In which the pond scores a bizarre trifecta, Lloydie of the Amazon, Lord Downer and the Caterist ...

 

Whenever Lloydie of the Amazon turns up these days, the pond leaps to attention, and is invariably disappointed, and so it was this day, when Lloydie was briefly over on the extreme far right of the digital edition of the lizard Oz, top of the reptile world ma ...

The reptiles promised only a two minute read, and that seemed like a purgatorial lifetime... Stark choice between Peter Dutton, Anthony Albanese: two very different leaders, Peter Dutton is working hard to make the choice for voters a character test – two people who have taken different pathways to end up in the same place and see the future in very different ways.

It seems that Lloydie of the Amazon has given up on environmental matters, or perhaps the reptiles told him to pull out his finger and contribute, and never mind the quality or the insight, just feel the word count and the verbiage, a tragic two minute read in reptile speak.

Whatever, the result was so soft core that it verged on the political pornographic, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

What's remarkable is the way that Lloydie of the Amazon swallowed that old cliché of pollies trotting out bull about life lessons, when cliff top Albo is a multi-millionaire, and the mutton Dutton has an estimated worth of some $300 million, the result of buying, renovating and converting buildings into childcare centres, aka gulags for the young.

And yet here we are ...

Anthony Albanese has made a good deal of his “origin story” of growing up in public housing in Sydney from where he rose to the nation’s highest political office.
On Sunday, it was Peter Dutton’s turn to lay out the detail of his formative years and the values they instilled in him and what they would mean if he were to be given the chance to lead the ­nation.
The contrast between the two leaders’ life experience is ­illustrative. Both came from relatively modest beginnings but each had a different pathway to political ­office. The Prime Minister was a product of student politics and worked as a bank officer for one year before being taken into the Labor Party machine.
The Opposition Leader had exposure to the sort of work opportunities and life lessons that are too often missing in our elected officials.
His life journey of enterprise defines the Liberal traditions of family, hard work and reward for effort, values Dutton says will shape the way he would govern.
He worked from grade 7 through to university throwing newspapers, mowing lawns and helping in a butcher’s shop after school and on Saturdays.
He saved a house deposit and bought his first home at 19.
Dutton ran a small business that employed 40 people, he was a police officer for nine years where he was exposed to the worst and best of human nature.
He became an investigator of organised crime, drug trafficking and sex offenders, sharpening, he says, his concern for the protection of women and family safety.

Just to rub in this hagiographic fawning, the reptiles provided an AV distraction:

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is vowing to get Australia back on track at a pre-election rally in Melbourne. His headline pledges are to fix the economy and deliver affordable energy. Mr Dutton argues Australia is worse off under Anthony Albanese, describing the current Prime Minister's government as “weak and incompetent”.
The Liberal leader says electing the Coalition will be the last chance to reverse the “economic and social decline of Australia".
 

The pond gets it, the mutton Dutton has made his pitch, and some reptile had to transcribe it, but this is the best Lloydie could do?

Mr Dutton has doubled down on the Coalition's nuclear plan, claiming it will transform Australia's economy. 

Why is it even in the opinion section if that's all Lloydie can muster? 

Ah, that'll resonate with Lord Downer ...

The rest was just as pathetic and offered a feeble attempt at both siderism, with Lloydie the Amazon butcher's thumb heavily on the scale in just one direction.

Dutton has been in parliament for 23 years, was assistant treasurer under Peter Costello and immigration minister when Aus­tralia faced a defining moment on cutting off the people-smuggler trade to stop people dying at sea.
As defence minister, he played a pivotal role in establishing AUKUS.
In his speech to launch the ­Liberal Party’s campaign for what will be a hard-fought election, Dutton returned to the basics of Liberal philosophy and tradition.
This is that family is the most important unit in society and that business and industries, not ­governments, are the main source of enterprise and wealth creation.
“Australians are best served by smaller government which gets off their back, supports free ­enterprise, and rips up regulation”, he said.
The responsibility of government was to get the big things right; manage the economy responsibly; ensure our nation was secure and self reliant and its citizens feel safe.
This is the big divide.
Dutton says the Albanese government has built bigger government to exert more power, instead of creating better government to empower citizens. If re-elected, it has promised more of the same.
Dutton says he will lower taxes, protect superannuation, assist small business, unwind industrial relations laws that punish causal workers, restrain trade union excesses, address immigration and its impact on housing and sort out the growing energy mess.
In reality, Dutton might not be able to do any of these things but what he says is a sliding doors moment for the nation is rooted in the real ideological divide between the two major parties.
He is playing to the Liberals’ traditional strengths as a strong leader, something that paid dividends for John Howard and Tony Abbott, who both wrested government from Labor.
Polling shows Labor has underestimated the voter appeal of Dutton and must do more than assume he is unelectable.
He is working hard to make the choice for voters a character test between two very different leaders – two people who have taken different pathways to end up in the same place and see the future in very different ways.

