The pond first wanted to reassure anxious herpetologists that coal remains dear to the reptile heart, and every threat to it is dutifully reported … with those yarns popping up yesterday.
The pond wanted to damp down anxiety because on a Thursday comes the savvy Savva, and it is the pond's painful duty to report on her excursions into the faraway tree land of heresy …
Oh dear … the pond's sensors were immediately on high alert … if only because we went from those with eyes wide shut to those who will not not see ...
The pond will overlook "curtesy" though it did appreciate a reminder of a word that first turned up c. 1523 to explain "a husband's interest upon the death of his wife in the real property of an estate that she either solely owned or inherited provided they bore a child capable of inheriting the estate."
Away with the pedantry. What is this message that Albo supposedly got, because if he hasn't now, he never will? Is this a message that some reptiles might also haven't got and never will?
Around this point, the pond confesses that the savvy Savva was being too cryptic for it. Albo was hopeless on coal, and yet SloMo was hopeless on coal …
They both believed in unicorns,and yet the savvy Savva seemed ambivalent. What was she thinking, what was she saying?
The pond knew where the game stood. Each time SloMo and coal are mentioned, or new technology is touted at the solution, the pond loves to remember the love affair at its peak …as a reminder that SloMo, deep in his heart, will remain true to his love ...
Ah, so touching, the Gollum and the precioussss …
And so to the heresy that the pond just knew was lurking under all this …
"One day coal will go the way of Holdens…"
The pond could hear the thumping noises, as reptiles fainted, and thudded to the floor ….
And so to an agonising choice ...
The bromancer, or our Adam, fresh from the paradise of reptile economics?
The pond is keen on anything that has to do with the triumph of the will, and the death of the Holden reminded the pond of the Savva announcing the death of coal …
Besides, it's the bromancer, a pond Hall of Famer, but how to walk past our Adam, fresh from the garden to talk of BS, though it might have been a tad more hard-hitting, if he'd managed to sound presidential, and spoke of bullshit …
Well the pond couldn't forsake the bromancer, indulging in yet another Hanrahan agony in eight fits … so let the fitting begin ...
Look, the pond doesn't want to rain on the bromancer's parade, but GM took over the Holden in 1931, and the real Holden was a saddle …
So to blather on about how we created it all ourselves and brought it to magnificent fruition is just sublime bromancer blather of the first water …we might as well talk of bringing Coca-Cola to magnificent fruition because they allowed the mix into the country ...
As for national symbols, please, even Vegemite was a rip-off of Marmite …
Never mind, the bromancer is clearly traumatised to the bottom of his Asian-manufactured socks, and never mind that it's his mob who have been keen exporters of manufacturing to other countries…
And so to a wonder of wonders, a reptile wanting to return to the days of Ben Chifley and Ming the Merciless and subsidies ...
Sweet long absent and now terribly anxious Lord, could the bromancer be hinting that coal and other mineral wealth might not be a solid basis for the Australian economy? Did the savvy Savva nobble him at the water cooler?
Disguised subsidies! Disguised if you like, so that no one will notice them!
The Canavan caravan! Manufacturing instead of digging it up and shipping it out - though perhaps we might need to dig it up, and happily burn it to create the energy we need for the manufacturing, and so life and climate science would balance itself …
So the pond was right to put the Canavan at the top of the page … because otherwise we'd be fat and happy, and which reptile could stand for that? Happiness? The pond spits on the notion …
And that's why it was terribly moved by the bromancer announcing that he was giving up journalism to go into manufacturing, but to start up the business, he'd done a Donald and sub-contracted a factory in Vietnam to do the first batch, before moving the game back on shore …
And if you can believe that, you too might consider a career in manufacturing ...
Sad to say, the pond is un-Australian and busy getting fat in new ways.
The pond has given up meat pies and dead horse for the dumpling craze that litters Newtown, and it began to wonder whether it had done right to go with the bromancer, when our Adam was faithfully waiting in the wings. And then the pond remembered the old fairy tale about seven at one blow …
Surely the pond could do three reptiles at one blow, so come on down our Adam, the pond really needs a dose of pure and true reptile thinking, and a restoration of coal to pride of place ...
Promise to go carbon natural? Is our Adam hinting that perhaps we need to go au naturel, whether in cooking or clothing?
Not to worry, the message is clear. All this nonsense about climate science and decarbonisation is just so much hot air, and our Adam is the one to puncture the fake news balloon ...
Still, all this talk of bullshit seemed to provide a chance for the pond to sound presidential …
The pond knew that all this talk of bullshit meant that our Adam would deliver the goods, and that coal would be redeemed ...
Bloody useless women, fancy them thinking they could fly planes; bloody useless poseurs, losers and dropkicks pretending to do business, but lacking the triumph of the will.
