In which the pond struggles to find entertainment, when all that's to hand in the hive mind is the Caterist and the golfing Major ...

 

Might as well begin the week with an AI joke ...

How about a link too, so right away correspondents could leave to read Saahil Desai's piece for The Atlantic, My Day Inside America’s Most Hated Car, The Cybertruck is a 7,000-pound Rorschach test (archive link).

Spoiler alert, the opening as a teaser ...

On the first Sunday of spring, surrounded by row houses and magnolia trees, I came to a horrifying realization: My mom was right. I had been flipped off at least 17 times, called a “motherfucker” (in both English and Spanish), and a “fucking dork.” A woman in a blue sweater stared at me, sighed, and said, “You should be ashamed of yourself.” All of this because I was driving a Tesla Cybertruck.
I had told my mom about my plan to rent this thing and drive it around Washington, D.C., for a day—a journalistic experiment to understand what it’s like behind the wheel of America’s most hated car. “Wow. Be careful,” she texted back right away. Both of us had read the stories of Cybertrucks possibly being set on fire, bombed with a Molotov cocktail, and vandalized in every way imaginable. People have targeted the car—and Tesla as a whole—to protest Elon Musk’s role in Donald Trump’s administration. But out of sheer masochism, or stupidity, I still went ahead and spent a day driving one. As I idled with the windows down on a street in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood, a woman glared at me from her front porch: “Fuck you, and this truck, and Elon,” she yelled. “You drive a Nazi truck.” She slammed her front door shut, and then opened it again. “I hope someone blows your shit up.”

And even worse, the closer ...

...By 9 p.m., I’d had enough. I valeted at my hotel, with its “Tibetan Bowl Sound Healing” classes, and got a nervous look from the attendant. I can’t blame anyone who sees the car as the stainless-steel embodiment of the modern right. This week, a county sheriff in Ohio stood in front of a green Cybertruck and derided Tesla vandals as “little fat people that live in their mom’s basement and wear their mom’s pajamas.” But it is also a tragedy that the Cybertruck has become the most partisan car in existence—more so than the Prius, or the Hummer, or any kind of Subaru. The Cybertruck, an instantly meme-able and very weird car, could have helped America fall in love with EVs. Instead, it is doing the opposite. The revolt against Tesla is not slowing down, and in some cases people are outright getting rid of their cars. Is it really a win that Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona exchanged his all-electric Tesla sedan for a gas-guzzling SUV?
Then again, Republicans aren’t buying the Cybertruck en masse. It is too expensive and too weird. Buying any Tesla might be a way to own the libs, but the right has proved maddeningly resistant to going electric. “Your average MAGA Trump supporter isn’t going to go buy a Tesla,” McDonald, the EV analyst, said. Before the car shipped in November 2023, Musk predicted that Tesla would sell 250,000 a year. He hasn’t even sold one-fifth of that in total—and sales are falling. (Neither Tesla or Musk responded to a request for comment.)
A bumper sticker on the back of a Tesla says "anti-elon-tesla-club"
Musk made a lot of other promises that haven’t really panned out: The Cybertruck was supposed to debut at less than $40,000. The cheapest model currently available is double that. The vehicle, Musk said, would be “really tough, not fake tough.” Instead, its stainless-steel side panels have fallen off because Tesla used the wrong glue—and that was just the most recent of the car’s eight recalls. The Cybertruck was supposed to be able to haul “near infinite mass” and “serve briefly as a boat.” Just this month alone, one Cybertruck’s rear end snapped off in a test of its towing power, and another sank off the coast of Los Angeles while trying to offload a Jet Ski from the bed.
The Cybertruck, in that sense, is a perfect metaphor for Musk himself. The world’s richest man has a bad habit of promising one thing and delivering another. X was supposed to be the “everything app”; now it is a cesspool of white supremacy. DOGE was billed as an attempt to make the government more nimble and tech-savvy. Instead, the cuts have resulted in seniors struggling to get their Social Security checks. So far, Musk has only continued to get richer and more powerful while the rest of us have had to deal with the wreckage. Let that sink in, as he likes to say. The disaster of the Cybertruck is not that it’s ugly, or unconventional, or absurdly pointy. It’s that, for most people, the car just isn’t worth driving.

And that's it for entertainment for the day, because there's bugger all signs of life below ...

As usual, it was the venerable Meade who called out the pond's worries and woes for the next few weeks.

