A big day at the lizard Oz, and a fine authoritarian reveal at the very end ...

 

Dilemmas, dilemmas, each day the pond faces dilemmas. 

Should it pay attention to the real world, or should it plunge wholeheartedly into the hive mind, with gay abandon ...

That's why the recent extreme Korean wildfires had completely passed by the pond, even though climate scientists had made a connection between this historic event and climate change.

If you want that sort of talk, try the Graudian or the Science Media Centre, or the ABC, or the Beeb...

Today the pond had expected some attention to be paid in the lizard Oz to the news of the 25% tariffs, or perhaps there'd be the taking of a cheap shot at the Nine rags for being hacked...

Instead the reptiles offered up hocus pocus news of the Pellists producing a miracle, only a step above finding the image of Christ in a toasted cheese sandwich ... there it was, an EXCLUSIVE, and the pond refused to highlight the nonsense ...

Oh come on,  it's a miracle...

Might as well go on a cruise ...

The pond had to wander way down the page to find talk of tariffs, and they came from Eric and the Minerals Council.

The Minerals Council?! And the US is all right, and never mind Jack or Jill down under.

Some minnow who'd never made it into the pond before was assigned the task of looking at the locals ...

Oh sainted aunts and uncles, is there a toasted cheese sandwich in the house? 

At least there was an immortal Rowe celebrating the Tusla clown car ...

Meanwhile, the reptiles are now in full electioneering mode and there's going to be a full five weeks of this madness, with bribe and counter-bribe made ...

Over on the extreme far right, there were other forms of madness ...

Now's the time for Killer Kreighton to relive his Kovid days?

Our Henry had joined the reptiles Children's Crusade against the woke?

It was as if all the reptiles were in a gigantic conspiracy forcing the pond back to pay attention to domestic politics.

Well okay, let's do it, let's do it live. 

The reptiles had been wildly excited, more to the point, disgusted and appalled, by the Albo bribe. 

But what could they make of the mutton Dutton's even more shameless bribe?

Dame Groan had been out of the blocks early, but no need to punish her or ignore her for her enthusiasm. 

She led the way yesterday, with Politics v economics: Why Peter Dutton is cutting the fuel excise, The danger is these relief measures can get out of hand, blowing up the budget and being counter-productive, and it was only a three minute read, so where's the harm?

The reptiles led with a snap designed to terrify, Leader of the Opposition Peter Dutton during question time at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Then came the ritual incantation, the standard injunction ...This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

The pond suddenly realised "Take me there" made more sense than Pellists producing miracles or Jesus in a cheese sandwich.

On with the Groaning, and there came saucy doubts and fears ...

There’s politics. And then there’s economics.
The hope of economists is that politically driven decisions are not too economically harmful.
Given the political popularity of providing cost-of-living relief, it was inevitable that Peter Dutton would make some sort of announcement in his budget-reply speech.
Having decided to oppose the very small tax cuts announced by Jim Chalmers to come into effect in 15 months, an alternative measure was in order.
Of course, if these relief measures get out of hand, they end up blowing the budget up, which then puts pressure on inflation and interest rates.
In other words, they can end up being counter-­productive.

The reptiles felt the need to slip in Jimbo, and do a little Sky Noise, cross-promotion ... Opposition home affairs spokesman James Paterson discusses Peter Dutton’s election pledge to halve the fuel excise for 12 months. This comes ahead of the Coalition’s budget reply speech on Thursday. “If you’re a family in the suburbs driving to work, driving the kids to school, running errands, if you’ve got one car this is going to be a big difference to you, if you’ve got two it’s going to be even more significant,” Mr Paterson told Sky News Australia. “Petrol and diesel are significant business costs – they’re inputs into businesses when we’re getting food and other products around the country in trucks, and if you reduce the cost of business, you’re also having a downward effect on inflation.”

At this point the pond should declare an interest.

The pond relies on an EV, and should the pond buy another car, it will also be an EV. The mutton Dutton's attempted bribe meant nothing, except perhaps a reversion to 1950s politics of the most mendacious and nonsensical kind.

The infallible Pope made the point admirably ...

So to the pond all this is just horseshit and pandering, and Dame Groan was clearly so desperate to find a nugget in the horseshit that she had to break into PowerPoint bullet mode ...

