In which Geoff chambers a nuclear bullet and the dog botherer interminably rants ...

 

The silly season has struck early and there was a dismal, disconsolate line up of reptiles at the lizard Oz early this weekend ...

This was what the reptiles had chosen to beguile grumpy punters out of bed? 

Oh dear, really? 

The dog botherer in campaign mode, Jack defending Neanderthals (what with their legacy still to be found in Surry Hills), reheated, warmed-up and growing stale fast simplistic Simon, still nuking the country, and Craig crossing the Tasman to brood about the Kiwis. 

The pond looked at the line up and wept ...

It might get better later in the day, but the pond doubted it.

There had been exciting news from the United States, as in this NY Times splash ...

At last a chance to bring back polio and Make Calipers Great Again ...

How could the local reptiles compete? 

Might not people be better off reading Rex Huppke's Nobel laureates vs. RFK Jr.? Have those nerds even tasted roadkill bear meat? I'm guessing none of the 77 Nobel Prize winners has experienced the brain-boosting power of raw milk or endeavored to sample roadkill bear meat.

So I see a bunch of so-called Nobel laureates have come out with a fancy-schmancy letter calling on U.S. senators to block Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from becoming head of the Department of Health and Human Services.
This is an outrageous overstep by people who read books and is a clear attempt to make President-elect Donald Trump look bad for wanting to put a measles enthusiast in charge of America’s health.
I’m guessing none of the 77 Nobel Prize winners has experienced the brain-boosting power of raw milk or endeavored to sample roadkill bear meat, making them far less qualified to comment on public health than Kennedy.
If only these renowned experts in medicine, chemistry, economics and physics would do their own research, they’d understand that this man whose brain is partially worm-eaten brings a commonsense dose of non-knowledge to his belief that vaccine scientists should be in prison.
“In addition to his lack of credentials or relevant experience in medicine, science, public health, or administration, Mr. Kennedy has been an opponent of many health-protecting and life-saving vaccines, such as those that prevent measles and polio; a critic of the well-established positive effects of fluoridation of drinking water; a promoter of conspiracy theories about remarkably successful treatments for AIDS and other diseases; and a belligerent critic of respected agencies.”
Sure, when you put it all together, it sounds kind of bad. But I, for one, am sick and tired of listening to a bunch of educated elites string together a series of incontrovertible facts to make a point that’s clearly in the public’s interest. 
Or as Katie Miller, a spokesperson for Trump's transition team, put it: “Americans are sick and tired of the elites telling them what to do and how to do it. Our healthcare system in this country is broken. Mr. Kennedy will enact President Trump's agenda to restore the integrity of our health care and Make America Healthy Again.”
Yeah. Screw reality. The last thing I need is some “doctor” telling me to take “medicine” for a “sickness” so I don’t “die” or unwittingly “contaminate and kill” other “people.”
This is America, dammit, and if I want to cure my respiratory infection by sticking potato peels in my left ear and drinking a cocktail of horse dewormer and apple-cider vinegar, no nerd is going to make me do otherwise...

And so on through assorted conspiracy theories, until the coup de grâce

In their letter, the Nobel prize winners wrote: “In view of his record, placing Mr. Kennedy in charge of DHHS would put the public's health in jeopardy.”
WRONG! Those no-good Nobel laureates need to take their expertise and wealth of knowledge and get on board the RFK Jr. all-engine-no-rails train. He can probably teach them a thing or two about the health benefits of polio.

Right, and couldn't the reptiles at least offer some seasonal Xmas spirit ... there's plenty of it around ...

If you wanted that FT story in full, you could head off to Murdoch family feud left hanging over media empire’s future:

Splendid stuff, but something that will never trouble the reptiles at the lizard Oz. Instead they've been given the job of selling the pup known as nuking the country to save the planet, by 2036 or thereabouts ...

It was Geoff who chambered another story in that saga under the defiant header ...Defiant Peter Dutton ready for nuclear scare campaign from Labor, Peter Dutton will ‘stare down’ nuclear scare campaigns and seek an election mandate to compel sceptical premiers and business chiefs into fast-tracking his plan to build seven nuclear power plants.

