A Killer time with the caroling Carroll, and Killer himself, coming to a town near you ...

 

The pond had to think long and hard about offering the caroling Carroll a place on the pond today. 

On the one hand, he's a firm favourite with some pond correspondents; on the other hand, his piece is a tedious ten minute slog (so the reptiles time him) through unremitting banality, featuring a deep love of mindless superficiality and never ending clichés, and a nauseating devotion to stereotypes.

This sort of poor man's Donald Horne (himself no great shakes) always seems to surface at this time of the year, trading off on pointless deaths.

The pond's solution? Banish the caroling Carroll to a late arvo slot where few will see him, and follow him with a Killer chaser to cleanse the palate.

Oh and strip out all the visual distractions, so that the banality might come through without any more clichés added to the brew.

Title maestro, if you please, The Anzac pulse is the key to our national mind and identity, Australia’s World War I legend still informs the Australian mind and identity, in mysterious and compelling ways.

Then came the first visual distraction, which pond readers will have to imagine, The Last Post played at dawn at the Anzac Day dawn service at Hobart cenotaph, 2017. Picture: Richard Jupe

For unknown reasons, the caroling Carroll decided to trot out Oswald Spengler for his opening thrust:

Anzac Day is close to the nation’s soul in some strange, enigmatic way – and epic. Every April 25, the bugle catches the early dawn light as it sounds the melancholy, haunting strains of the Last Post out over city and town across the country. Meanwhile, Australia Day has become a troubled and peripheral space.
Oswald Spengler wrote, in The Decline of the West (1922), of the English being bound by a “wordless harmony of national pulse”. This phrase gestures to the essence of national identity, an unconscious collective sentiment built up over generations, that becomes instinctive.

If anyone asked the pond to reference a historian, Oswald Spengler would be right down the list. 

Back to the pompous academic pedant trying to do a Russell Ward ...

The Anzac legend may seem dated – an anachronism today. Apart from championing warrior mateship, it incorporated bush romanticism, celebrating the tough resilience of outback life as the true Australia – a vast sunburnt country thinly populated by swagmen wanderers, drover’s wives, sheep shearing, swashbuckling bushrangers, and poets giving iconic form to figures such as the man from Snowy River.

Cue another visual distraction, This Anzac Day, we honour those who served with a moving tribute drawn from Laurence Binyon’s iconic poem For the Fallen.

On he plunged, stereotypes and clichés ready to blossom...

Yet its vitality was demonstrated once again in the 1990s, when Anzac Day flooded back to dynamic life, as if coinciding with the passing of the last World War I veterans. Younger generations took it up, including journeying on backpacker pilgrimages to Gallipoli itself.
Anzac Day prompts wider reflection on the state of national identity. I want to suggest here that the formation of the Australian mind is significantly a post-1945 story, but one incorporating Anzac traits in mysterious and compelling ways.
The 1950s was a decade of boundless post-war optimism, of new booming prosperity and expansion. But on the cultural front, AA Phillips’s phrase, “the cultural cringe”, caught more the mood of the time among the literati and intellectuals.
Everything produced locally in the arts, in literature, even science was seen as second-rate or worse, compared with what was originating at the centre – in London, Paris and New York. Many of the most talented locals went to the big cosmopolitan cities to build expatriate careers – to name some: Barry Humphries, Clive James, Robert Hughes, Germaine Greer, and future Nobel prize-winning scientists.

The pond was sorely tempted to include the next two snaps, because time had not been kind to them, what with unruly hair and such like, Robert Hughes, art critic, in 1972, Writer and activist Germaine Greer in 1972.

But a rule is a rule, and there's more than enough verbal blather to go around as compensation ...