Where the the Meidas Touch routinely refers to "state media known as Fox", here we have anticipatory, lying in wait with a baseball bat, hopeful, helpful, persecutory wannaba "state media in waiting known as the lizard Oz" ... (not to mention all the rest of the Murdochian empire)... 

....and there's weeks of the propaganda war to come ...

This morning's digital edition of the lizard Oz was almost as impenetrable as a Tesla truck ...

Sure there was a truly grotesque, nausea-inducing gif style wrap-around as a distraction ... featuring animated Kafka-esque eyes ...

Deeply, deeply weird, and over on the extreme far right things were no better ...

What to make of this sort of splash? 

ENERGY ELECTION WARS
PM walks away from 2030 energy bill cut
Anthony Albanese’s energy transition has been rocked after he junked ALP-commissioned modelling underpinning Labor’s power bill reduction and emissions reduction targets.
Geoff Chambers and Greg Brown

Of course he's been rocked, he's going to be endlessly rocked ... that's what happens in a war zone, where everything is a reptile war ...

There might be a job for a Freudian as the reptiles grapple with their state media in waiting assignments. 

Poor old simpleton Simon (here no conflict of interest), had the tragic job of reporting ...

EXCLUSIVE
Newspoll: Labor takes early lead but voters mark down budget
Labor has begun the election campaign with a rise in support, despite voters ranking Jim Chalmers’ budget as the worst for the economy in a decade.
Simon Benson

... and then over on the extreme far right rubbing his hands and looking at falling clouds in imitation of "Ned's" Chicken Little routine ...

Coalition risks snatching defeat from jaws of victory
This was always going to be a contest between who voters considered to be the least unattractive of two unappealing options. Newspoll suggests Dutton is now at risk.
Simon Benson
Political Editor

What can the pond do with any of this? 

What are the alternatives? Culture war fodder from Dame Slap?

EXCLUSIVE
Climate, gender focus of PNG studies shift
An Australian taxpayer-backed scholarship for students from PNG is pushing applications to focus on ‘gender, climate and disability-related studies’ instead of agriculture, education, and health.
Janet Albrechtsen and Noah Yim

Oh Noah, you poor thing, the company you keep. 

Is it willing, or were you forced, made to take a long march through the institutions of the reptile hive mind? 

That way lies madness, or as the venerable Meade reminded the pond, Pellist miracles...

A book promo?! A fisher of gullible fools?!

For some strange reason, as well as reminding the pond of cheese on toast, the pond was reminded of the Highest falls survived without a parachute. 

The wiki (and Guiness) gave the honour to Vesna Vulović, who managed a 33,330 foot drop: Flight attendant from Serbia who was the sole survivor of an airplane bombing mid-air. Likely landed in part of fuselage in heavily wooded and snow-covered mountainside. Suffered many bone fractures.  

See also the Beeb's Five survivors of spectacular falls.

No miracle Everywhere it's the same, with news from the croweaters offering hope ...

EXCLUSIVE
‘I’ll call Dutton first’: independent MP puts cards on table
In a boost to the Coalition’s hopes of forming government in a hung parliament, Rebekha Sharkie says she will meet with Peter Dutton first if he can form a stable administration.
By David Penberthy

Rats in the ranks are lined up to be berated ...

Turnbull’s ‘security’ forum more about personal vendettas

Does Turnbull think an anti-AUKUS or anti-Trump spray will damage his old political foe, Peter Dutton? I can’t be sure, but I can say it’s irresponsible to play politics with the US alliance during an election.

Anthony Bergin

What to do? Nothing much. Suffer in silence, lie still and hope it will soon be over ...

All the pond can do is bunker down, hunker down with a pained grin, trot out the regulars with minimal comment, and wait until the fever passes ...

So it was on with the Caterist, back on his Monday perch, warbling his timeless tune ...

At least doing the opening splash as a screen cap featuring rats in the ranks meant the pond could cut to the chase ...

Anthony Albanese’s decision to launch his campaign in the Opposition Leader’s suburban Brisbane seat was hailed as a “bold opening salvo” by Guardian Australia.

More objective observers familiar with the Prime Minister’s character might describe it as hollow chest-thumping from a leader inclined to be too cute by half.

Malcolm Fraser wouldn’t have given a second glance at Gough Whitlam’s western Sydney seat of Werriwa a half-century ago.

