Lord Downer, the Major and the Caterist walked into a bar ... and scribbled for "legacy media" ...

 

The number of times the pond agrees with Russian state member can be totalled on the head of a pin, but when the assembled portly gurus decided they were completely over the Cantaloupe Caligula, and that he should be dubbed "he who shan't be named", it was hard to argue.

If only Lord Downer had that level of wit and wisdom, but no, there he was this morning in the lizard Oz spruiking the mango Mussolini's plans for Gaza, as if it was a vision that had descended from the heavens unto His Lordship.

Best begin by sticking a Palestinian joke into the header,

Why Trump is on the right track with Gaza plan, Remember the old saying of Abba Eban: ‘The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity’. Trump offers them one and the negotiations should begin.

That didn't make any sense. How can negotiations begin if they're going to miss the opportunity?

Never mind, then show a snap of Lord Downer's very best people, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu

Then follow up with a classic outburst of His Lordship's patented snidery:

If you start a war, make sure you win. It’s an iron law of politics. Don’t expect the victors to thank you for your belligerence. Expect them to find a way you can never repeat your aggression.
That’s the situation the Palestinians in Gaza are in. Hamas decided to end a ceasefire and declare war on Israel on October 7, 2023.
What did they think would happen if they killed 1200 Israelis and took more than 200 hostages?
They knew exactly what would happen. And why did they keep fighting when the Israeli tanks, soldiers, artillery, all supplemented with air support, poured into Gaza?
Did they think if they kept fighting the Israelis would suddenly give up? Of course not.
The objective of Hamas and its backer, Iran, was diplomatic. Of course they knew Israel would retaliate if they declared war on Israel.
Of course they knew if they kept fighting in Gaza the damage and the casualties would grow. They didn’t care because their objective wasn’t to save lives or to offer the Palestinian people a bright future. It was to win an international propaganda war.

As His Lordship is renowned as a Pooh with very little brain, the reptiles decided that there needed to be an abundance of snaps and AV distractions, and so they flung in:

The Times of London Columnist Melanie Phillips says Donald Trump has “changed the conversation” on Gaza. US President Donald Trump has proposed his idea to take ownership of the Gaza Strip and rebuild it. The plan will include the US being responsible for dismantling unexploded bombs and removing weapons.

Back to Pooh for more astonishing insights:

The Iranians and their proxies did pretty well for a while.
Feckless and thoughtless governments started calling for Israel to desist from attacking Hamas and Hezbollah – including our own Australian government, incredibly – and resolutions were passed by the UN General Assembly condemning Israel.
The UN secretary-general – arguably the weakest and most clueless the UN has had – and leading UN officials increasingly condemned Israel.
Hamas brilliantly manipulated the Western media.
Breathless Western journalists mainly ensconced in the safety of Jerusalem endlessly repeated Hamas propaganda about casualties and food supplies.
No sceptical forensic analysis of Hamas’s claims, just acceptance of its propaganda on face value.
So this was the objective.

Amazing really, Palestinians as dumb as a piece of 4x2, yet astonishingly brilliant at one and the same time.

Then the most clueless of them all started flinging about words like "clueless", Alexander Downer says the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is arguably the most clueless the UN has had. Picture: AFP

On with the Trumphalism:

Not to destroy Israel in one blow but to build an international coalition that would demand not just a two-state solution but ultimately the one-state solution that is the ambition of Iran and its proxies.
Of course the Israelis knew all this.
That’s why they were oblivious to continued screeching from Western politicians, international organisations and an unquestioning legacy media.
That is also why Benjamin Netanyahu maintained his military campaign not just to destroy Hamas’s military capability but to destroy that of Hezbollah and finish off Iran’s air defence system.
The Israeli campaign has been a triumph.
If the Palestinians had wanted peace and to avoid casualties, they only had to put up their hands and ask for it.
But they didn’t; they kept firing rocket-propelled grenades, rockets, missiles and antitank weapons at the Israelis. The result was obvious.
So that brings us to the here and now.
What to do next? Well, mindless rhetoric from thoughtless political populists continues to demand Israel agree to a two-state solution. Of course that would be fine if it were at all possible. It’s not as though it hasn’t been tried time and again since 1948.