Donald Horne’s best-selling book, The Lucky Country, from 1964, continued the disparaging reading of the country and its European settlers as lazy mediocrities enjoying the sun and the ill-deserved wealth of a country bountiful in minerals and agricultural produce. Then, Ronald Conway’s The Great Australian Stupor (1971) added psychological bite to the cultural cringe perspective.
True, there was grudging acknowledgment of sporting excellence – world’s best tennis players and swimmers in the 1950s, top Test cricketers, and Australia’s third place in the medal count at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, extraordinary for its small population, still the nation’s best performance. But that generation of culture critics were snooty about sport, as they were about Anzac Day, putting both down as leisure activity for mindless philistines.
When discussing national identity and its values there comes an inevitable focus on excellence. The prestige of having the best, or being the best, is inescapable, as with returning tourists claiming to live in the best country.
The baby boomers tend to get a bad press these days, but I want to suggest here that it was their achievement to develop much of the consciousness that anchors Australia’s sense of itself today. The 1970s welcomed new cultural optimism to complement sporting triumphs.
A film industry emerged and flourished. Led by a new generation of directors – Peter Weir, George Miller, Bruce Beresford, and others – it created films of the first rank. Notable early were Picnic at Hanging Rock and Mad Max. Weir would later go on to direct several Hollywood masterpieces, led by Dead Poets Society and Green Card. Miller would develop his Mad Max themes. Beresford’s Driving Miss Daisy (1989) would win four Oscars including for Best Picture.
Oddly, as much as the 1970s saw the rise of a generation of brilliant directors, later generations would feature celebrated actors on the international stage – Mel Gibson, Russell Crowe and Geoffrey Rush, then Nicole Kidman, Eric Bana, Heath Ledger, Cate Blanchett, Chris Hemsworth, Rose Byrne and Margot Robbie.

Strange that he didn't include the joke about Miss Daisy not having a director, and then the crime was compounded by showing off an anti-Semite, a seriously loony man in company with an unfortunate suicide, Mel Gibson (left) and Heath Ledger in 2000.

Ostentatious superficiality being the name of the game, the caroling Carroll carried on with his cultural listicles ...

Concurrently in the 1970s, local theatre emerged, centred on The Pram Factory and La Mama in Melbourne, with playwrights led by David Williamson and Jack Hibberd using the vernacular to develop a zany, comic, very Australian style.
Locally produced television series such as Homicide, Division 4, and Matlock Police also took a confidence out into Middle Australia that its own ways of life were legitimate and worth valuing – through hearing local accents, slang and colloquialisms on television. Film and television encouraged self-belief. Hollywood no longer had a monopoly on popular culture storytelling.
In the domain of high culture there was also success. Patrick White won the nation’s first Nobel prize for Literature in 1973 – it remains the only one. The Swedish Academy recognised a broad “epic and psychological narrative art” introducing a new continent to ­literature.
White charts the singularities of Australian experience in a string of novels, led by Voss and Riders in the Chariot. Voss is an allegory of a quixotic attempt by European settlers to possess the new land spiritually, to come to feel at home here, and White does so in tragi-heroic mode, as the novel tracks a doomed explorer journeying into the nation’s harsh interior. There was some echo of Sidney Nolan’s iconic paintings of the lonely, quixotic bushranger Ned Kelly, garbed in homemade armour riding through the landscape.
Riders in the Chariot portrays four ordinary characters in outer-suburban Sydney on their own religious quests to find transcendent meaning in their mundane lives – a European Jew, an Aboriginal painter, an other-worldly spinster and an earth mother. White’s work is not in the absolute top rank of world literature, in the company of Henry James, but it is close.
Poetry also flourished in the post-war years. It, too, was giving form to uniquely Australian experience. It reached its peak in the work of Les Murray, continuing the tradition of early bush poets, but in a style of high literary sophistication. Like White, Murray sought signals of transcendence in everyday life, as with his paradigmatic An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow. A man is crying in Sydney’s Martin Place, cocooned in a pentagram of sorrow, the dignity of his weeping holding the gathering crowd back:

Time to trade off on Murray with a quote:

Some will say, in the years to come, a halo
or force stood around him. There is no such thing.
Some will say they were shocked and would have stopped him
but they will not have been there. The fiercest manhood,
the toughest reserve, the slickest wit among us
trembles with silence, and burns with unexpected
judgements of peace. Some in the concourse scream
who thought themselves happy. Only the smallest children
and such as look out of Paradise come near him
and sit at his feet, with dogs and dusty pigeons.

That was followed by a snap of the poet, looking somewhat different from the notion of fiercest manhood, smirking in the bush, Poet Les Murray on his property near Taree on NSW mid-north coast.

Sorry, imagination is required, as every cliché under the dinkum sun came tumbling out into the glare ...

