In which the pond returns home, only to be confronted by the denialist Ughmann and a severe test of strength, the "Ned" Everest climb...

 

Greetings from Euroa to JM and other correspondents ...

Now that's Victorian street art at its best.

It turned out that Euroa was a heritage village rich in heritage ...

Apologies for the poor framing but the pond's hands were shaking. 

As well as peddling parrots and the heritage routine, the town's a tourist trap. 

Seven bucks for a lamington! 

The pond reeled away, and drove off, aware that the next day it would have to tackle the reptiles ...and so that day dawned ... and there was no shelter to be found ...

Hmmm,  nattering "Ned" in full flight, and a timely attempt at renewables bashing in what purports to be the "news" section.

Over on the extreme far right, the reptiles were looking extremely threadbare...

Still no bromancer! MIA since February 26th ...

Our Henry still hanging around on a Saturday? 

But the pond had planned and arranged a late arvo debrief, juxtaposing our Henry with Killer Kreighton of the IPA, both rolled out by the reptiles on Friday while the pond was on the road, and the pond saw no reason to change.

And Polonius's prattle is always reserved as a Sunday treat ...

Besides, just getting through a "Ned" Everest climb on a Saturday morning would be enough of a challenge for anyone suffering from lamington deprivation. Seven bucks? And the pond didn't have the energy to tell 'em they were dreaming.

Meanwhile climate science denialism runs strong in the seminarian.

This is just the latest in a long running series ...

Doomsayers push climate of fear as Alfred hits, The prophets of an impending climate apocalypse are cashing in on the Brisbane cyclone. Do they believe that weaponising lies for a noble cause is justified? It is not.

The Ughmann really doesn't think it's a noble cause, more ignoble, like the ability to charge for lamingtons like a wounded bull.

It turned out that the Ughmann was offering the astonishing insight that this particular cyclone isn't unique, or even very unique, or perhaps totally unique ... Cyclones making landfall as far south as Brisbane and the Gold Coast are rare but Alfred is not unique. Snapper Rocks this week. Picture: Nigel Hallett

The pond thought the Ughmann would be an excellent warm-up for the "Ned" climb ...

Time for some excellent cherry-picking...

Even before the storm hit, the distortions began.
With Cyclone Alfred bearing down on southern Queensland, most people’s thoughts turned to hoping the worst of it might be averted. That the storm might weaken. That by a miracle it might miss major population centres. That the loss of life, the injuries, the destruction somehow might be limited.
But the Climate Council saw a business opportunity: another chance to terrify people into believing that this cyclone was a creature of climate change.
The council issued a media “talent alert” offering a menu of experts keen to link the storm to global warming, even though the release itself noted “a warmer world means fewer but more destructive cyclones”.
That’s right, there have been fewer cyclones making landfall in Australia in recent decades, according to all the best research.
It is detailed in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis.
On page 1586 it says: “(Tropical cyclone) landfall frequency over Australia shows a decreasing trend in eastern Australia since the 1800s, as well as in other parts of Australia since 1982. A paleoclimate proxy reconstruction shows that recent levels of (tropical cyclone) interactions along parts of the Australian coastline are the lowest in the past 550-1500 years.”
Surely this bit is good news. But what of the fears of “more destructive” cyclones?

Ah, there's a cartoon for all this ...

Carry on regardless, and make sure not to mention that climate science has definitively shown climate change to be happening, with devastating consequences, already being felt by anyone wanting to take out insurance ...