Then came another expert in AV form to help out His Lordship...

Strategic Analysis Australia Director Michael Shoebridge says Donald Trump’s plan in Gaza is “strengthening” Israel’s power in the region. US President Donald Trump has proposed his idea to take ownership of the Gaza Strip and rebuild it. The plan will include the US being responsible for dismantling unexploded bombs and removing weapons.

Really? Some might think differently to good old Shoe...

Never mind, His Lordship was still doing his victory roll ...

In 2000 the Palestinians were offered by the Israelis and the Americans 96 per cent of the West Bank, all of Gaza and their capital in East Jerusalem.
They just walked away from the negotiations.
There have been endless negotiations, wars, eruptions of conflict, intifadas and so on since then.
And every time there is a crisis it’s followed by peace talks and everyone settles back comfortably into a status quo that for the Palestinians is one of endless grievance and outrage.
So, after a while, war erupts again.
I’m just wondering how stupid we have to be to think we should keep going through this cycle.
It is time to think of completely new ideas. And, to his credit, that is where Donald Trump has landed.

Cue a snap of Lord Downer's hero, US President Donald Trump gestures to US Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff on February 3. Picture: AFP

Perhaps this shows better where he's landed ...

Way to win hearts and minds, and then came a real winner ...

Whatever the practicality of the US President’s roughly sketched plan, and it clearly requires a good deal more thought and negotiation, he deserves praise for having the courage to talk about a completely new approach to the Middle East peace process.

You have to admire that blithe ring of confidence, that toothpaste smile, embodied in "whatever the practicality". 

Whatever the inanity, whatever the stupidity, but when has Lord Downer ever worried about practicality? Heck, just give it the old shot, run it up the flag, and see who salutes ...

That stands in stark contrast to the pitiful bleating of the Australian government just repeating the same old mantra of the past 70 years.

Um, Lord Downer in 2011:

Downer: Yes. There is a consensus on some very simple propositions, and Israel’s right to exist within secure borders is absolutely accepted across the Australian political spectrum. There would be no political party in Australia that would oppose a two-state solution in the Middle East, not even the minor parties. When you get into some of the details there are differences, but not fundamental differences.

More pitiful bleating:

Trump wants to make big changes in the Middle East. First, he will need the co-operation of regional partners.
It’s clear, contrary to media speculation, that he has a close relationship with the Israeli Prime Minister and the Israeli government.
In contrast to Joe Biden, Trump is also close to the Saudis. In particular, he has a friendship with the ruler and Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman.
He also will need the support of the Emiratis, Bahrainis, the Jordanians and, crucially, the Egyptians.
Contrary to what many believe, none of these governments has any time for Hamas or Hezbollah. They want a peaceful Palestinian state, not a place run by militant Islamists.

Another snap to relieve the tedium, Former US president Joe Biden sits with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the start of the Israeli war cabinet meeting in Tel Aviv in October 2023.

Newsflash, Lord Downer has eyes, he has seen the hour of redemption come upon him:

Second, Iran has to know that its attempts to destroy Israel by using proxies in the Middle East are well and truly over.
What is more, the Iranian leadership needs to know that any development of a nuclear weapon will be curtains for them.
This is where Trump is truly effective.
He has made it clear that he is resuming maximum pressure on Iran and that, as he puts it rather ominously, Iran will never get a nuclear weapon. It’s obvious what that means.
Finally, third-party players need to keep right out of the Middle East peace process. In particular, there is no role whatsoever for the UN.
The secretary-general has lost all credibility and the behaviour of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East has been beyond the pale.
Not only were some of UNRWA’S people active participants in the Palestinian attack of October but for years they also have been teaching Palestinian children to hate Jews and Israel.
I’ve seen it with my own eyes when I visited Gaza.
For what it’s worth, if I were a foreign minister today, we wouldn’t give one cent to UNRWA. The EU also needs to keep right out of Middle East peace negotiations. And so do the Russians and the Chinese.

Luckily, FWIW, it's worth SFA these days.