There were also the strange, whimsical cartoons of Michael Leunig, starting in the 1970s, projecting strikingly similar sacred intimations to those of White and Murray. The nation had unwittingly fostered a quite unique religious sensibility within its very secular domains.
Comedy became a strong suit. Barry Humphries was the one to explore Aussie cadences, wit and biting satire in his suburban housewife creation, Edna Everage, going on to make her an international superstar. His Sir Les Patterson, a repulsive drunken lecher, was in the mode of Shakespeare’s Falstaff, displaying such Dionysian vitality and linguistic flair as to humiliate the tepid left intellectuals, phony cultural sophisticates and snobbish English whom he mercilessly lampooned. The Comedy Company (1988-90) took the colloquial into television, with hilarious caricature personalities imprinting on the national imagination, led by Greek greengrocer Con the Fruiterer, unemployable Col’n Carpenter, and coarse, scowling gum-chewing schoolgirl Kylie Mole – with her signature line, “She goes, she goes, she just goes”.

All that did was remind the pond of how Leunig and Humphries went off in their dotage, and as for The Comedy Company being hilarious, the pond adopted a pursed lip pose.

The way cleared, more joined the verbal parade ...

In 1997, feature film The Castle projected the qualities of a very “everage” suburban family living on the edge of the Melbourne airport. Darryl Kerrigan, the father, is utterly devoted to his family, holding it together with lavish enthusiasm. He is portrayed with the same ambivalence of satirical mockery and affection that Barry Humphries had blended into his characters. The Castle would coin phrases that became part of the national vocabulary, such as Darryl’s response to his son about the price being asked for household bric-a-brac – “Tell ’em they’re dreaming!”, or the sole argument put in the Supreme Court by their bumbling suburban lawyer, Dennis Denuto: “It’s the vibe, Your Honour, the vibe!”
More recently, children’s television series Bluey, made in Brisbane, took a distinctive Australian ambience out to what became a vast global audience, despite its use of homegrown slang. Its sitcom tale of a family of Blue Heeler dogs spiced a very ordinary, everyday life with upbeat fun, its easygoing ways centred on sending up the father with affectionate playfulness. Bluey has an ear for the tone of the local culture at its best.
This parade of characters, the nation’s most original outpourings, exhibits a recurring temper. Bluey, Darryl Kerrigan, Kylie Mole, Les Patterson, Leunig’s Vasco Pyjama, Hibberd’s Monk O’Neill, Murray’s crying man, White’s riders, and even Mad Max, echo the Anzac pulse, and its unique character type. That type combines gravelly directness and laconic friendliness with impish self-mocking wit, free from insecurity; and with cheerful acceptance of life’s trials, weirdly vivified by sacred yearnings.

The reptiles compounded that listicle with a matching stereotypical snap, Michael Caton’s Darryl Kerrigan (left) with Tiriel Mora’s Dennis Denuto in The Castle.

Suddenly the pond felt the need for a film sending things up shitless, perhaps a Muriel's Wedding, but no time, no time ...a Dane suddenly becomes emblematic of Oz ...

Architecture is an important part of the identity story. The Sydney Opera House, while designed by a Dane, would quickly become a national symbol – of a bright and airy people vitally tied to the sea, its white sails gleaming in the sunlight, as if there to catch an ocean breeze and soar aloft. At the same time, a tradition of high-quality domestic architecture has developed a vernacular style – one that can be appreciated in architectural awards. Ideal homes connect large living rooms – lounge, dining and kitchen – with visually open access to a garden, with plate-glass doors opening on to ample verandas, including barbecue facilities. Garden and sky become integrated into domestic space, and living more intimately with the climate and plants encourages an outgoing, optimistic cast of mind.
In essence, what was going on in these key post-war decades was building a culture, filling it out, giving distinctiveness to the people, helping them feel at home in their new country. It was building on the nation’s mythology that had taken its first major step after World War I, with the Anzac legend, articulated by Charles Bean in his official history and enshrined in memorials erected in every suburb and town around the country. Those war memorials themselves became local sacred sites, places of remembrance especially for mothers, whose sons were buried in some unknown grave in faraway Europe. The shrines signal that the Anzac disposition itself blended earthy jocular humour with grave spiritual yearnings. The mythology was supplemented in the inter-war period by sporting heroes Phar Lap and Don Bradman. Bradman’s voice, by the way, was itself a marker, a touch nasal with Australian vowels, its undertone slow with reticence and modesty, yet resonating with cheerful playfulness, words carefully chosen, combining a touch of humour with serious intent.
Post-1945, national awareness was expanded and amplified, with the baby boomers growing in confidence and self-belief. The emerging consciousness of what it was to be Australian incorporated the Anzac belief in giving everybody a “fair go”, and a sceptical dislike of pretension, and of fanaticism and extremism in religion or politics. This extended into a new attitude to the millions of post-war immigrants from hundreds of national and ethnic backgrounds, in effect saying you are welcome and can live here however you like in private if, in the public sphere, you conform to Australian ways, which are pretty easygoing – that means fitting in.
Australians are innately democratic, having what historian John Hirst termed a democracy of ­manners – soldiers at Gallipoli were infamous for disobediently mocking stuck-up British officers. Australians are the paradigm democratic people.

