In which Megalopolis strength gets the pond through Dame Slap and a nattering "Ned" ...

 

The pond finally made it. After weeks of clever delaying and avoidance tactics, the pond finished off Megalopolis, though it almost finished off the pond. 

It was a bit like being put in the stocks and having Coppola throw a variety of visual rotten tomatoes at the trapped victim. 

It took the pond two goes, an hour 17 the first night, another hour the next night, but the pond eventually reached the film's triumphant oneiric conclusion, a mix of poor person's Ayn Rand and cheesy artwork from 1950s sci fi magazines.

The pond had failed the Cats test. Worried by missing parts of the cats' anatomies and the possibility of turning full furry. 

A bit furry would be okay, but full furry might lead to costume anxiety. Passing the Megalopolis test put to bed a sense of catastrophic failure.

If the pond could handle the awful voice over and the sense that Kermode was right and Caligula was a better movie, the pond knew it could handle anything the reptiles at the lizard Oz might hurl at the pond. 

Even if a little jagged bit of reptile attitude transferred across and stuck in the pond's heart, it was a never no mind. After all, the pond still could speak a little of the Latin mass after many years absent from the church, and now treated it as a party trick to bemuse vulgar youffs.

Dressed in its invincibility cloak (with fetching cat tail), the pond wondered how the Murdochians might be spending the holyday season. There was a lot of advice doing the rounds ...

There was Rodney Tiffen in The Conversation offering sage insights in Memo to Rupert Murdoch: now is the time to sell Fox News.

Sell, sell, sell!

Merissa Marr, a consulting producer on Succession, was in the NY Times, and on the same Tiffen page in What Does Rupert Murdoch Do Now? (paywall)

She concluded:

...Waiting for the trust case to wind through the appeal process feels too pedestrian for the Murdochs. Resolving Rupert Murdoch’s legacy is a priority, and deal making is in his blood. He may want to take advantage of the incoming Trump administration and sell out completely to a sympathetic buyer. This, surely, would be Lachlan Murdoch’s least favored route, but it could net a giant pile of cash for everyone. Logan tried to do the same when he negotiated the sale of his empire to a nihilistic Nordic tech baron. (It could just as easily have been a South African one.)
Whether it is another round of legal shenanigans, a buyout, a sale or a new deal altogether, it will take time — and time may not be Rupert Murdoch’s friend. While he’s newly married and no doubt full of the youthful fervor that comes with that, my one piece of advice would be not to travel by private jet.

Oh that the pond could last long enough to see it come to pass - throw in the lizard Oz as well to sweeten the deal - but then the pond has finished Megalopolis, and so anything is possible.

After that, the pond turned to the lizard Oz with a sense of defiant invulnerability. Let them have at it ... let them try to match Megalopolis ...

Why the pond could even front Dame Slap, take her on the chin, and live to tell the tale, even as she offers a bizarre rant that could only emanate from the land of Planet Janet, whirling above the Faraway Tree ... In politics, the ‘modern moderate’ is nothing short of a con, If a political moderate advocates an idea, they will claim to be our moral saviour. If a political moderate disagrees with an idea, they will routinely deride the proponent of the idea as a moral reprobate.

The pond understands Dame Slap's sensitivity. She is after all routinely a moral reprobate and delights in her blonde sense of wickedness and fun ... and she has a far too easy target, John Pesutto holds a press conference after his loss to Moira Deeming in the Federal Court for defamation. Picture: Ian Currie

The notion that Pesutto is a moderate could only happen in Dame Slap's world and in the weirder sections of Victorian society. 

The last time the pond noted an actual policy initiative from Pesutto, an actual proposal, was a bit of black bashing, featured in the Graudian as John Pesutto finds a way to unite his party - and someone to blame for the housing crisis.

How to fix the housing situation? Indulge in a feeble attempt at bashing difficult, uppity black people:

...As former Victorian Liberal deputy state director Tony Barry has repeatedly said in the wake of the 2022 federal election and successive byelection losses, “you can’t create conservatives if they have got nothing to conserve”.
“If you don’t own a house, you can’t conserve. That’s our natural constituents and we need to get back to that,” Barry has said.
But is revamping CHMPs going to do that? According to the government and Indigenous groups, the answer is no.
The minister for treaty and first peoples, Natalie Hutchins, said the policy “won’t speed up any approvals”, noting fewer than 1% of developments require a CHMP.
The deputy premier, Ben Carroll, said it would do “nothing to alleviate the housing crisis”.
A spokesperson for the First People’s Assembly – the state’s democratically elected body representing traditional owners – said they were “not contacted or consulted with from anyone in the Liberal party” prior to Sunday’s policy announcement, despite having an “open door to political parties”.
“The data simply doesn’t support the suggestion that cultural heritage laws are holding up housing developments,” they said.
Marcus Stewart, an inaugural co-chair of the First People’s Assembly, went further. He accused Pesutto of “race-baiting” and attempting to “appease and throw some red meat towards the extremist right wing in his party” by blaming First Nations people for the housing crisis and pointed the finger at local councils for planning delays.

