The radicalisation of the pond continues with a serve of Dame Groan and the bromancer ...

 

So one minute the lizard Oz was reporting that the radicalised suicidal and homicidal co-pilot was part of a premeditated operation planned by the likes of Iran (here);  and the next minute that he'd been radicalised by living in Australia.

That the pond could understand. The pond has been dangerously radicalised by being exposed to a daily diet of lizard Oz "news" and opinions.

Who could add to the pond's radicalisation this day?

A horde of contenders rushed into view, but these days the pond has become selective in its diet.

While the pond appreciated Toby's assault on the perfidious French - how diabolical and insulting to call them Greeks - it lacked the necessary radicalising fizz...

Has France become the new Greece of Europe?
History shows that financial crises can spread remarkably quickly once confidence begins to deteriorate.
By Toby Johnston

... so the pond personally supervised its transfer to the intermittent archive so that its feeble attempt at radicalisation was to hand for all.

Ditto Damon (Damon?) Johnson's effort, which could only radicalise forlorn southern sparrows (you know who you are...

Why Labor is backing One Nation’s Pickering to join debate
Warren Pickering wants in. Ben Carroll wants him in. Why Jess Wilson is not so sure.
By Damon Johnston
Melbourne Bureau Chief

As for the "lead" news story, the only thing of note was the new snap of a completely bewildered Jimbo ...

EXCLUSIVE
Trusts trap: Tax office, Labor in twin hits as businesses brace
Trusts trap: ATO and Labor in twin hits as businesses forced to pay heavily
Small businesses and families face up to $13.3bn in restructuring and advice costs as the ATO cracks down on decades-old trust paperwork errors ahead of Labor’s looming reforms.
By Sarah Ison and Thomas Henry

The pond would love to be the fly on a wall in the editorial meetings where hit jobs are handed out ...with stout-hearted old diggers joining with Pauline to set up a wail ...

EXCLUSIVE
Hanson issues enterprising put-down of Chalmers
The One Nation leader attacked the Treasurer’s lack of private sector experience and told business chiefs her party is their champion.
By Geoff Chambers

"Enterprising"? "Issues"? What judicious, wise use of words ...

COMMENTARY by DENNIS SHANAHAN
Five months in and Dr Jim’s budget blunder still causing pain
No budget still at the centre of negative news and politics nearly six months after it was brought down can be called a political success.

On the upside, all this spared the pond from more Josh v. Beefy Boofhead, or freedumb boy ...

Besides, if the pond wants this sort of stuff, it won't turn to a recycling of the thoughts of a fake ranga. It'll reach for the OP Bundy rum ...

A strong Hayekian start, with subtle flavours of Robin Hood on the back palate.

And then there's the coffee. Let the overlords drink coffee!

The pond did its best to care, but it sounded just like another jihad ... one day death taxes, the next trusts, then the price of coffee (remember the good old days when you made your own and developed skills at making heart and fern shapes?) ...

It must be time for an AV distraction ...

By golly the reptiles seem to have an inexhaustible supply of snaps of Jimbo looking quizzical or bewildered ... and so to the final gobbet ...

The pond acknowledges it gave the old groaner short shrift by dishing her out in screen caps, but why not swallow down your daily dose of "we'll all be rooned" in four short gulps?

On with even more dangerous radicalisation, this time at the hand, or keyboard, of the bromancer.

He always knows the best way to get  a firing squad of stupidity into top shape...

The header: By Greg Sheridan Foreign Editor
The Greens are the worst antisemites

The call of the bot: Listen to this article
7 min

The caption of a snap of a possible Satanist: Green Party leader Zack Polanski delivers his speech during day one of the Green Party annual conference. Picture: Getty Images

The yearning for the Big G's attention: Make us preferred on Google

Not the bromancer, not another edition of the Australian Daily Zionist News ...

Correspondents sent into terminal despair at the thought know the pond's drill.

First a little balance by reverting to a Haaretz story which takes up the themes explored in that notorious documentary NAZA. 

There's an interview with the co-director on YouTube.

A new documentary, “NAZA,” provides a searing look into the inner-workings of the Israeli military’s operation in the Gaza Strip. Its namesake is derived from a Hebrew military term for “collateral damage.” Academy Award-winning director and investigative journalist Yuval Abraham joined Jacob Soboroff to discuss the film's implications, and the discoveries he made while making it. 

The Haaretz story provided details of war crimes in abundance:

'Even the Lowest-Ranking Target Justified Civilian Casualties': Israeli Intelligence Soldiers Detail Gaza Policy Shift (*intermittent archive)

This is how ethnic cleansing goes down ...

...According to A., who was also involved in the mission, those in the strike cell knew that a particularly large number of civilians could be harmed. Military Intelligence's calculations of potential collateral damage put the figure at roughly 250 to 300 people, so the decision was referred directly to the chief of staff for approval. The IDF, by contrast, says its collateral damage estimate was around 100 people. The soldiers say far more were ultimately killed.
After the strike, A. says, a damage assessment was conducted to establish what had happened on the ground.
"Among other things, we relied on figures coming from Hamas, which we considered relatively plausible, even if they weren't 100 percent accurate," he says. "As time went on, we realized the death toll was around 250. I remember being stunned that we were bringing down several densely populated buildings, killing and injuring hundreds of people, to kill a battalion commander who, just a few weeks earlier, hadn't even been someone we were supposed to gather intelligence on."

There's a lot more in that story, but it's time for the bromancer to keep radicalising the pond ...

The Greens political movement, in Australia and internationally, has emerged as an important generator of antisemitic prejudice, indeed hatred. The election of David Shoebridge as leader of the Greens doesn’t moderate this ugly trend, but consolidates it.
The Greens, in Australia and internationally, partly emerge from, and embody, the dominance of the far-left worldview that now dominates Western universities, especially in the humanities. This is a central element to the crisis that afflicts Australia and most Western societies. Universities have become, in part, agents of hatred, prejudice, ideological extremism and delusional paranoia in public policy.
It goes without saying that many good things happen at Australian universities. But there’s also a profoundly ideological crisis on our campuses. The royal commission into antisemitism, as well as mostly ignoring Islamist antisemitism, has barely touched university antisemitism, especially humanities’ classrooms. The real reason authorities baulk at confronting ugly antisemitic demonstrations is that these demonstrations give expression to the universities’ broader intellectual environment. To change them fundamentally would require a cultural revolution at universities. None of our leaders are up for this.
It should be noted this is a bipartisan failure. The Coalition was in office for a decade and no useful reform of universities, schools or other cultural organisations more widely took place. This is not a question of freedom of speech. It’s a question of vast taxpayer funding being used to undermine and destroy the basic tenets of civic and human decency.

Human decency? Per Haaretz:

The soldiers' accounts describe an entirely different approach to warfare since October 7, 2023, in which even the lowest-ranking target justified civilian casualties. Their testimony suggests that the high casualty figures the army calls collateral damage were not isolated mishaps or individual identification errors, but the result of a strike policy stretched to its limits. Haaretz has published similar accounts throughout the three years of war. These policies, combined with an effort to compensate for the intelligence failure of October 7, led the military to turn a blind eye to a civilian toll unlike anything it had ever seen.
'We were striking small fry'
One change the soldiers describe after October 7 was the opening of the intelligence apparatus to untrained personnel.
"People arrived at Military Intelligence who weren't from the unit, reservists who'd never even served in intelligence, brought in from all sorts of places," says A. "They sat in the Targeting Directorate looking for the most insignificant targets, the small fry, so they could kill them. Anyone displaying Hamas symbols on Facebook or identifying themselves as Hamas was marked as a target. Some were Hamas members, some were fighters too, but they really were small fry."
D., who served in strike cells – rear command teams that coordinate drone and other aerial strikes and act as the "eyes" of troops on the ground – reinforces that account as he describes how the criteria and methods changed.
"We were always told that things would look different in a war," he says. "But this was something else entirely. Suddenly, the IDF was striking even the lowest of the low indiscriminately, and everyone had forgotten about conserving ammunition. We were striking Hamas drivers. That's how far it went."

