In which the reptiles disinter the lying rodent from the cornfield, and Gina's pampered pet creates turmoil in the lizard Oz and the Major...

 

What gets the pond on a daily basis is the way that Faux Noise is responsible to a remarkable degree for the folly of installing mad King Donald, producing many, many absurdities along the way, from that former Faux Noise employee, the drunk Pirro, and the reflecting pool debacle, to that former Faux Noise employee Pete Kegsbreath and the major inflationary debacle of the Iran war...

A more fitting name for the lizard Oz would be "An American family presents", but none of the reptiles holding down sinecures would ever contemplate acknowledging reality.

That's how you get the likes of the fatuous Major Mitchell scribbling ...

Journalists look to the left as nation’s economy tanks
Media’s epic fail: why economic pain, not immigration, is the true driver of One Nation’s support
The inability of most political journalists to prioritise economic reform over social policy has given politicians a leave pass to fritter away our national prosperity, and social cohesion with it.
By Chris Mitchell
Columnist

More on the Major anon, but that will mean reducing Ben packing it - in an EXCLUSIVE - must be reduced to a teaser trailer...

EXCLUSIVE
Trump battleships put AUKUS subs at back of the line
Trump-class battleship ‘threatens AUKUS timeline’ amid reactor bottleneck
Donald Trump’s plan for a new class of gigantic namesake battleships has emerged as the latest risk confronting the $368bn AUKUS pact.
By Ben Packham

How could the pond resist showing the sketch at the top of Ben's panic, as remote as an AUKUS sub, as crude as those digital games that haunt the pond's logarithms?

Golly gee Ben, you don't mean that Faux Noise's favourite Prez might stiff more than a former Olympian, while in pursuit of another gilt-gold laden folly?

Meanwhile, the Major's feeble attempt to blame the media and "political journalists" for the rise of Gina's pet surfaced in other ways this day in the lizard Oz.

It was a measure of the size of the threat that the reptiles decided to wheel out the fossilised remains of the lying rodent with an EXCLUSIVE and a wild-eyed commentary by the bouffant one ...

EXCLUSIVE
Howard maps migration middle path for Coalition
Pauline Hanson’s monoculture push is ‘pointless’, John Howard declares in key intervention
Taking Pauline Hanson’s monoculture campaign head on, John Howard advocates for a con­servative path for ‘Australian multiculturalism’.
By Dennis Shanahan

Again with the teaser trailer for the intermittent archive listing ...

The bouffant one could only manage a two minute regurgitation, like a mama bird shoving masticated food down the hive mind throat?

Commentary by Dennis Shanahan
Former PM provides solution to ‘pointless’ monoculture
John Howard has a commonsense solution to ‘pointless’ Hanson monoculture debate

John Howard is a career-long opponent to One Nation and a leader subjected to allegations of racism by the Left. Now he has a simple formula for multiculturalism.

Indeed he could ...

It's a living, albeit a pathetic one, but why bother with the bouffant one repackaging and regurgitating the lying rodent, when little Johnny himself was to hand over on the extreme far right of the rag's digital edition?

How could it be any worse than the onion muncher routinely stealing the limelight, in his narcissistic way, from the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way?

The header: Frankly, I do not know what ‘monoculture’ means in Australia; Most Australians will regard the ‘multiculture’ versus ‘monoculture’ identity debate as quite pointless.

The credit for the astonishingly awful image that opened play, which on the upside avoids yet another snap of the lying rodent: “By any measure, post-World War II migration has been a resounding success,” writes John Howard. Artwork: Frank Ling

What with the lying rodent having paved the way for Gina's pet's parade of bigotry, fear and loathing about uppity, difficult furriners - a theme taken up with gusto by the lizard Oz hive mind - the little desiccated coconut could manage only a three minute attempt to defuse his very own time bomb ...

Preparations for the bicentenary of British settlement in Australia began when Malcolm Fraser was prime minister. He conceived a description for the celebration that was ideal in every way. That description was The Australian Achievement.
Regrettably, the Hawke government abandoned this description in favour of the limp, banal moniker of Living Together.
Fraser was right. In every way Australia had been an achievement. Oddly, though, one feature of that achievement had been an inability on occasions to recognise national successes.
Migration was a case in point. By any measure, post-World War II migration has been a resounding success. This is despite it having taken a long time to get rid of the White Australia policy – for which a Liberal, Harold Holt, deserves most credit.
Despite this, much political discussion of immigration today is beset by a pointless debate about whether we should call it monocultural or multicultural.
Most Australians regard this as quite pointless, simply because they have long favoured a steady immigration stream subject to it not imposing too great a strain on our infrastructure, especially housing. The other important constraint has been that existing citizens did not want new arrivals bringing their homegrown hatreds and enmities to this country.
I was powerfully reminded of how strongly most Australians felt on this issue by the reaction to remarks I made in my 2001 policy speech to the effect that “we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come”.

The pond was powerfully reminded of how a cynical politician used a captain merely trying to honour the laws of the sea to feather his own nest, and set off decades of bigotry.

As much to the point, how much is this a sign of a desperate attempt by the reptiles to keep living in the past? 

How much is this a sign that the reptiles have absolutely no confidence in the beefy boofhead, and so must resort to the little Bush to produce some decorative Bonsai?

As if to prove the point, the reptiles wheeled out a snap of a man who in later times and in his guilt-stricken dotage made the average Oz leftie look like a raving capitalist...Former prime minister Malcolm Fraser in his Melbourne office in April 2013.

At some point, it was inevitable that little Johnny would wheel out "Judaeo-Xian" ...

Despite differing political views, most Australians thought this encapsulated their feelings.
I, frankly, do not know what monoculture means in the context of immigration. To some it apparently means a mixture of people of different ancestries bound together by a common Australian citizenship. To others it can mean an uncompromising refusal to accept any deviation from a pre-established Australian identity.
For decades the friendly expression New Australian was extended to newly arrived immigrants, whether from the United Kingdom, Italy, Greece, the Baltic countries, Vietnam or elsewhere. It was meant as a welcome and most new arrivals saw it as such. Yet it fell into disuse and even attracted some criticism when the more politically correct expression multicultural began to be used.
As is well known, I have always felt uncomfortable with the expression multicultural. In my eyes it connoted a nation of tribes, which was the very antithesis of what most saw migration as having created in Australia. It suggested conflict and differences rather than overwhelming success and co-operation.
I have little doubt that the genesis of the expression multicultural lay in a desire for political advantage. The argument advanced by the proponents of multiculturalism (of which Al Grassby and Gough Whitlam were prime movers) was that the then protocol of assimilation obliterated traces of national origin and culture. This was never the case.
My experience had been that most new Australians happily combined absorption into the Australian mainstream with affection for the country of their birth or background. They had chosen Australia because of who we were, not because of what they might have wanted us to become.
Culturally, the Australia of 1985 was different from Australia of 1955. What had remained constant were the underpinnings of our society: the fundamental equality of men and women, the Judaeo-Christian ethic, free speech, the rule of law, scorn for distinctions based on class or any concept of aristocracy, and parliamentary democracy.

 Say what?

the Judaeo-Christian ethic, scorn for distinctions based on class or any concept of aristocracy

Is anyone going to tell King Chuck, the GG, and assorted bunyip aristocrats? Or the onion muncher when in a knighthood mood, down there with Billy Wentworth ...

At this point, the lying rodent reverted to the usual way of dealing with implicit notions of condescension ... by wheeling in a token furriner ...

Our habits and customs had been influenced and shaped by the multitude of migrants who had come to Australia in that 30-year period. I have never met a multicultural person. Yet I have met many bicultural people. One of them was my revered chief of staff when I was prime minister.
Born in Newcastle (Australia), Arthur Sinodinos is as Australian as the gum tree. Simultaneously he is proud of his Greek heritage and retains many connections with the Greek community in Australia. He has had an outstanding career in public life having served in the Senate, was a cabinet minister and Australia’s ambassador to the United States.

