After a flirtation with the dangerously "woke" deceased songbird - so much talk of loving the world and doing good and gay rights and black lives matter - the reptiles had another chance to take a walk on the wild side with the death of Tim Curry.
What with a hint of the gay, the trans and the exotic, the reptiles could have shown they knew how to do Jim Sharman's walk.
Instead they dropped poor old Tim way down the page, with a piece borrowed from The Times:
OBITUARY Rocky Horror’s Tim Curry dies aged 80 Tim Curry played the transvestite Dr Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Show with an erotic villainy that inspired cult fandom. By The Times
It seems a bit of cross dressing is good enough for your average dinkum footballer, but might be too much for the hive mind.
Sheesh, and the pond had wanted to boast it had been to the Grand Old Opry and not just at the wretched new theatre but at the Ryman Auditorium, heart of Nashville. You can take the pond out of Tamworth, but you can't take the Tamworth out of ...
Instead, for a lead, the reptiles went with the Nepal flash flood and a gif of disaster porn...
After that, the reptiles reverted to their usual wretched standard form of a propaganda sheet, boasting of their triumph in inducing an attack on dangerous furriners ...
The pond has to be indefatigable in labelling Geoff as indefatigable, but that's because he seems to have a first mortgage on double barrelled appearances at the top of the digital news, ma ...
COMMENTARY by GEOFF CHAMBERS Can Labor pull off its 'tough on immigration' act? When Labor’s final migration package is released next month, expect more of a feather duster than the big stick One Nation and the Coalition have advocated.
It's posed as a question, but Geoff and his shottie have already determined the answer ...
...As The Australian revealed this week, the Australian Border Force is finally pursuing unmanned drones to keep watch over the country’s vast ocean approaches.
Yet while monitoring illegal fishers and people-smugglers is vital, the Albanese government must impose greater authority over the country’s visa rules, have the courage to remove illegal overstayers taking advantage of Australia’s generosity and stop the rorting that has dominated sections of the traditionally lucrative international student market.
The Australian Zionist Daily News was also busy ...
EXCLUSIVE ‘Job not done’: Bondi families lead royal commission cry Bondi bereaved, Holocaust survivors call for extended antisemitism inquiry Holocaust survivors, Bondi victims’ families and former prime ministers have joined calls to demand the inquiry be expanded, concerned by its failure to call vital witnesses. By James Dowling and Elizabeth Pike
Even as the Royal Commission announced the last public hearings and the date for the delivery of findings, discreetly after the anniversary of the massacre, the reptiles were still bleating for more.
This handily sets them up for an extended bout of rage and pique in December when the findings and recommendations were announced.
The pond usually tries to avoid the petulant one, and this guaranteed it ...
Bondi’s dead deserved a forensic inquiry Not only is this royal commission one of the shortest in history but the elephant in the room, radical Islam, barely had a look-in. By Peta Credlin Columnist
Division, hate and fear and loathing, it's the staple diet for the monoculture hive mind ... and it was enough to make the pond personally entomb the petulance in the intermittent archive.
As usual, as a form of balance, at this point the pond usually turns to Haaretz to wonder what sort of country the residents of Gaza and the West Bank - and Israel generally for that matter - might inherit...
If you went beyond that screen cap, you copped this ...
At his party's convention on Saturday, Abbas spoke of the need for collegial cooperation among the Arab parties. Notably, he talked about joining the coalition and the government – as in taking ministerial portfolios, something Arab parties have traditionally declined to do. He then uttered the supposedly fireball words: "The Palestinian State exists and is standing; all the world recognizes it except the U.S. and Israel. God willing, they will recognize it. This is the kind of peace," he said, waving his finger at the audience with gravitas, "that will guarantee the end of the conflict, the end of the occupation, and achieve reconciliation and peace between the Palestinian people and the Israeli people." The horror. Under his leadership, the United Arab List has more than lived up to the model of the perfect Arab citizen that Zionist Israelis say they long for. His party has embraced political integration. He considered crossing lines from the opposition to join Netanyahu's coalition long before Benny Gantz put out embarrassing ads about breaking through the pro- and anti-Netanyahu blocs (to be fair, Gantz did cross those lines for a unity coalition in 2020 and got burned). Mansour Abbas led the first independent Arab party to join an Israeli coalition in 2021, putting the occupation on a back burner. He withstood endless debate and much criticism in the Arab political community for breaking taboos; he also earned a core voter base worth about five seats and gave voice to the consistent majority among Arabs who want an Arab party to join coalitions. Most recently, he broke with the Islamic roots of the party and wooed a mainstream Jewish lawmaker from the heartland of centrist Israel – Yoav Segalovitz, a former senior police official – to consider joining his list of candidates. In other words, Abbas is a leader. The pragmatic, accommodationist yet confident personality of an Arab political leader sends shivers through the ruling fanatical right wing. They really need Arab politicians to be radical Palestinian nationalists whom they can accuse of being ISIS or Nukhba, to prop up their flaccid polls with fear. Instead, Abbas insists on looking like a cross between Santa Claus and a teddy bear. Like nearly all Palestinian citizens of Israel, Abbas also has an impeccable record of having nothing to do with terror. No matter – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's rhetorical firing squad went to town on him for daring to mention peace, reconciliation and a Palestinian state. This is not unlike Netanyahu's 2011 fit against then-U.S. president Barack Obama for the crime of stating that a two-state solution would be based on the 1967 borders (the Green Line) – a great big duh. Not even a nation Netanyahu's current tirade included tired slogans that a Palestinian state would be controlled by Iran, or that it would be a "terror state," in the words of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. Minister of Annexation (my designation) Bezalel Smotrich tried to bully the opposition parties into disavowing Abbas and declaring their support for his plan to build up E1 once and for all. That's the strip of land outside Jerusalem cutting off the West Bank from north to south, seen as a death knell for a Palestinian state. Pretty much everyone ignored him. This anti-Palestinian-state screed followed on the heels of last week's statements by David Yosef, Israel's Chief Sephardi Rabbi, that the Palestinian "rabble" is not even a nation and never will be. But Netanyahu's primary target was not actually Abbas; it was his greatest opposition challenger at present, Gadi Eisenkot. "The price of a left-wing coalition with the Muslim Brotherhood has once again been exposed," said Netanyahu. "These are the partners of Eisenkot ... who boycott Likud voters but welcome supporters of [Arab party leader Ahmad] Tibi." Netanyahu has been doing this for months, hoping to rally anti-Arab hatred to drive voters toward the far right and prevent such a dastardly coalition. Here is where things got exciting: Eisenkot seized the moment. He boldly called Netanyahu's bluff and said yes! You're right, you incompetent, criminal, boomer loser. I see all partners for a better Israel as my political partners; I see all citizens as equals and embrace an optimistic future of cooperation instead of corruption. Your leadership brought disaster. Palestinian statehood alongside Israel will release Palestinians from decades of misery, while liberating our children and grandchildren from the curse of being occupiers and improving Jewish-Arab relations here in Israel. I support that future of peace and reconciliation that Abbas, my future partner, courageously embraces. I, Dahlia, also have a bridge to sell you. What Eisenkot actually said could not have been more disappointing for anyone still hoping for a leader. He simply parroted the line Netanyahu has been saying at least since 2015: "There will be no Palestinian state."
