In which the pond almost nukes the country, but settles down for a serve of bigotry and bile ...

 

The pond almost didn't make it to herpetology studies today. 

Yesterday's news that Mein Gott, with the help of RFK Jr., had solved the climate crisis seemed like a reason to celebrate, take a day off, bung on a sickie, especially as the news was compounded by an urgent desire to do a binge viewing of Succession.

A highly esteemed correspondent made things worse by flinging the pond into nostalgia mode with a reference to Saltbush Bill ...which would set you back a shilling back in the day ...

Vulgar youff wouldn't have the first clue, but there was a time that Pix and Australasian Post were to be found lying around working and lower middle class family homes, with the Post specialising in truly mild titillation for manly men. 

You could have knocked the pond down with the proverbial Tamworth feather when it found that some mug expected mug punters to fork over a fortune for an ancient 1960s issue ...

Sixty five bucks. Someone's dreaming or the pond lost a fortune not saving the family treasures.

At the back of the Post there was usually a cartoon by Ken Maynard of Ettamogah Pub fame, while Pix ran with Jolliffe. You could have knocked the pond down again when it discovered that Trove had digitised Pix, and that you could find Joliffe in his native habitat.

Don't blame the pond for doing a Tootle, blame the highly esteemed correspondent and his willingness to mix nostalgia with take downs of Mein Gott and Dame Groan. 

The pond was further knocked askew by all the news yesterday of the Succession capers. 

Crikey made a right royal meal of it ...

The pond saw no reason to intrude on the Crikey paywall - the mother lode was still the NY Times' story featured yesterday in the pond, but FWIW, for those who can use the links:

Paddy Manning: ‘Fair to assume Lachlan gets fired the day Rupert dies’, Rupert and Lachlan’s attempt to amend the family trust may have backfired spectacularly, upending the Murdoch succession and deepening the divide within the family. 

Eric Beecher: Is this the beginning of the end for Rupert’s empire? Where does this bombshell finding leave the future of the century-old conservative media empire — one that meddles ferociously in the politics of the US, the UK and Australia?

Charlie Lewis: The wildest details to come out of Murdoch’s failed Project Harmony case (spoiler: it’s all about Succession), Rupert Murdoch has failed to ensure his eldest son Lachlan controls his media empire after his death. We pick through the peculiar details of a case shrouded in secrecy.

Charlie ended with the Succession angle:

...the Nevada proceedings revealed that the Murdoch kids started discussing a PR strategy for Rupert’s eventual death in April 2023, inspired by the then recent Succession episode (SPOILER ALERT) in which fictional patriarch Logan Roy suddenly dies, leaving, as the commissioner wrote, “his family and business in chaos”.
Attempting to avoid any life imitating art, Elisabeth’s representative to the trust, Mark Devereux, swiftly wrote a “Succession memo”.

The Daily Beast took the same angle with its summary of the NY Times' story:

To top it all off, the immortal Rowe had a field day...

None of this disturbed the reptiles this day, as they carried on with their jihad, their holy war ...

Speaking of the jihad, the pond also read the keen Keane in Crikey ...

Dutton’s kowtow to Netanyahu splits Australians into two classes: ordinary people and Muslims, Peter Dutton and the Coalition have repeatedly placed the interests of Israel's government above Australia's social cohesion and national interests.

Keane showed remarkable restraint in not explicitly mentioning the reptiles' holy war, but they were in the mix.