Sounds like multiculturalism to the pond, it being possible to embrace several cultures in the manner of chewing gum, and rubbing tum ...Arthur Sinodinos is as Australian as the gum tree despite his proud Greek heritage.

And so to wrap up with a mixed message typical of his braying when in power ...

Although I personally little used the expression multicultural when I was prime minister, my government did not abandon its use completely.
It did, however, redefine it as being Australian multiculturalism. This involved an emphasis on the unifying elements of Australian citizenship, irrespective of ethnic origin.
In my time as prime minister I often invoked the expression “the things that unite us as Australians are infinitely stronger and more enduring than those that divide us”. Better than any other expression, that encapsulated the successful assimilation or integration of millions of new arrivals into our national life.
It was a reminder that a special character of our achievement as a nation had been immigration from many parts of the world.
John Howard was prime minister of Australia from 1996 to 2007.

What an offensive man he was, and continues to be ...

Here, take a break with the infallible weekend Pope, evoking how the pond felt after that read, badly in need of an injection of peptides like some vulgar youff in search of eternal life ...

Meanwhile, the reptiles were in an ongoing state of panic at another betrayal ....

EXCLUSIVE
James Ashby to be One Nation party boss as former Scott Morrison aide becomes Hanson’s chief of staff
One Nation has tapped a former top adviser to Scott Morrison to run Pauline Hanson’s office as James Ashby moves into a new role.

Great. Gina's pampered benefit will benefit from the same exceptional skill as shown when SloMo was in charge of proceedings.

Meanwhile, the reptiles decided that they'd have two indigenous folk argue with each other ...

Torment of powerlessness in remote communities must end
Pearson reveals how to end ‘torment of powerlessness’ in remote communities
Cape York leader Noel Pearson urges the Albanese government to cut ties with vice industries. Read the full speech here.
By Noel Pearson
Columnist

The hapless Pearson, always a sucker for a lizard Oz platform, ended with a question:

After the rejection of the Voice, the conversation about structural reform of the federal arrangements governing Indigenous affairs, must resume. If not a Voice, then let us ask the question Dr King asked in two years after Civil Rights and one year before his assassination: where do we go from here?

Nowhere Noel, you're in the lizard Oz, deep in the hive mind, where it's usually the voice, with the capital V and the concept driven into the wilderness, and an annotation always at hand ...

Structural reform is the only way back: A response to Pearson’s Garma address
The reality is that while the referendum did not succeed, the status quo has continued and the same problems plague Indigenous communities.
By Megan Davis
Contributor

What an honour they paid Pearson, because the Voice again became the voice ...

Pearson says after the rejection of the voice, the conversation about structural reform of the federal arrangements governing Indigenous affairs must resume.
The Productivity Commission’s bleak report card and Pearson’s address is a good place to start.
Megan Davis is scientia professor and Balnaves chair in Constitutional Law, UNSW Sydney.

So we can have an endless argument over whether it was the Voice or the voice?

Enough already, time to head back to the Major, also obsessed with Gina's pampered pet and who to blame, provided it's not the lizard Oz setting out a policy platform for her - climate science denialism (praise be to Lloydie of the Amazon and the Bjørn-again one), hatred of furriners ruining everything (where are you Dame Groan?) and bloody Islamics disrupting the social fabric (how many reptiles can you name, the Zionist Major being just for starters?)...

The header: Media’s epic fail: why economic pain, not immigration, is the true driver of One Nation’s support; The inability of most political journalists to prioritise economic reform over social policy has given politicians a leave pass to fritter away our national prosperity, and social cohesion with it.

The caption for the image of Gina's pet, the lizard Oz's policies creation now haunting the reptiles and the Major: Pauline Hanson is viewed by her support base as anti-establishment.

The Major spent a bigly five minutes having at ... the ABC, which along with furriners and Islamics, is responsible for all the thought crimes that have rooned the country.

On the upside, it wasn't his usual Zionist-inflected rant, so the pond realised it could probably cope ...

The failure of three Coalition prime ministers from 2013 to 2022 and Labor’s Anthony Albanese since to lift Australia’s economic performance has created the fertile electoral ground One Nation’s Pauline Hanson is now tilling.
The corresponding inability of most political journalists to prioritise economic reform over social policy has given politicians a leave pass to fritter away our national prosperity, and social cohesion with it.
ABC Afternoon Briefing host Patricia Karvelas seemed puzzled when Liberal deputy leader Jane Hume criticised Labor’s planned new Fair Work Court on July 23. Hume referred to the court several times as a “brand new bureaucracy”.
Karvelas ignores how much damage Labor’s pro-union economic reforms since Tony Burke was minister for industrial relations have done to national productivity.
This newspaper on July 27 said the court would add “another layer of complexity and regulation to the nation’s convoluted IR system”.

Cue an image of someone the reptiles fear even more than Gina's pampered pet, ABC Afternoon Briefing host Patricia Karvelas. Picture: X

What is it with the reptiles? It's not just Polonius who spends far too much time watching and listening to the cardigan wearers, and talking back to the TV screen like some superannuated pensioner, it's the Major as well ...

On Tuesday, ABC Radio National breakfast host Sally Sara interviewed retiring ACTU president Michele O’Neil the morning after O’Neil and ACTU secretary Sally McManus revealed plans to retire.
The Australian’s workplace editor, Ewin Hannan, quoted Albanese about O’Neil and McManus: “Working families are in a stronger financial position today than they otherwise would be because of the tireless advocacy and strong leadership of Sally McManus and Michele O’Neil.”
It is untrue. What amounts to an unwinding of the IR reforms of the Hawke and Keating Labor governments has made the union movement stronger at the expense of workers.
RN was having none of that. In nine minutes and 19 seconds, Sara asked nothing about whether the re-regulation of the labour market was destroying national productivity and creating per capita GDP stagnation. She allowed O’Neil to judge her time at the ACTU by a 12 per cent increase in union membership that still sits at only 13 per cent nationally across the public and private sectors.

The Major turned to a current revanchist to help him with his revisionism ...

It should have been easy for Karvelas and Sara given former reforming ACTU secretary Bill Kelty the previous week delivered a paper to the Senate outlining what needed to be done to kickstart productivity and growth.
Kelty, in a written submission to a parliamentary inquiry on July 21, said there was something really wrong with economic management nationally when living standards were falling at a time of high commodity prices in a nation that is a major commodities exporter.
He criticised governments that “pay for quarantine centres that are never used, Commonwealth Games that are not held in the country, infrastructure costs that are the highest in the world”.
Our productivity performance was the third lowest in the OECD, investment too low, and growth per capita “non-existent”, he said.
“But our taxes are increasing, government expenditure is rising faster than prices. It does say something is wrong with this place.”
Australia was second only to Italy in having the biggest reduction in real wages since 2021, the Australian Financial Review’s Phil Coorey reported Kelty as saying.
While journalists like to portray growing support for One Nation as a moral failure based on voter racism, as Nine newspapers’ political editor Peter Hartcher has argued several times this year, Kelty’s paper points to a better explanation for the “pox on both your houses” attitude shown by One Nation’s soaring support.

They even flung in a snap of Bill ...Former ACTU secretary Bill Kelty delivered a paper to the Senate outlining how to kickstart productivity and growth. Picture: Aaron Francis

The Major was keen to establish that Pauline's success had nothing to do with racism or bigotry or furriners, even though there'd been so much bigotry on parade that it had earned its own wiki listing... Pauline Hanson burqa incidents

You know, just a standard visualisation of a typical lizard Oz column bemoaning furriners and/or Islamics...