No wonder the pond prefers to do the walk with Tim ...
As for the rest of the extreme far right in the lizard Oz, it was equally depressing ...
Jack the Insider decided to take a snort in the nostrils ...
Elbows up Canada ...the pond has dealt with loons for decades, and now it's your unfortunate turn.
No chance to wonder about AI and the fate of the planet, no chance to celebrate the workings of the NT and Queensland governments, as the infallible Pope and more generally, Wuerker did ...
The pond apologises for its lack of interest in the lizard Oz offerings this day, but did do a deeper dive into the lizard Oz editorialist's offering.
It's no recompense, some might construe it as a bloody insult, but the pond was reminded yet again that Thursdays have always been the bleakest day in the reptile calendar...
The lizard Oz editorialist continued the current reptile jihad, and pretty much summed up all the pond had ignored above...
They really are busy setting up the final report and its recommendations for a slagging, and endless Xmas hysteria.
The lizard Oz editorialist also continued a much loved jihad, attacking the government on matters economic ...
Sure, it's framed as a "challenge" but in the land of the jihadists, this government has been a failure, is a failure, and will continue to be a failure, except in the matter of gambling reforms, where they have done just what the football mob and the Murdoch tabloids wanted them to do.
Finally, there was a rousing call to arms, even as the pond had noted, courtesy of Haaretz, the way the current government treats civilians ...
Once again Wilcox entered this dangerous territory ...
The pond guesses that at this point she doesn't have much to lose, even as she reminds the pond that her departure will produce a loss.
Here's hoping she finds a new home and fresh enthusiasm for the many tasks still at hand, including the need to wander into dangerous territory ...
Depressing times, depressing days, how the pond hates Thursdays ...
It's way past time for a bit of ancient kink.
Poor Jim Sharman, not only did he get dudded on a share of the profits, it also overshadowed all his other achievements ... (one of the pond's favourite moments in life was when it secured a painting Jim had been eyeing off).
On its road trip across the United States, the pond fully intended to get to Dollywood, and drove up the road to the main entrance, only to discover it was closed.
It was a bitter disappointment, and the pond's only Dolly anecdote. The pond did make it to Gracelands, and took away the lesson that you can never have enough TV sets ...
It's a measure of Dolly's place that for a nanosecond the lizard Oz abandoned its sundry top of the digital "news" jihads to go all in on Dolly ...
Agreed, it was a lot of borrowed plumage, from the likes of The Times and AFP, but at least they had a go...
Just below all that however, the Australian Daily Zionist News went about its usual business ...
EXCLUSIVE Top brass issue plea to extend Bondi royal commission Antisemitism royal commission a ‘lost opportunity’ without an extension: security chiefs Thirty of Australia’s most eminent national security leaders, including former governor-general David Hurley, say the inquiry could be a ‘lost opportunity’ unless urgently extended.
By James Dowling
The reptiles want it to go on forever, an endless treasure trove of daily Zionist news.
For news of a fanatical religious zealot at work you had to head off to Haaretz...
Down below that the lizard Oz added other jihads to the day's offerings...
Eek, is that the poodle?
The indefatigable Geoff was at it again ...
EXCLUSIVE PM, Treasurer face internal unrest, as business chiefs slam mediocrity The Business Council of Australia has warned Anthony Albanese that Australia’s ‘mediocre’ global competitiveness ranking must be urgently reversed as Labor MPs voice internal budget concerns. By Geoff Chambers and Sarah Ison
In the full header, the reptiles made clearer their targets ...
Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers face internal unrest, as business chiefs slam mediocrity
Could it be that the reptiles manage to label so many stories as EXCLUSIVE because nobody else can be fagged to join their assorted crusades?
As usual Geoff wielded a double barrelled shottie and chambered another shell ...
COMMENTARY by GEOFF CHAMBERS Business leaders flirt with Labor after being dumped by conservatives Union leaders don’t blanket Coalition governments with compliments when the conservatives are in power. They go for the jugular. So why is the Business Council love-bombing Labor?
The pond felt the urgent need for a bit of relieving business humour ...
Go sandgropers.
Just as tiresome as the chambering Chambers was Dame Slap, raging over on the extreme far right ...
The obvious irony is the entirely meritless Dame Slap rabbiting on about merit, but the only thing to note here was the way that the reptiles traduced a fine Brit sitcom, as if trading off on that made Dame Slap less of a prat ...
The day the humourless Dame Slap manages to match Yes Minister will be the day she resigns from the lizard Oz.
She's in the intermittent archive, personally placed there by the pond for any stray masochist, though perhaps they should try the Percy Grainger solution and get a nice bit of birch for their daily flagellation fix ...
It's difficult to imagine anyone being more tiresome and more humourless than Dame Slap, but Linda somehow manages it ...
For the love of the long absent lord, just go away.
Still making it all about "me, me, me", as if she's the one that was raped.
It was with particular relish that the pond personally stored her in the intermittent archive.
Fortunately, as he often does, the bromancer turned up to save the pond's day.
(Would he adopt the new argot of referring to Lake Ontario as Lake America?)
The header: Will Donald Trump walk the talk on Iranian sanctions? The US President bombed Tehran while letting it sell oil abroad – now he is betting the toughest sanctions ever imposed can force open the Strait of Hormuz.
The caption for the snap of the gesticulating mango monster: US President Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday (AEST). Picture: AFP
The pond has taken particular pleasure in the way that the bromancer of late has seen the scales fall from his eyes, his hopes dashed by his Faux Noise kissing cousins' preferred authoritarian leader ...
Can Donald Trump possibly do to the Iranian regime – namely compel it to reopen the Strait of Hormuz unconditionally – by economic sanctions what he has signally failed to do by military strike? First, it’s the right tactic for the US. A maximum economic boycott, sanction and blockade of Iran should have preceded military action. For most of the time the US was bombing Iran, it actually allowed Iran to continue exporting its oil, apparently out of a desire to minimise disruption to global energy markets. Now, Trump says, he will impose the toughest economic conditions on Iran ever seen. The critical question is whether Washington can get Iran’s most important trade partners – China, Turkey, Russia and the Gulf states themselves – to enforce the US sanctions regime. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declared: “Let there be no ambiguity as to the position of the United States. An economic engagement of any kind with this murderous regime will expose those responsible to the full reach of American power.”
To help out the hive mind, the reptiles introduced a graphic so that the readership wouldn't replicate the ignorance of Americans in vox pops when asked a geography question ...
The bromancer kept trying to talk up the notion that the mad King had hit on the right tactic, and - even more risibly - that Bessent had left a shred of personal credibility:
It’s noteworthy that the White House got Bessent to make the announcement. He and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are the two cabinet secretaries with the greatest personal credibility. Though passing all the Trump loyalty tests, the two rarely speak in the hyperbole-charged MAGA Trump dialect of often hallucinatory exaggeration and wish fulfilment.
