Sorry, the pond has a snow cone in Southgate to buy, before the tariffs kick in ...

 

What a dismal response to the Emeritus Chairman as prophet, visionary, seer, sage and futurist, and things continued dismal today ...

There was the Cantaloupe Caligula, sounding a retreat while attempting his usual bullying routine, and dominating the top of the lizard Oz page in the process... with JD "hillbilly peasant" Vance ably helping negotiations ...

Over on the extreme far right the usual motley Thursday mob were on parade ...

The pond was still finding its feet in the jewel of the south and so could only marvel at the sight of a birdbrain offering this lightweight bubble bath of froth and foam ...

Voters deserve more than lightweight election debate
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that neither side really trusts the public with a proper explanation of its policy beyond the barest outline or political caricature.
By Peta Credlin
Columnist

The pond realised that today was all about catching up on favourite cartoonists, a feeling compounded by another offering ...

Judgment defines the debate and slams the dogma
Justice Strum’s decision is the best-yet judicial guide to the debate about youth gender clinics.
By Bernard Lane

That trans thing again, a tremendous distraction, but the pond had just come off watching John Oliver, and all the pond could do was heed Parker Molloy's injunction, Send This John Oliver Segment to Anyone Still Confused About Trans Athletes, It's the most thoughtful, fact-based explanation you'll find about what's really happening in women's sports

There was a transcript of the show, so the pond's job in the slow Lane was done ...

Other offerings failed to stir, what with the pond anxious to get out and about and explore the Athens of the South ... (a title falsely claimed by croweaters) ...

Muslim Votes does not care about, nor represent, Muslims
Muslim Votes is a mix of the aggressive left, of opportunists, cynics, and the naive, with some undercover Liberal support in certain electorates, and idealists unaware of the strange amalgam which is this grouping.
By Jamal Rifi

Meanwhile, the ethnic cleansing goes on apace in Gaza - tremendous real estate opportunity - and the Poms finally get agitated ... about a couple of British MPs...

Then there was this ...

Dear pollies: take WFH from our cold, dead hands
I have no idea what a hybrid work-from-home model is, other than it sounds like the sort of a thing a car manufacturer would say. But the politics of work from home is like comedy.
By Jack the Insider
Columnist

That reminded the pond it had to get off this machine so that WFH could proceed apace ... quick, a relevant cartoon ...

Pickings were so thin, such a wretched gruel, that the pond had to turn to the lizard Oz editorialist, fresh from a bout of bog standard greenie bashing ...

It was just a two minute, read or so the reptiles said ... Trade war is only getting started

US-China breakdown suggests wild ride on tariffs is far from over.

While Australia looks to friends in the US to argue our case on tariffs, we remain hostage to where the real action is taking place. This is between the US and China. As Treasury noted on Monday, if Donald Trump’s trade war persists, 80 per cent of the impact on Australia’s GDP will come from a slowdown in demand in China. Since Treasury did its pre-budget calculations, it has been all bad news on the US-China front.

As financial markets have tried to second-guess whether the US President is indulging in a high-stakes bluff, the trade war has morphed from a negotiating ploy to a full-blown diplomatic breakdown between the world’s two biggest economies. Mr Trump has doubled down on China, lifting tariffs by an additional 84 per cent, bringing the total of the tariffs imposed in his second term to 104 per cent. In what has been an escalating dispute, Mr Trump has imposed 20 per cent duties on Chinese imports in retribution for imports of the socially destructive drug fentanyl. He imposed an extra 34 per cent tariff on China as part of what was presented as a shock-and-awe global fightback.

When China said it would retaliate against his actions, Mr Trump imposed an additional 50 per cent tariff.

Unlike other nations – notably Israel, Vietnam and EU members – China has elected to hit back first rather than negotiate its position. Xi Jinping responded to the reciprocal tariff with a blanket 34 per cent tariff on all US imports as well as curbs on US access to rare-earth minerals. The language from the Chinese Communist Party leader through his economic and media bureaucracy is that China will fight to the end. On Tuesday, China’s central bank allowed the yuan to fall in value against the US dollar, offsetting some of the impact of tariffs. The state is expected to respond further with stimulus spending and direct market support for local companies. All of these measures have grave economic risks for China and point to the political pressure the tariffs represent for Mr Xi.

Being an editorial, there were no illustrations, so the pond brought its own ...

The reptiles sounded gloomy, unaware that there had been a tremendous rebound, all had been fixed, everything was fine, and the pond could look into purchasing that snow cone in Southgate ...

As a result, without a circuit-breaker the potential is for a protracted dispute with unpredictable outcomes. As The Wall Street Journal observes, China sees Mr Trump’s actions as an existential threat aimed at keeping it from surpassing the US as the world’s biggest and richest economy. Mr Trump sees China’s dominance of global trade as the surest sign that the international trading system is rigged against the US.

The US President can point to the numbers for some justification. China in 2024 reported a global goods trade surplus of about $US1 trillion, while the US had a deficit in goods trade of $US1.2 trillion. About $US300bn of this deficit was directly with China but a large portion of the rest was with countries including Mexico and Vietnam that had been used by China to circumvent tariffs imposed by the first Trump administration.

This is why the US is using reciprocal tariffs to cut off China’s access to the US market through third-party destinations.

The US also is looking urgently for alternative supplies of rare earths and minerals to break its dependence on Chinese sources. This presents Australia with a long-term opportunity, but it is swamped by the reality of what a prolonged showdown between China and the US on trade will mean.

As financial markets continue to digest what is happening, Mr Trump is getting ready to increase the pressure further with a set of tariffs specifically aimed at pharmaceuticals. In an act of national self-sufficiency over economic prudence, this is designed to draw drug-makers back to where the market is, the US. It all signals that the wild ride is far from over.

Should the pond have attended to domestic matters? Not if that meant suffering through simpleton Simon style offerings ... (how many conflicts of interest would you like?) ...

Peter Dutton’s strategy to put integrity at heart of budget process

Peter Dutton demonstrated in the debate that he has started to find his line and length on the economic narrative. He now wants to steer the election contest back to safe ground for the Coalition.

By Simon Benson

Political Editor

Integrity! Always the first thought with the Duttonator ... so it was back to the wars ... so many wars ... or were they, as a correspondent had suggested, just wrestling matches?

The reptiles were forced to bring in a WSJ commentator to deal with all the feuding and the fussing and the fighting, a different kind of heady Mead ...

Donald Trump’s tariff flex is all about the pursuit of power, A guy who can turn a mug shot into a presidential portrait should never be discounted, and disasters that would ruin lesser talents leave him unfazed.

Walter Russell Mead

The reptiles assured the pond that once past a standard snap of the best "heel" wrestling has ever produced, US President Donald Trump steps off Air Force One as he arrives at Miami International Airport, it would be a mere three minute read:

How would this Mead handle such a wonderful drop?

Donald Trump’s hastily kludged together tariff plan has global financial markets swooning.

His plan has accomplished two things that befuddled Democrats couldn’t: tariffs have plunged Trump into the first true crisis of his second term; and they have US voters wondering if the President is fit for office.

It is much too early, however, to draft obituaries for the Trump presidency or the MAGA movement. If there is one lesson since the President descended the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015, it is not to write this man off.