Here the Climate Council appears to be on solid ground because it quotes from the 2024 State of the Environment Report, a joint effort by the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO.
“Fewer tropical cyclones, but with higher intensity on average, and greater impacts when they occur through higher rain rates and higher sea level,” the report says on page three.
But roll forward to page 13 of the same report, under the heading Tropical Cyclones, and it says: “The trend in cyclone intensity in the Australian region is harder to quantify than cyclone frequency, due to uncertainties in estimating the intensity of individual cyclones and the relatively small number of intense cyclones.”
What are we to make of a report co-authored by two of the most respected scientific bodies in Australia that is so internally inconsistent?
On March 4, the CSIRO published an article on cyclones. Here it was more precise.
“There is a projected increase in (tropical cyclone) peak intensity, on average. We also expect to see an increase in the proportion of tropical cyclones that reach the more intense categories (category 4 or 5).
“However, there is large uncertainty in these projections due to challenges associated with modelling tropical cyclone physics in coarse-resolution climate models.”

At this point the reptiles graced the seminarian with another snap, Surge damage at Froggies Beach on the Gold Coast ahead of Cyclone Alfred this week Picture: Nigel Hallett

Why is all this important to the reptiles? Remember that other angle?

So it's important for the Ughmann to drag in experts to explain how there's nothing here to see ...

So, models project storms might become more intense but they are qualified by “large uncertainty”. What about empirical observations, which are the bedrock of the scientific method?
Returning to the IPCC report, on page 1583 it says “there is low confidence in observed long-term (40 years or more) trends in (tropical cyclone) intensity, frequency, and duration”.
Professor Roger Pielke has spent decades researching what the Americans call hurricanes. In 2024 he published an article on global tropical cyclones that drew on a data set maintained by Colorado State University. Its records date from 1980 and it uses a metric called Accumulated Cyclone Energy, which combines cyclone frequency and intensity.
Pielke notes: “Over this time period and according to these metrics, hurricanes have not become more intense.”
Cyclones making landfall as far south as Brisbane are rare but Alfred is not unique.

Indeed, uniquely indeed ...

The trouble, of course, is that this routine isn't unique. Roam back through the past, note past events, and come to the conclusion that there's nothing to see here ... and yet the entire point of the science is that there's a curve showing that climate change is happening, the planet is warming, and we show a complete inability to tackle the problem.

Faced with that indisputable curve, it's beyond the valley of the moronic to resort to cherrypicking moments in time as a tactic and an argument, but it's the best the seminarian has to offer ...

The Brisbane Times reviewed the history of similar events and noted: “The last tropical cyclone to cross the southeast Queensland coast was ex-Tropical Cyclone Zoe in 1974, which arrived less than two months after Cyclone Wanda caused the catastrophic 1974 Brisbane floods.
“In January 1887 gale-force winds and heavy rains inundated the southeast corner, with buildings at Sandgate washed away, and 70 people reported dead.
“Across late January and February 1893, no less than five cyclones crossed the southeast and central Queensland coasts, sparking the Great Flood of Brisbane.”
There is no evidence that Alfred was caused by climate change. There is no evidence that burning less coal, oil and gas in Australia would have averted it or made it less ferocious. But that is precisely what the Climate Council, the Greens and a cavalcade of other politicians and activists intend to suggest as the media feeds on the fear they sow.
It’s all part of a pattern of climate misinformation that washes around the globe, echoed by governments, international institutions and the media as all aim to terrify populations into accepting wrenching and expensive change.

Actually, the Ughmann is part of a pattern of climate science denialism that washes through the Murdochians, echoed by loons on the far right, desperate to keep fucking the planet, and then hoping that the 'leets can hightail it to Mars with Uncle Leon ...

The way it works is that there's a growing hysteria in the scribbler about climate change hysteria, culminating in a grand flourish ...

