In which the Major remains MIA, the Caterist eventually surfaces like a bad penny, and the bouffant one and Lord Downer fill out this bloody Monday ...

 

Another bloody Monday, wooh, wooh, and the reptiles continued in disarray ...

The pond had expected the Major to remain MIA, stuck on some golf links somewhere, but where was the Caterist?

The pond turned to the extreme far right and there wasn't a sign of him early in the morning ...

Instead they'd put poor Sussssan (numerology suggests the power and strength of the "s") at the top of the world ma ...

Sussan Ley: ‘We lost the flag, but we’re ready for a new season’

The Opposition Leader has laid down some markers as the Coalition looks to recover government after a disastrous display.
By Sussan Ley

A football metaphor. Oh dear ...

But the pond doesn't get distracted by a game of metaphorical footy and kept on the Caterist search ...

Still no sign!

Instead the reptiles had elevated the bouffant one, staring into his navel, or perhaps what passes for the collective hive mind ...

The pond rarely pays attention to the bouffant one, but thought that, perhaps stripped of all visual ornamentation, could make it through the dismal offering ...

The header: Lazy election analysis fails history test, A popular narrative has taken hold: as the influence of social media grows, major media companies have been left to bellow from the sidelines. But that argument lacks nuance.

The caption for the ancient history snap few would care about, but included for comic effect: Former Liberal leader John Hewson at an election rally during his failed campaign in 1993.

The relentlessly tedious and meaningless reminder: This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

It took five minutes, so the reptiles said, but the bouffant one managed to explain just why the lizard Oz and the hive mind were deeply irrelevant and why vulgar youff had shifted to social media:

One of the toughest, if not the toughest, political piece to write during an election campaign is the newspaper’s editorial, which declares which party has the support of the masthead and is thus “endorsed” on polling eve.
Sometimes, the choice is so difficult that newspapers don’t make an endorsement of either side.
When The Washington Post decided not to publish a presidential endorsement editorial in 2024 in the lead-up to the contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris – perhaps understandably, given the choice – it created a public furore, prompted accusations of weakness and divided editorial staff.
The Post had previously endorsed both Republican and Democratic candidates so its decision to sit on the fence was seen as a way to avoid offending Trump if it didn’t endorse him, or causing a staff revolt if it did.
But would an editorial endorsement from The Post have changed a single vote?

Then came a snap, and what a relief not to show it: The presidential candidates at the 2024 US election, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Picture: AFP

On and on the bouffant one meandered and whimpered, able to be read only by the hive mind's aged demographic:

It may have changed people’s attitudes to the newspaper but, in my view, the controversy embodied the internal angst, the management power struggles, the academic discussions and political leaders’ expectations that are entirely out of tune with what an election editorial is and what impact it has on voters.
When newspapers were the main source of news, information and opinion, there was no doubt readers more closely followed the editorial line; indeed people tended to stay loyal to a particular masthead because of its editorial line. (My grandfather only ever bought The Sun.)
Now the editorial endorsement of a leader is more closely followed by political leaders than anyone else.
The editorial tends to be a statement of principles, reflect the philosophy and policy of the newspaper, and is in line with the proprietor’s general views. It shows a consistency with the editorial assessment and treatment of the government and opposition over the previous three years.
Editorials, now, do not dictate how people should vote.

The pond decided to allow one snap because it said something: Robert Menzies had to deal with changes in editorial support at the Fairfax-owned The Sydney Morning Herald in the 1960s.

What is it about Ming the Merciless? 

Why do the reptiles keep harking back to the 1950s? 

Why does every second yarn in the lizard Oz return to his ancient ghost, a relic entirely meaningless and lost to vulgar youff, especially those who find talk of Gough, Hewson, Keating et al irretrievably ancient.

This is a hive mind tribe that has lost its way and is now wandering around through the bog swamp fog of ancient history, yearning for ancient times, repeating aged mindless mantras ...