The Opposition Leader has announced that should the Coalition form government, the rate of fuel excise would be halved immediately from 50.8c a litre to 25.04c.
The cut would last for 12 months and cost the budget $6bn.
Most economists won’t be supportive of the proposal.
A dim view was taken of John Howard’s decision to freeze the indexation of the rate of fuel excise. The rate was also cut during the Covid period.
One reason why economists will object is our over-reliance on income tax to generate government revenue.
And that is a fair point.
But it’s not as if the Treasurer’s proposal to reduce the lowest marginal tax rate doesn’t have drawbacks. At $17bn over the forward estimates, it is relatively costly. It also doesn’t kick in for 15 months and is not targeted at lower income earners. There is also a jump in the effective marginal tax rate as people enter the 30c in the dollar income tax bracket.
The political advantages – and some economic ones – of cutting the fuel excise rate are:

• It’s immediate;
• It’s temporary;
• It’s clearly a form of cost-of-living relief;
• It’s targeted at people who need to use their cars for work and family reasons, particularly in the outer suburbs and regional areas;
• These people have been particularly hit by higher mortgage rates;
• It partly offsets the benefits that those who can work from home receive by making the cost of travel lower for those who must travel to work;
• Fuel costs also feed into business costs, and this could act to reduce the headline rate of inflation at least.

The broader question is what other economic measures the ­Coalition will propose and will the package add up to reform.
It is often overlooked that the Liberal Party is opposed to virtually all the new off-budget spending, including the dubious Future Made in Australia program.

Desperate stuff, which is why the reptiles introduced that other Jimbo ...With the 2025 election looming, Jim Chalmers’s budget is under intense scrutiny. Will it boost Labor’s chances or backfire at the ballot box? We break down what’s in the budget, how it’s being received, and whether it could define the outcome of the campaign.

Dame Groan ran out of steam, trying to reconcile the irreconcilable and realising the futility of trying to make a case for a dud policy ...

This amounts to big bucks and will reduce government debt substantially if the spending can be killed off.
The tax deductibility of lunches for small businesses probably won’t cost too much while giving a boost to local hospitality outlets.
It doesn’t count as serious economic reform.
Going along with the government’s highly inefficient and expensive promotion of GP bulkbilling – the cost of achieving additional bulkbilled appointments is extremely high – was disappointing even if it was politically understandable.
While Chalmers claims to be engaging in budget repair, the ­reality is very different.
Gross government debt will soon reach $1 trillion and government spending as a proportion of GDP is now over two-percentage-points higher than pre-Covid.
In these days of heightened global economic uncertainty, the government should be doing every­thing it can to strengthen our fiscal position to act down the track if needed.

Accelerated depreciation for small businesses makes economic sense and should probably be made a permanent feature of the tax code, as it is in the US.

If the mutton Dutton doesn't work out, have a go at Jimbo ...

Don't get the pond wrong. There will be some pleasures to be found during the election campaign.

The pond stumbled on this in Crikey ...

Down below in the comments section, some smart alec in the comments section had to trump the Monty Python trumpet references with Why Butt Trumpets & Other Bizarre Images Appeared in Illuminated Medieval Manuscripts

Go Clive, go butts, go billy goats, do not pass go...

Instead go off to get some Pearls of Wisdom, another 3 minute read treading the same Groaning turf ... Liberals fuel excise cut falls into shallow ‘me too’ strategy, Tweedledum’s $14 a week or Tweedledee’s $10 a week. Take your pick. But we deserve better than this.

Once again the reptiles decided to terrify ... Leader of the Opposition Peter Dutton delivers his budget reply speech at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman

This Pearl wasn't entirely happy ...

A major part of Peter Dutton’s budget reply speech on Thursday night was a pledge to halve the rate of petrol excise for 12 months. Commentators have said he has taken a page out of John Howard’s playbook, given his similar move in 2001, but for me it’s from Scott Morrison’s failed 2022 one.
I can see the tactical logic behind Dutton’s move. He is offering more household budget relief, and far sooner, than Labor’s derisory income tax reduction does. And he is targeting lower-income, car-dependent people in suburban marginal electorates.
Yes, Labor can point out that Dutton’s excise reduction will only apply for 12 months, but its own tax cut will be fully eroded by bracket creep by 2031-32.
Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers spent Wednesday crowing about Dutton opposing tax cuts. He has snookered them only a day later.
But if Dutton has won the tactical contest, in strategic terms he has capitulated to Labor. By framing the excise reduction as a cost-of-living measure, he has endorsed the government’s outrageous falsehood that short-term “hand-outs” reduce, rather than raise, inflationary pressure in the economy. Rather than exposing this folly for what it is, he has adopted it as the leitmotif of his entire campaign.

The reptiles decided an AV distraction was urgently needed, The Coalition will commit to slashing the fuel excise in a $6 billion pre-election pledge. Peter Dutton is expected to announce the policy in his budget reply speech tonight. The Opposition promises to cut the petrol price by 25 cents a litre for one year if elected – it would save motorists about $14 a tank per week at the bowser. It's in contrast to Labor's tax cuts, which will give most workers about $5 back a week.  The Coalition is expected to face accusations its fuel excise policy would put pressure on inflation and make the Reserve Bank's efforts to lower interest rates harder.