The seat was still off-limits for the Liberal Party in 2013. Tony Abbott worked hard to win the neighbouring seat of Lindsay but knew better than to waste his time on Laurie Ferguson’s patch. Yet Werriwa was where Peter Dutton spent much of day three of the campaign, standing alongside Sam Kayal, the Arabic-speaking son of Lebanese migrants, who is representing the Liberals for the second time.

Labor’s Anne Stanley won comfortably three years ago, increasing her margin to 11.6 per cent. This time, however, she’s in strife. In the great inversion of Australian politics that began under John Howard, Werriwa’s moment has come.

Whaddya expect from the flood waters in quarries whisperer? 

Then for some bizarre reason the reptiles dragged in the onion muncher as an example to follow, Sky News host James Morrow says Tony Abbott was “incredibly effective” as opposition leader. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has released the Coalition’s first ad ahead of the federal election on May 3. “Peter Dutton needs to urgently take a page out of Tony Abbott’s playbook,” Mr Morrow said.

Did it occur to the reptiles that the onion muncher was incredibly defective as a PM, and even punters with short memories would still be celebrating some of his knightly BBQ stoppers.

If he's the one to follow, if he's the heavily testicled budgie smuggling billy goat with the kick heads knob playbook, then the long absent lord help us all ...

But the pond had promised not to comment, just to let the flood waters in quarries whisperer ramble on ...

The loss of six blue-ribbon seats to the teals in 2022 was a reminder that the inversion works both ways. Robert Menzies’ former seat of Kooyong was once the kind of safe seat ambitious young Liberals would fight with bare knuckles to win. Even if the Liberals win the seat back from the EQ-challenged Monique Ryan in May, the words safe and Kooyong are unlikely to appear in the same sentence any time soon.

The big reversals in Labor’s class war began with Howard’s landslide in 1996, with wins in seats such as Lindsay, Hughes and Lowe in western Sydney and McEwen and McMillan in Victoria.

Boundary changes have muddied the waters, and fortunes have ebbed and flowed, but the long-term trend is unmistakeable. In 2013, David Coleman won the western Sydney seat of Banks for the Liberals for the first time in the Abbott landslide. He set up his electorate office a street away from the Revesby Workers Club with its giant hammer and sickle embedded in the wall. This time, the best Sportsbet will offer on Coleman is $1.05.

The same parsimonious odds apply to Melissa McIntosh in Lindsay. In the space of two terms, McIntosh has turned a once-bellwether seat into an impregnable Liberal stronghold.

Punters with an appetite for risk will find richer pickings in Bradfield on Sydney’s middle north shore, where Liberal frontbencher Paul Fletcher is hanging up his spurs. Fletcher retained his seat in the Abbott landslide with a margin of 30.8 per cent. Last time, he was lucky to hang on after a determined challenge from the political wing of the renewable energy industry, or teals as they’re known for short. On Sunday, Sportsbet was offering $1.75 on the Liberals’ Gisele Kapterian and $1.95 on Nicolette Boele, a Killara High School graduate, mum of two and climate finance professional from teal central casting. As the NSW Office of Responsible Gambling is constantly reminding us: is this a bet you really want to place?

That Dutton has a chance of becoming prime minister three years after a cataclysmic defeat boils down to three things: shoddy government, disciplined opposition and a household recession.

Time to showcase a candidate, Sam Kayal is the Liberal candidate for Werriwa. Picture: Jason Edwards

That set the Caterist off. 

It turns out - who knew? - that he's a tragic figure, regularly up at 4 am to eat his lump of tar, confiscated from the nearby street, before heading off to put in 24 hours at coal mine, a ritual he performs each day. 

What would the well-off riff raff know of his suffering, and his keening and his howls and whines of despair?

The recession is hardly apparent at Harris Farm Markets in Willoughby’s High Street, in Bradfield, where the median family weekly income was $3150 in the 2021 census. Mortgage stress? Not much. In these old-money, rugger-bugger suburbs, 36 per cent own their homes outright. Fuel prices? Only 25 per cent drive to work and 52 per cent of Bradfield’s workforce worked from home at the time of the 2021 census. Carnes Hill Marketplace, 40 minutes’ drive west of the Sydney CBD, is a better place to assess the human cost of 14 mortgage rate rises and rampant energy prices.

The shopping trolleys emerging from Woolworths tell the story: heavy on bakery and value-pack sausages, light on salami and prosciutto. Almost no one is lingering for an iced chai latte at Gloria Jean’s.