And so to the final snap, and it's usual in these dissertations for the reptiles to rub it in with a snap of desolation: Displaced Palestinians walk through a muddy road amid the destruction in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip. Picture: AFP

Strange how they managed to avoid this sort of coverage as the ethnic cleansing and genocide rolled out, but now on to a last few lines celebrating the great vision:

This is a great inflection point in the history of the Middle East.
This could be the moment when a genuine and lasting peace plan emerges. But calming down the Palestinians and getting them to accept that the Israelis should be allowed to live in peace is a big ask.
Remember the old saying of Abba Eban, the legendary Israeli foreign minister: “The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” Trump offers them one and the negotiations should begin.
Alexander Downer was foreign minister from 1996 to 2007 and high commissioner to the UK from 2014 to 2018. He is chairman of British think tank Policy Exchange.

Oh yes, the train has left the station, it's a tremendous inflection point, mind the track ...

And so to the Major, and it was John Naughton in the Graudian who steered the pond on to this doomsday summary by Garrett Graff. 

It was an amusing read, coming as it did after news broke that the new head of the FBI, Kash Patel, had pocketed 25k (and an EP credit) on a pro-Russian program (one hesitates to use the word "documentary") dissing on the FBI and exuding love for Vlad the Sociopath.

It was headed Musk's Junta Establishes Him as Head of Government and timed at nine minutes. No need for the pond to go there, just the set up:

I’ve long believed that the American media would be more clear-eyed about the rise and return of Donald Trump if it was happening overseas in a foreign country, where we’re used to foreign correspondents writing with more incisive authority. Having watched with growing alarm the developments of the last 24 and 36 hours in Washington, I thought I’d take a stab at just such a dispatch. Here’s a story that should be written this weekend:

Then came the first few pars of the opening thrusts:

Musk Junta Seizes Key Governmental Offices, February 1, 2025, By William Boot
WASHINGTON, D.C. — What started Thursday as a political purge of the internal security services accelerated Friday into a full-blown coup, as elite technical units aligned with media oligarch Elon Musk moved to seize key systems at the national treasury, block outside access to federal personnel records, and take offline governmental communication networks.
With rapidity that has stunned even longtime political observers, forces loyal to Musk’s junta have established him as the all-but undisputed unelected head of government in just a matter of days, unwinding the longtime democracy’s constitutional system and its proud nearly 250-year-old tradition of the rule of law. Having secured themselves in key ministries and in a building adjacent to the presidential office complex, Musk’s forces have begun issuing directives to civil service workers and forcing the resignation of officials deemed insufficiently loyal, like the head of the country’s aviation authority.

It's way more fun than reading the Major.

Assigning the task to Boot will be appreciated by punters devoted to Scoop,...

...wherein Boot awed the world with his style, 'Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole…’

... wherein Boot is briefed on the art of journalism: News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead.

Boot is also perfectly placed to understand the coup, having been briefed on worldly events by his paper:

‘Can you tell me who is fighting who in Ishmaelia?’
‘I think it’s the Patriots and the Traitors.’
‘Yes, but which is which?’
‘Oh, I don’t know that. That’s Policy, you see. It’s nothing to do with me. You should have asked Lord Copper.’
‘I gather it’s between the Reds and the Blacks.’
‘Yes, but it’s not quite as easy as that. You see they are all negroes. And the fascists won’t be called black because of their racial pride, so they are called White after the White Russians. And the Bolshevists want to be called black because of their racial pride. So when you say black you mean red, and when you mean red you say white and when the party who call themselves blacks say traitors they mean what we call blacks, but what we mean when we say traitors I really couldn’t tell you. But from your point of view it will be quite simple. Lord Copper only wants Patriot victories and both sides call themselves patriots and of course both sides will claim all the victories. But of course it’s really a war between Russia and Germany and Italy and Japan who are all against one another on the patriotic side. I hope I make myself plain?’

The pond was instantly reminded of the Major and knew there'd be a chance to shake his Booty in.. Trump’s critics in the media don’t bother with balance, Don’t expect the ABC or The New York Times to report fairly on the failings of the organisations that Trump targets.