Perhaps the worst offender is UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres and the organisation he leads. Swedish public radio recently broadcast an investigation by journalist Ola Sandstig into four oft-repeated claims about global warming: that climate change kills 1.7 million children under the age of five every year; that women and children are 14 times likelier to die in natural disasters than men; that the number of weather disasters has increased fivefold since the 1970s; and that families in Samoa are abandoning their homes and moving inland because of climate change.
All are grossly misleading. The 1.7 million claim appears on the UNICEF website. Sandstig notes this number is 40 times higher than the average total yearly deaths recorded from natural disasters across the past decade. The figure is drawn from two World Health Organisation reports and neither refers to climate change. Both focus on traditional environmental killers such as indoor and outdoor air pollution and fetid water.
Numerous UN agencies claim that women and children are 14 times likelier than men to die in natural disasters. Sandstig traced that claim to a report written 27 years ago by anthropologist Kristina Peterson, who took one piece of anecdotal evidence from one disaster and included it in a 1997 article in the journal Natural Hazards Observer. The author says it was never intended to be a metric for all disasters.
“You know what’s crazy is I’ve had people call me about it and I have said ‘No, don’t use that’,” she told Sandstig. “Would you use data on climate from 25 years ago? I thought people had more sense.”
The claim that the weather disasters have increased fivefold since the 1970s has been spread by the World Meteorological Organisation and broadcast by Guterres himself. The source of this number is the Brussels-based Emergency Events Database.
The pioneer of that database, Professor Debarati Guha-Sapir, told Sandstig the rise was primarily due to a massive increase in reports on disasters because of better communications. It would be “dangerous and misleading” to claim there was a fivefold increase in weather-related disasters in the past 50 years.
“You can actually argue that climate disasters, or natural disasters, have not actually substantially increased but the reporting has been much easier, much better, much quicker,” Guha-Sapir said.
Last year, Guterres travelled to Samoa, stood in front of an abandoned home on a beach, and recorded a message posted on X.
“Those who lived in these houses had to move their homes further inland because of sea level rise and the multiplication of storms,” Guterres said.
Sandstig interviewed a member of the family that abandoned the house in 2009. They left after the 2009 earthquake and tsunami. Neither is connected to climate change.
Here Pielke takes up the story: “Relative sea level rise has accelerated in Samoa. But that also has nothing to do with climate change but, rather, increased subsidence following the 2009 earthquake.”
“UN secretary-general Guterres’ Samoan photo op and press release can only be described as an intentional effort to mislead,” Pielke says.
The prophets of an impending climate apocalypse appear to believe that weaponising lies for a noble cause is justified. But one day the truth will out, leaving those who traded in fear with nothing but the ruins of their credibility among the ashes of their cause.

Yep, there he blowed, that grand flourish at the end is classic denialism, made worse by that notion that somehow the Ughmann sees climate science as a noble clause (sic). 

He's trading in fear, with nothing but the ruination of the planet as his final utterly unique contribution to climate science ...

Time now for an infallible Pope, offering a noble cartoon... (keep up those insurance premiums and never mind the rising tide of costs).

And so to "Ned's" latest Everest climb, and here's the thing about "Ned"s" latest bout of reptile hand-wringing and Chicken Little rushing about.

The reptiles clocked it as an 11 minute read, and stuffed it full to the brim with snaps and audio visual distractions.

11minutes! And not a lamington in sight to provide relief.

Just getting it all down became an epic in itself ...

Neither Anthony Albanese nor Peter Dutton seem able to face the challenges ahead, Election 2025 looms as one of the most irrelevant, insubstantial and uninspiring for many decades, because both Labor and the Coalition are devoid of political courage and fresh ideas.

Right at the start, the reptiles began with waving red flags in a gif that was wisely uncredited. 

The pond couldn't replicate the experience, and was deeply relieved it couldn't... correspondents will have to imagine those red flags flapping, waving back and forth, a bit like "Ned's" brain... The world is putting Australia on notice. This is an age of transformation. But Australia is locked in a culture of denial and obsolete thinking – election 2025 shapes as a dispiriting project with neither the Albanese government nor the Dutton opposition confronting the challenges the nation faces.

The pond felt the immediate need to counter with visual relief of its own, an echo from the Ughmann ...

This is how will go, this is how it went.

First a short burst from a gloomy "Ned" ...

The emergency signals are flashing: the eruption of Donald Trump, the Chinese flotilla circumnavigating the continent, a predicted decade of budget deficits, devastating misjudgment of spending priorities, moribund productivity and the exhaustion of economic reform.