Here no scare, no scare here, just like at the opening snap, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton announces the Coalition’s nuclear energy policy costings alongside Ted O’Brien, Angus Taylor and David Littleproud in Brisbane on Friday. Picture: John Gass / NewsWire

Oh they were all there, sturdy and refusing to be scared ...

Peter Dutton will stare down ­nuclear “scare campaigns” waged by Labor, the unions, Greens and clean energy groups and seek an election mandate to compel sceptical premiers and business chiefs into fast-tracking the Coalition’s plan to build seven nuclear power plants.
The Opposition Leader on Friday conceded bipartisan support would make timelines bringing nuclear generation online from 2036 “much more achievable”, amid criticism his $331bn energy plan failed to ­address near-term cost relief and power security for households and businesses.
Mr Dutton’s net-zero emissions by 2050 blueprint, which requires 65 per cent of ageing coal-fired power stations to keep operating until nuclear comes online, was attacked by Anthony Albanese and Chris Bowen as “reckless, fantasy, a con job, dangerous and risky”.
As business leaders, energy retailers and generators raised questions about “heroic” ­Coalition assumptions based on Frontier Economics modelling and concerns over cost blowouts and delays overseas, Mr Dutton said his plan would “underpin the economic success of our country for the next century”.

Just to keep the focus on the man, the reptiles inserted a happy video of a success story, Peter Dutton claims nuclear energy will “underpin” the nation’s success for the next century.

It was go, go, go ...

He said he would “have more to say about our energy policy in relation to the near term, ­because it’s incredibly important that people get help now”. The Liberal leader said he believed if Mr Albanese lost the election, there could be bipartisan support on the “vision that we put to the Australian people”.
“The independent costings that we’ve got (shows it will be) 44 per cent cheaper under the Coalition’s energy plan than Labor’s energy plan, over the ­period of implementation, and lower emissions from 2050 on under our plan,” Mr Dutton said. “The government has ramped up electricity prices after promising to reduce it by $275, and people are now paying $1000 more than what Labor had promised.”

Meanwhile, the Graudian had been making a meal of the yarn, with sundry stories ...

There were other wretches chipping in to knock the grand vision ...

And so on and on and meanwhile Geoff seemed to wilt a little and feel the need for a little both siderism:

Mr Bowen, the Energy Minister, identified “three fatal flaws” in the nuclear modelling, including Coalition claims costs would be lower because Australians would use less power, that costs did not reflect real-world experience and that there was “no need to build transmission to get power into homes”.
“If they are to be taken seriously, they need to outline exactly what transmission lines they would cancel. It doesn’t matter how you produce electricity, you’ve got to get it to homes and businesses, and that takes transmission. And the transmission lines are full and need to be duplicated regardless of whether the power comes from renewables or nuclear,” Mr Bowen said.

Time for a snap of, if not the anti-Christ then the anti-nuke Satanist in chief, Energy Minister Chris Bowen in Sydney. Picture: NewsWire / Jeremy Piper

Saucy doubts and fears began to infest this particular chambering:

As Coalition MPs expressed frustration that nuclear costings were publicly released before the partyroom was briefed, senior ALP operatives told The Weekend Australian: “We think the election debate is around economics.” Labor is planning to ramp-up attacks about the lack of detail underpinning Mr Dutton’s policies across energy, tax and ­migration policies.
The Coalition’s preferred “progressive” scenario assumes a ­larger Australian population will require less energy than planned under the current “step-change” scenario, fewer people will be driving electric vehicles despite manufacturers indicating a phase-out of internal combustion engines, and that green hydrogen does not develop as expected.
Under the Australian Energy Market Operator progressive scenario, after adding 38 per cent of nuclear in the grid, the energy system cost would be $331bn compared to $437bn without nuclear. Under AEMO’s step-change scenario, adding nuclear would cost $446bn compared to a base renewables-anchored scenario of $594bn. The Coalition’s proposed grid plan, which will dramatically scale back costs associated with transmission upgrades and projects connecting renewables, includes 38 per cent nuclear generation, 32 per cent wind, 17 per cent solar, 9 per cent hydro and 4 per cent storage capacity.

