A sex worker and an oligarch's son? It must be a day for bits and bobs, with the reptiles in silly season mode ...

 

O the upside, the pond did enjoy Sean Baker's Cannes winning Anora, a screwball comedy about a sex worker (Mikey Madison) caught up in capers with the vulgar son of a Russian oligarch. 

There's a tidy romcom plot line below the second act's slapstick surface, wherein the hooker eventually finds her humanity in the arms of Igor the gopnik (a nicely underplaying Yurly Borisov).

The pond realised there was a parallel - the pond indulging in carefree laughs with the reptiles, only to be reminded of actual humanity in the pond's comments section.

Okay, okay, it's a feeble attempt at humour, but reflecting another upside - this day the pond turned to the reptiles and discovered not a single commentator on the far right that had any appeal:

Petulant Peta doing over Pesutto? Nah, not really, no way that was going to tempt the pond into the arms of a budgie smuggler worshipper. 

Jack the Insider blathering about Kiwis? Nah to the nth. 

And why should the pond accept a few Pearls of wisdom and ugly truther Tom when the job should be done by a dinkum Groaning?

Nah, it would have to be a day of bits and bobs.

In desperation, the pond turned to Rosie Lewis, with Rosie offering an EXCLUSIVE, Labor challenges Peter Dutton on transmission projects he’d cut, Chris Bowen demands Peter Dutton reveal which ‘vital’ transmission projects he’d scrap as Tanya Plibersek approves the $4.8bn HumeLink.

It could be found in what passes for the 'news' section of the reptile rag:

Rosie's EXCLUSIVE began with one of those awesome (AI?) generated collages that has been a feature of the lizard Oz, with Satan's climate change helper featured, surrounded by whale-killing windmills and a saturation of solar panels beneath the noon day sun (the long absent lord alone knows what the blue on the far right is supposed to represent. Burl Ives singing clear, cool water?):

It turned out that the EXCLUSIVE was merely a beat-up to keep the current slapstick comedy bubbling along:

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen has demanded Peter Dutton reveal which “vital” transmission projects he’d scrap under his “reckless” nuclear plan as Labor doubles down on ­renewables and ­approves a controversial $4.8bn, 365km transmission project in NSW connecting Snowy 2.0 to the grid.
It comes as $1.2bn in additional funding for transmission and distribution projects was unveiled in the mid-year budget update on Wednesday, alongside $500m to expand a scheme improving ­energy efficiency for vulnerable households and $728.1m to boost the Australian Energy Market Operator’s cyber security system.
The Greens won the social housing energy efficiency concession in negotiations over the government’s housing package – labelling it “life-changing upgrades” to 50,000 social homes – but The Australian understands Labor had always planned to ­extend the program.
Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek on Thursday will announce the approval of Transgrid’s HumeLink – a 500 kilovolt high-voltage infrastructure project between Wagga Wagga, Bannaby and Maragle – one month after the NSW government gave it the green light, making it one of the largest transmission projects in the state’s history. The project, which is listed as critical infrastructure, has been fiercely contested by some landholders.
“This approval decision marks another important milestone in the government’s plan to make Australia a renewable energy superpower,” Ms Plibersek said.
“We know projects like HumeLink are vital to boosting renewables capacity and putting downward pressure on prices, but they are also great for local jobs and economies. This project will generate 1600 jobs in construction and over 60 ongoing jobs.”
An extra $1.2bn will also be pumped into the Rewiring the ­Nation program to underwrite support for transmission and distribution projects “critical to Australia’s energy transformation”, according to the government’s mid-year economic and fiscal outlook. Mr Bowen said nuclear was the most expensive form of energy but the Coalition’s “reckless ­nuclear scheme” was trying to hide those costs by “pretending” the country didn’t need transmission lines to get power into homes and businesses.

It might seem like the reptiles were doing climate change a favour, what with the weather and the heat and the floods being the joke of the month ...