Apparently here's a local variant of alleged Satanism, given the honour for daring to point out the indecent: David Shoebridge holds a press conference at Parliament House. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

On with the lesser Lesser commaning all to "make it so"...

Opposition shadow education minister Julian Leeser has introduced a bill to try to force universities to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition of antisemitism, which has been officially adopted by the Albanese government, all the states and indeed even the National Student Ombudsman, but not the majority of Australian universities. 

Stop right there. This was one submission in relation to that matter (you'll need to search to find the link, it being a pdf download):

Shades of grey bro, shades of grey ... though perhaps not for you or the lesser Leeser:

Speaking, powerfully, on Monday to support his bill, Leeser said: “When it comes to antisemitism, our public university campuses have a lot to answer for.”
Addressing the universities directly, Leeser said: “In far too many cases, you have allowed Jew-hate to become normalised on your campuses. It always hides behind the fig leaf that the abuse and intimidation is not antisemitic, just anti-Zionist or anti-Israel. This is a pathetic and ridiculous excuse when the targets are overwhelmingly Australian staff and students, and we all know the word Zionist is just the politically acceptable way to say the word Jew.”
Leeser correctly identifies a key fellow traveller of this ideological sickness as the Greens party. He says: “The Greens are the party of antisemitism.” Last week this stark reality was revealed in all its ugliness in Britain. The British Greens are led by Zack Polanski, surely the most odious purveyor of hatred and extremism in mainstream Western politics. Australian Greens periodically express admiration for the British Greens.
The British Greens passed a formal resolution at their conference last week that declared Zionism is racism. They further declared that modern Israel should not exist at all, that the Jews of Israel should live as part of “a single, democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine”. The resolution praised and encouraged resistance against Israel “by all means available under international law”. Senior Greens figures promoting the resolution were clear that includes armed struggle.
A central feature of all this is to understand what Zionism is. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines Zionism as “a movement aiming at the re-establishment of the Jewish nation in Palestine”. Note the word “re-establishment”. Jews have lived in Jerusalem and surrounding areas for thousands of years. It’s insane to call Israel a colonial nation. However, whether you like Israel or not, Zionism means, as the OED says, the idea that there should be a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Stop right there.

What is Zionism and why do some critics describe it as racist?
Green party debate over the motion ‘Zionism is racism’ comes amid renewed arguments over the meaning and history of a contested term

Shades of grey, bromancer, shades of grey.

Palestine wasn't some pristine terra nullius. 

There were people living there, and they'd been there for a long time...

Stay still What is Zionism? The different meanings of a contested term

...Most of these allegations concerned the alleged mistreatment of Jewish students and faculty who identify as Zionists, or merely refuse to denounce Zionism. That has led some administrations, such as Haverford’s, to explicitly affirm that it is forbidden to harass or otherwise discriminate against students who support Zionism – since such behavior has become increasingly common on some campuses in recent years.
As a scholar of Israel studies who teaches about Zionism, what strikes me when I read such statements is how narrowly they define it, reducing Zionism to a single belief in “the right of the Jewish people to self-determination and statehood in the land of Israel.”
This ignores the fact that there are multiple “Zionisms,” rather than a singular “Zionism,” and that the term has more than just one meaning. It is, at best, oversimplified to describe Zionism only as the belief in the right of Jews to have a Jewish state.

Shades of grey, bromancer, shades of grey ...

Oaky, the pond's interrupted more than enough. Cue a snap of the lesser Leeser: Federal Liberal MP Julian Leeser. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

And cue the bromancer ...

Modern Israel has been an independent state since 1948, just under 80 years. Every government, opposition and political party in the West that recognises Israel, such as the Albanese government, is definitionally Zionist. To call Zionism racism is to declare Israel, uniquely among all nations, wickedly illegitimate. Further, what the British Greens have done is stigmatise all British Jews who have any sympathy for Israel at all, who even utter the Jewish prayer “next year in Jerusalem”, as racists.
In doing this, the British Greens are intensely racist themselves, and justify racist persecution of Jews. Jews who attend “Zionist synagogues” are thus racist. Therefore, in this grotesque inversion of morality, to oppose racism the left opposes Jews. This is ugly antisemitism. The Nazis would approve.
Polanski is in his way so cowardly that he didn’t attend the vote on this resolution at his own conference. Under severe media scrutiny, he later said he would have voted against the resolution although he agreed with its substance. Happily, Polanski lost the by-election for former Labour leader Keir Starmer’s seat. Labour under Andy Burnham held on.
But the Greens, having passed this infamous, antisemitic, racist resolution, won a shocking 33 per cent of the vote. The British Greens are polling 11 per cent nationally. Other antisemitic parties poll well over 4 per cent. That means we now live in the unimaginable historic moment of so mainstreaming antisemitism that more than one in seven British voters now support openly antisemitic parties.

Did the bromancer have to drag climate science into it? 

He did, he did ...Greta Thunberg ...only to mourn the way that those bloody alarmists could hold more than one thought in the old noggin at a time ...

Hang on, hang on, say that again ...

Shoebridge is less verbally extreme than Mehreen Faruqi, whom he defeated for the leadership. But he leads a completely extreme party. While his language is marginally more civil – though he’s happy to call Coalition politicians “scumbags” – the substance of his leadership is extreme.

In mango Mussolini days, you're going to get agitated about a term. a word, a concept, that's within your lexicon?

The Australian’s Foreign Editor Greg Sheridan discusses the “terrible breakdown in civility” which has taken place in American politics. 
“Both sides of American politics, driven partly by social media, are very dangerously demonising each other,” Mr Sheridan told Sky News host Andrew Bolt. 
“When the worst of them generally are that, they are idiots; they are not really murderers and wannabe dictators and scumbags and all the rest of it.” (Less than 1,400 views for the bromancer and the Bolter? Happy days).

So the pond can call you an idiot and a barking mad Zionist, and that would pass the bromancer smell test?

On to the last flourish of extremist bromancer ...

He has himself shared and lauded maps that show Israel erased in one big Palestine sign, he’s identified with the “Free Palestine, from the river to the sea” slogan, he’s accused Israel of attempting to wipe the Palestinian people out, he’s described the accidental and tragic death of Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom as Israeli “murder”, he routinely describes Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide and says the Albanese government is “deeply complicit” in this genocide.
Shoebridge leads a far-left, extremist party, the Greens, as destructive an element of the sickness at the heart of our culture as anything we’ve seen.
Greg Sheridan is The Australian’s foreign editor.

Speaking of the sickness at the heart of our culture, a sample of the lizard Oz hive mind at work ...

On the upside, the pond was spared the bromancer frantically scribbling that mad king Donald had done some good things, generally unspecified ...

And here's an interesting addendum. 

This is the sort of censorship routinely featured on a daily basis by the Australian Daily Zionist News ...

Susan Abulhawa wins fight to restore censored Oxford Union speech on Israel apartheid

The deletions included her references to booby-trapped toys in southern Lebanon and allegations of sexual torture against Palestinian detainees, including her account of the death of Gaza surgeon Dr Adnan Al-Bursh. Other cuts removed criticism of Zionist claims to supremacy and of conduct during the Gaza genocide.

Here's the Oxford Union bit about the settlement ...

susan abulhawa and the Oxford Union are pleased to confirm they have resolved the dispute that arose between them regarding the publication of an edited video of her speech in the 28 November 2024 debate "This house believes Israel is an apartheid state engaged in genocide"

And here's the restored argument ...