In the 1960s, changes in editorial support at the Fairfax-owned The Sydney Morning Herald, first away from Robert Menzies and the Coalition in 1961 to Arthur Calwell and Labor, and then back to Menzies in 1963, caused huge ructions within the Fairfax family, management and senior editorial staff.
The editorials, written by Warwick Fairfax, turned against Menzies because of the credit squeeze and failures on defence policy in relation to Indonesia after Fairfax developed a personal relationship with Calwell, and then shifted back to the sitting PM because of subsequent dissatisfaction with the ALP on defence and foreign policy.
After the 2025 federal election there is a new narrative that, as the readership and influence of legacy media are challenged by social media, the decline of the influence of editorial endorsement is evidence “major media companies have been left to bellow from the sidelines”.
A research paper released by The Australia Institute last week, titled “Yesterday’s kingmakers, today’s spectators”, argues that “securing newspaper endorsements was once a key part of running a successful Australian election campaign, through which Australian media shaped Australian politics”.
“The result of the 2025 federal election was proof that the influence of major media companies over voter opinion has declined,” the paper said after analysing editorial endorsements from major newspapers and election results.
The institute found: “In the two most recent federal elections, the winning party was endorsed by fewer than half of all major newspapers, and from 1996 to 2019, the winner of every federal election was endorsed by the majority of newspapers. In 2022 and 2025, most newspapers supported the loser.”

Then came an attempt at relevance with a more recent snap: Labor Party supporters in Sydney cheer as the ABC projected a federal election win on May 3. Picture: Getty Images

How defensive can a reptile get? How miserable and miserably out of touch? Try this gobbet ...

With a somewhat romantic, out-of-date and overstated declaration, the paper claims that “although the spectre of media moguls as political kingmakers still looms large in the imagination of Australia’s political class, the opinions and endorsements published by Australia’s major media outlets now have little influence over how Australians actually vote”.
The study draws on various reports and papers looking at the moguls and “large oligopolies that carved up Australia’s media” in a pervasive attack on progressive politics as recent years demonstrate the failure of the newspapers to exercise influence. But the academic reasoning, the historical examples and the selected data designed to show the recent federal election results and aggregated newspaper editorial endorsements fail a test of political reality and logic.
What’s more, the narrative seems to be that the majority of newspaper editorials have favoured the Coalition over “progressive” Labor.
“In 2022, despite receiving a minority of major newspaper endorsements, Labor broke past the media gatekeepers, winning government with a large two-party-preferred swing in their favour,” the report said.
The argument is that in the 2022 and 2025 elections, “legacy newspaper and TV media has been left to bellow from the sidelines” because “newspaper endorsements and televised debates now appear to have little to no influence on public opinion”.
“Australian newspaper endorsements have overwhelmingly favoured the Coalition over Labor in the past three decades, with 2007 and 2010 being the only exceptions,” the report said.
As evidence of historical influence, the report refers to The SMH/Menzies editorials of 1961 and 1963, saying that Menzies “almost lost” in 1961 when the SMH editorialised against him, and yet the Coalition won in 1963 as well – suggesting the SMH editorial’s influence was limited, even back then. What’s more, the report argues that Anthony Albanese’s Labor government is the first in a generation to be elected when there was a majority of newspapers editorialising against it, and to make its point it tabulates the editorials and election results since 1996.
Of course, leaving out the 1993 election which Paul Keating won with only one newspaper – The Daily Telegraph – endorsing him suggests the paper’s findings have been carefully cherrypicked. The truth is that in 1993, it was not editorial endorsements that counted but a value added tax from John Hewson. Likewise, in 1998 – the GST election – almost 80 per cent of editorials endorsed the re-election of John Howard’s government. History shows that Howard’s tax reforms and proposed introduction of GST prompted a huge voter backlash that cost the Coalition 20 seats. In short, both in 1993 and 1998, overwhelming editorial opinions were ignored by voters.

And if Ming was completely ancient, what about the 1990s? 

Cue another antique snap, Paul Keating at a cabinet meeting at the Grand Hotel in Glenelg in 1994 during his prime ministership.