...Bessent’s bond market intervention is a signal that “Washington is increasingly uncomfortable with soaring long-term borrowing costs,” said Axel Rudolph, the chief technical analyst at the investing and trading platform IG. Bessent’s attempts to battle the financial markets are ironic, as he worked alongside Soros when he beat the Bank of England and forced the pound to crash out of the European exchange rate mechanism in 1992. That drama, which became known as Black Wednesday, showed how hard it is for a government to defend a currency when investors believe it is overvalued. But despite that experience, Bessent took part in a joint operation with Japan to prop up the yen earlier this month – seemingly to prevent Tokyo selling US bonds to fund yen purchases. “The irony of the guy working for Soros and Druckenmiller who broke the Bank of England back in 1992 pretending that you can do FX intervention alone, and lastingly defend a currency, is just amazing,” Adam Posen, the president of the Peterson Institute and an expert on the Japanese economy, told the Financial Times earlier this month.
But the penny had to drop and it did so quickly, with a "nonetheless" billy goat butt ...
Nonetheless, the plain truth is the Trump administration, for all its bellicose bluster, has a very feeble record of enforcing so-called secondary sanctions; that is, sanctions against third nations that trade with the primary subject of the sanction itself, in this case Iran. Although Trump likes to wield economic instruments of state power, this circumstance exposes his own distinctive weaknesses. Sanctions that are meant to cripple a nation should be a very rare policy effort. They work much better if they are multilateral rather than unilateral. An earlier president, a George W. Bush, say, would have brought a formidable posse of allies with him in the Iran operation. Trump instead insults and alienates allies, often imposes absurd tariffs on their economies, and then is surprised that they are slow to respond to his calls for support. Trump’s general proposition, that the US has done the lion’s share of security work and allies such as the European NATO members and Australia, are, if not free-riders, certainly not pulling their weight, is true. His demand that US allies do more on defence is thoroughly justified. Australia is among those doing very little, notwithstanding the AUKUS agreement. And it was certainly a mistake for some European allies to prevent the US even using its own military bases in Europe to conduct the initial campaign against Iran. Even the Albanese government, no profile in courage by any standard, nonetheless in contrast to most of the Europeans gave in-principle support to the initial US operation.
Insults allies? Oh come now, surely not ...
Sorry, at this point the reptiles actually dropped in another geography lesson, with little pop ups, though the pond could only be bothered with one example ...
The bromancer wended on down his gloomy path ...
Still, it’s an absolute failure of Trump’s to persuade allied opinion, much less international opinion generally, either to support the military campaign or now to support the sanctions campaign. Trump has discredited many of these economic instruments through his promiscuous, chaotic and endlessly changing deployment of them. The Wall Street Journal is surely right to label the tariff slugfest Trump has initiated with Canada, for example, as “the dumbest trade war in history”. Because Trump never abides by a trade deal for more than a few months, and is always wanting to reopen any deal, engage in new threats, impose new tariffs, international actors, allies and adversaries, have grown very wary of putting any faith at all in any trade arrangement, even a sanctions arrangement, that Trump proposes. Moreover, Trump’s wildly gyrating rhetoric on Iran, his near constant alternating announcements of peace at hand or the biggest military offensive since World War II – neither of which has ever eventuated – has destroyed Washington’s credibility on Iran across the board.
At this point the reptiles introduced an image which was perhaps a metaphor for mad king Donald, as well as for the lizard Oz and the bromancer, raging at clouds... Project not found
The pond has every confidence it would have been as tedious as the previous two geography lessons ...
Adversaries are not intimidated, allies are not inspired. Even more important, it’s clear that Trump, for the moment at least, cannot coerce Beijing to do, or refrain from doing, anything. Trump imagined a brutal US-China trade war, which he thought he would quickly win because the US is a bigger market for China than China is for the US. Instead, Beijing achieved “escalation dominance” by cutting off supply of rare earths and critical minerals that, with astute strategic planning, it had developed a near global monopoly in. Many of the weapons Trump has used against Iran depend on Chinese critical minerals. Since the critical minerals episode, Trump has ceased making any threats against China at all. All the way through the Ukraine conflict and the Iran conflict, Beijing has flouted any US sanctions and provided critical trade, money and technology to both Iran and Russia. Far from subjecting China to secondary sanctions, Trump has not even made this a significant issue in the bilateral US-China relationship. Similarly, Trump is once more courting North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. Kim too flouts all American sanctions without adverse consequence. For all that, the Iranian economy is certainly a desperate mess. It may be that at some point Tehran seeks an accommodation, even if the US-led sanctions are not watertight. But the Iranian government is now more hardline and determined than before Trump began his military operation. It still looks likely this messy impasse has a long way to run.
Relax bromancer, there are new wars to be fought, and what a triumph they are.
How long since anyone mentioned the Epstein files, as opposed to trying to work out the one night Melania stayed over in the White House in the last year?
A friend sent this clipping from Zuck's ravaging of minds:
At this point the pond should note the presence of the swishing Switzer, another reptile the pond personally consigned to the intermittent archive.
After Tampa: How Australia became the model for border protection What all the critics underestimated was how important deterrence of unauthorised maritime arrivals would become to the integrity of Australia’s immigration settlement. By Tom Switzer Contributor
The pond had no time for his nonsense, because he failed to explain how the integrity of the Australian system managed to allow in the likes of the floodwater-whispering Caterist and Switzer ...
The pond also knows what he's trying to do ... reassure punters drawn towards Gina's pet, but how can a ponderous, pompous drongo inclined to drivel match the immortal Rowe and Golding?
And so to the bonus.
Instead of the swishing Switzer, the pond turned to the man most likely to fulfil the pond's ambitions for its correspondents ... to make them so bored and so appalled that they resolved never to read another reptile emanating from the lizard Oz...
The header: Too punitive, too weak: our free speech dilemma; Section 18C is a bad law that has many defenders. But defending a bad law only guarantees social dissent.
The caption for the two snaps: Pauline Hanson and Mehreen Faruqi.
"Ned" arrived late to this reptile jihad, as he often does, and then spent a bigly five minutes bloviating on the right of reptiles to insult minorities and deploy the race card with impunity, Bolter style:
Free speech in Australia is trapped in a damaging legal bind – it is both too punitive and too weak, locked in a maze that damages our society, with politicians, parliaments and judges apparently unable to settle on urgently needed improvement mechanisms. Pauline Hanson is moving towards centre stage. She seeks leave to appeal to the High Court, having been found by the Federal Court to be in breach of section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, and if the case proceeds the High Court will rule for the first time on this provision. It follows years of fruitless political dispute about section 18C. Consider the disreputable condition of the country on free speech. Hanson’s comment that Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi should pack her bags and “piss off back to Pakistan”, while impolite, is deemed to be illegal in Australia; while pro-Palestinian demonstrations demanding the elimination of Israel “From the river to the sea” along with calls to “Globalise the intifada” – encouraging the murders of Jews – are permitted and apparently beyond the reach of our laws. A good and decent society is broken under such inconsistency and hypocrisy. How we got here is a complex story. How we escape is equally complex but must begin with recognition of our dilemma.
What a fatuous attempt at both siderism, what a typical Australian Daily Zionist News ploy.