What kind of warped notion of compassion allowed the Caterist into the country?

 

"I could say the stupidest things and you’d clap" - the mango Mussolini to his cult devotees.

"We can write the silliest things and you'd write approving letters to the editor" - the reptiles of Oz to their hive mind followers.

Come on down Major Mitchell, and prove it's so ...

What’s really behind the French riots?
France’s manufactured left-wing school riots are a warning to us al
The left is trying to harness this Muslim youth wave to compete with Le Pen in what will likely be a polarised election when Macron goes.
By Chris Mitchell
Columnist 

Eek, it's an Islamic youth wave. Be afraid, be desperately afraid...

Should the pond continue to pander to this kind of alarmist drivel?

Here the Muslim population is small by comparison, but it is important in outer suburban seats held by the Labor federal government. The Muslim vote is influential enough that neither the PM nor the premiers of NSW and Victoria were prepared to call for the banning of pro-Palestinian marches on October 7 last week – analogous to marching for Satan on Easter Sunday.

As always, the Major himself spends his time amplifying bad sources, in this case a certain Shellenberger, which means the pond must provide a reminder ...

...Shellenberger has faced accusations of "bad science" for his comments on climate change in Apocalpyse Never; he has also been criticized for arguing with prominent climate scientists on social media and "apologising" to the world on the behalf of environmentalists. A panel of scientists organized by Climate Feedback analyzed the claims he made in his "apology" article, concluding that they were "inaccurate or mislead readers by contradicting available evidence or using scientific data out of context." A Snopes article, which consulted multiple scientists that Shellenberger had cited, was similarly critical; Michael Mann called one of Shellenberger's central arguments "completely wrong," and found it was also contradicted by the very IEA source Shellenberger used to support it. (wiki)

So it was then, so it still is now.

Whatever, the Major is in the intermittent archive, and his blather about the usual suspects is even more tiresome than usual, so the pond will only offer a sample ...

Ah, nuking the country to save the planet, though in the same breath, the Major will hasten to assure you that the planet doesn't need saving from climate change, what with it being a Satanic conspiracy of the first water.

Meanwhile, it was poll day, a reliable way for the reptiles to sway the ABC news cycle, with bad news for Pauline only in the sub-header ...

EXCLUSIVE
Newspoll: Labor warned that spendathon ‘must come to an end’
Terrible 20s: Albanese, Taylor and Hanson all stuck below 30 per cent primary vote in Newspoll
More than one in two Australians want the PM and Jim Chalmers to cut spending as an inflation-fighting priority, according to the latest Newspoll, which also reveals a slip in voter support for One Nation and Pauline Hanson.
By Geoff Chambers

As happens with this sort of manufactured "news", Geoff chambered his own round ...

COMMENTARY by GEOFF CHAMBERS
PM’s keeping it cool despite One Nation and economic woes
After securing a second-term, winning 94-seats and watching the demise of the Coalition, Anthony Albanese is reminding colleagues that they’re not halfway through the current term and time is on Labor’s side ahead of a May 2028 election.

One note surely appealed to devotees of Barners:

...How right-wing is the Coalition prepared to go without alienating the centre that helped deliver Albanese a landslide victory last year? The challenge for Angus Taylor and Matt Canavan, who are struggling to cut through and differentiate their messaging from One Nation, is to devise policies that appeal to conservative values but are clearly distinct from Labor and One Nation offerings.
While Labor figures are confident of winning the NSW election and picking off traditionally safe Liberal seats, One Nation is expected to perform strongly across the state.
If the Nationals are obliterated, Canavan will need to explain how he intends to save the furniture, outside of rah-rah speeches.
The 45-year-old Gold Coast-born Nationals leader – who studied economics at the University of Queensland, worked at the Productivity Commission for six years, and was a senior executive at KPMG – does not have the same authentic appeal as his ex-boss and One Nation defector Barnaby Joyce. As one senior government source quipped: “Barnaby is a phenomenon. The voters seem to forgive him despite his colourful past.”
You can’t fake authenticity.

Say that again?  You can’t fake authenticity.

That's what the pond thought you said.

Back in his day, as every one in Tamworth knows, Barners was just a bloody accountant from deep north toad land...

From 1991 to 2005, Joyce worked in the accounting profession, and founded his own accountancy firm, Barnaby Joyce & Co., in St George, Queensland in 1999. (wiki)

He's about as authentic as an Excel spreadsheet or a plastic spoon.

You can't fake reptile stupidity. If an ability to get as pissed as a parrot and flop about like a Maguires pub stumblebum is a sign of authenticity, then the long absent lord is surely needed to save the country.

Meanwhile, top of the page came this EXCLUSIVE ... with its very own branded gif footage ...

EXCLUSIVE
‘Great loss for Australia’: Optimist Oliver takes aim over Firmus flop
Firmus co-founder Oliver Curtis has taken a parting shot from Singapore at Australian investors who refused to buy a ticket to Firmus’s $44bn float | VIDEO
By Liam Mendes in Singapore, John Stensholt and Perry Williams

Only an early version of the yarn had made it into the archive, and the epic whine only seemed useful as a way of drawing attention to this simmering feud:

Exceptionalism is no defence for AI companies’ ‘theft’
A senior Microsoft executive called AI scraping “the largest theft of labour in human history” – yet AI giants are now lobbying Australia to make it legal.
By Rod Sims
Contributor

That was worth an infallible Pope catch up ...

What else? 

Well freedumb boy was out and about ...

Trust law another Chalmers bungle
After five major backdowns and a credit card surcharge debacle, the Albanese government is now pushing trust law reforms that could damage small businesses.
By Tim Wilson
Contributor

The pond will get back to freedum boy (sorry, there's no 'b' in dum)  as soon as it's rich enough to have a trust to worry about.

That seemed to be some sort of reptile way of balancing the "news" that the beefy boofhead was in a feud with Josh ...

Taylor dismisses Frydenberg’s call for reform of GST
Angus Taylor rebuffs Josh Frydenberg on GST as MPs query Liberal leader’s economic metal
The debate within the Coalition has prompted Labor claim there is a growing black hole in Angus Taylor’s agenda, with government analysis projecting his migration clampdown would leave the budget $62 billion worse-off over four years.
By Greg Brown

Oh dear, the reptiles love to position themselves at the centre of the black hole...

...Angus Taylor has ruled out backing an increase to the GST, in a move that sharpens the divide between himself and potential future Liberal leadership candidate Josh Frydenberg, as economists and some MPs raise concerns it signifies a lack of political will to embrace bold reform.
The economic debate within the Coalition has prompted Labor to claim there is a growing black hole in Mr Taylor’s agenda, with government analysis projecting his migration clampdown would leave the budget $62bn worse off over four years.
Anthony Albanese’s economic approach will also come under fire in parliament this week as the Coalition ramps up its attack over the cost-of-living crisis, while proposing legislation to permanently stop the ATO from banning businesses paying tax bills via credit card.
Labor argues the Coalition’s ATO plan would cost the budget $200m a year but Mr Taylor on Sunday said the agency should be able to absorb the costs within its budget.
After The Australian revealed over the weekend that Mr Frydenberg was pushing for GST reform in a new book as he considers whether to make a political comeback, Mr Taylor said he did not support lifting the consumption tax.
Coalition MPs were privately split over whether Mr Taylor should keep GST reform on the table as part of a suite of measures to differentiate their policy platform at the next election from One Nation’s and Labor’s.
Economists warned it would hamper the ability of the opposition to formulate an agenda that could bolster productivity.
Several Liberal MPs told The Australian they were disappointed Mr Taylor ruled out the proposal so soon after it was floated by Mr Frydenberg, arguing it could be an electoral winner if it was accompanied by big cuts to income tax and the company tax rate.
Rebel Liberal senator Andrew McLachlan went public with his concerns, arguing Mr Frydenberg’s economic proposals should be taken seriously.
“Josh is our most experienced Liberal in Treasury matters. We should listen very carefully to his prescriptions to re-energise our economy,” he said.
“Policy development in opposition has to be more than just saying what you are not going to do in government. Our citizens need to also know how our ideas will improve their lives.”
But while several Coalition MPs want Mr Taylor to consider GST reform, others were scathing of the proposal and argued it was politically immature to believe the argument could be prosecuted from opposition.
“Talk about tax and spend, maybe Josh should talk to the Labor Party about being their leader,” one conservative MP said.