... and then an AV distraction ... Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has refused to answer when he will announce the date for the federal election as Tropical Cyclone Alfred looms. “I am focused not on votes, I’m focused on lives, I’m focused on Australians,” Mr Albanese told Sky News Australia in a wide-ranging interview. “What I’m focused on is good governance.”

How unhappy the reptiles were, with a cyclone depriving them of their election fever, sapping the circulation, wilting their lust for the tabloid campaigning.

Then comes another burst of gloomy hand-wringing from "Ned"...

The fear is the coming election will bring to a zenith the long-festering Australian malaise – that our political system cannot effectively identify and respond to the numerous and contradictory demands being imposed on Australia. Australia looks static, lost in a world moving too fast, defined by strategic danger, deepening economic competition, technological upheaval and unresolved fiscal demands. Apart from a few concessions neither Anthony Albanese nor Peter Dutton seem capable of putting an agenda to the public that is fit to meet the disruption, opportunity and transformation lying ahead.
Elections have the potential for renewal and redirection. But election 2025 looms as one of the most irrelevant, insubstantial and uninspiring for many decades because the main parties – Labor and the Coalition – are decoupled from the realities of the times. The upshot may be minority government, a weakened executive, a more difficult parliament and a split country.
Aside from the long-run notion of nuclear power – probably unrealistic – and this week’s belated moves on the defence front, the election is devoid of new ideas, political courage and any effort to break the years of complacency and third-best national policy that have diminished Australia and led to a community that is frustrated and worried about the future.

Note the cunning uncertainty of "probably unrealistic", but don't brood about it, because it's time for another AV distraction, this one featuring the dog botherer ... Sky News host Chris Kenny says the Albanese Labor government has been “throwing” around billions of dollars in pre-election announcements. Mr Kenny said this extra money expenditure comes with the federal budget heading towards “years of deficits”. “This march of ever-expanding government comes as Elon Musk … is tackling government spending in the United States.”

The dog botherer was also out yesterday in full campaign mode and the pond was relieved to have missed it. 

What with the cyclone delaying matters, the reptiles are possibly going to be in full campaign mode for ages.

Meanwhile, "Ned" was doing his best to make things seem doom-laden ... sure, we might be filthy rich, but what good is that, we're all rooned, or about to be rooned, a routine as aged as the poem ...

Australia, like other rich countries, seems trapped. The electorate knows things aren’t working, living standards are too stagnant; the status quo is fracturing, beset by cultural division, weak economic growth, social inequity and erupting security threats – but the public remains suspicious of change and our political leaders prefer tactical fiddles to any robust exposition of the fundamental departures that are needed.
The media, naturally, is obsessed by the competition between Albanese and Dutton. Yet this misses the point entirely. Neither offers an adequate agenda. The campaign shapes as a contest between two highly unsatisfactory offerings. This is so obvious, yet we seem incapable of recognising the obvious and demanding something better.
Trump’s chaotic meaning is unmistakeable – the purpose of government is to lead. Without strong constructive leadership a frustrated public will vote an alternative. In the US that was Trump; in Australia it may become a further vote against the existing two-party system.
Both Albanese and Dutton are locked into negative campaigns against each other. Yet the extraordinary story is the shared policy agenda between Labor and Coalition, a reality both seek to conceal with their inflamed rhetoric.
Don’t fall for the myth this election is a great battle of ideology and ideas. The rhetorical differences are huge and the policy differences are minor, energy aside.

The pond would usually pause to absorb that dose of neigh-saying both siderism, but what do you know, the reptiles produced yet another AV distraction, Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister Patrick Gorman has criticised the Liberal Party’s pledge to cut work-from-home arrangements for public service workers. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is seeking to crack down on the public sector before the federal election, pledging to reverse 36,000 jobs. “This policy is a stinker,” Mr Gorman told Sky News Australia. “They’ve only got three policies and they all stink.”