FFS, Glenelg in 1994, and not even a joke about Don Dunstan doing a King Canute? 

That's how ancient you have to be for this yarn, now thankfully coming to a close ...

“Between 1996 and 2019, only two elections saw half or more of the major newspapers endorsing the ALP, and in both cases they formed government. In 2007, 60 per cent of major newspapers backed the election of the ALP after its 11 years in opposition,” the Australia Institute report said.
After his election, which was endorsed by The Australian, Kevin Rudd became the most popular prime minister in the history of Newspoll which suggests there was more at play in the 2007 election – such as a tired Coalition government – than a ringing endorsement from this masthead.
As much as it pains me to say, the blood, sweat and anguish that goes into the big election editorial has never counted for much with voters. To suggest there’s been a sudden decline of their influence ignores the political reality.
Dennis Shanahan is the national editor of The Australian

Oh there's been a decline in influence all right and that feeble protest by the bouffant one explains exactly why ...

Meanwhile, the pond had finally found the Caterist, buried deep, and immediately regretted the hunt.

All that searching for this?

It was another pathetic post-mortem, as explained by the header: The numbers tell the story: lost tribe is key to new-age Liberals, It’s a numbers game: the Liberals need to pull back a lost tribe of voters if they are to regain government. We can see broadly who and where they are.

The pond did note Emilia's singular artwork, which perhaps she should have credited to AI and saved her professional pride: Looking for their lost tribe; From left clockwise, Ted O’Brien, Angus Taylor, Peter Dutton, Jacinta Price and Sussan Ley. Artwork by Emilia Tortorella.

Enough already with the magical instruction: This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

As has often happened with clueless, wretched reptile post-mortems, there was nothing to say about this outing ...

The Australian Electoral Commission struck 153,586 deceased voters off the electoral roll last year.
With the average age of death being 81, the sad truth for the Coalition is that most travellers who journey to that undiscovered country from which no voter returns are probably conservative.
So, while there is no single explanation for the loss of more than one million first-preference Coalition votes in the past six years, one reason is that 5 per cent of Scott Morrison’s supporters in 2019 have passed on.
Many Labor voters have also marked their final ballot paper, but we must assume they have been replaced in roughly equal numbers by new voters, since Labor is no more or less popular now than it was on the night Bill Shorten conceded defeat.
Political commentators declared Shorten’s 34.7 per cent of the primary vote to be a disaster. The same result in 2025 is hailed a triumph.
The unmistakeable conclusion is that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese did not win his landslide because Australians flocked to Labor. It was a gift from the Liberal Party, which forfeited the right to govern because it failed to inspire voters.

Pathetic really, and even more pathetic that the reptiles should slip in an AV distraction featuring Ted "nuke 'em all and an SMR in every home" O'Brien ... Deputy Liberal Leader Ted O’Brien says Australians “did not accept” the Coalition’s policy suite at the federal election. “I certainly concede that the Australian people did not accept what the Coalition was offering across its policy suite,” Mr O’Brien told Sky News Political Editor Andrew Clennell. “Our priority, right now, is to find out why. “I think it would be premature to rush to any conclusion that any one policy was right or wrong. “This is why we have to listen, and if we don’t do that right now, when will we?”

In your desire to nuke the country Ted, you nuked your party, and you still can't figure out what went wrong?

The Caterist kept plodding on ...

The starting point for the Liberals’ inquiry into this month’s disaster is not whether the party should move notionally left or right. If the party is forced to choose between meeting the moral expectations of teal voters or talking common sense to the masses, it can kiss goodbye to its chances of forming government.
Worse would be the Goldilocks option, neither hot nor cold. If Sussan Ley needs to know how that strategy works out, she should pick up the phone and call Morrison or Peter Dutton. A risk-averse campaign in 2028 will be the riskiest approach of all.
The inquest must begin with a search party to find the lost tribe of Coalition voters who have lived to tell the tale.