If Lloydie of the Amazon keeps going on like this, the pond will have to take him off the required reptile reading list. 

Gone, it seems, are the glory days of climate science FUD, and instead, there's just a husk, a shell, a pathetic tosser of a reptile.

To be fair, Lloydie was just doing what reptiles are required to do, with the mutton Dutton top of the "news" portion of the rag, still nuking the country to save the planet ...

That's why the pond sought refuge with Lord Downer, out and about on his new reptile Monday gig with No value to nation in deconstructing Australia Day, The hard Left who have campaigned for Indigenous rights over recent decades have often embraced the deconstructionist political philosophy. It has achieved nothing.

It must be that time of year again, and sure enough the reptiles showed that they were Sydney- and beach-centric, in a way predictable beyond banality, and reflecting nothing of the reality of those living in the bush or elsewhere than Sydney, People enjoy Australia Day at Bronte Beach in 2024. Picture: Nikki Short/NewsWire

If the pond sees another snap linking a Sydney beach with Australia day, it will let out a howl of Tamworth despair.

As for Lord Downer, talk of invasion day washed over him like a snag sausage doused in dead horse ...

As we approach Australia Day, we know the country will be engulfed in controversy about whether we should use January 26 to celebrate our country’s achievements.
It’s unfortunate this debate cannot be put to bed.
There’s a tendency for political debates to descend into those who think that justice can be achieved by deconstructing parts, if not all, of society, and those who want to build on our foundations. These are two very different approaches to objectives that are often shared across the political spectrum. Just about everyone wants a society they perceive to be fair; everyone wants equal rights for all people regardless of their gender, race or religion; and everybody wants Australia’s Indigenous cultures to be admired and respected as the oldest living cultures on Earth.
So how do we achieve those things in the most harmonious way possible?
For the deconstructionists, society needs to become financially more equal and that will happen if some of the wealth of high-income earners is destroyed.
The idea is simple. By imposing confiscatory levels of taxation on high-income earners, the wealthy will be levelled down and some of their prosperity redistributed to others. The idea is that no one will become really wealthy, no matter how hard they work or how inspirationally entrepreneurial they may be.
Experience shows this deconstructionist plan has two downsides. One is it discourages entrepreneurship and wealth creation, encouraging those people to seek greener pastures in other countries. As a result, some of the wealth-creating drivers of the economy are simply taken away, leaving the rest with less ability to support people in need.
What is more, there isn’t a finite quantity of wealth in society. If somebody is entrepreneurial and creative, they have the capacity to create wealth not just for themselves but for the whole community. The point is they create wealth rather than have wealth redistributed to themselves. So the deconstructionist approach will ultimately fail because it will destroy the wealth-creating capacity of society.
Then there are the gender issues. The rights of women can be advanced by destroying some of the rights of men and by discriminating against them in the workplace. That too has a downside. It doesn’t meet the traditional liberal virtue of judging all people on the basis of their merits, not their innate and unchangeable characteristics.
What is more, those who are discriminated against – males – will gradually grow to resent the discrimination. In the end, the deconstructionist approach will fail because there will be a revolt against it. So that brings us to reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. The deconstructionists argue that can be achieved by destroying some of the symbols and conventions of the nation. They assume the nation is inherently racist and much of it needs to be torn down. In particular, they regard the celebration of European settlement in Australia as immoral and inappropriate.

The reptiles compounded the banality by offering up this sort of empty-headed, vacuous dollar wasting nonsense ... cheap trinkets and distractions, beads and mirrors for mug punters, Australia Day merchandise. Picture: Glenn Campbell/NewsWire

Don't get the pond wrong, the pond is pleased at the way that the country has moved towards accepting gay rights (could do better on trans), where cross dressing is accepted as a personal foible, and anyone can indulge in it, on the basis of whatever floats their boat ...

It is however disappointing when a high heel lover thinks the point of the exercise is to shove a stiletto heel in the eye of those who had their country invaded and snatched away, and suffered assorted massacres ...