A guy who can turn a mug shot into a presidential portrait should never be discounted, and disasters that would ruin lesser talents leave him unfazed.

What we are seeing is classic Trump. The President believes in himself and his core intuitions and convictions.

Indeed, indeed, classic ...

This Mead was a heady brew ...

He believes the analysts and policymakers who disagree with him are foolish and weak. When he encounters resistance, his instinct isn’t to compromise and reconsider. It’s to double down on his bets, hype up the drama and intimidate his opponents through bold strokes and tough threats. Show him a Gordian knot and he whips out his sword.

As his policies at home and abroad encounter resistance – a resistance sometimes grounded less in the obstinacy of his enemies than in the unyielding nature of facts – Trump becomes more determined. This method has worked for him in the past and he believes it will work for him now.

Trump’s abiding goal appears to be to maximise his personal power, not to win arguments with trade economists or to boost stock prices. Domestically, he believes the political strength he gains from asserting total control over American tariff policy will intimidate businesses into supporting him. He believes the bonds with his supporters will survive an economic rough patch.

Internationally, the President hopes his shock and awe tariff tactics will boost his – and America’s – power and prestige. Access to the US market, he believes, is the most powerful weapon this side of a nuclear bomb.

The reptiles did allow one AV distraction, emanating from good old Shoe ...ASPI Defence, Strategy and National Security Director Michael Shoebridge has slammed the United States for imposing global tariffs. “America is the richest, most powerful nation on the planet and now behaving like a victim and trying to extract billions of dollars from every other country on the planet makes no sense outside his MAGA base,” Mr Shoebridge said. “Frankly the EU and China are starting to push back and they have real power to do so.”

Forget the Shoe, and arcane references to old movies, this was Huuuggee ...

In perhaps the most naked display of American economic power since Dwight Eisenhower forced Britain to abandon its Suez adventure in 1956 by threatening to attack the British pound, Trump wants to force US allies and adversaries alike to recognise his power and conform to his priorities. It is an understatement to call this a flex.

Trump knows that trade with the US is vital to the prosperity and even the stability of dozens of countries. He is aware that American guarantees underwrite the security of much of the world.

By telling the world that both trade rules and security guarantees depend solely on his will, he is concentrating the greatest possible amount of power in his hands.

The reckless and arbitrary nature of his tariff schedule emphasises how vulnerable others are to his decisions while advertising the absence of domestic constraints on his power.

Trump will need all the power he can get. The international crises confronting this administration grow larger and more dangerous by the day.

Vladimir Putin has taken no steps towards genuine compromise in Ukraine and, if anything, has cosied up to China. Xi Jinping is also standing firm, responding to the latest round of US tariffs with retaliatory tariffs of his own – even as he steps up military preparations against Taiwan. In the Middle East, bombing the Houthis has produced no strategic breakthroughs to date. And as US pressure on Iran and its Houthi allies grows, and the potential for more fighting in the Middle East rises, Russia and China aren’t walking away from their wounded and weakened Iranian friends.

The question as always with Trump is how he intends to use the power he has accumulated.

Does he want a fairer global trading system or are his instincts purely mercantilist? Does he seek to make NATO more effective by shocking the Europeans into behaving less foolishly or is his real goal to break it? Does the President want to reform government or is DOGE an attempt to weaken Washington’s capacity to restrain business interests? Does he care about policy or is his entire political career an expression of egotism and concern for his family’s financial future? Is he really out to conquer Canada?

Trump himself may not know the answers to these questions. But, one way or another, the steps he takes in the coming months will establish his place in history. For good or for ill, it will be huge.

The Wall Street Journal

Huge, and instead of napalm in the morning, there'd be spanners and cogs...

As for what the pond missed yesterday, it was nothing to write home about.

There was one very brief - a mere two minutes, so the reptiles said - visitation by Lloydie of the Amazon as the reptiles tried to do a song and dance about the Duttonator's energy polices ...

 

Queensland’s common sense approach has lessons for others, The engineers and bean-counters are back in control of the Queensland electricity system in what should be a template for the national grid.

There was the usual strange injuction, This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there, so the pond went there ... to see an opening snap The Callide Power Station in Biloela, Queensland. Picture: Getty Images

The pond was wildly excited ... 

The pond was always inspired by Lloydie and his saving of the Amazon, and at last a chance there'd be a chance to learn how nuking the country would save the planet ...

The engineers and bean-counters are back in control of the Queensland electricity system in what should be a template for the national grid. The way forward is for new investment in coal and gas, and a withdrawal of government from trying to pick winners on the basis of ideology not capability.

The pragmatic intent of the Crisafulli government’s energy rework is made clear in the renaming of Labor’s much-hyped Hydrogen Division in the Department of Energy and Climate, to Gas and Sustainable Fuels, which now sits within Queensland Treasury.

Say what, the way forward is good old dinkum, clean, virginal, Oz coal, and fossil fool gas? And nowhere nukes to be found?

The reptiles offered a snap of the visionary, Queensland Treasurer and Energy Minister David Janetzki. Picture: Dan Peled/NewsWire

Surely this was just a distraction, surely we'd get on to nuking the country to save the planet?

State Treasurer and Energy Minister David Janetzki is not backing away from the bipartisan pledge to net zero by 2050. But neither is he being sucked in to never-ending support for ideologically fashionable projects that should never have made it past the glossy brochure. Top of the list is the Pioneer-Burdekin pumped hydro project, where costs were estimated to have blown out from the original $7bn to $36.8bn.

Mr Janetzki has set out a five-year plan to bring order to a decade of Labor’s ideological energy obsessions. He has not been distracted by the possibility of nuclear energy in the future but has put the focus on what is needed now to guarantee reliable and affordable electricity. Top of the list is investment in the coal-fired generators that currently supply 60 per cent of the state’s electricity.

Say what, he was nuking the nukes and good old coal was top of the action, in much the way that the toads of the north had once given a peanut farmer's splendid ways of doing government to the world?

At this point the reptiles interrupted with an AV distraction, featuring Lloydie of the Amazon himself ...

Environment Editor Graham Lloyd explains how each party is tackling the issue of Energy, and how it will play a significant part in the 2025 Federal election.

What a splendid sight. Two wretches in grey on either side, while there was full-colour Lloydie, right in the centre of the action, explaining how coal was still the answer ... (and what was the question again?)

Renewables as well as smaller-scale pumped hydro are definitely still part of the mix. But Mr Janetzki wants the state to get out of the way and let private enterprise work the numbers and take the risks. He says sticking with net zero is critical to unlocking private sector funding.

The five-year energy plan represents a fresh broom by a new administration that only begs the question: What would happen if equivalent rigour were applied to other renewable energy-obsessed administrations such as Victoria’s.

There are lessons here for Chris Bowen as well. Don’t let the tail wag the dog. Stop throwing good money after bad. Get the energy priorities in order for reliability and price. The Queensland approach is designed to ease pressure on the budget, de-risk the energy future, add significant generation capacity, and apply downward pressure on household and business power bills. It will be up to the private sector to deliver on emissions reductions at an affordable price.

Ah, the private sector ... Gina's mob doing it dirt cheap ... (and should he get rid of that ridiculous beard while pumping up ridiculous insights?)

And with that the pond was done, with the infallible Pope helping out with a little headspace ...

