In which the pond revisits Billy Bunter - oh crikey, groaned the fat owl of the remove - before heading off to the lizard Oz's American kissing cousins ...

 

The pond's week ended in an eerie way when a correspondent sent the pond a snap, and the pond realised it had seen the man in the movie ...

Talk about unnerving. How prescient was Stanley, how photogenic was George? 

And then came this piece of comedy, via Charlie Sykes at The Bulwark...

Oh come on Benjy, come on Charlie, the days of caring about doggies has long gone ... and you've already moved on to The New Face(s) of the GOP and George in drag and the mango Mussolini as valiant defender of the freedumb of the press. Lock 'em up!

You can't just snatch away prime comedy material in an idle moment.

And that was just the beginning of the pond's exciting times, as the pond relishes its (temporary?) freedumb from the reptiles of lizard Oz, and runs wild and free through the full to overflowing intertubes ... though some traditions remain.

The pond still devours the venerable Meade on a Friday. As a correspondent noted, there's always something amusing, as in the observations on Jacinda mania in reptile la la land, and the Sky News mob doing a rebrand as freedumb thinkers, or some such thing ...

Then on a Saturday, the pond always turns to Marina Hyde for her great comedy stylings. Anyone who can start a column this way, as she did her latest, always has the rapt attention of the pond ...

More than three years after malign fun-fur mascot Boris Johnson first gibbered out the catchphrase, we finally have incontrovertible evidence of what “levelling up” actually is. For its duration, Johnson’s government had a flagship policy that it couldn’t have defined even if it hadn’t been drunk on the contents of a wheelie suitcase. Levelling up now turns out to be a sort of inter-constituency Squid Game, in which MPs who voted for various stripes of self-harm are now forced into trial-by-combat against each other in the hope of appealing to the caprices of shadowy gamesmaster Michael Gove. Arguably there’s an ironic wit to the format – a sort of handout for the anti-handout party, designed solely to inadequately mitigate the effects of cuts made largely by that same party. The players seem quite upset about it now, but are of course free to terminate the game if the majority votes to do so.

Or as one Conservative MP who missed out fumed yesterday: “I’ve got shops without roofs and whole streets of boarded-up houses and some people are getting cash for adventure golf.” Which is, by coincidence, exactly the picture in the political glossary next to the phrase “sunlit uplands”. Another Tory MP described the policy delivery as “a fuck-up of epic proportions”, casting it as the Stalingrad of not securing a planetarium for your northern marginal.

And so on, no point recycling all of the fun read, but what fun to be had ...

The pond was also hit by a bolt from the blue when a correspondent suggested the pond take a look at the Fat Owl of the Terror remove, and stirred fond memories in sundry punters ...

The pond can't even remember when it last took a look at the Terror's Billy Bunter, but is up for anything ... only to discover these days the reptiles load up the lard with tons of snaps, so there was no way for the pond to do an easy cut and paste.

It would have to be done the old school way ... just the words from the fatuous blimp, as the pond used to do in the early days.

Roll up sleeves and stockings and plunge head first into the vat of verbiage. 

So the pond started in, though with a caveat. 

It seems these days Bunter only visits the tuckshop on a Sunday, so perforce the pond must jump the gun ...there will be fresh fat owl of the remove meat tomorrow, but this is what the pond found on its plate.

The first offering was headed From the voice to Pell, Left fully-armed for culture wars, and was a doozy ...