...but it was really only so that Ted could be given a chance to strut his stuff and nuke the country to save the planet, and a chance for Rosie to rehash the hash:

Frontier Economics modelling released by the Opposition Leader last week shows a nuclear alternative to AEMO’s energy road map to net zero by 2050 is $22bn ­cheaper in transmission costs under a step-change scenario and $18bn cheaper under a progressive scenario.
“Peter Dutton must tell Australians what vital projects which are modernising our ageing grid and getting cheaper renewable power into homes he will cancel. The ­Albanese government is working with states and territories to ­deliver a modern, affordable and secure energy grid for a growing economy,” Mr Bowen said.
Opposition climate change and energy spokesman Ted O’Brien said every extra dollar Labor spent on transmission lines that could otherwise be avoided meant ­higher energy bills for families, small businesses and industry. “$20bn for transmission here, ­another $1.2bn there. Labor is treating Australians like the boiling frog, increasing costs over time only to lock the nation into a ­future of energy poverty,” he said.
“This is just the beginning. Labor’s agenda will require tens of billions of dollars more over time to overbuild poles and wires for its renewables-only grid.”
AEMO’s $122bn blueprint to transform the power grid details the extent of transmission required, but the Frontier Economics report argues nuclear generators can be co-located on existing “strong” transmission lines, reducing the need to build such an extensive network across rural and regional Australian.
“This can mitigate the loss of amenity to Australia’s rural and regional communities that are largely bearing the costs of the energy transition,” the report states.
“Aside from requiring less generation capacity to be installed to meet AEMO’s forecast for rapid and continuous growth in demand, less transmission capacity will be needed as fewer generators are required. To achieve these cost savings it will be important to plan for a system that includes nuclear as soon as possible.” The government has hit back at claims from Mr Dutton that his nuclear plan will see prices 44 per cent cheaper than under Labor over time, pointing to the Coalition’s own modelling that says it doesn’t present any results for prices.

Talk about a truly wretched EXCLUSIVE. 

We're now officially deep into the silly season.

And that was that, and for real comedy, it might have been better for the pond to look abroad, with much fuss being made about drones.

The United States is now officially in its medieval period, with shouts and alarums, and an anxious scanning of the night skies for Iranian mother ships and sundry beat ups and panic merchants everywhere.

This one featured in Mediate, ‘Are You Stupid?’ MAGA State Senator Gets Destroyed Over Stunning Tweet Mistaking Giant Star Wars Prop For Captured Drone

The pond thought that the Big Dipper mistake couldn't be topped, but this was a ripper, and though the dear far right loon later pretended he was indulging in a meme, his actual words showed he was dumber and much thicker than the average piece of four be two ...

It was the perfect excuse to run a Luckovich ...

Yep, panic about the drones, while a 15 year old girl shows her skill with guns ...

Meanwhile, those in Florida hoping to find snaps of Russian hookers at work would likely be disappointed ..

Ron DeSanctus strikes again, and speaking of perves, this summary of a Sun story caught the eye ...

That gave the pond a chance to note to correspondents that the pond does keep in touch with the cracking Crace, who recently offered MPs denied chance to hail Prince Andrew's spycatching heroics, while Marina Hyde was on the perving prince's case with I spy another Prince Andrew disaster. Pity the royals: how could they possibly have seen this coming?

While dredging through back issues, if pond readers wanted a real beat-up, they should have looked up the keen Keane, ravaging Pezz in Are you HARD ENOUGH for Mike Pezzullo’s comeback?, Discredited former Home Affairs head Mike Pezzullo has called for national service and 'hard patriotism' to fight China.

Pezz's piss poor effort to harden the fuck up was featured in the pond in a late Sunday arvo posting, Gad sir, thank you for your service ...