It's listed as a five minute read - way too much Major Mitchell squawking - and there's more about the Cantaloupe Clown, and a snap to boot ...President Donald Trump arrives to speak during the National Prayer Breakfast at the Washington Hilton on February 6. Picture: AFP

There was a huge amount of comedy at that National Prayer Breakfast (archive) - as you'd expect from a man who is less Xian than the pond, and that's saying something ... but we must keep on collecting Booty with the Major ...

The usual media suspects are again styling themselves as the “Trump resistance” – less than three weeks into the President’s second term.
Learning nothing from the coverage of the war in Gaza under previous ABC Radio National’s breakfast show host Patricia Karvelas, her replacement Sally Sara was quick off the blocks on Thursday after Trump’s press conference with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during which the American leader said the US would take over Gaza and turn it into a “Middle Eastern Riviera”.

As usual, the reptiles featured a huge snap of one of the Major's enemies, so large it appeared distorted, ABC journalist Sally Sara

A woman, and she's smiling. Talk about setting the Major off ...

Sara wheeled out Italian lawyer and UN Rapporteur for the Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, a Karvelas favourite and former Q+A guest. Albanese, a virulent critic of Israel, told listeners the Jewish state was committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
Never mind the International Criminal Court had issued only provisional rulings in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel. Albanese said the ICC had never ruled on the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide.
Remember here the death toll of about 50,000 in Gaza includes probably 20,000 Hamas fighters and the numbers are supplied by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.
Israel would have killed no one in Gaza without the Hamas pogrom in southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
Six million people died in the Holocaust, half the world’s Jews at the time. The Armenian genocide by Ottoman Turkey killed 1.2 million.
Palestinians are among the fastest-growing ethnic groups in the Middle East. A key feature of genocide is population collapse of the victim group.
Sara later interviewed ABC global affairs editor John Lyons who said all journalists could do was report the facts. True, but normal standards of fairness and balance should apply.
Former Egyptian foreign minister Nabil Fahmy also featured on Radio National for six minutes, Mustafa Barghouti, member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, for nine minutes, and another UN Rapporteur, Ben Saul, for seven minutes. All said Trump’s idea was “ethnic cleansing”.
Radio National did include seven minutes with the Israeli view, but that focused heavily on far-right government members’ views of Trump’s plan.
Listeners were given no context about the role of Hamas in destroying Palestinian lives or Israel’s departure from the territory in 2005.
Even if Trump’s thought bubble is forgotten as quickly as it arose, the President has a point. This column has visited Gaza and noted on October 14, 2023, that the strip sits on 40km of beautiful white sandy Mediterranean beach and could be a wonderful place if Gazans had leaders who cared for their population more than wanting to kill Jews.

Ah, whatever the practicality,  it's now a thought bubble to be forgotten as quickly as it arose, but what a splendid point he made ...

He's full of them ...

Then the Major took to the wing ...

Another player in the “Trump resistance”, The New York Times, last week rolled out one of its longest attacks since the November election.
The day before Trump’s Gaza announcement, two pieces that could not be more different surfaced online about the decision by the President’s efficiency tsar, Elon Musk, to target USAID, the $US40bn-a-year behemoth presented in the NYT as a crucial aid body. While coverage here of Trump’s daily executive orders has focused on tariffs, the USAID story is big news in America.
Author Michael Shellenberger’s Substack website, Public, called USAID (US Agency for International Development) a sinister influence peddler involved in everything from funding gain of function research into bat viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology to pushing for censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
The NYT published a lead piece under the headline “Inside Musk’s war on the federal workforce” on its website with six bylines, led by Jonathan Swan, the Australian son of the ABC’s Dr Norman Swan.

Naturally there was another snap of the enemy ... Jonathan Swan is an Australian journalist. Picture: X

The Major loves a good feast ...

Save some of that wing for the Major...

The piece was a long hit job on Musk and his role at DOGE, the president’s new Department of Government Efficiency.
It did not mention criticism of USAID by left-wing Democrat Bernie Sanders and academic Noam Chomsky, who both see it as an instrument for political interference in foreign countries.
The Times did mention the federal deficit had ballooned to $US1.8 trillion last year and reported the Government Accountability Office had found improper federal payments of $US236bn over 71 federal programs in the 2023 fiscal year. But it was more concerned about traumatised federal employees than misspent taxpayer dollars.