"Ned" ploughed on, being as gloomy as all get out ...

Don’t expect the Coalition to run on big tax reform or a bold winding back of Labor’s workplace laws. Dutton’s focus is on seven quarters of shrinking GDP per capita.
Since January Albanese has offered a serial spending agenda – $8.5bn for extra Medicare, $644m for care clinics, $7.2bn to upgrade the Bruce Highway in Queensland, a combined federal and state $2.4bn support for the Whyalla steelworks and $3bn to upgrade the NBN – all matched by the Coalition (some with policy adjustments).
Tactics and caution drive this campaign. Albanese promises more of the same – more spending in health, education, childcare and renewables while Jim Chalmers uses the latest statistics to say “inflation is down, incomes are strengthening, unemployment is very low and interest rates are coming down”.
Any second Albanese term will duplicate and follow the first. It’s the status quo – but the status quo is heading into a dead end.
Labor is caught out by a changing world, chronic budget deficits, the demographic time bomb and erupting strategic risk. Its low and middle-class spending is unsustainable given it refuses to engage in serious tax reform, while its defence agenda is grossly inadequate with Labor on election eve facing huge pressure to revise upwards its defence budget with the guaranteed upheaval this means for its political and social agendas.
The Coalition, meanwhile, is shy of putting its policy money on the table. On election eve, its core economic policies and numbers are largely unknown. Its message is smaller government, lower tax, less regulation, fewer public servants, prioritising gas and then nuclear in energy, but the details are sparse. Dutton is desperate to deny Albanese a big scare – anywhere. The fear is the long wait will be followed by a deeply insubstantial policy agenda.

It was a relief when the reptiles gave up the AV distractions for a banal interrupting snap, Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton are both locked into negative campaigns against each other. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

They might be negative campaigns, but do they cut the mustard up against a "Ned" determined to be completely negative?

Yes, it was time for "Ned" to turn to thoughts from others, as a way to pad out his piece to exorbitant length, when really he's just saying how forlorn he feels, and how the only hope he can find is forlorn ...

Come on down guru Richo, do your usual "Ned" thing ...

Independent economist and budget guru Chris Richardson tells Inquirer there is a silent pact between the politicians and the people: “We, as an electorate, have asked our politicians to avoid challenging us. It is becoming easier to become prime minister but much harder to do something as prime minister.
“In this election the two sides seem to be agreeing on mediocrity. In terms of the forward estimates I think they are agreeing on more than 99 per cent of the budget. That’s an acceptance of a status quo that is failing. We have stopped fighting harder for our future. And our politicians have stopped challenging us.”
It’s probably a forlorn hope. But the nation needs to avoid an election based on bipartisan mediocrity and that means some shock policy adjustments as we enter the campaign. Don’t hold your breath.
The status quo – spending at an exceptional high of 27.2 per cent of GDP in 2025-26 compared with 24.4 per cent of GDP in 2022-23 – testifies to a remarkable surge over three Labor years. Richardson identifies what has made it possible – the lottery of a massive, temporary, revenue boost worth an extra $173bn (with more coming) across the past two years.
What did Labor do? Richardson says since coming to office Labor has taken decisions to increase spending by $124bn and to raise taxes by $46bn.
“That explains how you can have a budget that moved into surplus and yet a budget whose fundamentals are worsening at the same time,” he says. “The permanent promises will go on, but the temporary luck will fall away.”

Then it was back to the relentless parade of AV distractions... Independent MP Allegra Spender has called for tax reform to tackle “insidious” bracket creep. “We haven’t seen economic reform out of Labor; we haven’t seen yet a commitment from the Coalition to really get into tax and get into some of those really thorny issues,” Ms Spender told Sky News Australia. “Bracket creep is an insidious tax; it’s an insidious increasing in tax and if you really want to set in stone long-term economic reform then I think you need to stop that bracket creep altogether.”