Then came a reminder of that major problem, the infatuation with Ming the Merciless... Robert Menzies Institute CEO Georgina Downer says the Forgotten People Broadcast is an "eerily familiar" read of the issues faced within middle Australia economics. 37 of those “key” speeches “are incredibly timeless,” Ms Downer told Sky News host Peta Credlin.

The Caterist continued his gloom parade:

The bad news for the Liberals is that the party has not just lost ground in wealthier inner metropolitan seats. It is in trouble almost everywhere.
Voters who have turned their backs on the Coalition arrived at polling booths in Ford Rangers as well as Teslas.
They include nice people who voted yes to the voice to parliament and those who didn’t.
The Liberal Party and LNP also lost ground in the mortgage belt, a remarkable feat after 12 rate rises under Labor.

You've guessed it. After Georgina blathering with petulant Peta came this snap, Past and future prime minister Sir Robert Menzies looks over points in a speech to be delivered in the 1940s. Picture: News Corporation Australia

WTF? What is it? Why Ming again?

Are mindless Ming memories like some kind of sled or snow globe equivalence for the reptiles? Or for those who remember Citizen Kane?

Here's Ming's legacy. 

He did a Joe Biden and hung around way too long, and left a party so enfeebled by hacks and ne'er do wells, men who thought they could swim, men whose voices quavered as they contemplated split skirts, that they were swept into the sea and not even a Chinese sub could save them.

Try telling that to these Ming devotees...

The descendants of Robert Menzies’ nation of homeowners turned their backs on the party he created.
In 2019, 1.65 million voters put Liberal or LNP candidates first in inner metropolitan seats. This time 1.23 million did so, a loss of more than a quarter.
Primary votes fell by 19 per cent in outer metropolitan seats, 8 per cent in provincial seats, and 12 per cent in rural seats.
The bottom line is that one in six of the 6.5 million voters who put Coalition candidates first in 2019 has walked away.
The Coalition’s voter deficit is even worse than that since the number of enrolled voters has risen by 10 per cent.
Labor’s primary vote may be close to its historical low, but unless it sinks dramatically, the Coalition must find a million and a half votes from somewhere to claw its way back into government.
To win over new voters, it will have to improve its appeal to younger generations, women, and immigrants. Every incoming Coalition leader has been acutely aware of this challenge since the Howard era, yet none have managed to rise.
Over to you, Sussan Ley.
The Opposition Leader must also win back the Coalition’s lost base, many of whom are older and see the world very differently from the mashed avocado-munching upstarts they frequently deride.
Their economic circumstances are also very different, which will add to the political and fiscal challenges greeting the next shadow treasurer.
The teal movement, the political wing of the weather-dependent energy sector, is mistakenly accused of being the main reason for the Liberal Party’s decline. While it deserves its share of the credit for keeping the Coalition out of office, its impact on the decline in the Liberals’ primary vote is marginal.

It's almost possible to feel sympathy for Sussssan, saddled with an impossible job, all the more so because the reptiles couldn't summon a snap of her and instead ran with this visual porridge, Australian Electoral Commission employees count ballots in Melbourne on May 3. Picture: AFP

Would Sussssan cop a visual mention? It was all that kept the pond going through the mounting pile of Caterist crocodile tears, a bit like Alice lost in that pool ...

Across the 10 former Liberal seats that have either fallen to teal independents or have been narrowly retained, the party’s primary vote fell by 91,000 between 2019 and 2025. Not all of those votes were lost to the teals.
Even if we add votes lost by the Liberals in teal try-hard seats such as Wannon and Dickson, the maximum total of the Coalition’s primary vote that has moved to teals is probably 200,000 at most, about half the number lost by natural attrition.
The Coalition’s primary vote has suffered far more from the resurgence of One Nation and other notionally conservative minor parties and independents. The primary vote for Pauline Hanson’s party in the lower house has more than doubled since 2019 to 984,000 votes.
The party has made significant inroads in metropolitan seats where its primary votes increased by 285,000.
Overall, the minor centre-right vote increased by more than half a million votes.
If we assume that three out of five of them are refugees from the Coalition, that could account for as much as a third of the Coalition’s lost tribe.

