Imagine a world without images or reptiles or images of reptiles ... it isn't hard to do ...

The pond had thought of starting day three of the reptile hunger games with a whimsical Xmas story, in the spirit of the season, but with the reptile competition hotting up, and poetry about the planet cooking all the go, it seemed better to cut to the chase. 

Maybe tomorrow, a notoriously slow and petulant day in the lizard Oz ...

It took the pond a noble effort to ignore obvious distractions, such as the good Hydeing on offer in It's the Rishi Sunak twilight zone: a Brexit battle reenactment that never ends ...

And some of the comedy on offer was simply too broad ... (paywall)

Imagine if Blogger had decided not to run images, but the pond was still left with words to spend freely ...

In court Tuesday, the second day of a jury trial to determine how many millions Giuliani will owe Freeman and Moss in damages, Howell warned Giuliani that he risks bringing further liability upon himself if he repeats those same lies when he testifies.
Before Moss gave heart-wrenching testimony about her personal struggles since Giuliani targeted her, like fearing she’d be attacked and left “dying in the street” as she walked to work, Howell pressed Sibley for answers regarding Giuliani’s behavior.
“Was Mr. Giuliani just playing for the cameras?” Howell asked Giuliani’s attorney, Joe Sibley, at the start of the second day of the trial.
Sibley conceded that Giuliani’s comments were unfortunate, adding that he “can’t control everything he does,” especially outside the courtroom. Later Tuesday, Sibley said in court, “My client, as you saw last night, likes to talk a lot unfortunately.”
In his opening statements Monday, Sibley insisted that Giuliani was aware he’d done wrong and that the poll workers were “harmed,” but he insisted their harassment, which included death threats and protesters showing up at their front doors, wasn’t the exclusive fault of Giuliani.
“They didn’t deserve what happened to them,” he said Monday. “But what happened to them happened because of a controversy involving a lot of people.”
Rudy Giuliani, wearing glasses and a suit, looks forward as he leaves a federal courthouse.
Sibley’s opening statement was partially contradicted by Giuliani hours later, however, something the defense attorney appeared displeased over.
“I’m not sure how it’s reconcilable,” Sibley acknowledged, referencing Giuliani’s tirade.
Sibley suggested the 79-year-old’s advanced age may play a factor in him acting unhinged. In addition to his post-court outburst, reports revealed that Giuliani remained seated at one point Monday when the courtroom deputy asked everyone to rise for the judge ahead of a break.
“This has taken a bit of a toll on him. He’s almost 80 years old,” Sibley said, adding, “There are health concerns for Mr. Giuliani.”
Howell shot back that she hadn’t seen evidence that Giuliani was struggling to pay attention in court, dismissing that his age was making him act irrationally. She did suggest that she fears Giuliani may act out when asked follow the court’s instructions, particularly when he testifies later this week.

Imagine if the pond's usual difficulties with inanities and reptiles were compounded by Blogger's sudden and bizarre refusal to upload images of any kind in any form, with the pond using a couple of different browsers to check that it was a systemic error ... and performing a standard technical fix which often works well ... re-booting the machine.

Alas, nada, nihil, nothing ...

Over the years the pond has used images as a reliable form of distraction, not to mention the cartoons ... so perforce this day's games would have to be different, old school, hard yards, tough, not a visual distraction n sight ... 

Likely this wasn't going to be fixed any time soon, and was - as was everything wrong with Blogger, so many things, so little time - beyond the pond's control ...

So please imagine that the pond has shown a copy of the digital edition. ..

Imagine that at one point Dame Slap was top of the world, in the extremely far right perch, right next to a shocking image of a cricketer wearing shoes with the words "Freedom is a human right" and "All lives are equal" ...

Imagine that shock to the reptile system, imagine the faux indignation ... fancy anyone asserting freedom as a human right.

Imagine then - after digesting how deeply offensive that was - that "Ned" displaced Dame Slap in her top of the digital page far right perch ...

