In which the reptiles have a makeover, but it looks more like a pitiful comb over of the mango Mussolini kind ...

 

Dear sweet long absent lord, in the pond's absence, the reptiles have been planning a digital makeover and now the front page of the digital edition looks like this ...

The reptiles seem to have shifted the commentary section into the extreme far right, "top of the digital world ma" spot, which means the propaganda that passes as news is on the sinistra side, while the pick of the reptile commentary (the pond uses "pick" ironically), propaganda that passes as propaganda, has been given a back-handed promotion to the far right, though in effect it's such a jumbled, messy look it's really a downgrade.

Was it because no one bothered to scroll down to the comments section in the old format? 

Most likely it's a pitiful attempt by the reptiles to beguile vulgar youff into reading the rag on a mobile device, but as a result, there's much emptiness on the far right (that's space as well as any challenge to the mind).

The tree killer edition seems to have escaped the change over and keeps harping on about renewables in the usual reptile way ... see yesterday v. today ...

The layout of the stories has changed too, and not for the better, and again seems designed mainly to suit mobile devices ...

It seems like a pitiful attempt at relevance, and so the pond will ignore the bouffant one's use of "rat in the rank" to describe a politician voting on principle when it comes to one of the current genocides (the sociopathic war in Ukraine seems to be largely ignored by the reptiles these days).

The pond decided it would take a step back and revert to Mein Gott's outburst yesterday ...

Mein Gott that's an ugly layout, with serifs in the header and sans serif in the text. 

It wasn't helped by the reptiles anxiously noting it was a "3 min read", lest vulgar youff lose patience and drift off into the digital ether ...

As well as the usual Mein Gott touches about not being a geologist and infesting a business function to score the goss, there were at least the usual visual distractions to the yarn ...

As an esteemed correspondent noted, the pond would have been better off reading the Graham Radfearn story in the Graudian, still in familiar layout ...

Where was the Riddster came the cry, and it seems there have been a few glitches in the changeover, because this was the Riddster's listing in the digital rag ...

Tragic, and so the pond returned to more of Mein Gott ... with the pond tormented by the new layout. 

Should the pond pack more into the gobbet, with smaller print, or enlarge the print and endure more chunks of Mein Gott. Mein Gott, what a dilemma ...

Don't get the pond wrong, talk of gassing the country to save the planet is at least a change of pace from nuking the country ...

... but the pond felt dissatisfied by the comb over ...

What was most urgently needed wasn't the comb over, but a change of hacks, some fresh faces who might tempt vulgar youff and incidentally revive the pond's flagging interest.

The only relief was that Mein Gott seems also to have gone pinko prevert socialist, with a call on government to gas the country ...

They must take "personal charge" and drill, baby drill? 

Is there no end to the new reptile enthusiasm for government intervention? First Dame Groan, now Mein Gott?

Speaking of which, the pond read the keen Keane yesterday (the other one with an "e" in Crikey yesterday: Under big-spending Nationals-lite Dutton, where to now for genuine Liberals?, Are genuine Liberals just in public life so they can expand the size of government? That's their role under Peter Dutton. (paywall)

Perversely, the matter of Dame Groan's change of heart came up ...