At the heart of "Ned's" blather? The usual images designed to terrify the hive mind: A Pro-Palestine demonstration marches through Melbourne’s CBD. Picture: David Crosling
"Ned" kept up an incessant whining and moaning, in a bid to outdo Linda:
Section 18C is a bad law that has many defenders. But defending a bad law only guarantees social dissent. Sadly, it is an article of faith for the Labor Party. The law proscribes race-based speech likely to “offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate”, with its critics saying the bar is set far too low. Former Liberal attorney-general George Brandis branded the provision a “grotesque limitation” on free speech and invoked George Orwell to say it was a device to channel how people thought. The Abbott government arrived in 2013 determined to reform the provision. It had plenty of intellectual support. Former NSW Supreme Court chief justice Jim Spigelman said: “The freedom to offend is an integral component of freedom of speech. There is no right not to be offended. I am not aware of any international human rights instrument, or national anti-discrimination statute in another liberal democracy, that extends to conduct that is merely offensive.” He said “offend” and “insult” impinged on free speech in a way “humiliate” and “intimidate” did not. Former human rights commissioner Sev Ozdowski said a threshold at “offend” was too low and contributed to distrust. But Labor was unmoved and crushed Tony Abbott’s reform. It branded the proposals a surrender to racism and racists. Labor made the debate about racism, not free speech – a winning play. The Abbott government, hindered by its political ineptitude, had no chance. As prime minister Abbott beat a retreat, with public opinion, the ethnic lobby and many Liberals forming a tidal wave of opposition. Claims by right-wing ideologues that Abbott had “chickened out” were nonsense. Abbott lost in the parliament and with the public, and nothing has changed to this day. There is no way the parliament will reform section 18C. Any effort by the Liberal Party or Abbott to reignite the issue these days would be blind folly.
As if defending the onion muncher wasn't bad enough, the reptiles flung in a couple of wild cards ... Former Attorney General Senator George Brandis; Retired NSW Supreme Court chief justice Jim Spigelman
How desperate is it? "Ned" has to defend that tired old racist trope about furriners needing to pack their bags and piss off back home, the sort of lowbrow humour and vicious personal insult you might find in a pathetic blog when talking about the likes of the swishing US Switzer and the quarry-whispering Pom Caterist:
But events have given Hanson a fresh opportunity. After Queen Elizabeth died, Faruqi, in a classic insight into the Greens, said: “I cannot mourn the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonised peoples.” An angry Hanson responded: “Your attitude appals 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 parliament. It’s clear you’re not happy, so pack your bags and piss off back to Pakistan.” Having lost two cases in the Federal Court, Hanson said she was going to the High Court to protect free speech. Abbott was supportive. Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke was true to form: he played the race card: “If the Liberal Party thinks there should be more racist things they’re allowed to say, tell us what they are.” But constitutional lawyer Anne Twomey criticised the Federal Court and has raised doubts about the constitutional validity of section 18C, saying the treaty on which it relies, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, does not seem to include the low-level conduct that 18C outlaws. The treaty deals with far more serious offences. Constitutional lawyer Louise Clegg said in The Spectator last month she believed the High Court would invalidate section 18C. A victory for Hanson would be a remarkable event, securing the victory the Coalition had long unsuccessfully sought. Hanson would become a political heroine. It would be a devastating blow for Labor – being exposed for running repeated campaigns attacking the critics for promoting racism only to finish up humiliated by relying for decades on a provision found to be unconstitutional.
And of course the reptiles would be right on board, because how sweet it would be to add new layers of racism and bigotry to their unrelenting campaigns about furriners, Islamics and the like.
Catholic fundamentalist bigots of the onion munching, mother England worshipping kind would have a field day ... Liberal Party Federal President Tony Abbott
"Ned" decided to echo the Nazi card ...
Of course, none of this may happen – yet the stakes are high, legally and politically. Meanwhile, at the Samuel Griffth Society conference last week, Federal Court judge Ian Jackman said the nation’s current crisis over social cohesion and antisemitism should provoke an “intellectual stocktaking” and a revision of the High Court’s 30-year-old implied freedom of political communications. Jackman argued that contemporary judges, notably the NSW Court of Appeal, influenced by the “implied freedom” judgment, were stopping parliaments, notably the Minns government in NSW, from enacting laws to better protect the Jewish community and the wider public. He stated the obvious: that Australia is now “a severely fractured and divided society” far different from the Australia of 30 years ago when the High Court handed down this judgment. “It would not have occurred to Australians in the 1990s that other Australians would abuse their freedom of political communication to publicly intimidate and vilify Jews,” Jackman said. “The idea that that might have taken place on the campus of the University of Sydney for weeks on end was simply unthinkable. Back then, we associated that behaviour with Nazi thugs in the Germany of the 1930s. There are many, probably the vast majority, who regard it as their democratic duty to stand against this hatred and wickedness and, if they can, to stop it.”
Actually muh lud, if the pond might be so bold, back in the 1930s, a reptile hero thought that Adolf was the really great man of the century, doing great things ...
Still no news of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank, a kind of modern times Kristallnacht?
To bring the pond down, the reptiles flung in a snap of the beefy boofhead, though seeing how despondent and bemused he looked did restore spirits a little ... Angus Taylor during Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman
To cap it all off, "Ned" had the cheek to talk about damaging the best interests of "our society", while scribbling for a rag that's part of a foreign-owned empire that has done its very best to debase public discourse, not least by mounting relentless jihads on anyone who has the temerity to disagree with them...
Yet efforts by the NSW parliament to limit public assembly for a temporary period in the aftermath of a terrorist attack were denied by the court, which said preserving social cohesion in this matter was not a constitutionally legitimate purpose. The reality today, nine months after the Bondi massacre, is that the NSW government and parliament are not able to apply the curbs and limits they want on demonstrators who openly promote antisemitism and advocate violence against Israel and Jews. Jackman delivered two strong messages. First, that this change in Australia’s life should drive the High Court into a “prompt reconsideration of the proper limits to our general freedom of political communication”; and second, that the appropriate branch of government to determine those limits is the parliament, not the judiciary. He said some people might admire the “dogmatism” of the High Court but the parliament had “wider and deeper sources” of information in terms of gauging and acting on the risks to the public. These included advice from the executive, the police and multiple viewpoints. After 30 years it is unrealistic to expect the High Court to abandon its “implied freedom” doctrine but Jackman has made a convincing case for a revision to this doctrine and for the judiciary to recognise the balance between freedom and protection is essentially a political decision, best made by parliaments, not judges. Until that is accepted, misplaced and outdated views of freedom will damage the better interests of our society.
Actually, it's perfectly easy to point out things in a polite way, as shown by the immortal Rowe ...
Sadly the reptiles downplayed the fuss, apparently on the basis that there's no point in exercising freedom of speech unless that freedumb conforms to the usual reptile jihads about the endless sufferings of big business.
See if you can spot a grim-faced "Ned" in the crowd ...he's old enough and grey enough ...
And now a little quavering, wavering Dolly, worthy of a lived Tamworth experience ...
Not a major problem, more molehill than mountain, but it's been torturing the pond.
The pond realises that the other place (aka the Nine rags) are a disgrace, what with their letting Wilcox go, but they've been running some very titillating material.
There's no way that the pond can so a segue from its lizard Oz herpetology studies to the material - the reptiles of Oz insist on filling the pond to the brim with their rantings and ravings.
And yet for context it's important to see what they omit from their jihads.
The only solution was a late arvo post, a very rare occurrence in the pond of late.
