In which the pond contemplates parochial issues, the wayward greenies, and the Caterists in full Ayn Rand mode lathering up the Stone Age fear ...

(Above: and more Moir here).

Think dull. Now there's a motto for the ages ...

But try as it might, the pond still thinks funny.

For example, the pond has, for its sins, recently taken to visiting Sydney's domestic airport at odd hours.

6 am Monday is a real doozy, though it has to be said that on any Friday, 6 pm is just as great. Desperate kamikaze drivers hurl themselves at traffic lights and other vehicles for a little advance over the tarmac. It's trench warfare with cars ... and with springs of steel that'll hurl the driver as fast as a leopard a good few inches each change of lights ...

Now your average politician, blessed with driver and car, doesn't have a clue about the trench warfare. Like Bill Hunter, they're in the tent listening to Bizet's duet In the depths of the Temple, from The Pearl Fishers, as the lemmings rush off to die ... (yes, it's heading towards that time of year).

But that's why the pond laughs so merrily, so gaily ... especially when WestConnex pumps out this sort of guff ...

Oh bliss oh poop said Toad ... lucky 2031 dwellers ...

But okay, after you've saved that twenty five minutes getting from Burwood to the airport, what happens to the fifty minutes you piss away ... battling the hordes on General Holmes drive as they hit the intersection, getting into the airport, sitting in the traffic jam and then escaping with relief, knowing that you've survived the Johnny Turks behind their wheels to live another day?

Which is why the pond chortled with glee to see this being paraded by the reptiles in the lizard of Oz:

Not a clue.

Not the foggiest, not the faintest idea, not even the understanding of a blithering idiot.

Come on Albo, join with the pond on a trip to Sydney airport at 6 am on a Monday, without benefit of chauffeur and government car and a stint in the lounge ...

Naturally the Caterists are out in force today, warning of the dangers of the greenies, and revealing their reading habits in the process:

...Wilderness Society boss Alec Marr set about fulfilling Ayn Rand’s 1970 prophecy of the forthcoming anti-industrial revolution. The old Left merely wanted to take over the factories; the new Left wants to destroy them.

Yes indeed, the Caterists are solid factory workers - see their soiled, begrimed hands, look how they toil at the ink-stained keyboard ... let's hope that in their dotage they don't have to end up like Rand on welfare under an assumed name ...

These days the punch drunk Caterists are still fighting the battle for the Franklin river:

Because, you know, saving the Franklin was a disaster, and there's still time to dam it now.

What a stupid revisionist man he is, long on possum pelts and short on sense, and never no mind the actual facts of that matter. Just the usual stone age rhetoric up against:

There was some concern, however, among economists and academics that an increase in power output would not necessarily strengthen the economy, nor decrease levels of unemployment.

Yes, a bit like saving 25 minutes to get to Sydney Airport, so you can waste 50 sitting in the mobile car park once you get there ...

These days of course Parks Tasmania are working the tourist riff:

The Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area conserves a diverse array of both natural and cultural features of outstanding global significance. As one of only three remaining temperate wilderness areas in the southern hemisphere, the region provides pristine habitats for a range of plants and animals that are found nowhere else in the world, including many rare and endangered species. For a number of animals which have become extinct on the mainland in recent times, the area offers a last refuge. The World Heritage Area is the Australian stronghold of temperate rainforest and alpine vegetation. Its landforms are of immense beauty and reveal a rich and complex geology. Aboriginal occupation extending back beyond 36 000 years, combined with nearly two centuries of European settlement, have created a legacy of humanity's interaction with the wilderness. 
The Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area offers all people, for all time, the opportunity to seek joy and inspiration amidst the untrammelled grandeur of nature, and refuge from an increasingly artificial world. It is waiting for you to discover it, and, perhaps, discover a part of yourself. (here).

You can just imagine the Caterists sitting in their clubs, hunkered down, denouncing this sort of stone age rhetoric, this idle romantic blather.

It's roughly equivalent to all the idle rhetoric about the wood chipping business without a viable business plan ...