Really? From "forlorn" we moved to "dismal story",  and the pond couldn't but help imagine "Ned" in a cilice, giving his back a good thrashing with a patented Percy Grainger whip ...

The budget papers tell the dismal story – deficits running for the next 10 years until 2034-35. But the situation is worse because this excludes what the states are doing and the new cult of off-budget spending.
What this means is Australia is bereft of options and the rising demands are everywhere – witness healthcare driven by demography and the rising imperative of defence given Trump and China’s intensified assertion. Labor’s presentation of its China policy as “stabilisation” is obsolete, with China’s flotilla a symbol of our deteriorating situation and our capability inadequacies.
The pressure cooker of providing the funding by ongoing, concealed, personal income tax increases via bracket creep will explode – it can’t do the job. Australia faces a collision between its refusal to revamp economic growth through productivity reform measures and the demands on the budget arising from a transformed world and ageing population. The solution: the political system offers none.
The Trump administration has put in headlights for the first time what it expects from Australia – defence spending to lift to 3 per cent of GDP; that’s a 50 per cent increase on where we are now. Nobody is surprised, yet in truth we have been taken by surprise. Our politicians have been in a confused scramble all week with senior Trump administration official Elbridge Colby nominating the 3 per cent in his confirmation hearings. Trump, of course, says he wants allies at 5 per cent, an absurd figure.
Albanese is being defiant. But Labor will be compelled to do more – it can get proactive or be driven into the ignominy of embarrassing catch-up.
“My government is delivering increased defence assets and increased defence capability,” Albanese says, defending the status quo.
Yet a couple of days earlier the Prime Minister left open the idea of providing an Australian force to any Ukraine mission being mounted by the Europeans. He is rummaging in the dark seeking better security credentials.

Ah, defence spending and never mind the subs ...

The reptiles countered with a snap of a smirking Cantaloupe Caligula minion ... The statement by Trump Pentagon appointee Elbridge Colby that Australia should spend 3 per cent of GDP on defence has forced a conversation about Australia’s defence budget. Picture: Getty Images/AFP

There was no way a cartoon could win against "Ned's" determination to get real, which as he rambled on, became increasingly surreal ...

Defence Minister Richard Marles points to Labor’s record, promising an extra $50bn in defence spending across the decade, mainly outside the forward estimates. He says Labor’s commitment is “well understood” by the US administration. Really? Marles says he understands the US wanting its allies to do more and that is a conversation “we will continue to have with the US administration”. This is feeble stuff.
Let’s get real. Any Australian government will be required to do more. Labor should say this now – otherwise it will fall into the odium of being depicted as succumbing to pressure from Trump. The current defence trajectory is inadequate. That’s not the view of the Labor cabinet or the Labor leadership group but its priorities are going to be overtaken. As usual, Labor looks as though it cannot effectively manage unfolding events.
Labor, presumably, doesn’t want its election agenda and spending decisions disrupted by a greater commitment to defence, a step that would be widely unpopular within much of the party. Under Labor, defence spending is slated to be 2.03 per cent of GDP in 2024-25, rising to 2.33 per cent in 2033-34. Those numbers are untenable given Australia’s national security needs. At a United States Studies Centre conference in November 2024, both the former head of the Defence Department, Dennis Richardson, and former defence force chief Sir Angus Houston said the defence budget needed to lift to 3 per cent of GDP.

Then came yet another snap, ‘Feeble stuff’: Defence Minister Richard Marles says defence spending is a conversation ‘we will continue to have with the US administration’. Picture: NewsWire / John Gass

"Ned" could summon only a short burst ...

Albanese needs to be extremely careful. If Trump makes a public statement about the need for Australia to do more the issue will become politically inflamed. His management of ties with the Trump administration will come into question – unfairly – if, as expected, Australia fails to win the exemption it seeks on Trump’s tariff increases.
The Coalition, however, has been remarkably cautious about its own defence plans. Last year opposition defence spokesman Andrew Hastie committed to a stronger defence budget than Labor. But it was only last weekend that Dutton announced a $3bn pledge to buy the fourth squadron of F-35 fighter jets that Labor had cancelled.