Some of the intrigue arises from the Nine rags' ongoing coverage of the ICAC saga.
If you stick to the lizard Oz, you'd be completely unaware of it happening.
And yet what a nest of vampires has been exposed to sunlight, what rats in the ranks are being uncovered ...
The rag boasts that it has "Sydney’s best coverage of the ICAC inquiry", but that wouldn't be hard, because rather like the government's feeble attempt at regulating betting advertising, it's been ghosted by the reptiles of the lizard Oz.
Even more intriguing for the pond has been the co-joining of two of the pond's favourite topics, a religious cult, and the beefy boofhead, not to mention the onion muncher and the Nazis.
Here's how to downsize a world of bigotry, prejudice and pain ...
...the group has traditional gender norms that dictate the roles of women and what jobs they can take. The moral behaviour expected of members is very high. And how they police their boundaries can be stricter and more punitive than other Christian groups. Those who leave the Brethren have a very difficult and painful experience because they are essentially shunned, cut off from their families.
In a way worthy of a theologian, Bernard Doherty offered an alternative label for the cult ...
...I don’t consider the term “cult” to be helpful as a way of understanding the group. The Brethren could be classified, from a sociological perspective, as an “introversionist sect”, though essentially they are just another conservative, evangelical Protestant denomination.
Say what? “introversionist sect”?
Fancy words for a cult.
Nah, the pond is good with "cult", but does appreciate that attempt to water down the cult into just another brand of Protestantism ...
The pond supposes it's just like saying that the Inquisition was essentially just another conservative Catholic activity...
The beefy boofhead loves himself some cult ...
“We’re being supported by the Rapid Relief Team, and they are an extraordinary group of people,” Taylor said. “Rapid Relief supports state emergency services, state rural fire service organisations across this country, and they do an extraordinary job. And I’m very proud to have been served by them, and I saw them starting up in my own electorate after the Yass fires back in 2013. Exclusive Brethren secretly paid far-right activists to perform stunts disrupting the federal election “They have been there every time when there has been a flood, when there has been a fire. We saw Lily Hooper, the very tragic death of a girl in my electorate in the Nattai National Park [south-west of Sydney] just last week, they were out there. “RRT was out there, supporting our emergency service organisations. That is an extraordinary organisation, and I am very sure many Labor members have been supported by that same organisation because of the great work they [the RRT] do.” Records kept by the federal government show the Rapid Relief Team won dozens of government grants across the country, worth $680,000 between 2020 and 2023 under a program in which the local MP selected the recipients and invited them to apply. In Taylor’s seat of Hume, the Brethren charity won its first grant, for $22,000 – the maximum available – to buy a coolroom trailer in 2021 to “facilitate the safe distribution of food to the community”. Two years later, the charity in Hume received another $11,000 for a coffee trailer to “support emergency services and the community”. In its latest financial statement, the Rapid Relief Team reported a surplus of $263,105, and a retained surplus of $4.6 million.
Nice work if you can get it.
That reminds the pond of its Marxist friends, who somehow managed to acquire very tasty Sydney properties ...free the workers, and free the rental market.
The beefy boofhead's friends rallied to the cult ...
There is no suggestion that Taylor knew of or supported the Brethren payments to far-right figures. But after this masthead revealed these details of the Brethren campaign, Byron Fay, executive director of political funding group Climate 200, referred the church to the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission for investigation. During a parliamentary hearing on Friday into electoral matters, Liberal MPs and Nationals leader Matt Canavan sympathised with the Brethren’s view that the questions they were being asked about the group’s role in the election were examples of religious discrimination. Later, Coalition MPs published a dissenting response, accusing the Labor-helmed committee of running a “witch-hunt against people of faith and people who just happen to have the temerity to oppose Labor’s agenda”.
Do go on ...and the pond will accept repetitions in the recitation ...
The pond misses so much stuff by sticking to the reptiles at the lizard Oz.
This was so rich the pond couldn't resist diving into the pool for a final splash, rather like Scrooge McDuck taking a swim amongst all the coins and the folding stuff ...
...Almost all their activities are directed towards helping their own members, not the public. The church’s spokesman, Lloyd Grimshaw, on Friday denied before a parliamentary committee the church had anything to do with commissioning or paying for the far-right stunts, or election campaign canvassing in general. Calling it “bizarre” that he was required to answer questions on the matter, he said the thousands-strong, co-ordinated effort at polling booths by Brethren members was simply a volunteering exercise by individual parishioners. Climate 200 disagreed in its letter to the charities commission. “The synchronised scale, geographic uniformity, and organisational backing suggest institutional co-ordination rather than purely independent, individual volunteering,” Fay wrote in his complaint. The chair of the Joint Select Committee on Electoral Matters, Labor MP Jerome Laxale, who is leading the grilling of the church over its election involvement, told this masthead that Grimshaw’s evidence before the committee “leaves me with more questions than answers”. Grimshaw told the committee he represented a small charity called Plymouth Brethren Christian Church Limited, not the church fellowship itself. Laxale said this “puts huge limits around the church’s denials”. “Hiding behind a narrow definition does not circumvent the requirement for all witnesses to answer questions truthfully,” Laxale said. “The giving of false or misleading evidence is a serious matter, and may be regarded as a contempt of parliament.” However, after the hearing, the Coalition doubled down on its support for the controversial church. A group of seven MPs, including Nationals leader Matt Canavan, three shadow ministers and senators from five states issued a joint statement describing the inquiry into the Brethren’s activities as a “hyperpartisan witch hunt” by Labor. The three-page statement described the inquiry as “persecution”, “madness” and a “disgraceful fiasco” and it called for Laxale to be sacked as committee chair. “Labor’s attacks smack of religious discrimination and are an assault on the basic democratic rights of all Australians,” Canavan wrote. NSW senator Jess Collins said: “We’re another step closer to Albanese’s communist utopia, where religious freedom is not tolerated.”
Religious freedumb? Two cheers for cults!
The pond expects a devotion to cults from the onion muncher, but the rest of the rabble shows just how much the Liberal party has been infested by barking mad far right religious fundamentalists ...
The Nine rags included that press release in full, and the pond decided it was a real winner.
Each page had the full logo and list of names, but the pond settled for just the verbiage after the first two pages ...
All the pond needs now is for the Liberal party to mount a passionate defence of Scientology, and neo-Nazis, who after all, are leery of commie swine utopia, and just want the religious freedom to follow their beliefs ...
On and on they went, pleading for the freedumb to be in a cult ...
It's a cult ... and it's fair and right to call it so, in a way that's downright fair dinkum ...
Ex-Brethrens on breaking free More than 50,000 people belong to a global religious sect that has restrictions around television, eating with outsiders and attending university. Some who’ve left the church say they still carry the trauma of what they experienced there.
That poorly formatted yarn told a couple of stories.
This is part of one victim of the cult ...
Homosexuality, she said, was a largely “unspoken” subject that was occasionally discussed “in a horrified whisper”.
“It’s considered one of the worst sins that a person can commit,” she (Tam) said.
It's a cult, and fear and repression are its stock in trade ...
For Tam, however, a future in such an environment was not something she could countenance.
Her departure from her family home was carefully planned. To avoid an emotional goodbye with their parents, Tam and her two brothers secretly packed their things.