Inter alia:

...The Coalition has also repeatedly called for Australian foreign policy to be made compliant with Netanyahu’s demands, railing at the Albanese government for joining most of the world in calling for a Palestinian state. According to Dutton and his frontbenchers, this was not merely an abandonment of Israel but an attack on civilisation itself.
Dutton’s home affairs shadow minister James Paterson also criticised the government’s refusal to permit extremist former Israel politician Ayelet Shaked to enter the country, in the face of Israeli demands that she be allowed in. Shaked has endorsed the murder of Palestinian mothers (who raise “little snakes”) and called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza.
Paterson expressed outrage that Shaked wasn’t allowed into Australia to peddle such hate, as if Australia’s immigration laws should be suspended for figures linked to the Israeli government. If John Howard said that we would decide who comes to the country and the circumstances in which they come, it seems that for the Coalition it is now Benjamin Netanyahu who will decide who comes to Australia. No Palestinians would be permitted to enter, being automatic security threats, according to Dutton, but those who want to see Palestinians murdered and ethnically cleansed are perfectly welcome.
Allowing in a hateful figure like Shaked would have been clearly damaging to Australia’s social cohesion, but that’s seemingly irrelevant to the Coalition. In addition to denouncing any protests against Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing as antisemitic and calling for the banning of Palestinians from entering Australia, Dutton — who has a history of vilifying Muslims — has now effectively accused the government of inciting terrorist attacks on synagogues.
Yesterday, however, the Coalition took a further step. NSW Senator Dave Sharma — who has a history of trying to play down Islamophobia (as Josh Frydenberg sought to do on Saturday) — moved to open denial of the existence of Islamophobia in Australia. It’s “fictitious”, Sharma insists.
Sharma presumably thinks Islamophobic vandalism never happened, death threats against Muslims are an invention, that Australian Muslims are lying when they say they’ve been targeted for abuse, that the arson attack on an Islamic school bus just hours before Sharma’s comments was some sort of false flag operation. What next — claims of a Muslim conspiracy to create a false equivalence with antisemitism?
That a major party politician blatantly denied the existence of Islamophobia even as an Islamic school was dealing with an arson attack should have been widely reported. Instead, the ABC was the only major outlet to report Sharma’s shocking comments — illustrating the profound racism and hostility to Muslim Australians that pervade our commercial media. Apparently the prime minister playing tennis is a more worthy subject for outraged journalists.
For the Coalition under Dutton, there are evidently two classes of Australians: ordinary people, and Muslims. The latter are automatically security threats, should not be allowed to enter the country, and should be deported if they criticise Israel. The attacks on their schools and their claims of being threatened, abused and vilified should be dismissed as fabricated.
These are the sentiments of people who place Australia’s social cohesion a distant second to enthusiastically endorsing a government engaged in — according to the International Criminal Court and Human Rights Watch — war crimes, crimes against humanity and — according to Amnesty International — genocide.
For the Coalition and commercial media, Muslim Australians are second-class citizens. Their pain is mocked as fabricated. Their grief is derided as innately racist. Their fears are denied as fictitious. Their protests are automatically illegitimate. They matter less than the rest of us, because they’re not really us at all. They’re foreign, Others, to be kept out, kicked out and kept in line.
In that, we’re different in degree, but not in kind, from Netanyahu’s Israel.

There was a cartoon to go with all that ...

The pond was wrenched away from the nostalgia and the ethnic cleansing and the genocide and the wild-eyed bombing of Syria and the seizing of land by imperial Israel when at last it turned to the extreme far right feature of the lizard Oz ...

Sheesh, the rag had gone full MAGA ... though that Pearl-clutcher piece about the RBA seemed to have missed the Trumpian memo about the need for the US Reserve to take the knee and kiss the ring.

Up above the pearl-clutcher, Bergin and a lesser member of the Kelly gang were kissing the Benji ring and atop it all - top of the world ma - was a return of the mad monk himself, peddling his patented brand of bigotry, hatred and bile ...

With a deep sigh of regret, the pond abandoned the 1950s to plunge back into the 1950s... Australia can’t wimp out on migration debate, Countries have a right and even a duty to keep their character. Having a non-discriminatory immigration policy doesn’t mean accepting everyone from anywhere all the time.

Wimp? It says so much about the cock-flaunting macho mindset of the Charles Atlas clone that he should deploy the "wimp" word, though sook or pussy or the Tamworthian "cowardly custard" would serve just as well ...