Speaking of black holes there was also this from simplistic Simon ...

$500bn of household wealth disappears in Labor budget abyss
Australian households have lost an estimated $70,000 each on average since the May budget, as falling property value and inflation combine to destroy national wealth.
By Simon Benson
Political analyst

Just as well the pond has saved its shekels by not subscribing to a Murdochian service ...

In this survey of the lizard Oz headlines, notable omissions or downgradings concerned the mango Mussolini's ongoing betrayal of Ukraine, and the Unites States turning into Afghan central with a proposed live stream of a public execution.

Luckily Golding and the immortal Rowe took up some of the lizard Oz slack:

And now back to the beefy boofhead and on with cratering Caterism ...

Even a casual observer would have noted that his recent immigration policy announcements found themselves on a sticky wicket while dealing with a sandpapered six stitcher (South African joke).

There was this in the Nine rags ...

‘We are talking billions’: Burke demands costings on Coalition deportation plan

Lurking behind it all was a matter which required the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way to protest too much ...

Taylor rejected the One Nation proposal to bar migrants from “risky” nations or regions, saying: “I’ve always said that we would discriminate not based on the country someone comes from, or their race, or their religion, but based on the person, and whether that person is a suitable person to be a resident or citizen of this country. That’s what we should focus on, and we should judge people on their character and conduct, not the colour of their skin.”

Garn, don't come the raw bigoted prawn.

And there was this in the Graudian ...

Coalition MPs concede immigration pledge not fully costed by independent watchdog

All that was by way of preliminary reading for a serve by a Pom import, the flood waters in quarries whisperer himself ...

The header: By Nick Cater
ALP migrant policy the opposite of compassion

The plea to listen to a bot: Listen to this article

7 min

The snap suggesting furriners might not be so bad: Workers on the Snowy Mountain Scheme in 1956; the post-WWII government paid more attention to the challenge of resettling refugees

A plea for the mighty G: Make us preferred on Google

The pond isn't quite sure why the Caterist decided to diss compassion when it comes to migrants.

The pond can't think of any other reason why a drop kick sociology student loser was allowed into the country ... unless we needed someone to sound completely clueless about the movement of flood waters in quarries.

As always, this sort of black sheep is always alert to any attempt to stray from little England:

While Labor’s broken promises may be testing voters’ loyalty, the Albanese government remains steadfast in its commitment to asylum-seekers.
In August 2023, then immigration minister Andrew Giles increased the annual quota of humanitarian visas from the long-term average of 13,500 to 20,000 a year. Six months earlier, Labor laid a path for boat arrivals under the Rudd and Gillard governments to migrate from short-term protection visas to permanent residency. By the end of July, 26,334 euphemistically named Resolution of Status visas had been approved.
Labor’s measures have led to an influx of refugees on a scale unmatched since the wave of post-war refugees from Europe in the late 1940s. The Albanese government granted residency to more than 100,000 asylum-seekers in its first four years.
It is a policy “anchored in compassion”, Giles told the Refugee Communities Association in a sentimental 2023 speech. As so often, however, good intentions alone have proved a treacherous foundation for public policy. The romantic image of the tempest-tossed huddled masses yearning to breathe free, crystallised in Emma Lazarus’s poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, lives on among today’s progressives, modified only slightly by the newly minted virtues of diversity and cultural relativism.

Remind the pond of why the Caterist was allowed in? Can't have much to do with the virtues of diversity, and as for cultural relativism, how relative is the bigotry and prejudices of little England?

The reptiles reminded the hive mind of the latest Caterist victim ...Then minister for immigration Andrew Giles at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

The pond got the next bit garbled, because one minute the Caterist was blathering about Josh Frydenberg's parents escaping the Holocaust, and the next minute he was dismissing progressive thinkers ...reluctant to test their cosmic vision against the cold, hard data of the world as it actually is.

Say what? Is Josh some kind of progressive thinker? Who knows ...

In Australia, the idealised image of the refugee is shaped by the many inspiring stories of post-war arrivals. Josh Frydenberg’s account of his parents’ escape from the Holocaust in his newly published book is a timely reminder of the great contribution made to Australia by Jewish migrants in particular.
As is their habit, however, progressive thinkers are reluctant to test their cosmic vision against the cold, hard data of the world as it actually is.
The cherished conception of the noble refugee is easier to maintain if you’re a ratepayer in Woollahra (home to 73 recent humanitarian arrivals) than in Fairfield in western Sydney (18,502 recent humanitarian arrivals). The heavy concentration of migrants in low-socio-economic neighbourhoods, mainly in Sydney and Melbourne, makes them all but invisible elsewhere.
Yet Giles’s electorate of Scullin straddles Hume and Whittlesea, two of a dozen local government areas where more than half of the humanitarian arrivals over the past 10 years now live.
It cannot have escaped his notice that humanitarian-category migrants have become the backbone of a new Australian underclass, trapped in grim suburbs, living in overcrowded, rented housing, on incomes well below average, heavily dependent on welfare, and isolated from their neighbours by their poor or non-existent grasp of English.
When Labor decided to raise the refugee quota by 6500 a year, did anyone in the room canvass the long-term consequences, which could be reasonably accurately predicted from the published data?
Did anyone put up a slide showing that 14,000 more people would claim unemployment benefits in five years if the government persisted with the change?
Or that in 10 years, more than 23,000 more Australians would be living in overcrowded conditions, and 900 would be living in acutely overcrowded accommodation?
That will be the result of Labor’s virtuously conceived policy if future humanitarian arrivals follow the pattern of those who arrived in the past 10 years, a grim future set out in the Australian Bureau of Statistics Migrant Settlement Outcomes report, published last month.
It reports that almost half of refugee migrants still rely on welfare benefits five years after arriving. Six out of 10 will be living in the poorest suburbs, and 44 per cent will not be proficient in English. Humanitarian migrants are twice as likely to be diagnosed with a mental health condition, including depression and anxiety, a proportion that grows the longer they live here.

Is that any better than an indigent Pom relying on Murdochian and think tank largesse, and some kind benefactor who might help out when a large defamation liability looms on the horizon.