A placeholder for a pond travel day, featuring a visionary Emeritus Chairman ...

 

This is a travel day for the pond, but instead of reheating some old reptile mush, the pond wanted to return to a promise it made some time ago, and now likely forgotten by everybody ...

It began with a comment by an esteemed correspondent, hailing the Chairman Emeritus in prophet, seer, sage, visionary, futurist mode ...

One wonders about contributors tapping ‘Orwellian’ into their word count. Their Chairman Emeritus is on record with opinions on the person who wrote as George Orwell.
It was back in 1993, when Rupert was giving the Bonython Lecture for the Centre for Independent Studies. He was introduced by Maurice Newman (how little do things change) and offered thoughts grouped under a title of sorts ‘The Century of Networking’.
Rupert told his audience ‘We have it within our powers to make Australia an economic powerhouse in one of the brightest eras of human history.’ Then asked, rhetorically, why they were so surprised? Which took him to ‘George Orwell’s great futuristic novel ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’. Briefly, Orwell thought that technology would led to tyranny. He thought it would enormously enhance the power of the centralised totalitarian state, . . . . . . . summed up with . . . ‘Big Brother is watching you.’
So far so ‘Orwellian’. But, before ‘contributors sprinkle the cue word too widely, the Chairman continued ‘Nevertheless, the plain fact is that Orwell was wrong in his central prediction. Technology has not led to centralisation and tyranny - rather, the reverse.’
The Chairman then borrowed from an author who is now largely forgotten - Peter Huber - for further comment on Orwell getting it wrong. Huber was originally a scientist at MIT. He took issue with the slogan ‘ignorance is strength’, countering that, ‘In a system based on science, ignorance is not strength, it is weakness.’ Remember, this appealed greatly to Rupert 33 years ago. He went on ‘What makes Huber’s scenario the more convincing is that this sort of scientific and technological atrophy was exactly what destroyed the Soviet Union. Without freedom of inquiry, scientific inquiry just could not proceed.’
‘The second reason that Orwell was wrong, Huber argues, is in . . the slogan: “Freedom is slavery”. But freedom is not slavery. Specifically, free markets are not monopolies.’
To the clincher - in the words of Rupert ‘Orwell believed that free markets must lead to private monopoly and hence to the driving-down of living standards. He believed this because, like a lot of intellectuals who are accustomed to thinking about literature and politics, he had no real concept of the price mechanism. He thought that profits must be extorted by power. For example, he assumed that capitalists would always deliberately suppress innovation to keep profits high.’
‘Because capitalists are always trying to stab each other in the back, free markets do not lead to monopolies.’
The Chairman then meandered about, trying to show that any kind of intervention blighted the sanctity of markets; just happening to mention ‘the bone in Australia’s throat,’ its labour market, to praise the work of the Centre for Independent (?) Studies on labour laws.
Now, looking at the world that Rupert still inhabits - on balance, his assertions simply do not hold up. The one he borrowed from Huber about a system based on science has no place in the Untied States of America, now and for several years into the future - and his mass media were greatly influential in replacing science with ignorance - and presenting it as strength.
But his contributors will continue to use ‘Orwell’ as a cue word, because none of them ‘do’ irony.

This became something of a holy grail for the pond - well, what with the CIA having already having found the Ark with the help of a psychic, a search for the grail of the Emeritus Chairman's speech seemed like a goodly substitute.

A cursory search of Trove provided a clue to its existence, though for what treacherous unknown reason, The Canberra Times had only put a cursory summary on page 3...

Not good enough, not nearly good enough, but then Trove coughed up the holy grail and the pond is proud to present it in full ... though it can also be found here ...

The pond won't interrupt this visionary as he outlines his splendid futuristic vision, though as the pond's correspondent noted, ironies (and curiosities) abound ...

The 1994 John Bonython Lecture
'The Century of Networking'
Rupert Murdoch
(Delivered in Melbourne, October 20, 1994)

Let me start by saying what a great pleasure it is for me to be here tonight in Melbourne, the city of my birth. As so close once again to so many of the institutions that formed me – such as Toorak Presbyterian Church, where my grandfather occasionally preached, Geelong Grammar School – and even the Flemington Race Course.

(The Emeritus Chairman has always been a deeply religious, deeply Xian man)

It is also a pleasure, and a privilege, to be giving this year’s John Bonython Lecture for the Centre for Independent Studies.
Of course, I knew both John Bonython, and the distinguished Adelaide family from which he came, very well. I believe I may even have had a tiny hand in his introduction to the oil and gas business, where he made such a contribution to South Australia. Furthermore our families had a long and entertaining relationship through Advertiser Newspapers which, when I first became publisher of the Adelaide News in 1953, showed its commitment to competitive enterprise by making a determined effort to run me out of town! Eventually we declared an honourable draw. I am happy tonight to pay particular tribute to John Bonython’s memory. 

(John Lavington Bonython had a special cultural and aesthetic affinity with the Emeritus Chairman)

The Centre for Independent Studies, of course, is one of the remarkable universe of similar think-tanks around the world. All are inspired with the principles of classical liberalism that are fundamental to our civilisation. Each one is now following its own independent course, but all can be traced back to a founding ‘big bang’, the celebrated Institute for Economic Affairs in London, which was such a powerful influence on the government of Margaret Thatcher.
 And I note with great interest, incidentally, that the secret of all these institutes’ success seems to be that they each find strong individuals to lead them. This is very much in accordance with my own discovery that newspapers and media companies, which like think-tanks are basically in the ideas business, cannot be run by committee.
The Centre for Independent Studies has been fortunate indeed in Greg Lindsay. I believe its recent program called ‘Taking Children Seriously’, focusing on the impact of government policy upon the family and upon the child, is an important example of how abstract economic theory can be translated into the most urgent terms of flesh and blood.
I said a moment ago that the Centre has a sort of celestial relationship with the Institute for Economic Affairs and, of course, above the door of its London offices, the IEA has the famous lines with which John Maynard Keynes finished his General Theory. They go, and I quote:
"The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the power of ideas."

(A madman in a position of authority, distilling voices from the newsprint)

Now, of course and contrary to some rumours, I am not ‘a madman in authority’ so I suppose I have to admit to being one of those ‘practical men’ – it is clearly true, however, that in the media business we are all ruled by ideas.
In the immediate sense, these are technological. Those of us who make our living by putting news and ideas and their audiences together face changes, triggered by science, that are no longer differences of degree: they amount to differences of kind. This is not so with all businesses. For example, in John Bonython’s oil and gas business, if I may say so, the issue, stripped to its essentials, is still that the oil is down there in the ground and you’ve got to get it up and out – faster, cheaper, more efficiently, no doubt – but still, up and out. By contrast, in the news business, because people keep on inventing things, it is not even clear who will be doing the editing in the future – whether the audience will accept a package of news or whether they will want programmed gadgets to select for themselves among all available news items, something that will be entirely feasible technically –let alone whether the system that delivers the news will be hard copy or electronic; and if electronic, whether by satellite, cable or cassette.
The news business is on running on a sort of metaphysical rolling log. It is what keeps us young. Or at least fit. However, there is a more general sense in which we in the media business are influenced by ideas. I don’t believe that you can contemplate the process of change in our business, and the wider effects that those changes have had upon society and upon the world, without being driven to broader conclusions about human affairs. Which is why, in the end, I am here tonight – and which is something I’ll return to later. Let me begin with a story. Almost exactly a hundred years ago, in May 1896, a young man, he was only just 30, sat in a London office awaiting the results of his latest publishing venture: the launch of a new popular daily newspaper, The Daily Mail. His name was Alfred Harmsworth. Later he was to become Lord Northcliffe – and later still, incidentally, he played a key role in the fortunes of my own family. According to legend, the future Lord Northcliffe had told his associates that launching The Daily Mail was a gamble that meant ‘bankruptcy or Berkeley Square’. And he had been in the office two straight days and two nights, getting the paper to press.