Then imagine that the pond went down below the fold to discover the bromancer amongst the contenders, as usual running deep, running noisy ...

Three top contenders, and no images, just naked words ...

The pond immediately ruled out the bro's Symbolism is welcome, but there are many ways AUKUS subs pact can founder for idle, unseemly, and unnecessary repetition ... but if there were no caps, how could this be a punishment?

The US legislation to notionally enable Australia to buy a Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarine in a decade’s time is a good first step, but like everything in AUKUS the payday is far, far ­beyond the horizon, there are countless “out clauses”, making the commitment at the moment purely symbolic.
It’s good symbolism, of course. The congress on a bipartisan basis is endorsing, in principle, the decision to provide nuclear-powered submarines to Australia.
But the out clauses are prodigious.
First, Australia has to have paid $US3bn towards building up the US submarine industry. That’s entirely separate from the purchase price of the submarine itself.
Second, the US president at the time, and we’re talking probably three presidential administrations into the future, has to be able to reassure congress that providing the subs to Australia won’t “degrade US undersea capabilities”.
That’s likely to be a very big ask. The US is barely producing 1½ nuclear submarines a year. A Virginia takes seven years to build. The US is unable to ramp up production numbers rapidly. The Biden administration has not significantly increased defence spending nor ramped up in a big way US defence industrial capacity. Even urgent defence expenditure, such as military aid for Israel or Ukraine, cannot pass the congress at the moment.
And then the legislation also requires that the transfer of the sub be “consistent with US foreign policy and national security interests”. That’s a polite way of congress saying if you get our sub you have to be willing to fight over ­Taiwan, if it comes to that.
Peter Dutton was analytically correct when he used to say in government that it’s inconceivable that the US could be fighting for a Pacific democracy and Australia stand on the sidelines. If we did that, it would certainly mean the end of the US alliance for us forever, with all the disastrous consequences that implies.

Imagine at this point that the reptiles themselves couldn't stand it and offered visual relief, to go with the already proffered relief of a snap of a bit of kit, a sub, designed to mollify the bro ...

US President Joe Biden and Anthony Albanese in San Diego in March. Picture: Getty Images

Imagine if the pond suddenly had the chance to imitate a Tamworth dog, return to its vomit, and show off the kit ...

Imagine that by this late stage this was the only way the pond could work out a way to interrupt the bro with a visual...

But government ministers shouldn’t say that publicly. No Australian government can ever offer another nation the right in-principle to declare war on our behalf. This could well be a very big sticking point near to the time of any deal actually proceeding.
The US will certainly be short of nuclear-powered subs. The Chinese will have had a further decade of breakneck military devel­op­ment and build-up, including their own new, stealthy subs.
Washington providing Australia a nuclear sub means taking one out of their own order of battle. In the long run, perhaps some time in the dying years of the 21st century, Australia may one day be building nuclear subs in Adelaide, though it seems hellishly unlikely. If that day ever comes, Australia will be adding to the military production capability of the alliance. Until then, any nuclear sub America sells Australia reduces the US capability vis-a-vis China.
The US legislation specifically requires that the US be building enough subs of its own by then. It also requires that Australia actually be able to host and operate ­nuclear submarines. There is nothing in our performance so far at all which would give us confidence on that score.
The biggest problem with the AUKUS deal is that the Albanese government has done absolutely nothing to produce any significant new military strike capability or any deterrence outside the notional acquisition of nuclear subs beginning, in the unlikely event that everything goes to plan, in 10 years time.
In a recent piece summarising his government’s achievements, Anthony Albanese had the decency and common sense not to mention defence at all, because apart from symbolic diplomacy around AUKUS, absolutely nothing has happened at the Australian end.
For American strategic hard heads, what you do is always vastly more important than what you say. And right now we’re doing nothing at all.

Imagine the bro not ending with his usual "this is nuts" ...

Then there was Dame Slap ...

