In which Karl goes, the beefy boofhead is confused, Ted refuses to take on Malware, and the ARC of history is sublimely Jordan-silly ...

 

Again the pond woke to news of unprecedented temperatures in Europe and again it magically disappeared from the climate science-denying world of the lizard Oz hive mind.

Again the pond woke to depressing news about Gaza (which can also be found on YouTube here), and again there wasn't a peep from the Australian Daily Zionist News.

Instead there was more of the same...

Stories about how Jews are killed won’t stop antisemitism
We need a rethink of Holocaust education. Teaching about Jewish identity and culture is essential to fighting antisemitism.
By Julian Leeser

The pond would have to rate today's lizard Oz digital front page tediously familiar and boring, apart from one bright spot ...

Karl Stefanovic dumped by Nine over explosive podcast interview
The network’s top executives have decided to cut ties with their high-profile star, after his Tommy Robinson interview was pulled and Pauline Hanson leapt to his defence.
By Steve Jackson

Having long ago determined that he was a dickhead, the pond had in the past needed to expend small amounts of energy avoiding him, but now won't have to bother.

The reptiles kept on doing their own version of Karl, with more celebrations of Pauline, along the way dumping on both the pastie Hastie and the windmill-hating beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way.

EXCLUSIVE
‘Declaration of war’: Roberts-Smith case triggers Coalition rift
Ben Roberts-Smith case triggers Coalition rift as MP parades Andrew Hastie critic
Defence personnel spokesman Phillip Thompson has paraded a prominent critic of Liberal colleague Andrew Hastie around parliament.
By Ben Packham

EXCLUSIVE
Libs question Taylor’s leadership after multiculturalism fumble
Growing number of Liberal MPs believe Angus Taylor will be on borrowed time if he can’t turn the party’s fortunes around
By Rosie Lewis and Greg Brown

Already? That drivel, that meaningless blather about "monoculture", means we have to get out the lettuce again, and see if it can stay a winner?

Possibly ... the lettuce might be able to handle the beached whale own goal scorer lovingly portrayedby the infallible Pope ...

Meanwhile, the reptiles were doing their best to lather up fear, high anxiety, and paranoia in the hive mind, with wild-eyed tales of Iranian assassins rampant, and terror stalking the continent (island if you insist).

There was an echo of this over on the extreme far right with Geoff chambering another round...

ASIO chief Mike Burgess leaves the shadows to make a salient post-Bondi massacre warning
An expectation that people applying for visas should adhere to the Australian principle of a ‘fair go for all’ is common sense and a welcome intervention.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

Somehow the cockies in the mighty 'Gong managed to stay calm.

It was with relief that the pond abandoned all that to watch as Ted ravaged Snowy 2.0, a proud Malware and Liberal party initiative, begun back in the heady days of 2017.

Take it away Ted ...but keep it short, say no longer than a 3 minute read according to reptile timings ...

The header: How Snowy 2.0’s latest audit confirms its shambolic progress; As a nation, we should be prioritising cost-effective projects that advance renewable energy, not a shambolic $40bn-plus battery.

The splendidly effusive and informative caption for the snap: Snowy Hydro 2.0 project.

The pond wondered if Ted might pause to mention that Malware (and his Liberal colleagues) was the proud auteur of the project, the man who devised the mise-en-scène, and was disappointed to discover that Malware had vanished, in much the same way as a European heat wave can be made to vanish.

The pond was forced to do a word search and check, but Malware didn't even have the presence of a lingering Cheshire cat smile...though less than a year ago, he could be discovered in the AFR, proudly defiant, still remarkably pleased by the cinematic triumph he'd produced.

Okay, take it away Ted ...

Has there ever been a more shambolic infrastructure project than the Snowy 2.0 pumped-hydro battery? That was reconfirmed last week in a damning performance audit by the federal Auditor-General that found “significant deficiencies in project governance arrangements have impacted value for money”.
The 11-month investigation concluded that Snowy Hydro’s project management had been only “partly effective”. Even that seems generous: there are few findings of appropriate, let alone good, management. Indisputably, the project has been ineffectively managed since its launch nine years ago.
The audit’s 98 pages are replete with management deficiencies. To quote just a few: “not effectively holding the contractors to account; not having access to quality data that would allow appropriate monitoring of the project; no agreed baseline schedule; the incentive framework (for the new contract) not working as intended; a reliable cost forecasting system is still not developed; risk management arrangements are still being established”.
Snowy Hydro agreed with four of the audit’s five recommendations, covering project management, performance measures, risk management and contractor payments – all basic governance practices that should have been embedded from the outset.

The reptiles trotted out the latest villain, Snowy Hydro chief executive Dennis Barnes concedes the Snowy 2.0 project may miss its 2028 deadline.

But the pond felt the need to walk the Cannes red carpet, and cry out for the auteur. Qui est l'auteur? Auteur, s'il vous plaît!

Sadly Ted wasn't listening and ploughed on ...

However, true to form, Snowy Hydro only “partly agreed” with the fifth recommendation, “to develop regular public reporting on project schedule”.
Clearly, Snowy Hydro intends to remain unaccountable and limit exposure of its inept performance, contravening the government’s commitment to “transparency and honesty”.
The audit states “the project is currently behind schedule and is undertaking a cost reassessment that is likely to result in a further cost increase. This is despite the reset in 2023 which extended the commercial operation date for the project from May 2026 to December 2028, and almost doubled the delivery cost (of the main works to $12bn, six times the original $2bn estimate)”.
The audit’s most damning finding is that Snowy Hydro “does not have a robust understanding of the cost to complete the project” – this is after nine years.
Even more perturbing, last October Snowy Hydro asked its contractor “to undertake a comprehensive line-by-line reassessment of its costs to deliver Snowy 2.0”.
How is it that the owner of a multibillion-dollar project does not know its completion cost and needs to ask its cost-plus contractor to find out? Incredibly, the reassessment “is expected to take up to nine months” (that is, by June 2026).
But, as with everything associated with Snowy 2.0, even that exceptionally lengthy timeframe has slipped. Shareholder minister Chris Bowen has “pledged to reveal the cost hike by the end of 2026”.
It now appears that Snowy 2.0’s updated main works cost will be about $20bn. That figure doubles to more than $40bn once financing costs and Snowy 2.0’s equitable share of 1100km of new transmission connections to Sydney and Melbourne are included. This is an absurd cost for a 2200-megawatt battery – five times Snowy Hydro’s $7.8bn market value and about $1500 for every Australian.
Looking back, it is most unfortunate that the previous June 2022 Auditor-General audit failed to uncover any governance deficiencies, instead “assuring parliament that Snowy Hydro has appropriate arrangements in place to effectively deliver Snowy 2.0”.
Snowy 2.0 was portrayed as a model project for other government entities to emulate. Not one improvement was recommended – almost unprecedented for an Auditor-General audit.
If only the then Auditor-General had not been snowed by Snowy Hydro’s spin and had uncovered the ineffective governance and pending cost blowout that were disclosed a year later in the 2023 project “reset”. Had those deficiencies been uncovered when just $3bn had been sunk, the incoming Labor government might not have blindly locked itself into supporting the project.