Unfortunately the Crikey paywall might kick in, preventing readers from enjoying the opening of the keen Keane's salvo, a right royal shot across Pezz's bows:

For some time, former Home Affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo has been engaged — primarily via News Corp papers — in a campaign of Nixonian rehabilitation, posing as a magisterial geopolitical thinker, prepared to utter the strategic truths others will not.
To be fair, this pose suits Pezzullo far better than his previous career. After his disastrous period at the helm of the immigration and then Home Affairs departments, one has to conclude he’s better suited to musing about the threat of China than actually running anything. There was the disastrous loss of control of Australia’s borders that occurred under the Coalition, which saw organised crime exploit Australia’s visa system; there’s the Paladin scandal, the stench of which still lingers over Canberra even now; there’s the spectacular failure of regulation of migration agents; there’s the hopeless bungling of maritime surveillance contracts costing taxpayers hundreds of millions; there’s the extended list of disastrously mismanaged procurement exercises and contracts.
All on Pezzullo’s watch, while he composed bizarre rants to his staff. It’s worth recalling, though, that Pezzullo wasn’t sacked for any of this, but for multiple breaches of the Public Service Code of Conduct. In the words of the Australian Public Service Commission, Pezzullo “breached the Australian Public Service Code of Conduct on at least 14 occasions in relation to five overarching allegations, those allegations being that he:

• used his duty, power, status or authority to seek to gain a benefit or advantage for himself
• engaged in gossip and disrespectful critique of ministers and public servants
• failed to maintain confidentiality of sensitive government information
• failed to act apolitically in his employment
• failed to disclose a conflict of interest”

Maintaining the confidentiality of sensitive government information was a particularly curly one for Pezzullo given he once called for leakers to be jailed and journalists to be censored. Industrial-grade hypocrisy from the self-styled hard man of the security establishment.

The keen Keane then sampled harden the fuck up Pezz's work, before concluding:

“A harder patriotism would,” Pezzullo concludes (for some reason, one imagines in the voice Jim Hacker used to do when feeling Churchillian) “build steadily as the people began to appreciate the stakes and the potential sacrifices that might have to be made to protect all that we cherish about Australia.”
One of the things we cherish about Australia, of course, is that disgraced public servants who leaked confidential information and thought they were a political heavy-hitter rather than a bureaucrat can be given a platform for their fascist fantasies about conscription, forced labour and Chinese invasions. Long may it remain so.

Jim Hacker? That's a paygrade too far for Pezz, and he wouldn't be up to playing Sir Humphrey Appleby either ... (how good was Nigel Hawthorne as mad King George? Pezz sadly is just barking mad).

What else? Well, if you dug beneath the fold, you could find a groaning, Jim Chalmers has always been a big spender, but MYEFO is a joke, MYEFO shows spend and tax is in Labor’s DNA. But there are no Peter Walshes or Paul Keatings to take an axe to excessive spending.

Dame Groan was sadly sub-par, managing what the reptiles deemed a mere three minute read of outrage, beginning with a snap, Jim Chalmers releasing the mid-year budget update at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Dame Groan chanced her arm at a little comedy, but she might have done better with a few Igor, gopnik and sex worker jokes, and perhaps a mention of the current Russian interest rates under Vlad the sociopath:

Never mind, Groan away:

I’ve always thought that MYEFO sounds like a disease that some of us contract just before Christmas.
Don’t get me wrong: it’s important the government updates its budget figures – 12 months is too big a gap without the known changes being disclosed. It tends to come too late in the year for sensible folk to take any notice.
In the past, I’ve compared Jim Chalmers to drunken sailors. But many readers regard this as unfair to inebriated seafarers. So perhaps the simpler term of Hey, Big Spender is more appropriate.
Let’s be clear: the MYEFO tells us what we already suspected: spend-and-tax is Labor’s DNA. Government spending will increase by a staggering 5.7 per cent next year, with government payments accounting for 27.2 per cent of GDP, a figure not “achieved” since the late 1980s, if you ignore Covid spending. Sadly, there are no Peter Walshes or Paul Keatings to take an axe to excessive, inefficient or unjustified government spending.
At least I got a bit of chuckle when Chalmers claimed that “what people will see with the mid-year budget update is a really responsible set of books which reflects the substantial progress that we’ve made cleaning up the budget since we came to office”. Can he be serious?