At last Susssan turned up, but eek, it was in the company of Nuking Ted, Liberal MP Zoe McKenzie who won the seat of Flinders says Opposition leader Sussan Ley and Deputy Opposition Leader Ted O'Brien have “hit the ground running” following their leadership wins. “I’m really optimistic about the future,” Ms McKenzie told Sky News host Chris Kenny. “They’ve indeed spoken to those who lost their seats. “We lost some extraordinary talent in this election. “It’s been a big blow here in Victoria. “Some terrible losses but silver linings as well.”

Oh Bid, the dog botherer's part of the problem, and certainly not the solution, and ditto the Caterist, still meandering back to Ming the Merciless times ...

Here’s a back-of-the-envelope guesstimate of where the lost tribe has been wandering: more than three out of 10 have thrown in their lot with Hanson or other centre-right dissidents, fewer than two out of 10 have fallen for the teals or other woke brands, two out of 10 have fallen for the Trojan horse parties of the left such as the Animal Justice Party or Legalise Cannabis, or haven’t cast a regular vote.
Informal voters have noticeably increased in some key outer suburban seats the Coalition must hold or win, including Banks, Lindsay, Werriwa and Calwell. Three out of 10 have died.
Ley’s seat centres on Albury, a place of pilgrimage for Liberal tragics who know their history.
In December 1944, in a humble room above a department store, Menzies gathered the tribes from the Balkanised centre right for the first formal meeting of the newly formed Liberal Party.
Together with its reliable Coalition partner, the Liberal Party has formed government for 51 of the past 79 years.
Ley’s task is to put the ugly factionalism of the past two weeks behind her and project a vision for the future rooted in Liberal principles and shaped by the lessons of recent years.
There can be no more demanding job in politics right now, nor one more important.
Nick Cater is a senior fellow at the Menzies Research Centre.

Project a vision?

On this very same day, the reptiles ran with ...

EXCLUSIVE
Ley faces pressure to dump net zero targets
Camps in both Coalition partyrooms are divided on whether to stick to net zero, as Sussan Ley says her leadership will be focused on smaller taxes, national security and better education.
By Geoff Chambers and Richard Ferguson

And they dragged an "insider" out of the woodwork to muddy things up by sticking in his two cents ...

"Insider" Garth managed to sound mindlessly moronic, a collector of catchphrases ...

The Liberal Party has been the safe harbour Australians have sought when their thoughts turn to the troubled waters of tomorrow. We’ve been that because our economic credentials have been excellent for generations.
However, our relatively recent support of blank-cheque policies such as net zero have not gone unnoticed by the Australian voting public.
To round out the narrative, turn to our support of the ever-growing NDIS, a funding model that is so totally flawed and yet has an assured growth profile well off into the future.
I could include defence spending on helicopters we’ve decommissioned and submarines we’ve cancelled. I could speak to our management of the federation that sees the states compete only for budget blowouts, new taxes, bureaucratic latency and record low housing approvals.
The point is that we’ve changed, we’ve lost the economic argument. That’s the hard truth.
The good news is that we don’t have to turn backwards, to chase those breadcrumbs, to find our way again. Just as you can follow the morning sun to head east, we can follow our values to head home.
We’re a centre-right party. If we move towards smaller government, balanced budgets, the individual above the state, we will always be headed in the right direction, and Australians with a mind to tomorrow will follow us.
This won’t be an easy path and I’ve no doubt we’ve many policy fights ahead. But it’s time to acknowledge the peace the Liberal Party enjoyed in the last term, the unity and stability we praised ourselves for, came at a cost.
Like all bad politics, that cost has been passed on to the next generation. We now have to deal with it.

The trouble with all that misrepresentation? 

He wasn't an "insider," he was just another blathering MP, Garth Hamilton is an LNP member of the House of Representatives

Here, have a cartoon before heading to the bonus ...

The pond only mentioned the Cantaloupe Caligula because for some reason the reptiles decided to startle the possums by using a snap of the orange clown to start off His Lordship's four minute read ...