Time for the Caterist to arrive and right the ship ...

Menzies Research Centre senior fellow Nick Cater senses “increasing desperation” from the Labor Party following the Coalition’s release of its nuclear costings. Mr Dutton claims his policy to build nuclear power stations will cost taxpayers $331 billion dollars by 2050. “They are not actually answering the substance of the argument that nuclear is the only way to get substantial reductions in carbon emissions and keep the lights on,” Mr Cater said.

Phew, you can always rely on the Caterist for flood water in quarries and nuking the country news, not to mention his famous concern for reducing emissions, a concern which he once branded as religious climate change zealotry, but never no mind, on with the grand plan ...

Mr Dutton says the Coalition would build, own and operate seven nuclear plants at decommissioned coal-fired power station sites in five states, including two small modular reactors and five larger power stations.
Grattan Institute energy and climate change program director Tony Wood, who believes it is time for Australia to be having an “adult discussion about nuclear energy”, said the Coalition’s cost comparison was not like-for-like.
“The progressive change is probably the most likely of the two given where we are at. That $263bn difference becomes more like $100bn, or a 25 per cent difference rather than a 44 per cent difference in cost,” Mr Wood said.
Amid growing expectations of an early election, senior Labor strategists said “the modelling is a joke … you can’t talk about a 2050 plan and not have a position about the impacts for people”.
“We will be saying that under the Coalition plan, costs will go up by $1200 a year. We will be focusing on the fact they do not have an alternative plan, while at the same time are opposing energy bill relief for households. We will focus on the delays and cost of nuclear and the cost to households and businesses. The election argument will be an economic one … under Peter Dutton’s nuclear reactor scheme you will go backwards, you will be worse-off,” an ALP source said.

Some thought it was risky, even on the home of climate science denialism in Australia, but Sky did their best to spin it as bold and ambitious ...

Sky News host Steve Price believes Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has taken the “biggest electoral risk in history” with his plan to run Australia on a combination of nuclear energy and renewables. Mr Dutton has announced his plan for nuclear energy will cost $331 billion over the next 25 years, according to research conducted by Frontier Economics. “Australians now have a very clear choice when we go to the polls in 2025,” Mr Price said. “Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is taking the biggest electoral risk in history, even outdoing, I believe, John Howard taking a GST to the voters in an election, with his ambitious, expensive, national building promise to run the country on a combination of nuclear energy and renewables, with some solar and gas as backup.”

As for that scare campaign? It's those bloody recalcitrant toads ...

Senior Liberal operatives said they were prepared for a “scare campaign” from Labor, the Greens and others, and were confident that Mr Dutton could unite premiers and business leaders around nuclear if he wins the election. “I suspect Labor’s negative campaign is more likely to focus on health rather than nuclear. But we’re not complacent that Labor could stimulate the nuclear issue as a scare campaign,” the strategist said. “We’ve seen evidence, certainly in regional areas, that there is good support for the concept of nuclear power. To date, Peter Dutton has had the better of the debate on energy and we will prosecute hard on the case that Labor broke its $275 lower power bills promise and made the cost-of-living worse, while Peter and Ted (O’Brien) have a longer-term vision for the country.”
A teals campaigner said while voters in metropolitan seats Mr Dutton hopes to win aren’t anti-nuclear, they are also very pro-renewables. Recent polling shows the top issues in teals seats are housing affordability, cost-of-living integrity and climate change.
“The problem for the Coalition is disentangling themselves from a pretty concerted campaign attacking renewables. Ultimately, nuclear will not change the contest. There may be some cut-through amongst younger male progressives but there is likely more interest in tax cuts and cost-of-living,” the campaigner said.
Queensland LNP Premier David Crisafulli, who hasn’t spoken to Mr Dutton about nuclear energy since winning the October state election, said his position had not changed and he would not remove state bans on nuclear.
“Canberra will have a debate on energy, my focus is doing what I’ve said for the people of Queensland,” Mr Crisafulli said.

The state bans to stay? Awkward ...

