Week after week, the pond yearns to return to English sport of the Marina Hyde kind. Who wouldn't want to jump fences of the For a prime minister who phoned it in, Boris Johnson is having a lot of trouble handing over one mobile kind? And never mind little England, the pond can't keep up with required US reading, such as Trump’s Lawyers Can’t Find Classified Doc Mentioned in Damning Tape.
But the pond promises it will all come together in a climactic punchline or cosmic joke at the very end, and meanwhile, for some reason, the pond couldn't help but think of prattling Polonius when it read the opening line in the latest grundling, The ABC at its worst is vastly better than its competitors. Time to defend it without apology (paywall).
The lede ran Management need to stop the racial guilt trip and state the obvious: public broadcasting strives to represent Australia, while the commercial networks manufacture Anglo whiteness.
The opening line, almost worthy of Bob Ellis, ran ...
Remember the IPA? It’s still kinda going, even though it’s lost its direct line to government, and its megaphone, The Australian, is a ruin, gutted by cuts. Now Tim Wilson et al are in some weird crypto unit at RMIT (public) university, and bearded Senator James Paterson looks like the aromatherapist your divorced mother married.
There were a few other lines the pond liked ...
...I mean there’s something surreal in having a week-long harangue of the ABC for racism, in a mediascape that includes Channel Nine, Channel Seven and Sky As Dark AF. The latter has derisory ratings — Sharri Markson will be going ’round to individual living rooms to do her show in six months’ time — but the former are big beasts. They remain, as they have always been, white, Anglo, and racist, not least by who and what they omit.
Channel Seven, the runt of the commercial litter (Ten is youf; Nine is king) has always been casual about straying into a white Anglo chauvinism/racism; a “race-baiting horror factory” as Nadine von Cohen described it.
Watching Channel Nine, part of the conglomerate Faruqi has a gig at, is like watching TV in a world where the Germans won WWII. Married At First Sight? Despite a few recent additions, it looks like a blondes breeding camp...
Not that the pond has anything against blondes, but it seemed like good, solid prep for the pond's weekly encounter with the ABC-bashing indulged in routinely by Polonius, with a short cut on his keyboard always ready to moan about the absence of conservatives of the Polonial kind (why didn't they give him his own show? If the likes of the swishing Switzer can get, and then amazingly keep one, where's the fairness? Where's the kindness?)
And then to the pond's horror came this ...
No ABC bashing? Just a re-run of a 1950s Ming the Merciless trade union scare? Had the pond's reading of the entire grundling been pointless (and he did wander off into byways and still managed to sound like a prize loon in places in the grundling way).
So it seems, because this week Polonius was all fired up about the wets and lovers of wets, and in particular the deplorably wet Bid ...
Talk about taking a firm stand and delivering a firm denunciation and making an astonishing prediction ...
"This may, or may not, be the case."
To be sure, or perhaps, to be sure not to be sure ... and then the reptiles snuck in a snap of Bid looking terribly glum - perhaps she knew that Polonius was determined to tan her hide ...
It was such a glum snap the pond couldn't find the heart to shrink it, and then it was off to Polonius for a final withering gobbet, and thus far only one feeble mention of the ABC, and then within a panoply of mortal enemies, including the Graudian and the Nine papers and the Saturday paper ... as if inviting the pond to
provide a link to the rag and offer up yesterday's Kudelka ...
Yes, it was Bid and the Nine rags that had taken the heat away from the cardigan wearers....
That's it?
"... it's unwise to make predictions about such matters"?!
What's the point of having a pontificating pundit if he's lost his powers of prediction, and even worse, entirely forgot to mention that there's not a single conservative within the ABC?
At this point the pond began to hunger for some genuine old-fashioned Catholic bleating, and thought it could slip in the Angelic one, still with her Calvary cross to bear ...
So it doesn't smell to high heaven of theology? And what's the theology that's in play here? Well the pond isn't the first to note that the Catholic church loves its real estate. Go to any country town and you'll find the Catholic church has staked out some grand real estate, often high ground and with great views.