That bizarre image of a chuckling Dame Groan stuck in the pond's head ...

Still, the old Groaner did restrict herself to a bit of a chuckle, and the reptiles tried to help out by bolstering the read with an AV distraction, Jim Chalmers has delivered the government’s Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO) for 2024-25.

It was Dame Groan's chance to sum up reptile outrage, and she did her best, though the pond wondered why she'd been put below the fold, and the heavy lifting had been left to Tom and a few Pearls of wisdom:

MYEFO now predicts cumulative deficits over the forward ­estimates of $144bn, a $22bn increase over what was forecast in the May budget. To be sure, there is a slightly lower deficit – still a deficit – this financial year, but it’s essentially a rounding error. There will fact be an extra $17.5bn in spending this financial year, it’s just that revenue (income tax and company tax, in particular) has held up better than expected.
But here’s a key point: we now need to watch the headline budget figure rather concentrate entirely on the underlying cash balance. By shifting so much activity off-budget, the real impact of the Chalmers’s spend-a-thon is only revealed by looking at the headline figure. This is where the effect of the ­entirely politically driven decision to write off a portion of student debt shows up. And all those cute-sounding programs – rewiring, housing, future building Australia – are parked there.
The headline budget deficit this year is $47.8bn compared with the underlying cash deficit of $26.9bn. The cumulative headline deficits over the forward estimates are forecast to be a massive $233bn. After all those years of genuine ­attempts to clean up the books by our longest-serving treasurer, Peter Costello, by shutting down artificial off-budget recording, we are back to where we were and worse.

A final snap ...Jim Chalmers and Finance Minister Katy Gallagher release the mid-year budget update at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

... and a final short burst of outrage and the Groaning was done and dusted, for this day at least ...

Do you remember when Chalmers as opposition Treasury spokesman taunted the Coalition government for predicting that government debt would exceed $1 trillion? Well, next year, government debt will exceed that figure and some more. Net interest payments go from $15bn this financial year to $27.5bn in 2027-28. You can buy a lot for that sort of figure or, alternatively, offer a meaningful tax cut.
If we look around advanced economies, we see many of them dealing with seemingly intractable budget positions, with deficits sometimes making over 6 per cent of GDP. Think France and the US. Far too many political leaders are incapable of restraining the growth of government spending, let alone actually cutting it.
A great deal of spending is embedded in legislation; benefits quickly become entitlements; and spending programs are defended by politically savvy lobbyists. ­Opposition parties calling for more prudent budget management are quickly labelled peddlers of austerity, creating pain for the most disadvantaged in society. This trick is in Chalmers’s playbook, accusing anyone who even contemplates lower spending of “slash and burn”.
While we may be a few years behind these fiscal embarrassments, it is only luck that led us to being able to record two budget surpluses – thanks to high commodity prices and income tax bracket creep. We are now on a clear downhill trajectory, which could end badly for a small open economy.

Put it another way for the chuckling Groaner ...

If the pond had wanted a country in all sorts of screwball comedy, it would have preferred the finance news from Canada ...

Now that's how to resign after being given the flick to a lesser job than Finance minister:

Waiter, a gigantic serve of maple syrup ...for the fearful wallowing therein ... as a tangerine tyrant stalks the woods like a moose or a Russian sex worker in heat.

The pond did warn it would be a day of bits and bobs, but March next year promises much, with the London public toilet man demanding a jury trial, which will surely mean a week of panem et circenses for the mob ...

And speaking of doomed broadcasters ...Hugh Marks is the new managing director of the ABC. Is he the right person for the job?

The pond's answer? Nah, not really, while he might not be a Jonathan Shier, he will make a flexible, rubbery, supine pawn for Kim to do his thing, whatever that thing might be...  

Wilcox offered this summary of the Peter Principle, shortly to become the Hugh Principle, at work, a fitting closer to bits and bobs and groans and Hughs: