A late afternoon treat with dead as a dodo dog botherer thinking ...

 

Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lizard Oz column lives ...(apologies to that famous soap).

The pond isn't going to indulge in retrospection, or introspection, or analysis for a late arvo weekend treat.

Nor is the pond going to savour reptile tears - there will be plenty in the coming months, but too much imbibing of heady chemical brews can weaken the mind.

The pond didn't even pay that much attention to the coverage last night, and spend most of the evening watching bad movies. 

As the news broke, the pond scrambled to catch up. For the first time in years, the pond visited 10, and it was pathetic, as expected. 

The only reason to visit Seven was to see Clive watch his campaign sink like his Titanic. The pond has no idea why Seven wanted to enable him, but as they have time for war criminals, it's possibly not surprising. 

Nine held no charms, while the ABC was in full cardigan-wearing mode, anxiously trying out new strategies to replace the departing Antony (his jigging dance will be missed).

Not living in the bush, or wanting to pay for Sky Noise down under, the pond was clueless as to what went down there, but needn't have worried, because as a pond correspondent has noted, that expert herpetologist, the venerable Meade, was on hand to tell tales from the void... Andrew Bolt says it was the voters who were wrong as Sky News commentators grieve Dutton election loss.

Delicious. Calling the punters deplorable, ignorant, foolish knaves is a sure fire way to recover lost ground.

Of course the pond could have ignored the rest, could have served up Jia Tolentino in full AI intertubes Trumpian meltdown mode in The New Yorker, My Brain Finally Broke,  Much of what we see now is fake, and the reality we face is full of horrors. More and more of the world is slipping beyond my comprehension (archive link).

Could have noted how Faux Noise contributed to the Duttonator's demise on a number of fronts, what with Key Trump officials appeared more than 500 times on Fox networks in the first 100 days of his presidency.

Instead the pond thought it might indulge in a dog botherer autopsy, guaranteed to satisfy true crime proceduralists, though correspondents should be warned that after only a day the corpse was decidedly smelly, emanating a real stinkeroo.

You see, the dog botherer scribbled his usual crap about climate science and zealots and nuking the country, and yet overnight everything he scribbled became deeply irrelevant and dead to the world.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief nuke powered candle!
A lizard Oz column is but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets its hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by a dog bothering idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

It was a manifestation of all the nonsense and misguided populism that led the coalition and the lizard Oz to a dead end ...

The risible header: This election is a historic chance to end our energy self-harm, No other country is even attempting our stated aim of running a modern economy on 82 per cent renewables because they know it cannot be done. Yet our pretence goes on.

The caption, featuring a serve of a bog standard reptile villain: Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Martin Ollman

The click heels three times to land in Surry Hills command: This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

The pond knew that the Spanish affair would be irresistible to the dog botherer, and so it came to pass ...

The Iberian Peninsula went to net zero for more than 24 hours this week. When you black out Spain and Portugal, plunging 60 million people into chaos and darkness, you get a taste of an electricity and emissions-free world.
We had our own experience almost nine years ago when South Australia, the leading state for renewables penetration and baseload retirement, was plunged into an unprecedented and costly statewide blackout on September 28, 2016. This is the same state that has the nation’s most expensive power – go figure.

The reptiles slipped in a snap designed to add to the dog botherer's hysteria, A woman uses her phone’s torch while she walks her dog as the street lies in complete darkness during a massive power cut affecting the entire Iberian Peninsula. Picture: AFP

The pond isn't going down that rabbit hole again, but for those who want to, there's a piece on the possible causes at The Conversation.

Instead the pond  got stuck on the DB's "go figure" and figured it could go figure more of that venerable Meade coverage.