... before the reptiles offered up another AV distraction ... Shadow Defence Minister Andrew Hastie has criticised the government's willingness to send Australian troops to Ukraine. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says he will consider any proposal from Ukraine as part of a multinational peacekeeping force. Mr Hastie also criticised the Prime Minister's handling of three Chinese warships which conducted live-fire drills in the Tasman Sea.

The pond felt bludgeoned into submission. There didn't seem to be the time or the space to note that the F-35 was a turkey, and that likely the subs, if they ever arrive, would also be turkeys, way past their use-by date, if they ever had any use at all ...

To talk about coalition credibility in this context is to imagine the mutton Dutton as a fearless leader ...

It's not enough to blather about dropping money on big items, but that's where we are ...

The Coalition says the $3bn is a minimum commitment. Obviously, it needs to come in the forward estimates. This is a tangible sign of an increased defence budget under the Coalition – though many experts doubt whether the F-35s are the correct priority. The Coalition has yet to announce the share of GDP it will devote to defence, but it would be folly, given the deteriorating strategic situation and the attitude of the Trump administration, not to commit to 3 per cent.
For Dutton, that is an absolute benchmark for his security credibility. And it will raise fiscal problems for the Coalition.
Albanese’s status quo mentality about China became a national embarrassment when he suggested its unprecedented firing drills in the Tasman Sea were unremarkable and when Australia’s surveillance was obviously exposed as inadequate. By contrast, Defence Department head Greg Moriarty told Senate estimates the Chinese “are practising and rehearsing” and collecting intelligence. Rehearsing for what?
Former head of the Home Affairs Department, Mike Pezzullo, tells Inquirer that China’s strategic attitude towards Australia is largely divorced from the bilateral relationship, whether that is good, bad or indifferent, a point lost in the public debate.

The pond has no idea why the reptiles keep on attempting to rehabilitate Pezzullo. He was a disgrace while in office, and he was drummed out for good reason.

The pond is tired of providing links as a reminder of why he was given the flick. Try Mike Pezzullo sacked years too late ... 

Luckily the pond flung another AV distraction into the mix, featuring unlovely Rita, meter maid ... Sky News host Rita Panahi has called out Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for “shrugging his shoulders” in his “utterly inept” response to China’s live fire drill. The Albanese government said the Chinese are complying with international law and that Australia participates in many military exercises in the South China Sea following China’s live fire exercises in the Tasman Sea. “During a week where he’s been utterly inept – he hasn’t actually stood up for Australia while we’ve got Chinese warships not far from our borders doing God knows what without advising us,” Ms Panahi said. “He just seems to be shrugging his shoulders and saying, ‘well, strictly speaking, they’re not breaking any international laws’. “Why are they here and doing these exercises so close to us?”

In Rita, meter maid's world, the ideal response would have been to bung on a do and start WWIII, and then the bromancer could have been installed as our fearless leader...

The pond digresses because this attempt to rehabilitate Pezzullo as a strategic thinker is incredibly wearing ...