Well, plunging into the morass of the onion muncher's mind is always a dirty business, but someone's got to do it ... though the omens weren't good, with the mad monk's opening snap featuring Former prime minister John Howard delivers a speech in Adelaide in October 2001.

It was time to go full Pauline, and kick the Hansonite migrant can down the road yet again ...

John Howard was right when he famously declared, in the run-up to the 2001 election: “We shall decide who comes to this country and the circumstances under which they come”.
Immigration has such ramifications for the economy, for society and potentially for security too that it has to be closely managed by national governments; yet too often it’s effectively subcontracted out to educational bodies, using overseas students as cash cows, businesses too shortsighted to train and pay locals, or even to people smugglers preying on those desperate for a better life.
Mass migration means downward pressure on wages, upward pressure on housing costs and massive pressure on infrastructure of every type. Often it strains social cohesion too as newcomers from very different backgrounds struggle to integrate. Illegal migration at scale is even more problematic as it’s a form of peaceful invasion and a threat to national sovereignty as well as living standards.
Reducing the current very high levels of migration from comparatively poor to comparatively rich countries means overcoming the vested interests of those who benefit from it: namely schools and colleges selling an immigration outcome in the guise of “export education”; employers who want cheap and abundant surplus labour; and ethnic activists looking for numbers to boost their political clout.

Why do this all over again? Why is the mad monk back on Sky News, jaw jutting in heroic pose?

Former prime minister Tony Abbott joined Sky News Australia to speak out on the one-year anniversary of the Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel. “Yes, this is a grim day, but it’s also a brave day,” Mr Abbott told Sky News host Peta Credlin. “Grim because we’ll remember the dead and we mourn with their families. “But brave because we see all the efforts that the Israeli government and people are making to defeat their foes.”

The one year anniversary? There's been much genocide and ethnic cleansing since then, and yet how the reptiles love to dwell in the past.

It's all about the art of division and distraction, uglification and reeling and writhing, as noted by the cawing Crowe in the Nine rags, Indigenous flag an easy target for Dutton when he's kicking down .... (paywall)

...Dutton invites a backlash from Indigenous leaders about his remarks but no doubt calculates that this will work for him – just as the progressive attacks on Donald Trump seemed to amplify his message and help him win.
The Trumpian tactics are obvious. Some conservatives are cheering Dutton for challenging the “woke” agenda – even though Indigenous Australians Minister Malarndirri McCarthy points out the Indigenous flags have been official flags of Australia for decades.
The timing is revealing. Dutton is about to reveal the costings of his nuclear energy policy but is happy to detonate an Indigenous dispute. Labor wants this week to be all about nuclear, but Dutton knows the tricks required to set up a distraction.

And again:

...In doing so, of course, he plays a nakedly political game over Indigenous rights without doing anything practical to help. That is not leadership.
Dutton calculates that this will work, but he risks paying a political price. Will voters really thank him for talking about flags instead of telling them what he will do about the cost of living? Do Australians want three years of culture war after the next election?
Labor is trying to brand Dutton as angry, negative and divisive. His latest ploy makes him look all three.

But it worked for the tangerine tyrant and dare the pond mention that the recent dastardly CSIRO report. might have required a little extra homework on those pesky, difficult costings ...

Additional analysis on three key nuclear generation topics

Based on public discussion of GenCost’s approach to nuclear generation since the 2023-24 final
report release, the three most common areas of contention are: 

• The capital recovery period should be calculated over the entire operational life (e.g. 60 years), and not the industry standard of 30 years used in GenCost
• Due to US experience, capacity factors of below 93% should not be considered (GenCost uses the range 53% to 89%)
• The nuclear development lead time should be 10 to 15 years, not 15 years or greater as proposed by GenCost.

Additional evidence and analysis of these topics has been provided in this consultation draft.

