In which there's some alternative reading and viewing, and the Caterist and the onion muncher for those who are silly season desperate ...

Some pedants insist that the 12 days of Xmas last until the 6th January, so the pond feels perfectly respectable linking to Parker Molloy's updated A Look Back at the "War on Christmas", People have been freaking out about the "War on Christmas" for more than a century.

It was one of the tragedies of this Xmas that the reptiles abandoned the war, and there were only a few feeble offerings of the bromancer and craven Craven kind.

While visiting, you might checkout other offerings by Molloy, such as Meta's AI "Users" Are the Last Thing Social Media Needs, Mark Zuckerberg's latest scheme involves filling Facebook and Instagram with fake people, because that's definitely what was missing from social media.

That reminded the pond why it's never been on Facebook.

While visiting sub-stackers, you might also come across Paul Krugman, as in this outing about tariffs, Never Underestimate the Ignorance of the Powerful, When you’re a star, people let you think you're smart.

Previously while visiting Krugman, you might have bumped into shady characters idling in the corridor, like David Brooks and Ross Douthat. These days Krugman can cheerfully take down the bothsidesing NY Times, as in Bothsidesing, With a Republican Slant: Here We Go Again.

Krugman also uses social media to rant about social media, The Plot to Poison Children’s Minds, but frequently provides links to social media hosted music as a closer (in this case Feist).

The pond's partner is reluctant to visit sub-stackers, insisting that the site is a haven for neo-Nazi scribblers, and that might be so or not, but while mentioning neo-Nazis, the pond would like to slip in a kind word for The Order, which demonstrates that actors get better as they age.

Now long past his inept, insufferable pretty boy days, Jude Law has a good time (in a thespian sense) as a worn and torn FBI agent dealing with neo-Nazis in the American backwoods in the 1980s. 

Based on "real events", as they say, there's an Oz auteur, Justin "Snowtown" Kurzel at the helm. As with many dramadoc style productions, it's remarkable how "real events" conform to Hollywood structures and genre - anyone who can't predict what will happen to Tye Sheridan's local innocent young cop needs to get out and about more often - but it's slickly done, and it concludes with a warning of where the far right rabbit hole can lead, from the Oklahoma City bombing to the January 6th attack.

Speaking of far right rabbit holes, it's time to go down the lizard Oz rabbit hole, and without complaint, because the pond has recommended plenty of alternative reading and viewing.

Sheesh, it's going to be a hard year and not just because of King Donald I and President Leon - it's also election year, and so the reptiles are going to be full of endless hard times stories ...

You know, simplistic "here no conflict of interest" Simon blathering about bipartisan courage ...

As usual, a visit to the rabbit hole involves sacrifices. 

The pond has neither the energy nor the desire to deal with Goulburn's beefy boofhead, Angus Taylor, in full election mode in Labor’s profligacy is draining our sources of prosperity and talent, No amount of spin or unfounded optimism from Jim Chalmers will restore our prosperity without a change in direction. But the good news is there is a better way.

Not the gospel of the beefy boofhead! If that's the good news, then bring on some bad news or at least a belated war on Xmas.

For some reason the reptiles couldn't summon up a thumb snap of the beefy boofhead, which signals their interest in what he has to say.

They could find a snap of the onion muncher for his outing, Conservatives must resist tyranny of officialdom, Conservative governments have tended to be in office but not really in power – because they lacked an agenda of their own or because what agenda they had was thwarted by a leftist establishment.

That was the reason the pond had to save its strength. Any visit to the mad monk of Manly involves extreme stress.

The best thing about reading a failed politician like the onion muncher is the way he automatically goes into regrets mode, as in "if I had my time again".

The joy is that he'll never have his time again, instead he's been reduced to a gadfly on the Emeritus Chairman's rump ... and the best he can do is seek out like minds, like the opening snap, featuring Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre speaks during a news conference in Ottawa. Picture: AFP

The mad monk is fond of using terms and concepts like "Anglosphere",  a reminder that The Turner Diaries aren't just something that turns up in films such as The Order ... (yes, it was shot in Canada and post-produced in Australia)...

Across the Anglosphere, recent conservative governments have tended to be in office but not really in power – because they lacked an agenda of their own or because what agenda they had was thwarted by a leftist establishment.
In 2016, Donald Trump was first elected on a promise to “drain the swamp” but eventually “the swamp” got him.
As someone who had never been in government and was unfamiliar with Washington, he had instincts rather than well-developed policies or even well-thought-through ideas for how to develop policy.
So he churned through a series of cabinet outsiders, businessmen such as Rex Tillerson and generals such as Jim Mattis, who were clueless about making a difference or turned out to have little like-mindedness with their boss.
Trump’s cuts to red tape and tax were enough to create an economic revival but his failure to tame the administrative state – which took over the pandemic response and then united behind a left-establishment challenger – doomed his first bid for a second term.