Meanwhile, Kayal has been finding plenty of takers for his campaign leaflet. Across the first days of the campaign, a steady stream of locals stop to share their thoughts on Albanese and Labor. None could be described as remotely complimentary.

Why would they be? Werriwa is the kind of place people move to in the hope of getting a toehold in the housing market, to send their children to affordable non-government schools and find work in the surrounding industries, which these days are dominated by warehousing and logistics.

Fuel prices matter for business owners and workers, half of whom rely on a car or truck to get to work. Dutton’s promise to cut fuel excise by 25.4 per cent was precisely calibrated for seats such as this.

The deal breaker, however, is housing. In the past decade, families have moved to suburbs such as Austral, rezoned from rural to urban development in 2013, as part of the NSW government’s South West Growth Area.

Actually the pond has gone off Harris Farms at Broadway, and much prefers the offerings of Panetta Mercato in Marrickville. 

Oops, that puts the pond in prime Albo turf, Anthony Albanese on the campaign trail with Alicia Payne and Katy Gallagher. Picture: Jason Edwards

And then with pursed lip, and tongue firmly in cheek, it was time for the last of the ramble from the floodwaters in quarries whisperer ...

Austral didn’t exist for census purposes in 2016. By 2021, however, it had a population of 6847, mainly families, and an average age of 31. Fifty per cent had taken out mortgages, with average monthly repayments of $2535. After three years of Labor, the average monthly repayments would now be close to $4000. The median family weekly income, $2224 in 2024, has not caught up.

The number of cars in the driveway has barely changed, not for display but out of necessity; 65 per cent of homes had more than one. Since this is a thoroughly aspirational suburb, half of children go to non-government schools. These families have invested well. Austral will be prime real estate once the Western Sydney Airport precinct is completed.

In the meantime, they have to deal with the inconveniences that come with a new suburb: no public transport, the nearest children’s park is several kilometres away and the congestion on 15th Avenue means it can add 40 minutes to the daily commute.

It doesn’t take much imagination to understand why there’s a queue seven cars long for the bowsers at Costco in nearby Casula, where E10 cost $1.66 – 40c cheaper than the Edgecliff BP. Just 45km west of the Sydney CBD feels like a completely different planet.

The iron law at this election is that where competition for cheap fuel is most intense, Dutton’s stocks increase. At least a half-dozen NSW and Victorian seats, which the Coalition has never held before, are now in play.

The odds are that Dutton will fall short of the 22-seat target he needs to form a majority government. Win or lose, however, 2025 is shaping up to be a strategic triumph, re-establishing a new Liberal heartland among the people Labor forgot.

Nick Cater is a senior fellow at the Menzies Research Centre.

Say what? The Caterist has gone all Black Knight, and is calling it a "strategic triumph", whatever happens, win or lose, legless, or sans arms, or headless ...

Usually at this point the pond would try to tippy toe outside the hive mind and drag in some alternative entertainment, but this day didn't have the heart ...

The pond has Tesla'd for its fun, and now can immortal Rowe'd ...

And that's it, though it's probably not just winter that's a Doug Ashdown lyric, it's likely spring, summer and fall too...Minnesota officials seek answers after Ice detains graduate student.

So close to full-blown fascism.

And now back to the reptiles ...

It was good of the Major to take time off from his golf, even if it meant the pond would waste five minutes of precious life indulging him in his bog standard ranting about renewables and the urgent need to nuke the country to save the planet ...

Chris Bowen could be Peter Dutton’s best asset at May 3 election, If it appears Chris Bowen is keeping a low profile ahead of May 3, it might just be because he knows something most environment writers have not yet reported.

Naturally a villain had to start off proceedings, Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen. Picture: Martin Ollman

How many bogeys must the pond endure?

If it appears Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen is keeping a low profile ahead of the May 3 election, it might just be because he knows something most environment writers have not yet reported.

Bowen has claimed in interviews since Labor’s 2022 election that wind and solar are the cheapest forms of energy.

But this is only true in that the marginal cost of wind and solar at peak output times is zero. It says nothing about the actual cost of system-wide electricity production.

The International Energy Agency in January compared electricity prices in countries with different levels of renewables: those with the most wind and solar also have the highest electricity prices.

This column has for years reported on manufacturers, especially car makers, leaving Germany and the UK for cheaper power in the US and China.

The UK under the previous Tory government was worse than Germany. UK energy prices adjusted for inflation are up 300 per cent between 2003 and 2023.