“We planned it so … they wouldn’t see, because we knew that it would be very upsetting for all of us,” she said.
“We left early one morning, we sort of snuck out together.”
And that's what the Liberal party is trying to defend.
Huzzah, today the reptiles turned to a new twist on a venerable, ancient jihad ... super ... with a super time for all guaranteed...and at least for a moment it was top of the digital news "ma"...
The pond was deeply moved, especially by the golden broken egg in the accompanying artwork, though no reptile stepped forward to claim a credit for the artwork ...
It felt cruel to consign the canny Cranston to the intermittent archive, but whatever ...
EXCLUSIVE Revealed: Labor’s stealth ‘super tax’ to cost retirees Labor’s hidden super tax to hit $372bn worth of assets despite promises to carve out retirees A hidden tax buried in Labor’s capital gains rules has exposed $372bn in superannuation assets to higher levies, with one of Australia’s biggest funds demanding an urgent rethink. By Matthew Cranston
The crapulent Cranston has been in top form of late, but an excess of his reptilian contributions left the pond feeling overwhelmed, especially with the superabundance of reptiles that turned up this day.
Just for starters, there was the bromancer, Lord Downer and Dame Groan doing the rounds, and that's to exclude the war on Victoria, the war on the ABC, and the latest doings of the Australian Daily Zionist News.
So many jihads, so little time, and yet the pond had no choice - when it comes to the crunch, the bromancer is the pond's favourite.
The header: Donald Trump turns Rocket Man Kim Jong-un into wars’ big winner; The President’s latest crazy move empowers North Korea and damages the US alliance system in Asia.
The caption for the splendid artwork, resembling a Rorschach inkblot test, credited to Debbie: Kim Jong-un has leveraged North Korea’s military assistance to Russia to gain high-tech defence technology and diplomatic backing. Pictures: AFP. Artwork: Debbie Schipp
Is it wrong for the pond to enjoy the bromancer's recent howls of pain?
North Korea, under Kim Jong-un, the world’s most odious dictator, is the real winner of the Russia-Ukraine war. Now Donald Trump seems to be trying to make sure they are the real winners of the Iran war as well. This can be the only result of Trump’s grotesque decision to curry favour with the Pyongyang dictator by curtailing US-South Korean military exercises, then publicly begging for a summit with Kim later this year. This is very bad for Australia. No country has advanced its strategic interests through the Ukraine war more than North Korea. The hermit kingdom of 27 million people remains an impoverished place. But as Trump said, it possesses nuclear weapons. Trump specified 57 nuclear weapons. Either that’s a random Trump remark or he pointlessly released highly classified information. Trump observed you’ve got to take Pyongyang seriously because of its nukes. As analysts point out, this is a compelling argument for Iran, and every nation worried about security, to get nuclear weapons. Kim is easily underestimated because he looks so clownish. But while North Korean dynastic politics is distinctively Game of Thrones in style – Kim killed his uncle and half-brother because they constituted possible dynastic rivals – Kim is in his way quite shrewd. North Korea has been dependent on China. When international sanctions were at their strongest, only Beijing’s willingness to flout the sanctions kept Pyongyang going.
The reptiles interrupted with a snap, Kim Jong Un farewelling Xi Jinping during the Chinese president’s departure from Pyongyang International Airport. Picture: AFP
The bromancer carried on with his Ginsbergian howl of despair ...
Until a few years ago, Washington was nonetheless able to sway international opinion sufficiently that the UN would authorise quite tough sanctions against Pyongyang because of its nuclear program. Moscow routinely supported such sanctions. Beijing rarely vetoed them because it didn’t like to be isolated in international opinion, though of course Beijing never enforced sanctions. Kim shrewdly used the Ukraine war to secure a new relationship with Moscow. He took big risks. He sold Russia huge quantities of artillery shells and rockets (and made a lot of money). More radically, he sent thousands of North Korean soldiers to fight for Russia against Ukraine. Western intelligence doesn’t know exactly how many North Koreans this involves. Some estimates say more than 18,000. Huge numbers of North Koreans were killed or wounded but Kim got everything he wanted. He had reciprocal visits with Vladimir Putin and in 2024 concluded a new defence alliance with Russia. Russia is now giving North Korea very hi-tech military assistance. Pyongyang’s missiles are now far more accurate than before. It has greater capacity to attack assets in space. Pyongyang has had intercontinental ballistic missiles for some time but has had trouble making them fully effective nuclear delivery vehicles. Moscow is suspected of helping with that and with nuclear submarine technology. Ukraine is the world leader in drone warfare, but Russia is not far behind. North Korean troops are learning all those skills and acquiring that technology. All this significantly erodes the qualitative edge South Korea’s conventional military has traditionally enjoyed over the north.
Just in case the hive mind couldn't pick it, Vlad the sociopathic invader was (R) ...Vladimir Putin (R) and Xi Jinping review a military honour guard during an official welcoming ceremony in Beijing. Picture: AFP
The besieged bromancer found no relief from Faux Noise's favourite mad king ...
Beijing under Xi Jinping itself has an intense alliance with Putin’s Russia. Nonetheless, it probably doesn’t like Kim freelancing. But its response has been to offer Kim more goodies and greater diplomatic recognition. Kim had equal billing with Putin as the foreign guests of honour at Beijing’s grand military parade last September (Victoria’s former premier, Daniel Andrews, was a lesser visitor). Kim can play Beijing off against Moscow and may soon be able to do this to some extent with Washington. Beijing and Moscow now always support Pyongyang at the UN. In 2018 Trump tried to woo Kim into a historic deal to give up nuclear weapons. In one of his many frankly ridiculous statements, Trump announced at a joint summit with Kim in Singapore that the nuclear threat from North Korea was now finished and Pyongyang would denuclearise. This was always preposterous rubbish. There has never been any chance Pyongyang would denuclearise. The last chance the West had was in 1994 when Bill Clinton was on the brink of taking military action to destroy Pyongyang’s nuclear program. That’s not possible now. Mike Green of the US Studies Centre dealt with North Korea a lot when he was Asia director at the National Security Council under George W. Bush. He was called in by Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, to give advice to the Trump administration after the 2018 Trump-Kim summit. He concluded Trump himself never thought he could get Kim to give up nukes but was motivated when he discovered that North and South Korea didn’t have a peace treaty but only an armistice, so they were still technically at war. If Trump could convert armistice to treaty he might get the Nobel Peace Prize. “This is all really driven by a vanity project by Trump,” Green tells me.
Then came a snap of the man who helped trigger the bro, US Studies Centre chief executive Mike Green. Picture: Jane Dempster / The Australian
And so to the moment astute correspondents have been waiting for ... the billy goat butt moment ...
It’s a vanity project with huge costs. Trump recently cut the military exercises in half to suck up to Kim. He did something similar in 2018 at the suggestion, unbelievably, of Putin. This humiliates South Korea, lessens the military effectiveness of South Korea, undercuts the reliability of the US, diminishes deterrence and seemingly validates the critique of folks such as Paul Keating and Hugh White who think the US no longer has any serious purpose in Asia. But the good news is: it’s just Trump. The tilt towards Pyongyang and away from Seoul has no support in the US congress or anywhere in the US system. Trump’s bizarre view of the world sees alliances as liabilities, democratic allies as low-rate gardeners or maintenance men to screw everything out of financially. Whereas dictators of nuclear-armed nations are Las Vegas casino owners he can do real business with.