And so to the bonus, and the pond supposes that it should deal with the dog botherer, if only because he was briefly top of the far right digital world ma with Albanese has shrunk in office, paralysed by responsibility. It’s sad to watch, Labor politicians and strategists are dumbfounded by Anthony Albanese’s decline and confused about his agenda. They know he has one last chance to reset – but what will he advocate?

This tragic tale of Albanese’s decline and confusion and the last chance to reset &ndash takes an interminable 7 minutes, or so the reptiles say. 

It felt to the pond like an eternity, as if the bromancer had channelled the terminal ennui to be found while attempting to climb a nattering "Ned" piece. Peak Everest.

The pond decided it was best to adopt an anthropological approach - this was an example of the reptiles in full campaign mode before the silly season took hold completely - and the runes, entrails, neigh tea leaves could be examined as signs of the best the reptiles thought they had for the coming campaign.

Of course in best dissembling mode, disingenuous and deflecting as to the real purpose, it was framed as a question, Can the Prime Minister emerge from a Christmas and New Year hiatus to unleash a new approach?, with one of those feeble uncredited collages best blamed on AI:

The utegate man is undeniably ideally placed to discuss political folly:

Anthony Albanese has become an empty vessel, doing and saying what he hopes others want him to do and say, searching for love and purpose. It is quite sad to watch, and debilitating for the government and country.
Beneath the Prime Minister is an ALP apparatus and membership, and vast labour movement of union officials and members, waiting for something. Can the Prime Minister emerge from a Christmas and New Year hiatus to unleash a new approach and reset in the short few weeks or months to an election, or will the slide continue into a first-term defeat they thought inconceivable three months ago?
Where is his judgment? Just last Friday, and through Saturday, Sunday and Monday, Albanese seemed to think the firebomb attack on a Melbourne synagogue was something that did not demand his personal attention but could be managed from his campaigning caravan in Perth during an itinerary that included donor drinks and an afternoon of tennis.
He even headed back to Canberra for a day before visiting the site and the community.
No idea.

The reptiles seemed to think the point was to offer double dog botherer, dog botherer in print and dog botherer in AV form:

Sky News host Chris Kenny has launched a scathing attack on Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, labelling him as a leader who is “weak” and “desperate”. “Next year is a federal election year. Anthony Albanese could be facing his Alamo,” Mr Kenny said. “He is floundering, he is weak, and he is desperate. “We need competence; we need leaders with conviction, but what we get all too often, and all we’ve ever gotten from Albo is government by media announcement, spin over substance, politicking over policy.”

Yep, it's full campaign mode in the silly season. Couldn't the reptiles take a break and enjoy the seasonal cheer on offer in that FT story?

