The pond has an epiphany ...

(Above: the pond maintains the sophisticated Daily Terror approach to Australian politics, so much more advanced than social media. Malcolm Turnbull is on the left, Tony Abbott centre, and Jolly Joe Hockey on the right).

Being a half-full, rather than half-empty kind of pond, each day we thank the long absent lord that we cover the Murdochians and the commentariat for the daily ...

Reliably eccentric, routinely crazed, regularly paranoid, determinedly sexist, occasionally racist, doing their best to hide deeply embedded homophobia, prone to Hansonism, dressed up in a kind of rabid Scott Morrison fundamentalism, and frequently given to belief systems involving pie in the sky bye and bye, they always entertain and amuse ...

Oh they sing and they clap and they pray till they get all your votes on the drum, then they tell you when you're on the bum, but if you work and pray, you can live on hay, and you'll get pie in the sky when you die ... (thanks Joe Hill, learn the chords here).

The alternative, in the form of current chairman Rudd, is deeply dispiriting and alienating.

What to make of the Ruddster's grand yet only recently discovered plans for the north, plans that eerily echo those of the madder segments of Abbott la la land, including but not limited to Gina Rinehart?

The NT News was one of the few rags that bothered to pay much front page attention:

I know, I know, your eye is immediately drawn to "Witches saved by an elf", and that's the supreme joy of Murdoch la la land.

It is of course a sign of desperation on the part of the Ruddster, a proposal that if you vote for his team, you'll get Abbott lite, and all those assaults delivered by Gillard and Co. on Abbott's proposal was just so much hot air.

The private polling must be killing him ... as he comes to recognise that all that leaking, that all that backbiting, and deviousness, that all that conspiring and dropping mercury in the ear of Gillard via Peter Hartcher might now come to naught. But for the moment we have assorted Ruddisms:

Mr Rudd dismissed claims he was copying Mr Abbott, saying he wanted to make ''concrete steps to bring about northern Australia's development''. 
''I understand Mr Abbott has talked about a white paper,'' Mr Rudd said.

Concrete steps? Why stop there, why not concrete the whole of the north? Tar and cement, acres and acres of tar and cement ...

He understands Abbott talked about a white paper? It was only in June that Abbott talked the frontier talk, as you can read in Tax incentives flagged to develop north.

So now we know how soon you're expected to forget in the land of nod ... two months or thereabouts ...

Well nothing much has changed:

The Wilderness Society criticised Mr Rudd's Ord plan as throwing good money after bad. “It is perplexing that the Rudd government would place more stress on the federal budget by throwing yet more money at the failed Ord scheme to seduce Chinese investment into sugar cane,” campaigner Gavan McFadzean said. 
“More than $1.3 billion has already been ploughed into the Ord River scheme, yet all attempts at large scale cropping have failed, including sugar, rice and cotton." 
Mr McFadzean said that money for food bowl development would be better spent on assisting the agricultural sector with research and development, finding new markets and improving supply chains. (Tax cuts, economic zone part of Kevin Rudd's plans to develop northern Australia)

And so on ...

Of course this makes it difficult for the commentariat. Having embraced (or much more rarely, sometimes denounced) the more lunatic aspects of Tony Abbott's "frontier man" chest beating, what to do with the Ruddster jumping on the bandwagon?

Easy peasy. The reptiles at the lizard Oz - at heart just a southern version of their NT tabloid cousin were agog with excitement:

Epiphany!

1. Epiphany: 
a. A Christian feast celebrating the manifestation of the divine nature of Jesus to the Gentiles as represented by the Magi. 
b. January 6, on which this feast is traditionally observed. 
2. A revelatory manifestation of a divine being. 
3. a. A sudden manifestation of the essence or meaning of something. 
b. A comprehension or perception of reality by means of a sudden intuitive realization (here)

And why are the reptiles so wildly excited about this epiphany? An epiphany about an epiphany, you might say ...