Life improves on most measures over time. Yet refugees who have lived here for a decade or longer are half as likely to be in the workforce as other migrants. They have lower median incomes ($51,000, compared to $78,000 for all migrants) and are substantially less likely to own or be buying their own home.
Behind these statistics lie thousands of human stories of suffering, poverty and endurance that illustrate the tension between selecting migrants who deserve our sympathy and those we can actually help.
From any perspective, our humanitarian migration program is failing. From the standpoint of a progressive, moved by the Prime Minister’s commitment that no one should be left behind, the plight of tens of thousands of refugees caught in a spiral of poverty from which they cannot easily escape is an indictment, made worse by the seeming reluctance to talk about it.
For a Menzian liberal, committed to the God-given principle that every human deserves equal respect and that everyone who comes to this country should be given the chance to thrive, the current state of affairs is intolerable.
From a dry economics standpoint, the billions of dollars spent to administer the humanitarian program, and the fiscal impact of a cohort that draws more in government benefits than it pays in taxes over a lifetime, offer a poor return on investment.
If we intend to reduce human misery worldwide, a $17,000 grant to a school in a Jordanian refugee camp will offer better value for money than a year’s worth of Jobseeker payments.
Clearly, we need to pay more attention to the resettlement challenge.
The wave of so-called displaced persons after WWII spent weeks attending classes in migrant camps, learning English and other essential skills. Many were earmarked for jobs on the Snowy Mountains Scheme and were obliged to stay in employment for at least two years.
Today they receive advice on Centrelink payments, are offered non-compulsory English classes at local TAFEs, then essentially left to fend for themselves.
Yet, for the country’s benefit, the government must substantially reduce the humanitarian quota.

Then came the beefy boofhead ... Coalition leader Angus Taylor plans to halve the humanitarian refugee intake to 10,000 a year Picture: Nathan Smith

And at this point, the pond should note the cruel calculations already at work, and shown up by the treatment of Afghani refugees ...

There's this on YouTube from SBS ... A former Afghan prosecutor has declared the federal government has a moral obligation to bring to safety local Afghans who assisted Australia and who are now living in hiding under Taliban rule.

And this in the Graudian ... ‘You called us brothers’: Afghans who fought with Australian troops still live in fear of Taliban

Almost a year after their country was left by foreign forces to the Taliban, Afghan soldiers who fought alongside Australian troops say they live in constant terror, and have been abandoned by the countries they served.
“We fought on the same battlefield together, against the same enemy. You called us brothers,” one former soldier told the Guardian from hiding. “But now you leave us in this hell. Our lives are hell and we are left alone. We trusted each other; we never thought this would happen.”
The Guardian has spoken to a number of former soldiers who are being hunted by the Taliban, and to Australian volunteers who are trying to get them to safety.
One former commando, Abbas – a pseudonym to protect him and his family – spent 11 years fighting alongside international forces, including Australian troops in Uruzgan province.
‘We fought on the same battlefield together, against the same enemy’: Afghans and Australians during a security operation in Kandahar province. Photograph: Department of Defence/AAP
He said the joint forces depended upon one another for their lives.
“We ate together with them, slept under the same roof and trained together ... If one of us would be killed, we would sympathise with each other like brothers, and Nato forces would always call us brothers.
“And these forces now leave us like this, alone ... They leave us with our hands tied, in front of the same enemies that we fought against for years.”
Abbas stresses he does not blame the soldiers with whom he fought, but the governments that ordered their troops out so rapidly, without proper consideration for those who fought alongside them.
“I think those countries that said they were strengthening democracy in Afghanistan and talking about peace were lying. They told us ‘we will never leave you alone’. They were here for 20 years, and now they have forgotten us. Every day we despair. We have no food to eat, and we know they, the Taliban, are coming for us.”

It was a great betrayal, with many Afghani women also hung out to dry, and yet somehow we found room for the likes of the Caterist blathering on about the need for a lack of compassion.

Fair dinkum...

The Coalition’s plan to halve the humanitarian intake to 10,000 would ease pressure on scarce resources such as housing, while raising the per-capita economic contribution of Australia’s migration program as a whole.
In the short term, that may mean committing more resources to the selection process, ending the heavy reliance on the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, whose priorities diverge from the national interest. Far from being hard-hearted, as Angus Taylor’s critics on the left will no doubt claim, the Coalition’s policy will begin to restore the high ideals on which Australian migration was founded.
While other countries are content to provide sanctuary, Australia offers the chance of a new life, not just the right to live in this country, but the chance to share in the Australian dream of building a better life for oneself and family.
Today’s huddled masses deserve nothing less than those we welcomed 80 years ago.

Speaking of huddled masses ...

And so to a broken clock getting it right twice a day ...

Cue another immortal Rowe portrait of the mad king:

Blood and oil is a nice variation on Sturm und Drang as the price of treachery ...

And now, speaking of cultists in the grip of a truly weird cult, this ...

In which Polonial prattle and Ughmann science stir the lizard Oz hive mind ...

 

The pond would have liked to have spent time with the mad man child, well into his second childhood, and his enormous sulk about not getting that peace prize, as if his war mongering, boastful ways should have been rewarded. 

His Mussolini style preening - Greenland! - surely put its it out of his reach for the rest of his reign, but not out reach of his never-ending delusions, with the latest his epic betrayal of Ukraine to Vlad the sociopath, all for a little diesel to fill up the gap created by the mango monster himself, all in a desperate bid to avoid a midterm blow out. If a president ever needed to go at once, right now, it isn't Zelensky.

Or perhaps the pond could have brooded about little Marco - 2028 pretender -  and his shameful assault on the ICC, pandering to his senile master, or have spent its Sunday time wishing the cockroaches every success in their battles with the notoriously corrupt Modi regime.

But life isn't easy for herpetology students, and instead the pond got lumbered with its usual Sunday duty, wasting valuable time and space dealing with Polonius and his prattle, as he goes even more Zionist each week (almost an essential qualification these days for contributors to the Australian Daily Zionist News).

The header: By Gerard Henderson
Louise Adler’s free speech double standard exposed

Call of the bot wild: Listen to this article
7 min

The caption for the uncredited collage forcing another victim into a lizard Oz jihad: Former Adelaide Writers Week director Louise Adler says the Bondi massacre had no impact on antisemitism ‘other than the shocking and tragic loss of the lives of 15 individuals’. Pictures: News Corp/Supplied

The begging for the mighty G: Make us preferred on Google

Correspondents will by now know the pond's drill as soon as this topic hovers into view. 

Rather than pay attention to Polonius, this week shouting in an addled way at Adler, the pond likes to provide some alternative reading.

This might be as simple a strategy as referencing Steve Bloomfield's outing in the Graudian, In three years, Israel’s war on Gaza hasn’t just changed the Middle East, it’s changed the world

...The before-and-after pictures tell part of the story. An update to Google Maps, released last week, underscores just what three years of relentless Israeli military onslaught has done to Gaza. Satellite images show how entire towns have been reduced to rubble. Mosques and hospitals, visible three years ago, have now disappeared. Meanwhile the once-empty shoreline is now crammed with tents. This is what it looks like when an attempt has been made to destroy a people.

But the pond is deeply perverse. 

Only an excerpt from an interesting story to match every Polonial visual distraction would suffice.

This story in Haaretz caught the pond's eye as a way of coping:

Israeli Settlers, IDF Soldiers Prevent Palestinian Olive Harvest Across West Bank
The Israeli military also arrested nine Palestinians in Hebron, including the director of the Tomb of the Patriarchs' Ibrahimi Mosque, the Palestine News Agency reported (*intermittent archive link).

Here's a starter gobbet:

That'll serve the purpose.

Now, having shown how to provide a little balance, it's time for a case study in Polonial denial, and let the Polonial photos and matching excerpts begin.:

For a case study in denial, look no further than Louise Adler’s submission to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion. The content of this public document was revealed by James Dowling on these pages last Wednesday. It is one of some 20,000 such documents.
It is widely known the Melbourne-based Adler is a Jewish critic of Israel. Not just the nation under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu but of the very existence of the Jewish state, which was created by the United Nations in 1948.
Adler is by no means the only anti-Zionist among Jewish Australians. So is Antony Loewenstein, who was sympathetically profiled by the ABC Compass program in May 2024. Adler received a remarkably soft interview from ABC TV 7.30 reporter Laura Tingle on December 4, 2023, in which she claimed to have been silenced. Loewenstein is mentioned with approval in Adler’s royal commission submission.