Imagine the sublime projection, the incredible cheek in a MAGA cap donning, climate science denying ponce proclaiming From halls of learning to an intellectual wasteland ... 

Imagine Dame Slap failing to realise what an intellectual wasteland a MAGA cap wearer must be ...

Imagine that the pond considered Dame Slap as a serious contender ... yes, it takes some imagining ...

Instead of Oxford University Press language experts choosing an annual (and often ridiculous) word of the year, they could do something that might help stem intellectual darkness. The editorial staff at OUP should draw up a shortlist each year of the worst, most distorted words and phrases that are enemies of clear thinking. The worst of the worst could be named the Brave New World Word or Phrase of the Year.

I have a list to get us started. First is “context” – a word used many times by the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts Institute of Technology when they were asked a simple question last week during a US congressional hearing into the rise of anti-Semitism on US campuses.

Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik asked Harvard president Claudine Gay, Penn’s Liz Magill and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth whether advocating for the genocide of Jews violated their universities’ code of conduct regarding bullying and harassment.

‘Depraved inability’ of US colleges to condemn anti-Semitism having ‘massive consequences’

None among the three intellectual thought leaders said yes. Instead, they waffled about it being nuanced and context-driven, as if they are stuck in an ivory tower minus the Socratic dialogue.

There is nothing nuanced about Jewish students being harassed and intimidated on campus by pro-Palestinian protesters chanting the chosen slogans of Hamas terrorists. What context makes this legitimate?

Context is an entirely sensible word when used properly to explain complex issues. During three minutes of excruciating testimony last Wednesday, since viewed by millions of people, these well-educated university leaders from some of the most esteemed universities in the US used “context” to let pro-Palestinian protesters off the hook for knowingly or unknowingly advocating on campus for the genocide of Jews.

Here you should imagine that the pond went off to Yahoo News for an NY Times story, ‘We Are All Sick’: Infectious Diseases Spread Across Gaza...

Imagine that the pond did one of its notorious cut and paste routines ...

Infectious diseases are ravaging the population of the Gaza Strip, health officials and aid organizations said Monday, citing cold, wet weather; overcrowding in shelters; scarce food; dirty water; and little medicine.

Adding to the crisis in the enclave after more than two months of war, those who become ill have extremely limited treatment options, as hospitals have been overwhelmed with patients injured in airstrikes.

“We are all sick,” said Samah al-Farra, a 46-year-old mother of 10 struggling to care for her family in a camp housing displaced Palestinians in Rafah, in southern Gaza. “All of my kids have a high fever and a stomach virus.”

While the collapse of Gaza’s health system has made it challenging to track exact numbers, the World Health Organization has reported at least 369,000 cases of infectious diseases since the war began, using data collected from the Gaza Health Ministry and UNRWA, the U.N. agency that cares for Palestinians — a staggering increase from before the war.

And even the WHO’s extraordinarily high number fails to capture the scale of the crisis: Shannon Barkley, the health systems team lead at the World Health Organization’s offices in Gaza and the West Bank, said it does not include cases in northern Gaza, where the war has destroyed many buildings and what remains of the health system is overwhelmed.

The most common diseases raging through Gaza are respiratory infections, Barkley said, including colds and pneumonia. Even normally mild illnesses can pose grave risks to Palestinians, especially children, older adults and the immunocompromised, given the dire living conditions, she said.

Al-Farra, speaking by phone, said her family had been sleeping on the ground since they fled Khan Younis, a city just to the north of Rafah, a week ago. For the last three days, al-Farra said, she and her children have had high fevers and suffered from persistent diarrhea and vomiting.

Like many others in the battered enclave, al-Farra said that she and her family had been drinking the same foul-smelling water that they used to wash themselves.

“When I wash my hands, I feel like they get dirtier, not cleaner,” she said.

Her youngest child, 6-year-old Hala, spent the majority of the last three days sleeping and was too weak to ask for food after weeks of going hungry, al-Farra said. “She used to beg for more food, but now she can’t even keep anything down,” she said. Her 9-year-old son, Mohammad, has been having seizures, likely from his fever, she added.