Those hapless employees...

Carry on with the liberation Major, shake that Booty ...

Public’s analysis, written by Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag, was headlined “USAID’s history of regime change, destabilisation and censorship justified its closure by Trump”.
Fair enough for the NYT to report the concerns of federal bureaucrats in the firing line. Also fair to report the concerns of Democrat politicians worried about the power the President has given Musk.
But why ignore USAID’s role in censoring information damaging to former president Joe Biden? Why not report USAID’s attempts to ban social media posts critical of the government’s handling of Covid? Why the silence about funding for the Wuhan lab?

Step aside for a moment sundry conspiracy theories. Make room, next up, a snap of Jolly Joe, Former US president Joe Biden. Picture: AFP

Turns out the Major has the best sources ...

Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi, who publishes Racket News on Substack, worked together on the Twitter Files after Musk took over Twitter and renamed it X.
Both have published revelations about the way the intelligence community duped much of the media, especially the New York Times, during the Russiagate hoax in Trump’s first term.

Speaking of hoaxes, this one is a doozy ... not that the Major would mind or care ...

The full version was featured in the rag the Major loves to hate (archive)...

Sorry, the pond loves reading about FAFO mug punters, and besides, the pond just had to take a break from all the mindless puffery, the Taibbi-isms,  the Bootyisms, the Shellburger game  ...

Shellenberger followed up on Thursday morning (AEST) revealing details of links between USAID and a shadowy investigative journalism body OCCRP (Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project) that was behind stories about Trump’s efforts to track down Biden family dealings in Ukraine. These were the basis of the December 2019 impeachment of Trump.
Why the Trump focus on USAID? Shellenberger suggests this is partly because it is a funder of the sort of censorship uncovered when Musk opened up Twitter’s internal correspondence with the government and its security agencies.
He also says USAID is “an instrument of the US empire and voters elected Trump to pursue ‘America First’ over global commitments”.
The Wall Street Journal brought some balance to the issue in Wednesday’s print edition.
Congress would have to pass legislation shutting USAID and Trump had not yet committed to doing so. It pointed to millions of dollars of controversial USAID funding, including to “organisations directly in Gaza controlled by Hamas”.
USAID had also funded EVs for Vietnam, transgender clinics in India and a Serbian LGBTQI lobby.
The Journal would not mind seeing USAID shut but warned Trump and Musk would need to be better at the politics of government efficiency.
This will certainly be the case when Trump expands his crackdown to the UN Human Rights Council and the UN’s Palestine refugee funder UNRWA (the UN Relief and Works Agency for the Palestinian territories). He cut funding to both in his first term.
Just don’t expect the ABC or The New York Times to report fairly the failings of the organisations that Trump targets.

Oh yes, it's all going tremendously well ...

The pond almost abandoned the Caterist this day. Still banging on about the Voice? Even more amazing seeing that as the path to Victory?

What a tired, tiresome, tedious hack he is, but the pond recognises he's in hyped-up election mode and has his devotees, and there he was in his usual perch over on the extreme far right, just below the Major ...

The pond likes to show its workings, just to prove there was bugger all else early in the morning, unless you count the latest shit stirring about the miners, and impending Victory ...

So the pond rounded out the reptile triptych with Labor’s voice failure won’t be forgotten at the ballot box, Albanese’s referendum misjudgment is not one of those stories that flares for a week before disappearing from headlines.

Being in election mode, the reptiles ran with a snap of Satan himself, Anthony Albanese holds a press conference after the voice to parliament was defeated. Picture: Martin Ollman

The pond had hoped the Caterist might have gone into his usual full-blown, maggot-riddled climate science denialsm, but it was tossed aside in a few lines ...

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen’s thoughtless decision to anchor rows of giant wind turbines off the coast is not the only reason Labor MP Meryl Swanson should start looking for another job.
The member for Paterson retained her seat comfortably in 2022, but that was before anyone was told about the offshore wind zone that would occupy a stretch of ocean 1½ times larger than Greater Newcastle.