Speaking of short termism, Golding had the perfect question to ask ...

On and on the Pearls of Wisdom kept dropping ...

Better to adopt a “me too” approach to Labor, apparently, than to take a principled or courageous stand against it.
This is not the Dutton who bravely opposed the voice or exposed Labor’s collective antinuclear neurosis. Other economists are arguing that Dutton’s excise reduction is poor tax policy. It is, but provided it is reversed after 12 months, it’s not the end of the world.
Let’s not forget that the fuel excise base has been shrinking for decades (by almost one-third since 2000), and is projected to fall further (if there is greater future take-up of electric vehicles).
It is not a major revenue source, with excise (fuel, tobacco and alcohol) and customs duty accounting for only 7 per cent of tax collected, down from 25 per cent 40 years ago.
If we want to reduce our dependence on personal income tax, the best and only politically realistic option is to cut spending, not raise other taxes.
Many are arguing that Dutton has drawn inspiration from Howard.
In early 2001, when he was behind in the polls, Howard reduced the petrol excise rate by 1½ cents a litre and got rid of indexation.
This was not Howard at his best, but some form of relief was necessary to neutralise opposition to his recently introduced goods and services tax. (World oil prices spiked in early 2001, which focused attention on the government’s failure to fully compensate motorists for the GST’s impact on petrol prices).
In stark contrast, Dutton’s excise change has no redeeming policy rationale. It is no different to Morrison’s 2022 reduction, which was purely political.
If Dutton were serious about emulating Howard’s reform legacy, he would have instead announced his intention to eliminate bracket creep for good.
When explained to the electorate, this would have immediate political appeal. We index pensions, unemployment benefits and other welfare payments for inflation, but why not our income tax thresholds?
Even more importantly, getting rid of bracket creep would be a significant economic and fiscal reform in its own right. It would put an immediate check on the growth of government, denying Canberra access to its hidden, regressive and incentive-destroying inflation tax.
Instead of feeding the spending beast, we would be putting it on a permanent diet – as happens in Washington, Berlin, Ottawa and most other OECD countries.

Time to introduce the main villain, Treasurer Jim Chalmers during Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman

Then there was just a final gobbet, with these Pearlers almost as unhappy as Dame Groan's ...

As my former secretary, Ted Evans, told me once, bracket creep is lazy fiscal policy.
Even Ken Henry has realised, perhaps a little belatedly, the inherent unfairness of this practice, which hits younger workers the hardest and keeps us addicted to economically damaging personal income tax.
If Dutton committed to getting rid of bracket creep in the election campaign, he would ideally identify specific spending cuts to pay for it – for the first few years, at least. But beyond this time frame, finding savings for tax threshold indexation should be a regular part of pre-budget planning – setting an overall funding envelope within which Canberra has to operate.
We are not talking about huge sums, although the cost rises over time – about $4bn each year initially (less than 1 per cent of annual revenue raised), but increasing to $10bn after a decade. We need a major reduction in our income tax rates across the board, paid for by permanently smaller government, but ending bracket creep is a worthwhile initial step.
I wrote in these pages in February that we face a Seinfeld election. The world trading system and global security are under threat. Our public finances are unsustainable, with an out-of-control NDIS swallowing up a rising share of the budget. We struggle under a self-imposed net-zero energy tax, which will limit future growth and continue to eat away at living standards.
Yet the response of our two major parties, comfortable in the political duopoly our electoral system has given them, is to ignore all of this and squabble instead over competing cost-of-living handouts.
Tweedledum’s $14 a week or Tweedledee’s $10 a week. Take your pick. We deserve better than this.
David Pearl is a former Treasury assistant secretary.

Luckily there was an immortal Rowe to hand celebrating bracket creep ...

It was at this point that the rubber really hit the pond's road. Should the pond indulge Killer in his Kovid Krusade.

What if some unsuspecting bystander read Vaccine tops list of Covid pandemic blunders still ignored across West, Five years on I should apologise for not having been as strident in condemning mass coerced Covid vaccination?

What if they wasted four minutes of their life, and decided not to get vaccinated, and thereby terminated their life in a painful and ugly way?

What if they were assaulted by the stupefying banality of the lizard Oz illustrations? Staff at CSL are seen working in the vaccine lab in Melbourne.

There is, of course, no point in arguing with Killer when he gets in one of these moods ... the man is a complete and utter barking mad loon, right off into tin foil hat territory ... and now memories of actual death by Covid have dimmed, especially as Australia managed to escape the worst of it ...