Imagine then that the pond cut back to the nauseatingly smug Dame Slap for yet another burst ...

Alas, free speech was not their north star. Instead, as The Wall Street Journal noted this week, Harvard was 248th out of 248, and Penn was 247th, in the annual college ranking by the free-speech Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

In September last year, during a mandatory online Title IX training session, Harvard students were told that not using a person’s preferred pronouns could violate the university’s sexual misconduct and harassment policies.

Racial microaggressions are policed on campus; academics are sacked for committing “progressive” speech crimes. But if you chant the genocidal slogans favoured by a terrorist group, it’s a matter of context.

It’s welcome news that Gay has walked back from her context drivel, and Magill was forced to resign. But when the first instinct of university elites is moral pusillanimity, why wouldn’t university students feel free to intimidate Jewish students?

To understand how we got into this mess, let’s move on to the next contender for worst word or phrase of 2023: “from the river to the sea”. Why on earth are university students running around campus chanting Hamas’s genocidal plan to claim the state of Israel “from the river to the sea”? Do the kids know what it means? They may not have learned about it at Harvard, Penn and MIT, but there is the internet.

The terrorists who murdered 1200 Israelis on October 7, raping and mutilating women, beheading babies, and kidnapping 240 others enshrined this genocidal slogan in their 2017 constitution: “Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.” The terrorist organisation doesn’t mention where seven million Jews and two million Arabs living between the Jordan River, bordering eastern Israel, and the Mediterranean Sea, to the west, should go.

Students are shouting this violent slogan on campus, disrupting classes and intimidating Jewish students because more than a decade ago liberal values lost out to a new political order on campus.

Liberalism is a progressive project that depends on a marketplace of ideas, on people listening, on genuine tolerance and treating people equally and civilly. Instead, we have become a marketplace of outrage where groups claiming to sit on the lower rung of the oppression ladder, along with their supporters, insist on different and higher rights to groups they imagine are higher up the oppression hierarchy.

The oppressed groups, with their special status, have succeeded in convincing university elites that words and ideas they disagree with amount to a form of violence.

Imagine that the pond could take only so much of this inane smugness before cutting back to that NY Times story ... a story reminding anyone but Dame Slap that there was a huge amount of collective punishment going down, and not just the mindless bombing of the country back to the stone age, and the random killings in the killing fields, but a determined collective persecution ...

The Israeli military announced on Monday that it was opening a second security checkpoint at the Kerem Shalom Crossing — on the border between Israel, Gaza and Egypt — to screen humanitarian aid arriving via Egypt, a move meant to allow more food, water, medical supplies and shelter equipment into Gaza. Aid organizations have said that the rate of aid coming into Gaza since the collapse of a temporary cease-fire earlier a week and a half ago has been far from enough.

Hospitals that are still considered to be functioning are focused on providing critical care for patients with trauma injuries from airstrikes, according to Marie-Aure Perreaut Revial, an emergency coordinator at Doctors Without Borders, who was speaking from Al-Aqsa Hospital in central Gaza. But many of those patients receive postoperative care in unsanitary conditions, resulting in severe infections, she said.

And the primary health care system in central Gaza has completely collapsed, she said, leaving those in need of basic medical care without treatment.

“There’s a very big focus on the wounded and the injured patients, but it’s the entirety of the health care system that is just being brought to the ground,” she said.

One Gaza resident, Ameera Malkash, 40, said that when she first took her pale and jaundiced son, Suliman, to a hospital in Khan Younis last month, it was overrun with casualties from airstrikes that day. They were not able to see a doctor.

They tried again the next day, she said by phone, and the doctor told them it was hepatitis A — a liver infection caused by a highly contagious virus that spreads easily through contaminated water. Suliman was supposed to quarantine, but there were no rooms left in the hospital, Malkash said, so they had little choice but to go back to a shelter crammed with thousands of other people.