Only hard-headed Adam knows the future, and knows the way forward, and is at one with the dog botherer's zeitgeist …
And cunning tease that he is, our Adam has left the big insights for the final gobbet ...
Yes, the climate change debate is dominated by emotion. Unlike the reptile love of coal, which is driven by a rational consideration of climate science, and its implications for the ongoing use of coal …
Oh heck, who's the pond fooling? We all love our clean dinkum sweet Oz coal, oi, oi, oi, we just loves it to death … and if we must fuck the planet because of our love of coal, all that proves is the depth of our sublime passion.
Some might think this means the reptile climate change debate is dominated by emotion, fear, paranoia, and assorted loathings.
But please, pause for a moment to think rationally, reptile fashion, if you can.
There is no emotion here, here there's no emotion.
It takes a cool, calm, collected head to kill off an ecosystem, and make the planet uninhabitable, and our Adam is just the man for the job.
Here no conspicuous compassion, here someone so blind there is no need to see, here someone intent on the triumph of the will, and the triumph of the coal …
Why, coal is as dinkum as Holden, as black and true as Vegemite, and at a pinch can be sprinkled on a meat pie in preference to dead horse …and that's the way the world will end. Not with contemptible conspicuous compassion, but with sublime love for a shiny substance …
The pond felt an enormous relief. At least one reptile had stayed true to the cause, and so the pond could end on a light note with a few cartoons …
"To offer the familiar Australian excuse — that we are too small to have a manufacturing industry — is pathetic, untrue, self-deluding. It is a first cousin of the equally false and crippling mythology that we are too small to defend ourselves. We are a nation of 26 million of the richest people on Earth, with the 12th or 13th largest economy in the world."
ReplyDeleteBut, of course, we are too small and insignificant to make a difference on emissions.
Seldom do they refer to Norway, where one-fifth as many people, but overall much smarter than we are, have developed technology that can now put highways under the sea. How they got there is set out in (Australian author) Paul Cleary's book 'Trillion Dollar Baby'. I don't know about our being of the 'richest people on Earth', because on tables of per capita GDP, Norway sits well above Australia, regardless of which agency does the reckoning. Cleary does point up some of the reasons why Australia has not been nearly as smart as Norway, which may explain why he is seldom cited by opinion writers in our supposed national newspaper.
DeleteOther Anonymous.
Australia comes in about 29th in the world in GDP per capita. Even the Isle of Man rates above us (it is 8th).
DeleteSo just how is Australia so very rich ? Well, simply because Australia's wealth is calculated by adding up the value of all our apartments, flats and houses. And because the "value" of all those things is hugely inflated, well then Australia is very rich - 8th richest in the world with "wealth" that we can't actually do anything useful with - unless we sell off a huge swathe of houses to the Chinese.
It all comes from having avoided a nominal recession arising from the GFC, so our inflated house prices were never significantly deflated.
But we did manage a GDP per capita recession or two - ie at least two quarters of decreasing GDP er capita, and our GDP per capita has been in slow decline for quite a while now.
They just don’t do irony, do they? The Economics Editor (THE Economics Editor??) writes of ‘BS jobs’ as ‘highly paid, sometimes-less-than-useless roles in bureaucracy and large corporations’. Presumably space did not allow him to extend that to ‘bureaucracy, large corporations and steadily shrinking publishing and broadcast organisations.’
ReplyDeleteOne might have thought that would spring to the Editor’s mind when he expressed his concern over BS announcements. Because, without those BS announcements, those claiming to publish or broadcast a version of ‘news’ would have to employ people actually to seek out what was happening in the world, or otherwise prepare material with some substance, to fill the pages, and the time of the talking-head.
So much cheaper to do the electronic ‘cut’n’paste’ of whatever has come in from the PR section of a potential advertiser, or just accept the entire ‘opinion piece’ from the trusty think tank or ‘industry body’. Why - the good folks at the IPA now send in stuff that can double as the editorial for the day, and all apparently free. Economics at its finest.
I have to confess that a friend who, yes, subscribes, has sent me some comments made by the faithful in response to this column by the Economics Editor. Admittedly they have been selected, but they do display serious difficulty with English grammar and spelling, so many of the faithful may not grasp irony if he chose to display it.
Other Anonymous
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the reptile house, someone is out of step:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/renewables-save-the-day-in-interstate-energy-crisis/news-story/2de6aa0338d88f65aafdd869ecc646dc
Seems rather at odds with the boldly stated but unsupported statements of our economics editor.
If that link doesn't get you behind the paywall follow it through from here:
Deletehttps://twitter.com/kanethornton/status/1229727109884461056
This wont help the planet but if it hurts good old Ozzie coal I'm all for it
https://www.mining-technology.com/news/india-stop-thermal-coal-imports/
Thank you Befuddled - interesting how contributors to this site co-operate and assist others.