Five years on from the collective madness that gripped much of the world during the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s become fashionable to decry the kind of government overreach that was practically championed by almost everyone in Australia.
Earlier this month, the Australian Human Rights Commission chimed in, condemning lockdowns as an affront to human rights, something that should’ve been obvious at the time. The idea that all the restrictions and lockdowns passed any sort of cost-benefit analysis is laughable, especially given the endless list of socio-economic and health damages they wrought. That’s why no pandemic plan of any nation recommended those sorts of policies be pursued, let alone for a mild and contagious virus.

Still the reptiles want to demonise Comrade Dan? Yep, Former Victorian premier Daniel Andrews speaks at a Covid-19 update. Picture: Tim Carrafa

A measure of Killer's madness is the company he prefers to keep ...

These measures led to the biggest increase in inequality in human history, supercharging asset prices while crushing the educational attainment of a generation of young people. They saddled future generations with debt levels comparable to the aftermath of a world war. Indeed, in a week where commentators have decried the imminent surge in federal public debt beyond $1 trillion, let’s remember that at least a third of it can be traced directly back to our ludicrous spending binge.
Numerous countries across Europe, including Switzerland, Sweden and Norway, exhibited practically no increase in public debt without noticeably different health outcomes. Indeed, Sweden, which famously refused to copy China’s totalitarian approach, ended up practically with the least excess deaths of any Western country.
Why the greatest levels of panic and fiscal insanity were concentrated so significantly in English-speaking countries remains to be explained. While it’s great to see the case for lockdowns headed for the intellectual scrap heap, there’s another Covid policy that unfortunately remains largely immune from criticism: de facto compulsory Covid vaccination.
I am proud of my record criticising Covid policies. Donald Trump’s elevation of Robert F. Kennedy, Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Makary – all part of that small group of brave Covid critics – into his administration has been a wonderful vindication of their expertise and persistence.

Say what? RFK Jr. full of expertise, and not just the best way to cook road kill?

Then came outright vaccine denialism, in the form of an AV distraction ...Epidemiologist Dr Clay Golledge does not believe it is a “big deal” for Australians to go out and the get the latest COVID booster vaccinations. Australians are now able to get a new updated COVID booster vaccine. Health authorities are advising people to make sure their vaccines are up to date as infections rise.

Ah the old fear of the jab routine ... but as noted yesterday, the pond has already completed its shingles vaccine course and is lining up for its annual flu shot and a Covid booster, because it is a big deal if you're of a certain age ...

Meanwhile, Killer cranked his vaccine denialism up to 11 ...

Five years on I should apologise for not having been as strident in condemning mass coerced Covid vaccination. At the time, I didn’t dare: the experimental vaccines were accorded practically religious veneration by the mainstream media. To point out that more people died from all causes (unrelated to Covid) in the vaccinated as opposed to the placebo group of Pfizer’s 2020 trial would risk total banishment.
I was not as brave as former New York Times journalist Alex Berenson, who was infamously thrown off Twitter and “cancelled” for asserting in 2021 that the Covid-19 vaccines didn’t stop transmission or infection.
“Don’t think of it as a vaccine; think of it – at best – as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficiency and terrible side-effect profile … And we want to mandate it? Insanity,” he tweeted.
All that was true then, and even more obviously now. It’s entirely possible that coerced Covid vaccination caused more damage to society even than lockdowns.
In 2023, Western Australian health authorities quietly released data that compared the risk of adverse reactions across different publicly available vaccines: it was an eye-popping 24 times greater for Covid vaccines than for all others combined. Doubtless the various Covid vaccines helped people, but it should’ve been a personal decision, especially given they never stopped transmission.
The Amish population of the US, about 350,000 strong, refused entirely to take the Covid-19 vaccine for ideological reasons, providing a natural control group. They are still around and thriving, exhibiting not worse outcomes than other Americans, as are the millions of residents of numerous less developed nations that couldn’t afford the Covid-19 shots.
Quite aside from unnecessary injuries and deaths, largely of young people who were never at serious risk from Covid, confidence in public health authorities and tried and proven vaccines has been trashed.
Numerous polls in Australia and the US now point to declining rates of confidence in public health authorities, and even declining confidence in tried and proven vaccines for diseases from measles to polio, a point The Australian reported this month.

What to say? Trust Killer and die, or get a shot?

At this point the reptiles slipped in a snap of Killer's idol, source of tin foil hattery ...Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

What news of the man? Well it seems as if putting the Gwyneth Paltrow of wellness in charge of things might have caused a little fuss ...(archive link)

Talk about road kill if you will, talk about vaccine denialism, but don't snatch soda from their cold dead unvaccinated lips ...

Then came the last of Killer's denialism ...