Last week, the Palestinian Authority’s health minister, Mai Alkaila, said about 1,000 cases of hepatitis A had been recorded in the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian Authority’s health ministry is based in the West Bank and operates separately from the health ministry in Gaza.

Dr. Marwan al-Hamase, the director of Abu Yousef al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah, said on Sunday that his small facility was accommodating hundreds of displaced people, and that they were sleeping on floors where wounded people were also being treated. Those floors have not been cleaned in weeks, he said, because “we are unable to find cleaning products.”

Malnutrition has become “beyond control,” and anemia and dehydration cases among children have nearly tripled, al-Hamase said.

Imagine then that the pond reverted to Dame Slap for yet another bout of self-congratulatory smugness ....

The reverse is true for the so-called oppressor class: when Jewish students face real intimidation with genocidal chants, we’re told it’s just words.

Today, ideas are no longer contested. In these dark anti-intellectual times, people are.

For thousands of years, different groups have hated each other on the basis of race or religion or some other tribal identifier. We were meant to be better than our forebears, understanding that judging people according to their individual character, not by group membership, would better unify us. Yet, in 2023, group hatreds continue, though under the new name of identity politics.

As Andrew Sullivan wrote in 2018, we’re all on campus now, with this new oppression hierarchy seeping into our broader culture. Our streets are full of protesters chanting “from the river to the sea”. Hamas enjoys unwitting support from ill-informed Westerners, the latest a group of Australian artists whose collective letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza included Hamas’s genocidal jingle.

If you think it’s unkind to call them useful idiots, University of California, Berkeley political science professor Ron Hassner published the results of a small survey of students that found only 47 per cent of them could name the river and the sea. Some thought it was the Nile and the Euphrates, the Caribbean, the Dead Sea (which is a lake) and the Atlantic.

More than a quarter of the chant’s supporters claimed the Oslo peace agreements were never signed. Less than a quarter had heard of Yasser Arafat; 10 per cent thought he was an Israeli prime minister.

“There’s no shame in being ignorant, unless one is screaming for the extermination of millions,” wrote Hassner. Importantly, the survey of 250 students from across the US found that students switched from supporting “from the river to sea” to rejecting the motto when they learned some basic facts.

When it comes to genocide, facts should matter. Which brings me to another contender for bullshit word or phrase for 2023.

Imagine that talk of genocide sent the pond back to the NY Times story ...

Milena Murr, a spokesperson for the relief agency Mercy Corps, said that when her colleagues in Gaza fled their homes two months ago, they did not prepare for weather that has turned cold and rainy. Many did not bring blankets, jackets or warm clothes.

Displaced people taking refuge in U.N.-run shelters have been sharing bathrooms without running water. And fecal matter accumulating on the streets can contribute to the spread of disease and further contaminate water sources, Barkley, of the WHO, said.

Firas al-Darby, 17, who is at a U.N. school-turned-shelter in the south, said that he’d had a fungal infection all over his body for weeks. “Bacteria, filth, disease and epidemics are all over the school,” he said.

Hala al-Farra also had a skin rash, her mother said, as well as lice. Al-Farra added that she was considering cutting off Hala’s hair because she could not afford shampoo.

“I have no idea how I will help my kids,” al-Farra said. “I’m now going around knocking on people’s homes and begging for clean water.”

No need however to imagine the cold unempathetic response from the MAGA cap wearer. It's there in black and white ...

In her end of week mea culpa, the Harvard president told student newspaper The Harvard Crimson she was sorry for not conveying “my truth”.

My truth? What about the truth? Is Gay an Ivy League university president or an angsty teenage girl at a counselling session wanting to speak her truth? When a university leader describes a judgment about those who advocate genocide as her truth, she opens the door for others to claim they have a different truth. Which is exactly what is happening on university campuses right now.

Universities aren’t just coddling the minds of students. They are messing them up. When “my truth” is used to win an argument, why wouldn’t universities become breeding places for anti-Semitism?

