TGIF, and so a Friday pot pourri for this wonderful, lavish age of political entitlement ...

It was Judge Dredd who conjured up the fascist vigilante soul in style, though it was left to the comical Sly Stallone, who at one point ruined the Judge on the screen, to give perfect expression to the notion with lines like "Crime is the disease, I'm the cure".

Campbell Newman has already had more Judge Dredd moments than you can find comic books, and yesterday it was big Bazza O'Farrell's populist vigilante turn, as you can watch in Judges cop more criticism from Barry O'Farrell, as he got the legal eagles upset by suggesting the lot of them would do a better job if they'd started out as plods and coppers and fuzz fighting junk ...

Routinely journalists have great fun mocking fringe candidates in political parties for their woeful ignorance of the notion of separation of powers, and the whys and wherefores, as with the reptiles at News doing over Clive Palmer's candidates struggle to answer political questions:

What is the separation of powers? 
CHANDY: OK well I did learn that as a subject but I couldn't give you a definition. 
WAYNE: The upper house and lower house. 
MARTI: Got me on that one, sorry 
JODIE: The separation between the Senate and the House Of Reps

It was Joh of course who set the benchmark, though Campbell Newman is doing his very best to get to Joh land. Remember dear old Joh at the Fitzgerald inquiry into police corruption back in 1989:

QUESTIONER: What do you understand by the doctrine of the separation of powers under the Westminster system? 
JOH BJELKE-PETERSEN, then Queensland premiere: Of the ...? 
QUESTIONER: The Westminster system. 
JOH BJELKE-PETERSEN: The ...? 
QUESTIONER: The doctrine of the separation of powers under the Westminster system. 
JOH BJELKE-PETERSEN: No, I don't quite know what you're driving at. The document? (here, where it's done in play form as a re-enactment)

So where's the daily mocking of Campbell "Little Adolf" Newman, and now big "Benito" Bazza?

Instead, it's water off a duck's back to the fascist mind, when there's strutting and preening and posturing to be done, and re-election to be secured, and so absolutely no need to read stories like Police powers, not violence, cast a cloud over Mardi Gras.

Meanwhile, the news of the unemployment figures has made life really difficult for the hagiographers and the knob polishers.

The splash for the bouffant one suggests a little incipient rising sense of hand-wringing alarm:

What if Abbott can't deliver a million jobs in five years? Or half a million in his first term? What if (space for gasping here) he knowingly, deliberately lied? Made a false promise?

Luckily, the reptiles have all hands on deck for the lead digital story, and they know who to blame:

Yes, it's pro-active Tony.

Blame, blame, blame. He'd fix things except he's hapless, and hopeless and constrained and impotent.

Do something about unemployment? Why bother when you can kick the Bill Shorten and union cans further down the street, and the commentariat will string along like a pack of thugs and bully boys.

Remind the pond once again why the one-eyed Daily Terror is the least trusted newspaper in Australia?

WTF? What's the Schapelle Corby story got to do with Bill Shorten? You might as well splash a story with Liberal strategists trying to promote Tony Abbott as an employment generating dynamo should note the public didn't warm to Akker Dakker seizing any stray metaphor to lather up his usual storm.

It's got so you need to wear a wet suit just to go anywhere near the frothing and the foaming, of a kind you might expect of a cocaine addict caught up in the hysteria of turning on, tuning in and dropping out.

Even Simon Benson, who usually purports a little balance in the least trusted newspaper in Australia, couldn't help himself, salivating and dribbling in Going in the wrong direction at the prospect of Abbott launching an attack on Shorten, Labor and unions in the coming months.

It was only when you got to the end when you came to the fly in the ointment, the sting in the tail, and the balancing act:

Shorten’s challenge — if he is to weather the storm that is coming — is to articulate a modern economic and jobs policy agenda and commit to the continuity of reform within the Labor Party. 
If Labor stalls on its reform process and modernisation, as it appears to be doing, it will be in danger of becoming as redundant as the workers they claim to be standing up for. 
The one thing Shorten is absolutely right about, however, is that Abbott doesn’t have a credible plan for jobs either. If he does, he is not telling the rest of us. 
The Coalition is going to have to articulate how it will create the jobs of the so-called new economy, in the face of declining mining and manufacturing sectors. So far, its own rhetoric on making it easier for businesses to employ people rings as hollow as Labor suggesting taxpayers should subsidise jobs in inefficient and dying industries.

Yes if Abbott and his lawyer colleagues had a smidgin of results orientated private sector work, they'd realise it's not about feather-bedding for their re-election, or blaming everyone except themselves. It's about results, numbers, figures on the ground ...