Nuclear technology’s long operational life

Nuclear advocates have asked for greater recognition of the potential cost advantages of nuclear
technology’s long operational life and CSIRO has calculated those cost advantages for the first
time. Our finding is that there are no unique cost advantages arising from nuclear technology’s
long operational life. Similar cost savings are achievable from shorter lived technologies, even
accounting for the fact that shorter lived technologies need to be built twice to achieve the same
life.
There are several reasons for the lack of an economic advantage from longer operational life.
Substantial refurbishment costs are required, and without this new investment nuclear cannot achieve safe long operational life. When renewables are completely rebuilt to achieve a similar project life to nuclear, they are rebuilt at significantly lower cost due to ongoing technological improvements whereas large-scale nuclear technology costs are not improving to any significant extent owing to their maturity. Also, due to the long lead time in nuclear deployment, the limited cost reductions achieved in the second half of nuclear technology’s operational life, when the original capital investment is no longer being repaid, are not available until around 45 years from now, significantly reducing their value to consumers compared to other options which can be deployed now.

Nuclear generation capacity factors 

GenCost has always provided a capacity factor range for every generation technology rather than a single point estimate. However, nuclear advocates would prefer GenCost only consider a single value of 93% which is the average capacity factor achieved in the United States. To be clear GenCost agrees that high capacity factors of around 90% are achievable for nuclear generation. However, a prudent investor (government or private) must prepare for all plausible eventualities. The fact is that the global average capacity factor for nuclear generation is 80% and 10% of nuclear generation is operating at below 60%. This is because circumstances vary widely between countries and even within a country there is a merit order for generation dispatch. On international data alone, the proposition of only considering a 93% capacity factor is not supported by the evidence.
However, our preference is to always use Australian data where it is available. In Australia we have more than 100 years of experience with operating baseload generation, not nuclear but coal. Some black coal plants operate at close to 90% capacity factor but the average for black coal in the past decade is 59%. On this basis a single point estimate of 93% does not adequately capture the plausible range achievable in Australia. GenCost bases its capacity factor assumptions for all baseload technologies – coal, gas, and nuclear – on the Australian evidence, applying a maximum  of 89% and minimum of 53%. The minimum is based on the same formula that we apply to renewables (the minimum capacity factor for new build generation is assumed to be 10% below the average capacity factor of existing equivalent generation). 

Nuclear development lead time

The development lead time includes the construction period plus all of the preconstruction activities such as planning, permitting and financing. Many stakeholders have agreed with the GenCost estimate of at least 15 years lead time for nuclear generation. Those stakeholders that are more optimistic cite two alternative sources, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) who have an estimate of 10 to 15 years and the recent completion of a nuclear project in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) had a 12 year lead time. Both estimates are in relation to building nuclear for the first time. This consultation draft provides additional analysis of nuclear lead times to examine this issue more closely. We examine recent construction times and their relationship with the level of democracy in that country.
In the last 5 years, median construction time has increased to 8.2 years compared to 6 years when
the IAEA made their estimate in 2015. This increase in construction time cannot be explained by the pandemic because median construction times were longer in the two years preceding the pandemic (8.6 and 9.8 years). Note that most of the historical construction time data is dominated by countries with established nuclear industries and so may be optimistic for a first-time country.
There is some statistical evidence for the impact of the degree of democracy on nuclear lead times. Pakistan, China and the UAE have had the fastest construction times in the last decade with average construction times of 6 to 8 years, but their democracy index scores are low. Finland, South Korea, the United States (US) and India all had construction times 10 years or longer with high democracy scores. The two Western democracies in this list, Finland and the US had construction times of 17 and 21 years respectively which is significantly longer than the Asian democracies.
Another factor which is correlated with shorter construction times is the existence of an ongoing building program rather than long intervals between projects.
Given the direction of construction data available after the report’s release, the IAEA range of 10-15 years should likely be reinterpreted as 12 to 17 years to allow for the extra 2 years median construction time which now prevails. The lower part of this new range, 12 years, would be consistent with the UAE experience. Australia is not likely to be able to repeat the UAE experience because our level of consultation will be consistent with our higher level of democracy and the experience of other Western democracies. As such, at least 15 years remains the most plausible lead time.