That point of view makes several assumptions. First, that Australia as a continent would have made a greater contribution to human welfare if no one other than the original human settlers had ever come to live. Secondly, it assumes European and subsequent development of Australia has been at best unsuccessful. That assumption is deeply flawed.
I have visited more than 100 countries around the world and I know of none that combines as well as Australia does a high standard of living for most people, extensive individual freedom of choice and expression, and almost unequalled multiracial harmony. To suggest this isn’t something to celebrate is just ignorance.
Thirdly, it assumes that Indigenous societies structured as they were in 1788 would have been sustainable until 2025. That was never going to happen. One of the nations with advanced technology – be it European or Asian – would eventually have taken control of the Australian continent.
Indeed, in all probability more than one nation would have done so, and that could have led to very real tensions between different parts of Australia.
The fact that the British settled Australia with their emerging commitments to human rights and economic progress, as well as democratic institutions accountable to the public and a rule of law under which all citizens would be equal, was, to say the least, a blessing for this continent.
But trying to destroy our national symbols and institutions has another downside. It is deeply offensive to the vast majority of Australians. To achieve what is called reconciliation may require tolerance, patience and the creation of new mechanisms. It might even require the creation of some new institutions, particularly educational institutions. But it won’t be achieved by destroying what is important to many people.
Mocking Australia Day, calling it invasion day and demonstrating only offends people. Councils that have cancelled Australia Day ceremonies irritate the majority of people.
Sure, these demonstrations please some Indigenous activists, particularly the more radical ones, as well as others in society who want to deconstruct our whole way of life. That isn’t most people.

So much to unpack in all that, but the pond left it all in the port so it could rush off to the beach.

Still, the pond did feel a twinge separate from the arrogance and racism.

Why couldn't Lord Downer have turned his sharp eye on other seasonal matters? Surely there were burning issues that might have appealed to his sharp mind ...

But when all you can offer is a mindless variation on "cancel culture", you know you're in the land of the vacuous pinhead, recycling the same old, same old ...

Trying to cancel our national day of celebration is not a contribution to reconciliation. It’s one of many divisive symbolic mistakes made by Indigenous activists. The other is using excessively the imported practice of acknowledging traditional owners. There’s a time and a place to do something like that, and all Australians certainly agree the whole nation, including Indigenous Australians, deserves respect. But inserting an acknowledgment at the beginning of every speech, every public event and even at private events is pretentious, patronising and insincere. More importantly, it is starting to irritate people, thereby becoming counter-productive.
The hard-left political activists who have campaigned for Indigenous rights over the past two or three decades have often embraced the deconstructionist political philosophy. It has achieved nothing. And it’s legacy is one of polite irritation throughout the mainstream of Australian society. They’re quiet about it but look how they voted on the voice.
So as we approach Australia Day, it would make more sense if we found ways of building on our strengths as a society rather than looking for ways to deconstruct. Building is likely to win the support of the public whereas deconstruction is only going to alienate vast swathes of our society.
Alexander Downer is a former foreign minister and high commissioner

13 days to go, and the pond is praying that other reptiles won't adopt the same simple-minded approach to providing filler, about as sustaining as eating the kapok that can be found in kapok mattresses.

Feeling decidedly empty, the pond turned to the Caterist, for a promised four minute read, Cold, hard energy lessons for Australia in UK’s grim winter’s tale, The nuclear debate has taken attention from our most immediate challenge: the critical gas shortage created in large part by the climate zealotry.

Now the average pond punter might think that the Caterist would deal with the haunting images coming out of the LA fires, but instead he took the low road Two skiers make their way along a road following the coldest night of winter so far, with an overnight low of -14.5C recorded at Altnaharra on January 10, 2025, in Crathie, Scotland. Picture: Getty Images

You might also think that the LA fires raised some questions about devotion to fossil fuels. Not for the Caterist ...

Britain’s last coal-fired power station closed at the end of September, throwing households to the mercy of the weather. Turbines and cooling towers at Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire are about to be demolished to make way for a zero-carbon technology and energy hub. Sadly, Britain’s green activists have no plans to follow coal into retirement. The curse, or joy, of being a fighter for progressive causes is that your work is never done.
“The priority now is to move away from gas as well,” Friends of the Earth’s Tony Bosworth told the Guardian. Friends of the Earth, like every other international green activist group, also opposes nuclear power. This begs the question: How will Britain keep the lights on without the three sources capable of providing baseload power? Bosworth’s clownish answer is posted on FoE’s website. “We have an abundance of natural resources like wind and solar,” he says. “They’ll go on forever, and we won’t be reliant on expensive gas and oil.”

You might even wonder how the Caterist begged the Hinkley Point C question, as noted by the Climate Council here, the UK’s Hinkley Point C energy facility is running 14 years late, at a cost three times its original estimate—now sitting at a staggering $90 billion AUD. 