On coming to the leadership, Peter Dutton backgrounded the media that he was far less right-wing than he was portrayed as — hadn’t he, after all, devised the plebiscite as the way to get marriage equality through under Turnbull? But while Dutton as an MP predates the merger of the Liberal and National parties in Queensland, he is the perfect representation of that political union — which is the socialism and populism of the Nationals masquerading under the Liberal name.
It shouldn’t therefore be a surprise that the first LNP leader of the federal Coalition — Dutton is the first non-NSW Liberal leader of the Coalition since the Downer disaster back in the 90s — has lurched the party sharply in a Nationals direction. As Crikey noted last week and other outlets are slowly realising, Dutton has proposed a truly unprecedented direction for the federal Coalition — not merely has he proposed a colossal infrastructure project that, on a sensible costing, would cost the best part of $100 billion, he has proposed an entirely new sphere of Commonwealth activity: power generation. Power generation has traditionally been left to the states, and nearly all of them have long since privatised it, leaving state governments as regulators.
Dutton doesn’t just want to move the Commonwealth into what used to be a state sphere, he wants it to be government-owned.
A coalition government under Dutton would almost certainly try to pretend that its $100 billion would earn a return on capital, while, hilariously, insisting that nuclear power would be cheaper than renewables — nuclear is prohibitively expensive even before you insist it generates a rate of return of the long term bond rate plus 5%. But this would enable it to keep the spending required on the capital side of the budget. It pulled the same stunt with the National Party’s last massive boondoggle, the $31 billion inland rail, which will never generate a cent of return for taxpayers. But whatever the accounting trickery in the budget papers, it will still mark a dramatic expansion of Commonwealth spending, in an area where the Commonwealth has zero experience or expertise.
It’s funny how partisanship warps people’s intellectual consistency. You’d think the man most associated with the privatisation of electricity generation in Australia, the very antithesis of public ownership of power generation, would be aghast at not only a state government but the federal government entering public power generation. But Jeff Kennett, it turns out, is a big fan of Dutton’s proposal for publicly owned nuclear power. And Judith Sloan, who is usually intellectually consistent even if it places her at odds with the editorial line of the Murdoch press, turns out to be a fan of public ownership too — inconveniently, just a couple of weeks after railing against public subsidies for renewable energy...

The pond will overlook the keen Keane labelling Dame Groan as "intellectually consistent" and willing to swim against the public tide, but did follow the link provided, and sure enough, below the requisite shot of whale-killing, beefy boofhead upsetting windmills ...

... there was a standard Dame Groan rant deploring renewables ...

Again there seems to have been a problem with the transition, or so We’re told ...

The pond had already covered this way back when, but offered that gobbet as a way of showing the format changes, the new, ugly font, and the rest of it ...

The pond should perhaps finish off the keen Keane's rant, yearning for the good old days of the free market ...

...Another problem with Dutton’s nuclear fever dream has been pointed out by Turnbull, but has attracted little coverage: it is fundamentally at odds with Australia’s comparative advantage. The sun and wind are bountiful and easily accessed in Australia, more so than virtually anywhere else in the world, and with storage either via batteries or pumped hydro, that comparative advantage in energy can be exploited for cheap power. Nuclear, which is many times more expensive to build, is always on and can’t be shut down whether power is needed or not, is the exact opposite.
Nuclear power is a lot like Labor’s Future Made In Australia, another policy that defies Australia’s comparative advantage. Both are old ideas — from the days when we relied on always-on thermal power and made stuff, no matter how much more cheaply it could be made elsewhere. Australia’s advantage lies in plentiful renewables, as it lies in extractive industries, education, lifestyle and its high-quality public and civil institutions. Both Dutton and Labor instead want to pursue big dreams of government intervention in pursuit of 1970s ideas.
The Liberal Party under Dutton is thus, for all its climate denialism and attempts at product differentiation, ideologically the same as Labor — big government and government-industry intervention, ignoring our advantages. At least with Labor such an activist conception of government is in the party’s DNA and not only does it not apologise for it, it celebrates it.
But where to for real Liberals who don’t want an endlessly expanding government extending itself into new fields of activity, who want a market economy allowed to operate without massive intervention? Are genuine Liberals getting into public life just to be pale versions of the Nationals, to preside over massive economic intervention and a permanently enlarged government? That’s the future while an LNP figure like Dutton leads the party.

All things must change, it seems, and too say the pond is unhappy with the reptile makeover is something of an understatement, with the lizard Oz editorialist seemingly consigned to the digital wilderness. 

Never again that bright red nationalistic flag announcing the thoughts of allegedly patriotic scoundrels?

The pond had to ferret out this astonishing set of insights ... relax, it's only a "2 min read" ... you can stick it out ...

The pond wonders what will happen to the rest of the reptile commentariat? Can the new layout allow for the rampant propaganda to take a proper place in the rag? Will important issues be front and centre?

Or will they disappear in an attempt to pander to the vulgar youff market?

And should the pond take the easy way out and make the gobbets almost impenetrable, with every reader offered reading glasses, as a "2 min read" becomes, gasp, a "3 min read", and yet is really only worth a single gobbet?

Ah well, never mind, it's just the usual reptile blather about a Kean rat in the ranks, and as usual, for the news of the day, the pond will still revert to the 'toons ...