After all, she's just reflecting the lizard Oz's anti-Islamic jihad that has been a feature of the rag for many years, with the Major a major proponent, but don't expect the Major to look in that mirror.

Little wonder he wanted to look elsewhere...

Polling published by the AFR on Tuesday suggests while many One Nation supporters share Hanson’s position on cutting immigration, that is not their main driver.
Tony Barry, a director of RedBridge Polling, said: “Pauline Hanson’s biggest political asset is that her base sees her as their anti-establishment outsider and their wrecking ball against a political model that they feel no longer works for them.”
While most One Nation support comes from the Coalition, the forgotten history of the party – discussed in this column on February 8 and April 6 – suggests Labor governments can manipulate debate about preference exchanges with Hanson to turn elections into referendums about racism.
Journalists on the left are only too happy to reflect such spin from Labor governments, as Sara did last Wednesday morning when pressing Victorian federal Liberal MP Dan Tehan on the possibility of a Coalition-One Nation preference exchange at the upcoming state election on November 28.
Tehan said Sara was simply repeating the lines of new Victorian Premier Ben Carroll, who had said the previous day that Labor was facing the Coalition and One Nation.
This is exactly the strategy former Labor premier Peter Beattie used to topple the Coalition in the June 1998 Queensland election. Expect ABC, Guardian and Nine papers journalists to run hard on the idea that the Coalition faces a moral imperative on One Nation preferences.

Will the lizard Oz also face a moral imperative?

Not likely, because they simply can't let go of their bashing of multiculturalism, with the Major proposing it was time to let the notion go, though he did the standard cunning reptile ploy of palming that trick off onto another player...

History offers other One Nation lessons.

Hanson’s apparent prevarication on domestic violence last month was nothing new. Right back to her 1996 election in the Queensland federal seat of Oxley, the state’s Men’s Rights Agency was one of her strongest backers.
Nor was Hanson called out by journalists or Coalition politicians for her claim in a podcast with UK far right figure Tommy Robinson that multiculturalism and the end of the White Australia policy were the work of Labor’s Gough Whitlam.
Both had more to do with the Coalition in the late 1960s, and especially former minister for immigration and later prime minister Harold Holt.
Journalists have also conveniently forgotten that it was during Hanson’s first incarnation that Polish Australian intellectual Jerzy Zubrzycki, the father of Australian multiculturalism, said the term may well have passed its use-by date. He believed the policy was being misrepresented as antithetical to social integration.

So it was the father of the concept that said the concept was dead? Reptile case closed. How to back that up? Drag in another loon retrieved from the dustbin of far right history ...

Former NSW Upper House MP David Oldfield discussed One Nation’s core beliefs in a piece published in The Australian on July 23.
He suggested that without a clearer policy positioning beyond immigration and patriotism, Hanson would not win the number of federal seats suggested by the published polling.
Oldfield thought One Nation would win up to seven Senate seats and some Lower House seats federally, “but not enough to make a difference”.
Labor has other ideas and will do its best to pump up the One Nation threat, as Albanese did last week in Adelaide at the party’s national conference. It will use Victoria as a testing ground.

Yes, the excesses of the far right, daily on parade in the Murdochian press, are all the fault of leftists, and it will all be the fault of Albo for pumping up the threat ...Prime Minister Anthony Albanese during day 3 of the ALP National Conference at the Adelaide Convention Centre. Picture Matt Turner

And for a concluding irony, the Major, offered a retirement sinecure so that he could come in from the golf course to indulge in a weekly Zionist rant, offered this as his closing gobbet ...

Journalists of the left will try to create a media storm portraying opposition to high immigration as a racist moral failing rather than the entirely foreseeable result of economic pain that the media really should be doing more to expose.
It’s easier for highly paid journalists in secure jobs at the national broadcaster to posture about their own values than to empathise with working class people who simply feel that Australia’s social contract with them is broken.
As The Australian’s Paul Kelly wrote last Wednesday, “Hanson is a political gift to Labor with the government now enshrining One Nation at the heart of its re-election pitch.”

That's how weird it's got, how incestuous, with the Major ending by referencing "Ned", as a way of proving he was clueless as to how to handle Gina's pet, as if it was impossible to see that bigotry and economic hardship might run together ... (and might even explain how the uneducated might be manipulated into a MAGA frenzy).

Cue a teaser trailer for "Ned" peddling the same line...

One Nation is a thing of beauty for the Labor Party
One Nation will give Labor the electoral exemption it needs to dodge proper accountability for its flawed agenda

Been there, done that, and all it did was remind the pond what a thing of beauty mad King Donald still was to Faux Noise and Murdoch HQ... no matter that it was on again, off again, on again, off again, on again, off again ...

And so to this, because the pond had made a promise to run this the next time blather about Judaeo-Xian nonsense reared its ugly head ...

In which the pond goes in search of bonus reptiles, and ends up starting with Jensenism and Polonius ...

 

The pond hasn't thought about Jensenism (or Pellism for that matter) for many a long year, and yet suddenly there was a rush of fragrant memories that came tumbling into the noggin, discovered as the pond went looking for a bonus for its Sunday meditation.

How could the pond resist bumping up a leading Jensenist to top of the page, with talk of lads gone fishing?

Alas, the pond then discovered that the intermittent archive was feeling out of sorts, and so it was impossible to save the rest. 

How could the pond leave the Jensenism in mid-stream without showing another young lad?

There was a homily that followed after that last snap...

But perhaps the boys themselves have sorted it out. Fishing isn’t organised. It isn’t run by adults. It isn’t even very competitive, as far as I can see. There are no grades, no likes, no followers. There’s no pretence. You either catch a fish or you don’t. And if you don’t, so what?
There’s something wonderfully honest about that.
Perhaps this little revival of boys fishing is telling us something hopeful that we shouldn’t miss. Left to themselves, absent the adult panic, boys can figure it out.
I wonder if that’s also why we are beginning to see young men drift back towards church. At its best, the church offers many of the same things that fishing does: not entertainment but purpose; not instant gratification but patient formation; not isolation but togtherness; not endless choice but a demanding way of life.
Perhaps the instincts that make for good fishermen are not so different from the instincts that make for men of faith (and women too). Both require patience, humility, teachability, perseverance and hope. And maybe those instincts were never lost. We simply forgot to believe they were there.
Michael P. Jensen is a writer and the rector of St Mark’s Darling Point, Sydney.

Bizarrely, a hot link attached to "absent the adult panic" led straight back to the very same piece of Jensenism.

Sadly there was no indication that Michael P. had written anything else for the reptiles, but the pond does encourage the reptiles to repeat the dose, even if the angry Sydney Anglicans seem to have lost a little of their bite. 

Such stupefying banality is the sort of soporific the pond needs when confronted by the challenge of getting out of bed on a Sunday.

Dissidents might murmur at the way the pond favoured Jensenism over Polonius's prattle, but rest easy, this lad never goes fishing. He prefers hunting green elephants ...

The header: Green elephant in the room: political focus on the wrong minor party; Journalists hold the Coalition to a standard rarely applied to Labor when it comes to minor party alliances.

The caption for the stunningly meaningful and insightful snap that sets Polonius on his journey: The unintended consequence of One Nation’s apparent success could be a return to a Labor government, in Victoria and nationally, on the back of Greens preferences. Picture: NewsWire/ David Crosling

Polonius offered his standard 4 minute read, and the pond immediately knew what the problem was.

Polonius, often inclined to indulge his obsession, had been watching the ABC yet again, early in the morning, and it had set off his bile juices and compounded his jaundice...