(Harold Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere, Berchtesgadn, 7th January 1937, with a figure much admired by the Daily Mail)

Finally, the sales reports came in. Northcliffe had gone on the record as hoping that The Daily Mail would sell 100,000 copies, but on that first day, it sold nearly 400,000. And it was well on its way to becoming the first English-language newspaper to reach the then miraculous mark of a million copies a day. Northcliffe responded to this with the poetry and high-mindedness we have come to expect from media moguls. Turning to his chief lieutenant, he said ‘We’ve struck a goldmine!’ I might note that this sort of instant success is very rare in publishing. Usually, you have to stick with a publication for long time until it finds its readers. It took twenty years before we made a profit on The Australian. Which I guess is another reason you can’t run media companies by investment managers.
Northcliffe’s launch of The Daily Mail was one of those magic moments that are both symptomatic and symbolic. He was the nexus, the nodal point on a network of profound forces that were developing in late nineteenth century society.

What suddenly came together that day in May 1896, was:

• firstly, that Britain’s rail system had created a national market;
• secondly, radical advances in printing and paper technology making it possible to generate enormous press runs; and,
• thirdly, a previously unsuspected mass audience, newly literate because of the educational reforms of the 1870s and 1880s.

Print abruptly ceased to be only an elite medium and became also a popular medium. (The Daily Mail was priced at a halfpenny when all other papers were priced at a penny – and price matters in all markets as we are showing in London today.) Eventually, this happened all over the world. But it was because of Northcliffe’s very real genius for popular journalism that it happened in Britain so dramatically and decisively.
And part of Northcliffe’s genius, if I may say so, is that he had an eye for talent. That was how he later came to know my father, a young Australian journalist who arrived in London in 1915 with a graphic story about the disaster at Gallipoli, where Northcliffe’s own nephew had just been killed.
When my father came back home to Melbourne to be the editor of The Herald, he remembered Northcliffe’s lessons and kept in touch with him. And when Northcliffe came out to Australia in 1921, he visited my father here in Melbourne. At my father’s request, on the ship back home, Northcliffe read back issues of the Melbourne Herald and dictated comments on them, which I still have.
In vital ways, his comments are still intensely relevant to the media business today. For example, Northcliffe stressed the importance of news, and lots of it. That’s something we still emphasise in all our newspapers, at a time when many newspapers are giving up the struggle with television and turning themselves into daily lifestyle magazines.
Even our much-maligned London tabloid, The Sun, which is a ferocious competition with other popular papers, always has more, longer and better written stories than any television newscast. And it gets those stories read by about a quarter of the adult population of Britain.

(Always a paper to deliver the truth)

Northcliffe also vehemently denounced what he saw as the tendency of advertisements to dominate The Herald’s pages. This was a battle he fought in his own papers throughout his career. I mention it just to show that the free market works in subtle and self-correcting ways. The capitalist press is not a slave to advertisers: in the interest of its own survival it can only have a limited and uneasy alliance with them.

(The Emeritus Chairman's publications never indulge in vulgar advertising displays)

Now, I don’t want to make too much of the Murdoch family’s connection to Northcliffe, because apart from anything else, he did eventually go mad! But it is an interesting thought that the whole brilliant episode of the rise of the mass media is in the careers of so few men. And I think there’s no doubt that the type of mass popular journalism that Northcliffe brought to newspapers has now extended to television. That’s why News Corporation has got involved with Sky Television in Britain, Fox Television in America, Star Television in Asia, and Vox in Germany. It’s why we have 24 hour TV news in Britain.

I hope you won’t get me wrong. I have always said that personally I prefer newspapers to television. And I believe newspapers, and mass circulation newspapers, will be here, and very profitably here, for a long time to come. But the growth is going to be in television and other, even more exotic, electronic media. When you think about it, those years around the turn of the century, when Northcliffe was rising to the peak of his career and my father was just beginning his, were an amazing period. At that time also, technological change – the telephone, the motor car, the aeroplane – was so radical as to amount to a difference in kind, rather than degree, in the way that people have lived for centuries, indeed millennia. Now again today, equally profound forces are at work in the world. Right now, anyone anywhere in the world is able to got to a computer screen, exchange messages with anyone anywhere else in the world, get information, news and entertainment, work and play, at minimal cost – and at no marginal cost for distance. What this means, at the very least, is that whole new audiences are markets are being created. In the near future there are going to be many more magic moments when the new Northcliffes suddenly find that they have struck new goldmines.

I don’t know, no one knows, precisely what these new goldmines will be. But we are all doing our best to find out!
I do know, however, that this new era of technological change has revolutionised Australia’s position in the world.
Australia’s first two centuries, as I said three years ago when I spoke at the University of Melbourne, were the centuries of rent-capturing – capturing what economists call ‘rents’, profits from primary products sold into the world market. The returns from these products had to be exceptional, because they had to overcome what Geoffrey Blainey has called, in a well-known phrase, the tyranny of distance. In fact, as you are all aware, it was the Australian gold rush in the middle of the nineteenth century that provided the first boost to this great city of Melbourne. (I’m talking about old-fashioned boring real gold here! – not the infinite gold of the mind and the market.)
But the next century will be one in which the tyranny of distance has been abolished. For Australia, it will be the century of networking. Australia will profit from its strategic location, as a highly-educated, English- speaking society that because of technological change is now as integrated in the world economy as any place on earth.
Melbourne-Manchester-Manhattan-the middle of the McDonnell ranges – it’s all going to be the same. New Northcliffes will strike unsuspected global goldmines while physically located right here in Australia, perhaps publishing software or some specialised information product for sale on an international electronic network. They won’t ever have to got to London and be called rude names for saving the British newspaper industry! Assuming, that is, that government policy allows Australian entrepreneurs easy access to imported computer hardware – on which to develop what will really count: the software. And assuming that it does not tax them to the point where they decide to take their goldmines, all nice and portable in a laptop’s hard disk, and go off elsewhere.
All this sounds very optimistic – and it is. We have it within our power to make Australia an economic powerhouse in one of the brightest eras of human history.
So why are we so surprised? I think one of the reasons is a congerie* of attitudes epitomised by George Orwell’s great futuristic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Briefly, Orwell thought that technology would lead to tyranny. He thought that it would enormously enhance the power of the centralised totalitarian state, which would literally be able to keep an eye on its citizens through two-way television screens installed in their homes. He summed it up with one of a number of Orwellian phrases that have entered the language: ‘Big Brother is watching you.’
I was at Geelong Grammar in 1949 when Nineteen Eighty-Four was published. I have to admit that I don’t remember anything about the stir it caused – although I can remember the winner of the Melbourne Cup that year! It was Foxzami.
But I did arrive in England in 1950 to go to Oxford. And I vividly recall the rationing, the queues, the shortages, the shabbiness, the general weariness, that made only too credible the soul-destroying privations of the future total-welfare state that Orwell envisaged.