In the US confidence in public health has plummeted, from 69 per cent in April 2020 to 44 per cent three years later, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer.

Pinning down the extent of the damage is difficult. Given how enthusiastically they championed compulsory vaccination, neither the pharma industry nor government will investigate these important subjects.
Personally, I know of many individuals, among friends and colleagues, who experienced serious vaccine injuries, which contradicts the media narrative that injuries are vanishingly rare.
In any case, the public and investors have spoken: demand for the Covid shots, now mercifully voluntary, has collapsed throughout the developed world, even as governments campaign for them to continue. While the Overton window – the range of tolerated public commentary – has shifted since the crazy years of 2020 and 2021, not enough public criticism is directed at de facto compulsory Covid vaccination. The policy was wrong in principle. The supposedly “safe and effective” products clearly failed to live up to their promise, and they have caused many thousands of injuries and deaths around the world.
“Trust and confidence will not be restored unless politicians and bureaucrats recognise the full human cost,” the Human Rights Commission recently concluded.
Picking which of the Covid-era health policies was worst is challenging, but forcing lightly tested vaccines on the world’s population has good claim to being the worst of all.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

To go Lord Downer and Shakspere, here's the rub, aye here's the rub. 

Down below Killer's piece, the reptiles decided to provide a link to more reading, More Coverage, RFK Jr and the measles outbreak

It was like moving from the barking mad to the reasonably sensible in the world of the hive mind, with the WSJ Editorial Board offering a two minute note, RFK Jr and the measles outbreak, Now he’s health secretary, not a gadfly, as unvaxxed children are hospitalised.

Again there was a snap of the road kill man, Robert F. Kennedy Jr has been confirmed by the Senate as the new Health Secretary in the United States. Picture: Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images

Contrast this text with that of Killer ...

The Senate voted 52-48 last week to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr as the nation’s health secretary. In other news, 13 people in Texas were hospitalised for measles amid an outbreak of 48 cases, almost all in children whose vaccination status is negative or unknown. That was as of Friday morning. “Due to the highly contagious nature of this disease,” the Texas health department said, “additional cases are likely.”
The tragedy is that this doesn’t have to keep happening. In 2000 measles was declared eliminated from the US, meaning 12 months with no continuous spread. Immunisation has saved millions of lives around the world since the vaccine became available in 1963. The peril isn’t small. “About one in five unvaccinated people in the US who get measles is hospitalised,” according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. “Nearly one to three of every 1000 children who become infected with measles will die.”
Yet for some people, the reality of measles feels like a sepia-toned history lesson, whereas the anti-vax hooey featured on podcasts these days sounds current. RFK Jr, an environmental lawyer by trade, has long been part of the problem, and at his Senate confirmation hearings he presented himself as just asking questions, man. That undersells his role in spreading doubt and confusion.
“Two doses of MMR vaccine” – for measles, mumps and rubella – “are 97 per cent effective at preventing measles,” the CDC says. But coverage is sliding. For the 2023-24 school year, the national estimate was 92.7 per cent of kindergarteners had two MMR doses, down from 95.2 per cent in 2019-20. An intervening shock was Covid-19, and there were bound to be consequences after health authorities burned their pandemic credibility.
Restoring confidence matters, particularly since these trends have longer and deeper causes. In Gaines County, Texas, where the measles outbreak is centred, state statistics show MMR coverage for kindergarteners is 82 per cent. Texas law lets parents opt out of school vaccine mandates for “reasons of conscience.” In Gaines, 17.6 per cent of kindergarteners have filed a “conscientious exemption” to at least one shot. For Texas as a whole, that number has climbed to 3.6 per cent. A decade ago, it was 1.3 per cent.
This is courting heartache that parents used to face routinely but that modern medicine has made unthinkable for most. We are on record as sceptical of RFK Jr’s nomination. The Senate confirmed him. Now the best-case scenario would be for Mr Kennedy to internalise that he is no longer an activist outsider who needs to take provocative potshots to get attention.
He’s the nation’s health secretary, and there are children in the hospital with measles who shouldn’t have to be there.
The Wall Street Journal

Well yes ...

The pond went a little cartoon crazy there to help hide its shame.

You see, the pond had resolved in recent weeks not to join the reptiles' children's crusade in persecuting universities, academics and law schools, and in particular Macquarie University.

And yet the pond's beloved holey Henry went there. 

The pond thought about it long and hard, thought about sending him off to a late arvo slot, thought about dropping him entirely, thought about censoring him and just keeping the good bits, the arcane, ancient references, the ones that conformed to our Henry's first law, “There is no argument that cannot be bolstered by citing a long-deceased notable who had no direct knowledge or experience of the subject under debate.”