The trouble of course is that this happens all the time with infrastructure projects. 

The original bright spark, the incredible initiating auteur, has long left the stage, and instead assorted bunnies are required to front up to deal with the turkey, and speaking of a bunny, Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen during Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Ted stayed rigorously true to his mission, and nowhere in the last gobbet could there be found a mention of Malware ...

The latest audit makes a two-sentence mention of the 2022 audit, offering no explanation for why it was so wrong.
So, how will the government respond to this latest audit? Will it ignore the findings and squander further billions, regardless, on the premise of 73 per cent completion and $12bn already sunk?
But that claimed completion percentage looks exaggerated: only two-thirds of the tunnels have been excavated, the power station caverns are incomplete and no electromechanical equipment has been installed. And the remaining costs are still likely to exceed the benefits, with no assurance the forthcoming cost reassessment will not again prove understated.
Snowy 2.0 is not only a financial and project management disaster but also an environmental disaster. Vast areas of pristine Kosciuszko National Park have been destroyed across 35km, with massive earthworks, huge spoil dumps, roads and tracks, transmission lines and easements, introduced weeds, depressed water tables, reduced stream flows and forthcoming pest fish transfers.
For years, industry experts have been urging the government not to rely solely on Snowy Hydro’s repeatedly flawed advice and impossibly optimistic estimates.
Will this latest audit finally prompt a rigorous independent expert review, so the least-worst option can be determined? If not, Snowy 2.0 will continue down the shambolic path of the past nine years – at the cost of taxpayers, electricity consumers and the Kosciuszko environment.
As a nation, we should be prioritising cost-effective projects that advance renewable energy, not a shambolic $40bn-plus battery.
Ted Woodley is former managing director of PowerNet, GasNet and EnergyAustralia. He is a board member of the NSW National Parks Association.

Well at least it took the pond's mind off other issues of the day ...

The pond also woke to news from Vlad the Sociopath's Russia ...

Russian anti-war politician jailed for seven years over social media posts

How lucky that Russia is developing a compleat monoculture. 

And so to the bonus, and for this the reptiles arranged yet another despatch from that bizarre concoction known as ARC ...

The header: Why the West must relearn true meaning of liberty; I refuse to accept the future in which our daughters vote for Zohran Mamdani and Zach Polanski, while our sons spend their days watching Bonnie Blue and Nick Fuentes.

The slack-jawed local yokel reptiles repeated the same collage as seen before, and again without any credit for the monstrosity: Some of ARC’s leading speakers, including Jordan Peterson, Niall Ferguson, Douglas Murray, Philippa Stroud, Bari Weiss, Ayaan, Hirsi Ali, Tony Abbott, Kemi Badenoch, John Anderson, Erica Komisar, Kostantin Kisin and Michael Shellenberger.

As can be judged from the collage, this is prime fruit loon territory and Konstantin didn't disappoint for an exhausting five minutes ...what with an endless cry for freedumb ...

Many today argue that the pursuit of liberty is what has given us a society of disconnected, disassociated, atomised individuals. Liberty, they say, contains the seeds of its own destruction.
Liberty is becoming a dirty word on both left and right because many mistakenly associate liberty with the grotesque excesses of liberalism, which has mutated from the pursuit of freedom from tyranny to the pursuit of freedom from reality.
The consequences are all around us. Our public finances are a Ponzi scheme. Our energy policy seems to be set by the moronically possessed. Our societies openly discriminate in favour of some groups and against others while calling that equality. And Britain, a country that once famously and somewhat controversially ruled the waves, can’t stop a few rubber boats.
Like it or not, the heart of our civilisation today lies not here in London but in Washington.
We like to make fun of Americans for not speaking English the way we do; you know, properly. That joke is based on a thing most people don’t know, which is American English is much closer to the way our ancestors spoke than the way we speak now. Americans preserved the language of their ancestors while we, as its originators, continued to experiment with it.

WTF? They say fall, and we say autumn, and somehow we're the fallen? 

What a stupid man, and what a silly point to make, as the reptiles slipped in a snap of a man who turned out to be not the solution, but part of the problem ... Nobel prize-winning author and critic of Soviet regimes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn sitting on low stone wall outside his home. Picture: Steve Liss / Getty Images

The pond doesn't have the time to go into the damage he did, but try on ...

Solzhenitsyn, Putin and the historical myth-making that drives Russian imperialism
March 18, 2022
Tomiwa Owolade
Undeniably there are deep cultural and political ties between Russia and Ukraine. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a hero in much of the West, but he helped inspire in Putin a destructive scepticism about Ukraine's status as a nation.

Meanwhile, back to the gathering of the loons ...

This is true of more than language, and it’s time to concede that not all of our experiments have been for the better. When friends across the pond say we in Europe have become authoritarian, that we’ve weakened ourselves militarily, destroyed our economies in the name of ideology, we have to have the courage to admit they’re right. They’re not saying anything new.
Here’s what Alexander Solzhenitsyn said in his Harvard address in 1978: “Europe … has of its own accord abandoned its strength and its influence on world affairs, and not just its physical influence but its intellectual influence as well. Potentially important decisions, major movements, have now begun to mature beyond the borders of Europe. How strange it all is! Since when has mighty Europe needed outside help to defend herself? At one moment she had such a surplus of strength that, while waging wars within her own boundaries and destroying herself, she was still able to seize colonies. A moment later, she suddenly found herself hopelessly weak without having lost a single major war.”

See above, and cue an endless, and endlessly destructive war on Ukraine by Vlad the sociopath.

On the pond trudged ...

There is no shame in learning from America. We’d only be learning from ourselves. Remember, the American founding fathers were born and bred in Britain, educated in British law and political philosophy, and steeped in British constitutional tradition. The arguments they used to justify independence were British arguments. They believed the British crown was violating British principles, which they fought a war to defend.

We should learn from the USA?

It seems that Konstantin didn't mind a crazy old geezer running the show ...

Many today worry about the strength of the trans-Atlantic relationship. I do not because I know that what holds us together is not just a shared history. We’re bound together by a shared destiny. The job of America is to spread the ideas of England. Liberty is one of them, but let’s be precise about what liberty actually is.

At this point the reptiles slipped in an AV distraction:

Konstantin Kisin's Opening Speech at ARC
"THE TIME IS NOW"

For once the reptiles were linking to a YouTube video, but the pond didn't feel the need, what with this already a sumptuous feast of the silly ...

