In which the pond surveys the dismal Monday reptile scene, with only a Canuck-devoted Caterist in full peacock mode ...

If the lizard Oz started off this day with a single property scare story, the pond knew it would have to reference Samantha Maiden's piece: 

The Coalition reckons rents could increase by 30 per cent, but NAB and Ray White insist they are not | Samantha Maiden
The Coalition’s rent scare campaign has collapsed after the very companies it cited said they never made the predictions being attributed to them, writes Samantha Maiden.

Take it away Sam:

In the delightful children’s book The Boy Who Cried Alien, a notorious fibber named Larry the Liar tries to warn his town that a spaceship has crash-landed.
Nobody believes him, although there is a happy ending of sorts when aliens roam the town and he opens up the School of Fabulous Fibbing.
The basic idea is that dishonesty destroys your trust and reputation and people will not believe you when the real danger arrives.
Something of a similar nature is unfolding in the increasingly deranged debate over the impact of negative gearing and capital gains tax on rising rents.
The Albanese government reckons that Treasury says the impact is $2 a week and nobody believes them.
The Coalition reckons rents could increase by 30 per cent and nobody with any brains believes that either.
They could of course. Theoretically they could go up 500 per cent. Pick a figure. It’s possible.
But is it likely?
When even the truth-tellers – the National Australia Bank and Ray White – insist they are not saying that at all, it’s a big roll of the dice for the Liberal Party to assert otherwise.
First, the National Australia Bank clarified this week that it was not predicting 30 per cent rent increases at all.
Instead, it was a hypothetical prediction of how much rents would need to rise to make it attractive for new investors, if property prices didn’t fall at all.
A kind of fantasy footaball for property investors, if you will.
Then, Ray White entered the chat with a similar prediction.
But once again, it was not a forecast of how much rents will actually rise but a hypothetical scenario about what needs to happen to deliver the same profits to new investors if property prices did not fall at all.
“We don’t do forecasts for rents,’’ the property group said.
“Ray White is not forecasting a 30 per cent rise in rents.
“In reality, we expect the adjustment to come through a combination of higher rents and softer prices.”
Got it? It seems the Liberal Party missed the memo.
Over in question time, Liberal MP Melissa McIntosh was still talking 30 per cent rent hikes.
“My question is to the Minister for Housing,’’ she said.
“Today, Australia’s biggest rental property manager, Ray White, said rents could surge by 30 per cent as a result of Labor’s toxic taxes. Is the minister damn proud of making millions of Australians pay higher rents?”
For the government, it was a case of come in spinner, given that Ray White itself had clarified it was not saying this at all.
“Really appreciate this question from the member opposite,’’ Housing Minister Clare O’Neil said.
“I’m really worried for the honourable member opposite who has asked me this question for the sheer number of mistruths she was able to pack into one question.
“Let’s go through it one by one. The first is that she has knowingly misquoted me in her question.”
What’s curious about the entire hullabaloo is that there are plenty of good and solid reasons to probe and criticise the Albanese government.
There’s no need to resort to fact-free scaremongering...

Uh huh, and indeed, but who provided all the evidence for the fact-free fear mongering?

Here Ms Maiden let every single ball go through to the keeper, though as Bangladesh just showed, that doesn't always work. 

For that information you had to turn to Tory in the Weekly Beast last Friday ...

Brace yourself, The Australian warned on Tuesday, citing a note from the National Australia Bank to its clients: “Rents are projected to soar by as much as 30% over the next two years to compensate many landlords for the loss of property tax concessions” in the budget, its story said.
Hold on, NAB said. That was “one possible scenario” and “not a forecast”.
And on Wednesday, again in The Australian: the real estate agency Ray White “has affirmed that Jim Chalmers’ budget could lead to a 30 per cent spike in costs for tenants”.
Whoa, Ray White said. That wasn’t a forecast. More like a “modelling scenario”.
“We don’t do forecasts for rents,’’ a Ray White spokesperson told news.com.au. “Ray White is not forecasting a 30 per cent rise in rents.”
Not to be denied, on Thursday the Oz ran a further story quoting the real estate agency as saying: “The Australian has accurately represented Ray White’s analysis.”

In proper lizard Oz fashion, Tory provided a link to within the Graudian for further rebuttal ...

Critics of Labor’s tax changes claim rents could climb by up to 30%. Here’s why they probably won’t

But that's not the real point. The compelling thing is that even a fellow Murdochian couldn't stand the naked scare mongering and claptrap carry on involved in the latest lizard Oz jihad ... which brings the pond back to today.

Heck, they were at it again.

Come on down Major Mitchell, taking the hive mind back to the days when the hunt for Order of Lenin medals were about to begin ...