There are any number of stories about nuclear fantasises, including another Climate Council story here which put the cost of Hinkley at A$97 million, while Nicki Hutley continued the yarn in the Graudian here. 

Mike Foley in the Nine rags wondered about the cost of decommissioning planets, posing it as The $80 billion question buried in Dutton's nuclear power plan.

The best the Caterist could do was to offer his standard form of sneering condescension ...

Climate activists are average people, driven by average calculations of average temperatures on average days projected into the future. On the other hand, people who run electricity systems focus on actual weather since much of the theoretical capacity at their disposal depends on it. So while activists were celebrating their symbolic victory over coal last autumn, energy operators were looking nervously at the long-range weather forecast and the prospect that the weakness of the Polar Vortex might continue into winter. Sure enough, it has, with a characteristic high-pressure system sitting stubbornly over Greenland blocking the Atlantic Gulf Stream winds that make the UK winter less intolerable.
Last week, an Arctic front hit with a vengeance, reducing temperatures to as low as minus-20 and burying parts of England in snow. The diminishing number of Brits who could afford to do so turned up the heating. Many are readers of the Guardian, 85 per cent of whom are in the top socio-economic group. The less affluent readers of the Daily Express were offered helpful tips using a 20m roll of aluminium foil selling for 99p ($1.97) at Aldi. Lining the wall behind the radiator apparently reflects more heat inside.
Demand for electricity rose to a high of 50GW on Wednesday, well above the 44.4GW peak predicted by the National Energy System Operator in its winter outlook, published just as 2GW of coal generation capacity from Ratcliffe-on-Soar was vanishing forever. Meanwhile, wind speeds fell, as they often do in winter when the Polar Vortex turns limp. In theory, NESO has 30GW of wind at its disposal. On Wednesday, as electricity demand went through the roof, only 3GW was available. Solar? Forget it, for this is Britain, after all, at the lowest point in the winter solstice.

Naturally at this point the reptiles offered up a fossil fuel treasure ...The Ratcliffe-on-Soar, the UK’s last coal-fired power station, which closed on September 30, 2024. (Picture: AFP)

Always with that undying devotion to coal, but the real kicker is going to be insurance. Elizabeth Kolbert wrote it up in The New Yorker in The Insurance Crisis that will follow the California Fires ... (paywall)

What is often referred to as California’s “insurance crisis” has been years in the making. The devastating Camp Fire, near Chico in 2018, caused an estimated sixteen and a half billion dollars’ worth of damage and led to a net loss for companies that had written fire policies in the state that year. In 2019, the number of homeowners’ policies in California that were not renewed jumped by more than thirty per cent. In 2023, two giant insurers, State Farm and Allstate, announced that they would stop writing new policies for various forms of property insurance in California. State Farm said the move came in response to inflation and “rapidly growing catastrophe exposure.” Last summer, it cancelled coverage for more than fifteen hundred homes in Pacific Palisades, the wealthy enclave where the first of the L.A. blazes began.
There are several reasons that “catastrophe exposure” in California has in recent years been growing. One is that more people are moving into wildfire-prone areas. Another is that fires are becoming more destructive, in large measure owing to climate change. A 2023 study concluded that the area consumed by summer wildfires in central and northern California has increased by five hundred per cent during the past several decades and that “nearly all of the observed increase” is due to warming. Another study, put out last year by the group Climate Central, found that rising temperatures had increased the number of “fire weather days”—windy, hot, and dry—throughout California. This was particularly the case in the desert basin east of L.A., which now has an average of sixty-one more such days per year than it did five decades ago. “As our climate warms, the chances of intense, fast-growing fires like the ones Californians are facing today will keep rising,” Kaitlyn Trudeau, a senior research associate at Climate Central, said on Wednesday.

Well yes, unless you happen to be a blinkered Caterist. 

California tried to get out of its insurance catastrophe exposure using a state-backed system going by the acronym FAIR, but there's a more than fair chance its future is bleak ...

...All of which raises the question of what role insurance can—and should—play in a warming world. As the dangers of climate change in California have increased, FAIR has absorbed much of the risk. This has been a boon to homeowners in the most fire-prone neighborhoods, but it could prove a burden to other state residents if they end up picking up the tab.
“The bet on the FAIR Plan is the state’s decision to do whatever it takes to keep property markets working, even in risky areas, and to mute the price signal of riskiness,” Susan Crawford, a clinical professor emeritus at Harvard Law, wrote in a recent Substack post. “That bet may now be being called. No one knows what will happen next.”