(The young chairman emeritus, avowed socialist, supporter of trade unions, and lover of Lenin, with a bust of his hero in his Oxford accommodation)

Now, George Orwell was a writer of genius and Nineteen Eighty-Four is a work of inspiration. In recent years, for example, it has become a great favourite in the former Iron Curtain countries because of its uncanny insight into the psychology of corrupt totalitarian bureaucracies. Orwell, of course, had no direct experience of this. But he was apparently able to figure it out intuitively – based on his wartime stint working for the BBC.
I don’t know whether it would have been different if he had been working for the ABC!
Nevertheless, the plain fact is that Orwell was wrong in his central prediction. Technology has not led to centralisation and tyranny – rather the reverse.

(George Orwell, an actual socialist)

I’ve been musing about this recently because I’ve been reading the galleys of a very impressive new book on exactly this theme, by Peter Huber, an American lawyer and scientist – and, indeed, a fellow of another think-tank in the same constellation as the CIS: the Manhattan Institute in New York. It’s an essay on why Orwell went wrong, combined with a rewriting of Nineteen Eighty-Four to illustrate what might actually have happened.
Huber rewrote Nineteen Eighty-Four by a particularly ingenious method: he scanned Orwell’s collected works into his computer, and then picked up and chose and reorganised pieces of Orwell’s prose. I think this is the closest that anyone has yet come to fulfilling the long-standing dream of all editors: to be able to put newspapers together without having to deal with journalists!
Huber’s book is being published by Simon & Schuster in New York – regrettably one of our competitors. It’s called Orwell’s Revenge: The 1984 Palimpsest.
What is a ‘palimpsest’? I had to look it up too. It’s a writing surface, like a tablet or parchment, that can be scraped clean and written on again. Orwell used the word to describe history in his nightmare world – constantly rewritten, with newspaper files and reference books retrospectively altered, to suit the ruling party’s current line. And, indeed, this was exactly what Stalin was beginning to do in the Soviet Union. We’ve even seen an odd attempt or two around here recently!
The destruction of the collective memory – something Alexander Solzhenitsyn defined in his 1970 Nobel Prize speech as the essence of totalitarianism – was a spectre that haunted Orwell. He had written with horrified fascination, in a 1944 essay, of the Caliph Omar’s destruction of the libraries of Alexandria. Burning manuscripts kept the public baths warm for eighteen days. Great numbers of tragedies by Euripides and others were lost forever, including great works by Aristotle, Plato and others.
Right away, we can see the difference that technology has made. The Xerox machine – which of course did not exist even in Orwell’s day – has made keeping track of original documents, so they can be rounded up and destroyed, an impossible dream. Xerox machines have also made the copying of subversive or sensitive documents for publication or leaking quite unstoppable. Which is why Xerox machines in the Soviet Union were kept under lock and key as late as the mid-1980s.
But we should also note the next step: the collective memory will hardly have a physical existence at all. It will escape into cyberspace, transmitted back and forth by modem and even satellite between scores of millions of computer network users. Solzhenitsyn took the title of his Nobel Prize speech from the Russian proverb: ‘One word of truth outweighs the whole world.’ In the future, we will have many words of truth, ever-present in the ether.

Why was Orwell wrong? Peter Huber argues that it was for two basic reasons. Firstly, Orwell was wrong to suppose, in the words of one of the slogans of his totalitarian party in Nineteen Eighty-Four that ‘ignorance is strength’. In a system based on science, ignorance is not strength: it is weakness.
In Huber’s scenario, a situation arises in which the party is simply unable to maintain its two-way telescreens because of a shortage of technical personnel. The screens are co-opted by enterprising ‘proles’ – the proles you will remember, are the underclass outside the party circle – who exploit the screens’ interactivity to communicate with each other. Far from being a centralising device, the telescreen network decentralises and diffuses power.

What makes Huber’s scenario the more convincing is that this sort of scientific and technological atrophy was exactly what destroyed the Soviet Union. Without freedom of inquiry, scientific inquiry just could not proceed.
By the mid-1980s, there were extraordinary reports of Western scientists going to the Soviet Union on some joint venture, finding that two separate groups of Soviet scientists were working on the same problem in ignorance of each other, sometimes even in the same city, and putting them in touch with each other. Science was being strangled by the security needs of the Soviet state. When President Reagan launched his Star Wars program, it was the last straw. The Soviets knew they could never match it and their will broke. The second reason that Orwell was wrong, Huber argues, is in effect contained in another of his totalitarian party’s slogans: ‘Freedom is slavery.’ But freedom is not slavery. Specifically, free markets are not monopolies.
Orwell believed that free markets must lead to private monopoly and hence to the driving-down of living standards. He believed this because, like a lot of intellectuals who are accustomed to thinking about literature and politics, he had no real concept of the price mechanism. He thought that profits must be extorted by power.
For example, he assumed that capitalists would always deliberately suppress innovation to keep profits high. He believed that this had actually happened to a type of ‘flexible glass’ that had been mentioned in antiquity by the Roman writer Petronius, but was now irretrievably lost.

In fact, however, capitalists are slaveringly eager to innovate, to cut into each other’s market share. Perhaps when Orwell was growing up, it was possible to argue hypothetically that the Soviet Union would innovate faster. But as it turned out, it was precisely at innovation that capitalism beat communism most decisively. Because capitalists are always trying to stab each other in the back, free markets do not lead to monopolies. Essentially, monopolies can only exist when governments support them. For example, the media business in this country is relatively concentrated at least in part because of Canberra’s restrictions against foreign ownership (and monopolies are quite often mirages – people just have not thought carefully enough about what constitutes the relevant market. For example, both advertisers and audiences in fact do have alternatives to newspapers – radio, television, eventually quite possibly the telephone system – throughout Australia.) The fact that Orwell did not understand markets leads to one of the most pointed, and indeed poignant, differences between Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Peter Huber’s rewriting of it in Orwell’s Revenge. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the street markets run by the proles and technically illegal, are drab and depressing places. But in Huber’s scenario, they are lively, bustling – indeed, they provide better goods and services than the party’s official outlet. You get the impression that the proles have implicitly declared independence from the party state. It withers away, although not at all in the way Marx expected.
 

Again, we know from the collapse of communism that this is entirely realistic. In the Soviet bloc, the black market rapidly became the only effective way to get anything of value, and grey markets in the Soviet Union itself, towards the end. Some vast proportion of all produce sold came from the minute fraction of agricultural land that peasants were allowed to cultivate themselves.
As Huber points out in his book, it is the hijacked telescreen system itself that has really unleashed the elemental power of these private street markets. The proles are able to use it to trade goods. In economists’ jargon, it makes possible the more efficient allocation of resources.
The poignant aspect of this is that Orwell did have some dim inkling of what street markets could mean. In one of his earlier novels, he provided a lyrical description of one (which Peter Huber promptly appropriated for his rewritten book). And in that novel, Orwell had his hero reflect on the scene as follows: ‘whenever you see a street market you know that there is hope for England yet.’
That’s a moment of true artistic insight – albeit unsupported (as sometimes happens with artists) with any rational or scientific follow-through. The freedom, the unforced exchange of the street market, its pragmatic acceptance of human self-interest and its transformation of self-interest into something mutually, peacefully beneficial – it does mean there is hope for England ... and, indeed, for all of us in the Western world. It’s not an accident that Napoleon called England a nation of shopkeepers. What Orwell and Napoleon together saw, however confused or critical they felt about it, was the extent to which markets, of what I referred to earlier and more grandly as the principles of classical liberalism, are fundamental to our civilisation.