A pity really, the pond had wanted to link to Moninya Roughan's piece It’s official: Australia’s ocean surface was the hottest on record in 2024 in The Conversation:

There was a graph ...

....and a question

Why should we care about ocean warming?
Rapid warming of Earth’s oceans is setting off a raft of worrying changes.
It can lead to less nutrients in surface waters, which in turn leads to fewer fish. Warmer water can also cause species to move elsewhere. This threatens the food security and livelihoods of millions of people around the world.
Just last week, it was reported that tens of thousands of fish died off northwestern Australia due to a large and prolonged marine heatwave.
Warm water causes coral bleaching, as experienced on the Great Barrier Reef in recent decades. It also makes oceans more acidic, reducing the amount of calcium carbonate available for organisms to build shells and skeletons.
Warming oceans trigger sea level rise – both due to melt water from glaciers and ice sheets, and the fact seawater expands as it warms.
Hotter oceans are also linked to weather extremes, such as more intense cyclones and heavier rainfall. It’s likely the high annual rainfall Australia experienced in 2024 was in part due to warmer ocean temperatures

But what would a Professor in Oceanography know up against the floodwaters in quarries man? 

Besides, he'd done his renewables snipe, and it was on with the election campaign ...

That wasn’t the only surprise.
The voice referendum was announced after the polls had closed.
It was rejected by 70 per cent of voters in Paterson, one of 56 Labor-held seats that said no to Anthony Albanese’s signature first-term policy.
The decision to pursue a single lost cause at the expense of everyday concerns exposed the Prime Minister as out of touch with vast swathes of Labor’s heartland long before his unfortunate decision to invest in prime coastal real estate.

The reptiles are indefatigable in promoting the likes of petulant Peta as a break from Caterist swill:

Sky News host Peta Credlin says the Albanese government has been “struggling” in the polls for months now. Over the summer break, Labor has slipped further down to 31 per cent on the primary vote with the Coalition stable at 39 per cent. “It started with the defeat of the PM's pet project, the Voice, and as our cost of living has gone up, his standing in the polls has gone south,” Ms Credlin said. “Poll after poll and it's hard to see how the Prime Minister can turn this around.”

There's a lot of slobbering and slavering and Trumphalism going down ...

At a time such as this Labor needs a prime minister such as Bob Hawke, a leader with finely honed interpersonal skills, sharp political instinct and emotional intelligence who could make himself at home in any front bar.
Instead it has Albanese, who is unable to read the room and seemingly incapable of passing the pub test in any establishment that doesn’t sell craft beer.
In 2022, former Labor adviser Lachlan Harris declared Albanese’s everyman persona his greatest strength in an era of scripted politicians.
Albanese’s colleague Tony Burke ranked him as “the closest we will see to a Hawke both in leadership style and in authenticity”.
The referendum ended any illusion that Albo is a man of the people.
If any Australians were losing sleep because of anxiety about the constitutional status of Aboriginal Australians, they were vastly outnumbered by those kept awake worrying about meeting mortgage repayments.
Yet Albanese chose to lavish his limited political capital pushing an esoteric solution to an abstract problem, using language foreign to most voters.
Conventional wisdom suggests voters are prepared to overlook rookie errors in a first-term government and give it a second chance. Yet Albanese’s referendum misjudgment is not one of those stories that flares for a week before disappearing from headlines.
For 15 months the Prime Minister and a rag-tag bunch of finger-waggers hectored people who had watched as an assortment of jumped-up nobodies was given airtime to trash-talk their country. Two and a quarter centuries of Indigenous misfortune dumped on the heads of white people who could expect to pay reparations for untried crimes allegedly committed by their distant ancestors.
It mattered not if your ancestors were soldiers with the First Fleet or refugees escaping from communist Vietnam. Your right to be accorded the same respect as every other citizen was about to be annulled in the Constitution.

Inevitably that mention of Bob Hawke meant there had to be a snap of Bob Hawke ...

Funny how times change. Once reptiles of the Caterist kind loathed Hawke, but any stick or cudgel will do in a flooded quarry ...