Liberty matters not because it maximises individual pleasure; that is liberalism’s mistake. Liberty matters because you cannot be a responsible citizen if you’re not free. A man who does the right thing because the state compels him to is not virtuous, he’s compliant, and because of that dangerous. When the state compels him to do the wrong thing, he will comply as well.
Virtue requires choice, responsibility requires freedom and freedom requires responsibility. They’re not opposites, as the left and the new right suggest, they’re the same thing seen from different angles. The free market without moral respons­ibility gives you the financialisation of everything.
Freedom of speech without the courage to tell the truth gives you a cacophony of noise and no signal, and personal liberty without the understanding that freedom is for something is how you get the atomisation. We’ve kept the freedom and discarded the purpose. We must not compound the mistake by discarding freedom too.

Indeed, indeed, freedumb...

And so to the "what's it all about Alfie?" moment ...

Why are we here at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship? We did not come together because we had a clear, rigid vision of how we wanted the future to look. We came together because all of us, in our own ways, saw that our societies and our civilisation were drifting. Wherever we looked, we saw demoralisation, decline and despair.
Because we observe that we are not a society of responsible citizens. It will take decades to change that because generations of Westerners have been taught to hate their civilisation. They’ve been taught up is down and good is evil.
Everyone is by now familiar with the saying that hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men and weak men create hard times. The weak men have done their bit and the hard times are here. If you pay attention, you can hear the clamour for strength rising. It will get only louder. It is possible that we here are the strong men and women reacting to hard times and fighting back. But it is possible that our generations are the weak men and the hard times are just beginning.

The reptiles made it clear where they stood by bringing together two civilisational threats ... Tia Billinger aka Bonnie Blue; New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Those images seemed to trigger Konstantin bigly ...

If that is true our children are the ones who are going to have to do the heavy lifting. Saddled with huge debts by their irresponsible parents and grand­parents, facing the most disruptive technological transformation in human history, in a deteriorating geopolitical environment, our children will face hard times. Our job, then, is to prepare them to be the strong men and women who can rebuild our civilisation. That is why we must teach them that most difficult thing: how to be radical without being extreme.
I refuse to accept the future in which our daughters vote for Zohran Mamdani and Zach Polanski, while our sons spend their days watching Bonnie Blue and Nick Fuentes. We must teach our children that the gravitational pull of the digital world is towards a society of atomised individuals.
Human connection, family and community are what sustain our humanness, and no technology will ever replace it. We must teach them that people who disagree with you about politics are human. Zoomers are seven times likelier than Boomers to believe political violence is sometimes justified. Above all, we must teach our children to separate the comforting lie from the unpleasant truth and give them the courage to want to do it.
None of these things can be taught, they can be instilled only by example, and so in the final analysis a society of responsible citizens will be brought into existence only by individuals who decide to do that thing that Jordan Peterson was brought into the world to remind us all to do: to take responsibility. Not by government diktat, not through the use of force, but by a voluntary choice exercised for the sake of not only your family and your community but that of your own soul. The fact we can do that is the beauty of our civilisation.
Konstantin Kisin is a satirist, author and co-host of the podcast Triggernometry. This is an edited extract from the speech he delivered at the Alliance of Responsible Citizenship conference.

He passes as a satirist? 

But there was one sublime satirical moment.

When the pond checked the archive for the piece, there were two concluding links about Jordan that didn't work.

The pond fixed them, so that so long as the intermittent archive kept working, they could be found.

The reason? 

Some blackly humorous lizard Oz sub-editor had decided to mess with Konstantin.

The first link led to a story about Jordan's breakdown ... and lordy, long absent lordy, it was a breakdown for the ages...

The second link, allegedly about taking responsibility, led to a review of his latest pile of drivel, which to say the least wasn't laudatory ...

What a sublime touch of genius on the part of some reptile determined to undercut Konstantin!

A potent satirical thrust.

And now, as the pond has mentioned Vlad the Sociopath's Russia, this from Wilcox ...

And now reptiles, please pay a little attention ... it'll only take a couple of minutes ...

In which a certain Stroud redeems little England, and someone must discover the laws revealing the state of being Dame Groan ...

 

The pond woke to news that Europe was in the grip of a massive heat dome, and that France had endured its hottest day on record, and that many had drowned seeking to escape the heat, and was comforted that if the lizard Oz took any notice, it would be so far down the page that none of the climate denialists would be troubled or feel the need to trot out the usual bilge.

As for the regular group of bilge spouters, fermenting like algae in a badly lined pool, the pond came away disappointed.

Dame Slap is always hit and miss.

Too often she disappears up her fundament, or contemplates her navel, or spends endless column inches whining about some justice who fails to conform to her own peculiar ideas about the legal system. 

So it was again today, and so the pond had no problem confining her to the intermittent archive cornfield. The pond had the tedious duty of saving it to the archive, but better that than dealing with Dame Slap at length.

Courting politics is more than an error of judgment
NSW Supreme Chief Justice Andrew Bell seems to have fallen for the rookie judicial mistake of thinking his black robes confer greater morality on his views.
By Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist

For those tempted to wade into that festering swamp, it was just more about an internecine struggle, with the justice in question having committed a thought crime ...

Bell has publicly criticised Tony Abbott for spreading misinformation when the former PM posted that “it should not be for a judge to decide when a political protest is justified. The decision to close the Sydney Harbour Bridge to facilitate this protest is a political decision and should be made by elected and accountable ministers – who, as it happens, think the march should not go ahead.”
Bell must have known full well that there is a legitimate political debate as to whether we should empower judges to make decisions of a political nature, especially when it concerns intelligence impacting the government’s first duty to keep people safe.

Ditto the pond decided to despatch the always anal meretricious Merritt...

Non-publication order leaves reasoning in dark
Justice is meant to be seen to be done – but a District Court judge has excluded key video evidence against two former nurses while hiding his reasoning from the public.
By Chris Merritt
Legal Affairs Contributor

The reasoning was obvious enough, but the meretricious Merritt didn't like it because it left the prosecution in a bind, and how he dearly wanted a result.

The pond also decided to let go another member of the Kelly gang ...

Why ignoring Holocaust education is the worst kind of teacher activism
It is shameful that the Australian Education Union is deflecting from teaching the Holocaust by using the excuse of the Middle East conflict.
By Mike Kelly

On any other day perhaps, but this was the day that the reptiles studiously ignored yet another UN report ...per the Graudian ...

Israel continues to commit genocide by targeting children in Gaza, UN inquiry finds
Independent report says by aiming at children Israel is undermining capacity of Palestinian people to exist

Inter alia ...

The pond looks forward to the day that the reptiles run a column deploring the way that they've ignored a current, ongoing form of ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Then the pond turned to another scything ...

At this civilisational moment, we must resist sliding into cultural amnesia
Australia is one of its great success stories. The institutions that formed in this country brought the best out of people. It’s time we restitch the social fabric.
By Philippa Stroud

But then the pond stayed its hand.

It turned out that this was a loon for the ages, celebrating a gathering of loons, featuring a wondrous collage of loons as a temptation to venture further ...

The header: At this civilisational moment, we must resist sliding into cultural amnesia; Australia is one of its great success stories. The institutions that formed in this country brought the best out of people. It’s time we restitch the social fabric.

The caption for the incredible collage that lured the pond in, shamefully with no credit for the artiste responsible for this meisterwerk: A montage of ARC speakers, including Jordan Peterson, Niall Ferguson, Douglas Murray, Philippa Stroud and Tony Abbott.

The pond had the incredible pleasure recently of watching Niall Ferguson and Douglas Murray say incredibly stupid things about mad King Donald's Iran folly (Ferguson appears in the Bulwark video c. 22'35" in, Murray follows at c. 29'20"). And the pond was delighted to discover that the always addled Jordan Peterson was still considered a thing.

So the pond was more than prepared for blather about ancient Greeks, Christ and the joys of Western Civilisation, and the baroness obliged ...

Last summer, my husband and I walked the sun-bleached streets of Athens in search of the sites that built this civilisation. We climbed Pnyx Hill, the birthplace of democracy. We sought out the ruins of Plato’s Academy. We climbed the Areopagus, where the Apostle Paul first spoke the Christian message to an unresponsive city.
At each point we felt humbled as we took in the history of places that, 3000 years on, still shape how we think and what we believe. And yet something was wrong. While some of the ancient temples were awash with tourists, these places were empty. Forgotten.
Their forgottenness reflects something about our civilisation today. We have lost touch with our foundations.
We can all feel that something is not quite right. We feel it in the mental health crisis among young people from cities like Melbourne to my home city of London. We feel it in the collapse of trust in our public institutions and the fracturing of our politics. We feel it in the way our societies have lost confidence in their history and unpicked many of their core foundations.

The pond was outraged. How dare she suggest there was a forgottenness which suggested an ability to forget the wonders of the English language.

Didn't we enjoy Our Henry each Friday? 

Didn't we note the odd times that he failed to mention Thucydides or some other ancient Greek?

Doesn't he offer a parade of arcane references? Are we not made civilised and whole in consequence?

The reptiles decided to torment the pond further by showing a snap of the abuser of the English language... Executive chair of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Baroness Philippa Stroud speaking at the Aspire conference in Sydney. Jane Dempster / The Australian

It turned out that the baroness liked a bit of a scrap ...

Recent YouGov polling for The Times found that only 11 per cent of Britons aged 18-27 would fight for their country. In Australia, the equivalent figures are barely better. A majority of young people across the West are fearful about the future they are about to inherit.

The pond noted the discreet age, which conveniently put the baroness outside a call to arms, though perhaps Ukraine could use her in some capacity.

The pond decided to take a squiz at her wiki, and was surprised to see that while she did many things, not once had she decided to serve her country in the military.

Never mind, she could always issue a different, but still rousing, call to arms ...

Philosopher Os Guinness puts it like this. He says we are at a civilisational moment – a defining moment for the West, in which we have a simple choice. Will we choose to renew our foundations, or will we drift into decline?
This week, at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London, a global gathering of leaders from across the free world is laying out a blueprint for reconstruction.
Some of the most important contributions are coming from Australians. 

Oh dear, not the Viktor Orbán lover and not the sucker on the Hungarian taxpayer's teat, not the rustic from Gunnedah too much time on his hands, not Bid and Danny ... but so it came to pass:

Tony Abbott is speaking on why we must have confidence in our national stories; John Anderson is speaking on what it takes to lead with character in a time of fracture; Bridget McKenzie is speaking about the fundamental importance of the family to our flourishing, and; Danny Abdullah is bringing his powerful testimony of forgiveness in the darkest times.
What does reconstruction require? It begins with getting serious about our history and our philosophical foundations. For too long our young people have been told stories of decline, and we have neglected the golden threads that run from Athens, Rome and Jerusalem to our own day. The Western story is a good story. It grounds the belief that every life has dignity, that justice is found where there is the rule of law, and that free exchange is the greatest means of unlocking abundance.

Again the pond was outraged.

Had not mad King Donald continued the noble tradition of Roman emperors by bunging on that UFC do on the White House lawns?

Was that not a grand continuation of panem et circenses? And didn't he, each day, evoke memories of the ways of the emperors, whether Tiberius or Caligula? Or perhaps the mad Queen in Alice, shouting off with their heads?

At this point the reptiles flung in another snap ...Leila and Danny Abdallah. Picture: David Swift

The pond was more interested in what followed.

As Tony Abbott’s new book underlines, Australia is one of its great success stories. The institutions that formed in this country brought the best out of people and built a nation in shared prosperity. It is a story worth celebrating.

Say what? The onion muncher has got a new book out and the pond missed it? Wait, she's probably referring to the tome that came out last year ... and which the pond luckily managed to avoid.

And so to a message of despair and malaise...

With our foundations recovered, we must restitch the social fabric – strengthening families, communities, and the bonds of responsibility that hold a free society together. The decline of marriage, the collapse of the birthrate, the loneliness epidemic, all of these are symptoms of a deeper malaise in society that requires new vision.

Fear not, you just need to sup deep on the baroness's favourite form of koolaid...

We have to return to the foundational belief that the home is the primary site of moral formation, that the family is an indispensable institution for our flourishing, and that we will get nowhere if we do not intentionally seek to build bonds of family, community and nation once more.
From here we turn to the economy. Much of the West’s sense of decline is tied to economic stagnation and a social contract that no longer holds. We must back the builders again. That means throwing off the regulatory and ideological constraints choking enterprise. It means restoring the abundant, reliable, affordable energy on which industry, prosperity and modern life depend. It means an economy in which the young can once again hope to own a home, build a business and raise a family with confidence.
Finally, we are midway through a technological revolution that will define the coming decades. Artificial intelligence, robotics and biotechnology carry extraordinary promise. They also carry profound risks. The attention economy has already weakened the mental health of a generation. AI is concentrating power in ways that could deepen inequality, not reduce it.

Could the reptiles get through without featuring a snap of the onion muncher? Not likely: Liberal Party Federal President Tony Abbott. Picture: Asanka Ratnayake / Getty Images

Sure, he resembles a mouth-opened carp, but will the reptiles ever feature a more appealing snap?

And so to the final gobbet ...

The question that must govern every decision in this space is simple. Is the technology we are building serving human flourishing, or undermining it? The challenges we face in the West are not simple, they are multi-layered, impacting culture, society and our economies: we need a blueprint for reconstruction at every level if we are to turn the ship around.
We are called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship because we have a fundamental conviction that the answer to our greatest challenges lies at our door.
The answer, on every front, depends on people. On leaders willing to think for the long term. On parents and teachers prepared to form character. On builders and entrepreneurs willing to take risks for things worth building. On citizens who remember that a civilisation is not a possession but an inheritance, held in trust for the generation that comes next.
The West is struggling but there is still real hope. But we cannot trust the government to solve our greatest challenges. The work of reconstruction will not begin by itself. It will begin when enough of us, on both sides of the world, decide the inheritance we have been given is worth fighting for.
Baroness Philippa Stroud is the executive chair of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. ARC is holding its 2026 conference, themed The Age of Reconstruction, in London from June 23-25.