Well yes,  and the only reason that the enfeebled Victorian Labor government is still in office is that the Liberal party is full of nutters, weirdos, deviants, dropkick losers and loons pitching to the far right while fancying themselves as moderate.

Sorry, the pond recognises that was an avoidance tactic. Be Megalopolis strong, hearken to Dame Slap ...

Politics has a knack for neutering language. Take the word moderate. My dictionary defines moderate as “avoiding extremes of behaviour or expression: observing reasonable limits”. Like sensible health warnings at Christmas about our alcohol and pork crackling intake.
But when it comes to politics, moderate is a con. If a company used this word in the same way that, say, many moderate Liberals do, directors would be up on charges of misleading and deceptive conduct.
Before we get to the ruse, there are some other telltale identifiers of a political moderate. Take Liberal moderates. Many are as wet as the proverbial week-old lettuce leaf. Moderate in this sense means sentimental and emotional. Or to put it another way, completely free of sharp and rational analysis.
The other, related, trait of many political moderates is they haven’t had any recent big political wins.

At this point the reptiles cut away to Sharri, disrespect, and their own form of AV distraction:

Liberal Senator Hollie Hughes says the moderate faction has been the “dominant faction” in the New South Wales division of the Liberal Party for a while. “Andrew [Bragg] was always going to get re-preselected,” Ms Hughes told Sky News host Sharri Markson. “At the end of the day, he’s backed by the moderate faction in the Liberal Party, and they have been the dominant faction in the New South Wales division for a while. “He was always going to get there.”

Never mind, on with the bilious Dame Slap, offering her patented form of bile:

Before Malcolm Turnbull writes a letter to the editor about same-sex marriage, remember that reform was supported by people across the political spectrum – and, in any case, it was championed by Warren Entsch long before Turnbull did the victory lap in parliament.
The voice is the most recent example of the woeful political skills of modern moderates. Those moderates who supported the voice had a decade or so to win us over, yet the more they spoke about being on the right side of history, the less likely they were to succeed in inserting a race-based body into the Constitution. Their claim to the high moral ground made no sense; it was regressive and radical, not progressive and moderate to reject Martin Luther King’s dream that people should not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.
The worst political moderates are moral bigots. While most conservatives will contest an idea they disagree with by saying the idea is a bad one, and explain why, many moderates conflate an idea with the presumed morality of the person espousing the idea.
If a political moderate advocates an idea, they will claim to be our moral saviour. If a political moderate disagrees with an idea, they will routinely deride the proponent of the idea as a moral reprobate. Think the voice, again.
To illustrate, I can’t work out if former BBC journalist Nick Bryant wants to be a journalist and writer or a religious preacher. His morality lessons are as tedious as his book titles: The Rise and Fall of Australia: How a Great Nation Lost Its Way followed by When America Stopped Being Great. 

Ah, that's a sensitive subject for Dame Slap, what with her being a MAGA devotee, and so a believer in the tangerine tyrant's ability to make America great ... but first a snap of a loyal servant of the onion muncher and destroyer of the NBN, a lickspittle foot soldier to the far right ... Malcolm Turnbull

Dame Slap is proud to hang around with fringe nutters ...