What always bemuses the pond is the way that politicians of the onion munching kind actually hate the concept of government and then wonder why they fail when in government.

 King Donald I is an excellent example, and naturally featured ... Donald Trump gestures at supporters as he holds hands with Melania Trump on election night in Florida. Picture: AFP

These snowflakes are always victims of the times and circumstances and dire enemies such as cardigan wearers ... but there are surely great times, always just ahead ...

The onion muncher is an expert at conjuring up explanations for dismal past failures, including his own and the likes of Boris ...

The British Conservative government first elected in 2010 was initially handicapped by being in a coalition with the centre-left Liberal Democrats, then internally divided over Brexit, then led from the insipid centre under Theresa May and finally sabotaged by a “remoaner” establishment that the previous Labour government had empowered via the Equality Act, devolution and changes to the judiciary that no Conservative leader had the gumption to repeal.
Boris Johnson had the potential to be a great prime minister but squandered working people’s support on the altar of climate change-driven policy gimmicks such as mandatory electric cars and heat pumps replacing gas boilers.

Cue interrupting (huge) snap of Former British prime minister Boris Johnson. Picture: AFP

Then thar he blows, in his Cher moment, If the clock could be turned back. Sing along, if I could turn back time...

Eventually, furious conservative voters with an understandable desire to punish the party that had let them down ended up punishing themselves by electing an incompetent and clueless Labour government.
The Australian centre-right Liberal-Nationals Coalition government that I led into office in 2013 started strongly enough by stopping a wave of illegal immigration by small boat and by repealing a carbon tax and a mining tax. But Senate obstruction sabotaged its first, economically reforming budget and internal policy differences then led to a revolving-door prime ministership.
If the clock could be turned back, I would have insisted all my frontbenchers provide a detailed blueprint of what needed to change to make a difference in their portfolio area, and explain how their proposed changes reflected our “smaller government, bigger citizen” political instincts.
I would have insisted that at least a version of their thinking be made public well before an election. That way the bureaucracy – or at least that section of it still motivated by traditional Westminster ideals of impartial public service – would have had more guidance in policy formation.
And incoming elected and accountable ministers would’ve been less susceptible to being snowed by unelected and unaccountable officials. An example of this was the introduction, by ministers who had been captured by bureaucrats, of the social engineering, gender fluidity encouraging Safe Schools program that was masquerading as an anti-bullying initiative, even though it had been devised under my predecessors.
This is where incoming ministers need to have thought through all the key issues they are likely to deal with and be sufficiently robust to interrogate and stand up to officials urging caution or assuring them that the “experts” know best.
Judging by the blizzard of announcements and appointments since his 2024 election, Trump is much better prepared this time. He seems to have used his time out to ponder how he may do better and since his election he has been acting quickly. It’s not clear how much collaboration there was between Trump’s team and efforts such as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, but at least a group of clever policy analysts at various think tanks has been pondering doable centre-right options for the incoming administration.
If I had my time again, I would have worked in advance with like-minded institutes to prepare more detailed plans for key incoming ministers rather than have them largely directed by the bureaucracy based on sometimes thin pre-election policy announcements.
Winning an election on a promise to be different and subsequently having to make excuses when not enough changes is the trap to be avoided by every centre-right political movement on the verge of victory.

How wondrously pathetic, how perfectly coulda woulda shoulda ...

And then it's off to Canada ...Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Picture: AFP

As well as wanting to turn back time, the onion muncher wants to repeat himself ...

