A late arvo prank with Mein Gott ...

 

The pond understands the old tradition that pranking on April Fool's day should stop by noon ... the day's wiki, without citation, blames the Poles ... for some in Poland prima April ends at noon of 1 April and prima April jokes after that hour are considered inappropriate and not classy.

Dammit, when has the pond been appropriate, when has the pond had class?

The pond was determined to reheat day old Mein Gott and regurgitate it as a late arvo treat, a final celebration of the day, and to hell with blather about being classy.

There was a CRISIS afoot.

No, not the CRISIS affecting the Murdochians, written up by Christoper Warren for Crikey and quoted earlier in the day, Finally, an election where Murdoch doesn’t matter — and it’s News Corp’s own fault, After decades of media moguls acting as political kingmakers, we finally have an election where the Murdoch family just won’t have much of a say. (archive link).

The pond isn't entirely convinced, but loves quoting from the piece ...

This election is going to be different. For the first time in almost a century, it looks like the Murdochs just don’t matter — in shaping how people vote, at least.
The power they once wielded to shape public opinion, and to inspire fear in political leaders, through the combined bludgeon of their tabloids and the sharp sabre thrusts of their upmarket broadsheets, has evaporated in the age of fragmented media. 
Instead, the Murdoch media has been captured by its audience. It’s been dumbed down by the basest components of its own comments sections, where users insist the News Corp piper give them the tune they’re paying for. The business imperative of paywalls and subscriptions (and the limited range of Sky News) means the company is talking to a cloistered audience that is unlikely to shift its votes from its current right-wing party of choice.
To the extent its power endures, it’s to keep the conservative parties aligned with the prejudices of the company’s dyspeptic commenters with the carrot of access and the stick of criticism.
In a recent rare interview with Vanity Fair, Gawker founder Nick Denton (who more or less created the insider-outsider gossipy approach that shapes the digital news reporting on the new oligarchy) said: “Once you’ve been captured by your audience, it’s very hard to pull back. What are you going to do? You’re going to fire your audience?”
Denton was talking about Musk (“Musk did not take over Twitter, Twitter took over Musk … he’s being brought down to the level of the nut gallery that he’s playing to on Twitter.”). But it’s true, too, of the Murdochs.
Most infamously, Fox’s pandering to the Trumpian stolen election narrative has already cost the company more than US$787 million in settling a defamation writ with Dominion Voting Systems. The company faces a further claim for US$2.7 billion from Smartmatic, with the voting technology company alleging that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch directed Fox to embrace a “disinformation campaign to win back its audience” after Joe Biden won the 2020 election.
And that’s before you count the legal cases that involve the Murdochs personally, including the Fox shareholders who are suing the directors in Delaware over the Dominion settlement, and the intra-family dust-up in Reno, Nevada, over post-Rupert control of the trust that owns the voting shares in Fox and News Corp. 
The second Trump administration demonstrates the power shift in billionaire rankings from media moguls like the Murdochs to the big tech broligarchy, with Trump passing over Rupert Murdoch’s recommendation for vice president (fellow billionaire Doug Burgum) for the Silicon Valley choice of JD Vance (as discussed in the recent valuable conversation between CNN’s Kaitlan Collins and The New Yorker’s Clare Malone about access-reporting challenges under Trump 2.0.)
Even within their narrow audience, the News Corp mastheads are struggling. In the UK, the once dominant The Sun has been out-outraged by the Daily Mail and out-politicked by GB News. According to the company’s report to its US regulator, take-up of The Sun’s digital “offering” in December was half what it had been the year before. In the US, the New York Post reported a 27% slump in its year-on-year numbers.
That’s a lot of people no longer getting their news refracted through the Murdoch lens.

Would that it were all true, but the pond gets its news and opinion refracted through Murdochian lenses, which is to say Mein Gott's patented lens, and there's a CRISIS afoot, abroad on the moors, a veritable hound from hell, and only Mein Gott can save the Baskerville, sorry, strike that, the Murdochian legacy  ...

Huge deficit is one of six crisis points to know before you vote in 2025 election, Albanese and Dutton are failing to inform disillusioned voters of the very grim outlook ahead. Here are six crisis points.

Say what? It's not just one CRISIS, there are six of the buggers, SIX CRISIS POINTS, and Mein Gott will set them all out in a succinct three minute read? 

And then for some obscure reason, the reptiles immediately got in the way with an interview? How weird, how perverse is that?

For those unwilling to click to enlarge, the text reads, Journal Editorial Report: Paul Gigot interviews former U.S. Senator Pat Toomey, with the urgent invitation, This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

Beware. Grave Dangers. Looming Crisis.

Voters in the 2025 election are not being warned by either major party of the grave dangers facing the nation of Australia.

Aw, and then Mein Gott tried to undercut it all by talking about the potential crisis Australia is facing.

Potential? The pond wanted a full blown crisis, happening right here right now ...

I don’t believe Anthony Albanese understands the potential crisis Australia is facing, and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton believes he would be mutilated in the polls if he based a campaign on a looming crisis. Accordingly, the campaign is already disintegrating into a “spendathon” battle. What is best – the Albanese “cup of coffee” tax cut or Dutton’s lower petrol prices for a year?