And this is the broader conclusion to which I said I would return.

I said earlier that we suffer from a congerie* of attitudes that cause us to be surprised by the idea that technology might be beneficial – and perhaps by the underlying principle that free markets are fundamental to our civilisation.
A part of that congerie is the eclipse into which the idea of markets passed for a considerable part of this century. For a variety of reasons, it was assumed by Left and Right alike, and indeed it is still too often assumed, that markets do not work properly and that governments have to step in. I’m not talking about communism here, or even socialism, but about all pervasive regulation and control.
And that assumption still underlies many of our Australian institutions – notably our labour market, the bone in Australia’s throat, something which I know the Centre for Independent Studies has examined recently – with appropriate distaste.
When you rethink this assumption about markets, you see the world through different eyes. It wasn’t just the Soviets who thought that street markets were the work of speculators and assorted anti-social elements. The entire establishment of Western development economists viewed them as trivial at best, unproductive middlemen at worst.

Well, at News Corporation we are enlightened. For example, in India we have discovered that tens of thousands of pirates have invested in reception dishes and are selling Star** programming to a few hundred, sometimes just a few score, households in their immediate neighbourhood.
Some cynics have said this will be fatal for our Asian television company, Star**. We disagree. Indeed, we look forward to a long partnership with these splendid entrepreneurs. They are pioneering the market – a market that Orwell himself, who worked in the BBC’s Indian service, said was fatally flawed because it did not yet embrace the masses.
The case of India, by the way, illustrates another important point: although technology does not lead to tyranny, neither need it lead to chaos. The new markets it creates don’t just make Northcliffes rich: they may also solve age-old political problems.
Indian leaders have long been desperately worried about disunity in their vast, teeming, multilingual country. This is something we can hardly understand in the English-speaking world, where we achieved total political stability so long ago. To try to achieve it in India, there has been an effort ever since independence to promote Hindi as the lingua franca, what in India is called the ‘link language’. But the effort has failed. Until now. With the coming of the electronic mass media, Hindi is finally spreading, because everyone wants to watch the best television programming. And I suspect we will see this story repeated throughout the developing world, not least in China with Mandarin.
In which case it will not only be prosperity that we will catch in our networks, but also order – and, ultimately, peace.
And peace, remember, has been in short supply in the twentieth century. The optimism of Northcliffe’s 1890s gave way to the catastrophe of the First World War. And the First World War looms over this entire century, really only ending with the fall of the Soviet Union. In its dark shadow we dreamed the Orwellian totalitarian nightmare.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell was a pessimist. But he was also an optimist – as I’ve said, you can’t expect artists to be consistent. Earlier, he had written a poem about a young volunteer militia he saw in the Spanish civil war:

No power can disinherit
No bomb that ever burst
Shatters the crystal spirit

Ladies and gentlemen, in this century of bursting bombs, I like to think that we are doing our part, however humble and mundane to free that crystal spirit.***

* congerie (from the Latin, pretentious, usually "congeries") (used with a singular or plural verb) a collection of items or parts in one mass; assemblage; aggregation, heap:

From the airplane the town resembled a congeries of tiny boxes.

First recorded in 1610–20; from Latin: “a heap, pile, collection,” equivalent to conger- (stem of congerere “to collect, heap up,” equivalent to con-, combining form + gerere “to bear, carry”) + -iēs abstract noun suffix; con-
My own are his pansy collages, tightly packed, edge-to-edge congeries of overlapping floral faces that give off a bright radiance as well as well as a sense of menacing, staring eyes.
From New York Times
A novel loosely holding together distinct histories and temporalities effectively dramatizes a society that is a congeries of ancient and new, old lore and tradition bumping up against thoroughly modern ambitions and expertise.
From The New Yorker
Does that justify corporate managers spending ever-shifting congeries of their shareholders’ money, without consulting them, on political campaign contributions and ads to sway citizens’ decisions about which officials should regulate the corporations themselves?
From Salon
The sixties may be just another decade, but The Sixties are something more – a mood, a state of mind, a way of life, a congeries of sounds and images.
From The Guardian
The first, titled “The Book,” describes a strange bookshop, a “congeries/ Of crumbling elder lore.”
From Washington Post

** aka Disney Star

*** Peter Brock famously used the crystal spirit in his Energy Polarizer box ...

In 1986, Australian motor racing driver Peter Brock unveiled a device called an Energy Polarizer, which consisted of a black box containing a sliver of crystal surrounded by magnets, with promises it could improve the fuel performance and handling of any car which uses it. Despite no scientific testing of it, Brock claimed it worked through "aligning the molecules" of the car, and began fitting the device to all (General Motors) Holden Dealer Team specials. Other benefits claimed by the device included absorbing road shocks more completely and quietly, to reduce overall vehicle noises — both inside and outside — to achieve greater efficiency of the power train and steering systems, improving the engine and suspension performance and to create a more pleasant environment for the driver and passenger.

The same stunning benefits of the unleashed crystal spirit can be seen in News Corp to this very day.

In which the reptiles lose their way, and neither the bromancer nor the returning ravaging Robbster can help them find it ...

 

Tomorrow is a travel day for the pond, and the pond has arranged a placeholder in lieu of usual reptile coverage. 

The pond thinks it will satisfy the most fastidious and fussy herpetology student, featuring as it does the Emeritus Chairman as sage, prophet, seer and futurist.

In any case, the pond isn't sure of the benefits of daily coverage, as the reptiles have lost their way, in no small part because of the baleful influence of their kissing American cousins at Faux Noise, what with King Donald I, affectionately known as the Cantaloupe Caligula, routinely snatching the top headline ...

The reptiles were all set up to run with scare headlines about banned lobbyists and Labor lacking a buffer for the Klown King's Kavortings ... when the bully pulled another social media stunt, and snatched the top spot with tales of wildly swinging markets...

Over on the extreme far right, there was a sense of desolation and despair, with only the debate tonight offering some forlorn hope ...

"Snappy" Tom was extremely snappy ...

‘The Art of the Dill’ a godsend for ailing incumbents
While poison for investors, business, consumers and policymakers, the US tariffs could be good news for Labor at the federal poll.
Tom Dusevic
Policy Editor

"Dill"? Had it come to that? 

Elsewhere, Simpleton Simon (here a conflict of interest) wailed and moaned at the upheaval ...

COMMENTARY by Simon Benson
Deep uncertainty: Trump has turned the federal election on its head
Labor’s model now has an electoral trigger in common with John Howard’s Tampa election of 2001. Like Howard, fear is what Anthony Albanese is seeking to exploit.

"Fear"? How wretched and shameless. As if the reptiles would ever peddle fear ...have the reptiles reached the very bottom, labelling the lying rodent as a fear monger?