DeleteOther Anonymous
Well, OA, you know what they say: "don't feed the trolls". But DP takes some trouble to unceremoniously expel any trolls that somehow fall through a space-time warp into loonpond.
DeleteHence we can unreservedly "feed" all of our co-commenters and enjoy the interplay. So lots of us like it here, as you seem to.
Befuddled - you have given us a way to identify our economics editor; henceforth I shall think of him as the Unsupported Economics Editor. He deserves some such title for his makeshift adaptation of the Thorstein Veblen phrase. That he claims Veblen used 'conspicuous consumption' to mock the mores of the upper classes suggests that our Unsupported Economics Editor has not read 'The Theory of the Leisure Class', nor realised that it was published in the last year of the 19th century.
ReplyDeleteIt is not quite as tawdry as the Cater purloining Donald Horne's inspired phrase, and releasing his own book with the title 'The Lucky Culture', which added nothing useful to any discussion about the nation, but did devalue Horne's term.
Oh well, perhaps Cater the sociologist can explain the greater significance of Veblen in the 20th century, to the Unsupported Economics Editor.
Other Anonymous
Savvy Savv: "But at the ballot box last May they showed they care more about their hip pockets, their jobs, their tax, their cost of living and their economic security."
ReplyDeleteNow you'd think that with such a long list of "cares" that the primary vote for the LNP wouldn't have actually fallen - with a net gain of only one miserable seat - would you. Well it did: only by 0.6% but that was after Clive Palmer's "shifty Shorten" $millions and, of course, a relentless attack by the reptile press.
And even if things had gone like Savvy says: Labor wins Kooyong and Higgins, Phelps holds Wentworth, the state of the parties would be: LNP 73, Labor 71, Independents, Centre Alliance and Greens 7. Shorten might have become PM, but it was by no means certain. And it still would have been a minority government (just like Gillard's) dependent on many non Labor votes in both Houses (and Shorten is no Julia Gillard).
So I think we might just begin to doubt whether Savvy and the reptiles have quite "got the message" either. As you say, DP: "the savvy Savva seemed ambivalent. What was she thinking, what was she saying?"
But now for the Bromancer: "while Australa was the eighth richest nation, we ranked 93rd for complexity."
Of course, there's nothing at all complex about biochemistry and medicine, is there. So tell me again, which was the first "non complex" nation outside of China to map COVID-19 ? Could it just perhaps be that CSL and Cochlear and such like might be a better bet for "non complex" Australia than an old fashioned motor industry ? And what about CSIRO and the coming 'hydrogen' industry ? Which nation was it that invented the hydrogen-ammonia cycle (and the catalysed membrane that makes it feasible) ?
Can we just get rid of ignorant old dvckheads who can't see past metal mining and smelting as "complex" industries ?
But I do have a question for our bewildering Bromancer; he says: "we are the 12th or 13th largest economy in the world". Now how can that be when we are only the 55th biggest population (smaller even than Cameroon) in the world. Sure we're the "8th richest", but only the 55th biggest. Please explain.
However, what about this: "the report [from Harvard] didn't appeal to left wingers because they hate manufacturing because all manufacturing produces greenhouse emissions".
Sheesh, that outright nonsense from a bloke who asks "Are we forever incapable of mere common sense ?"
But I guess the one to really ask that of is good old Adam who would like to tell us that in the honest and decent past "People simply behaved reasonably." And that clearly is why we now all live in an Earthly paradise. Oh yes. Except that we have "a climate debate dominated by emotion."
Yes, Adam old mate, that is yours and the reptiles gift to us all. And to all the generations coming after us, too.
Fictitious Lies
ReplyDeleteWe’re caught in a trap
We can’t walk out
Because we love coal so much don’t we?
Emitting one point three
We impact minimally
Yet no-one believes a word we’re saying…
Blame it on green alarmists
And their fictitious lies (fictitious lies)
The elites are foiling our schemes
With their malicious minds
Oceans are lapping our toes
The planet’s starting to glow
But there is still a place for the coal industry
We need export cash
From iron, coal and gas
Our surplus will crash if we stop mining (if we stop mining)
Although there’s been some weather
Of the capricious kind (capricious kind)
That’s no reason to follow Greta
With her autistic mind
…Oh let big coal survive
Keep shipping it off to Shanghai
Without it our surplus will die
Well you know
We would never, ever lie to you
Ooooh, yeah, yeah…
We’re in a climate change trap
A carbon shootout
But we still need coal power don’t we?
So by 2050
We’ll plant a billion trees
Why does no-one believe a word we’re saying?
Now that's a lovely Elvis blast from the past, Kez.
Delete