Nah ...the pond is too busy celebrating the triumph of standalone Brexiting little England ...

Again if you don't mind...

Thank you immortal Rowe ...

No wonder they're bleating about civilisational rot in little England.

And now the pond should at least give an honourable mention to a howl of despair, a cry of pain by the bouffant one, only two minutes long, and available in full at the archive ...

Could be worse.

Thank you Ms Wilcox.

Could Pauline be the only true reptile saviour in their desperate hour of need?

And so to a truly great bonus.

At the get go, the pond should note that it was struck mightily by a correspondent's notion that there should be a Dame Groan law, or laws, up there with the series of laws designed to codify Our highly esteemed Henry's contributions to western civilisation.

The pond wondered if some aspect of Murphy's assorted laws might be made to fit...

Left to Jimbo and Albo, things tend to go from bad to worse.

If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked Jimbo and Albo.

If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the Jimbo deed that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong. Corollary: If there is a worse time for Jimbo to go wrong, it will happen then.

Whatever, this requires greater minds than the pond's sludge pit.

See if this inspires ...

Sheesh, the pond got it wrong from the get go ...

The light at the end of the tunnel is only the light of an oncoming Jacinta.

The header: Budget verdict: Victoria and Tasmania named Australia’s worst economic managers;Victoria has already sold everything it owns, Tasmania is building a stadium no one needs, and Queensland is hosting an Olympics it cannot afford.

Sadly no caption or credit for the remarkable opening image, and so the pond assumes that AI must take the credit.

The pond did wonder if the old biddy was suggesting nationalisation, what with her deploring the deep southerners for selling off everything they owned, but no such luck.

Instead what followed was a remarkable compendium of charts and figures, and while the reptiles contend it's just a four minute read, you could start and get lost forever in the figuring, but rest assured, the message is the same, "we'll all be rooned, and before Xmas no doubt":

The final whistle has sounded. The state budget season is over for another year. It’s time for the wrap-up and the awarding of prizes.
Let me be clear that I have decided to rule out Western Australia from the competition. Blessed by the extraordinary flow of revenue from royalties as well as its sweetheart GST deal, the Sandgropers are playing in another league from the other states. Western Australia will simply get the label “DNQ”.
There was a time in the early 2010s when commenting on state budgets was like describing grass growing, slowly. Net operating surpluses were delivered, capital expenditure was relatively modest, state government debt was well controlled.
These days, it’s more like watching out-of-control bushfires that have been raging since Covid took hold and, in some cases, before then – Victoria being the obvious example.
All the states apart from Western Australia are in various states of fiscal distress. Not that the politicians in charge want to admit this; but it’s the reality. The total size of the states’ debt is approaching the level of the federal government’s debt.

Every state treasurer reassures their population that everything is under control, and things are about to improve. Sure, there have been successive net operating deficits and state debt is soaring, but over the next four years – or perhaps a little later – everything will be back on an even keel. Good try, Daniel Mookhey, NSW Treasurer, but I’m not convinced.
The messaging has a strong St Augustinian ring – fiscal rectitude, but just not now. Bung in some optimistic forecasts about state output growth in the out-years and suddenly that burgeoning state government debt as a percentage of the assumed output doesn’t look that bad.
So let me start the drum-roll and begin awarding the prizes.

But not before a snap, NSW Treasurer Daniel Mookhey delivers the state budget on Tuesday. Picture: NewsWire / Bianca De Marchi

Now on with the prizes:

Best quote from a state treasurer: South Australian Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis: “It would be lovely to give everyone free public transport and free carparking and a puppy”, in response to the plea for cost-of-living measures. (Forget the puppy, Tom, but a dozen Veuve would be great.)
Worst fiscal performance by a state: It’s a draw between Victoria and Tasmania. Because it’s small, Tasmania is often overlooked in these competitions; it’s basically the size of a handful of suburbs in Melbourne and Sydney.
State government debt in Tasmania goes from $6.82bn this year to nearly $10bn in 2029 – the speed of this deterioration sets a new sort of depressing benchmark for that state.

This state thinks it can’t live without a wildly expensive new stadium that will be used a few times each year because it must have an Aussie rules team. The difference between want and need obviously has escaped those living in the Apple Isle.
In the case of Victoria, were it not for creative accounting in its budget papers, it would be fiscal toast. Oh, that’s right, it’s already fiscal toast, with state debt easily sailing past $200bn when you include government agencies, and everything in the state that could be sold off already flogged.
But the rating agencies, perhaps not altogether naively, think that the federal government will bail out the state. There’s quite a bit going on under the table already – the funding of the biggest white elephant of them all, the Suburban Rail Loop, for example.

Worst capital expenditure item: Obviously the SRL mentioned above is the likely winner: it’s a massively expensive boondoggle taking people between suburbs in Melbourne that no one currently travels. It’s a gift to the CFMEU to keep the high-paid jobs flowing for years to come.
But there are other contenders. Virtually all large-scale projects being undertaken in every state are overpriced and badly delayed.
The new women’s and children’s hospital in Adelaide must be approaching Taj Mahal standards given its rising cost. The completely unjustified Copper String transmission line in Queensland also makes the short list as does the exorbitant cross-river rail project in Brisbane. The cost of the Metro project in Sydney is also way over budget.

Worst pre-election bribe: Again, another tie, this time between Victoria and NSW. Who wants to pay full price for car rego? Come to either of those two states to get a discount, with the cost going on the state debt tab.
Mind you, the ongoing 50c public transport fares in Queensland probably deserve a perpetual award. If the preposterous initiative wasn’t bad enough to begin with, making it permanent is unforgivable. Forget the puppy; it’s a litter of puppies.
The worst GST deal: All the states whinge about this, well apart from Western Australia, but it’s clear that at this point, NSW is coming off worse from the divvying up of the GST revenue, receiving just above 80 per cent of what they would get on a per-capita basis.
The bigger picture here is that federal financial relations are absolutely cactus; the case for reform is overwhelming. The federal treasurer would have spent his time much better trying to fix this problem, rather than imposing a massively complex series of tax assaults on business and capital accumulation.

The biggest threat to state budgets: At this stage, it’s the slump in stamp duty revenue that will almost certainly occur from the fallout of the government’s new tax package (as well as higher interest rates) on the housing market. Note here that stamp duty revenue is more sensitive to variations in the number of transactions than the price of those transactions but both variables matter.
The state that will be most affected is NSW – stamp duty as a proportion of total revenue is highest in that state. Some downgrades have been factored in, but they may not be enough.