The pond valiantly resisted the chance to feature the new pope snubbing JD, or King Donald's bizarre rants about Comey and Clinton's alleged killings, and so on and so forth ..

Instead the pond pressed on, praying there'd be no mention of Ming ...

The header: Liberals need to return to rational economic principles, It’s ‘astonishing’ that in the era of progressive economic orthodoxy no one asks where the money is coming from.

The caption for those just in from Mars: US President Donald Trump. Picture: AFP

The bizarre command for Martians arriving in the hive mind: This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

The good thing about His Lordship's analysis is that there was just one visual distraction.

It meant that the pond could offer His Lordship without too many disruptions:

The two decades after the end of the Cold War was a golden era in policymaking. It was one of those rare periods when politicians realised it’s impossible to defy markets – that is, the preferences of ordinary consumers – indefinitely. Regulatory structures were liberated, tariffs dismantled, taxation systems reformed and competition introduced into hitherto public and private monopolies.
The transformation to rational economic policymaking wasn’t pain-free. But it worked. Living standards rose, jobs were created, new industries emerged and productivity increased.
That’s all old hat now. We’re modern and we have replaced economic rationality with progressive economic orthodoxy.
Three things drove this change: the global financial crisis, Covid-19 and the emerging climate change policies. Western politicians decided economic rationalism wasn’t “modern” and policies were introduced to defy markets. The response to the GFC led to the introduction of regulatory restrictions on financial institutions. The consequence was to increase the cost of borrowing to everyone from homebuyers to business investors. That in turn guaranteed lower rates of growth in Western countries than would have otherwise been the case.
And then there was climate change. The economic rationalist response to the need to reduce CO2 emissions would have been the introduction of a global emissions trading scheme with an adjustable price for carbon depending on demand and the extent to which governments wanted to reduce CO2 emissions. The market would then have taken care of providing energy at the best available price.
For all sorts of political reasons, this rational policy was rejected almost everywhere, including in Australia.

Sorry, sorry, the pond simply had to interrupt:

For all sorts of political reasons

What a monstrous dissembling prize maroon he is, another reason why vulgar youff long ago fled the lizard Oz for social media. This is a bit like visiting one of those ruined, abandoned American malls which routinely attract big viewing numbers for ghoulish YouTube videos ...

As a result, politicians came up with all sorts of eye-wateringly expensive and fancy renewable schemes – normally involving the building of windmills and solar panels – which in turn have dramatically increased the price of energy. This has happened in Australia, the UK, the European Union and even in parts of the United States. Given that energy is the very heart of any economy, pushing up its price is going to reduce economic growth.
So since 2008, throughout the Western world, economic rationality has been replaced with what we might call progressive economics. This trend was accelerated during Covid. Civil liberties, which had been fought for for generations were suspended by governments and parliaments. It’s difficult to know precisely how much governments worldwide spent during that sorry period but one estimate suggests it was $16 trillion. This was funded partly by borrowings but substantially by quantitative easing by central banks. Not surprisingly, this was inflationary.
Having stimulated inflation, governments then decided to compensate people by borrowing more money, locking in inflation for longer than was necessary. The Australian government was not alone in being guilty of such malpractice.
So there we have it. All the work done in the 1990s and the 2000s was thrown away as huge budget deficits and debt were expanded. Added to this abandonment of sound economic principles has been the return by government to protectionism. This takes different forms in different countries. We all know about Donald Trump’s 10 per cent base tariff and his vigorous negotiations on reciprocal arrangements with everyone from the UK to China. But our own government has its protectionist measures not using tariffs but instead pumping borrowed money into favoured industries. An economic rationalist will draw attention to the fact that investable funds are being diverted from activities that will generate the highest rate of return into sub-optimal economic activities.