And here it came ...
That’s not to say Trump hasn’t done some good things.
What they were, what they are, is left unnoted by the bromancer.
Perhaps it's the splendid restoration job on Washington, still ongoing, perhaps it's unleashing tariff wars around the globe in a bid to replicate the days of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and generate the next world depression, perhaps it's his assembling of a pack of clown minions unrivalled by any previous US government, or perhaps it's his desire to become best friends with authoritarians and dictators around the world. Perhaps it was sending Sean Duffy on a road trip.
Then came a classic bro clunker:
But the rest of his term, after he loses congress in November, will likely be full of nutty vanity projects. This latest crazy move empowers North Korea and damages the US alliance system in Asia. That’s intensely harmful to Australia’s national interests. But the North Koreans, and everyone else, knows that Trump will be gone in five minutes and can’t deliver much. US alliances will likely endure. Polls show South Koreans don’t trust Trump but greatly value the US alliance. Australians share this view and, in this respect, are authentic Asians.
We're authentic Asians now?
We're all Spartacus?
Talk about tone deaf stupidity, but once again the bromancer delivers ...
At this point the pond thought it might do a detour and help out the bromancer.
The WSJ's editorial board recently offered a summary of mad king Donald's most splendid war, even better than his Iranian adventure ...
The Dumbest Trade War Revisited Triump’s (sic) decision to escalate a tariff brawl with Canada makes no economic or political sense.
And so to an anguished Lord Downer:
The header: Why mounting public debt poses a greater threat than global war; My greatest worry is not war but the escalation of debt by governments around the world.
The caption for the snap of a man doing a raven impersonation: Treasurer Jim Chalmers addresses the media during a joint press conference in the Blue Room at Parliament House. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman.
Is it wrong for the pond to sup on Lord Downer's tears and fears?
My greatest worry isn’t whether Donald Trump’s resolve in the war against Iran will fade. It isn’t that the Russian army will suddenly overwhelm the heroic Ukrainians. Although I do worry about those things. My greatest worry is the escalation of debt by governments around the world. In our case the federal government debt has passed the $1 trillion benchmark. If you had been part of the Howard government, as I was, it was agony to watch. After all, by the time we were evicted from office in late 2007, we had paid off all government debt. By global standards, Australian debt isn’t alarming. Federal government debt is only 34 per cent of GDP. Mind you, if you add state government debt as well, which amounts to about $650bn, then total government debt in Australia is a more concerning 55 per cent of GDP. In the US, debt is more than 124 per cent of GDP; in France, 121 per cent; in Britain, about 100 per cent. Even in more fiscally responsible Germany it has blown out to 65 per cent. What is alarming is that in none of these countries, including our own, is there much concern about the explosion of public sector debt. Yet that debt has to be financed. Governments have to borrow by issuing bonds. Somebody has to buy those bonds. In Australia’s case, an estimated 52 per cent of Australian government bonds are held by foreign investors. The rest are held by Australian institutions, including the Reserve Bank.
His Lordship rather undercut the sense of fear he was trying to instil by slipping in that line early in the piece ...By global standards, Australian debt isn’t alarming.
Recognising the slip, he did his best to recover and crank up the fear, but then the reptiles slipped in a snap that generated real fear and horror in the pond, distant memories of politicians who had done much to increase the inequality divide ... John Howard and Peter Costello listen to Alexander Downer during Question Time inside Parliament House, August 2006. Picture: AAP Image
The pond would have liked to stick around for the other three, but time was pressing and they're at the link, as Lord Downer craved the pond's attention ...
For the Australian government to borrow, its bonds have to be attractive to foreign investors. Investors are going to take into consideration the risk of investing in Australia, which is low. The Australian government is highly unlikely to default on its borrowings. But investors will also take into account the size of government debt, which translates as the supply of bonds going on to the market, as well as Australia’s inflation rate, which is relatively high, and the exchange rate risk, which is also quite high. These and other factors determine the interest rate on the bonds. It’s the interest rate on those bonds that tells you something about what the markets think of the government to which they’re lending. In Australia’s case, the benchmark 10-year government bond yield is about 5 per cent. That is the interest rate the Australian government has to pay on its borrowings. The US rate is lower at 4.4 per cent, the British 4.6 per cent and Germany a mere 3.3 per cent. So there is a problem. Australia needs to set the interest rate at a higher rate than comparable countries. Indeed, what is noteworthy is that during the past four years, the interest rate on Australian government bonds has risen from 3.5 per cent in August 2022 to 5 per cent today. In other words, lenders want a higher return now because of concerns about growing government debt, the weakness of the Australian dollar and persistent inflation in Australia. The Australian government is spending more than $40bn a year just on servicing its debt. Add to that about $25bn a year being paid by the state and territory governments, and in total Australian governments are spending $68bn a year just financing their debt. That is more than the federal government spends on defence, more than it spends on education, and is about 64 per cent of federal spending on health. In the case of Britain, its government spends almost twice as much on servicing debt as it spends on defence.
And so to the real dogs in this catfight ... Former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and President Donald Trump listen during a cabinet meeting at the White House, July 2018. Picture Leah Millis / Reuters
Lord Downer was full of bitter personal memories and bereft of solutions:
During President Trump’s first term, he asked Mike Pompeo, the head of the CIA at the time, what he thought was the greatest problem the US faced. Pompeo said he thought it was growing government debt. President Trump’s response was: “Voters don’t care about government debt.” That’s perfectly true in the short term, but if debt continues to grow then the crisis can be catastrophic for ordinary people. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Back in 2010, I was working in southeastern Europe, and I saw the impact of the Greek financial crisis that year. So huge were the Greek government’s debts that the markets wouldn’t lend them money to finance those debts any longer. As a result, the Greek government had to go begging to the EU and the International Monetary Fund for a bailout. They provided the bailout but on strict conditions. Not surprisingly, they demanded massive cuts to government expenditure as well as increases in taxation. Greece’s GDP fell by 25 per cent between 2008 and 2016. Public sector employees had their remuneration cut by about 30 per cent and pensions were reduced by about the same amount. Private sector wages declined by 20 per cent. That was the price Greece paid for overspending over many years. Governments do have an alternative to borrowing on international and domestic markets. They can print money. The trouble with that is they increase the amount of money chasing the same number of goods and services available in the economy. That is inflationary. There’s no easy solution. The higher the level of government debt, the higher the interest rates needed to persuade investors to lend. The higher the interest rate, the higher the percentage of government expenditure has to be devoted to servicing that debt. High interest rates slow economic growth. The alternative is to print money and weather the storm of inflation, which also reduces living standards.
There came a reminder of the treatment the Germans had dished out to the Greeks, Former Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou looks on at the Greek parliament during a vote on austerity measures, June 2011. Picture: Louisa Gouliamaki / AFP Photo
Lord Downer put on his most solemn face ...