Meanwhile, the Caterist blathered on about poor old Britain ...

Where do the system operators turn next after scrounging 4GW of nuclear power from France and Belgium, and 1.5GW of hydro from Norway? They turn to gas, the demon fossil fuel activists want to ban. Between Thursday and Saturday, 55 per cent of electricity came from gas and just 11 per cent from wind and solar. The output from Britain’s nuclear reactors hummed along at 4.7GW, but at 10 per cent of total output it only touches the sides of Britain’s baseload thirst.
At the start of the century, when Britain’s baseload was supplied by coal, the country was blessed with abundant supplies of natural gas. The output from the North Sea fields was around 100 billion cubic metres a year. Output fell dramatically as the fields became depleted. The appetite to invest in new fields was dulled by Boris Johnson’s imposition of a windfall tax on North Sea gas in May 2022, increased to 35 per cent under Rishi Sunak. Output fell to 26 billion cubic metres last year, forcing the UK to import the rest. Subsea pipelines from Norway supplied 29 billion cubic metres while the shortfall was supplied by LNG tankers, mainly from the US and Qatar.
Britain’s gas problems have only just begun. Buying gas on the international spot-market is expensive and supply chains are vulnerable. A 140,000-cubic-metre LNG carrier would supply less than half the daily demand. The tragedy is the UK has abundant reserves of gas, if the green warriors would only call off their campaign. On top of substantial reserves beneath the North Sea, there are at least a quadrillion cubic feet of onshore shale gas that’s hardly been touched. If a tenth of that proves economically viable, Britain would have enough gas to last 50 years.
Yet, as in Australia, the activists have gained the upper hand. A Supreme Court decision in June known as the Finch ruling obliges planning officials to factor in the emissions of consumers, not just the emissions used in extraction and transportation. This has set the scene for a judicial activists’ picnic. Greenpeace and Uplift have applied for a judicial review of the Rosebank and Jackdaw North Sea developments sending them back to the planning stage.
It’s a flashback to the nightmare of Britain in the 1970s when a miners strike put the country on a three-day week and the BBC shut down at 10.30pm to save electricity. This time, it’s not the union movement that’s usurping the role of an elected government but the green movement, aided and abetted by the courts.

The reptile attempt to get away from the LA fires reached peak absurdity in the final snap, Highland cows sit in a snow-covered field in Lumsden, Scotland, following the coldest night of winter so far. Picture: Getty Images

The Caterist might have been better off celebrating the cost of Brexit rather than the suffering of moo cows, as weather oscillates wildly all over the planet and climate change really begins to kick in.

The Independent ran an extensive feature to  celebrate the fifth anniversary, The damning statistics that reveal the true cost of Brexit, five years on, As January marks five years on from Britain leaving the EU, Alicja Hagopian and Kate Devlin explore its impact

No need to go on about it, though it's a gloomy tale, with graphs to gladden the ABC finance department ...

And so on, and on ...

Why does the pond mention this? Well there are lessons to be learned from that gloomy anniversary tale. 

The Caterist was of course a determined remainer, with that ancient memory from 2016 still on the ABC's Facebook page (caution, link to Zuck the suck's outer ring of hell).

The Caterist  routinely and reliably gets almost everything wrong, whether it be the movements of flood waters in quarries, climate science, the cost of nuking the country to save the planet, or the joys of Brexit ... though it sometimes takes years for the errors in his blithering idiocy and mindless advocacy to become so apparent that only the Caterist is left to stick by them ...

So there are lessons to be learned ... just never the ones the Caterist refuses to learn ...

There are lessons for Australia from this gloomy winter’s tale. The nuclear debate has taken attention from our immediate challenge: the critical gas shortage created in large part by the same climate zealotry. Yet gas will be an indispensable part of our energy mix well into the second half of the century, with or without nuclear. It is vital even to Chris Bowen’s plan, which accepts the intermittent challenge can’t be overcome with batteries and pumped hydro alone.
Reducing a continent as richly endowed as ours to the point where it is about to import gas on the east coast is no mean feat. It has taken many years of patient activism, weak-kneed government, pusillanimous journalism and dumbed-down policy discussion to get us to this point. Here, as in Britain, it will take years to reverse the momentum and establish a reliable energy network if we ever do, which for the moment is an open question.
Nick Cater is senior fellow at Menzies Research Centre.

What really sticks in the craw is the way that taxpayers' cash in the paw helps fund the MRC and the blithering idiocy.

On the other hand, it could be worse ...