The latest IEA comparison confirms what Australia’s CSIRO, various green energy bodies and Bowen have denied: because of the need for ageing fossil fuel assets to be retained as backup, renewables actually turn out to be the most expensive form of power when the entire system cost is considered.

Relax, the hot link in that text wasn't a link to anything relevant, it was to a lizard Oz editorial titled Energy shock treatment keeps coming for Chris Bowen, Ideological fascination has been allowed to derail common sense...

...because that's how it works in the hive mind. 

Once you've booked into the hive mind hotel, you can never leave.

And don't expect any relevant links or actual graphs ... that's not how it works in the hive mind ...

An IEA graph charting prices per kilowatt hour versus percentage of renewables in a country’s system shows those countries approaching 40 per cent renewables and more have by far the highest prices. These include the Netherlands, the UK, Spain, Germany, Denmark and Greece.

Green energy evangelists said batteries would provide backup and neither old fossil fuel plants nor new gas peakers would be needed. Most environment writers won’t admit batteries are for harmonisation of the grid and short-term (a few minutes) backup only.

Copenhagen Consensus Centre director Bjorn Lomborg wrote in the UK Daily Telegraph on January 25 that to provide sufficient backup for extended periods of low sun and wind, total UK system storage would need to be 10,000 times larger than it is now at a cost of £15 trillion ($31 trillion) – or five times the UK’s average annual GDP.

Citing the IEA, Lomborg wrote: “The average electricity cost with little or no solar or wind power is about 10 pence a kilowatt hour. For every 10 percentage points of additional solar and wind, the cost increases by more than 4p.”

There's the trouble in a nutshell, or more simply a nut. 

The Major is a Bjorn-again one believer, and the only relief the pond could find was in the caption, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s country is buying in coal so it can build wind and solar infrastructure to expert. Picture: Getty Images

"To expert"? So and thus, and so it goes, with the Major an export in his own mind...

Environment writers like to talk about China’s commitment to renewables but seldom mention most of China’s increasing use of coal is to make wind and solar infrastructure to export to the West.

A peer-reviewed study in Germany and Texas suggests wind power with storage backup could be 12 times more expensive than coal.

Most environment writers like to quote from the many new green news websites that have sprung up globally. One this column uses is Climate Action Tracker.

The top six global emitters – China, the US, India, the EU, Russia and Japan – are responsible for more than 60 per cent of emissions. Climate Action Tracker finds most are not on course to meet their targets.

While the Nine newspapers and Guardian Australia correctly claim China is making rapid progress on green energy, it has still not reached peak coal, and Climate Action Tracker on September 17 rated its overall net zero efforts “highly insufficient”.

Ditto India. Russia was rated “critically insufficient”.

The US rated “insufficient”, as did the EU and Japan.

This should set off alarm bells in the minds of Australian voters only days after the federal budget extended more power price handouts to consumers. After all, Bowen says we are on track for 82 per cent renewables by 2030.

The UK sits at 42 per cent and Germany at 62 per cent. Both face ruinous power bills to households who watch on while global CO2 emissions continue to rise. This is why Labor is subsidising household bills.

Renewables sit at 20 per cent of electricity supply in the US, where inflation-adjusted power prices have been stable since 2003.

Inevitably there was a snap of the Major's hero, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton wants an election about power prices. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

At least that avoided dragging up memories of the onion muncher ...

China hopes to hit 30 per cent wind and solar by the end of 2025. Despite media claims it has passed 50 per cent renewables, that number included traditional hydro power generation, 13 per cent of system output.

So what’s the real position globally?

The IEA says electricity demand is soaring across the planet as poor countries flock towards airconditioning and new technologies led by artificial intelligence and big data centres lift electricity demand in China and the West.

And while fossil fuel use is expected to plateau in 2027, the IEA says coal will continue to be used in an effort to increase electricity production globally.

Gas, recovering from the Ukraine war shock, will increasingly be relied on to stabilise renewables at times of low solar and wind production. LNG output rose 2.5 per cent in 2024 and is expected to rise 5 per cent this year.

Relax, the hot link in that text is to a lizard Oz editorial titled Energy shock treatment keeps coming for Chris Bowen, Ideological fascination has been allowed to derail common sense. 

Think you vaguely remember that being mentioned before? 

Relax, that's how it works in the hive mind, endless repetition, rote learning of misinformation, and an insistence no one strays outside the hive.