Sorry, so sorry, the pond didn't mean to go there... talk about an epic bout of distraction ...

...but there's only so much bigotry and bile the pond can take in a sitting without seeking some comic relief. 

If the pond hears Judaeo-Xian culture out of the lips of the onion muncher one more time, the pond is likely to let out a shout which would make even the shouty Skolimowski go silent ...

It also means resisting the policy makers who think all migration is good migration because it helps to dilute an “oppressive” Judaeo-Christian culture or because it supposedly boosts the economy and enriches a previously sterile “Anglo” culture.
This is only true if the newcomers are, on average, at least as skilled and sophisticated as the existing population – a very dubious proposition, given that the temporary cessation of immigration during the pandemic did not lead to a sudden shortage of brain surgeons and rocket scientists but of cleaners, drivers, carers, waiters and pickers.
Immigration certainly boosts overall GDP but not necessarily GDP per person (which is the best proxy for living standards and economic strength) and can often be a lazy substitute for productivity-boosting economic reform.
Stopping illegal migration means resisting bleeding heart pleas that rich countries have no right to refuse entry to people from poorer ones, even if those demanding “asylum” have passed through several safe countries to their preferred destinations where jobs are plentiful and social welfare generous. It also means finding the political will to bypass the judicial activism that’s plagued immigration detention in Australia and sabotaged the recent British policy to send irregular maritime arrivals to Rwanda.
Decision-makers are often reluctant to canvas changes to immigration policy for fear of upsetting migrants and being called racist. Because vast numbers of people from poorer countries would like to live in richer ones, this reluctance to discuss immigration means that migrant numbers tend inexorably to increase and host countries’ cultures tend inevitably to change. The risk is that countries’ characters could quite substantially evolve and the paradox is this could be the very last thing that most migrants want.
Migrants only move to countries they regard as being in some significant way better than their homeland. In effect, they are voting with their feet in favour of their preferred destination and against their current homeland. At least for the vast majority, they’re coming not to change us but to join us.

The reptiles compounded all this with a standard misrepresentation, Hamas supporters rally outside the Sydney Opera House on October 9, 2023. Picture: Getty Images

It's so easy to defame those who deplore genocide and ethnic cleansing and mass starvation and sundry other war crimes. They automatically become "Hamas supporters" in the lizard Oz hive mind ...

It always bemuses the pond at the way that migrants are given to slagging off migrants.

The onion muncher was himself a ten pound Pom ...

... blessed with that ineffable sense of intrinsic superiority that marks the English when they want to be obnoxious ...

But over time, in sufficient numbers, change us they do. Mostly, but not always for good. Most migrants understand this. That’s why it’s almost impossible to find a recent immigrant who’s critical of the country, who isn’t somewhat concerned about subsequent immigrants, and who doesn’t readily understand that IT consultants from India, say, will generally have less trouble settling in than, say, illiterate farmers from sub-Saharan Africa or brainwashed Islamists from Gaza; hence the observation that it’s usually the last one in who wants to lock the door.
Thanks to many individual migrants, countries like Australia have finer food, better universities and a more sophisticated high culture. Without migrants, many industries would find it harder to operate. But in part because of recent migrants from the Middle East, as well as neo-Marxist ideas about Jews’ “white privilege”, there’s also massively increased anti-Semitism, typified by our October 9 day of infamy on the steps of the Sydney Opera House when a large crowd marched to the Sydney Opera House chanting “F*** the Jews” and what sounded very much like “gas the Jews”, but that NSW police forensically analysed to be “where’s the Jews”, as if that made it alright.
In most Western countries the anti-Jewish tirades, near riots, and mini-Kristallnachts started even before Israel’s just war against Hamas in the aftermath of the October 7 atrocity. Yet authorities have danced around prosecuting or deporting hate preachers, clearing encampments and banning disruptive protests because they don’t want to be accused of a non-existent Islamophobia, especially by the militant leaders of poorly integrated immigrant communities, which in Australia and even more in Britain, now comprise a large proportion of some cabinet ministers’ electorates.
Countries have a right and even a duty to keep their character. This is especially important in countries like Australia and New Zealand where fully 30 per cent of the population is overseas-born, double the rate in the US and UK.
Having a non-discriminatory immigration policy doesn’t mean accepting everyone from anywhere all the time. Especially as their migrant sources diversify, settler societies need a strong civic patriotism to replace fading ethnic and religious ones.