Bathurst offers a particularly splendid example - not just the cathedral, but the size of the land grab and the schools - and along with that theological positioning, the Catholic church has been adept at getting its paws on government money. The church managed to get along with Mussolini for a considerable time, and in Australia, schools, hospitals and charities have provided excellent ways to subsidise church funding. And once you've got something to hand, why give it up?
Go figure? There's not much to figure, but the pond loves the bleating and so hung around for the second bleating reason, as paranoia runs rampant...
Um, might not the Vatican sell off a few of the treasures the pond noted while touring the Vatican museum?
...Of course, these are small numbers compared to the overall size of the Vatican’s financial empire. In 2004, the AP estimated that the Holy See’s real estate, excluding St. Peter’s Basilica and the Sistine Chapel, was worth nearly a billion dollars. Then there is the untold quantity of priceless artwork, including world-famous works by Michelangelo and Raphael. The Vatican doesn’t even try to apply a fair-market value to its art collection — the price used to be listed on the church’s books as 1 lira — but it’s safe to say that if sold, even a fraction of the works could likely fetch billions more.
The new pope, whoever he may be, could solve all of the Vatican’s cash-flow problems for years by unlocking some of that value. But since the Vatican frowns on the idea of selling its art (“They belong to humanity,” a Vatican budget official told Fortune of the artworks in 1987), it’s highly unlikely he would ever choose to do so.
Of course, of course, and not just to humanity but to the Vatican's tourist trade, with the pond being just one of millions of suckers ...
And so to the bonus, and here the pond was torn. Sure the pond had red carded Dame Slap yesterday, but the alternative was nattering "Ned" and he was exceptionally tedious.
The pond put a cautious toe in the water with Dame Slap ...
It was befuddling for the pond.
It goes without saying that the pond has no time for the likes of PwC, but the pond will say it, and the pond will also say that the notion that the pond has no time for News Corp is a truism.
But here's the perplexing thing, and it's always confused the pond. Berating virtue signallers always seems to imply that there's something wrong with virtue. Wasn't Christ himself, when not being a trans shape shifter, from god to person and back again, a virtue signaller of the first water? Wasn't he always blathering on about virtue?
The trick, it seems, is to sound righteous about the misdeeds of others. Thus we might say of News Corp that it behaves like a scoundrel behind open doors, and refuses to herald any virtue publicly ....
You only have to observe Dame Slap, carrying on like a pork chop about the voice and the Lehrmann matter on an almost daily basis to see how this kind of virtue works ...
The pond found discussing the concept tiresome and wearisome ...
Didn't 2 Peter 1 say ...
And beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge;
And to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness;
And to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity.
So what's wrong with virtue? At least if you happen to purport to celebrate the lizard Oz celebrating white Xian nationalism ...
Well you won't find much kindness or charity in Dame Slap, just sanctimonious righteousness, while working for News Corp - of all the demonic corporations on earth, surely among the worst ... and so the pond cut out all the rest of the Slappian bitchiness, and went to the end ... and as always there was projection and a singular failing ...
And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.
It's a pretty big mote, splendidly ignored ...
So it goes, and so Dame Slap blithely remains unaware of the stench that surrounds her, from Sky after dark through Faux Noise to the lizard Oz itself ... but as ever she remains sanctimonious to the end.
And with Dame Slap's rant cut short, there was nothing for it but to go on that epic Sunday Everest climb with nattering "Ned" ...or perhaps just stay in bed ...
Right from the get go, the pond should say that it has no dog in this fight, and couldn't care less. If Low stays or goes, there'll be another to take his place, and likely of a similar kind, while the rest of us are tossed like corks on the economic ocean, as we beat against the tide.
The only reason the pond is going to hang around is for the cosmic coming together at the end ...
The pond also supposes there are some incidental pleasures, such as blather about the media indulging in a cult of demonisation and thereby debasing our public and political life, without the foggiest sign that "Ned" was describing the News Corp business model.
Demonisation is about all they've got ...
"Ned" is, of course, intent on using the Lowe stick to give Labor a sound thrashing ... you might almost think he was intent on demonising them ...
There also always comes a point where "Ned" runs out of things to say, but insists on his right to keep saying stuff, and so he turns to others to supply the padding.
This time it's Ross Garnaut, hauled in to help with "Ned's" word dump ...