Ah, that would explain the pond infamously and disobediently mocking the stuck-up prof, pompously declaiming in a pedantic way, made more clear by the absence of distractions ...Anzac Day in Hobart, 2024. Picture: Alan Barber

Somehow the absence of distracting pictures made this attempt to expound a national consciousness, a national identity, pass more quickly ...

The baby boomers switched focus from bush to city, in effect bringing about a cultural revolution. This transition in nation-forming mythology away from the bush was crucial, as modern Western culture is city-centric. The city is where most live, and their imaginations are shaped by urban living, whatever fantasies they may harbour about arcadian retreats to ­nature.
Mind, the Australian ideal is represented in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, living in a city fronting on to the ocean, with the beach its favoured sacred site. Likewise, the Sydney Opera House joined the kangaroo as the best-known national symbol, reflecting life in the centre of a city, on the edge of water, under the summer heavens.
By the 1990s, Australia had managed to develop arguably the most liveable cities in the world. It turned out to have a talent for them, developing a unique symbiosis of urban and suburban making for congenial living. This drew on the upbeat Anzac spirit of good-humoured earthy practicality, a source of DIY inventiveness, but incorporating a cafe and eating culture that travelling baby boomers had experienced in Europe and adapted back home. The climate helped. In the coming years, Melbourne was judged by The Economist the world’s most liveable city, seven times. The returning tourist’s insecure brag about living in the best country was gaining some plausibility, as echoed by Clive James in his final poems.
Spengler’s evocation of a national pulse is in the liberal conservative tradition of Edmund Burke, who wrote of the English still being able to cherish and cultivate those inbred sentiments that are the faithful guardians and active monitors of their duties. Love of country is natural, coming instinctively – its lack, a kind of cultural pathology.

Spengler again! To quote from his wiki ...

Spengler was an important influence on Nazi ideology. He "provided skeletal Nazi ideas" to the early Nazi movement "and gave them a respectable pedigree". Key parts of his writings were incorporated into Nazi Party ideology.
Spengler's criticism of the Nazi Party was taken seriously by Hitler, and Carl Deher credited him for inspiring Hitler to carry out the Night of the Long Knives in which Ernst Röhm and other leaders of the Sturmabteilung (SA) were executed. In 1934, Spengler pronounced the funeral oration for one of the victims of the Night of the Long Knives and retired in 1935 from the board of the highly influential Nietzsche Archive which was viewed as opposition to the regime.
Spengler considered Judaism to be a "disintegrating element" (zersetzendes Element) that acts destructively "wherever it intervenes" (wo es auch eingreift). In his view, Jews are characterized by a "cynical intelligence" (zynische Intelligenz) and their "money thinking" (Gelddenken). Therefore, they were incapable of adapting to Western culture and represented a foreign body in Europe. He also clarifies in The Decline of the West that this is a pattern shared in all civilizations: He mentions how the ancient Jew would have seen the cynical, atheistic Romans of the late Roman empire the same way Westerners today see Jews. Alexander Bein argues that with these characterizations Spengler contributed significantly to the enforcement of Jewish stereotypes in pre-WW2 German circles.
Spengler viewed Nazi anti-Semitism as self-defeating, and personally took an ethnological view of race and culture. In his private papers, he remarked upon "how much envy of the capability of other people in view of one's lack of it lies hidden in anti-Semitism!", and arguing that "when one would rather destroy business and scholarship than see Jews in them, one is an ideologue, i.e., a danger for the nation. Idiotic."
Spengler, however, regarded the transformation of ultra-capitalist mass democracies into dictatorial regimes as inevitable, and he had expressed acknowledgement for Benito Mussolini and the Italian Fascist movement as a first symptom of this development

If that's the vitality of national consciousness and identity, count the pond out.

And so to a final word, and credit where credit is due ...

The vitality of national consciousness lies in the subterranean ties and partialities that bind across generations, the wordless harmony of the country’s pulse. The power of incubated cultural instincts, sounded once a year by the mournful Anzac bugle, will endure long after the turbulence of the passing moment. Accordingly, raucous minorities today, chest-thumping in public, proclaiming their own identities in mantras for diversity, equality and inclusion, non-binary gender, and other divisive issues, are being quietly countered across the suburbs and towns of Australia with a rolling of the eyes and a dismissive: “Tell ’em they’re dreaming.”
John Carroll is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at La Trobe University.