The issue goes deeper still, instilling an aggressive form of anti-intellectualism. Students ill-equipped to distinguish between facts and feelings will rely on their subjective truth to make demands of university administrators, including protection from words and ideas that offend them. When someone speaks of their truth, they ring-fence it from debate.

Worst of all, the foundational virtues of a liberal democratic society are, more often than not, being turned on their head by people who dare to call themselves progressive.

My nomination then for the Brave New World Prize for most disfigured word or phrase for 2023 is “progressive”. Practitioners of illiberal identity politics have no claim to this word. Progress means improvement. It is one thing to critique the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza by suggesting a better way forward to stop terrorism. How many of the pro-Palestinian protesters, be they screaming students or letter-signing artists, are doing this? Most of them are taking the low road, echoing chants for the annihilation of Israel. That’s not progress.

But congrats all around to the prize-wining faux progressives.

Congrats to the reptile sociopaths. Another day, another round of collective punishment, mass displacement, and ethnic cleansing ...

Imagine that this point that the pond had become so disaffected by Blogger, the lizard Oz, reptiles, etc, that the pond ran a Wilcox cartoon about COP ...

Then imagine that the pond turned to nattering "Ned" and dubbed him winner for the day, and worthy of a caps treatment ... except this day no images were allowed on the pond, thanks to Blogger ... except now, what if they were?

What to do? Alas, what had already been done ... feature "Ned's" headline, usually done by screen cap, After the voice, disaffected voters are ready to shatter political convention.

But wait, what if Blogger had come good? Well at least a token gesture then ...

Imagine how forlorn the pond would have been if it couldn't have celebrated Captain Spud with an ECU taken from a recent immortal Rowe ...

Then came the usual cry, take it away Everest "Ned" ... bring on grim tales of doom, gloom and relentless foreboding, even if life wasn't quite so bad as being trapped in Gaza right now ...

We are all slaves to conventional wisdom. The risk in politics is that conventional wisdom is being applied to the fate of the Albanese government when the conventional is dying. The dominant theme in our politics today is fracture – the established order is under assault.

The old rules of politics are falling apart. The electorate is more temperamental, divided and volatile. The troubles of the Albanese government have two sources – its own mistakes and the fracturing of our political culture into subcultures.

Imagine the fun the pond could have had with the hot link in that opening grab... because it led to a groaning ...Corporate elites due a post-referendum reckoning on spending ..

One of the issues raised in the recent voice referendum campaign is the role of corporate donations. It’s clear a majority of the top 20 listed companies made donations.

The big four banks made substantial contributions, totalling more than $7m, and large donations were also given by Wesfarmers, Qantas, BHP and Rio Tinto. Interestingly, Rio Tinto has an agreed Code of Conduct preventing the board from making political donations but the contribution to the Yes campaign was interpreted differently. Explicit shareholder approval was not sought in these cases.

(It should be noted that donations to the No campaign from the owners of private companies are in a different category: the owners can do whatever they want, akin to private citizens.)

Wesfarmers chairman Michael Chaney had no doubts about the decision by the company to donate to the Yes campaign. “Occasionally, you hear someone say that companies have no right to give away shareholder money to community causes. But the board of a company is charged with deciding how expenditure is allocated.”

And in the groaning there was a link about the big four banks that led right back to "Ned" ...Dutton’s rift with big business over the Indigenous voice to parliament.

That's right, "Ned" referencing Dame Groan referencing "Ned" ... in a sublime navel-gazing circle ...

Liberal leader Peter Dutton’s attack on Australian corporates for lacking a “significant backbone” and failing to respect community views, and implying they are guilty of hypocritical behaviour, confirms the entrenched split over values between the Liberals and business.

The dispute over the Indigenous voice is vital in its own right. But it is also a template for changes in our political culture revealed at the 2022 election, with the alienation of the nation’s high-income professional and corporate classes from the Coalition parties.