In a recent op-ed for Canada’s National Post I set out this track record for centre-right parties and offered some advice on how best to avoid these trap for incoming governments, as the turmoil in Justin Trudeau’s government suggests a future Conservative win in Canada is ever more likely.
Naturally enough, shrewd politician that he is, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre will be taking nothing for granted and will be trying to win every possible vote. Still, after almost a decade of Liberal rule, culminating in a housing crisis, a cost-of-living crunch and a crime wave, a smart opposition would be thinking almost as much about how to govern well as about how to win the coming election.
Up against a shop-soiled government, winning an election is the relatively easy part of an opposition party’s job; the hard part is getting ready to run a good government, especially with the bureaucracy, judiciary and upper house all likely to be obstructive.
Even a big majority in the Canadian House of Commons does not guarantee that an incoming Poilievre government will be able to implement a strong conservative program.
For one thing, incoming ministers – most of whom will have little practical government experience – will face difficulties with policy implemen­tation.
For another, Canada’s appointed-until-retirement Senate is stacked with political progressives who are bound to be, at best, sceptical towards the new government. And Canada lacks even the hard-to-do and rarely used mechanisms for breaking a deadlock between the two houses of parliament and for changing the Constitution to overcome judicial activism that Australia has.
This is where it’s especially important for an incoming Canadian government to have the strong and explicit mandate for change that only detailed policy proposals can generate.
Across the past two years, Poilievre has brilliantly mobilised and crystallised opposition to the Trudeau government with his political mantra: axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget, stop the crime. This clearly identifies some of the key problems an incoming government will tackle but is less clear about how that might be done. It’s never easy in opposition to get the balance right between saying too much and too little.
But the more specific an opposition party that’s about to form a government can be, the likelier it will be to succeed, because when voters back a clear and specific plan, that signals to all the unelected senators, bureaucrats and judges that the public wants the proposed changes.
The winds of change are sweeping across the Anglosphere. Poilievre can ensure that this will mean more than voting out the failed incumbent; it will mean delivering a new agenda for a better Canada.
Tony Abbott was prime minister from 2013 to 2015.

There we go, more mindless blather about the Anglosphere. The Turner Diaries aren't far from his heart.

2015 and now it's 2025, and visiting the mad monk is like discovering a sock gone mouldy in the Sydney humidity.

Here, have a nostalgic moment to celebrate his passing, spinning the platters that matter to amuse the mugs in the trenches.

As for the Caterist, he was out and about this day with Brown’s Greens wouldn’t recognise their own party under Bandt, Bob Brown was inclined to be passionate, but he seldom let his passions get the better of him. Anthony Albanese is unlikely to find Adam Bandt as accommodating if the 2025 election results in a hung parliament.

There's something particularly fragrant, piquant, like the smell of an outdoor dunny in Tamworth during the summer season, watching the Caterist pretend that he's a guardian of greenie traditions, and can speak for Bob Brown.

This journey began with a snap, Leader of the Australian Greens Adam Bandt and Anthony Albanese during Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman

Then it was into the rant, a tiresome outing by an extremely tiresome man, growing ever more tired in his weekly outings.

In the annals of identity politics, Penny Wong lays claim to the title of Australia’s first openly gay government minister.
Yet as a loyal ALP senator she put her own feelings to one side in the 2010 election campaign when she was questioned about gay marriage in a Channel 10 interview. ‘‘The party’s position is very clear that this is an institution that is between a man and a woman,” she said. ‘‘I am part of a party, and I support the party’s policies.”
The backlash, such as it was, was muted. The Star Observer labelled Wong a hypocrite and Bob Brown declared he was “horrified”. Yet his horror was not so great as to prevent the Greens leader from signing a coalition agreement with Julia Gillard five weeks later when the election didn’t go as well as the prime minister had hoped.
Brown was inclined to be passionate, but he seldom let his passions get the better of him. He understood politics offered no solutions, only trade-offs. “Here is a very good example of us saying, ‘we accept what the people of Australia say, and we’re moving to get them a good outcome’,” he told the ABC at the time.

There is a point to this farce, and it's not the snaps of Bob Brown and Richard Di Natale.

It takes until the very last line for the Caterist to get there, and there's much distraction offered up before hand ...

Anthony Albanese is unlikely to find Adam Bandt as accommodating if the 2025 election results in a hung parliament, as conventional wisdom tells us it will. The Greens stopped playing by grown-ups’ rules about five years ago when the pragmatic Richard Di Natale resigned as leader and was replaced by the hardline Bandt.
The election of three new Greens MPs in 2022 and three more senators was seen as an endorsement of Bandt’s uncompromising radicalism. The Greens are no longer satisfied with incremental gains in bending the arc of the moral universe towards justice. The new regime’s strategy is not to persuade but to conquer.
For Bandt, legalising same-sex marriage wasn’t a victory but merely the elimination of “one part of a system that bombards LGBTIQ people from every angle”. Trans rights are non-negotiable, Bandt assures his followers on social media. Gender-affirming healthcare should be free on Medicare. The carbon tax Brown persuaded Gillard to adopt was a sellout. Now, the Greens demand the immediate cessation of coalmining and gas extraction.
Bandt calls for “radical, nonviolent civil disobedience against big corporations backed by the state”. He supports Extinction Rebellion’s tactics of shutting down the streets but says “there needs to be more … more protests, more rallies and more power and wealth back to the people”.
His rhetoric in recent months signals his intention to draw Labor into a governing partnership if neither major party achieves a clear majority at the election. If Albanese were to accept an agreement on Bandt’s terms, the country would be in deep trouble.