Still, the pond was in a state of high anxiety, and not just because it was reminded of a Mel Brooks movie, there were people hiding the truth, a truth only Mein Gott could reveal ... Peter Dutton and Anthony Albanese during Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman/NewsWire

Carrying on like there wasn't a crisis.

All that was left was a faint, rapidly fading hope ...

As Australians, we have to hope the potential scenarios I will describe below do not happen.

Oh enough of hope, glet'set on with the fear and the grum predictions of doom ...

But I fear the campaign is a mirror image of the 2022 Victorian election, where the consequences of the previous bad decisions by the Daniel Andrews government were set to explode in the state in the next 24 months. But voters were not warned in strong terms by the Opposition, so they gave Andrews a disastrous third term. He bailed out, but his replacement was unable to manage the crisis she inherited. She made it worse.
When I saw the budget I warned readers that there were dangers of grim times ahead because it projected a cash deficit of some $80bn in 2025-26, then $70bn in each of the next four years. This was unsustainable. In addition, we will need to spend another $25bn annually on defence to maintain ANZUS.
I now realise the situation is much worse than it seemed on budget night. And the vast majority of voters have no inkling of what looks to be ahead.

How to cope, what to do?

A listicle, that'd fix everything ...

We must do a listicle of CRISIS POINTS ...down there with tulip mania and the Y2K bug ...

Here are six crisis points:
1. In the vicinity of a third of Australia’s GDP comprises exports, and those exports are dominated by iron ore, gas and coal.
In the past decade we have enjoyed strong demand and an international reputation for reliability of supply. Tax and royalties from those exports enabled Australians to fund a vast social security system which underpins our standard of living. It’s in danger of crumbling just as both parties go on a disastrous spending spree to get votes.
2. We are deliberately trashing our reliability of supply reputation. In iron ore, BHP and Rio Tinto are now facing almost endless industrial action as the unions seek to regain much greater control of the operations.
Current BHP executives have come up via the mining industry and believe that they must fight to maintain management control. Rio Tinto, which had been a pioneer in gaining management control of iron ore mining from the unions, is now managed by executives who have not experienced what happens when unions control mines. Both are likely to accept the short-term pain to maintain long-term supply reliability.
In gas there have also been industrial disputes, and they have been combined with environmental issues. Australia is rapidly trashing its reputation of being a reliable supplier.

It's the bloody useless unions! 

Or is it EVs? BHP and Rio Tinto are moving to transform their haul truck fleets into battery-electric powered machines. Picture: Supplied

By now the pond was truly ruly rattled and terrified, and yet the pond had only reached the third point ...

3. In the past that would not have mattered because the world was desperate for product. But now demand is softening on the back of the repercussions of reduced consumption in China and the Trump tariffs.
At the same time, regions including Africa and South America are replacing Australia as the top country for supply reliability. Australia faces lower iron ore prices and lower market share.
4. Many countries have tried the Australian renewables power generation experiment and discovered it boosts prices and lowers reliability.
Here, Dutton has got it basically right, but the argument is confused by nuclear issues and swamped by the “spendathon”.
If Albanese wins, Australia will be a high-cost, low-reliability energy supplier without the option of nuclear power. We currently overcome the high renewables cost problem with subsidies, but the above revenue reduction forces and our high borrowings mean the subsidies are not sustainable.

Dear sweet long absent lord, we must do a bromancer, we must do a Danby, we must become gigantic sucks ... it's the only way forward.

Former Labor MP Michael Danby urges Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to “drop his pride” when dealing with US President Donald Trump. A second round of tariffs from the US President is expected to be announced within days.

Drop your pride, especially if it's gay pride, fawn, bend the knee, kiss the ring, we must fall in line, and then an executive order will take care of everything ...

Sorry, the pond didn't mean to get in the way of the unfolding, terrifying Listicle of Crises ...

5. Whether it be in the US, some countries in Europe, Chile or Argentina, administrations are waking up that to attract investments the rules must be more attractive than in the past.
With our high-cost, low-reliable power, the industrial relations quagmire, environmental issues and our endless bureaucracies, we will fall dramatically behind the rest of the world in attracting capital. And voters have no idea it is happening.
6. Unless there is dramatic change, Australians’ largest looming mining project – the South Australian copper belt – will be replaced by expansion in countries that want investment more than Australia.
How does the message get to Australia? Once the currency traders see the mess we are in, they will dump the Australian dollar. At around US50c to US55c, we will be forced to defend the currency because the cost of imports will skyrocket. That means lifting interest rates sharply.
We will also be forced to reduce the deficit at a time when it will be very painful. That’s when we will realise that the 2025 elections did not address the issues. That’s what Victorians now realise happened to them in 2022.

Relax, remember it was just a pond prank done after hours, way after noon ...

Remember that terror and fear are the most fragrant weapons in the reptile armoury.

And while remembering, remember that Mein Gott question...

What is best – the Albanese “cup of coffee” tax cut or Dutton’s lower petrol prices for a year?

Relax, Wilcox has the answer, and with it, the pond's late arvo prank is done ...