Come on down assorted Sky Noise heavies, including the Ughmann, and full disrespect Sharri:

...But that’s where Bolt’s praise for the Labor leader ended. It was incomprehensible, he said, that a government that “left Australians poorer, more divided, more uncertain”, could have been re-elected.
“Well, it did because Anthony Albanese didn’t look threatening,” he said.
“If Peter Dutton does lose in Dickson, they’ve got a leadership crisis. Because there is no person one can say ‘that man is a leader, or that woman is a leader’.”
By the time Dutton’s gracious concession speech was over at 9.39pm, Sky News was calling the election result a “blood bath” and recriminations were flying between Sky’s commentators and their political guests.
Like Bolt, the Sky political editor, Andrew Clennell, pinned the loss on the leader. “People don’t like Peter Dutton,” Clennell said matter of factly as he recounted what happened when he went door knocking. “You know, it’s just one of those unfortunate things.”
For Chris Uhlmann, a former ABC and Nine political editor who has embraced his conservative side over on Sky News, the Coalition’s primary vote is down to a “horrific” 30% and the party is facing “an existential crisis”.
Labor supporters celebrate at a reception for Anthony Albanese in Hurlstone Park, New South Wales
Australia re-elects Anthony Albanese as Labor rides anti-Trump wave to seal crushing win
Read more
“Where does this party go?” he asked. “This is a party that will tear itself apart while it tries to work out how it articulates itself to appeal to enough people in Australia to be able to form a government in future.”
But shadow minister Sarah Henderson was not conceding defeat. “It’s looking pretty challenging,” she said. “There’s no doubt about that … but there is some green shoots. I like to stay positive. And I want to say that in Solomon, in the Northern Territory, there looks like a very strong swing to the Country Liberal Lisa Bayliss.”
While everyone expressed their surprise at the magnitude of the loss, Clennell suggested the election drubbing was far from a shock to many senior Liberals as Sky producers had struggled to get them on air tonight.
“I just want to take you through how big this is,” Clennell said. The pre-polls can come back, but is Albo about to win a landslide?
“I don’t think there’s any doubt that Albanese has got an increased majority, not just a majority.”
Sky’s election analyst Tom Connell called it not long after 8pm: “This contest is effectively over. Albanese will be prime minister of Australia.”
For much of the night Sky After Dark host Sharri Markson, stationed at Coalition headquarters, was hanging on to the pre-poll results as a path to redemption, predicting that when those results came in the gap between the parties in some seats would narrow.
But it was also Markson who recently predicted the national opinion polls were inaccurate and the Coalition’s private polling was positive: “the polls you’re reading in the news are wrong when it comes to this federal election”.

Go figure indeed, while the dog botherer was trotting out yesterday's statistics, unaware that in wanting to nuke the country, and nuke the libs, he was actually nuking the coalition.

Plunge into the runes, sort through the entrails:

In Spain and SA the over-reliance on renewables led to the system failure and inhibited efforts to re-power the grid. (In both cases the restart was assisted by having an interconnector feeding electricity from elsewhere, in SA from Victoria, in Spain from France.) Yet under Anthony Albanese and Labor our nation will continue to rush headlong down this renewables path – and our national grid has no external lifeline.
The Prime Minister used modelling of his renewables-plus-storage plans at the 2022 election to promise that household electricity bills would be cut by $275 a year. Yet now that modelling is completely discredited – household bills, in fact, have increased by up to $1000 – Albanese and Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen are sticking to the same plans and expecting the opposite result.

The reptiles decided at this point to introduce an AV distraction, Energy Minister Chris Bowen discusses Australia's transition to renewable energy following the power outages in Spain and Portugal. Massive power outages hit the countries, which some energy experts believe was the result of an over reliance on renewables. "Every system when it's undergoing changes has to very carefully calibrate changes, that's what we're doing in Australia," Mr Bowen told Sky News Australia, "[There] hasn't been a blackout caused in Australia by lack of energy in our time in office. "The last blackouts were when Angus Taylor was the minister."

Well yes, that dunderhead from down Goulburn way is a gigantic black hole ... as the dog botherer blathered on, unaware of the gloom that was about to descend and encompass the reptiles in their bunker ...