Fuck the pond as dead as a doornail, not only had the old dotard joined the crusade, he'd gone full Trumpian crusader. 

Was it the pond's place to deny the hole in the bucket man, especially as it was only by ploughing all the way through, by reaching the end of the piece, that correspondents could realise just how dangerously radicalised our Henry had become?

The pond decided on a punishment - strip our Henry of his illustrations - and let him rant and rave in visual isolation...

Role of law schools is to teach, not preach, The critics of current law schools aren’t seeking a return to “black letter law”, they are seeking a return to impartiality and objectivity instead indoctrination.

Oh fucketty fuck, the pond realised it had made another grave error. 

How to mention the astonishing banality of reptile graphics, as in Is it is acceptable for a law school to grade students on the enthusiasm with which they deliver a welcome to country?, without actually demonstrating them? Quod erat demonstrandum ...

No, the pond had to stay strong, that would be the last visual illustration ... leave the ignominy to the verbiage...

Writing earlier this week on these pages, Andrew Lynch, dean of law and justice at UNSW Sydney, accused those who have criticised the politicisation of law courses of advocating an absurdly narrow, “black letter” conception of the curriculum law schools should adopt.
Lynch’s characterisation of these intellectual troglodytes would hardly surprise Aristotle, who first identified the straw man fallacy in his On Sophistical Refutations. Its telling sign is that the target is purely imaginary – for Lynch neither identifies, nor can plausibly identify, any living, breathing human being who fits his caricature.
But in this instance as in so many others, the “ignoratio elenchi” fallacy, which is surely the oldest trick in the academic book, serves its purpose. That purpose, Isaac Watts elegantly explained in Logick; or, The Right Use of Reason (1725), is to allow a disputant who “finds his adversary too hard for him”, to “with slyness and subtlety turn the discourse aside to some other kindred point which he can prove, and exult in that new argument wherein his opponent had never contradicted him”.

Their goal, he claimed, is to ensure that “law schools teach just a bunch of ‘black letters’ on a page” – “an impoverished conception of law” that would “produce a profession ill-equipped to serve its society”.

Ah, the pompous pedant in full portentous flight. How could the pond have stood in his way?

The reptiles gave the pond a chance to drop one snap, dragged out from ancient times, because that's all the reptiles had ...Andrew Lynch at UNSW law faculty Sydney, 2005.

Instead it was on with the verbiage ...

Once he has “with a great deal of pomp, attacked and confounded these images of straw”, he can proudly proclaim “a triumph over his adversary, as though (he) had utterly confuted his opinion”.
Thanks to that ruse, Lynch completely avoids what is actually at issue: whether it is acceptable for a law school to grade students on the enthusiasm with which they deliver a “welcome to country”.
The university’s own justification, if one can call it that, is manifestly pretextual. In effect, were it true, as Macquarie University contends, that those exercises in conspicuous virtue are needed for dealing with Indigenous clients, why would they be optional in the honours course, which opens the path to a practising certificate, but compulsory in an undergraduate course, which does not?
The reality is that far from being formative of crucial legal skills, grading students on that basis is no less a form of indoctrination than would be assessing them on their fervour in reciting the Lord’s Prayer.
It is therefore hardly unreasonable to ask just how widespread phenomena of that kind are in our law schools, which, as well as being heavily funded by taxpayers, play a central role in training Australia’s governing elite. And the fact that Lynch himself seems confused on the responsibilities of universities makes that question especially pressing.
Thus, citing Hal Wootten, his school’s founding dean, Lynch emphasises the “absolute need” for a law school to “communicate to its students a keen concern for those on whom the law bears harshly”. It is, however, one thing to explore the social context and impact of the legal system; it is quite another to allow teaching to degenerate into preaching, imposing the lecturer’s conception of social justice on students who have little choice but to acquiesce.

At this point the reptiles interrupted with an AV distraction featuring the Bolter and Sky Noise...

University of Buckingham Politics Professor Eric Kaufmann discusses strategies to challenge woke ideology. “Young people are twice as woke, at least much less tolerant than older people, young leftists are much less tolerant than old leftists,” Professor Kaufmann told Sky News host Andrew Bolt. “So, we have to get at the education system, and that means conservative governments are going to really have to focus a lot more seriously in reform of the curriculum and getting woke indoctrination out of the schools.”

What a torment. That word had been mentioned, and the pond was under strict contractual requirements whenever it appeared in a reptile text... 

Again the pond had to break the visual illustration rule ...

Speaking of fuckheads of the pompous pedantic kind ...