Anybody who thought this was a passing phenomenon or just a response to Scott Morrison should be disabused by now. This fracture is deep and getting deeper. It is driven by rival principles and different visions for Australia.

While this is an immediate problem for the Liberal Party, given its loss of former safe seats to the teals, it will also have consequences for corporate Australia. The debate over the voice puts on display a startling insight – the extent of shared cultural values now held in common by the nation’s corporate, educational and institutional leaders, a function of progressive norms and the politicisation of most forms of behavio­ur.

So it goes, reptile referencing reptile, inside the giant reptile bubble, a veritable orgy of snakes devouring tails ...imagine that the pond might have been tempted to slip in a picture of bubble boy from that politically incorrect Seinfeld, or a hive mind, or of an actual ouroboros ...

Imagine instead that the pond had to turn back to the original "Ned" without any sign of visual relief in sight ...

The voice referendum reveals the erosion of our common purpose. The internal tension over the Israel-Hamas war is another prime exhibit. The central disorganising principle is the hostility between the public and elites (left or right) and the public’s distrust of institutional political power.

Interviewed by The Australian, the director of RedBridge polling group, Kosmos Samaras, refers to his agency’s analysis of the voice result and its core finding that the Yes vote lost in the middle and outer suburbs of our capital cities – moving beyond the 10km range from the centre – where 7.2 million adult Australians or 40 per cent of eligible voters live.

‘Big revolt’ expected from communities as renewable energy set to take over farmland

His message: “Lose these areas badly and it becomes impossible to win an election or referendum.” Samaras says: “This 40 per cent of the electorate has a very strong feeling that it is not represented in our politics. They feel that much of what happens in our political life has little relevance for them – whether it’s the Brittany Higgins court case or other issues that bubble from the media cycle, particularly from the left of politics.

“These people feel an absence of connection with many high-profile issues. The voice was a peak episode of that. They quickly realised the voice was being pushed by people engaged in the power networks in our community. The concept of power is critical here. And people rebelled against it. What we are starting to see here is the development in Australia of the sort of schism we see in the US politics. It’s starting to become an issue.

“Labor’s problem is that, up to now, it hasn’t been talking to these people. Not only do they feel disconnection but this is where the main financial hardship and mortgage stress is located, it’s right in these areas. These people resent both right and left-wing elites who seem to be controlling the agendas in this country. They feel as though these bookends dominate everything and their response is ‘my view of the world gets completely shut out.’

“When you talk to focus groups about the Middle East and the protests, their response is always ‘Can’t people stop bringing their problems to this country’ and ‘Why are we always importing other people’s disputes?’

“These outer suburbs resent people and elites they think have a monopoly on power and access to power. And it’s these 40 per cent of Australians who will determine the next election.

Imagine then that there was a huge snap of one Kos Samaras in pompous, portentous pose, elbow poised against a tree stump.

Imagine that the pond immediately juxtaposed this with another huge gratuitous snap of Brittany Higgins.

Imagine that the pond followed this up with another sublimely huge snap featuring Dai Le, dressed up in an outfit which purported to be the Australian flag, but which was in fact the Union Jack, with a couple of token stars on the arms ...

Imagine the visual fun the pond could have had with that ...

Instead there was the purgatory of an Everest climb with "Ned", with no visual relief ...

“Right now, they are eating into their savings, living off their credit cards. That’s why it was so important in the first 18 months to ensure Labor got its cultural settings right. These people would say to us about the economy: ‘I don’t expect politicians to fix everything, I know this is a complicated problem, but I want them in my corner.’ But what the Albanese government did by focusing on the voice for so long was to bake-in the brand that Labor wasn’t interested in the concerns of these people.

“Labor spent the first 18 months defining themselves as a government that culturally does not connect with these people in political terms. It’s not easy to undo things once you’ve convinced people who you are.”

The RedBridge analysis on the referendum shows Australians divided by location, education and income. There were two distinct concentrations for the Yes vote: the high-density urban cores of major cities (about 15 per cent of the total vote) and remote Indigenous communities. The Yes vote was higher in communities with higher median household incomes and where a larger share of the adult population had a university degree.