At some stage the engineering reality, costs and practicalities of this world-first, mainly renewables experiment will hit home to Albanese and Bowen – perhaps when they are stuck in a lift or stranded at an airport during a statewide system failure – but the damage they are doing to households, small businesses and whole industries in the meantime is unforgivable. Not to mention the environmental damage to bushland, coastlines and farming communities as wind farms, solar factories and thousands of kilometres of transmission lines are built out.
Eventually the ideological dreams of Labor, the Greens and the teals will be dashed against reality, nothing is surer. But we are left to wonder how long this will take because I fear the election campaign has failed to shift the debate.
Part of the problem is the sheer fiscal irresponsibility and audacity of Labor. Having seen electricity prices spiral, instead of fixing its policy Labor has plunged the budget further into debt to provide rebates that artificially lower prices before they get to consumers.
So instead of hurting taxpayers with high electricity prices, Labor also borrows more money on behalf of taxpayers to hide its mistakes, adding to the future tax burdens of those same taxpayers. And voters are supposed to be grateful for this chicanery.

Oh it's too rich, that bit about dashing against reality, as the reptiles flung in another meaningless snap of powerlines and a caption that hadn't aged well over night, Electricity rebates show Labor’s ‘sheer fiscal irresponsibility and audacity’ Picture: NCA NewsWire / Aaron Francis

If irresponsibility and audacity gets you that result, then boldness be your friend.

Not that the government is immune from criticism. See Adam Morton in the Graudian, and his A climate election? The Coalition wants to take Australia backwards, while Labor is standing still.

It goes without saying that the dog botherer wants to take the country backward. 

Cue a zealot abusing other alleged zealots with a tremendously boring recycling of "zealots", the most over-used word in the reptiles' extremely limited vocabulary:

Endlessly we hear Albanese, Bowen, the Greens, teals and other zealots telling us that renewable energy is the cheapest form. This is a bit like saying the cheapest boat is the one where you buy a one-third share – sure, but we need electricity more than every third weekend.
To the extent it occurred, the campaign energy debate focused on the cost of the Coalition’s nuclear plan. Labor used a deliberately fanciful figure of $600bn which, according to the CSIRO, independent economists and a collection of 50 scientists, businesspeople, nuclear experts and environmentalists, is five times higher than the likely cost.
This wildly wrong and discredited number has served two dishonest purposes for Labor. It has been used to question the affordability of nuclear and has been co-opted to claim the Coalition needs to find spending cuts elsewhere, thereby underpinning Labor’s elaborate scare campaign.
It is nasty and dishonest politicking – it has been astonishing to see a Prime Minister demean himself by promulgating a figure he knows is false. Yet, according to the opinion polls, it has succeeded.

The question arises as to what cost the Duttonator his seat. 

Was it the MAGA Mussolini's influence? Or was it gobsmacking stupid Ted, wanting to nuke the country, allegedly to save the planet? Credit to both, as the reptiles ran a snap of Ted looking remarkably furtive, Opposition climate change and energy spokesman Ted O'Brien faced off with Chris Bowen at the National Press Club debate in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Back to the venerable Meade, for the closer and for the news that the Swiss bank account man was still hanging about on Sky Noise:

...Peta Credlin, a former chief of staff to Tony Abbott, said it was disgraceful that Dutton had been “demonised” as he was a decent guy. But she came alive when suggesting her side of politics should fight more culture wars. “I’d argue we didn’t do enough of a culture war,” Credlin said.
She went on to suggest the Liberals make a “simple statement” about the rights of biological women, and when she was shouted down by the panel she fired up.
“Again, gentlemen, if you would forgive me, but I’m sick of being mansplained about what biological women feel about biological female rights. We do care about it.”
Former Labor minister Graham Richardson, who hasn’t lost his talent for the one-liner, said the Liberals have got to ask themselves where do we go now?
“We’ve tried Dutton - what else have we got? Well not much because if Angus Taylor is the answer, it’s a stupid question.”

Ted's neither a stupid answer or a stupid question, he's in the grip of a classic case of Black Knight syndrome, down there with the relentless stupidity of petulant culture war warrior Peta...

Not knowing what was coming, the dog botherer ploughed on ...