In earlier times the cry “What about the workers?” could be heard in the labour movement across the land. A more relevant question today is: “What about the Greens?”
It’s understandable why Labor Party leaders at federal and state levels claim, because of the increase in support for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party, the Coalition can form government only if it is in coalition with One Nation. But is it true?
Last Wednesday Sally Sara interviewed opposition frontbencher Dan Tehan, one of the better performers in the Liberal Party-Nationals Coalition, on ABC Radio National Breakfast. The Coalition has been in operation at the federal level, with only a few breaks, for a century.
The program ran an audio of Ben Carroll, the new Labor Party Premier in Victoria, stating opinion “polling says Victoria is on track for Australia’s first Liberal-One Nation government”. He did not mention the Nationals.

Naturally the reptiles followed up with a snap of Dan "the man": Senior Liberal frontbencher Dan Tehan. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

That vile ABC hussy sent Polonius spiralling out of control ...

Sara threw the first question to Tehan: “In your view would it be better to have a Coalition slash One Nation government or another Labor government in Victoria?” This question followed Carroll’s claim that “a Liberal-One Nation government will cut … services Victorians rely on”.
Tehan responded: “Look that’s just Labor Party spin”, and said Labor had been “cutting services in Victoria”.
But Sara returned to her original point about whether “it would be better to have a Coalition government in coalition with One Nation than to have another Labor government”. Tehan stuck to his point that the Coalition’s aim was to attain a majority of seats in its own right.
Sara implied that one or the other was the only possible outcome of the Victorian election in November. But this is not the case. The most recent Newspoll for Victoria, published in these pages on Tuesday, has the Coalition at 31 per cent, Labor at 28 per cent, One Nation at 19 per cent, the Greens at 13 per cent and others at 9 per cent.

Where would the reptiles - and its hive mind readers - be without a reminder of where their allegiances lie ... Opposition Leader Angus Taylor, Victorian Liberal Party state president Brian Loughnane and Victorian Opposition Leader Jess Wilson.

Polonius dared to dream a One Nation dreaming ...

If the Coalition won more seats than Labor without attaining an absolute majority it could possibly govern with the support of One Nation and/or some independents. That’s called a minority government. This would not require any formal link with One Nation MPs, only a guarantee to support a Coalition government by passing supply and not supporting votes of no confidence.
It’s the same with Labor. If Labor did not win enough seats to govern in its own right, it too might get support from Greens or independent candidates if they happened to win seats.
In other words, a Coalition government, led by Jess Wilson, comprising Liberals and Nationals would not need a formal alliance with One Nation to govern. No surprise that Labor is running the opposite line, but journalists should know better.
The states show how this can work. In Tasmania, the Liberal Party holds 14 out of 35 seats and Labor holds 10 seats. The crossbench consists of five Greens, five independents and one Shooters, Fishers and Farmers MP. The Liberal Party has enough guarantees of confidence and supply that it can govern in its own right.

You see? It would be an alliance, but an informal alliance, not a formal alliance, and that makes all the difference. Just look at Tasmania for how tremendously effective it can be ... Jane Howlett resigns as Tasmania's Racing Minister amid questioning over publicly funded legal bill

And then there's Minnsie (Minnsy?), busy bulldozing public housing ... NSW Labor Leader Chris Minns. Picture: NewsWire/Monique Harmer

Everybody's doing it, but it's just not fair the way they look at it. They need a set of patented, unique Polonial glasses ...

It is sometimes overlooked that the Chris Minns-led Labor government in NSW does not hold a majority in the Legislative Assembly. It has 46 out of 93 seats, one short of a majority. There are nine independents and three Greens on the crossbench. One independent serves as Speaker.
There is a difference between a formal capital-C Coalition government between the Liberals and Nationals and a small-C coalition government that would bring together two parties with significantly different policies. Neither the Coalition nor Labor like this.
The likes of Sara who ask a Coalition frontbencher about whether it would form a coalition government with One Nation seldom raise a similar questions with Labor leaders about the Greens.
It would be reasonable for journalists to ask Minns if he would go into government with Greens MPs who happened to win seats to form a minority government after the election. The answer almost certainly would be similar to Tehan’s response to Sara.
Namely, that Labor intends to govern in its own right but would form a minority administration. Labor MPs dislike the Greens much more than some Coalition MPs dislike One Nation. No Labor MP in NSW would be likely to advocate a coalition with the Greens. Yet the question is relevant for a journalist to ask, if only to avoid being accused of double standards.
Nor are the opposition’s leaders – the Liberal Party’s Angus Taylor and the Nationals’ Matt Canavan – likely to concede that they would form a coalition with One Nation.

Sheesh, just at the moment the pond thought it had spotted a rebrand, the old brand surfaced yet again, courtesy simplistic Sharri ...Veteran Broadcaster Ray Hadley says Opposition Leader Angus Taylor needs to “stop bagging” One Nation Leader Pauline Hanson. Mr Hadley told Sky News host Sharri Markson that all Angus Taylor is “promoting her” every time he talks about One Nation. “If you want to beat Labor, there’s a Coalition to be formed.”

And after all that, Polonius dissolved into his usual state of uncertainty, a blank void of unlikies, suggestions and possibilities ...

In any event, the next federal election is not scheduled until May 2028. Anthony Albanese is unlikely to call an early election. For starters, there is no reason to do so. Moreover, Albanese is a cautious politician disinclined to take unnecessary risks. Then there are his parliamentary colleagues. It’s unlikely that all Labor MPs will hold their seats at the next election. Most of those in marginal seats will want to hang on to their positions for as long as possible.

The latest national News24 Pulse/YouGov poll, conducted between July 21 and July 28, has Labor at a primary vote of 28 per cent with One Nation at 25 per cent, the Coalition at 22 per cent and the Greens at 13 per cent.
This suggests the Taylor-led Coalition is narrowing the gap between it and the Hanson-led One Nation. As mentioned in these pages not long ago, the essential task of the Coalition is to get ahead of One Nation. Then it could benefit from One Nation preferences – provided they go to the Coalition at the same high rate as Greens preferences go to Labor.
This is possible but far from certain since some One Nation supporters are former Labor voters. Which leads to the tentative conclusion that the unintended consequence of One Nation’s apparent success could be a return to a Labor government on the back of Greens preferences. Both in Victoria and nationally.

Why it was almost as bland and as soporific as a burst of Jensenism, or watching the ABC ...

If Polonius had to feature simpleton Sharri, why not the full deal?

At this point, the pond went looking for that bonus, and became terribly distressed ...

Following on from the bromancer's assault yesterday on the conduct of the war on Iran by mad King Donald and minions of the Pete Kegsbreath kind, it seemed his fellow reptiles were just as down on other mad king schemes.

Stewie was in a real stew ...

Endless hurdles ahead in fragile plan to disarm Hamas
Hamas agrees to disarm but major obstacles lie ahead
For the first time Hamas has agreed to a plan to lay down its arms – but the devil is in the detail of a plan riddled with obstacles.
By Cameron Stewart
Chief International Correspondent

A teaser trailer should suffice for this treasonous attitude ...

Outrageous. As if the pond hadn't seen it clearly set down in print...

There, done and dusted, a rolled gold proclamation, sorted and solved. When has anything the mad King so ordered not come to pass?

Who are these provincial bums to question His Majesty or the thinking of state regime media, aka the Emeritus Chairman's Faux Noise.

And yet, outrageously, the pond must report that Jennings of the fifth form was in the same camp as Stewie, and he was pulling the same stewed prune face ...

‘I want to believe’: Why Trump’s disarmament agreement with Hamas will fail
It is more believable the US is hiding aliens than Hamas will lay down its weapons in favour of peace and property develop­ment.
By Peter Jennings

Why are all the reptiles so down on mad King Donald?

Could it be that maybe Benji wasn't too keen on peace before those elections, what with being on a war footing a handy way to rustle up a few more votes?

Could it be that Benji might shaft mad King Donald yet again?