That's the why and the how, the beginning and the end, the Alpha and Omega, of the Major rabbiting on in his usual way ...

Global coal use peaked at 8.77 billion tonnes in 2024 and is expected to top out at 8.87 billion tonnes in 2027 after rising 1.2 billion tonnes since 2020, most of that in China.

A third of all coal burned worldwide is now used in China’s electricity sector. Coal use is declining in advanced Western countries.

While global CO2 emissions rose 1 per cent last year and 1.4 per cent in 2023 the IEA expects emissions to flatten out through to 2027 as more renewables come on stream around the world, and particularly in China.

This flattening comes in the context of average annual global electricity production rising by 3.9 per cent. So the emissions intensity of electricity production is falling.

The IEA forecasts a continued ramping up globally of nuclear plant construction and says nuclear is the second-largest source of low emissions electricity worldwide, just behind hydro power but ahead of wind and solar.

It says the world’s fleet of 420 reactors will reach record output this calendar year and notes 63 new reactors are under construction.

The IEA electricity report shows the world will need all its generation sources to meet what is calls “the age of electricity”.

“Over the next three years global electricity consumption is forecast to rise by an unprecedented 3500TWh. This corresponds to adding more than … a Japan … each year.”

Demand will be driven by China, India and Southeast Asia.

Despite the rapid expansion of wind, solar, hydro and nuclear, fossil fuels still account for 80 per cent of power generation worldwide.

Australia’s determination to reach 82 per cent renewables by 2030, and the Western world’s commitment to net zero by 2050, may reduce CO2 emissions from what they would otherwise have been.

But fossil fuel emissions will continue as poorer countries use coal and gas they know is cheap to push for economic development.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s focus on petrol excise and gas in his budget reply last Thursday suggests the Coalition wants an election about power prices. Bowen could prove to be Dutton’s best asset.

That's it, that's all he wrote. 

Oh wait, the pond can't let struggling punters who made it to the very bitter end go home without a kewpie doll, like the heroic struggling cane cutters they are to have achieved the feat ...

This just in from John Hanscombe in The Echnida, having grand fun with the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way ... (you have to subscribe to get the email) ...

It will be a struggle but they'll do their best not to mention the T word. That's because in a tight election fight, unwanted attention on it could be poison for the Coalition. Just like the N word - nuclear - the less said the better.

No, the T word is not Trump. It's Taylor, Angus Taylor, the man who would be treasurer.

Also, the man Labor has made a sport of taunting almost every question time, goading him to get up on his feet to ask a question of his opposite number just so Jim Chalmers can knock him off them again.

Taylor, the bloke who, under hard questioning, bears the embarrassed expression of someone holding up the ATM queue because he can't for the life of him remember his own PIN.

The bloke even Sky News called out last year for what it called his "litany of gaffes", among them confusing the monthly inflation rate with the annual rate, claiming the price of Vegemite had gone up 8 per cent in a month when it had gone up by that much over a year and, an absolute howler, saying the opposition had always supported the government's energy bill relief.

The bloke who, in July 2022, found himself incapable of addressing Deputy Speaker Sharon Claydon as anything other than "Mr Speaker". It wasn't a one-off slip of the tongue. He did it 32 times in his 10-minute ramble. We know Angus can't think on his feet but the suspicion is he also struggles when sitting down.

That's why Jim Chalmers is desperate for Taylor to debate him on the economy. The Treasurer's put the offer out there but it's been rebuffed. That's a pity for us, the voters, who'd like some kind of assurance the fellow who would be treasurer can remember where he parked the Range Rover, can count and is fit to hold the nation's purse strings.

Taylor vs Chalmers would be far more entertaining and instructive than Albanese vs Dutton, who've been waging a colourless Punch & Judy show for three years. But it won't happen. When you think you're on the cusp of power, as Peter Dutton does, the last thing you want is Angus inserting his RMs into his own mouth. Safer to leave him in his own electorate, promising millions for new pavilions at local sports grounds - if the Coalition wins government, that is...

The pond treasured a few of those lies ...

We know Angus can't think on his feet but the suspicion is he also struggles when sitting down.

As for that prime beefy boofhead, Angus on the hoof, promising new pavilions, that's a relief, Mr Hanscombe.

For a minute the pond thought he might be promising millions for new windmills, for the endless tilting thereat, and thereon, on the grounds that it's a sport for the mindlessly stupid...

And so to end with Herbert, wondering if there might be an alternative to all this nonsense...