Addressing the “rehearsal’ point, Pezzullo says: “I don’t think the Chinese want a war with the Americans. I think Xi Jinping’s strategy will be to use the Trump presidency to try to settle new strategic terms in Asia that benefit China without a war. But if you’re a Chinese war planner you’ve got to plan on the basis that this strategy might not work. The flotilla was not really about the bilateral China-Australia relationship.
“It’s a rehearsal because in any war China will need to destroy a series of bases and facilities in Australia to deny their use to the Americans. This is about a strike on Australia. I know people are hurting with cost-of-living issues and grocery prices, but there’s no point having assurances around them and not having a country.
“Nobody is taking away the importance of social and other benefits, but you make choices in life. We can have social benefits or we can have a country. This is the new world Australia has to live with.”
Pezzullo says the real issue is whether Australia will retain its sovereign autonomy. The dangers arise from the combination of a Trump administration less interested in alliance guarantees and China’s assertion. He says: “This is not about an invasion but about our freedom of action and choice. Do you really think an Australian government – if we’re not spending 3, 4 or 5 per cent of GDP on defence – would be able to say to China things like we can’t accept Huawei in our network? In that situation our ability to make sovereign choices is completely constrained or obliterated.
“We should do more on defence spending because that is our national interest. We should not be waiting for Donald Trump and we should not think of an increased defence budget as some form of tribute. The wake-up call from this Chinese naval task group should indicate that the phasing and sequencing this government has put on our defence expansion is completely inadequate and inappropriate. We need to end up quickly at about 3 per cent of GDP and that’s just to do the crewing, maintenance and getting the current force battle ready.”

What a wanker he is, and speaking of wankers, the reptiles flung in a final AV distraction, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has called for taxes to be reduced “wherever possible” but says it will be dictated by “how much money is left” in the budget. “We’ve been very clear that we want a simpler, fairer tax system,” Mr Dutton told Sky News Political Editor Andrew Clennell. “We want to reduce taxes wherever possible but will be dictated to by how much money is left in the bank. “We’re not going to act in an irresponsible way. “If we can afford tax cuts, then they will be delivered.”

So much blather, so little time. but at least the pond had reached the end of the hand wringing, the final flourish, the last gobbet of this "Ned" Everest climb ...

Richardson sums up our dilemma: “The world is now moving very fast. But Australia is moving very slowly. We are not match fit. We have a tax system that is increasingly littered with disasters. We have a spending system that is wasting lots of money. We have a defence system now absolutely caught on the hop by the rise of China.
“Looking back to what Paul Keating did, it wasn’t perfect but it took courage, and that courage is so spectacularly lacking today. We have both sides of politics now promising mediocrity, and I believe their promises.”
Inadequate budget policy penetrates to the heart of the problem. University of NSW economics professor Richard Holden tells Inquirer: “Neither the government nor the opposition seem to have a plan to close our structural deficit – other than bracket creep over a decade. In other words, a constant tax increase on work and workers. Peter Dutton understandably doesn’t want to announce spending cuts in the lead-up to the election. But this leaves him vulnerable to the ‘tell us what spending you’d cut’ line from the government. Hence the response: it will be cuts to the public service.
“The United States has shown what happens when a political system is incapable of fiscal responsibility – either denial (Democrats) or a slash-and-burn figure like (Elon) Musk appears on the scene.”
In his Australian Financial Review column this week, Holden wrote: “We’ve entrusted our prospects to a set of political leaders – left, right and centre – who show no signs of being up to the task.”
This week the Business Council of Australia called for major reforms to deliver sustainable health and care services given the dramatic consequence from an ageing population. BCA chief executive Bran Black says: “This is no longer a future problem – it’s here today – with large cohorts of the baby boomer generation due to turn 80 by 2027, placing significant pressures on our health system and the budget.”
Current projections show there will be fewer working-age people to pay for care in the future, with the number of working Australians per retiree projected to fall from about 6.4 in 1980 to less than three within 40 years. The message is the need for internal reform of the health system – much is being done yet this only touches the surface of the problem. At this election both sides of politics should offer a researched, comprehensive new health and funding model for the future.

And so at last "Ned's" Everest has been climbed yet again, and yet again the pond is not a jot wiser or a tittle more informed.

It's a form of masochism, of mad attention to the irrelevant, which the pond needs to discuss with a shrink, if only one could be found for free ... but the pond must save up all it's loot to be able to afford a lamington in Euroa ...

And so to close with a relieving immortal Rowe, knowing that our Henry v. Killer Kreighton is on the arvo horizon, and will soon sweep the taste of "Ned" away ...