Nor are the stakes trivial. As Lynch presumably knows, the 1915 Declaration of the American Association of University Professors, which defined the modern idea of academic freedom, justified the rights and privileges it ascribed to universities by reference to their role as “nonpartisan institutions of learning” that encourage students “to think for themselves”, rather than force-feeding them “ready-made solutions”.
As US Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren wrote, in his enormously influential plurality opinion in Sweezy (1957), “the classroom”, if it is to live up to that function, must be a veritable microcosm of “the marketplace of ideas”, in which university students are “trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth ‘out of a multitude of tongues, (rather) than through any kind of authoritative selection’ ”.
And drawing on the same intellectual foundations, Warren’s colleague, Felix Frankfurter, a towering figure in jurisprudence, authoritatively defined the academic’s indispensable attributes. “The special task of teachers,” he wrote in his oft-cited Wieman (1952) opinion, “is to foster those habits of open-mindedness and critical inquiry which alone make for responsible citizens, who, in turn, make possible an enlightened and effective public opinion.”
That teachers can only do “by precept and practice, by the very atmosphere which they generate: they must be exemplars of open-mindedness and free inquiry” – for it is only in that way that they can they provide not just instruction but “the moral education” for democratic life, with its need for tolerance and civility.
If academics fail in that respect, stressed William Van Alstyne in a classic article published in 1972, the justification for the special freedoms of universities necessarily fails with them.
University administrators therefore have not just a right but a duty, said the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in a 1972 opinion co-authored by Professor John Paul Stevens before his appointment to the Supreme Court, to prevent, correct and reprimand behaviour by academics that is “destructive of the proper functioning of the institution” – including “uncontrolled expression at variance with established curricular standards” that amounts to compelled speech or forced indoctrination.

The reptiles turned to unlovely Rita meter maid for another AV distraction ... The national school curriculum’s priority is “woke content”, much like university curriculums, says the Institute of Public Affairs Colleen Harkin. “The university curriculum is as warped as the national curriculum,” she told Sky News host Rita Panahi. “They are not prioritising the skill set that is required to do the job, which of course then means the people who are coming out the other end are not skilled in the job they have to do to manage a classroom.”

Not the IPA again ... the pond didn't mind missing out on that distraction ... because the full, ugly truth was about to be revealed ...

Not a single, solitary one of those opinions was penned by the Gradgrindian “black letter” lawyers who, like evil goblins, populate Lynch’s demonology. Rather, what the eminent judges had in common was an abiding, perhaps greatly exaggerated, belief in the contribution higher education could make to an often searingly divided democracy by teaching young people to face reality with an open countenance, unprotected by false certainties or fashionable prejudices.
And they well knew Max Weber’s famous statement that the university does not have “the gift of grace of seers and prophets dispensing sacred values and revelations” – along with his warning that if universities abandoned the ideals of impartiality and objectivity, they would “spawn only fanatical sects but never a genuine community”.
However, the judges who authored those opinions knew one more thing too, which the AAUP itself had stressed in 1915. If universities refused to fulfil, with “judicial severity”, their responsibility to ensure impartiality and objectivity, and instead invoked academic freedom “as a shelter for inefficiency, for superficiality, or for uncritical and intemperate partisanship”, then it was inevitable that others would step in, more bluntly and forcibly, to correct their failings.
That is what we are now witnessing in the United States, where the Trump administration is exercising its right, which the Supreme Court confirmed in Rumsfeld v Forum for Academic & Institutional Rights (2006), to withdraw federal funding from errant institutions. With our own universities having in recent years tolerated the harassment of Jewish students and faculty, struck repugnant deals with Islamists and descended, in the voice referendum, into unabashed partisanship, it is high time they took a cold, hard look at themselves.

Say what? He's gone full Trumpian?

...the Trump administration is exercising its right, which the Supreme Court confirmed in Rumsfeld v Forum for Academic & Institutional Rights (2006), to withdraw federal funding from errant institutions.

He has, he has...the old dotard has gone full authoritarian ...

And yet, and yet ...

First They Came for Columbia

Like many autocrats before him, Donald Trump has launched what could be a devastating attack on universities.
Over the last week, the Trump administration has cancelled $400 million in grants and contracts to Columbia University and $800 million in grants to Johns Hopkins University.
Both schools were on a list of 10 universities (including Harvard) that the Department of Justice announced it was investigating over politicized allegations of antisemitism. The Department of Education subsequently launched a similar investigation into 60 universities.
And last week, the administration arrested a former student seemingly not for a crime but for his political speech on campus. Trump, who has pledged to punish universities that permit “illegal protests,” called it “the first arrest of many to come.”
So far, America’s leading universities have remained virtually silent in the face of this authoritarian assault on institutions of higher education. That must change. Harvard must stand up, speak out, and lead a public defense of our freedom to speak and study freely.