...However, Rupert’s move — which blindsided the other children — created a “lot of bad blood”, said a person close to James.
The situation has devolved into a “family feud”, the person said, adding that James “doesn’t have a plan”. Instead, the feeling is: “I don’t know what I want, but I don’t want the other one to take it,” the person said.
Rupert Murdoch moved to cement power for Lachlan in part because he feared his other children would shift the business from its core conservative image, said people familiar with the case. James in particular has been critical of Fox News in the US. But this was a “false narrative”, said one person familiar with the siblings’ thinking.
The person close to James shot down speculation that the more liberal-minded Murdoch son might try to take over Fox News and tilt its politics after his father dies.
“He doesn’t want to be the guy who presides over Fox News. He’s smart enough to know that if he repositions Fox News it’s as good as dead. Because the power of Fox News comes from the ideological position that it has.”
However, James would “want fair value for [Fox]”, the person added. Fox Corp is valued at more than $20bn on the stock market.
The other major asset at stake is News Corp, the owner of newspapers including Wall Street Journal and the Sunday Times and book publisher HarperCollins. The total Murdoch family fortune is worth more than $6bn. The trust controls about 40 per cent of the voting stakes in Fox and News Corp, and a 17 per cent economic interest in each of the companies.
The family chaos has left bankers and analysts speculating over whether Rupert Murdoch might opt to sell his assets before he dies, to avoid leaving them to his feuding children.
Rich Greenfield, analyst at LightShed, said: “We believe there is a near zero per cent chance that Rupert wants to leave planet earth with the future of the assets he spent his life building left in limbo.”
He predicted the situation will be resolved in one of two ways. The first would be for Lachlan to raise capital in order to buy out his three siblings, which would likely prove expensive because of the “control premium”.
If Lachlan is unable to strike a buyout deal, the other path is to auction off the assets. “Could Elon Musk buy Fox News for north of $20bn? Not such a crazy idea,” Greenfield said.
One person familiar with the court ruling said Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch “are not expected to give up”.
“Could they try to buy out the siblings? That’s been tried before. I think they are trying to work out how they achieve their goal by different means. It’s all still to play out.”
Greenfield said he expects Murdoch would want to sell his businesses after Donald Trump takes office for “easier regulatory approval” by a more business-friendly administration.
Claire Enders, media analyst at Enders Analysis, said there have been repeated attempts to buy James’ stake in the trust over the past six years, but no deal had ever been acceptable to both sides. But Rupert is “not a man who gives up”, she added.
Shareholders are worried the rifts in the family trust will lead to instability over future direction of the business. Activist investor Starboard Value argued earlier this year that the four Murdoch siblings “are reported to have widely differing world views, which, collectively, could be paralysing to the strategic direction of [News Corp]”.
The Murdoch children are still expected to extend an olive branch to their father despite the anger caused by his attempted coup, said people familiar with the matter.
“This has always been about protecting the rights as established under the trust. Now it is about restoring some harmony, or as much as possible,” said one person close to the group. “The three siblings want to put this behind them.”
Enders expected Elisabeth would lead efforts to reach a détente between the two sides: “She is believed to have taken the lead in previous disputes and crises requiring conciliation efforts between her father and his children.”
However, those close to the situation say that while families often use Christmas as a time to get together, the chances of the Murdochs gathering around the tree this year appear vanishingly small.

Never mind, that just prolongs the agony as the dog botherer ranted away, with the jihad, the holy war that has been the subject of monomaniacal coverage these past few weeks ... and which the pond managed mostly to avoid ...

Many of us have been deeply concerned about emergent anti-Semitism since October 8, 2023, when we saw Sheik Ibrahim Dadoun shout to a cheering crowd at Sydney’s Lakemba how it was a “day of courage, it’s a day of pride, it’s a day of victory, this is the day we’ve been waiting for”. The mob replied with “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) as Dadoun said: “I’m smiling and I’m happy.”
Albanese’s response then was tepid, declaring there was “nothing to celebrate” in the murder of innocent civilians. You don’t say. Perhaps the most disgusting and abhorrent public meeting this nation had seen, members of one religion celebrating the barbaric slaughter of men, women and children of another faith, even as the horrors were still unfolding in Israel, terrorising Jewish Australians and threatening social cohesion, and those were the words the Prime Minister summonsed.
And there was no action.
The next night we saw Jew haters take their threatening chants to the Sydney Opera House forecourt and police warned Jewish Australians away. Albanese’s role was more akin to a spectator than Prime Minister, without outrage or firm action, without leadership.
Some of us implored him publicly and privately to take a stand, but here we are 14 months later with a synagogue firebombed, repeated acts of sickening graffiti, cars torched, death threats, doxxing and the demonisation of Israel and Jews. We all play our part in standing up to this madness, but the person with the most social power and political authority to stem the tide is the Prime Minister – and he has been wafting around, sniffing the zeitgeist, knowing he needs a sensible mainstream position but confused by the morally vacuous, radical activist viewpoints of his youth.

At this point the reptiles decided even more dog botherer was needed ...

Sky News host Chris Kenny discusses the lives “terrorised” as multiple antisemitism terror attacks occur around Australia. “It has happened again, we have warned about it since October the ninth last year … how often and how long we have been calling out the weakness of Anthony Albanese and the state governments as they have stood by and let antisemitism rise,” Mr Kenny said. “Now it is getting worse.”

So much dog botherer, so lucky that the pond could avoid watching. 