COMMENTARY by CHRIS MITCHELL
Economic fibs: Chalmers is using first-home buyers and renters as a smokescreen
Left-wing economists and media have spent decades misrepresenting the Hawke-Keating negative gearing backflip, while rents surge and first home buyers face negative equity.

Feel the vibe of Hawkie and the French clock lover living rent free in the hive mind:

There's a lot more ancient history to hand by following the archive link, but after that extended plunge into ancient history, the Major turned to the present, and sho 'nuff ...

...This newspaper on August 18 splashed with economics correspondent Matthew Cranston warning the National Australian Bank believed rents could rise 30 per cent as landlords losing tax benefits sought to recoup their losses.
The nation’s biggest residential rental agency, Ray White, concurred in the following day’s page one lead.
“Ray White, which manages 250,000 rental properties nationally … released analysis showing new investors stripped of property tax concessions … would have to raise rents by about 30 per cent.”
Chalmers and Minister for Housing Clare O’Neil criticised the reporting of the Ray White and NAB analyses on Wednesday, sticking with the budget forecast of rents up $2 a week.
They were apparently unaware The Daily Telegraph on August 15 had already published details of Sydney suburbs where rents had risen $100 a week since May.
On Thursday, the AFR reported residential property development giant Stockland had seen new home sales inquiries fall for three months. It expected no recovery until interest rates fell.
Chalmers is using first-home buyers and renters as a smokescreen. All he really wants is more revenue as the government heads to cumulative deficits he forecasts will hit $1.2 trillion by 2030.

Très drôle, and now pardon the pond if it stays in reptile survey mode ...

Near the top of the digital "news" page early on the Monday came the usual Australian Daily Zionist News outing ...

EXCLUSIVE
‘High Court’s challenge to foil the antisemites’: leading judge
Ian Jackman has urged the High Court to revisit its ‘dogmatic’ stance on free speech, warning antisemites are exploiting past rulings to vilify Australian Jews.
By Elizabeth Pike

Devoted herpetologists will recall Dame Slap moaning that there wasn't enough free speech and urging the High Court to offer more.

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

Sock it to 'em Dame Slap:

...The High Court’s invention of an implied freedom of political communication and further inventions of entirely subjective tests that apparently determine when the implied freedom applies, make the whole area harder to decipher than the Voynich Manuscript. At least the Voynich Manuscript has some pictures. This uncertainty means we, the people, have no real clue as to what we can and cannot say – until a High Court cryptographer tells us so.

Hanson is forced, then, in this case to ask the High Court for permission to talk. This is policymaking, not law. Each case is the equivalent of tossing a coin by reference to previous cases that were coin tosses too. Heads, you win. Tails, you lose. Or shall we make it best of three?

This is untenable. Hanson supporters may not be reading Federal Court and High Court judgments, but their instinct to distrust the tendencies of a small group of elites to think they know better than the rest of us is entirely rational.

It would be a travesty and a sign of cowardice, or perhaps hubris, if the High Court refuses to hear Hanson’s appeal.

It is high time the nation’s most senior court took a long and considered look at the mess they have created and the uncertainly they have foisted on Australians.

Now it seems that there's way too much free speech, way too much freedumb ...

Rule of Law Institute vice-president Chris Merrit said the address was a “careful analysis” after fellow speakers at the conference raised concerns about the “adverse consequences” of implied constitutional freedom.
“Freedom of speech is important but no right is absolute,” Mr Merritt said.

Go tell that to Dame Slap and her whining about the perils of being Pauline.

Moral? Trust the reptiles to get you coming, and then get you going ...

Right at the top of the digital edition came the usual reptile defence hysteria, though strangely the bromancer was MIA and the reptiles gave Cameron the job of panic merchant

EXCLUSIVE
Fat frigates: doubts over speed, range and endurance
Australia’s $27bn Hunter-class frigates have ballooned to 10,500 tonnes, raising expert fears the warships lack the speed and range needed for the Indo-Pacific.
By Cameron Stewart

Somebody should have sent Cam a pack of drones to help him out ...

For some reason the pond was reminded of Wilcox ...

Perhaps that was only because the reptiles were wildly excited by her leaving the Nine rags ... and in true Daily Australian Zionist News fashion, they made it all about one cartoon ...

Anyone who draws attention to the deplorable ways of the current government of Israel is an antisemite, at least in the hive mind ... but maybe she was just jack of it all, in the way that each day the pond feels like taking a hammer to its screens.

As part of this day's survey, the pond should note that simpleton Simon was out and about ...

Canberra has been left holding the bag for states’ profligacy
Anthony Albanese has passed two milestones in the last fortnight – one might be considered an accomplishment, though not so much the other.
By Simon Benson
Political analyst

And so on, and on the one hand the pond thinks it has a duty to correspondents, and on the other hand, simplistic Simon was too tedious a read, so the archive could handle his both siderism.