The Coalition should have been doing more earlier to call this out; its tardiness is reminiscent of how slow it was to call out Labor’s Mediscare lies in 2016. And sure, journalists should have challenged the figure every time it was used, but it is a sad fact of life that most in the media are reluctant to hound left-of-centre politicians.
Instead of exposing the lie and taking on the argument, it seems the Coalition largely abandoned the topic. Opposition climate change and energy spokesman Ted O’Brien was hardly seen during the campaign and Peter Dutton’s daily events did not highlight the energy argument.
It reeks of a campaign deferring to focus groups rather than conviction.
The real advocacy task needed was to make clear that this is not some vanity choice between a grid of your preference, renewables or nuclear. The real options are a renewables-plus-storage model that is already failing and cannot succeed, or a proven nuclear energy model that works around the world.

What a stupid Utegate enabling man he is, and the reptiles decided he needed some competition, because they trotted out the Ughmann, in enhanced stupidity mode with petulant Peta, featuring yet another of those meaningless snaps of a stack that the reptiles love, Sky News contributor Chris Uhlmann discusses how Labor’s $600 billion nuclear energy claim has given them a lot of “traction” in the election campaign. “The $600 billion claim which clearly had a lot of traction for the Labor Party,” Mr Uhlmann said. Mr Uhlmann sat down with Sky News host Peta Credlin to go over the final stretch of the election campaign battle between Labor and the Coalition.

Ah, the Ughmann ...

For Chris Uhlmann, a former ABC and Nine political editor who has embraced his conservative side over on Sky News, the Coalition’s primary vote is down to a “horrific” 30% and the party is facing “an existential crisis”.

What felicitous wording, "embraced his conservative side", much more nuanced than the pond's standard "gone climate science denialist barking mad."

Embrace the madness.

Unaware of the Saturday night massacre that was to come, the dog botherer blathered on, clinging to his field of dreams...

Nuclear is so practical, proven and necessary in a net-zero world that it is inevitable if we maintain our emissions reduction goals. Every year of delay only adds to the costs in financial and opportunity terms.
No other country is even attempting our stated aim of running a modern economy on 82 per cent renewables because they know it cannot be done. Yet our pretence goes on while most modern economies expand or turn to nuclear energy as the only form of clean baseload generation.
When Spain’s electricity grid crashed it was running on about 60 per cent solar and 10 per cent wind, and when SA went dark it was running on 70 per cent renewable power. In Spain the initial trigger for the event is believed to have been a surge of solar power; in SA it was a storm knocking out a transmission line. But in each case the instantaneous surges or falls in the system cascaded, tripping out other power sources and connections until the whole grid shut down.
Baseload power provided by the high-speed, usually steam-driven turbines of coal, gas or nuclear generators provides not only a steady volume of alternating current power but also the pulse of the system frequency. Renewable generators produce direct current that is converted to AC and then matches the existing pulse in the grid – it does not provide that pulse or inertia, steam turbine generators with AC power, or costly machines that imitate them, are needed to do that.

The reptiles flung in another distracting snap, this time of windmills busy killing whales, as they do all over the place, Wind turbines in Burgos, northern Spain, on Tuesday. Picture: AFP

Here's the thing. By pursing this mindlessly moronic strategy, the reptiles and the opposition didn't nuke the government, nor, it turned out, did they have a snowball's chance in hell of getting an opportunity to nuke the country to save the planet, aka piss money against the wall on unicorn SMRs.

Instead they nuked themselves, they nuked their parliamentary representation, they nuked some of their best and brightest, who might have taken over from the Duttonator.

After all the nuking, brave souls who went out into the wasteland to see what was left after he explosion saw only the most noxious, toughest and dullest of weeds, the Angus boofhead burr, and the Sussan bindi, were left standing. (You might also have found a dull brown cocky in the shape of Little to be Proud of).