Dam it, burn it, turn it into wood chips, pave it, and let's have a six lane motorway so it only takes five minutes to get to the airport in Hobart ...

Yes, there's plenty of guff, as only the Caterists know how. Tasmanians are on the march, Tasmania is on the move, and it's all thanks to the Liberals as the dark days are swept aside and all this talk of Tasmania being a nice place is swept aside with dreams of hard working serfs slaving for a living:

And there you have it, the ineffable stupidity of the Caterists, celebrating the success of Tasmanian's primary producing industries, which like New Zealand can trade off on the notion, especially in polluted China, that the state is pristine, with clean, safe plentiful supplies of good stuff to eat.

Where are your wood chips and coal mines now?

Not to mention the way the Caterists gloss over the history of what actually happened in Tasmania during the Franklin dam days, not least the peculiar notion that tourism jobs don't matter ... the same sort of rhetoric which would see the Great Barrier Reef plundered for oil, because who cares about heritage sites or tourism ...

Which explains why the Caterists are experts on the Stone Age ... mentally that's where they dwell, armed with a club ...

Cartoons aside, the Labor party would be unwise to rely on the Caterists to interpret the recent NSW poll results.

While CSG might have been an issue locally, there were other issues at work in Newtown, like the proposal to destroy the King street shopping centre with motorway madness, and the way the Labor party, long accustomed to treating the area as a fiefdom, routinely ignored the interests of locals ...

But if the Caterists are clueless, then what about the Labor party itself, and the pair - the absent Albo and his partner, whose idea of helping was to turn up on the ABC's election coverage - who presided over the Marrickville/Newtown debacle?

Cue Troy:

Populists?

What, with actual popular policies that appeal to the populace? As opposed to rolling over and going doggo with the metadata men?

Well we can't have that, can we?

Well no Troy, that's what basket weavers might think, and they might claim Balmain is the oldest branch of the party, but actually, though perhaps long forgotten in certain quarters, Labor tradition assigns the birth place of the Labor party to a meeting of striking pastoral workers underneath a ghost gum ("The Tree of Knowledge") in Barcaldine, Queensland in 1891 ...

But do go on ... hit us with a chunky gobbet of paranoia ...

Stop right there Troy. 

Nifty and the doofus Carr are suddenly heroes? Carr, the man who ignored Sydney's aching infrastructure needs and went with panem et circenses and the Olympics? He's the hero ... but isn't he the one who came out in favour of selling off the poles? (here at the Daily Terror Labor party hate site). Shouldn't he be expelled? (Though frankly no one would miss Martin Ferguson carrying out the orders of his industrial masters).

And Luke Foley, the man who voted against gay marriage, is going to lure in progressive voters?

Why this is wondrous stuff, do go on:

Stop right there Linda. In the interim, post-Eddie, the Liberals had about ten parliamentary members fall on their ICAC swords. Everyone knows both the major parties are corrupt and in the thrall of Sydney property developers.

In Newtown there were more important issues than Eddie Obeid. You should know that.

Stop right there Linda. Are you suggesting that the selfish buggers in St Peters and Newtown and Enmore selfishly opposed the destruction of their suburbs so that a few ponces from Burwood could cut a few minutes off their airport travel time, and never mind what happens when they hit the airport?

Why how outrageously selfish of them ... but how poignant it makes these closing thoughts sound ...

Damn right, try again in four years time ...

But enough of parochial issues.

Time to rejoin the larger cosmic federal circus and it seems that the poodle Pyne was out and about last night, and in fine, frisky poodle form, mounting any object or person within sight.

So how goes it in poodle land?

Oh dear, and there was jolly Joe out and about yesterday, doing his level best to set up an increase in the regressive GST - which affects the poor much more than the rich, just see sales tax at work in the United States - so that he might save the rich from arduous exposure to income tax.

It was an epic performance, and it had the pond salivating in poodle style at the thought of the impending budget.

As usual, the knavishly incisive Pope summed it all up in a single image, and more incisive Pope - careful, the surgeon's knife cuts - can be found here.