A final snap, Queensland Premier David Crisafulli shakes hands with Treasurer David Janetzki after he tabled the 2026-27 budget in parliament. Picture: Newswire/ Tertius Pickard

And then a final serve of doom, garnished with despair:

The Olympics impact: One of the worst decisions made by the then Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk was to “bid” for the Olympic Games in 2032, not that there were any other bidders.
The truth is that Queensland is not well-placed to bear the fiscal costs of building the necessary infrastructure for the Games. The capex component of the budget will proportionately surpass anything we have seen in the overspending southern states and that’s saying something. The feds will have no choice but to chip in well beyond the current commitment.
Watching state budget bushfires might be more exciting than watching the grass grow, but I’d settle for the quiet life any day. At this rate, I’ll be waiting a while.

Did Dame Groan get her prizes right?

And why wasn't there a prize for most gloomy brooder about economics? Surely she would have won in a canter, but what modesty, what a self-effacing scribbler she is.

After all that the pond wondered if a law would truly fit, or could possibly replace poetic insights:

While round the lizard Oz in clothes genteel
  Discoursed the Groan of mark,
And each reptile squatted on their heel,
  And chewed their piece of bark.

"There'll be state debt and disaster for sure, me Murdochians,
  There will, without a doubt;
We'll all be rooned," said Dame Groan,
  "Before the year is out."

And speaking of gloom, let the infallible Pope provide a final note, with hints of little England and bird flu on the back palate ...

A little Thiel will fix what ails ya...(see Wired in the archive for the yarn)

In which the Brexit-loving Bromancer struts his stuff, and Dame Gran does her regular Tuesday groaning ...

 

This day the Australian Daily Zionist News was in full flight ...

As a coda, Col was on hand on the extreme far right to follow the Benji line ...

Trump’s peace deal leaves no winners except Tehran
Iran has long demonstrated it will never concede its uranium enrichment program regardless of military or economic pressure.
By Colin Rubenstein
Contributor
Colin Rubenstein is executive director of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council.

He would say that, wouldn't he?

Ironically a little further down the page came ...

LIVE Iran peace talks
Iran to let nuclear inspectors in, allowed to sell oil in dollars
JD Vance says IAEA inspectors may be back in Iran from as early as this week, the US clears the way for Tehran to sell oil in dollars, including to American buyers | FOLLOW LIVE
Staff writers and agencies.

Who knows what  might happen with a couch lover in charge?

One thing seems likely ... Benji misplayed his hand.

None of this had any interest for the pond, except for noting Geoff chambering another round with the need to "stop the Left’s false equivocation between antisemitism and Islamophobia".

Really? In recent times, for an atheist observing from the outside who prefers to be called conservative rather than leftist, they seem more than a fair match.

Perhaps Geoff has forgotten that back in 2019 it was an Australian who conducted a massacre in a Christchurch mosque with a body count of 51 dead, 89 injured, 40 by gunfire, a total which shades the Bondi massacre, not that this is a competition to be celebrated.

And when you consider the current ethnic cleansing being conducted by the current government of Israel, it seems like a dedicated attempt to match the behaviour of the mad mullahs towards their own people in Iran, not that this is a competition to be celebrated.

But more than enough already, because the pond watched live the teary farewell of Sir Keir, and knew that the reptiles would pay some attention.

It's truly remarkable to be able to chew through so many PMs in so few years, and then to have a blow in from the north take on the job with no preliminaries, and no desire to call an election to confirm his legitimacy, despite having abused Rishi Sunak for his failure on that score.

The reptiles called on the malignant Magnay to have several says ...

UK leadership race
Starmer resigns as British PM, Burnham set to run unopposed
Sir Keir will remain in the job until a new Labour leader is chosen, with Wes Streeting withdrawing from the contest and backing hot favourite Andy Burnham.
By Jacquelin Magnay

Keir was a dud prime minister but the country’s pain will only continue
Keir Starmer will be remembered as one of the worst British prime ministers in recent history but his resignation will usher in a period of tumult.
By Jacquelin Magnay
Europe Correspondent

That was all very well, and Magnay conformed to the reptile agenda, but the pond was of course compelled by the bromancer's take, a man with an almost infinite, Boris-like capacity for getting it wrong.

The header: Brexit gave Britain the freedom to succeed. It’s bad government that’s let it down; Countless faux experts claim that Brexit has cost Britain millions, billions, trillions. Name your figure. It’s complete eyewash.
The caption for a shameless liar who shamelessly misled the country, and how satisfying he should set the tone for this bromancer outing: Boris Johnson wears boxing gloves emblazoned with “Get Brexit Done”. Picture: Frank Augstein / AFP

The bromancer spent a bigly four minutes peddling assorted big lies, dancing on sundry graves by peddling hogwash about the benefits of Brexit.

Say what you will, when the bromancer is wildly in error, he sticks to his gun with the rigid stupidity that would have made him a dead cert as an advisor to Boris, or perhaps these days, Nige ...

The 10th anniversary of the Brexit vote – when Britain left the EU – celebrates one of the most joyous, hopeful events in the modern history of Western civilisation. It was, and is, a mark of national and democratic maturity. It’s one of the most brilliant and inspiring moments of real democracy, by which I mean not only a decision arrived at by a majority vote but a people determined to regain and keep control, to exercise self-determination and accept all the responsibility that goes with that.
Of course, there’s a paradox. Britain has been very badly governed for the past 10 years, as Keir Starmer’s defenestration richly demonstrates. As I wrote last weekend, it’s appallingly governed now. But Brexit means when British politics finally gets around to tackling its problems, its institutions have the national freedom to do so effectively.

One of the key problems is that the bromancer routinely talks to the wrong people, and he seems to be doing that in spades in his current trip to Old Blighty. 

The Moggster, long an irrelevance, will always take the time to talk to any passing colonial dropkick willing to listen, and so it came to pass with the bromancer's return to his spiritual home...

Jacob Rees-Mogg, one of the architects of Brexit and a senior minister in Boris Johnson’s government, does not remotely deny the failures of the last Conservative government. He lists them for me: too much Covid lockdown, too much legal immigration when people wanted it cut, too much illegal immigration, too much tax, not being conservative enough.
But he says of Johnson: “In Brexit, he delivered the most important constitutional reform in Britain in centuries. It was fundamentally important. It restored democratic control to parliament.”

All nonsense, drivel as pure as a heated English summer of course, and as a distraction, the reptiles slipped in a snap: Keir Starmer speaks to members of the media on the sidelines of the G7 summit. Picture: Isabel Infantes / Getty Images

The bromancer carried on like a pork chop just as the British government is trying to undo the Brexit damage and sidle up to the EU - what with mad King Donald on the loose - see the Beeb's A decade on from Brexit, the new PM has big calls to make on Europe

Europe might be a bit of a mess, but there isn't any joy across the Atlantic, as Keir discovered to his cost, but inevitably the bromancer wasn't having any of it ...