I swear that most recent book title was scavenged from the first episode of Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom, where surly cable news anchor Will McAvoy slaps down a sorority girl for asking what makes America so great.
Whereas Sorkin is one of the most brilliant creators of television, Bryant is lucky that a country can’t sue for defamation. He would not have a truth defence for this incoherent blather.
Just before Christmas in 2022, Bryant suggested that Australia would be consigned to the international sin bin if we voted No to the voice. “A yes vote would help quash any lingering vestiges of the stereotype that Australia is a redneck nation. A no vote could be devastating and seen as proof that the country is a racial rogue nation,” he wrote.
More recently Victorian Liberal John Pesutto mastered the art of moral bigotry when defaming fellow Liberal Moira Deeming. After Deeming attended a Let Women Speak rally in March 2023, the Opposition Leader – a so-called Liberal moderate – could have taken her aside and said something measured like this: “Moira, you’re new to politics, so may I give you a few bits of advice. First, women’s rights are tremendously important to us Liberals, given attacks by radical trans activists.
“But, Moira, please be careful of those neo-Nazi nutters who turn up to protests. These attention-seeking crazies may end up wrecking your reputation and your career – and they may damage the Liberal Party too.”
Instead, Pesutto went full-frontal moderate – meaning there was nothing remotely measured about his attacks on Deeming and his attempt to have her expelled from the Liberal Party.
As Federal Court judge David O’Callaghan found last week, it was Pesutto – not neo-Nazis – who damaged Deeming’s reputation and career by defaming her as a Nazi sympathiser after the women’s march was gatecrashed by neo-Nazis.

Nothing Pesutto could do to damage Deeming's reputation could match Deeming's almost infinite capacity and ability to self-destruct. 

Just take this load of crank attitudes from her wiki (footnotes at the link):

...Deeming is well known for her anti-trans views. In her maiden speech before the Legislative Council, Deeming stated that she was against Victoria's Safe Schools program, transgender people accessing toilets corresponding to their gender, and the decriminalisation of sex work. Deeming has described Safe Schools as being created by "paedophilia apologists" and "sleazy". In 2020 she described the "watch and wait" approach for treating gender dysphoria as "highly successful, low risk"—in line with the Victorian Liberal Party's statement that while they oppose gay conversion therapy, the Andrews' government legislation "allows government interference in the relationships between medical professionals and patients," and "unfairly targets psychiatry and psychotherapy specifically".On 18 March 2023, Deeming spoke at an anti-trans rally, which was part of anti-transgender rights activist Kellie Jay Keen's speaking tour.
Deeming is anti-abortion, believes that laws legalising abortion need to be repealed, and believes that rape victims should reject abortions and turn to the church. She is against voluntary euthanasia. Deeming is against the COVID-19 vaccine mandates, and considers vaccine passports immoral and a form of segregation. As of September 2021 she said in an interview that she was unvaccinated, and that she'd be waiting and that she was reserving her judgement due to concerns. Deeming is against changing the date of Australia Day. She is a member of the conservative think-tank Institute of Public Affairs.

In short, a nutter of the kind that Dame Slap loves, but being something of a far right IPA nutter herself, all this would strike her as perfectly normal. That's the way it is on Planet Janet, far above the Faraway Tree.

Then for some obscure reason, the reptiles decided to promote Nick Bryant with a snap:

Then it was back to keeping company with the nutters:

Pesutto didn’t defame Deeming once; that might be vaguely moderate. He did it five times – in a media release, in radio and television interviews, at a press conference and in an expulsion motion and dossier – imputing the worst kind of wickedness. As the Federal Court judge found, Pesutto imputed “that Mrs Deeming associates with Nazis and is thus unfit to be a member of the parliamentary Liberal Party”.
At his press conference following the Let Women Speak rally, Pesutto defamed Deeming by conveying the imputation that she “participated in a rally and knowingly worked with … organisers to help them promote their odious Nazi agenda and their white supremacist and ethno-fascist views”.
In other words, the dictionary definition of moderate doesn’t apply to Pesutto.
After trying to claim the high ground by throwing dirt of the worst kind to impugn an opponent’s character, the Opposition Leader faces a $300,00 defamation award, along with staggering legal bills.
When JK Rowling congratulated Deeming a few days later, she exposed another common trait of so-called political moderates. The Harry Potter author and champion of women’s rights noted: “The ‘right side of history’ is racking up a hell of a lot of losses recently.”
Being “on the right side of history” is like being on the side of God – or a brutal Russian dictator – if you know anything about the roots of this phrase.
The biggest name to use historical determinism to try to win an argument – after Hegel and Marx – was Stalin. Marx was Hegel’s most famous student, and Stalin learnt about historical determinism from Marx. 

Oh FFS, the pond is determined to leave that determinism drivel to anybody who can take that kind of Dame Slap drivel seriously ...

And then that was compounded by a snap of the nutters forced together in a collage, Moira Deeming and JK Rowling;

The pond's only satisfaction is that Rowling's books are a regular feature at local street libraries and are slow movers. 

These days it's hard to give her away even for free, and after checking out the odd page of truly inept scribbling, the pond always passes on the chance to suffer ...

Some kids writers live on, others shuffle off to Charles Hamilton penny a word yarhooh whoop yow-ow-ow status, leaving only a panoply of loved characters behind.