But the Yes campaign became a study in elites uncomprehending how their campaign alienated the voters they needed to attract.

Samaras says it was difficult for Labor but in the end “it became a campaign all about the left-wing elite part of our country”. It was a display of power in a nation driven into multiple cultures: “They used the pillars of their society – celebrities, sponsorships, endorsements, companies supporting the voice. They ran a campaign that was tailor-made for themselves using their own social networks.

“It had nothing to do with people in the outer suburbs. So these people turned up and voted no.”

Imagine that instead of that snap of Higgins, the pond had inserted a cartoon, just as some form of relief before carrying on with "Ned" ...there was another Wilcox to hand, a joke about public spending ...

But imagine that Blogger had deemed this day that no images were allowed, and so the "Ned" climb had to be done cold turkey ...

For Samaras, the Albanese government needs to move quickly: “It needs to pivot drastically to an economic narrative that talks to these outer suburban areas. But Labor is going to be pulled from pillar to post. I mean, talking about the Labor Party in general, a majority of the people who work for the Labor Party, they don’t live among these people in the outer suburban areas. The staffers don’t, they don’t live in these areas.”

At the 1949 election that began the Menzies era, 96 per cent of votes cast were for the major parties. At last year’s federal election this figure had fallen to 68.3 per cent. It means one-third of the electorate is choosing a primary vote outside the major parties. This is a long-run and pervasive trend – a fractured culture is creating a fractured politics.

“At the last election 5.6 million Australians voted for something other than the major parties,” Samaras says. “I think that will be well over six million at the next election. The people are waiting, they’re looking for an alternative.

“There will be more pressure on the major parties. The concept of a safe seat is starting to die. On the Labor side last election Fowler was the canary in the coalmine – it’s not an exception, it’s what’s coming.”

The seat of Fowler in Sydney’s southwest, previously a safe Labor seat, was won by independent Dai Le, with Samaras saying: “You had someone who was respected, who came from these communities, who didn’t come across as an institutional political player.” Samaras says at the last election – even with a winning Labor result – the ALP primary vote plummeted in a range of once-safe ALP Melbourne seats. It’s an omen.

Imagine at this point the pond had actually inserted that huge snap of Dai Le in Union Jack, with token stars on arms, because it looked so absurd ... but couldn't ... at least until it suddenly discovered it could ...

Then imagine the pond's huge sigh of relief at this peculiar form of torture was coming to an end ...

“A lot of seats aren’t stable any more,” he says. “As long as Anthony Albanese and Tanya Plibersek stay in parliament Labor will hold their seats, but once they leave Grayndler and Sydney will be in jeopardy of falling to the Greens.”

Samaras says a vote against the Albanese government doesn’t necessarily equate to a vote for the Peter Dutton-led Coalition. Politics doesn’t work like that any more.

“In many ways it’s a choice between bad and worse,” he says. “In these outer suburban communities people will tell you they don’t want the Labor Party but the other mob are worse.

“This applies particularly to younger people, they’re reluctant to vote for the Coalition if you offer them a genuine independent.”

The Liberals are still far short of being genuine contenders to win the next election. The current danger for Albanese is being reduced to minority government and the long oblivion that follows. This would be the second minority government in 15 years. But the bigger problem for our democracy just gets bigger – alienation and fracture in the political system.

Imagine then that the pond wrapped things up with the infallible Pope of the day, a joke about school funding for the public education sector, with the discovery of Gonski's skeleton in a cupboard as students flee the school ...

Then imagine that after an elaborate presentation of a "words only" treat, Blogger had decided to come good ...

Imagine that this happened when the pond made one last desperate attempt to upload the infallible Pope ... because dammit, there had to be an infallible Pope to hand ...

Imagine that ...  and while you're at it, imagine why the pond has grown to hate Blogger about as much as it loathes the reptiles ...