Countless faux experts claim that Brexit has cost Britain millions, billions, trillions. Name your figure. It’s complete eyewash. Folks who discount sovereignty and want Britain, as they want other nations, tightly bound in undemocratic rules of undemocratic internationalist Frankensteins such as the EU predicted instant economic collapse for Britain the minute it left the EU.
No such thing happened. All the claimed economic costs of Brexit are similarly fatuous.
Let’s subject the claims to the most elementary empirical test. How have comparable European economies such as France and Germany gone in the past 10 years? They had what the eurocrats would regard as the incomparable benefits of continued EU membership while Britain did not.
In fact, over the past 10 years, the French and German economies have fared worse than the British economy. Starmer, on most measures, is the most unpopular man to have been UK prime minister. Yet he was less unpopular than Chancellor Friedrich Merz in Germany and President Emmanuel Macron in France.

The pond realises that the bromancer has no head for figures, and so decided a little trolling wouldn't hurt, and so reverted to the Graudian's celebration of the tenth anniversary of the folly:

How Brexit has made Britain poorer – in charts
Forecasters were wrong about an immediate recession but right that we would be worse off outside the EU
Richard Partington Senior economics correspondent

There were many graphs and much data, including ...

There are none so deaf as those determined not to hear.

Strangely, looking at that graph was more appealing than looking at the interrupting snap of Jacob Rees-Mogg...

Rather than delve into the data, the bromancer preferred rhetoric of the bro kind:

So all these incomparable, unbearable, debilitating, self-inflicted, monstrous, illogical, populist, ruinous, self-destructive costs of Brexit have ended up with Britain amazingly doing better than France and Germany despite all their (substitute similar cliches, but positive) benefits of continuing EU membership.
Could the cause of success and failure over the past decade actually reside instead in the content of government policy?
Brexit didn’t guarantee good government, it provided the opportunity for good government. Some of that has come about for Britain, such as free trade agreements with the US, India and Australia. Freedom to manoeuvre on tariffs. A more flexible policy on artificial intelligence than the eurosclerotic behemoth could ever deliver.
But on the biggest things, of course, the British government is not delivering.

Dear sweet long absent lord of delusion, the free trade agreement with the US? The pond wants whatever the bromancer is on ...and hopes he doesn't do a search for the benefits, or it might depress him...

As for India and Australia, what a hoot. Freedom to manoeuvre with King Donald on tariffs? Good luck with that. And a chance to lie down and be screwed by AI? Wonders will never cease.

The reptiles next interrupted with a snap of a man who, having helped introduce the ruinous Brexit, is now making plans to ruin little England some more...Nigel Farage celebrates and poses for photographers at Brexit

The bromancer went on a big rhetorical jag, what with welfare wastrels and Covid, as if Boris didn't have anything to do with any of that ...

Famously, Andy Burnham just won a big victory for the Labour Party, and for himself, in the Makerfield by-election. On the same day, Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives took a House of Commons seat from the Scottish National Party, which was the Conservatives’ first big win under Badenoch. In yet another by-election, the SNP held a seat, with the Conservatives, not Labour or Reform, coming second. If Burnham actually believes some of the things he said in victory, Britain is in for years more of terrible government and deepening crisis. In courting popularity, Burnham is saying yes to everybody and promising everybody more goodies. But the simple reality is that Britain is broke.
Bizarrely, Burnham attributes this to 40 years of, allegedly, Thatcherism, neoliberalism, austerity, privatisation and deregulation. Frankly, that analysis is hallucinogenic.
More than half of all British households now receive more in welfare than they pay in tax. The welfare system is totally out of control. Far from being neoliberal, the budget is in vast, chronic deficit. In May, the government borrowed more than £23bn ($43.4bn), more than half of which was to service the interest on existing debt.
Under Covid lockdowns, the country squandered hundreds of billions of pounds. No one in politics opposed this and no one was prepared to tell the British people that at some stage it would all have to be paid back.

The reptiles decided to put up snaps of the two likely contenders, though really Kemi's party is working hard to be completely irrelevant ...Andy Burnham; Kemi Badenoch

 

The bromancer kept on resorting to the usual suspects ... uppity furriners, Covid and welfare wastrels, thereby suggesting a limited palate, but when you have a litany, best stick with it...

One reason for the huge immigration spike after Covid was that the government effectively thought the British people, or some millions of them anyway, had lost interest in working. There’s some empirical evidence for that dolorous reflection. Almost everyone you encounter working in London hotels and restaurants comes from overseas, while there are a million young Brits involved in neither employment nor education or training. That, surely, is social and policy failure.
The long and badly managed fallout of Covid, massive government expenditure, debt and transfer payments, net-zero policies producing the most expensive energy in the world – these are infinitely more the causes of Britain’s travails than the fictional “neoliberalism”, much less “austerity”, of Burnham’s imagination.
One aspect of the three by-elections was fascinating – the degree of tactical voting.
In Britain’s first-past-the-post system, if you vote for a candidate who doesn’t come first or second your vote is wasted. Under Australia’s preferential voting system you get a second chance.

Inevitably the Nige/Reform curious bromancer put in a good word for the habitual liar, who doesn't mind scoring the odd five million quid from a filthy rich donor, and then staying mum about it...
British voters are becoming adept at tactical voting. A habitual Liberal-Democrat voter might vote Labour to defeat the Conservative, a Conservative voter might vote Reform to defeat Labour. The demonisation of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK may well lead to tactical voting to keep it out in many electorates. (That may apply to One Nation in Australia.)
Overall it makes the next British election very hard to pick. More than ever before it will have the character of 650 by-elections.
Neo-liberalism is a ludicrously fictitious bogeyman. Brexit means any government has the policy power to fix the nation’s problems.
Will it have the courage, competence and grip to do so? That’s the question, just as it should be. The whole world can thank Brexit for that happy outcome.
Greg Sheridan is The Australian’s foreign editor.

Thank Brexit, thank that fraud Boris? Only in the bromancer's alternative bizarro world ...

Why was the pond reminded of the current state of play down under?

Reform, One Nation, King Donald, peas in a bromancer pod.

On the deregulation front, the departure of the man responsible for inspiring the 2008 financial disaster was well down the page...and then it had to be borrowed from the WSJ ...

Obituary
Former US Fed chairman Alan Greenspan dies at 100
Alan Greenspan, a rock-star Fed chairman whose legacy was dimmed by the financial crisis, dies at age 100
The ‘maestro’ rivalled the US president for global influence. But his faith in financial markets’ ability to police themselves became an Achilles’ heel.
By Nick Timiraos

Bizarrely Dame Slap was also on the regulatory case. It's a few days old, but better noted than never ...