The bouffant one was also out and about, though in the usual Shanners way, he could only manage a two minute spurt which the pond personally had to save to the intermittent archive, as no one else had cared enough ...

Billion-dollar Band-Aids no solution to job-threatening Labor policies
Labor is beginning to become aware of the dire outlook for rural Australia, but there’s no sign yet of a fundamental change.
By Dennis Shanahan

What a reliable reptile he is.

Someone has to roll up the sleeves each day and scribble about job-threatening policies, and Shanners is always there ...but what's that line about "due to drought"?

Is the silly old reptile hinting that maybe climate change might be hovering into view?

And so to the reason for staging a survey.

That archive-directed teaser trailers left plenty of room for the Caterist doing an "elbows up Australia" routine ...

Please allow the immortal Rowe to set the scene...

Now on with the Caterist ...

The header: Albanese is learning all the wrong lessons from Carney’s Canada; Carney is correcting the imbalance in the housing market. Albanese, on the other hand, is frozen in the headlights.

The caption for the snap of the two grinners: Anthony Albanese with Mark Carney at Vatican City.

The quarry whispering Caterist spent a bigly five minutes using Canucks as a club for Albo's mob, but steady Canucks, the flood waters expert also spends some time clubbing Canucks, just as King Donald mounts an economic war...

If Jim Chalmers’ goal was to provoke a housing slump and simultaneously increase the cost of renting, his 2026 budget will go down as a rip-roaring success.
Since neither of these objectives featured in his speech on budget night, however, we are drawn to the alarming conclusion that the government has abandoned the discipline of policy formation and is simply making it up as it bumbles along.
This is particularly risky in the housing market, since history shows that sudden shocks in the property sector frequently trigger recessions. An International Monetary Fund study of 122 recessions found that the housing market was the epicentre of a quarter of them. In most cases, the shocks were caused by non-market forces – that is, government intervention.
You don’t have to be Milton Friedman to conclude that we’d be in a happier place now if the Albanese administration had decided it would do nothing other than remove red tape and lower and simplify taxes.
Instead, it has thrown a succession of interventions at the market – the Housing Accord, the 1.2 million new homes target, the expanded 5 per cent deposit guarantee, and now changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax – in the hope that something will stick. Some hit the accelerator (cheaper deposits), some slam on the brake (cuts to the CGT discount) and some are simply hot air (the new homes target). Buyers, sellers, investors and developers have responded by sitting on their hands.
It is a different story in Canada, which emerged from the Covid pandemic with remarkably similar problems: surging immigration and a housing shortage.

Get ready Jimbo, there are lessons to be learned ... Treasurer Jim Chalmers during Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

The pond rarely has a twinge at his absence, but the pond suddenly had a deep regret that Lord Downer hadn't become a regular Monday scribbler for the lizard Oz, and so was MIA this day.

Instead the pond was left with a caricaturing Caterist, truly beyond caricature as a whining Pom...

Canada also has a centre-left government, albeit led by a Prime Minister with considerably more real-world experience than either his predecessor – the hapless Justin Trudeau – or his Australian counterpart, whom he visited in Canberra in March. Who knows what they discussed behind closed doors, but the official communique gives us a flavour of the discussions: “Leaders acknowledged the Ngunnawal people as Traditional Custodians of the lands … Leaders recognised the shared values underpinning the close partnership … parliamentary democracy, multiculturalism …”
Multiculturalism ranks alongside five-pin bowling, poutine and Justin Bieber as one of Canada’s least helpful contributions to the world. It was adopted in Canada around the time Coca-Cola launched its “I’d like to teach the world to sing” campaign, with a similar spirit of earnest but incurious optimism. Over the course of half a century, the saccharine sentimentality of multiculturalism hardened into the doctrine of diversity among the fruitcake theorists on the progressive left and in Labor’s policy platform.
“We recognise Australia’s diversity is our greatest strength,” it reads. Labor will “seek to develop policies and make decisions informed by an envelope-based understanding of the needs of different Australians”.
Did the authors of this document even try to contemplate the downside of diversity and attempt to measure the trade-offs? Almost certainly not. As Thomas Sowell observed: “It is scary how easily so many people can be brainwashed by sheer repetition of a word.” The diversity imperative is distorting Labor’s thinking on immigration just as the White Australia policy did in the 1960s, and for essentially the same reason. Theoretical arguments about the ethnic composition of Australia have clouded practical decisions about the quantity and quality of our migration intake.
Linking the housing shortage to the unprecedented number of migrants admitted since Covid has become taboo among the Labor intelligentsia. In April, junior Treasury minister Andrew Leigh wrote this in the Australian Financial Review: blaming migrants for a housing shortage was “a populist manoeuvre”. On housing, he wrote that “migrants aren’t the culprits”, “In fact, they’re often part of the solution.”
Carney, a former central bank governor who studied alongside Angus Taylor at Oxford, takes a different view. His strategy, released in 2024, stipulates that immigration needed to be matched to Canada’s “capacity to build new homes” and that the objective was to “balance housing supply with housing demand”. Canada reduced planned permanent migration from the previous trajectory of 500,000 a year to 395,000 in 2025, 380,000 in 2026 and 365,000 in 2027, while also introducing targets for temporary migration for the first time. The previous target of 673,650 new temporary residents in 2025 was roughly halved to 385,000 in 2026 and 370,000 in 2027, as were student arrivals, which were cut to 155,000 in 2026, down from 305,000.
The changes to the housing market have been startling. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation reported in July that slow population growth was weakening housing demand. Vacancy rates were rising in a number of cities and rent growth was slowing.