Even the bromancer, at the top of the digital world ma early in the morning, was in a sort of "pox on both their houses" mode ... but as always the pond listened to our very own Reichsmarschall des GroßAustralisch Reiches, soon to lead us into the war with China ...

Dutton is no ‘Bulldog’ on Port of Darwin call, So far, the opposition has been entirely reactive in this campaign. At the last election, they left their one good policy until the last minute, making it entirely ineffective politically. Will they this time do the same on defence?

The reptiles began with a snap of the object of the bromancer's ire, Peter Dutton holds a press conference in Darwin regarding the port in Darwin on the campaign trail for the 2025 federal election. Picture: Thomas Lisson

The bro was agitated, and dismayed by what the advent of the mango Mussolini might mean ...

It’s good that both sides of politics have decided to take back control of the Port of Darwin from the Chinese-owned Landbridge company. But what a colossal mess they’ve both made of this issue for the past decade. How wretchedly they’ve both been effectively forced into doing the right thing, only after exhausting all other possibilities.

Darwin has become a militarily crucial port. In one of the very few positive strategic developments for Australia in recent years, increasing numbers of US troops, aircraft and navy ships rotate through northern Australia.

From Australia’s point of view, this serves key national interests. It strengthens allied deterrent capability in Australia. It reinforces the US alliance. It helps the US manage its regional force structure. And it ties the US into the Indo-Pacific.

The advent of Donald Trump makes these objectives much more difficult. That doesn’t make them less important but more important. We need to keep the substance and structures of the alliance intact.

From the US perspective, the northern Australian initiative helps decentralise and disperse its regional forces, making them harder to hit, especially pre-emptively, and offering greater operational flexibility.

Indeed, indeed, we must do everything to pretend that King Donald isn't daily doing an impression of King George III, we must pretend the substance and structures are intact.

To think otherwise would create a serious issue: how could the bro possibly bung on a do with China?

The bromancer's objectives were much more difficult with either mob in charge, with the reptiles triggering a flashback by featuring another snap, Peter Dutton has announced he will end the uncertainty and security for the future of Port of Darwin. Picture: Thomas Lisson

That provoked the bromancer into a funk, not back to the second world war and the bombing, but to a reminder that it was the Liberals that had been the ones that wot did it... and by golly and by Jiminy, did he have it in for Little to be Proud of ...

Since the US began this process Chinese interests have emerged everywhere the US went. We can speculate about what the Chinese wanted out of such presence. The original decision on the lease, in October 2015, was a national security atrocity. The then Liberal government did subsequently reform foreign investment regulations concerning critical infrastructure.

But it had from 2015 to the election in May 2022 to reverse the situation by requiring the sale of the lease to an approved entity, either Australian owned or perhaps a company owned by an ally or friend. That it never did this is evidence of its woeful passivity in the face of Defence bureaucracy inertia. The Defence establishment would never admit its initial advice that the lease was perfectly harmless and happy was wrong.

So for all the anti-China talk from the Turnbull and Morrison governments, including when Peter Dutton was defence minister, precisely nothing happened.

No Coalition spokesman looked quite so clueless as Nationals’ leader David Littleproud explaining on the ABC’s Insiders that responsible governments, and even responsible oppositions presumably, had to act when given certain advice.

What advice was he referring to? Official advice? Defence advice, rebuking its former findings, findings that had been reaffirmed by the Prime Minister’s Department as recently as 2023?

Of course, there was no advice. Nor was any advice needed. Here’s a giant, radical idea: political leaders sometimes actually lead. Dutton’s decision to take back control of the port is sound but there is no explanation for the Coalition’s failure to do so in government.

Littleproud sounded astoundingly unfamiliar with national security as a coherent policy area, more like a word processor than a political leader. Why hadn’t the Coalition put forward its defence spokesman, Andrew Hastie, for an interview like that?

Clueless, astoundingly unfamiliar? 

To do a proper pox on both their houses, there needed to be an urgent, even more severe poxing of the other side, set off by a snap ...Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles hold a press conference in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman

The bromancer didn't need any visual cue, he was right into the poxing ...

But the Coalition was a positive combination of Winston Churchill, Clausewitz and Sun Tzu compared with Anthony Albanese and Defence Minister Richard Marles. The Prime Minister claimed the Labor Party had always opposed this lease. But his very government in 2023 conducted an inquiry that found – quelle surprise! – that the former official advice was sound and there was nothing to worry about in the lease arrangements.

This was a very convenient finding when Albanese was desperate to “stabilise” the relationship with China.

Marles was interviewed by a heroic Tom Connell on Sky News on Monday. Marles was even more ridiculous and word processor-like than Littleproud. Echoing Albanese, Marles repeatedly stated that Labor’s overriding concerns on the Port of Darwin had been consistent since 2015. But what about your assurance in 2023 that the lease was fine, Connell asked in several different formulations. What’s changed? Is there new advice?

Marles, robot-like, simply repeated the preposterous line that Labor had always been consistent on this.

There is a kind of banal, national tragedy in this whole issue. The nation needs and deserves a national security dialogue about 28 standard deviations better than this.

It demonstrates, among other things, that both sides of politics routinely hide behind the tattered fig leaf of formal “advice” in making crucial security, defence and even foreign policy decisions in government. No Australian government should need official advice to know that the Darwin lease was ridiculous and against the national interest right from the start. Even that well-known warmonger, Barack Obama, complained about it.

But from 2015 to 2025 our national leadership, on both sides of politics, couldn’t bring itself to take the obvious and necessary action. This indicates that in national security the quality of our political leadership is very poor.

As if to remind us it was a both sides sudsing, the reptiles reverted to a snap of the deeply clueless, and the bromancer's pet, the pastie Hastie, No Coalition spokesman looked quite so clueless as Nationals’ leader David Littleproud. Picture: News Corp, Coalition defence spokesman Andrew Hastie. Picture: News Corp

If only the bromancer could be out on the field, rather than a coach shouting on the sidelines at the inept teams ...

Politicians don’t know enough, they don’t understand enough, they don’t take responsibility and they don’t lead. 

Unlike the bromancer, who knows much more than enough, understands much more than enough, takes responsibility for his columns, and aspires to be the lizard Oz's leading reptile ...

The pond snapped - almost like a snappy Tom.

Surely the bro was being manifestly unfair, surely some politicians made decisive decisions, surely some led from the front?

The bromancer was inconsolable and being something of a thugby boofhead, resorted to thugby league for his closing metaphor ...

The Darwin decision has happened now, it seems, only because each side was scared it would lose a trick to the other and thereby might appear weak.

Albanese has been Prime Minister for three years, so his is the more proximate responsibility. But the Liberals are meant to be strong on national security. Dutton was a defence minister. So their decade-long failure on this issue is even more politically damaging.

So far, Dutton is losing this campaign and he’s even managing to mangle national security.

Where and when is the Liberal commitment on defence spending? If it’s a lot, the Liberals need to campaign for it, explain what it will produce, why it’s necessary and where the money’s coming from. If it’s not much, then they should hang their heads in shame.

They can’t do what both sides of politics currently try – simply avoid all hard discussions and all hard decisions. US founding father Alexander Hamilton famously argued that “energy in the executive” was a critical quality in good government.

It’s pretty important in good opposition too.

