Mano a mano? That's nothing, not when we could have parrot a parrot ...

The pond was delighted when the matter of a republic briefly erupted...

Naturally the mischief-making reptiles raced off to check that the trouble-maker in chief, and leader of the opposition in exile, hadn't changed his views ...

Note the difference in the pitches ...

Yep, google features the "youff" angle - and their love of a good frock and babies and all the glamour, sigh, oh to be a prince and a princess - but the reptiles naturally framed it as Abbott v. Malware ...

Well there's no surprises there, and s0 the reptiles seized the moment to pile on and foment trouble by celebrating the schismatics and the splitters ...

In the usual reptile way, all of them piled in on the 'let's do nothing' angle.

The reptile editorialist was a safe pair of hands ...

And over at Fairfax, the magic water man was diligent in his duties, as you can read here ...

It's safe to say that the magic water man is just the chappie to recognise a shallow fraud built on zero substance ... just drink the magic water and you'll catch the level of his insight ...

Naturally the magic water man, while cheerfully criticising everybody else, didn't actually bother to come up with his own model, though posing as a milksop republican...

Talk is cheap, he blathered, but in fact subscribing to his blather is far too expensive for the pond ...

Never mind, the pond was most pleased because of the rumblings that were exposed ...

Now that story, with links, is here,  and it made the pond feel mortified and apologetic at the lack of quality time it gives to tedious old farts like David Flint,  though the likes of Flinty hardly - pace Tony Abbott - constitutes the "youff" side of the monarchist marketplace ...

The ACM abandoned its website some time ago - its corpse lies here, with its last entry for 8th June 2015 - so that they could spend time on the "youff"-orientated intertubes at Facebook here ...

It's easy enough to bell the political cats strutting that page - like Caleb Jones, who is presented as the Daily Telegraph's "youthful columnist", when in reality under the new regime at the Terror, the youthful Caleb is no longer the flavour of the month (Graudian it at the Weekly Beast here).

There are other indicators of certain tendency, a certain inclination. 

The page faithfully regurgitates Miranda the Devine delivering her hate of David Morrison, and Terry McCrann delivering his hate for Australian of the Year, and Paul Kelly delivering his hate for the Labor Party - it's all their fault - and then there's the thoughts of Ian Callinan  and lots about the doings of the mighty Flinty, and for a moment, the pond thought it had stumbled on a branch of News Corp ...

It seems that, to be a monarchist, you must belong to the wretched, backward-looking, navel-gazing, fluff- and lint-gathering tedious Murdochian school of deeply conservative commentariat politics ...

The best that Flinty could come up with as a balance for his tendency, his inclination, was Doug Sutherland, one time mayor of Sydney. That good old boy has always been window-dressing for balance for some time, but it's a gold chain, flowing robes parochial kind of balance...

Rival Australian Monarchist League has its headquarters here, and it plays a different kind of bat ... with the parrot on hand to greet visitors and make them feel most welcome ...

Of course the AML is a team player and rebuked the ABC here ... explaining that they were quite terribly bemused, rather than frightfully amused by talk of a War of the Roses amongst the monarchists ... (the pond recently enjoyed Simon Schama's description of that war as completely mysterious and incomprehensible in his televisual history of Britain).

What spoilsports.

The pond still lives in hope. Could this renewed debate see the end of Captain Flint, in an epic battle between parrot and parrot ...

Let's remember that Long John Silver called his parrot Captain Flint, and the bird even featured on the title page of some editions...

So it would be parrot v parrot, and may the best parrot win, though the pond would be devastated if all this ruffling of monarchist feathers led to the departure of one of its very special magnificis avis.

It's rare to be graced by the presence of such a preening bird-brain in such splendid plumage and with a marvellous call, and his absence would be a loss to all ...

One can almost sense, almost hear, feel and touch the Queen gently weeping into a discreet hankie ...

Let us remember the good times, when the birds lived in peace, much as it's to be hoped that apes and humans will eventually live side by side on the planet of the apes ...