We did mention Joe Hill, didn't we?

But it does present a problem for the likes of Judith Sloan, the unthinking person's Ann Coulter pretending to be Janet Albrechtsen thinking she's Judith Coulter (did the pond get those readers' comments right), so the canny Sloan, in Kevin's Top End conversion (behind the paywall, where Janet Ann Sloan belongs) uses old Labor quotes bashing up Abbott to browbeat the Ruddster, before concluding:

The best way to help the Northern Territory is to get government out of the way and to facilitate a conducive environment for private investment. If it is true that there are rivers of gold to be made from rising Asian demand for the foodstuffs we produce, the dollars will follow.

But where was Sloan when Abbott announced his tax breaks? Where were all the reptiles? And now they're suddenly excited that the Ruddster has embraced a really wretched thought bubble by Tony Abbott ...

Well of course it's the lure of the socialist vision, the five year planning, the pissing of billions of government money against the wall in these straitened budgetary times, the resolute determination to expend squillions on a dream, on a vision, and to hell with the deficit ...

What next? Well the pond lives in hope that a determined band of socialist revolutionaries from Murdoch la la land will decide to head off to Paraguay to transform the wilderness (yes, William Lane was a newspaper man, he was, he was, and did you know you could read his Labour novel The Workingman's Paradise here, and for certified history buffs, you can find numbers 1 to 19 of the New Australia newspaper, here. Are you ready for your Paraguay epiphany?)

So there you go. Scratch your average free market, sober budget surplus, non government intervention, small government lizard in reptile fortress Murdoch la la land, and you'll find a budget deficit, government intervention, five year plan Stalinist, piss squillions of government money against the wall in the north lizard itching to get out...

The vision never dies ... pie in the NT sky bye and bye ..

The odd man out? Well there's David Uren bleating about it turning into a relocation dodge, and noting how good old Centrebet found its home in Alice Springs - it's the next Las Vegas, the pond tells ya - but where was he when Tony Abbott unveiled his socialist dreaming?

Meanwhile, it's the pond's routine to drop in on Gra Gra "whatever it takes, including Swiss bank accounts" Richardson for a Friday update, and the news in Campaigns don't come dumber than this isn't good.

Gra Gra, you might recall, was right behind Kev, and it seems he's sick and tired of bloody women mucking things up:

I regard the controversy over his use of the phrase "sex appeal" in relation to a female candidate as a load of old cobblers. The candidate herself laughed at the remark, as did the vast majority of the women who would have seen the footage on the nightly news. For 24 hours, Labor rightly stayed away from it, but then Rudd himself hopped into his opponent on the issue. Rudd would do well to ponder the wisdom of lining up with Christine Milne and Mia Freedman on the issue. It's not a good look.

Mia Freedman! Aargh, mama mia, won't someone help Richo to an old grump's retirement home ...

Poor Richo. It seems whatever it takes has run into a few hurdles:

As week two draws to a close, my depression is now more acute. I ended last week's column with an exhortation to Rudd to rediscover his form. Like most of my advice, it has been ignored at best, or at worst is regarded as undoable. At the start of this long march, my view was Labor would lose 10 seats. That view is now looking optimistic. If some fire and energy from the Rudd campaign does not manifest itself immediately it will be little consolation for Rudd to claim he "only lost 20 when Gillard would have lost 40". On September 7 the prize for coming second is irrelevance.

Mama mia, that's not a good look.

Will Richo ever understand that he's part of the problem, and certainly not the solution? Probably not ...

Never mind, the pond looks forward to Tony Abbott and the commentariat providing endless hours of amusement over the next few years, though perhaps it won't be a pond half-full, so much as a Kakadu swamp full of crocs ...

(Below: and since the pond always adopts the Daily Terror approach to politics, and we're saving up our best sitcoms, here's a freshly minted Tumblr, Hey Girl Tony Abbott)