Way past time for that Killer chaser to cleanse the palate ... No matter who wins the election, the banks will cash in on housing crisis,As someone who’s recently bought a place in Melbourne, it’s personally reassuring that no matter who wins the federal election house prices are likely to keep rising.

As usual, Killer was offered a distracting snap, and the pond saw no harm in featuring it, now that the caroling Carroll moment had passed, Pedestrians walk past the Commonwealth Bank of Australia branch at Martin Place.

Luckily the pond had an old infallible Pope to hand to help with the discussion ...

Now stand by for a revelation ...

As someone who’s recently bought a place in Melbourne, it’s personally reassuring that no matter who wins the federal election house prices are likely to keep rising. The grab bag of demand stimulants announced by the two major parties can only push prices one way – up.
Politicians say they want “housing affordability”, but that vague phrase conveniently allows for rapid increases in dwelling prices that – let’s be honest – most voters quietly desire, especially anyone who has just bought with a 5 per cent deposit under Labor’s imminent scheme!
If wages rise faster than house prices, or banks relax their lending standards, then homes could in theory become more affordable, even amid rising prices. To be sure, that rarely occurs, but it’s not mainly because of two-faced pulling strings to get higher prices, but rather because of the least understood aspect of our economy: how bank credit, which is in effect money, comes about.
I had a chance to dwell on the process again this week when my home loan was approved by one of the big banks. Some bank clerk in Sydney pressed a button and $700,000 in new money was created, conjured out of thin air.
The bank’s assets (home loans) suddenly increased by the same amount as its liabilities (customers’ deposits): $700,000. This had nothing to do with the Reserve Bank, Treasury or any regulatory agency, as most people believe.

Killer could borrow 700k? 

By golly, things must be sweet at the lizard Oz and more recently in Gina's IPA land ...

Cue a burst from petulant Peta, Sky News host Peta Credlin discusses Labor’s “tricky language” around their mess in debates on the negative gearing election issue. “He pretended … or claimed last night there had not been done any modelling via treasury at the government’s behest but that is something the treasurer has already admitted,” Ms Credlin said. “Tricky language here with Labor.”

The pond humbly suggests that tricky language doesn't just belong to Labor ...

Pezz to the rescue, that'll fix everything, and how, and now for a burst of Killernomics ...

The bank didn’t lend me someone else’s funds, it created them itself. Don’t believe me?
“Whenever a bank makes a loan, it simultaneously creates a matching deposit in the borrower’s bank account, thereby creating new money,” the world’s oldest central bank, the Bank of England, said in a rare public admission in 2014. “One common misconception is that banks act simply as intermediaries, lending out the deposits that savers place with them,” it continued.
When banks can create money on demand, almost without limit, to allow “borrowers” to buy assets that are practically in fixed supply, such as residentially zoned land in desirable locations, prices in dollar terms will, with the occasional cyclical deviation, relentlessly rise.
The total value of home loans and dwellings (to be more accurate, the land underneath the dwellings) are inextricably linked. Over the four years to December 2024, the total value of dwellings in Australia increased 40 per cent to just over $11 trillion, according to the ABS. Over the same period, the value of owner-occupier and investor loans outstanding increased almost 30 per cent to $2.4 trillion.
Way back in 1976 the total value of all loans in Australia was under $40bn. When banks can create money, practically without limit, by simple accounting, it’s no surprise over time there’s a lot of it sloshing around. For all the attention it receives, the impact “negative gearing” has on property prices over time would be laughably small by comparison. Indeed, among the range of widely panned policies put forward by the major parties to help first-home buyers, the Coalition’s plan to instruct the prudential regulator to make it easier for banks to extend more and bigger loans to lower-income households could have the biggest upward impact on prices.

So much for the Reserve Bank, print all the money you like, and now another distracting snap, Property development under construction in South Melbourne

The pond kept finding old handy cartoons to help with the visual distractions ...

On with the bank bashing, an Australian sport strangely overlooked by the caroling Caroll ...