After all, it was Benji who facilitated Hamas as an alternative power base, a way of ensuring that factions would be riven and there'd never be a Palestinian state, not that any of that much troubled Jennings of the fifth form ...

Of course, it's all the fault of Hamas, because Benji would do anything to help out the mad King.

After that extended detour, the pond kept looking for a bonus that might appeal, but came up short.

The pond has always found snappy Tom to be Dame Groan lite ... never willing to go to the heart of the apocalyptic chaos that will surely erupt before Xmas...

RBA and Fed wait, but inflation beast has not been killed. Who is to blame?
Most Australians blame the RBA for causing inflation. But the central bank says most believe the cure for inflation is actually making it worse. And that confusion makes its job harder.
By Tom Dusevic
Columnist

Even the uncredited collage below the header looked very low rent ...

Enough already with these teaser trailers!

Why had the Angelic one let down the pond when she was badly needed?

The pond decided on a desperate strategy.

It was time to turn to the lizard Oz editorialist for a summary of the key issues the reptiles had confronted this weekend ...

There was simplistic Sharri and the Fauci matter ...

Roll that last line trippingly around on the tongue ...

His failure to do so will leave citizens in the US and around the world more hostile to health authorities, including in the event of future crises. Many citizens, for good reason, became more sceptical as the Covid crisis unfolded. Their reluctance to trust health authorities in future could bring its own problems.

Say what? Their reluctance to trust health authorities in future

This in the age of Robert Kennedy and mad King Donald?

And then there was the Lloydie matter, that nuking of the country, not to mention the planet, in order to save the planet from the ravings of a climate science cult ...

Say what? The lizard Oz editorialist felt the need to start that last sentence with an "If"?

If you can fill the unforgiving nuke

    With sixty seconds’ worth of energy run,   

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

    And—which is more—you’ll be a reptile, my son!

Dare to dream ... and talk of that climate science cult, that hoax, will melt in the noonday sun.

And lastly there was the fertilizer matter, which had been a weekend lizard Oz EXCLUSIVE ...

Yet again there was no mention of the masterminds behind all this fuss.

Yet again the reptiles had failed to understand the wisdom of tariffs, or the need for the mad King to make out like a crypto bandit, or the need for the US government to forcibly acquire shares in corporations ... or arrange for chips to be shipped forthwith to the middle east, so that they might be forwarded on post haste to China, facilitated by appropriate crypto deals.

Yet again they failed to understand how their kissing cousins in regime state media had opened them up to suspicion and derision ... what with the Faux Noise approved war still surprisingly resilient and going swimmingly well ...

And so to the usual weekly debrief ...

In which the bromancer is in dire straits, but Lloydie of the Amazon is full of hope, nuking the planet to save the planet ...

 

The reptiles are nothing if not inventive, daily devising new EXCLUSIVE ways to launch invective on hapless Albo and his mob ...

EXCLUSIVE
‘It stinks’: Labor’s fail on fertiliser firms rescue
Labor’s big stink: import scheme ‘cost us millions’, say fertiliser importers
It was meant to keep the nation going through the Iran crisis but Labor’s $7.5bn fuel and fertiliser scheme has cost some companies millions while distorting the market, amid conflict and governance concerns.
By Matthew Denholm

Might not mad King Donald also stink because he started the ruckus?

Meanwhile, Fergo scored top billing with an apocalyptic headline ...

State of chaos: Can anyone stop Victoria’s rot?
Victoria faces line-in-the-sand poll as both leaders back reset
There will be a dramatic shift away from spendathon politics, regardless of who wins office on November 28.
By John Ferguson

The pond was almost beguiled and tempted to indulge, not least because of Emilia's stunning collage atop the piece ...

Why bother with AI when Emilia can do the job?

Fergo went on and on and on, for a bigly 11 minutes, but the immortal David Rowe summed it all up in a single image with shades of St. Kilda...

Besides, the pond is extremely loyal to its stars, and how could it walk around the bromancer, top of the world ma over on the extreme far right?

The header:  Iran moves decisively against its greatest enemy – Donald Trump; Lyndon Johnson will be remembered for Vietnam, George W. Bush for Iraq and Trump for the strategic disaster that Iran has become.

The caption for the only snap to relieve readers mired in the bromancer's suffering: US President Donald Trump faces escalating Middle East tension and severe political headwinds ahead of November elections. Picture: AP

Please allow the pond to begin at the beguin ...

Way back in March, the bromancer was cautiously optimistic ...

Trump’s Iran campaign aims to reverse the revolution
If Donald Trump produces a more normal government in Tehran the whole world benefits. But every outcome, including the worst, remains possible.

The bro began that piece with sublime hope and a dash of saucy doubts and fears ...

In launching his military campaign against Iran, Donald Trump has made his boldest play at history yet. This is his biggest attempt to bend decisively the planet’s geo-strategic arc.
The instant reactions give you some the clue. Around the Western world, perpetual demonstrators of the left, and pro-Islamist demonstrators, are in the streets denouncing Trump. Ethnic Iranians in the West, long subject to co-ordinated intimidation from Tehran, danced in the streets, as did Iranians at home, at the end of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s rule.
Trump has the right enemies, the right friends. That’s not to say he’ll succeed. His operation is intensely risky, involves huge human cost, and is unpredictable in its consequences. Nonetheless, when Trump declared: “No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight”, he was for once telling the truth.
Whether previous US presidents were constrained by wise prudence, or an unwillingness to face strategic necessity, is a matter of judgment.
The Albanese government is right to endorse Trump’s action and deserves some recognition for this. Deciding that in a war between Iran and the US, Australia backs the US, is not exactly rocket science – morally, strategically or electorally. Nonetheless, the government has made the right call. That the UN secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, is strongly opposed to the US action is a further sign that it’s probably more good than bad.

But since that glorious start, endorsed by stout-hearted Albo, the bromancer has progressively become more disheartened and disillusioned, the vision growing darker and darker, the outlook getting gloomier, the result looking bleak, and today saw the bro in a grumpy mood ...

There’s now a good chance Iran will totally destroy Donald Trump. The Iran war is the biggest challenge Trump has ever faced in a long and eventful life.
This past week saw a critical inflection point. With attacks in both directions halted, and Trump claiming negotiations were proceeding and Iran wanted a deal, Tehran decided to escalate with direct missile strikes at US bases and allies. That the Iranians can do this, even after Trump repeatedly declared their military destroyed, demonstrates their determination, Russian and Chinese help, and the asymmetric drone warfare they’ve mastered.
Iran also activated key proxies – militia in Iraq and Houthis in Yemen, who announced a blockade against Saudi Arabia transporting oil via the Red Sea. Among other effects, this raises US gas prices. America retaliated militarily. That was inevitable. The Iranians knew this. That’s what’s so striking. Iran, though vastly weaker than America, initiated escalation, knowing the consequences.
The Iranians themselves are divided, more than capable of overplaying their hand and making big mistakes. They could yet unravel. But this week it looked as though Tehran calculated its moves, acting deliberately and confidently. Whatever you think of Trump, it’s infinitely better if the US prevails. But this week shows us the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the mullahs think they’re winning and want to deny Trump any way out. They sense huge historic, strategic gain and the chance to cruel Trump’s presidency. The Iranians hate Trump. They’ve tried to kill him more than once.

The pond knew at once what the bromancer needed. 

As the reptiles had refused to offer him any visual distractions, it was up to the pond to supply some light-hearted 'toons ...

That should have cheered the bromancer up, but he seemed inconsolable ...