Yes, yes, the greenies are a dire threat, terrify the hive mind with a snap ...Leader of the Australian Greens Adam Bandt, Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, Senator Larissa Waters, Senator Nick McKim and Max Chandler-Mather MP hold a press conference at Parliament House in Canberra.

Naturally the Caterist was amongst the terrified, the terrorised ... you know, the long march, the Commie swine, the filthy Marxists, etc., etc., the climate scientists, yadda yadda ...

The contraction of the resources sector would constrain Australia’s wealth-earning capacity for decades. The adoption of Bandt’s fiscally incontinent policies of including dental and mental care in Medicare, waiving students’ debt and the wholesale construction of public housing would entrench a suicidal level of recurrent public spending. Yet Bandt, believe it or not, is the acceptable face of today’s Greens. Wealth redistribution and climate change justice are merely the beginning.
The Greens no longer are content with changing institutions. Their goal is to pull them down.
The ideological ambitions of today’s Greens extend far beyond the preservation of the natural environment. Their goal is a full-scale cultural revolution replacing individual rights with group-identity-based rights, the race-based redistribution of wealth and power, the silencing of dissent and the collapse of the old order.
The path the Greens have taken towards a racially charged, new Marxist agenda mimics the transformation of the US progressive left analysed by Christopher Rufo in America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, one of the most important books published since the advent of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Want an irony? How about I get by with a little help from my friends, Frank Bongiorno reviews Nick Cater’s The Lucky Culture, from 2013, concluding this way, co-joining the onion muncher and the Caterist ...

...I often think of the sage advice of Mr Chips to his schoolboys when their Latin lesson at Brookfield School during the first world war was disrupted by a German air-raid: don’t judge the importance of something by the noise it makes. Whether Cater’s book presages a renewal of the kind of culture wars that disfigured Australia during the Howard era is unclear. Cater might be up for it, but Abbott may well turn out a more reluctant warrior than the neo-cons at the Australian would like. Perpetual warfare with a third or so of the population no doubt looks more attractive from News offices in Wapping and Surry Hills than from inside the political bunker, especially to a potential prime minister desperate, for sensible electoral reasons, to moderate his image as the hard man of Australian politics.

Those were the days, and meanwhile, it's back to the lizard Oz supporting the Gaza genocide with an AV distraction, Greens Leader Adam Bandt claims Labor is “slowly moving” towards his party’s position on the Israel-Hamas war. The minor party has been calling for a ceasefire shortly after the October 7 attack. During an interview, Mr Bandt says the Albanese government agreed a ceasefire was necessary after supporting a UN motion earlier this month. The Greens leader believes Labor has been “forced to admit” his party was “right all along” regarding Middle East policy.

Back to that irony ... 

This at the start ...

When I read that Nick Cater, a senior editor at the Australian, was writing a book about “the rise of an Australian ruling class” I was a little puzzled. The only people I knew who still talked and wrote about “an Australian ruling class” were a few irrepressible Marxist friends and colleagues. And although I was unfamiliar with Cater, it seemed implausible that Rupert Murdoch would permit one of that small band of true believers to exercise any influence over the flagship of his Australian fleet.
The mystery, of course, was soon solved. Cater’s “ruling class” was the same crowd that John Howard called “elites” and others, following the Yugoslav communist Milovan Đilas, called “the new class.” The average reader of Inside Story is a member of Cater’s “ruling class.” So is its editor, Peter Browne, and probably all of the contributors. But Nick Cater, oddly, isn’t – despite his tertiary education, cultural power and (I presume) hefty salary; and nor, apparently, is his multi-billionaire employer, Rupert Murdoch, although it’s difficult to tell because he only receives five entries in the index of this 300-page book. Gina Rinehart is mentioned once.
Cater’s “ruling class” is a self-serving, tertiary-educated middle class that believes itself superior in every way to ordinary Australians. Australia is a naturally virtuous and egalitarian country whose culture is being wrecked by this cosmopolitan clique. Cater occasionally pretends that his argument is not about left and right – that his elite crosses political boundaries. The pose should not be taken too seriously, for Cater is a right-wing author, and much of his book is given over to intemperate attacks on the usual targets of such authors in this country: “progressives,” environmentalists, refugees, the ABC, universities, the Human Rights Commission, the National Museum, the external affairs power and the Labor Party. Other people – notably “progressives” – have ideology; Cater and the ordinary Australians for whom he professes boundless admiration have common sense.