Why did KPMG behave so recklessly? ‘Because it could’
A disastrous 30-year-old law shielded accounting firms from liability, creating the toxic moral hazard behind the KPMG scandal.
By Janet Albrechtsen

Relax, it's all about being woke, what with unreconstructed greed passing as woke these days in the hive mind, but what better way could be found to introduce Dame Groan's regular Tuesday rant about us all being rooned by Xmas?

The header: Treasury was once the premier agency for economic counsel. Not any longer; Was Jim Chalmers the principal villain or was it the faulty advice provided by inexperienced, bungling Treasury officials?

There was no caption for the snap, but that's because everyone in the hive mind knows who these downcast/grim looking villains are ...

Dame Groan was in feisty form, ready for a full four minutes of abuse, and didn't get past the first sentence before she rolled out "fiasco":

It’s hard to know who to blame for the rolling budget fiasco. Was Jim Chalmers the principal villain or was it the faulty advice provided by inexperienced, bungling Treasury officials? Probably the answer is a bit of both.
Treasury would be fully aware that Labor doesn’t like small businesses, which are incapable of being unionised. There are no downsides to recommending measures that harm them, if only inadvertently. Labor also distrusts most small business owners. Are they just doing what they’re doing to rip off the tax system? Do they treat their workers in the same way as big business?
So, when Treasury officials recommended that the capital gains tax changes be broadened beyond housing to include all capital gains, including those made by small business owners, the Treasurer would have seen this as an attractive option. The addition to revenue would be very welcome and he could crow about reducing tax for working Australians – OK, by only $250 in over a year’s time.
Treasury’s effective dismissal of the additional compliance costs of the indexation method – 14 steps are required to calculate liabilities – is one thing. But its support for what will become one of the highest CGT rates in the world is another thing altogether.

How to sooth the hive mind after rolling out those disasters? Show a snap of Petey boy: Peter Costello arrives at the 30th Anniversary of the Howard Government. Picture: The Australian / Nadir Kinani

Dame Groan was ropeable at sundry students who'd failed to absorb her teaching:

I’ve said it before, but let’s be clear – this new proposed method of CGT calculation is not a reversion to the Keating method. There was no 30 per cent minimum tax, a very onerous burden, and averaging over five years was allowed then but not now.
One important issue that a genuine economist would have picked up is the suitability of the consumer price index as the factor to be used for indexation. In fact, it is completely unsuitable, with a much more defensible index being the long-term government bond rate. It was used in Wayne Swan’s ill-fated mining tax calculation, the one aspect of that tax that the government of the day got right.
What a CGT should be trying to capture is the surplus above the risk-adjusted return given the nature of small business activity. The preferred route at this stage would be to stick with the CGT discount method, both because of its incredibly low compliance costs and the fact it is widely understood. Its bias towards high-growth assets is a good thing; it’s not a defect.
Let’s not forget that the discount method was introduced after thorough investigation by the 1999 business tax review commissioned by treasurer Peter Costello and led by John Ralph, culminating in a report of several hundred pages. Those were the days. Labor fully supported the change.
Now if the 50 per cent discount was deemed to be too high, there was always the option of reducing it, say to 40 per cent or 35 per cent. In fact, this is one of the proposals that had been widely floated by the busy advocates of tax reform, including MP Allegra Spender.

Oh dear, not Allegra, that'll send Dame Groan right off: Allegra Spender. Picture: Sam Ruttyn

It might be worse ...

Thank the long absent lord, Dame Groan never worries about the big picture.

Instead she was so exasperated she had to resort to dot points:

What is likely to emerge is a hotchpotch of different arrangements, including the immensely bureaucratic (proposed) Innovative Business CGT Concession. Businesses that meet the criteria for this scheme will be able to stick to the 50 per cent discount on CGT, although there is a lifetime cap on the benefit achievable.
But check out the ludicrous list to qualify.

•  The company must be genuinely focused on developing one or more new or significantly improved innovations for commercialisation.
• The business relating to that innovation must have a high growth potential.
• The company must demonstrate that it has the potential to be able to successfully scale up that business.
• The company must demonstrate that it has the potential to be able to address a broader than local market, including global markets, through that business.
• The company must demonstrate that it has the potential to be able to have competitive advantages for that business.

Shocking stuff and Dame Groan was in despair...

Companies must meet these criteria when equity is first raised, but the assessment by the Australian Taxation Office of whether the tests are met does not occur until the capital gain is realised. If this is the lauded carve-out for start-ups, it’s a joke. In the meantime, other small businesses can just put up with the onerous and costly new CGT rules, even with the enhanced concessions.
Chalmers also would be wise just to drop the changes to the taxation of trusts, having been forced to back away from his bizarre attack on discretionary testamentary trusts. It is estimated that about 400,000 small businesses are set up as trusts and the imposition of a minimum 30 per cent tax will force many of them to the wall. This is made worse by the double taxing of bucket companies that often are set up by businesses in association with discretionary trusts.
As for the naive advice offered up in the budget papers that small businesses currently set up as trusts should simply restructure as companies, the cost of doing so is basically overlooked. The payment of stamp duty to state governments alone will make this route impossible for many small businesses.

Just to compound Dame Groan's grief, the reptiles insisted on a snap of the Cold Chisel man, Labor Party President Wayne Swan

Dammit, enough of that working class nonsense, let's hear it for those rich enough to be able to construct a trust to hide their wealth:

It’s worth noting that many discretionary trusts distribute funds to charities and not-for-profit organisations. This option will be effectively destroyed by a 30 per cent minimum tax, to be initially collected by the trustee and distributed to beneficiaries on a non-refundable basis.
There’s no obvious solution to making charities tax-exempt from trust distributions, although a way out may have been found in respect of realised capital gains.
One of the most depressing aspects of the past several weeks has been the obvious decline in the professional capacity of the Treasury to offer well-informed and economically sensible advice.
Once upon a time, Treasury was the premier agency for excellent economic counsel; not any longer. Mind you, if you head to Treasury’s website, you will learn about the Inclusion and Diversity Strategy 2023-2028, “where difference is celebrated and used to activate innovative ideas, policies and practices”.
It doesn’t extend to ensuring that Treasury officials are fully prepared to answer questions from senators. But evidently within Treasury, “diversity, wellbeing and integrity are embedded in a supportive culture that enables people to thrive”.
It’s just a pity there is not more focus on having the most capable and experienced people providing the highest quality advice to the benefit of all Australians.

Oh dear, the pond knows who that is, and what a pity Dame Groan didn't make it clearer: 

It’s just a pity there is not more focus on having the most capable and experienced people, like me, the most fair and experienced groaner in the land, providing the highest quality advice to the benefit of all Australians.

Fixed it.

The pond trusts that the usual suspects enjoyed this outing ... as David Rowe turned up to help celebrate the latest twist in the little England saga ...

Is there no end to entertaining circuses?