How low will all this go? 

As low as possible, with the reptiles breaking Godwin's Law with impunity, A man surveys the damage to the Lichtenstein leather goods store after the Kristallnacht pogrom in Berlin, November 1938.

It's hard to know what's more obnoxious, the invocation of the Nazis or the bullshit blather about joining Team Australia. If the onion muncher's on that team, please excuse the pond for joining another team or deciding not to play the game ...

Talk about the 1950s and “I love God and my country, I honour the flag, I will serve the Queen, and cheerfully obey my parents, teachers and the law”.

Well the Queen is dead, and they can serve the current talking tampon King as much crap as they like, but the pond will cheerfully cock a snoot at the humbug emanating from the void ...

That means a clear insistence that migrants to Australia join Team Australia rather than simply live in Hotel Australia. The expectation has to be that migrants integrate quickly and eventually assimilate. If it’s not to mean becoming a nation of jostling tribes, being “multicultural” can mean no more than a measured approach to integrating and assimilating, perhaps in the next generation.
That need not mean loss of community distinctiveness. Jewish Australians for instance have managed to maintain their religious and cultural personalities across multiple generations, and also their interest in Israel, while, if anything, over-contributing to our national success and helping to shape our national character.
Sovereign nations can’t let immigrants self-select via paying an educational institution or a people smuggler. Simply getting here can’t mean staying here. The best way to ensure immigration is working for our existing citizens as well as for our new migrants is to base it around specific employment: if someone has a specific job offer, from a specific employer, at a fair market wage, with a foreign worker tax to be paid by the employer to the government to help cover infrastructure, and can stay em­ployed and out of trouble for five years, then that person and his or her immediate dependants would undoubtedly make a fine Australian family, paying tax and contributing meaningfully from day one.
In the West, in Europe no less than in North America, there’s alarm at the damage done by uncontrolled migration. Irregular migration has to be stopped, preferably with “dreamers” swiftly and safely returned to their place of origin.
Even legal migration has to be run much more obviously for host countries’ benefit. This is especially important for settler societies, like ours, if the social licence for immigration is to be preserved, and is not a denial of our Australian nationhood, with an Indigenous heritage, a British foundation and an immigrant character, but the only way to preserve it.

In short, noting that dog whistle to Jewish Australians and giving them a free pass to be Jewish, in much the same way that the onion muncher swears allegiance to a foreign power, the theocratic Stato della Città del Vaticano, the implication for the different and the other is clear enough:

For the Coalition and commercial media (and the onion muncher), Muslim Australians are second-class citizens. Their pain is mocked as fabricated. Their grief is derided as innately racist. Their fears are denied as fictitious. Their protests are automatically illegitimate. They matter less than the rest of us, because they’re not really us at all. They’re foreign, Others, to be kept out, kicked out and kept in line.
In that, we’re different in degree, but not in kind, from Netanyahu’s Israel.

How weird is it for a devoted atheist to think that Palestinians have copped a raw deal?

The one relief? The onion muncher is now a stranger in this strange land, and must wander the world preaching his bigotry and bile, with only the reptiles in the lizard Oz hive mind paying attention, and bringing his remarks back home, like some unwanted immigrant:

Tony Abbott was prime minister of from 2013 to 2015. This article is based on remarks he delivered last week to the Danube Institute-Heritage Foundation forum in Washington.

No one else noticed, no one else cared ... and as for the United States, how happy the reptiles would be if they could export its unique brand of division and hate ...