The US and Israeli military campaigns have damaged Iran, wiping out its navy and air force and damaging its economy. But Americans don’t credit, can’t really understand, the intensity of Iran’s Islamist ideology. The state burns to oppose America, Israel and women’s rights (an agenda bizarrely adopted by the Western left). In light of their ideology, the Iranian calculation they’re winning isn’t irrational. They willingly sacrifice their economy. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the first revolutionary leader, famously declared: “Economics is for donkeys.”
Trump now has no chance of securing a meaningful nuclear deal. Trump says he needs Iran to commit to no nuclear weapons. But the Iranian leaders make that pledge (dishonestly) routinely. The struggle is no longer really about nukes. The US and Israel have done all the damage they can to Iran’s nuclear programs.
The struggle now is over the Strait of Hormuz. So far, Iran is decisively winning that struggle.

Oh come now ... it's not that bad, everyone has a Verne moment now and then ...

Still more gloom?

Consider the following facts, which convince Iran it can decisively defeat, humiliate and even perhaps destroy Trump.
The US Air Force and navy are deployed in the Middle East in overwhelming and unsustainable numbers (at huge expense). Yet even with all that American military muscle in the region, and even after six months of battering, the US cannot secure the Strait of Hormuz for commercial shipping.
After six months of intermittent warfare, the US is running out of several kinds of missiles. As long ago as April, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies issued a definitive report, Last Rounds. It detailed US use of seven key munitions: Patriot interceptor missiles, THAAD missile defence systems and five attack missiles – Tomahawks, JASSM, PrSM, SM-3 and SM-6. For four of these, the US had used more than half its pre-war stock, including more than 1500 Patriots and more than 1000 Tomahawks. The report suggested they could take three or four years to replace. Many more have been used since.
The US military industrial base needs massive reform. It needs competition and a premium on designing cheap, plentiful munitions, as well as exquisitely hi-tech, perfection weapons it produces so well but so expensively. That this hasn’t happened is an indictment of both Trump and Joe Biden.
Iran’s asymmetric warfare has been technically brilliant and exposed this US weakness. The US Air Force recently announced it would scale back Pacific exercises because of Middle East needs.
That’s a huge constraint on Trump waging war indefinitely in Iran or even pursuing heavy, temporary escalation. But such escalation is anyway politically and morally impossible for the US.

Constraints? Nah ... no way ...

The bromancer kept sagging into the swamp of despair ...

Trump has threatened to destroy Iranian civilisation. But increasingly his threats are manif­estly hollow. Would the US military really commit massive war crimes against Iranian civilians? Or create millions of new Islamic refugees for Europe? And to what end? A few hundred Iranian fighters with drones could still keep the strait shut. Iran’s leaders seem confident they can withstand whatever Trump throws at them. It’s like the Muhammad Ali/George Foreman rope-a-dope fight in 1974. Foreman was bigger and stronger and seemed to throw all the punches. Ali dodged or absorbed them all, then knocked the exhausted Foreman out. Being bigger and stronger doesn’t guarantee success.
In any event, Trump faces much stronger, more immediate constraints. The American people hate the Iran war. The latest CNN poll shows 72 per cent of Americans oppose the war. This is not some rogue CNN poll. All the polls show the same thing more or less. A Politico poll from late July shows the war has lost support even among Trump’s base. Only 37 per cent of MAGA Republicans now support the war. Trump’s own personal approval ratings are diabolic, just 34 per cent in the latest CNN poll, worse than his position at this stage in his first term.
The Republicans will almost certainly lose the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate in November. The reason is Iran.
The Republicans face three bad headwinds going into November: inflation, the war and lack of enthusiasm among Republican voters. Inflation, especially of petrol and diesel prices, is caused by the Iran war. So is lack of voter enthusiasm. Trump promised no more forever wars. The dearth of Republican voter enthusiasm also arises from Trump and Republicans being unable to prosecute any significant domestic agenda as their efforts are concentrated on Iran.
Iran has hurt a lot of American presidents in the past – Jimmy Carter with US hostages in Tehran, Ronald Reagan with the Iran-backed terror bombing in Beirut in 1983 that killed more than 200 US marines, the terrorists Iran supported who hurt George W. Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq, the weak nuclear deal that so discredited Barack Obama. They follow US politics minutely. Now they think they can have their greatest triumph over Trump, their greatest enemy.
Lyndon Johnson’s presidency is remembered for the Vietnam war, Bush’s for Iraq and Afghanistan. Iran will be Trump’s legacy, for better or worse.

But there's still hope, surely, if mad King Donald turns out to be wily ...

Eventually the bromancer ran out of steam ...

Another critical inflection point over the past six months is the deepened military integration of the West’s enemies. China, Russia, Iran and North Korea (the CRINKS) are now much more intimately linked, militarily, strategically, technologically, than ever. Former US State Department heavyweight Philip Zelikow argues powerfully that they’re more integrated than the Axis powers were in World War II.
Trump has weakened America’s alliances, once a decisive US advantage, while the anti-American alliance has strengthened. Bush would have had the Europeans with him in Iran. On Trump’s watch America’s enemies have evolved into much more of a genuine military alliance. US economic sanctions can never finally bring Iran to its knees while it has Russian and Chinese backing.
The Democrats give Republicans a chance in November by embracing far-left candidates associated with the Democratic Socialists of America. Nonetheless a big anti-Republican wave is still the most likely result. Just as congress prevented Richard Nixon from ending the Vietnam war decently, left-wing congressional Democrats and fed-up Republicans could well combine to end the Iran war, to de-fund it, no matter the strategic cost.
That would leave Iran controlling the Strait of Hormuz. Trump would try to camouflage a surrender with some pseudo deal and endless bluster and distractions. The Iranians look like they won’t give him anything. This would be a humiliating tragedy for Trump, and pretty bad for the world.

Oh surely not, surely it's all good, surely Faux Noise will triumph, and surely the immortal Rowe has evoked the current state of play ...

For the bonus, the pond gingerly trod around simpleton Sharri, full disrespect ...

‘America’s doctor’ fails to come clean on Covid fiasco
The world’s most trusted doctor privately suspected a lab leak while publicly branding the theory a conspiracy – and Anthony Fauci has now pleaded the Fifth 111 times.
By Sharri Markson
News24 Host

The pond knows that silly Sharri is much loved by correspondents, and so this teaser trailer might send them off to the intermittent archive ...

The pond decided if it could help out the bromancer, it could do the same for Sharri ...

The only exciting bit came down at the very bottom of Sharri's piece, with news that the reptiles look like they've brazenly decided to pinch the ABC branding ...

Sharri Markson is the author of What Really Happened in Wuhan and the host of Sharri on News24, Monday to Thursday at 8pm.

Herpetologists who look up News24 might well stumble on a South African digital news platform...

For once the pond broke its rule of not linking to reptile sites, because correspondents would probably like to marvel at the way the actual "au" website is a tragic, wretched thing...

https://www.news24.com.au/

The pond also avoided that dill Dillon, pandering to the reptiles in the most pathetic way imaginable ...

‘Racist’ cartoon made vital point we still ignore
Bill Leak’s legacy: Why fear of being called racist is failing Aboriginal children
Maybe on this 10th anniversary of Bill Leak’s ‘Righto, what’s his name’ cartoon, we make it our goal not to be silenced.
By Anthony Dillon

He gave the reptiles yet another chance to recycle that racist cartoon at the top of the piece, so the pond walked on by ... (no scare quotes needed for racist).

But the pond didn't need any of them because Lloydie of the Amazon was making a rare appearance ... and it was nukes all the way ... and the pond just knew that this would be a marvel and a triumph that would send correspondents away feeling fully sated ...

The header: Nuclear power on the back of a truck moves closer to reality in the US; Australian Bobby Gallagher is pinning his hopes on a very small nuclear reactor that could change the future of global energy.

The caption for the snap for a device the pond has already placed an order for, so it can be installed in the pond's backyard by Xmas: The 1 megawatt Unity Battery is a microreactor that can run for five years without needing to be refuelled.