Yep, it's just a one time Pom black sheep bashing furriners for ruining the country ... Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has addressed the Australian Parliament with a focus on trade and security.

Could "melongate"get another run? Of course it could ...

The heat had been taken out of the property market, and prices were beginning to drop in some cities, though not as sharply or as erratically as in Australia. It is too early to tell whether Carney’s incentives to build new housing stock in close co-operation with provincial governments will work. Yet by slamming on the brakes for temporary migration and prioritising migrants with useful skills, Carney is correcting the imbalance between supply and demand in the housing market.
Albanese, on the other hand, is frozen in the headlights, without a coherent housing policy and an immigration policy that remains in flux. Reports at the weekend suggest Albanese has been spooked by predictions that cutting immigration will push the country into recession. He’s also nervous about taking on the commercial vested interests of the university sector by capping overseas student numbers and removing the links between student visas and permanent migration.
Neither can we gloss over the PM’s vanity as a constraint on rational housing and migration policy. The suspicion that Albanese has succumbed to a particularly strong form of hubris – an occupational hazard political leaders should guard against – has been confirmed over the last fortnight with “Melon-gate”. The entire executive government, including its most fervent feminists, has been absorbed in attempting to impose a benign interpretation on the PM’s lewd hand gestures.
Albanese’s strongest objection to linking housing policy to immigration may be that Taylor called for it first and that Albanese’s authority will be further diminished by tacitly admitting it is a sensible idea.
Either way, housing and immigration are shaping up to be perhaps the biggest test of leadership and character in Albanese’s prime ministership. Correcting course requires the courage to confront vested interests both inside and outside his own party, and correct the mistakes made in Jim Chalmers’ May budget.
It will require taking a firm position based on economic principles and inner conviction, the kind of leadership we last saw in a Labor government under Hawke and Keating.
It’s a leadership style that has been conspicuously absent in this government. Yet the experience in Canada suggests it has not entirely been extinguished, even on the left.

Sheesh, not Hawke and Keating again. 

First the Major and then the Caterist, and how that pair continue to live rent free in the hive mind as a reminder of a golden age that never was, and more to the point, as a golden age way of bashing the current Labor mob, though the pond distinctly remembers that at the time the pair were the ruination of the country, or so the reptiles said ... 

... but then getting them coming and getting them going is the art and the point of the game.

And now as a trade war erupts between mad king Donald and the Canucks, the lizard Oz editorialist thought this might just be the solution, a trade war with biffo ....

So it's the right strategy, because the military campaign was such a stunning success?

As a follow up, the pond turned to the WSJ, mentioned in despatches by the lizard Oz editorialist ...

The pond has a deep admiration for anyone who can take the TACO bone spurs warrior seriously ...

Full steam ahead, and what could possibly go wrong?

And with that, the pond simply had to note this note about Golding...

Too painfully true to be funny? And just as the Nine rags abandon the one thing they have going for them? Their cartoonists ...

Another sample of Golding's wares ...

And now, as the Australian Daily Zionist News has been mentioned a few times, this ...

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

 

Imagine the pond's despair.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pond hates doing anything using handwriting. 

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

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

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

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

The pond isn't the only one.

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

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

Marvel at the scribbled annotations:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so to the real reason for the entire exercise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uh oh, that word again ...

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

On with Dame Slap ...

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

Quick, an AV distraction featuring the stifled one. 

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

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

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

Charming.

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

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

  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See The New Yorker ...

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

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

And so to the final whine ...

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

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

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

Elbows up Canada ...

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

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

 

Shameful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And just who should appear below the canny Cranston?

Himself, served up again ...

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

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

Crude propaganda graphics matching the crude propaganda.

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

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

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

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

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

The Lynch mob attending a lynching?

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's deeply offensive ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She's a bloody feenomin ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He really is off his oats ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suspiciously devout? JD is both amoral and barking mad:

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

And again ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh yes, a real triumph ...

And speaking of JD ...