Sky News host Rowan Dean says the “whole world of woke” began with former Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam. “Whitlam, the ‘Grandaddy of Woke’,” Mr Dean said. “Did Gough leave Australia better off or worse off? “In my opinion, there is no question on far too many fronts he trashed what had successfully worked before and replaced it with socialist fantasies that we have laboured under ever since. “In a nutshell, the culture wars began under Gough Whitlam and the left have been torching our precious values and institutions ever since. Worse off? You bet we are.”
Despite claims to the contrary, the culture wars are not only alive, they are virulently raging at every level of society and 2023 will only see them increase exponentially.
Climate change, the Voice to Parliament, the death of Cardinal George Pell, even NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet’s 20-year-old fancy dress folly, are all the ammunition the progressive Left needs to keep the nation divided.
Just as Russia’s Vladimir Putin needs to endorse a mammoth dose of hypocrisy to provide cover for his murderous war on Ukraine’s civilians, so too do Labor, the Greens and Teals rely on double standards and an acquiescing population prepared to ignore duplicity to strengthen their grasp on power.
The Bureau of Meteorology, when not playing its own brand of the identity politics game, has gamed its own records to support its demonstratively false claims that we are in a climate crisis.
BoM officials are as politicised in their support for the Albanese government’s hysterical climate extinction measures as Chris “Blackouts” Bowen, the energy and climate change minister who refuses to acknowledge that his weather-dependent wind and solar cannot provide adequate base load power to support our population as coal-fired power plants are closed.
The need for constitutional change to accommodate a separatist Voice to Parliament only for a minority of Australians remains unexplained but it is clearly only about providing another power base for an urban elite.
The Aboriginal Affairs Minister sits on the frontbench and in Cabinet. If the holder of the portfolio cannot adequately represent those Australians who identify as Aboriginal, then what is the point of the position?
That there is currently a disproportionately larger number of MPs who claim Aboriginal identity than there are Aboriginal Australians in the general population is stark proof that Australian voters are not racists, no matter how vehemently the progressives make that claim.
As Australia Day nears, the usual ranting activists will again make the claim that the arrival of European settlers (albeit, initially convicts and their guards) constituted an invasion.
It goes without saying that the principal medium for spreading propaganda for the woke progressive agenda has been the taxpayer-funded ABC and the hordes of anti-social media bloggers.
Cardinal George Pell’s death saw the public broadcaster indulge in what seemed to be a well-coordinated disinformation campaign, which mentioned his dying only in the context of rehashing the sexual abuse claims on which he was wrongfully convicted, as the High Court found so unequivocally unanimously.
But the ABC, as the driving force behind the Victorian police’s politically-driven campaign against the Cardinal and the false narratives that led to his wrongful conviction, has heavily invested in its war on the Christian religion.
Premier Dominic Perrottet’s naïve choice of a Nazi uniform to wear to his 21st birthday party 20 years ago –and two years before Prince Harry chose a similar outfit to another birthday party – sent some sections of the media into a frenzy.
His response though, unlike the hapless Harry, was honest, logical and clear.
“I think, life, as we go through life, we mature and we grow and we have different experiences that make us understand and appreciate the significance of various aspects of life and I, I’m not the person I was when I was 21,” he said.
A positive recognition that we learn through life and do not need to wallow in self-pity and self-recrimination to achieve a well-grounded maturity.

The pond will confess that back in the day, the pond rarely took the fat owl of the remove seriously ... and almost every time the pond looked, there was a Bunter comparison to be made ....

The pond eventually tired of the game and became quiet cruel in its comparisons ... but as there recently came news of the discovery of a record-breaking toad, why not go there again?

And so to the next sample, again stripped of plenty of meaningless snaps, so that the pond could get the meaty essence of goodness in Chris Bowen’s blind faith in renewable energy beyond belief...

Still the eternally snickering footman climate science denialist, still fondly remembered by the pond for his part in fucking up the NBN ...

Today Energy Minister Chris Bowen’s "own explanation" confirmed the renewables push has created the current energy mess, says Sky News host Chris Kenny. Just two days after Mr Bowen said “renewables are the solution to this crisis, not the cause”, he admitted, “we’ve had so much electricity leave the system over the last ten years and only a little bit come on … that means we’ve got less energy reliability and more pressure on prices”. “Yeah, that's right, the stuff that he was calling a lie, the forcing out of reliable fossil fuel generation, has created this crisis,” Mr Kenny said. “Blackout Bowen is leading the government and the country down a blind alley.”

The great Labor-Green renewables gravy train must be stopped before it totally derails the Australian economy.

Running on bombastic unachievable renewable energy claims, its engineer, Climate Minister Chris Bowen, and stoker, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, have to know it can deliver only blackouts and national bankruptcy.

Bowen’s questionable ministerial record under the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments should have precluded him from ever holding another senior cabinet position but presumably the dearth of talent and factional dealing saw him awarded energy and climate despite his time in the immigration, treasury, superannuation and small business portfolios.

It appeared from the get-go that Bowen struggled to understand how electricity is generated or stored, and it is now patently obvious that he has learnt nothing over the past six-and-a-half months.

His blind faith in the capacity of renewable energy from wind and solar farms, and the storage potential of yet-to-be built batteries and the yet-to-be delivered Snowy 2.0, Bowen is beyond belief.

Yet, as he remarked last week, more renewables will “firm-up our grids, providing more capacity as more and more power stations leave the power grid, as more and more coal-fired power stations innovatively close”.

How exactly he plans to “innovatively close” more coal-fired power stations is yet to be seen. Pointless destruction without any replacement power source is hardly innovative, it is outright vandalism.

With coal, gas and uranium readily available but placed out of reach by out-of-date ideologically-driven Green-Left policies, the Albanese government is setting up the nation to fail as it “innovatively closes” the coal-fired power plants which once powered our now all-but extinct manufacturing industries.

The planned batteries will not store the necessary energy to keep the lights on, and if we look at the European and North American examples, those virtue-signallers who rushed to buy electric vehicles will be keeping them in the garage or buying fossil-fuelled generators to keep them on the road.

The Swiss are already considering limiting the use of electric vehicles to essential use because of the power shortages brought on by Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, and California’s electric car users were asked in September not to charge their cars during heatwaves.

The Swiss will also be asked to reduce the temperature of their washing machines, showers, and the use of leaf blowers, and seat heaters on ski lifts will be banned while video streaming will be slowed to standard definition to cut power consumption.

The hydro the Swiss largely rely on during the warm months is naturally reduced when winter freezes lakes and they take more energy from Germany, which is reopening coal mines, and France, where nuclear keeps things moving. Germans restricted heating buildings to 19C.

Albanese has promised Australia will reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 43 per cent by 2030 even though there is no evidence that the less than a thousandth percentage of CO2 created by humans present in the atmosphere influences the climate, only modelling which has been shown to be serially flawed or mischievously manipulated.

Over the past fortnight, Senators Gerard Rennick, Hollie Hughes, David Fawcett and Ross Cadell have shown this is yet another Green-Labor pledge that won’t be met – just like the incessant promise to reduce power bills by $275.

“My understanding is you have to get to 82 per cent renewables on the grid to get your 43 per cent reduction in CO2,” Rennick stated at a recent committee hearing.

“Surely we must have a pretty clear plan and strategy in terms of how many transmission lines need to be built between now and 2030 to hook up enough renewables to get it into the grid, which is just eight years away. 28,000km of power lines?” he asked, to be met with obfuscation and denial from public servants and Senator Jenny McAllister, the assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy.

The government doesn’t know how much the much-vaunted renewable grid will cost, it doesn’t even know how long the new transmission lines will be, and it hasn’t put the necessary $700 million in the budget needed to refit the proposed new gas-fired power plant in the Hunter to enable it to run with 30 per cent hydrogen fuel, or said where the energy will come from to produce the hydrogen.

We need to install “about 40 wind turbines every month until 2030” and “for solar, more than 22,000 panels every day” to achieve the Labor-Green fantasy, according to Bowen.

There were more than 120 public servants in attendance on Monday, November 7, and though this number dwindled to just over 50 on Monday, November 28, McAllister could do no more than bluster otiosely.

No thought of nuclear energy either, though we are hoping to buy and build nuclear subs, and more than 30 nations rely on nuclear power for base load energy.

Meanwhile, the definitive advice from the OECD in April this year is that nuclear is in fact the cheapest form of electricity generation.

We are being taken for the most expensive and nonproductive ride of our lives. 

And who can argue with any of that, especially the conclusion? By the time that the Murdochians have fucked the planet, those left will be in for the most expensive and destructive and nonproductive ride of their lives ...

Speaking of climate, the WSJ was also at it, but instead of the demonic windmills and satanic solar panels that would be at the head of a lizard Oz yarn, there was a snap of Satan himself ...

Naturally the sight of Satan himself sent the American kissing cousins of the lizard Oz into a frenzy ...

No need to revert to the Chairman's nonsense about there being no climate science denialists in the house, though the pond would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when the Chairman gave his deposition ...

Meanwhile, back at the WSJ the pond was determined to crank up the level of its paywall affected Murdochian quota, and so turned to a lesser form of Mead ...

There was a particularly rich form of irony available to the pond thanks to this pompous ass blathering on about the 'leets of Davos ... it was exactly the same use of the word 'leet as had been offered up by that one time teen Greta in Thunberg says Davos elite 'fuelling destruction of planet'.

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg slammed business and political leaders attending the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday, saying it was "absurd" to listen to them while they fuelled "the destruction of the planet".

Two days after police briefly detained her at a protest against a coal mine in Germany, Thunberg and other young campaigners took part in a debate on the sidelines of the summit of global investors, CEOs and political leaders in the Swiss Alps.

"We are right now in Davos where (there are) basically the people who are mostly fuelling the destruction of the planet," the 20-year-old said, explaining that the world should not rely on them "for solving our problems".

She added that it was "absurd... we seem to be listening to them rather than the people who are actually affected by the climate crisis".

"Without massive public pressure from the outside, these people are going to go as far as they possibly can... They will continue to throw people under the bus for their own gain," she said.

Well yes, and had this useless fermented Mead gone full greenie, had the Murdochians sided with Greta? 

Of course not ... it was the sort of verbiage a local reptile of the dog botherer kind could have hacked out in an hour ... what with the usual easy, if relentless, use of clichés of the "green virtue-signalling" kind ... 

The pond particularly liked the notion of blaming it all on the Germans - after all, could any reptile be expected to remember the Marshall Plan? 

But the pond couldn't be expected to dilly dally, it had to get through the final gobbet so it could indulge in a personal pleasure ...

Oh yes, they're still keen to fuck the planet, no doubt about it, an eerie sense of déjà vu, a bit like finally realising that Stanley had put George in The Shining and it had taken the pond this long to realise it ... just as the pond had finally realised that the lizards of Oz were part of a horde of Murdochians determined to assault the planet, and not just like the playing cards that gave Alice such a hard time ...

And so to the pond's personal pleasure. Having done its Murdochian quota, the pond could turn to a slightly mouldy at the edges Speccie mob outing ...

Why this particular outing? Well the pond did love the notion that Britain had unilaterally abolished slavery in the early 19th century ... and that was all she wrote.

The pond knew that there'd be a wiki with a few words to say about slavery in Australia ... to the present day ...

Slavery in Australia has existed in various forms from colonisation in 1788 to the present day. European settlement relied heavily on convicts, sent to Australia as punishment for crimes and forced into labour and often leased to private individuals. Many Aboriginal Australians were also forced into various forms of slavery and unfree labour from colonisation. Some Indigenous Australians performed unpaid labour until the 1970s.

Pacific Islanders were kidnapped or coerced to come to Australia and work, in a practice known as blackbirding. Labourers were also imported from India and China, and employed in various degrees of unfree labour. Legal protections varied and were sometimes not enforced, particularly with workers who were effectively forced to work for their employers and would often go unpaid.

Never mind the World Cup and the treatment of labour in that shameful exercise and all the rest of it, the pond was also reminded of the liar from the Shire in The Conversation...

Prime Minister Scott Morrison asserted in a radio interview that “there was no slavery in Australia”.

This is a common misunderstanding which often obscures our nation’s history of exploitation of First Nations people and Pacific Islanders.

Morrison followed up with “I’ve always said we’ve got to be honest about our history”. Unfortunately, his statement is at odds with the historical record.

This history was widely and publicly documented, among other sources, in the 2006 Australian Senate report Unfinished Business: Indigenous Stolen Wages.

What is slavery?

Australia was not a “slave state” like the American South. However, slavery is a broader concept. As Article 1 of the United Nations Slavery Convention says:

Slavery is the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.

These powers might include non-payment of wages, physical or sexual abuse, controls over freedom of movement, or selling a person like a piece of property. In the words of slavery historian Orlando Patterson, slavery is a form of “social death”.

And so on, and on a more practical level, the pond was reminded of this criminal case, though there are many more examples in Australian brothels, designed to remove the need for Gorgeous George types to travel to the Philippines to get their fix ...

The pond became so distracted it forgot that it should finish with Kurti, albeit in a more curt way ...

Dare the pond mention the Vestey Brothers and the Wave Hill Walk-Off?

Probably best not, probably just time for an infallible Pope ...

Such a sad figure really, not that the reptiles would care, and so to a munching and a crunching of the final gobbet ...

The pond supposes that the out clause in that sentence is "any modern contemporary society", which absolved the pond of any sense of guilt about purchasing shoes and clothing flung together by 12 year olds in some factory somewhere ... and anyone who watched the World Cup could at last attain absolution for their sins ...

And so to acknowledge the source ...

Peter Kurti is Director of the Culture, Prosperity & Civil Society program at the Centre for Independent Studies, and Adjunct Associate Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame

For those who came down in the last shower, that's a tyke university, and may the long absent lord offer meaningful help to its students ...

And now as Davos has been mentioned and the WSJ is at one with Greta, time to finish off with an immortal Rowe, another tradition the pond would find hard to give up ...

And as a footnote, for those who doubted the fat owl of the remove would have groaned "Oh, crikey", he did it in Billy Bunter's Postal Order, a pdf on hand here ... and a yarooh, yoo-whooooop yow-own-ow-ow-woooop to all ...