Still the dog botherer didn't get it, as he kept on and on with the nuking:

The Australian Market Energy Operator and other organisations are experimenting with other options such as large batteries to make a rapidly expanding renewable grid sturdier. But the required system inertia can be supplied reliably only by AC generators.
In response to the 2016 blackout when it took a week to restore power to some parts of the state, the SA Labor government imported nine diesel generators, installing them as a $600m emergency power plant. Does anybody count that as a cost of renewable energy?
A group of highly credentialed electrical and nuclear engineers banded together this week to call out Australia’s madness in the wake of the Spanish experience. They were incredulous that the government’s target of 82 per cent renewables by 2030 would nearly double the size of the national electricity grid – “the largest and most complex single machine in the southern hemisphere” – while claiming prices to consumers would drop.
“Engineers know that the laws of physics, the principles of engineering and the realities of economics make this a reckless, political folly,” said the group, headed by former Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation chief Adi Paterson and electrical engineer James Taylor.
These nonpartisan experts say Spain and Portugal provided the warning: “Australia has time to avoid the same fate – but not much. If we don’t slow down and back renewables with proper firm generation, millions of Australians will pay the price in darkness, danger, and economic disruption.”

How mad was this? 

To show it could get even madder, yet again the reptiles featured that dullard drunk from New England - oh Tamworth, oh Armidale what have you done? - who managed to stand upright while having a conversation with the Bolter about nuking the country, Former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce discusses the Coalition’s nuclear energy plan and how it will be important for Australia. Mr Joyce told Sky News host Andrew Bolt that Anthony Albanese is telling a “lie” on the price of nuclear energy. “Don’t listen to their lies … don’t be that naive.”

So quaint, so aged, so hung out to dry ... but will the reptiles learn from their mistakes?

Not likely. When you're a zealot, everything looks like zealotry, as you go about your cause with a relentless zealotry ... whether black bashing, or bashing Jesus for being woke, or nuking the country to save the planet ...

The firm generation could be provided by coal or gas, or in a mountainous nation with plentiful water hydro might do the job. But for all intents and purposes, given our net-zero commitments, the only answer in Australia is a sufficiently large amount of nuclear generation. (Spain has some nuclear generation but has been winding it down and there have been warnings that doing so while increasing renewables was unwise.)
“The Spanish experience shows us that it’s easy to take grid stability for granted,” Centre for Independent Studies energy program director Aidan Morrison warns. “Rushing to replace synchronous generators with wind and solar is playing a giant game of Jenga with the grid. Great care is needed to prevent a total collapse.”
Morrison says the SA and Spanish episodes share a similar pattern of cascading failure in a relatively unstable grid and warns the “breakneck” speed of the solar and wind rollout increases the risks.
“Even AEMO’s own plan identifies some challenging ‘transition points’ as soon as spring this year,” he says. “Replacing coal with nuclear is a sure way to avoid encountering the risks that the Spanish experience has exposed.”
Much of the election debate has focused on Medicare, economic management and enticing giveaways, all important but familiar. But even if they have failed to put it front and centre, the Coalition is offering a historic chance to end our energy self-harm, reclaim our cheap and reliable energy advantage, and embark on a modern nuclear future.
We will reject it at our peril.

And there you have it. The autopsy is complete, the forensic examination of the entrails finished. 

A historic chance, a modern nuclear future, reject it at our peril ... and no one to to hand to tell them they were dreaming ... and so this dead as a dodo dog botherer emission passed on into the digital fish and chip wrapping bin.

And so to celebrate with an oldie, but an infallible Pope goodie ... showing several of the reasons the Duttonator imploded (how the cartoonists must be mourning their loss) ...

As for the pond's ongoing travelogue, there's not much to say about Armidale, a mention of which always brings back the pond's severe PTSD (or acid flashbacks, whatever)...

It was however pleasing to see that the shell of Richardsons still survived ... in Tamworth the best you could see was the name P. G. Smith above an awning, while Treloars was but a dream ...

The main drag is now dead, with the Beardy street mall strategy a clear and present failure - judging by the low rent shops that lined it - with all the mall action having shifted down a block towards the creek and dominated by the usual chains.