No doubt it’s a popular policy among banks. Creating credit is a very profitable enterprise. A banking licence is quite literally a licence to create money. In the simplest terms, the bigger the loans the greater the profits, because the average interest rate on loans is significantly greater than the average interest rate paid on deposits. There’s another advantage of a larger balance sheet too: the bigger a bank becomes, the less chance any government would ever let it fail, which in turn slashes its borrowing costs. Coles or Qantas could go broke, for instance, without much disruption to the broader economy, but not banks, which together run the payments system, and whose collapse could trigger the collapse of other banks. A financial system dominated by a handful of huge institutions, despite appearances, is not genuine free enterprise.
No one seriously thinks any of the major banks, or even Macquarie or the smaller banks, would be allowed to collapse by the Australian government. All the prices and interest rates they charge are affected by this critical caveat.
All this is to explain why ANZ’s purchase of Suncorp in the middle of last year, the last of the country’s “smaller” banks, was one of the worst public policy decisions in recent history. In a free market, businesses should absolutely have the right to merge, but not when they are de facto arms of government, whose profitability is supercharged by complex regulations that favour bigger players.

Golly gee, that interest rate on Killer's loan must really be hurting him, as the reptiles flung in another distraction, RedBridge Group Director Simon Welsh discusses the growing sense of “uncertainty” and “risk” around Peter Dutton’s policies. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese have paused their election campaigning for today following the death of Pope Francis, who passed away at the age of 88. “It’s not that voters have suddenly become enthused and inspired by the Albanese government,” Mr Welsh told Sky News Australia. “What we are seeing on Peter Dutton … whether it be nuclear, whether it be super for housing, there is a whole bunch of these policies that voters have some real concerns about. “It’s not just that they don’t find them attractive as policies, but they actually fear them.”

Say what? Isn't fear enough?

And so to a final Killer burst ... and yes, you guessed it, as usually happens with Killer, the Kovid Katastrophe turns up right on time ...

Even without the government guarantee, modern banking has become a strange beast: the product is in effect numbers on a screen that represent the Australian dollar, itself a product entirely of federal legislation.
Certainly, the acquisition made sense for ANZ and Suncorp: they appealed to the ironically named Australian Competition Tribunal, which duly overturned the ACCC’s earlier decision to prevent it.
The banking system is now less competitive, and the implicit guarantee from taxpayers (which is worth billions of dollars a year) more certain and valuable.
The Covid pandemic snuffed out much debate about economic reform and productivity, a state of affairs that sadly appears to have continued into the current election campaign. The financial system is just one of many areas of the economy that avoids scrutiny, as if all the problems identified before the pandemic have vanished.
Questions about industry structure might equally be asked about airlines and supermarkets. Genuine competition is a critical part of a free society. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently called for a nationwide push to improve financial literacy. We could certainly do with some of that – and economic literacy – here too. It’s not only credit creation that few understand, but even what a mortgage is. Borrowers typically say “I have a mortgage”, but no, the bank has the mortgage, a legal right to the borrower’s property. We have a long way to go.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

We might have a long way to go, what with the borrower having a legal right to the bank's property if it pays off the bank in a zillion years or so, the only hope being that it's not in company with the IPA ...

You know, this IPA ...

A spectre haunts Australia. The horrible thought, that somewhere, somehow, somebody is using private initiative and taking on personal risk—not to mention responsibility—to get ahead in life. Once again, there seems to be a moral panic over so-called ‘negative gearing’. This time the panic is related to housing affordability.
The housing market in Australia is in disequilibrium. Demand for housing strongly outpaces the supply of housing. As any high school economics student could tell you, that means the price of housing should increase. This in turn means people should economise on housing (kids move back home, for example) and that the supply of housing should expand. It is really not that hard. The economy has been so badly mismanaged that at a time when there is a massive housing shortage, housing construction companies are going out of business.
Australian political elites, however, seem to have formed the view that increasing taxes on landlords will solve the problem. Add to that the always popular view that negative gearing is somehow a rort and, once again, we see the political drums beating for ‘someone to do something’ about negative gearing.

Stand proud with landlords and rentier capitalism and rent seekers.

And so to a final infallible Pope, helping out both Killer and the caroling Carroll ...

And now in keeping with the pond's slide night celebration of its recent travels, and in the spirit of the day, the pond was curiously moved by a simple store window display in the hamlet of Barraba. (Please don't say Bar ... aaaarh...baah, as a Victorian would).

It featured a number of tributes to the local citizenry via their war uniforms - worth more than all the Carrolling tea in China - including this one ...

Meanwhile, in Tamworth, the citizenry reserved a place for an imperial adventure, worthy of the drunken stumble bum who currently represents them, outside the railway station of all places ...