People don’t easily get over that kind of bullying. Wounds opened by the voice debate are still raw among the people you run into on steak night at the Lithgow Workers Club, the Olary Hotel or any place where Australia Day is celebrated with unabashed enthusiasm.
Losing a referendum is not always a career-ender.
Robert Menzies failed to get the 1951 Communist Party dissolution referendum over the line early in his second term yet he remained in office for another 15 years. Hawke lost the referendum on the interchange of powers and four-year parliamentary terms in 1984 but won the election on the same day.
The voice falls into a different category. It exposed the fault line that has broken through in almost every Western democracy between the university elite, which controls most civic institutions, and the rest of Australia, which is trying to control their own lives free of incursions from the state.
Few, if any, elections today are determined by party loyalty or abstract notions such as left and right. They are fought between those who abide by institutional wisdom on matters such as gender, race and climate change and those who trust common sense.
The great tectonic shift has been changing the political landscape for more than 30 years.
John Howard’s landslide in 1996 was due in part to Liberal Party gains in Labor’s traditional heartland.
Labor, on the other hand, has turned previously marginal inner-city electorates such as Adelaide into safe seats.

At this point, things turned unfortunate, with a snap of Robert Menzies at the Melbourne Town Hall, 1951.

How weird is that, remembering Ming the merciless' words of praise for Adolf in the 1930s ... and the current vibe ...

Never mind, back with the wildly optimistic Caterist ...

Peter Dutton is poised to make the largest assault on the Labor heartland since Tony Abbott in 2013, when the Liberals captured blue-collar seats such as Lowe.
In fact, Dutton may enjoy a clearer run than Abbott or Howard. Dutton’s courage in opposing the voice in the face of opposition within his own party put runs on the board in the parts of the country where the voice was regarded as a proxy for everything woke.
Crucially, outsiders now have the language to voice their common concerns and unite them in a common cause.
The word woke was unfamiliar to most Australians in 2022. Now it’s common currency and is used by the Opposition Leader almost daily.

Ah woke ... and sorry, at that mention, the usual penalty must be imposed ...

More comedy, with the prize loon railing at the "legacy media", apparently unaware he's appearing in legacy media ...

Terms such as elite are understood more widely and precisely. The voice referendum made it clear to voters whether they were insiders or outsiders and which politicians were watching their backs.
The concept of the legacy media would have been unfamiliar to most people before Covid. Now it is recognised as a hostile force that conspires with the powerful to censor and lie.
Donald Trump’s election has changed things, too. His industrial slaughter of sacred cows in the US has put progressives on the defensive here too. Sooner or later, the dissonance between voting patterns at the referendum and federal elections will be resolved.

Then came another unfortunate snap, John Howard makes victory speech at Wentworth Hotel, Sydney, in 1996.

Really? They're all getting into the act?

Forget it Jake, it's Caterist quarry town.

Woke and the Voice will bring certain victory. 

Tap that paint can lid and say out loud, trust the Caterist ...

The Liberals will face an uphill battle to retain Bradfield, the only Coalition seat to vote in favour of the referendum.
Labor’s challenge is greater.
The disparity between the No vote and support for Albanese in 2022 is widest in the NSW seats of Hunter (ALP 54 per cent two-party preferred, No vote 70.9 per cent, a gap of 16.9) and Paterson (16.8), closely followed by Lyons in Tasmania (16.5) and Blair in Queensland (15.1).
The 25 Labor seats where the Yes vote was higher than the national average included ALP strongholds such as Gough Whitlam’s old seat of Werriwa; Shortland, where the incumbent is retiring; and McMahon, where the incumbent would retire if he felt the slightest degree of responsibility for atrocities such as the Hunter offshore wind project.
The seat where the Yes vote and Labor’s vote are most closely aligned is Grayndler (Yes 74.6 per cent, ALP 78.9 per cent), suggesting the Prime Minister will comfortably win his seat. Whether he retains his title is another matter.

No wonder the pond's numbers are down...

Even worse, there's going to be a lot more of this, either the Cantaloupe Caligula in full barking mad flight, or the reptiles in hysterical barking mad election mode, and the pond caught in the middle, and all the pond can do is turn to the 'toons and to the immortal Rowe for consolation ...