A million jobs in five years in smart new innovative technological industries, while the NBN withers on the vine, the CSIRO is given a short back and sides, Qantas strolls in as casual as you please and gets jolly Joe onside, and the Abbott government is going to generate heaps of jobs courtesy the "new economy"?

Why you might just as well ask luddites to design a nano computer ...

Meanwhile, where are the hard hats and the hard heads when it comes to dealing with a board and a management and a CEO who have determinedly reduced Qantas to rubble?

Gone to water everyone of them.

Instead the pond had to revert to its favourite writer on matters aeronautical, Ben Sandilands, pointing out the bleeding obvious in Flying monkeys; Qantas wish list won't save Joyce's management:

...Joyce said the Qantas Sale Act was preventing it from further capital raising. This is nonsense. Qantas never had the slightest problem making capital raisings — most of them oversubscribed, under the “restrictive” Qantas Sale Act  — until the current management took over five years ago. 
 It was often argued that the QSA actually improved the attractiveness of Qantas to overseas investors because it guaranteed that at least 51% of the enterprise would be supported by Australian investors on the share register because of the cap on foreign domiciled shareholders. Qantas raised $1.2 billion from offers that were often jointly supported by domestic and foreign investors in nine offers pre-Joyce.

Sandilands reminded the pond of the way Qantas management, back in 2011, in the name of an industrial dispute, stopped operations and stranded travellers.

The politicians might forget, but travellers don't. The pond ended its loyalty to the airline at the time and hasn't gone back

And now the politicians are lining up to offer support to a board, management and CEO who have conspicuously failed at their jobs?

And the next day they'll be lining up to explain to the world how the age of entitlement is over? All except, it seems, for failed CEOs, boards and managements ...

Sheesh, the pond needs a comedy fix:

Is the whole world going crazy, or is it about time for the pond to join a new religion?

Finally those peculiar words "inadvertent" and "inadvertently" have rise to the surface once more, proving that other things beside cream float to the top.

We have Customs to thank, though nothing can be revealed, nothing can be confirmed, and nothing much can be discussed, because inadvertently that might help people smugglers.

What the pond wants to know is that Mike Carlton, a well known navy tragic with good contacts ready to talk about the WOMBATS, was definitively wrong when he scribbled last week:

The blundering incursion into Indonesian territorial waters by Parramatta and its sister ship HMAS Stuart was a disaster, almost incomprehensible in the era of pinpoint satellite navigation. 
Five times they did it, neither ship aware nor concerned it had happened. This despite the absolute diplomatic and military imperative of not upsetting the Indonesians. As one admiral told me this week through gritted teeth: "They f---ed up." 
But it gets worse. Scott Morrison and Co would like you to believe the turn-back-the-boats show is seamlessly run by the new Operation Sovereign Borders, headed by the now famous Lieutenant General Angus Campbell. In fact it's not. Bizarrely, there are no fewer than four different commands with a piece of the action, often overlapping. 
They are Northern Command, based in Darwin, nominally in charge of land, sea and air operations in the Top End and the theatre beyond. Border Protection Command, which covers the entire Australian coastline. The new Joint Agency Task Force, aka Campbell's Sovereign Borders. And finally, Joint Operations Command, which controls the whole Australian Defence Force worldwide from its spanking new HQ in Canberra. 
I'm told it was Northern Command that blew it. It should have known what Parramatta and Stuart were up to, but failed to restrain or control them until way too late. That is another shocker. The grim reality is that Northern Command is a creaking anachronism left over from 1942, with little naval expertise. It should have been abolished years ago. 
Given this government's mania for secrecy, it's likely the official report on this fiasco will be heavily censored when it comes out sometime next week. But the navy and the ADF will still have to eat the proverbial faecal focaccia, and grin through gritted teeth while doing it. 
They will cop a heavy kicking from the media, and in this case deservedly so. 
Expect heads to roll. (here)

Expect heads to roll? So far all Customs has offered is another apology to Indonesia, and to the Australian public, a generous dose of faecal focaccia. Here's how it's served:

Mr Pezzullo is currently considering what parts of the report to release publicly. 
"There are going to be elements of this that are covered by the public interest immunity claim," he said. "There are going to be other matters that are in the public interest to discuss. That is to say how did this inadvertent transgression occur? Why did it occur and what remedial action needs to be taken to ensure that it's not going to occur again?" 
He will not say when the document will be released. (here)

Welcome to the age of entitlement and Judge Dredd, where transparency of government is a dream and a delusion ... and "inadvertent" is the faecal word of choice ...

And don't expect politicians' sense of entitlement to wither and die, not when they have someone else to blame, and the hagiographers and knob polishers clustered around, kissing their feet (not that the pond has anything against foot fetishists in general) ...

Quick, the pond needs a sugar hit (and more Pope here, and Rowe, who did the Qantas cartoon above can always be found here):