But the pond is Megalopolis strong and summoned up the strength for the final gobbet:

The Russian tyrant assured his opponents that those who resisted his totalitarian regime were “on the wrong side of history”. More accurately, his opponents were on the wrong side of a gun, a forced labour camp or famine.
It’s not clear that those Australian historians who signed a joint letter during the voice debate, calling “on our fellow Australians to be on the right side of history” by voting Yes, knew their history.
“The right side of history” crutch to preclude debate is dodgy one.
The purveyors of this claim don’t want to think too hard about their views. They reckon their views are correct because they’re on the “right side of history”, and they’re on the “right side of history” because others can’t resist the onslaught of their views. Who’s going to argue with their circular reasoning?
We will.
So my Christmas wish involves a slight tweak to Eartha Kitt’s rendition of Santa Baby. Along with a 1954 light blue convertible, a sable and deed to a platinum mine for me, my wish is that political moderates find a dictionary and a book on Russian history under their Christmas tree.

Actually Dame Slap's real wish is that everyone have a MAGA cap under their bed, and a book on how to go full authoritarian fascist, with a deeply weird trans fixation as a bonus ...

It's fortunate that the pond doesn't do Dame Slap that often, because a reminder of her MAGA cap devotion is obligatory whenever the pond does ...

Then there were just two lines left ...

It’s fortunate I’m not a songwriter.
Thanks for reading and wishing you a very Merry Christmas.

Thanks for suffering with the pond, and the pond wishes everyone a very merry Saturnalia ...

And so to survey the rest of the scene this day ...

Oh dear, there's "Ned" nattering away in what purports to be the news section. Anything on the far right to distract the pond?

Nope, just a few reptiles in election mode, and blather about the ABC. The reptiles should be delighted. With Kim Williams and Hugh Marks - a genuinely inept dork and illustration of the Peter Principle - in charge, the broadcaster is pretty well doomed ...

Being Megalopolis strong, the pond didn't need to go there, but was up to the Everest challenge of an alleged five minutes of time wasting with "Ned", scribbling in "Ned's" inimitable Chicken Little style ... 

Note to Labor: Beware the ‘unpopular’ Liberal leader, Labor’s blunder is to miss the truth – conservative Liberal leaders are highly effective at attacking Labor. This has been obvious for years. Yet progressive apologists typically don’t get it.

"Ned's" piece started with one of those half-baked AI compiles, Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton face off.

The pond realised immediately that while it might be Megalopolis strong, it would need 'toon help to make it to the end ...

Yes, that's what's needed ...

On the eve of the 2025 election year the structure of politics looks utterly familiar. Another Labor government, this time the Albanese government, has underestimated an initially unpopular conservative Liberal Party leader, this time Peter Dutton.
It is a saga with a rich history. Indeed, John Howard in his opening run as Liberal leader was famously dismissed as “Mr 18 per cent” – a hopeless, unpopular conservative. In 2009 when Tony Abbott, another an unpopular conservative, became Liberal leader the Labor Party was euphoric, sure he was unelectable. When Scott Morrison, another unpopular conservative, became Liberal leader, Labor began measuring the curtains for the Lodge.
Unpopular conservative leaders have a conspicuous record of electoral success. They perform strongly against the Labor Party notably in their first outing. In the end, Howard won four elections, Abbott won in 2013 and Morrison won in 2019.

At this point the reptiles interrupted with a little AV distraction:

UNSW nuclear minerals engineer Dr Edward Obbard is “incredibly pleased” to see Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s “serious attempt” in pushing Australia towards nuclear. Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen has criticised the Coalition’s nuclear costings as a national embarrassment. Mr Bowen says Mr Dutton is reckless and risky for assuming Australia will use less energy by 2050. “I’m incredibly pleased to see a serious attempt at costing a combined grid that includes nuclear and renewables,” Mr Obbard told Sky News Australia. “No one has ever tried to do that in Australia before. “I think, clearly, the future is going to be a zero-carbon grid, where you have nuclear and renewables working together. “I’m actually really happy to see somebody trying to do that in a serious way. “So far, any of the costings we’ve had have really walled off the nuclear future as it were from the renewables one as if they were two fundamentally different futures for Australia, and I don’t think that’s true. I think you have to consider both together.”

Yeah, yeah ...

The pond felt the need to check out Ed, and luckily he had absolutely no skin in the 'nuke the country to save the planet' game ...