We have an impending crisis. Just about every government is accumulating huge quantities of debt and demanding that investors lend to them to finance those debts. Recently, the US government has implicitly demonstrated its concern about the financing of its debt. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the US government would spend $4bn buying back US government debt. That is the equivalent of printing money. He’s doing that to try to push down the interest rates on US government borrowing. It’s just a detail, but it points to a long-term problem. The moral of this story is that all governments, including our own, need to stop spending more than they earn. The populist passion for expanding welfare entitlements and diverting resources into building windmills is slowly strangling our economies. And if debt continues to grow, we could confront a global financial crisis. As Ernest Hemingway famously said when asked how he went bankrupt: “Two ways: gradually, then suddenly.”
Talk to the hand, or perhaps talk to mad King Donald, Faux Noise's favourite economist ...
It being Tuesday, the pond simply had to make room for Dame Groan, favourite cult for herpetology cultists ...
The header: Why it’s your money vs the nation in the fight over super; Despite criticism of its weak policy credentials, One Nation is leading key areas of the country’s policy debate.
The caption for the incredible artwork, featuring playing cards and a grim looking beast, all thanks to the astonishing Debbie: ‘Treasurer Jim Chalmers is using superannuation to attack One Nation politically by incorrectly asserting that Pauline Hanson wants to scrap it,’ writes Judith Sloan. Artwork: Debbie Schipp
The pond is pleased to report that Dame Groan has gone One Nation ...
There is a certain irony to the fact One Nation is leading the policy debate on several topics given the widespread criticism of the party for its weak policy credentials. Think here of immigration, tobacco excise and now superannuation. While the details may be missing, there is no doubt Pauline Hanson is contributing to the discussion on these three topics.
Think?
The pond had some difficulty associating that word with Gina's pet ...
... but please, hear Dame Groan out as she joined the lizard Oz war on the super front ...
Let me focus here on superannuation. Hanson makes a strong point simply by stating that superannuation belongs to the policyholders, not the government. It’s a feature of the system the Labor Party doesn’t always fully embrace. For example, Anthony Albanese recently remarked: “There is a real potential to see these funds as a national asset that can be used more appropriately and get better returns as well, not just for individuals and for retirees but for the nation.” The clear implication is super accounts don’t belong only to policyholders. Jim Chalmers also has talked about directing superannuation investments to national priority areas, including affordable housing and the energy transition. Former Victorian premier Jacinta Allan even urged the superannuation funds to invest in “funding hospitals, schools and other critical infrastructure”.
Could it be a One Nation piece without a snap of the bottle-died ranga? Pauline Hanson speaks to the media at Parliament House. Picture: Getty Images
Inspired, Dame Groan began to brood ...
The key questions that now emerge are: Who really owns superannuation and what purposes can it be used for? Contrary to the party’s mythology, Labor did not invent superannuation. It existed well before the decision to make it compulsory for all employees from 1992. This followed a high-level deal between the federal government and the ACTU to reduce the unions’ current pay claim. Before that superannuation had been largely confined to executives, public servants and academics. It’s estimated that about 30 per cent of the workforce was covered by super before the introduction of compulsory universal superannuation. The rules and taxation applying to superannuation have been adjusted several times. The stipulated rate of contribution has increased from 3 per cent to 12 per cent. While Labor has always favoured the union-controlled industry super funds, the management of the current $4.5 trillion pool of funds is divided between these funds, retail funds and self-management arrangements. While self-interested players describe Australia’s system of compulsory superannuation as the envy of the world, there are some fundamental weaknesses that have never been addressed. Most particularly, the proportion of older people claiming the Age Pension remains high, albeit with proportionately more claiming only a part pension. Adding in the tax concessions that apply to superannuation contributions and earnings, the net savings associated with the superannuation system are not as high as many would assume. And for those on low incomes, compulsory superannuation is just a form of taxation because their entitlement to the full Age Pension is knocked off, at least for a while, because of means-testing.
At this moment, the reptiles stepped in, determined to help, albeit at a PREMIUM ...
PREMIUM How much super do I need to retire? Become a member to access our premium video content
Sorry, reptiles, the pond must watch its pennies, and even it's ha'pennies...as Dame Groan got gloomier and gloomier:
The deal is to forgo 12 per cent of your wage and get paid a partial Age Pension when you finally retire, possibly without owning a house. The broader point is that the system assumes most older folk own a home and a super lump sum is a welcome top-up to ensure a comfortable retirement. This assumption is looking less realistic across time. Does it really make sense for people to forgo 12 per cent of their incomes during their working lives while being unable to buy a home? The case for the figure of 12 per cent was never justified based on providing adequate retirement incomes. This was made clear in the 2010 Henry tax review. A maximum rate of 9 per cent was recommended in that report. The higher figure of 12 per cent – indeed 15 per cent was even mooted – suited the industry super funds, which are always intent on maximising the inward flow of funds. Recent changes, such as same payday super and compulsory super for juniors, are in the same category. This is where the debate comes in: should policyholders be able to withdraw money from their own accounts to pay for important expenses such as buying a home or avoiding mortgage default? There are some provisions for early withdrawals, but there are tight restrictions associated with any requests. The Australian Taxation Office handles some requests, but these are limited to serious illness and covering the cost of vital treatment. Requests based on financial hardship can be made to the super funds, but the sums are limited and proof of continuous receipt of government benefits is required. These withdrawals are subject to tax. There is also a specific scheme that allows people to use superannuation as a vehicle to save for a home deposit. But the government’s 5 per cent deposit scheme has become the dominant policy intervention used by first-home buyers, eclipsing any potential popularity of using super. In most instances, the funds held in super accounts are tied up until policyholders reach preservation age, which is currently 60 for those born after July 1, 1964. This suits the funds and the various firms that make a living from the system, but whether it really is in the best interests of every policyholder is debatable.
Where is all this heading? An opportunity to brag? Liberal Senator Andrew Bragg speaks to the media at Parliament House. Picture: Getty Images
And that was a bridge too far ...
This problem has become more acute with the lack of growth in real wages. When real wages were rising along with increases in the superannuation contribution rate, workers could feel happy that the present and the future were being accommodated. But for the past five years real wages have been going backwards, and this warm inner glow has faded for many hard-pressed workers and their families. The implicit social compact, in which compulsory superannuation is an ingredient, has started to fray. One policy option is to consider freeing up the use of three percentage points of the superannuation contribution based on the proposition that 9 per cent can’t be touched but there should be some flexibility on the use by policyholders of the contribution above that figure. There is no doubt that this would play well with many voters.
What a canny move, what a cunning way to degut the purpose of having super on which to retire, with Dame Groan not able to make the final leap ...
Liberal senator Andrew Bragg has amped up the debate, declaring the system of compulsory super is “one of the biggest policy failures since Federation”. According to him, “the whole system is broken”.
Talk about going too far and producing a billy goat butt from the groaner:
This is a big call and flies in the face of survey data that shows reasonably strong support for superannuation, along with a high degree of ignorance of its working.
So dumb punters are happy to support their misery, and only Dame Groan truly understands how it works, which is why she values Gina's pet, because she's a tremendous discussion starter ...
In the meantime, the federal Treasurer is using superannuation to attack One Nation politically by incorrectly asserting that Hanson wants to scrap it. The reality is that it’s timely to discuss the real purpose of super and its key weaknesses, including the danger of governments directing the investment of people’s super accounts.