Open letter We call on Columbia to stand up to authoritarianism, How Columbia responds to this attack will determine whether universities remain independent or end up serving as extensions of an authoritarian state

To the Columbia University administration,
As journalists who were trained by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and who are steeped in America’s long traditions of free speech and academic freedom, we write to you to express our horror at the events of the past week.
The Trump administration has sent immigration enforcers into university-owned student housing and university public spaces at Columbia, has arrested and sought to deport Mahmoud Khalil – not for having committed any documented crimes, but for the thoughts that he has expressed; and has forced another student, Ranjani Srivasan, to flee to Canada after her visa was revoked, also apparently for thought crimes.
It has sought to financially cripple the university by withholding $400m in federal funds. And it has demanded the university shut down or restructure departments it deems to be politically problematic, and that it alter its criteria for who to admit to incoming student cohorts.

How Columbia gave in to Trump’s demands to get its $400m funding back
The New York university’s federal funding was revoked last month over allegations of ‘antisemitic harassment’ on campus.

Columbia University has agreed to a list of demands laid down by United States President Donald Trump in return for negotiations to reinstate its $400m federal funding which he revoked last month citing “a failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment”.

Among other concessions, the university has agreed to ban face masks and to empower 36 campus police officers with special powers to arrest students.

A new senior provost will also be installed to oversee the department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies and the Center for Palestine Studies.

Columbia should have said ‘see you in court’, not ‘yes, Mr President’, Institutions must resist thuggish bullying. There is no satisfying Trump. He will move the goalposts again and again

Since early 2024, I’ve been running a journalism ethics center at Columbia University.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that I see the university’s capitulation to Trump both in terms of journalism and ethics.

I’ve never run a university, but I have run a newsroom. For 13 years (until I moved to New York City in 2012 to be the New York Times public editor), I was the chief editor of the Buffalo News, the regional newspaper in my home town. I had started there as a summer intern. As editor, I made a lot of decisions; the buck stopped at my desk.

It’s not a perfect analogy to Columbia’s situation, but I’ve been thinking about what my options might have been if the paper’s biggest and most powerful advertiser – one important to our financial wellbeing – had gotten wind of an investigation they didn’t like the sounds of. Something that would reveal something negative about their business, let’s say.

Suppose that advertiser had threatened to withdraw all their advertising unless we dropped the story. In fact, suppose they wanted promises of positive coverage – perhaps a fawning profile of their CEO, and a series about the good things the company was doing in the community.

Let’s complicate it more. Let’s say that my boss, the paper’s owner, was on the advertiser’s side, or at least inclined to see their point of view.

What would my options be as editor?

There really would be only one: to hold fast. To make the case to the owner that if we were a legitimate newspaper, we would have to be brave and not allow ourselves to be bullied. And to refuse to pull the story. Make sure it’s bulletproof – every fact nailed down – and proceed with plans to publish it.

What would happen?

That’s hard to say. Maybe the advertiser would blink. Maybe the owner would fire me. Maybe I’d feel I had to resign.

The point of this imperfect analogy is simply that allowing oneself – or one’s institution – to be bullied or threatened into compliance is never the right answer.

Some principles are so central to an institution’s purpose that to betray them should be unthinkable

And it’s especially important for strong institutions to stand up, to set an example and to insulate those who have fewer resources or are more vulnerable.

Columbia has a huge – nearly $15bn – endowment. It could have withstood the withdrawal of federal funds.

Columbia’s leadership could have chosen to say “see you in court” rather than “yes, sir”.

Some principles are so central to an institution’s purpose that to betray them should be unthinkable. You don’t kill a valid story under pressure. Because journalism, however flawed, is about finding and telling the truth.

And a university – which stands for academic freedom, for freedom of thought, speech and expression, including the right to peacefully protest – cannot buckle to demands to undermine those principles.

Sadly, that’s what Columbia did, even going so far as to put an entire academic department under highly unusual supervision, and to empower beefed-up campus police to detain, remove or arrest students for various supposed offenses.

Well yes ... but sadly that's what the old dotard just did ... he went full authoritarian Trumpist...

Is our Henry inclined to fascism, like so many of the Trumpian kind? The pond is just asking, just wondering ...

...the Trump administration is exercising its right, which the Supreme Court confirmed in Rumsfeld v Forum for Academic & Institutional Rights (2006), to withdraw federal funding from errant institutions.

Yep, full authoritarian, and soon enough, maybe full fascist ...

And what of other Trumpist betrayals and treacheries? What of SignalGate? What of selling out Ukraine?

In the reptile world, all is lick spittle appeasement, and fellow travelling, or grovelling, abject silence, leaving Wilcox like a closing, ominous shag on a rock ...