And if you wanted an alternative opening line to the next gobbet, you might try "His diplomatic advance, slow and halting, where he managed to join the 158 countries in favour, including the UK, NZ, Canada, japan and Germany ... leaving the United States and Israel with the likes of Argentina, Czechia, Hungary, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay and Tonga for company ..." (Al Jazeera for the numbers)

Instead the pond copped this ...

His diplomatic retreat on Israel has won praise from Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. So Australia has broken faith with the US and Israel but is winning favour with terrorist groups and militants who are obsessed with grievances and war rather than peace and prosperity.
The perpetual tragedy of the Middle East political machinations is one thing; the diminution of Australia’s national values in global affairs is another. We deserve better.
Around the world the superficiality of the digital media age has deformed public discourse. Consider how social media has been preoccupied all week with a handsome assassin rather than the innocent husband and father he murdered in New York City.
The same inane forces derail domestic politics. When substance, character and values are jettisoned in favour of memes and retweets, you can end up with someone as inconsequential as Kamala Harris running for president, and someone as hollow as Albo running our country. The signs were bad coming into office – Albanese had never had a real job – but we were entitled to expect more, even from a man whose best week in the election campaign was when he was out of action thanks to Covid.

At this point the reptiles interrupted with another snap of the Satan in chief, apparently in full decline and dumbfounding all, ready for his retreat to his clifftop mansion ...

Labor politicians and strategists are dumbfounded by the Albanese decline and confused about his agenda. Picture: NewsWire/John Appleyard

Then the reptiles gave up on the visual distractions and allowed the dog botherer to go on a full, visually uninterrupted rant.

The pond understood why, it was a case of light taper and stand well clear...you could put out an eye if you tried to hold on to this exploding double bunger ...

Albanese had been a minister, managed government business in the House of Representatives, told us he liked to “fight Tories” and we hoped he might be competent. But Albo has shrunk in office, paralysed by the responsibility. He put up a referendum for a voice proposal he refused to detail and for which he failed to provide any proper rationale (presumably because he did not understand its history or logic) so he condemned a precious Indigenous consensus to failure, undermining reconciliation, while telling us it was not even his government’s proposal but one that belonged to Indigenous Australians.
It was a reckless way to deal with Indigenous aspirations and has done enormous damage. The only winners have been the conservatives (the people Albo refers to as Tories), some of whom now use the disastrous referendum to shoot down any nod to Indigenous culture or advancement.
Labor politicians and strategists are dumbfounded by the Albanese decline and confused about his agenda. They know he has one last chance to reset in the New Year. But what will he advocate? Albanese cannot promise lower electricity prices again, when they have only gone up; he cannot promise lower mortgages again when they have only risen; and he cannot promise to ease the cost of living again either, given it has only worsened.
Some in Labor make the case for a focus on housing, others on immigration; some have clever ideas to combine the two (but the Coalition, too, will have strong policies in these areas).
ALP hardheads must fear that their penchant for debt-fuelled giveaways will not cut it in an inflation constrained economic environ­ment.
The thing with Albanese – to be frank, the problem with Labor’s Socialist Left – is that his perspective does not align with the mainstream. This means his decisions are not made from a firm footing of ideological beliefs and core values but from the transparently opportunistic place of political motivations and psephological judgments.
Almost invariably this leads to the wrong decisions being made for the wrong reasons, and voters eventually see through it. They may be fooled once, given the choices before them, but they won’t be fooled twice – ask Kevin Rudd.
After the disaster of the voice, a trainwreck that began with election night triumphalism, this year has been a continual slide for Albanese. This column offered him praise early in his term for standing up to China and embracing AUKUS, and readers well know I had long been a supporter of the voice, if not the way Albo handled it.

This year’s columns have chronicled Albo’s decline, noting in early May that the more uncertain he was, the more verbose he became.
Under the heading “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate, PM”, I wrote: “Forget about an absence of malice; to watch the Prime Minister’s media conferences these days is to endure a pitiful search for words and an avoidance of meaning.” Later that month my frustrations, and those of voters, were starting to build and I asked, “What is the point of this Prime Minister?” because he was consistently avoiding opinions or ducking responsibility. I had a flashback to my school days, noting Albo was “shrinking before our eyes, like an empty Twisties packet on a heater”.