Ah, that'd be the demonising of the unions, debasing reptile journalistic life on a daily basis. How many reptiles belong to the MEAA?
Never mind, we're building to that punchline promised so long ago at the start by the pond ... but first "Ned" has to rip off another scribbler to ensure that his tome takes on a stentorian quality ...
Say what? At the end of all that, "Ned" arrives at "The examples are the United States culminating in the Trump presidency and in Britain culminating in Brexit", and somehow "Ned" thinks that this might be a problem?
And so "Ned" manages to bring the pond back to a grand unifying theory of everything, featuring the mango Mussolini and Brexit, and yet without any memory of the role that News Corp played in those debacles? Not a whit, not a jot, not even an acid flashback to the days the reptiles cheered on the orange one and Boris ...
It would be too tedious to rehash all that ... and remind "Ned" that he's part of the problem, and certainly not anywhere in cooee of being part of the solution ...
Instead the pond will just close out with a vaguely relevant
immortal Rowe ...
But to celebrate, the pond feels like adding a mango Mussolini cartoon...
And why not celebrate the best of Brexiting Boris, with more at the Graudian
here ...
To ask a couple of obvious questions of Ned - how is productivity measured at News Corp? And has productivity increased in recent years?
ReplyDeleteI suppose, for example, that if you measured Ned’s productivity in terms of sheer wordage you’d have to say that it’s increases, given that his sermons have grown increasingly lengthy - and even more tedious, if such a thing is possible. But surely volume alone can’t define productivity. Has Ned’s increased output achieved more in terms of outcomes? Difficult to measure, but does anyone honestly think that his blather has any discernible impact in those sectors that he presumably seeks to influence? The same could be said for many other Reptiles; what real productivity improvements have been delivered by Dame Slap, the Angelic one or, gawd help us, Polonius? For all his endless jabberings, has the Bromancer influenced Australia’s foreign affairs or defence policies in the slightest, or provided his wretched readers with the slightest insight or understanding?
Yes, News Corp has maintained output while managing to cut costs - but how? Eliminating sub-editors, decimating the graphics department, duplicating content across multiple mastheads, and engaging contributors who presumably wrote for peanuts but are more suited to ranting at Speakers’ Corner (should such a thing still exist) or shoving poorly-printed manifestos at passers-by in the street. The ramshackle edifice of the company may still be holding up, but surely a key factor in productivity must be sales and subscriptions and advertising revenue - and how are they all going?
Most importantly of all - has the productivity of News Corp as a whole increased the influence of the Chairman?
Apparently there is still a Speakers’ Corner in the Domain in Sydney, a couple in Brisbane and a Sunday arvo 'corner' outside the State Library of Victoria.
Deletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speakers%27_Corner#Other_countries
I did go occasionally to the old Melbourne 'corner' when it was still at Birrarung Marr, but not for quite a few decades now.
So Shannahanna prefers the 'black-right' ideology of the Catholic hierarchy to the "notoriously green-left ACT Labor government." Well I guess so would many if they were a Catholic mum with 9 kids of whom she's disowned one because of his sexuality.
ReplyDeleteI’m in the ACT. Perhaps it’s just the circles in which I move, but I’ve yet to meet anyone who is up in arms about the Government takeover of Calvary.
DeleteIt's just because the ACT is full of atheists, Anony, so nobody much - other than the likes of Shannahanna - is feeling defensively protective towards Catholics. Especially towards Catholics who, like her, think they are empowered to impose their belief-set on everybody.
DeleteJust maybe we would have increased productivity if the Libs had not stuffed up the NBN system just to suit murdoch.
ReplyDeleteNo 'maybe' there Anonymous - I am aware of a couple of small businesses that have folded, or trimmed their business, in our nearest town of about 6000 people. They were in the publishing business, hoping to expand nationally, but what is locally labelled as 'NBN' just is not up to that. I see one of those people socially, from time to time, and he quotes to me sometime minister Pyne's remark that the Coalition broadband had enough capacity for people to unload a movie at night, so what more did they want? Yep - them coalition folks really understand business.
DeleteAnd if the game really is about producing more stuff - which is what productivity commissions measure - then a simple tweak to the copious incentives that were supposed to encourage small investors to build houses for the rental market would achieve a lot. Just make it a condition that the incentives are activated only for new build homes of all kinds. Then sit back and wait for the squawks from the ever-growing investment advisor lobbies, because such 'advisors' are often commissioned to find a property for newly-flush clients within a month or so of tax time.
Rule 1, Chad: never believe a Liberal, especially one who hasn't got a clue as to what he's talking about.
DeleteApropos house-building there's basically two paths: build one for yourself or build at least one to rent. Now for one of those, there's this thing called 'negative gearing' which helps the 'build to rent' crowd. But why can't that be extended to the 'build to live in' folks: just calculate what the build to rent costs and returns would have been, and calculate the same 'gearing' tax reduction for both ?
And then there's 'stamp duty' which is added to the initial cost of buying so people are saying 'replace it with a land tax' which nobody is real keen about having to pay for the rest of their lives. So, why not just delay collecting the stamp duty: hold it back and let it cut in 'progressively' after, say, year two. Which would make it just a kind of deferred, terminating land tax.
Ok, ok, I'll crawl back into my hole now.
GB - I encountered the works of Henry George in my undergraduate years, when I found a copy of his 'Science of Political Economy' in a notable 'Rare Book Store' in Brisbane. Looking at the introduction, I noted that he had decided to write it after a visit to Australia, and that copy was published by the Henry George Foundation of Australia. A good quality book, which I still have.
DeleteEssentially, I always found the principle of his land tax much more attractive than stamp duty, and it made more sense to me than the growing emphasis then on income tax to fund the national government. I was unwise enough to mention it to friends I had made who were majoring in economics (well, more likely 'commerce') who gave the then standard dismissals of George's ideas. Given that the then Professor of Economics at UofQ still promoted the gold standard - I just gave up mentioning any of it to those who claimed to be studying commerce or economics.
In our time in Adelaide, we became acquainted with the local 'Henry George Society', which fielded a candidate for the senate in every federal election, up to about year 2000.
So many people I've never heard of, Chad. So glad you're here to bring them out of obscurity. But at least I can honestly claim that I've never formally studied either economics or commerce. Just read a few things written by some of those who have. Galbraith pere et fils, Quiggin, Dillow and even Gittins now and then.
DeleteBut I think that a 'land tax' is just a little bit like GST: very hard to introduce, virtually impossible to increase, impossible to remove. So, by all means favour an eternal land tax - well, at least as long as the land is 'owned' and who will pay the tax for all the land 'owned' by First Nation folks and does it apply to very large country 'stations' - and I'll go for a deferred, fixed maximum 'land tax' (aka a delayed stamp duty) and together we'll form a neutral duprass. I'll never vote in favour of increasing the GST either.
㋡
GB - essentially Henry George proposed that the major source of funding for a nation came from resource rent taxes. At the time he wrote, most of that was realised from land in the USA, but he would have approved the way Norway has harvested national income from its hydrocarbons. In the USA several major universities were funded by companies and individuals who were becoming remarkably wealthy from land grants, especially those given as incentives to build railroads. It was well understood that the professors of the new study of political economy ('economics' was still a bit too new) would instruct their students that 'Georgist' taxes would be the utter ruin of the great land of the free, home of the brave. That became a central tenet of conventional economic wisdom, for at least the next hundred years. The experience of Norway and Qatar is making that a tad more difficult to defend, but we are certainly seeing it in the blatherings of Australian gas producers right now.
DeleteI'll have to give that some thought, though I'm still puzzled as to where the 'landowners' get the money to pay the 'resource tax'from. That sounds just vaguely like the money is simply 'brought into existence' somehow, somewhere along the line.
DeleteWhich is the way we know things really do work: money is always being "brought into existence" somewhere along the line. So where do those who buy the resources sold by Norway and Qatar get the money to do so ?
While this week’s contribution by Polonius does appear a little disappointing - so little ABC bashing! - it does contain at least one gem of Polonial pedantry, in his comments on the WA Premiership -
ReplyDelete“There were three Labor frontbenchers considered to be in the running to become Premier. They were, in alphabetical order…”
Who else would go into such detail about a recent development that is already a matter of public record. Who else would actually list the contenders in alphabetical order? It takes a real gift to inject that degree of tedium into commentary.
Don’t ever change, Gezza - not that you’re capable of doing so.
It's just because of his very selective and loyal readership, Anony: he knows his faithful readers only read him, so he has to explain everything down to the finest details.
DeleteHi Dorothy,
ReplyDeleteThis snippet from The Saturday Paper caught the eye;
“Royalties advance from HarperCollins Christian Publishing.”
Scott Morrison
The former prime minister updates his register of interests, revealing he has signed a book deal. The contract is with Rupert Murdoch’s Christian publishing division, a literal partnership between God and the devil.
Amazing! The Liar from the Shire has literary aspirations and Murdoch has a Christian publishing division, yet more evidence that there is no supreme being that would deliver Devine retribution.
Got it in one, DW.
DeleteGRundle: "Remember the IPA? It’s still kinda going, even though it’s lost its direct line to government, and its megaphone, The Australian, is a ruin, gutted by cuts." No further comment at this time, but has anybody mentioned non-indigenous "voices" at all ?
ReplyDeleteNoodles Neddles: "...the increased living standards pledge on which Labor won the election hinges upon productivity gains that are not being delivered." Oh no it didn't: Labor won the election by the public considering that the anti-Labor leader was that great Christian believer, Scott Morrison. So some Libs lost their seats to "Teals" and to those awful "greens" and Labor picked up just enough seats to form a majority government: 77 seats out of 151. Labor won 8, the Libs lost 17, the Greens won 3 and 'Others' ended up with 7.
So let's just be clear about this: Labor won less than one-half of the seats lost by Lib-Nats so Labor did not "win" the election on anything, the Libs simply lost the election. But it's a common reptile ploy: pick something you can claim Labor won on, then hit them for failing to deliver it. So, Labor ended up in a very small majority largely because some people were sick and tired of that lying scoundrel ScoMo.
But when a reptile exclaims: "The lift in annual inflation in April to 6.8 per cent from 6.3 per cent the month before is not encouraging." Well yes it is, it might have gone from 6.3 per cent to 9.8 per cent and our reptile wouldn't have had a clue why or any idea what to do about it. So, sufficient unto the day, let the reptiles squirm away in their burrows for a while.
Oh but just one quicky finale: "...wage rises to be sustained need to be buttressed by rising productivity, otherwise they slip into inflation." Yeah, right, so actually, Neddles, sustained wage rises are caused by continuing inflation - 2 to 3 per cent a year if we listen to our Reserve Bank man. That is why both wages and living costs keep rising every year without any noticeable change in 'productivity'. Even if there's a very big increase in productivity it doesn't give rise to sustained wage rises, inflation does.
Typical reptile though: always reverse the cause-and-effect relation so as to be able to blame the wrong people.
Ooh, something for the Bromancer to contemplate once he finishes being a political rent boy:
ReplyDeleteUS warships cost at least twice as much as they should
https://jabberwocking.com/us-warships-cost-at-least-twice-as-much-as-they-should/
Does that apply to nuclear powered submarines then ? Should we really only be paying about half of that $368billion that we agreed to ?
And talking about the Bromancer:
ReplyDeletePoland: hundreds of thousands march against rightwing populist government
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/04/poland-hundreds-of-thousands-march-against-rightwing-populist-government
But no problem really, Duda will stamp that out very quickly because he's a real democrat who doesn't believe in identity politics.
"...I mean there’s something surreal in having a week-long harangue of the ABC for racism, in a mediascape that includes Channel Nine, Channel Seven and Sky As Dark AF. The latter has derisory ratings — Sharri Markson will be going ’round to individual living rooms to do her show in six months’ time — but the former are big beasts. They remain, as they have always been, white, Anglo, and racist, not least by who and what they omit."
ReplyDeleteAh, Grundle - confusing the gammatical shit out of one, two and more. Who he's talking about is anyone's guess.
Not to mention poor old Polonius - in his alphabet, "Cook, Sanderson, Saffioti" are in alphabetical order. Someone should retire the old fart.
Delete