The pond keeds, the pond keeds, he's all in on nuking the planet, and that's got to be worth a 'toon:

Then it was on with "Ned", talking up the egg man:

In 2014 federal Liberal director, Brian Loughnane said: “History shows the successful Liberal leaders – Menzies, Fraser, Howard and Abbott – have come from the conservative side of the party. They secured the base and built upon it.” This is what Dutton is doing.
Every national election won by the Liberals since 1996 – Malcolm Turnbull’s 2016 victory aside – has been won by a leader from the conservative wing of the Liberal Party. Abbott and Morrison are examples of initially unpopular leaders who defied the orthodoxy and ran devastating campaigns against their Labor counterparts.
Labor has a bad record in judging Liberal leaders. After Morrison’s abject defeat in 2022, the Labor orthodoxy was that the Liberals would be consigned to opposition for years and that Dutton, an unpopular conservative, was unelectable and unlikely to revive Liberal fortunes.
Yet Dutton in 2½ years has achieved a polling position Labor once regarded as inconceivable. The latest Newspoll has the two-party preferred vote at 50-50 and Dutton leading Anthony Albanese on the question of leadership strength 60-44 per cent while the latest Bridgewater poll has the Coalition heading Labor 51-49 per cent.
This is not yet a winning position for Dutton. But it is making Labor highly uncomfortable. Labor didn’t anticipate the factors that have assisted Dutton.

Just in case no one knew, the reptiles reminded the hive mind of Anthony Albanese:

Okay, okay, there were reasons to laugh aplenty during Megalopolis and that's one of the reasons that the pond could make it to the end.

The same applies to "Ned" talking up the mutton Dutton. Try this for a laugh:

Dutton is unchallenged as leader now and likely for some years. His method is to consolidate the conservative vote and then appeal to the centre; his conservatism is essential to minimising breakaways to the right. 

Appeal to the centre? That produced a peal, neigh a gust of laughter ...

Perhaps poor depressed Wilcox was right ...

Today the mutton Dutton appealed to the centre by nuking the country but refusing to provide details. 

There weren't many details in "Ned" either ... just a lot of barking and chasing in the hope of catching the bus ...

His success has been to rebuild Coalition support in the mode of the Howard “battlers”; his tactics are to run relentlessly on values, attack Labor over cost-of-living pressures and target Anthony Albanese as a weak leader.
Analysis that the Liberals faced an existential dilemma after the 2022 election, given the success of the teals, is probably correct. Dutton is gradually moving the Liberals away from that existential dilemma but the party is far from out of the woods. The task of regaining many teal seats in 2025 remains daunting. Albanese is favoured to be a minority prime minister post-election.
Labor’s related blunder is to miss the truth – conservative Liberal leaders are highly effective at attacking Labor, its beliefs and its policies. This has been obvious for years. Yet progressive apologists typically don’t get this – they complain that Liberal leaders are too negative, too policy dumb or even get an easy ride from the media. This just misses the point.
The conservative attacks work because Labor’s policies and values are flawed. This was apparent during the Rudd-Gillard era and it is still apparent. You can’t have a 30 per cent primary vote and pretend you are in touch with the community. But what does Labor do? It just doubles down – it delivers more of the same when the same isn’t working. This is not smart politics. Paul Keating and Bill Kelty sounded the siren but nothing happened.
Albanese, in effect, rolled out the red carpet and turned Dutton’s leadership into a startling success. Albanese’s dilemma arises from the clever tactics he used to win office in 2022 – an agenda of reassurance, no pledges of big tax and big spending, and no frightening the public on economic policy.

Here's a measure of "Ned", and where he lives in his mind, and what the reptiles think is their key core demographic:

Gough Whitlam addresses the crowd near Parliament House, Canberra, after his dismissal by Sir John Kerr. Picture: Ross Duncan

The pond remembers, but what on earth would vulgar youff make of that sort of trip down "Ned's" memory lane?

Really? Still Goughing after all these years? Goughing as a way to assert gravitas, a kind of Ancient Mariner?