The reptiles produced a snap of the man who aroused Polonial ire: Journalist, writer and blogger Antony Loewenstein.

The pond turned back to Haaretz for more details of matters the reptiles routinely ignore or deny:

Does any of this have any effect on Polonius? Of course not:

The essential message of Adler’s document is to accuse fellow members of the Australian Jewish community of attempting to quash dissenting views. This allegation will be covered later. I had expected this before reading Adler’s submission. My initial response was to be shocked by her exaggerated comments.
Early on, Adler criticises South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas for decisions he supported concerning the 2026 Adelaide Writers Week, of which she was director before resigning the position. Malinauskas is quoted as having said, with respect to this decision, that “Bondi changed everything”. The reference is to the terrorist attack at Bondi Beach on December 14 last year in which 15 people were killed (including 13 Jews) and numerous individuals injured.
In her submission, Adler wrote: “Antisemitism, like all forms of racism, has long been a scourge in Australia and Bondi changed nothing, other than the shocking and tragic loss of the lives of 15 individuals.”
This is absolute tosh. Sure, during much of the previous century, Jewish Australians were excluded from gentlemen’s clubs in Australian capital cities and the like. But such antisemitism bears no relationship to the Bondi massacre.
Moreover, in the early 20th century, Australian politicians appointed General John Monash as head of the First Australian Imperial Force. Not long after, Sir Isaac Isaacs was made the first Australian governor-general. This is not the behaviour of a racist nation that allegedly discriminates against Jewish citizens.

In the usual way, Polonius spends his time adjudicating ancient matters, involving parochial dropkicks of the great Adelaide aunt on the verandah kind ... Dr Abdel-Fattah accused SA Premier Peter Malinauskas of using he (sic, so and thus) Bondi attack as an excuse to intervene in the Adelaide Writers’ Festival. Picture: Emma Brasier

That meant there could be only one response. A desperate desire to rub Polonial and Malinauskas mushes in it:

Anybody who cares about such matters is automatically on the lizard Oz jihad hit list:

Adler was a publisher at Melbourne University Publishing, Monash University Publishing and Hachette Australia. She became director of the AWW in 2023. As I have documented in these pages over the years, literary/writers festivals are invariably occasions where literary types get control of a bag of taxpayers’ money and use it to invite their leftist comrades to address overwhelmingly leftist audiences. In short, these functions lack viewpoint diversity.
So it was with Adler’s AWW over the years. In 2023, for example, Adler invited seven Palestinians to talk at the AWW but not one Israeli. It was much the same the following year when Caroline Overington commented in these pages that all speakers on the Middle East were critics of Israel.
It was the same in 2025 when the AWW was, once again, a leftist stack virtually bereft of politically conservative voices. Then, in 2026, a controversy broke out when Adler invited political activist/writer Randa Abdel-Fattah to address the AWW. She is a fierce critic of Israel and had once posted on social media, “If you are a Zionist you have no claim or right to cultural safety”.
At a time of widespread antisemitism in Australia, including violence, this was, at the very least, an unprofessional act. It led to the decision of the AWW board to withdraw her invitation, a decision that was revoked by a replacement board. And so it came to pass that Abdel-Fattah will be a guest at the AWW next year. But Adler resigned in protest at the original decision.

This dusting off of ancient feuds is a typical reptile strategy ...Louise Adler appearing on 7.30 following her resignation from Adelaide Writers' Week. Picture: ABC

It helps the reptiles to avoid the here and now, the slow progress of ethnic cleansing in action...

The pond could have reverted to other texts, especially when Polonius blathers about freedumb for Arabs ...but anyone can read the wiki ...

...Many Arab citizens feel that the state, as well as society at large, not only actively limits them to second-class citizenship, but treats them as enemies, affecting their perception of the de jure versus de facto quality of their citizenship. The joint document The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel, asserts: "Defining the Israeli State as a Jewish State and exploiting democracy in the service of its Jewishness excludes us, and creates tension between us and the nature and essence of the State." The document explains that by definition the "Jewish State" concept is based on ethnically preferential treatment towards Jews enshrined in immigration (the Law of Return) and land policy (the Jewish National Fund), and calls for the establishment of minority rights protections enforced by an independent anti-discrimination commission.

A 2004 report by Mossawa, an advocacy center for Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel, states that since the events of October 2000, 16 Arabs had been killed by security forces, bringing the total to 29 victims of "institutional violence" in four years. Ahmed Sa'adi, in his article on The Concept of Protest and its Representation by the Or Commission, states that since 1948 the only protestors to be killed by the police have been Arabs.

Yousef Munayyer, an Israeli citizen and the executive director of The Jerusalem Fund, wrote that Palestinians only have varying degrees of limited rights in Israel. He states that although Palestinians make up about 20% of Israel's population, less than 7% of the budget is allocated to Palestinian citizens. He describes the 1.5 million Arab citizens of Israel as second-class citizens while four million more are not citizens at all. He states that a Jew from any country can move to Israel but a Palestinian refugee, with a valid claim to property in Israel, cannot. 

Or how about another wiki?

...Since 2011, Israeli nationalists have made anti-Palestinian chants such as "death to Arabs" (Israeli Hebrew: מָוֶת לָעֲרָבִים, romanized: Mávet la'Aravím) in parades on Jerusalem Day. Other chants include "May Your Village Burn," "Muhammad is dead,""a Jew is a soul, an Arab is a son of a whore," "burn Shu'afat" or "Shu'afat is on fire" in reference to the Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem where a Palestinian boy was kidnapped and set on fire, as well as the Hebrew curse with Biblical origins for enemies of the Jewish people "may their name be erased." According to Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, the Jerusalem Day parade is a "spatialized enactment of power," and in 2015, "over 30,000 young religious and nationalist Israeli Jews rampaged throughout the Old City of OEJ chanting 'Death to Arabs', 'Muhammad is Dead' and other racist slogans, restructuring the sensory experiences of Palestinians in the space.

It might be different if that was just the odd bigot doing the rounds, but those attitudes infest the highest levels of the government of Israel.

Water off a duck's back to Polonius ...

In her royal commission submission, Adler accused what she termed the “Australian Jewish community’s leadership” of being unequivocal in its support for Israel, and maintaining that it “works tirelessly to stifle criticism” of the Jewish state (in which some 20 per cent of Arabs live in freedom).
This suggests that Adler lacks self-awareness. She seems blissfully unaware that her taxpayer-funded AWWs are all but devoid of supporters of Israel.
For example, Adler personally declined an offer by Michael Gawenda, of left-wing background and a one-time editor of The Age, to appear at the AWW. Gawenda is the author of My Life as a Jew (Scribe 2023) and a one-time friend of Adler. Adler identifies as a pluralist who supports debate and discussion, but who does not practise what she preaches.
On January 14, The Australian Financial Review reported that businessman Tony Berg, who resigned from the Adelaide Festival board that presides over the AWW, had accused Adler of “hypocrisy in defending free speech”. Berg revealed that Adler, along with Abdel-Fattah and others, had called for New York Times journalist Tom Friedman to be disinvited from the 2024 AWW.

At this point the reptiles decided to feature a photo of a drop kick, embedded in the text ...Tony Berg was on the Adelaide Festival Board.

The pond thought this was the best way to illustrate it ...

One gobbet deserves another ....

And that left just a few Polonial last words ...

Adler’s royal commission submission warrants being classified as fiction. It is Jewish Australian creatives who are being cancelled and doxxed by the combined forces of the radical left and radical Islamists as documented by Danny Ben-Moshe in his recent film, Cancelled. Adler is in denial about this reality.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

The pond can think of another movie that's been cancelled in the lizard Oz, with Polonius in denial about its reality:

Troubling documentary ‘NAZA’ details Israel’s AI-assisted airstrikes in Gaza

...Wherever you fall regarding the continued destruction of Gaza, what the filmmakers of “NAZA” make disturbingly clear is that the simplest machinery to spread dehumanization and death is happening now, easing its users into acceptance and rewriting everything about the moral cost of conflict. It’s stone-cold frightening.