A bloody ute, and it looked like it was all put together with a bit of barbed wire, a stocking, string and some sealing wax!

What's more, Lloydie came back with a full-blown bang, an 11 minute read which the pond knows will just blow away its correspondents.

Lloydie was all in on sorting out reducing carbon emissions, though the pond didn't have the first clue why, what with everything the pond has ever read in the lizard Oz leading the pond to believe that climate science is a religious cult, a hoax, a fraud, and very silly:
Bobby Gallagher is a no-nonsense Australian from Brisbane who wants to make a big impact on the global energy future with a very small nuclear reactor that he jokes looks like a trash can.
On July 1 his company’s Unity Nuclear Battery was wheeled into the Idaho National Laboratories test facility in Idaho Falls, Idaho, where it became the third new US reactor to achieve criticality as part of a moonshot program launched by Donald Trump in 2025. Criticality means a chain reaction has been achieved. The next step is to add the hardware to allow it to be turned up to produce the heat required to drive a steam turbine to generate electricity.
As Australia grapples with decarbonisation and a booming demand for electricity from data centres, Gallagher says his technology could be transformative, “enabling the data centre boom, reducing carbon emissions at scale, providing stable long-term energy security as well as the ability to re-industrialise and reshore industrial capacity back to Australia”, he tells Inquirer.
The technology has a first-of-a-kind target cost of 15c a kilowatt hour with next-of-a-kind cost steadily coming down to 5c/kWh by the mid-2030s delivered to the customer end-user site. The key is mass production and Gallagher means business.
The heart of the Unity reactor was delivered to INL on the back of a Ford F-150 pickup truck. When complete, the whole package will fit into a shipping container. It has all happened at breakneck speed and if all goes to plan commercial deployment will start by 2028.

Aw, so the pond will have to wait until Xmas 2028 to place its backyard order, as the reptiles produced a snap of an assortment of mad Kind Donald heavies which gave the pond exceptional confidence in everything Lloydie was scribbling ... Bobby Gallagher with US secretary of the interior Doug Burgum, US energy secretary Chris Wright and US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on July 24. The Trump administration sees nuclear reactors as a key source of power for data centres and economic growth. Picture: UPI/Bloomberg

It was all mad King Donald, all systems go ...

Gallagher was a fourth-generation soldier with the Australian Defence Force, and his journey is a big story that stretches from war zones in Afghanistan, Iraq and Timor to making his millions in the oil and gas sector inventing an “air bag” to stop a repeat of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
Last month, Gallagher was posing with Trump in the White House as a pioneer of the nuclear future.
Unity Battery is a 1 megawatt microreactor that can run for five years without needing to be refuelled. It is easily transportable and can be run in series to power a single industrial facility, a ship, an island or a mine site, or be scaled up further to underpin a small city or a major data centre.
A fleet of reactors can be used depending on whether you need 1MW, 10MW, 100MW or 1000MW of power. It does not require water for cooling, can be buried underground, can replace gas to back up renewables and uses only a tiny fraction of the land needed for other power sources to generate the same output.
Gallagher’s company, Deployable Energy, boasts its microreactor has been designed to use standard fuels, materials and industrial processes already available at commercial scale. The result is a system that can be produced in volume, deployed quickly and operated reliably across a wide range of applications at what the company says will be a competitive cost.

It's a bloody miracle, and at this point the reptiles wheeled out an innovative montage of images, which managed to completely confuse and conflate what was being shown under a generic caption, A mobile nuclear reactor built in 150 days

The pond couldn't replicate the profound insights offered by the montage, but can report the images which quickly followed each other ...

After that, it was back to the central theme of the needs of AI...

“We think it is going to fundamentally change the energy complex,” Gallagher says.
The timeline from here includes full power operations under US Department of Energy authorisations at the INL in 2027, US Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval of a commercial licence in 2028, with 1GW of manufacturing capacity annually from 2030 and initial production facility essentially booked through 2035.
Gallagher says the company has more than $100bn in commercial interest.
Deployable Energy is not alone at the pointy end of a global race for nuclear that has taken on a new dimension with the advent of power-hungry data centres and artificial intelligence.
Having spent years making energy more expensive and our grid less secure, Australia is now faced with a surge in demand we cannot afford to ignore.
Energy planners everywhere are asking how to power data centres that can each consume the same amount of electricity as a small city and demand it without interruption. Australia is being targeted as a politically stable location to host mega data centres for the Asian region. It is a bet on the future that could define the nation, like mining before it, or see us left behind.
The Albanese government is embracing the future with caveats. It wants data centres to provide their own electricity by underwriting deployment of renewable energy projects. It is a big ask given the problems that federal Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen has encountered in the existing energy revolution, where renewable energy and batteries backed by gas are expected to replace coal-fired power stations as they are forced out of business.

The reptiles quickly helped Lloydie change tracks, from nuking the country to tales of the urgent needs of AI ... The Goodman SYD01 Data Centre is a major 90MW digital infrastructure project being built on the former ABC television studios site in Artarmon in Sydney. Picture: Corbis via Getty Images

How Lloydie of the Amazon wept at the suffering of AI ... and how he loved to offer hope ...

The problem is not ideological but practical. Costs are rising and time frames are blowing out. Even projects that have won government guarantees under the Capacity Investment Scheme have not been able to make it to financial close. New data shows only 6 per cent of government-backed wind farms have reached financial sign-off. The cost of developing onshore wind has roughly doubled since 2022. The situation is further complicated by the slow pace and high cost of new transmission lines that are needed to link up a widely a dispersed spread of wind and solar projects across states.
There are slow planning and environmental approvals, rising construction costs and increasing pushback from local communities with environmental and social concerns. Energy users are told repeatedly that renewables are the cheapest form of energy available but savings in generation costs are being swallowed up by more elaborate networks and higher connection charges. The data centre industry worries it will not be possible to develop large-scale renewable energy projects on time. And even if data centres do agree to go with renewables, it is likely the power grid and data centres will be sweating on the same projects, not additional supply.
The federal government is facing pushback from state and territory governments as well as business. The Northern Territory has joined Queensland in rejecting Labor’s national green vision for data centres that mandates data centre operators to find new renewable energy supplies and pay grid expenses so costs are not passed on to consumers.
Queensland Treasurer and Energy Minister David Janetzki said this week while Queensland wanted to attract data centres, it was concerned about forcing uneconomic investment into the electricity system and raising household power bills.
Australia’s biggest data centre operators have warned Labor’s proposed AI power rules could prove difficult to meet. Major data centre developer AirTrunk has said there must be a level of flexibility to reflect the difficulty of perfectly sequencing new clean energy supplies with data centres that can be delivered in just two years.
It is not ideological, it’s technical. Data centre developers are big investors in renewable energy globally but they want backup.
In Australia, they are looking to the vast gas reserves in the Beetaloo Basin in the Northern Territory for security. The NT government has met them with open arms to the dismay of environmental groups.

The NT government? What could possibly go wrong?

What Lloydie of the Amazon needed was an artist's impression which could set the NT on a magical journey to being the capital of the world, and the reptiles obliged in spades ... An artist's impression of the Beetaloo data centre, which could start the NT on its way to being the “data centre capital of the globe”. Picture: Jazz Pedder/Gabbert Design

A truly dazzling and splendiferous vision, up there with growing rice at Humpty Doo.

Mad King Donald and NT's Lia, what more could a pond correspondent want?