It worked a treat. But the voters still weren’t persuaded by Albanese. Who was he? Even Labor’s 2022 campaign review conceded Morrison’s unpopularity was the pivotal factor, not regard for Albanese. Labor fell into office.
This left open the big question: what did Labor really believe? And Labor’s still sorting that out. It is an unconvincing Labor government – devoid of Gough Whitlam’s panache, Bob Hawke’s command or Kevin Rudd’s assurance. The Albanese government has been cautious where it should have been strong and strong where it should have been cautious.
It needed to be far stronger running a tougher anti-inflation agenda, pushing a productivity agenda with guts, and installing better foundations for private sector investment; meanwhile it pushed too hard on the Indigenous voice, the pro-union IR changes, its gas-sceptic, pro-renewables posture, its across-the-board faith in state power and its immigration policy that lacked control and discipline.
Albanese gave Dutton the ultimate prize – his failure to deliver on his 2022 pledge to tackle the cost of living and increase living standards. There’s progress, but not enough. The upshot – Labor’s agenda is still suffocated by the cost-of-living bogy, now entering the third year. This is tied to Albanese’s conviction deficit – he hasn’t yet found a substitute for the voice, not since the public said no to his appeal from the heart.
The situation has been compounded by Albanese’s ineffective response to anti-Semitism since October 2023. Labor, again, thought this was smart politics – play down the problem, say the right things but do little, stay alert to the Muslim vote. But the perception, far beyond the Jewish community, is that Albanese looked a weak leader in responding to one of the gravest threats to community cohesion in this country since World War II. It wasn’t smart politics, just the reverse.

Say what?

...one of the gravest threats to community cohesion in this country since World War II

Sheesh, how to talk down the Murdochians, the gravest threat to community cohesion in this country since the lizard Oz began and Adrian Deamer was sacked.

Then the reptiles turned to an unholy triptych, Former prime ministers John Howard, Scott Morrison and Tony Abbott. Picture: Kym Smith

All gone now, all just memories ... a bit like that other wretch celebrated by the infallible Pope ...

That's one of the pond's favourite poems ...

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Rupert, Chairman Emeritus;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Sorry, there's still one last gobbet of "Ned" to go ...

Dutton has exploited every blunder. The weaker Albanese looked, the stronger Dutton looked. And Labor sat pat. What the hell happened to its political brains?
In Australia’s polarised climate something else is starting to happen to Dutton. He’s not a Donald Trump type figure. But he’s becoming more than a Liberal leader – he is becoming a symbol for people who feel disenfranchised, overlooked by the system, denied a voice and patronised by the elites. These “forgotten people” in 2025 constitute a growing segment of the population and every move by progressives – from backing identity politics, bagging Australia Day, championing high immigration, altering the way people live, promoting distinctions on race, sex and gender, and deploring Dutton on the flag – only boosts Dutton’s profile.
The progressives don’t get it. Just as progressive Democrats in the US helped Trump to win, left progressives in Australia are Dutton’s best friends.
Dutton’s campaign on nuclear aspires to change the politics of climate change – the Coalition is in a better position being attacked for backing nuclear than being attacked as climate deniers. Again, the nuclear option is popular with the Coalition base but can appeal beyond that. It’s a big idea but just an idea.
The reality is that government-owned nuclear power stations constitute the biggest experiment in state power and nationalisation in Liberal Party history – the private sector isn’t interested, doesn’t believe the Liberal costings, bipartisanship is a pipe dream and realisation is a forlorn prospect. But the idea has traction. Labor will run a ferocious negative campaign – but it won’t necessarily work and it won’t save Labor from punishment over power bills. Is nuclear a trap for Dutton or for Labor?
Dutton’s biggest risk is the rollout of Coalition policies before the election. Unpopular conservatives often stumble at this hurdle – putting their money on the table. Labor hopes to thwart Dutton in the straight, calculating his skill as a policy advocate won’t match his skill as a Labor critic.

And that's the best that "Ned" has to offer. A desperate cynicism, a pandering which might see the mutton Dutton and the country be forced to catch the nuke bus ... a bit like that AUKUS sub bus ...

And it will soon see the United States reap the rewards from its recent Faux Noise inspired experiment in FA and FO ...

Remind us, "Ned" of the reality you so willingly contrive to ignore ...

The reality is that government-owned nuclear power stations constitute the biggest experiment in state power and nationalisation in Liberal Party history – the private sector isn’t interested, doesn’t believe the Liberal costings, bipartisanship is a pipe dream and realisation is a forlorn prospect. But the idea has traction. 

Yeay, go get 'em "Ned"... put the country in traction, because at heart you're now just a hollow shell yearning for the days of Gough when you thought of yourself as a contender ...

Meanwhile, in that other country ...Kremlin Insiders Spill Putin’s Secret Plan to Manipulate Trump (paywall)

It's also here ...

For those who prefer notes, here's the rest ...

And that's where the reptiles have landed, kissing cousin with the kissing cousin who's the kissing cousin who's kissing Vlad the sociopath ...

All thanks to the magic fairy living above the Faraway Tree ...