But not to the stone-cold devotees in the lizard Oz of the ethnic cleansing killing fields.

How about another story to offer a little more balance, also from Haaretz ...

Thousands Are Held in Israeli Torture Camps. This Is What Happens Inside (*intermittent archive link)

The pond frequently yammers on about the lizard Oz hive mind, but rarely provides evidence of the condition.

Take a squiz at this and you'll get the idea. The hive mind is an ugly, pulsating reality ...

Worse than an episode of the X-Files, or perhaps they're all pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, so united are they in their conformity.

Here, have a break with another cult ...

What to do for a bonus?

One thing's certain. 

After all that Polonial kerfuffle, there was no room at the pond inn for grating Gemma...

October 7 taught me that evil has a name
What October 7 taught me about silence and evil
Australia is facing a crisis of courage. Nothing has changed, and I fear we will simply forget.
By Gemma Tognini
Columnist

Instead the pond took the easy way out ... a serve of climate science denialism from the unreformed seminarian known as the Ughmann ...

The header: Beijing prioritises grid reliability with coal while Australia races towards risky 2030 targets
Chris Uhlmann

The call of the bot: Listen to this article
12 min

The cause of all the problems? Deluded folk who think the sun has some kind of free energy on offer: Which country’s energy policy do you prefer? One based on economics and physics or one based on targets and ideology? Picture: Getty Images

A call for punters to be trapped in the paywall by Murdochian spiders: Make us preferred on Google

Always with the projection. 

As soon as the Ughmann talked of climate science and possible solutions to the climate crisis as "ideology", the pond was immediately plunged back into the world of the unreformed seminarian's approach to science.

There's really no need to carry on at length. The sub-text of any Ughmann outing is that we should never have abandoned dinkum, sweet, virginal, clean Oz coal, and the sooner we get back to using same, the better off we, and the world, will be, because what climate science?

In Ughmann argot, talk of climate science is to enter a cult, a theology full of "greenwishers" ...

In the eyes of the world’s greenwishers, China is the energy transition poster child. This much is true: Beijing has spent more money, built more wind turbines, erected more solar panels and manufactured more batteries than any nation on earth. As at the end of last year, China had almost half of the world’s installed wind and solar fleet.

Curiously the reptiles decided to insert an AV distraction which offered a Xi vision ...

Next video thumbnail
Xi: China to cut greenhouse gas emissions by up to 10% by 2035
Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday (September 24) told the United Nations that by 2035, his country plans to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 7%-10% below its peak emissions, and called out "some countries" for moving against the global clean energy transition.

The Ughmann would have none of it ... forget all that talk of renewables, coal and gas are the way to go. What could possibly go wrong?

But China also has more than half of the world’s coal-fired generating capacity, and it is growing. In 2025, China accounted for 80 per cent of all new coal power commissioned globally. In that single year, China brought online almost four times as much coal-fired generating power as Australia has in its eastern grid.
Not surprising then that China produces almost a third of the world’s carbon emissions. China also produces almost one third of the world’s hydro-electricity, has 64 nuclear reactors and another 39 under construction. China does China. It builds more of everything than everybody.
But given the Middle Kingdom’s dominance of wind, solar and battery deployment, it is worth paying close attention to how its world-leading energy planners rate the value of that generation on their grids and how they see it evolving.
We know what they think because, in July, Beijing released the detailed renewable-energy plan that sits under its latest Five-Year Plan, and it contains a remarkable set of numbers.
Here is the one that makes headlines in places like Australia: by 2030, Beijing plans to have more than 2800 gigawatts of wind and solar installed. That is roughly 38 times the combined generating power of our National Electricity Market. So, big. And worthy of a headline. But there is a much deeper story.

And yet each interrupting reptile snap hinted at an alternative universe ... Clockwise from top: Solar photovoltaic panels at a wind solar heat storage project in Golmud City; water is released from the Three Gorges Dam; a wind farm in Xinjiang; Shichengzi photovoltaic industrial park in Hami. Picture montage: News Corp

The rabid ranting about renewables continued apace ...

While wind and solar will account for half of China’s electricity generation capacity by the end of the decade, Chinese planners make it abundantly clear that they distinguish between big nameplate numbers and the production of actual energy. Nameplate capacity is an ideal: the maximum power a wind or solar farm could produce under perfect conditions. Generation is reality: the amount of energy delivered over time.
So, despite wind and solar accounting for more than half of installed capacity by 2030, China’s planners anticipate they will produce only about 30 per cent of the country’s electricity.
But averages are deceiving: they conceal the feast and famine of weather-dependent generation. What about the times when demand peaks and reliable electricity is desperately needed? What value do you place on wind and solar to deliver on that third cold, cloudy, still day when the batteries have run flat and your system is running flat out?
China’s planners have put a number on how much wind and solar power they believe they can actually rely on when the electricity system is under stress. They call it “confidence output” and they set the bar high: a measure of average available energy across 95 per cent of periods of peak demand.
Their answer is a risible 8 per cent.
Put bluntly, for every 100GW of wind and solar capacity, China’s planners reckon they can confidently rely on just 8GW at critical times. And that calculation includes wind and solar farms with on-site battery storage.

What would the Ughmann embrace? 

At last the reptiles provided a visual answer, a rough equivalent go Gollum's precious ... The coal-powered Datang International Zhangjiakou Power Station. China has more than half of the world’s coal-fired generating capacity, and it is growing. Picture: AFP

Forget all that talk of climate science. Relish the power of coal and gas ...

Batteries do improve system security but they are not equivalent to reliable generators. Professor Alex Coram has looked at the mathematics of security in electricity systems and the way in which increasing amounts of weather-dependent generation cause the risk of failure to accumulate over time. His equations show the fundamental misconception in believing storage and continuous generation are interchangeable. A battery is a bucket. It pours until it runs dry. Continuous generation is a tap. It keeps pouring. The more stress there is on the system, the more critical that difference becomes. As Coram notes: “You can’t buffer your way out of ruin.”
China’s planners clearly understand this. They boast about the enormous amount of wind, solar and batteries they are building, but when it comes to keeping the lights on, quality trumps quantity.
Beijing has now put a price on that distinction. In January, China introduced reforms to reward generators for the power they can reliably supply when demand peaks. Coal and gas are being paid for their dependable generating capacity, while batteries are valued according to how long they can keep delivering. The message to the gatherers of sunshine and wind is unmistakeable: not all gigawatts are created equal.
Close observers of China’s wind and solar build-out have noticed something else. Beneath the bewilderingly large numbers, the breakneck pace of renewable expansion has begun to slow. China added roughly 1300GW of renewable capacity during its 14th Five-Year Plan. Its target for the 15th is about 960GW.
Reuters reported in July that China’s new solar installations had fallen 66 per cent in the first half of 2026 compared with a year earlier. Wind installations also fell, by almost 25 per cent. Together, China installed roughly 56 per cent less new wind and solar capacity than over that same time in 2025. Part of that dramatic slowdown reflected a rush to commission projects before Beijing’s new market-based electricity pricing regime took effect last year.

In that context, this snap illustrates a notion terrifying to the Ughmann and the reptile kind ... This solar farm in China’s central Anhui province was the world's largest floating solar power plant in 2017. It has since been overtaken by multiple projects in China.

More saucy doubts and fears tumbled out into the hive mind ether ...