Then came the sole visual interruption, and waddya kno, it featured Killer Creighton in conversation with another The Price is Wrong ... IPA Senior Fellow and Chief Economist Adam Creighton discusses Labor's plans to increase tax on unrealised capital gains. "This is the beginning of a wealth tax, basically starting in superannuation that may spread elsewhere later," Mr Creighton told Sky News host Steve Price. "The history of these taxes around the world are really bad – they don't work."

After that it was all downhill, a doddle, a bleat from His Lordship about the suffering rich ...

As a result, there will be less economic growth and pure jobs and lower productivity than would have been the case had these protectionist measures not been taken.
Progressive economics, which is now much favoured in Australia, has yet another characteristic. It is about levelling down.
It is rational to invest in trying to help lower-income people improve their living standards and their employment opportunities while leaving high-income people alone. After all, it makes sense for people to aspire to higher incomes.
What is more, the government does need to raise revenue and we would all agree whatever the economic consequences that it is fair to raise more income tax revenue from high-income people than lower-income people.
But today we have a situation where the 20 per cent highest-income earners in Australia pay somewhere in the vicinity of 70 per cent of all income taxes and the top 10 per cent around half of all income tax. And there are still politicians who think those high-income earners should pay still more. For example, the re-elected Labor government wants to impose a wealth tax.
This tax introduces a completely new principle: taxing people on the notional increase in the value of their assets. This is just another example of a mindset determined not to level up but to punish people who work hard all their lives, are creative and ingenious, and are good savers.
Coming on top of the massive increase in spending in response to both the GFC and Covid, the government is expanding the welfare state at an astonishing rate: free childcare, heavy subsidies for students, subsidies for electric cars and solar panels, and so on. In the recent election campaign both parties offered all sorts of enticing bribes to an electorate that has become immune to economic principles.
What is astonishing is that in the era of progressive economic orthodoxy no one asks where the money is coming from and what is the opportunity cost of taking money out of the productive economy and putting it into less productive activities. Sure, some of them may be necessary and virtuous but it would only be fair to do an intelligent cost-benefit analysis of measures rather than just play to prejudices.
With this descent from economic rationalism into progressive economic orthodoxy there have been no surprises. Rising living standards have stalled, productivity growth is static to negative, and private sector investment is plateauing.
So for the emasculated Liberal Party there is a huge opportunity to attack the irrationality of progressive economics and explain to the public that if you try to suspend the laws of supply and demand you will destroy economic growth. That means taking away from people the opportunity to better themselves.
And what is more, markets are not some curious right-wing ideological obsession: a market is a place where individuals make decisions about what they want and the price they’re prepared to pay. A market is about giving power to the people: progressive economics is about putting power into the hands of a few.
Alexander Downer was foreign minister from 1996 to 2007 and high commissioner to the UK from 2014 to 2018. He is chair of UK think tank Policy Exchange.

Yippee, no mention of Ming, but then His Lordship is almost as ancient when it comes to vulgar youff trying to remember irrelevant politicians still imaging they have some relevance... like His Lordship signing up to become part of the reptiles' ongoing campaign for the endlessly suffering rich.

The pond didn't have the time or space to go all the way with that campaign, and so while Dimitri was also on hand to wail and moan, he simply howled into the wilderness ... 

Needed tax reform sacrificed in attack on wealth
The tax on unrealised super profits is ‘fundamentally flawed’ in principle and appallingly designed in practice.
By Dimitri Burshtein

The pond should care about those with a lazy $3 million. How many would the new tax actually affect?

0.5%? Some 80,000 people?

That's not a hill the pond needs to die on ...

The pond needed a corrective and found one online, with this summary ...

Australia’s most decorated soldier just lost his defamation appeal. The media’s response? Barely a whisper. But when Sussan Ley became Liberal leader, Murdoch’s mouthpieces went full meltdown — blaming the voters, the system, and even democracy itself. Meanwhile, influencers like Hannah Ferguson are rattling the media cage, and News Corp is terrified of losing control.
From war crime coverups to super tax tantrums and a full-blown narrative crisis, this week’s Scam of the Week is chaos with a press pass.

Take it away, wrap up last week and end this bloody Monday ...