NT Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro has voiced ambitions for the Territory to become the “data centre capital of the globe” underpinned by the region’s ample renewables and gas resources, access to land and water, and its high-speed fibre-optic cable links with Southeast Asia.
According to Greenpeace, the NT proposal “marks a dangerous escalation in the AI data centre industry’s expansion, which threatens to entrench fossil fuel infrastructure for decades and put immense pressure on the region’s fragile water resources while continuing to be unregulated”.
Greenpeace Australia Pacific head of climate and energy Joe Rafalowicz says: “This disaster proposal for a 2GW gas-powered AI data centre in the NT is a shocking example of the unchecked expansion of hyperscale data centres in Australia.” He says it is “more evidence for the urgent need for a moratorium on all new data centres until strong, binding regulations are put in place to protect our communities and climate.”
“While Beetaloo Energy and the NT government prepare to bulldoze ahead with this climate and water disaster, the Prime Minister is asleep at the wheel, promising to legislate a vague set of standards next year,” Rafalowicz says. “Next year is too late, and anything less than mandating data centres cover their own energy demand, and then some, with new renewable energy is not enough.”

Oh poo poo, alarmist greenies. 

Listen to Lloydie of the Amazon, hearken unto his song ...

Whatever Greenpeace may wish, gas unquestionably will be a big part of the future energy mix. But the contest has been set between the new frontier of joining the tech race with AI and sticking with existing government policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Which is why in the US the world’s biggest tech firms are investing billions of dollars restarting closed nuclear reactors, writing power purchase agreements with those still operating and funding what many hope to be the new era of nuclear, small modular reactors.
That story has been updated to include microreactors – essentially nuclear batteries – that are smaller again in scale but are quickly showing their potential.
There is another step change taking place in manufacturing. On July 22, the US Department of Energy put artificial intelligence at the centre of its nuclear build-out strategy, awarding $US60m ($85.4m) across three years to Prometheus, an INL-led project that will use AI to design, license, manufacture, construct and operate reactors.
Prometheus partner X-energy says the world is at the edge of one of humanity’s great technical evolutions. AI money is moving beyond the chat window and into the physical world.
The big nuclear investments involve a who’s who of innovation: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Google parent organisation Alphabet and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta.
Trump may have famously said “drill, baby, drill” but he is also betting big on AI and nuclear.

And whatever mad King Donald bets on, he always wins ... just ask the bromancer.

Besides, is there any better way to produce confidence in the reader, than to bring in that "meta"man, and the wedding in Venice man, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are central to Donald Trump’s AI and nuclear energy plans.

It was go, go, go with mad King Donald ...

In May last year the US President signed executive order 14302 in which he said: “The United States originally pioneered nuclear energy technology during a time of great peril. We now face a new set of challenges, including a global race to dominate in artificial intelligence, a growing need for energy independence, and access to uninterruptible power supplies for national security.”
Trump said “swift and decisive action is required to jump-start America’s nuclear energy industrial base and ensure our national and economic security by increasing fuel availability and production, securing civil nuclear supply chains, improving the efficiency with which advanced nuclear reactors are licensed, and preparing our workforce to establish America’s energy dominance and accelerate our path towards a more secure and independent energy future.”
A little more than one year later, the program is bearing fruit.
In June last year the US Department of Energy announced its new reactor pilot program to expedite testing of advanced reactor designs under the department’s authority. The target set by Trump was for three reactors to achieve criticality by July 4 this year.
One of the developers chosen was Deployable Energy, which was described as an Australian concept, now a Houston-based company developing the Unity Nuclear Battery. Deployable Energy was selected in April this year, a reactor was transported from Houston to INL in May and on July 1 the unit achieved full core criticality at INL, the third new US reactor to do so.
Since the breakthrough, Gallagher has been opening up about his journey and management style across the specialist nuclear media. Gallagher’s reactor is far from being developed in a back shed; he has assembled a team of leaders from venture-backed deep-tech energy start-ups, the commercial, research and naval nuclear sectors, traditional energy companies, the military, the US Department of Energy and national laboratories. His management skill is to get people to think outside the box, ask the right questions, prioritise repeatability and efficiency, and see nuclear as a production line product at scale.
“We combine entrepreneurial speed with deep technical and regulatory experience to solve one of the hardest problems in energy: delivering affordable, reliable power at scale,” Deployable Energy’s website says.
Deployable Energy was founded last year on a simple idea: nuclear energy should be a product, not a project.
“The modern US industrial base is built to manufacture products – repeatable, scalable systems that can be deployed quickly and affordably,” the company says. “We are building nuclear systems in the same way the energy industry builds everything else – through world-class engineering, manufacturing and supply chains that already operate on a global scale.”
Gallagher says Houston was chosen on purpose.
“Detroit, that means automotive. If I was to say Silicon Valley, that means software. If I was to say Taiwan, that means chips. Houston is all about energy infrastructure that’s deployable to sites. That’s what Houston does better than anywhere else in the world. That’s why we’re located right in the heart of the energy corridor where a good portion of the world’s energy infrastructure is design built, deployed, and ensures the lifestyle that we live right now,” Gallagher told one nuclear energy podcast.

A podcast! So it must be true!

The pond was dazzled by the dreaming and the dreamers, Deployable Energy chief executive Bobby Gallagher says nuclear energy should be a product, not a project. Picture: AFP

Lloydie of the Amazon wrapped it all up with a final gobbet that had the pond wild-eyed with excitement ... a startling pitch for nuking the country to make it safe for AI ...

Gallagher says he likes the “fire to fission” route where natural gas is switched over to small-scale nuclear. He says it is a “hybrid option where the customer doesn’t take on a lot of risk”.
Back in Australia, nuclear engineer Tony Irwin, technical director of Australian company SMR Nuclear Technology, has been monitoring the progress of the SMR program and says Deployable Energy has achieve a breakthrough success that represents another technology loss for Australia. He tells Inquirer SMR projects are finally making it to production and deployment.
The first of four GE Hitachi BWRX-300 SMRs is under construction at Ontario Power Generation’s Darlington site in Canada. Each unit will generate 300MWe and the four units will power 1.2 million homes.
There are also plans for deployment of the BWRX-300 in the US, Finland, Sweden, Poland and Britain. Rolls-Royce, which has built all the reactors for British nuclear-powered submarines, has designed a complete nuclear power station and signed a contact with Great British Energy-Nuclear to allow work to start immediately on delivery of three Rolls-Royce SMRs at Wylfa in Wales, an existing nuclear site that has old shutdown Magnox reactors. Each Rolls-Royce SMR will produce 470 MWe.
Rolls-Royce is also deploying its SMR in the Czech Republic and signed an early works contract in April this year. Several other countries, including, Sweden are also interested.
The microreactor space is considered to be a game changer of its own. Irwin says microreactors “will be an economic option for strategic installations including data centres and for replacing diesel fuel to supply electricity, heat and other energy needs for remote communities, islands and mine sites in Australia”.
He is not surprised that it is an Australian leading the way but disappointed that there is another great missed opportunity for domestic manufacturing. The big question is: Will Australian learn from its mistakes and embrace the new frontier of nuclear technologies that can offer solutions to the obvious problems being experienced in the decarbonisation puzzle?
Gallagher says Australia’s bans are “misguided and a relic of misconceptions about nuclear power and atomic weapons”. He says it has been clearly demonstrated globally that nuclear power is one of the cleanest, safety and less environmentally impactful forms of energy. “The next generations of reactor technology will continue to build on that record, whilst reducing costs and construction lead times,” Gallagher says.
“It’s time to lift the ban, set appropriate regulations modelled off world-class nuclear regulators in other jurisdictions and allow the market to determine demand and Australia to enjoy the economic and environment benefits.”
AI offers new complexity but also a great opportunity to get with the global program. Small nuclear is a new frontier that was once considered too good to be true but now looks as if it finally could be an opportunity that is too good to miss.

Indeed, indeed, and it was purely by chance that this week Tom was all in on genius inventors and innovation and entrepreneurs and governments picking winners...

And this one's for Sharri ...