My beloved Bulldogs in the NRL are at the moment in the place God always intended for them, at the top of the competi­tion. Supremely, they display “energy in the executive”. They dictate the tempo of the game by being faster than their opponents in everything. And they never give up on a play.

So far, the opposition has been entirely reactive in this campaign. At the last election, they left their one good policy, letting people use their super to buy a house, until the last minute, making it entirely ineffective politically, because they were scared it would be opposed. Will they this time do the same on defence?

By the way, in Sunday’s game, the Dogs’ opponents were entirely reactive. And they didn’t score a point.

As if the mutton Dutton had been entirely reactive ... as if he couldn't score a point ...

How deep was the reptile despair?

For some reason, they decided to exhume Andrew Robb and offer up three minutes (according to the hive mind clock) of the Robbster talking tough, Begging for concessions legitimises Trump’s illegal tariffs, Australia should not negotiate with Donald Trump. We are a sovereign nation not to be bullied and intimidated. We should just ignore him. No gratuitous comments. No supplicant phone calls.

Things got off to a bad start with a snap of the orange tubby pointing, a confronting posture designed to inflame, President Donald Trump speaks during an event to announce new tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House. Picture: AP

That set the Robbster right off ...

Australia should not negotiate with Donald Trump. We should just ignore him. No gratuitous comments. No supplicant phone calls. No offer of concessions. No response to his illegal tariffs. We are a sovereign nation not to be bullied and intimidated.

Oh dear... it had all started so splendidly, and then the sniping began, Labor accuses Dutton of copying Trump ... Education minister criticises 'extreme' Coalition stance as treasuer warns threat to funding comes 'right from the Doge playbook', followed by the walkbacks, Coalition abandons 'end' to work f rom home, walks back 41,000 job cuts ... and now here was the Robbster returned from the political grave to ravage the mango-coloured monster, still being defended against all odds by Faux Noise... themselves under stress as they had to face rivals offering even better defences, Newsmax guest defends Trump golfing during market crisis: “You don't want people to see you stressed out”

The pond is well past doing a montage of King Donald berating Obama for always playing golf - there's way too much footage, it would last forever - but it was difficult to ignore the way that the reptile world was falling apart, Fox vs. Fox: Trump apologists defend tariff chaos while experts raise alarm. 

The pond pressed on with the Robbster ...

Trump is desperate for a cringing phone call, an opportunity to glory in his power, a reason to claim that our offer on concessions confirms the legitimacy of his actions. We mustn’t play his pathetic game.

How can Trump plead “unfairness, currency manipulation and trade barriers” when the US has the highest living standards in the world; sure, there are serious inequities in the US, but it is a problem of its own making, not ours. The response in Australia to date has focused on our across-the-board 10 per cent illegal tariff. Yet, the biggest impact on Australia will come from our neighbours in the Asian region.

Our biggest trading partner is China and, taken as a bloc, the ASEAN countries are our second-biggest trading partner. The tariffs imposed by Trump on all these countries range from 35 per cent to 65 per cent. There will be a deep recession in Asia, and it will profoundly impact on growth, jobs and investment in Australia. It is cruel to poorer countries such as Cambodia and Vietnam; punished for being key to US supply chains.

The reptiles helped out by featuring a clip which wasn't in keeping with their Faux Noise kissing cousins, George Washington University's Steven Hamilton weighed in on the reverberations of US President Donald Trump’s tariffs, claiming “I don’t think anyone … expected it to get this far”. Mr Hamilton explained how after tomorrow, the US markets will experience “the sharpest stock market crash since 1987”. He told Sky News Australia that a pause on these tariffs won’t cancel out the damage as “the damage comes from the uncertainty that’s been generated by these moves”.

Et tu, Sky Noise down under?

The Robbster was as angry as hell, and opened his window wide and shouted he wasn't going to take it anymore ...

Australians have been a loyal ally of the US for over 70 years. We have supported every US-initiated war around the globe, and in doing so we have lost so many young Australian lives and condemned thousands more to lifelong post-traumatic stress disorder, with so many ending in suicide.

We have a significant trade deficit with the US – last year we imported over $60bn of US exports, and the US imported just over $30bn of Australian products and services. As well, we host, free of tax, US tech giants. Furthermore, we also have an investment deficit with the US – we invest more of our savings in the US than the US invests in Australia. And, more importantly, more than 20 years ago we signed a legally binding free-trade agreement that committed both countries to imposing zero tariffs on one another’s exports. It is why Trump’s 10 per cent tariffs on everything we export to the US are illegal and in total violation of this legally binding FTA.

Now we get told that unless we respond with “phenomenal” concessions, we are stuck with the 10 per cent tariffs on everything we export, with potentially more to come if we don’t “bend the knee” to this hapless President. America does not become greater through making allies supplicants.

Why should we meekly negotiate concessions with the US? It won’t be a negotiation; the US will expect unilateral concessions. A concession implies we have wronged the US. Yet, there is nothing to negotiate because the tariffs are illegal, totally unwarranted and deeply offensive given the loyalty and friendship Australia has extended to the relationship with the US for more than 70 years. We have not wronged the US in any way.

To help out those who had completely forgotten about the Robbster, the reptiles inserted a snap, Andrew Robb. Picture: News Corp

Then it was on to a final flourish of defiance ...

We should just get on with finalising an FTA with the European Union, and consider initiating a process to combine two existing Asia-Pacific agreements: the 12-county Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership and the 15-country Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership – to deliver a comprehensive Asia-Pacific free-trade zone, open to the current 27 member countries, which include China, Japan and South Korea, and with an invitation for India and the US to join when they see fit. This would be an unequivocal statement of where we stand. This should be our response to President Trump.

It would also recognise the reality that while the West is closing up its economies, Southeast Asian countries, and India, have been opening up by dismantling so many of their former protectionist positions, with the result that billions of dollars are being invested, and tens of millions of people are joining the middle class – a clear demonstration, once again, that freer trade works.

Sadly, this Southeast Asian progress will be smashed by Trump’s 35-65 per cent tariffs in Asia. Retaliating to US tariffs by imposing our own tariffs will only increase Australia’s inflation and hurt our own people, as we saw in the 1930s global recession.

We must resist the Trump mantra, which involves throwing the law of comparative advantage out the window. We must not give credence to his demands and expectations. We cannot negotiate with this man.

Andrew Robb was minister for trade, investment and tourism, 2014-16.

Talk about withering. Why "this man" was almost as insulting as "that woman" ...

And so to close with an immortal Rowe, and a plea to keep those comments flowing while the pond goes travelling.

Yesterday, the pond learned a new term of abuse, "Bunyip Lord Downer", cackled at the notion that Killer Creighton was the "heel" - it's all wrestling in the mango Mussolini's universe, especially education - and rolled Jaffas down the aisle at the notion that Le Pen should compare herself to Alfie Dreyfus, on the proviso he changed his religion ...

That's the vexatious, vexated loon spirit ...

As usual, it's all in the detail ... treasure Gina, national treasure Jane, treasure the rustics ...

But did the immortal Rowe get the wrong footie for the bro? And was that poster and the 'puter screen designed to enrage the already raging Robb?

And then there was this treasure designed to delight the pond. Give that man a briefing, give them all a briefing, they're all confused and befuddled and bewildered ...