2013, and yet here we still are ... though these days the Caterist enjoys a sinecure at an organisation partly funded by the Australian taxpayer ...

Rufo traces the revolutionary left’s conscious strategy from the 1960s onwards of the long march through the institutions starting with the universities. The embrace of critical theory and the high-minded condemnation of “isms” – capitalism, imperialism, sexism and colonialism – were the means for radicalising academe. The strategy is set out in the writings of the movement’s intellectual leaders like Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paula Freire and Derek Bell, none of whom were squeamish about declaring allegiance to a Marxist cultural revolution.
With the BLM movement, America’s cultural revolution reached its endgame, Rufo writes. Herbert Marcuse’s critical theory of society, which he developed in near obscurity, has embedded itself in every major institution from Ivy League universities to Fortune 100 corporations.
Anti-racism has become a substitute for morality. Society is divided along a crude moral boundary of “racist” and “anti-racist”. The Greens have been captured by this subversive narrative, particularly in the Senate under Bandt’s deputy, Mehreen Faruqi. Faruqi fell for the BLM line and its crazy conclusion that the way to fight racism was to de-fund the police.
“In Australia, we should be having the same conversations about the viability of a so-called justice system that perpetrates violence on Indigenous people,” she said after attending a BLM rally in Sydney in June 2020. “We should not be afraid of a conversation about rethinking the very idea of policing and incarceration.”

Naturally there has to be a demonic figure for these modern times, and here she is ...Senator Mehreen Faruqi.

Her thought crime?

Faruqi says the country that welcomed her as a migrant from Pakistan more than 30 years ago is beset by racism.“We must proactively dismantle the racist system we live in, a system that oppresses and silences people of colour.” When the Senate passed a motion congratulating the King on his accession to the throne, Faruqi switched to full victimhood mode, declaring it “a painful reminder to people of colour like me, who migrated here from a place that was colonised, ravaged and looted by this very British Empire”.

Well yes, millions died in the partition and millions more were displaced, and while it's possible to argue about the numbers, it isn't possible to avoid the blight that the British Empire produced inn the sub-continent, and elsewhere, most notably the middle east. Nor is it easy to ignore the racism inherent in the way references to the Anglosphere trippingly emanate from the tongue of the onion muncher.

Sorry, the pond didn't mean to interrupt the one time sociology student, latterly 'flood waters in quarries' expert ...

Faruqi’s essentialist view of race, and claim to special status as a “person of colour”, is not shared in the wider community. Her demand for the abolition of horse racing on cruelty grounds and her ritual petulant performance on Melbourne Cup day is further evidence of a Senator who is off with the fairies, wholly unsuited to the administration of public affairs. 

Actually there's a lot to be said for taking out horse racing (and dog racing while we're at it), and what a relief it was to read stories such as Melbourne Cup forced to seek new appeal as race no longer stops the nation.

Even Sky News had a sob story, 'Turn their back on it': Bruce McAvaney's sad confession about the Melbourne Cup, Legendary commentator Bruce McAvaney has confessed that horse racing's greatest prize, the Melbourne Cup, is now the race that "no longer stops the nation". (caution, Murdochian link)

But now to the real point of the story. The Caterist, and other reptiles, are clearly terrified that all their campaigning will see a hung parliament, which would see a revival of greenies working with Labor.

It's unthinkable, a betrayal, endless suffering, endless hysteria, and that's why the Caterist purported that he could channel Bob Brown, like ectoplasm emanating from a Caterist nostril ...

A Labor-Greens partnership should be unthinkable while Faruqi remains deputy leader, controlling the passage of legislation through the upper house.
As leader of business in the House of Representatives under Gillard, Albanese would be aware of the damage to Labor’s reputation from its 2010-13 alliance with the Greens. By comparison with today’s Greens leaders, Brown stands out as a moderate and eminently reasonable.
The Prime Minister would be well advised to rule out negotiations with Bandt and Faruqi in the event of a hung parliament, together with any suggestion of an exchange of preferences. He might contemplate the Bible’s message in the Book of Proverbs: “He that walketh with wise men shall be wise: but a companion of fools shall be destroyed.”

That biblical quote said with a monstrous lack of self-awareness, proving that the pundits might well be right, and that the silly Xmas season has lasted into this Monday ...

Why do they despair? Surely all will be well? Surely the undertoad is waiting in the waves, while an actual undertoad lurks on the beach, expectant and hoping?