That move was also telling. Previously, wind and solar generators were largely protected by guaranteed prices. Now they must sell their electricity into the market, although Beijing still provides a financial safety net. It was a recognition of the fact that electricity is worth less when everybody produces it at once and considerably more when you actually need it.
In June, China’s State Council Information Office described a “major shift” in its energy transition strategy, with the focus moving “from expanding new energy capacity to building an energy system capable of integrating it”.
That is a revealing change of emphasis. China has spent years building wind and solar at a scale no other nation can approach. Now its planners are increasingly concerned with what happens after all that capacity is connected to the grid: how much electricity it actually produces, how much the grid can absorb, what it does to prices and system security, and how much power can be counted on when the system is under stress.
Or, in the words of the energy analysts at Doomberg: “At what point does the forced introduction of intermittent wind and solar power on to an existing grid begin to break things?
“A simple but highly effective rule of thumb is to inspect the proportion of highly dispatchable power capacity contributed to that grid by natural gas and impoundment hydro-electricity. Once intermittency swamps dispatchability, the pain can become overwhelming.”

Valiant dissidents fell into line behind the Ughmann ...

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Farmers fined thousands as Labor sizes up their land for renewables
Furious farmers in Western Victoria say they won't give in to Labor's plan to build transmission lines across their prime agricultural land.

Forget all that talk of a climate crisis. You can't expect an unreformed seminarian to give two hoots for surfers ...

Climate crisis is coming to crush many of world’s best surf breaks, study warns

Changing tide levels, shifting sands and hardened shorelines put waves at risk, affecting more than just surfers

...The study, published in the journal Climatic Change, concludes: “Climate change and coastal management both have significant negative implications for the future viability of multiple surf breaks of global significance and, therefore, the myriad distinct local communities, cultures and economies they support.”

Almost 200 local experts analysed 57 surf breaks in all but two of the 13 WSRs, spread across eight countries. The researchers said thousands of other surf waves around the world faced similar peril.

Oh noes, not the chance to get eaten by a shark.

It was all a bad break off grommet Ughmann's board, a closeout, a dump requiring a return to coal and gas, because what could go wrong?

Pass that point and the grid becomes more fragile as the economics get rapidly uglier. Models show that the more weather-dependent generation is added to the grid, the faster the costs of supporting it rise. The cheap gigawatts come first. Then each new addition demands disproportionately more storage, transmission, back-up and other system support, while increasingly cannibalising the value of generation already in the system. The next 10 per cent is not the same proposition as the first 10 per cent.
China’s planners are now explicitly grappling with all these problems and, believe it or not, once upon a time, Australian energy planners were doing some of the same work. Before the 2022 election, the Energy Security Board was developing a capacity mechanism. The idea was pretty straightforward: in a system becoming more dependent on unpredictable power, Australia’s eastern grid needed to develop a market to put a value on predictable power.
The board proposed assessing generators according to how much power they could actually be relied upon to provide when the system was under stress. It determined that a megawatt of wind or solar should not be treated as equivalent to a megawatt of coal, gas or hydro. The technical term is de-rating.
The board concluded that wind and solar might make only a “minimal contribution” to the dependable capacity needed to keep the system running. So the planned market would reward generators for their ability to keep the lights on.
And what became of that expert advice? It was junked because the lion’s share of what could sensibly be supported was coal and gas generation.

The reptiles produced collage designed to terrify the hive mind ... After the 2022 election, the government began underwriting more wind, solar and batteries, instead of paying for dependable power.

That sent the Ughmann into an even greater frenzy of denialism ...

Showcasing their superpower of combining marketing genius with staggering energy illiteracy the greenwishers branded the capacity mechanism “coalkeeper”.
When Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen assumed his role at the head of the table of the nation’s energy ministers, a capacity market was abandoned and its zombie child the Capacity Investment Scheme emerged. Instead of paying for dependable power, the government began underwriting more wind, solar and batteries.
The minister now boasts this scheme will deliver 40GW of new capacity by 2030 – 26GW of wind and solar and 14GW of “clean dispatchable capacity”, principally batteries. Apply China’s 8 per cent reliability benchmark to the wind and solar, assume four-hour batteries and a prolonged generation drought, and that advertised 40GW shrinks to something in the order of 4GW of dependable power.
In an exercise of magical thinking, Australia built the world’s only capacity mechanism with next to no capacity in it.
Our experts are aware of the fragility of the system under construction. Buried in the blizzard of technical data accompanying the Australian Energy Market Operator’s 2026 Integrated System Plan is a spreadsheet estimating their contribution to reliable supply at times of peak demand. In some cases, it rates that contribution at less than 10 per cent of installed capacity.
All the evidence a sensible government needs to urge caution when putting almost all your chips on weather-dependent generation is available. So Australia is not sleepwalking into a catastrophe, we are striding there with our eyes wide shut.

The reptiles offered a final AV distraction ...

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Australia stands alone on energy policy as Bowen calls coal an ‘unreliable asset’
News24 host Jaimee Rogers rips into Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen's renewable energy transition. “You keep saying the renewable transition will deliver cheaper power, but bills continue to go up,” Ms Rogers said. “You say coal is now an ‘unreliable asset’, so why did coal still provide more than half the electricity generated in parts of the country last year? “Perhaps Australia isn't leading the world on energy policy as you claim, and instead is increasingly standing alone.”

Now ask yourself this chilling question. If the planet follows the Ughmann's thinking, what then? Will climate science and the observable effects of climate. change just go away?

For that you need the magical thinking of an unreformed seminarian?

Consider the tale of two administrations. Canberra wants 82 per cent of our electricity to come from renewables by 2030. The mix is mostly wind and solar generation with some hydro. Beijing has no intention of attempting that. It expects wind and solar to generate 30 per cent of China’s electricity by then, with hydro, nuclear and other sources providing another 20 per cent. Coal and gas will still supply roughly half. While Australia races to shut down its coal-fired power stations, China is building more of them.
Now ask yourself this chilling question. Who do you trust? The central planners of the Chinese Communist Party or Australia’s energy ministers? Which country’s energy policy do you prefer? One based on economics and physics or one based on targets and ideology?
Goodhart’s Law warns that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Australia is in the process of discovering that meeting an electricity generation target is not the same thing as building a functioning electricity system.
Given that there is no prospect of the Albanese government admitting error and making a course correction, this is going to be a long, painful and expensive journey. But, eventually, it only ends one way. To borrow again from Doomberg, in the battle between physics and politics, physics is undefeated.
Maybe there is one thing we can salvage from the rubble. I suggest we set up a de-rating system for politicians based on performance. On this measure, some of our political class would struggle to keep a light bulb burning.

Politicians might struggle to keep a light bulb burning, but that might be a better outcome than a planet set to a dinkum burning by the likes of the Ughmann.

There'll be no more of this kind of claptrap ...

If everybody had an ocean

Across the U.S.A.

Then everybody'd be surfin'

Like Californi-a

You'd seem 'em wearing their baggies

Huarachi sandals too

A bushy bushy blonde hairdo

Surfin' U.S.A.

The pond hesitates to ask, but does anyone want even more evidence of the lizard Oz hive mind at work?

No? A sensible response, but please, consider these examples:

Does the Ughmann get his science from AI?

Which is to say, AI that's been fed on lizard Oz drivel, as bots relentlessly crawl the rag in search of devotion to coal and gas!

These days that ensures the pond's hits rarely drop below 10k a day, an absolutely absurd figure prepared by a bot, counting other bots.

Who knows, but whatever, it ain't helping the climate ...of fear:

And now, as the demented mad king seeks to shift blame, Trump rips Zelensky amid Russia diesel deal feud: ‘I suggest they get a new leader’, here's another chance to discover ways the Murdochians and Faux Noise have managed to stuff the Unites States and the planet ...