zero power.
And wind and sunlight do not gather themselves into electricity. That requires solar panels, wind turbines, inverters, batteries, transformers and synchronous condensers. Calling that sovereign energy is akin to declaring a Chinese warship Australian because it is bobbing around off our coast.

You see? He's clearly struggling. When the seminary doesn't give him the right sort of Martin Luther metaphor, he's forced into blather about Chinese warships.

It was past time already for a visual interruption, and in these outings, it's always the job of the graphics department to come up with an outlandish shot of renewables at work, designed to terrify the hive mind. Come on down A partial view of a molten salt tower solar thermal power station in China, where spending on green energy has soared. Picture: Getty

It was so terrifying that the pond thought it should be shown in a bigly way ...

Meanwhile, the Ughmann was getting worried by the way that China had stolen a march on the world, and especially on that prize maroon, King Donald ...

China’s grip on solar power
We are all now familiar with the numbers that describe the choke point that is the Strait of Hormuz. Roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil and gas trade is locked behind that narrow passage. But that pales beside the lock Beijing has on the machinery that turns the weather into sometimes-there electricity.
China controls more than 80 per cent of every stage of solar panel manufacturing, from polysilicon to wafers, cells and modules. It also dominates battery manufacturing, rare earth processing and critical minerals refining.
Beijing also dominates the global wind industry, with its manufacturers accounting for around three-quarters of new turbine installations worldwide. But the real choke point is the specialised magnets buried inside the generators. China manufactures around 90 per cent of the world’s rare-earth magnets, giving it an extraordinary degree of control over one of the most critical components in the renewable energy supply chain.
So how sovereign is a system whose construction depends almost entirely on factories controlled by a strategic rival? What might a regional war do to this supply chain? And when all this kit is assembled here, how sovereign do you think it will be when its brains are coded offshore and can be updated at will, with the now not entirely academic possibility of an effective off switch in Beijing?
Where are the electric planes, Minister?

Poor Ughmann. He probably thought that was a killer question.

Why didn't he ask where the methane is Minister? Don't worry, it's here ...

Beyond that, Bowen’s recent role as diesel diplomat has clearly not sharpened his world view into the central role liquid fuel plays in driving our economy. Despite the hype about electrifying everything, we are a short way down a very long road. Electric vehicle numbers will rise, but even if every new car sold from today were electric it would take more than a decade for the national fleet to turn over.
Then you have to work out how to electrify heavy transport, agriculture, aviation and mining. Norway is often offered as an example of success. Two points. You can fit two Norways in NSW and diesel trucks still make up well over 90 per cent of that country’s heavy vehicle fleet. Where are the electric intercontinental passenger planes?
Hard to abate means what it says on the tin. If it were easy, someone would have done it.
Then there are the more than 6000 products that flow from a barrel of oil, from plastics to the petrochemicals that are the base for most of our medicines.
There is no energy sovereignty without hydrocarbon sovereignty.
Bowen also believes that endlessly chanting the claim that wind and solar generation delivers cheap electricity will make it true. If it were, the federal government would not have needed to spend billions of taxpayer dollars on energy bill relief to hide the bill shock.
Unpicking Labor’s broken power bill promise
Since Labor promised to deliver a $275-a-year cut to power bills relative to December 2021 prices, costs have marched ever upward. Every time a model hints at a future cut to electricity prices, Bowen claims it as vindication, despite the growing chasm between what he pledged and what actually happened.
Let’s underscore this point. Models do not pay electricity bills. Australians do. And consumers do not pay the wholesale cost of power; they pay the total system cost. We are conducting a real-world, real-time experiment on the eastern electricity grid and the only metric that counts is the retail power bill.
This is not a debate about forecasts. It is an audit of outcomes against Labor’s promise. So far, the verdict is clear: it is an abject failure.
Bowen’s latest victory dance had a tiny bit more substance than usual as it came after the Australian Energy Regulator handed down a determination that will result in the safety-net price of electricity falling in some jurisdictions in July.

Actually it's the solar panels on the pond's new digs that helps pay the electricity bills, and how the pond is enjoying that novelty.

Meanwhile, the reptiles resorted to an old gripe ... Former Snowy Hydro CEO Paul Broad claims Energy Minister Chris Bowen wanted to blame the project’s massive cost and timeline blowouts on the Morrison government. “When the [Albanese] government came in, and Chris Bowen became the Energy Minister, he was hellbent on knocking me over and rewriting history,” Mr Broad told Sky News Australia. “He wanted me to go out and bag [Morrison-era energy minister] Angus [Taylor] and make all the problems his.”

Um ...

And with that it was time to wrap up the Ughmann ...

It should be noted that the same regulator now has warned twice that a wall of capital expenditure is coming at consumers in the form of higher transmission and distribution charges, which could swamp any falls in wholesale costs and be baked into bills for years. And a close reading of the latest default market offer seems to be bearing that out.
The biggest price cut was in coal-heavy Queensland while the retail price for some residential customers rose in South Australia, the most wind and solar-dependent jurisdiction in the land. That was driven by rising system security costs. Unfortunately, when you dismantle old coal-fired plants, you also remove the essential frequency-control services they delivered as a by-product of the big spinning machines at the heart of their steam-driven generators.
Elsewhere, the ACT’s independent regulator approved a hike in power bills because a fall in wholesale electricity costs was trumped by rising network costs and the expense of the territory’s green policies.
Power retailers absorbing the risk
It also seems clear that retailers are being forced to absorb more risk by the regulator. AGL has objected to its wholesale price calculations, arguing that retailer exposure under a fixed price cap is asymmetric: losses during price spikes are immediate and unrecoverable, while gains in lower-price periods are competed away. It warns of the possibility of retailers going broke.
Origin has attacked the regulator’s treatment of network charges, arguing it is not supported by any logical, analytical or legal basis and risks undermining the credibility of the default market offer process.
Victoria has its own regulator and it also has lowered the safety-net price of electricity. But the default prices there and in the federally regulated states apply to only about one in seven or eight customers. It will be intriguing to see what happens to the cost of electricity when the other 90 per cent get their market offers.
And one swallow does not make a spring; the trajectory of electricity prices is up.
Is it too much to ask the evangelists of the so-called energy transition that they be honest about the costs, trade-offs and risks? That includes not just the politicians but the vast ecosystem of bureaucrats, subsidy hunters, billionaire energy hobbyists, activists and carpetbaggers who swarm around this debate. People can read the results in their power bills, and the blizzard of shopworn slogans about cheap wind and solar is just another reason there is a revolt against politics as usual.
We need real energy sovereignty, not bumper sticker slogans.

Feeble stuff, more bumper sticker rant than insight, a rote parade of standard reptile renewables coverage, what with their lust to see climate change wreak havoc on the planet.

After all that, the pond wondered if it had missed something, and then it dawned on the pond that certain matters had gone AWOL.

Amazingly early on the Saturday, the reptiles didn't find any top of the page space for news of King Donald, Iran, the latest talk of peace, and the whole damn thing.

The pond hadn't expected nipplegate to reach their august pages, but surely they should have been down with the war, or at least the latest in US cultural events?

Must the pond always rely on the cartoonists?