Oh come on reptiles, come on, what a chance for an inspirational illustration, and a break from the ranting ... cue empty Twisties packet, heater impact notable ...

Such opportunities abounded and yet the reptiles refused to help out ...

Around this time I recalled a video made for a South Australian Liberal Party launch in 1993 showing lowlights of the Bannon-Arnold Labor government cut to Helen Shapiro’s 1960s hit, Not Responsible. It seemed apt once more, so I played the song on Sky News and it struck a chord. Before long 2GB’s Ray Hadley and his musical mates the Robertson Brothers had cut a fresh version about Albanese – listeners and viewers loved it because it resonated.

Did the pond have to do all the heavy lifting and show off the beehive as a way of setting the tone for the reptile hive mind, stuck back in the sixties?

The pond was inclined to join the sullen reptiles and let the dog botherer rant without let or illustration...

In June Albanese averted his eyes from the bullying and intimidation of former Chinese prisoner and now Sky News presenter Cheng Lei by Chinese officials at a formal Canberra media event. I wrote that we were seeing the “authority of office shed from his bearing like fur from a sick cat”.
By September even Albanese’s green-left soulmates at The Sydney Morning Herald, disappointed by his positions on Gaza, immigration and climate change, “could no longer remember what he was for or against”. This column described him as the “incredible shrinking Prime Minister”.
Still, this past week, with his ham-fisted and morally ambiguous reaction to the Melbourne synagogue bombing, then desperate attempts to catch up by visiting the Sydney Jewish Museum after another anti-Israel attack in Woollahra, Albanese’s ambivalence has confounded even his most ardent supporters.
In January 2022, on the cusp of becoming prime minister, Albanese spoke at the National Press Club and focused on Scott Morrison. “Never before has Australia had a prime minister with such a pathological determination to avoid responsibility,” he said. “Every action, every decision has to be dragged out of him – and so often, after all the build-up, he gets it wrong anyway. And it’s always too little too late.”
This was Albanese on Morrison – but it reads now like a prescient piece of self-appraisal. It defies logic that someone could be so preoccupied with politics all their life, wanting to “fight Tories”, and then get to the highest office in the land and have so little idea about what to do.
John Howard once had a rapier insight into Julia Gillard’s failure as prime minister. “She lacks authority,” Howard said, surmising that “she didn’t win the last election outright and, having taken the job of a popularly elected prime minister, she really needed to win outright to have authority”.
Albanese is a similar study; he overestimated the weight of his win and assumed authority had been bestowed upon him. But winning government from a record low primary vote of less than 33 per cent, way below the Coalition primary vote, was hardly a popular endorsement.
Instead of thinking of himself as a Sun King anointed to shape the universe, Albanese should have realised he had fallen narrowly into government thanks to the Greens and teal breakaways, and that he needed to work every day to win over the mainstream.

How could the reptiles have resisted that one? The pond decided it was a spot on comparison ...

Eventually the dog botherer ran out of steam, as all ranters are wont to do ... there's only so much energy to hand before a desire for self-harm sets in ...

Now he is hoping for a cool February lest a heatwave expose his energy self-harm while the Coalition proposes a nuclear alternative. He needs to get to the polls early enough to avoid delivering a budget that will expose our structural decline but, he hopes, late enough to see an interest rate cut that will give some relief to households and an indication of economic progress.
The Prime Minister does not have a story, plan or purpose. Albanese only has political moves, and they may not be enough, even if he is only fighting Tories.

How to elevate all this ranting, how to give it a touch of class? 

Luckily Shakspere had thought of it and covered all the bases ...

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Lizard Oz hive mind musings

Creep in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time

Or at least until the sale of News Corp (ta James)

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools and lizard Oz readers

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot dog botherer, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

A gentle suggestion.

Can the reptiles just can the campaigning, at least until January when nobody cares about anything?

And so to wrap up this day's wretched proceedings with an immortal Rowe, nuking the country to save the planet...