In which a serve of the bromancer is more than enough catering to the paleo reptile diet for the day ...

The reptiles did their level best this day to make things worse by making this the lead item early in the morning ...

Ley’s emissions target: not a lot of (net) zeroes

Sussan Ley has declared she will not pursue a net-zero emissions target at ‘any cost’ as she faces a backbench push to go to the next election with a vow to pull out of the Paris climate agreement.

By Greg Brown and Sarah Ison

... and then followed up by putting the bromancer just below ...

Over on the extreme far right, petulant Peta was once again top of the digital reptile world ma ...

Just one quick look convinced the pond it didn't need to go there ...

Liberals beware: ‘Me too’ on renewables won’t win you elections
The problem with rolling over and supporting Labor’s energy policy is that the Liberals would become complicit in its consequences.
By Peta Credlin
Columnist

Later in the day the reptiles pumped up the volume with a splendid splash...

The pond still wasn't tempted, and what a pity this effort in The Saturday Paper lurks behind a paywall ...

Exclusive: How Abbott and Credlin control the Liberals

Jason Koutsoukis Liberal MPs reveal how the former prime minister and his close confidante have been at the centre of a string of disastrous decisions that led to the party’s stunning election loss and the collapse of the Coalition.

On the other hand, there's a rather dull exposition of the yarn on YouTube,  where the "c" word gets an outing, 'A cancer': How Abbott and Credlin control the Liberals, with this the teaser attached ...

Tony Abbott was on a layover in Dubai when he phoned Natasha Griggs – the president of the Country Liberal Party – and set off a chain reaction inside the Coalition.
Hours later, Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price defected to the Liberals and a surprise leadership ticket was taking shape.
For moderates, it was another sign that the former prime minister and his confidante, Peta Credlin, are still pulling the party’s levers from the outside.
Today, national correspondent for The Saturday Paper Jason Koutsoukis, on Tony Abbott, the shadow network steering the Liberals and why insiders say it’s a cancer that’s killing the party.

'Nuff said, but before heading off to the onion muncher's best bud and eternal bromancer, please consider this.

Evan Osnos in The New Yorker scribbling ... Donald Trump’s Politics of Plunder, The greed of the new Administration has galvanized America’s aspiring oligarchs—and their opponents. (* archive link)

It's finally dawning on some that the United States is now a full-blown authoritarian banana republic ruled by a man governed by whims and fetishes.

This gives the flavour of the Osnos piece ...

..In a matter of weeks, the flood of cash swirling around the White House swamped whatever bulwarks against corruption remained in American law and culture. There have always been wealthy donors, of course. But a decade ago no one on earth had more than a hundred billion dollars. Now, according to Forbes, at least fifteen people have surpassed that mark. Since Trump first took office, Musk’s net worth has grown from roughly ten billion dollars to more than four hundred billion.
The ultra-rich have captured more of America’s wealth than even the nineteenth-century tycoons of the Gilded Age. Scholars who study inequality as far back as the Neolithic period struggle to find precedents. Tim Kerig, an archeologist who directs the Museum Alzey, in Germany, told me, “The people who built the Egyptian pyramids were probably in a less unequal society.” He suggested that today’s richest people are simply accumulating too much wealth for the system to contain. “The economic and technical evolution is much faster than the social, mental, and ideological evolution,” he said. “We had no time to adapt to all those billionaires.”
Two decades ago, Jeffrey Winters, a political-science professor at Northwestern University, started teaching a course called Oligarchs and Elites. His students at the time considered this exotic terrain. One protested, “Russia has oligarchs. America has rich people.” But over the years Winters noticed a shift in his students, accelerated by the Supreme Court’s decision, in 2010, to remove limits on political contributions. “The challenge really became convincing any of them that the United States was still a democracy,” Winters said. “They argued that oligarchs dominated everything that matters.”
Many Americans today espouse two seemingly opposed sentiments toward the very rich: resentment and aspiration. In a 2024 Harris poll, fifty-nine per cent of respondents said that billionaires are making society more unfair, and a nearly identical number said that they hoped to become billionaires themselves. There is a growing sense that only those who belong to the club can thrive. New investment vehicles allow people to copy the portfolios of Congress members, on the theory that lawmakers have an edge that the rest of us do not. The rapper Kendrick Lamar secured his status as a liberal icon by using the Super Bowl halftime show to protest the unfairness of American life. He also released an ode to “more money, more power, more freedom,” which centers on the refrain “I deserve it all.”
Winters, looking across history, believes that the U.S. has reached “peak oligarchic power,” a time when “the rules of the political process make it possible for wealth to shape the outcomes and agenda.” He added, “It’s so undeniably visible now that it’s no longer possible to say we have rich people and other countries have oligarchs.”

Of course it's not all as bad as Osnos purports. 

The American media is always holding up a blowtorch to the rampaging dinosaur and current events...

What a fine introduction to a man scribbling for one of the increasingly irrelevant minor oligarchs, but before proceeding, the pond will admit to a failing, or at least to a caveat ... 

The pond could have gone with simpleton Simon saying ...

Ley circles the wagons, with potshots at party poopers
As leader, Ley’s task was to consolidate a sense of party unity. Instead, the shadow ministry appointments only guarantee a continually divided partyroom.
By Simon Benson
Political Editor

The pond only notes this to wonder: Is he still hopelessly conflicted? Is he still hanging around with barking mad Bid?

How can he write anything about a continually divided partyroom, without a closing acknowledgement, "this writer shares a bedroom with a woman who has done much to ensure a continually divided partyroom"?

Stripped of pictures, this simpleton's hit piece was also stripped of any mention of Bid ...

The first irony of Sussan Ley’s great reunification of the Coalition is that the only partner in the marriage that apparently retains support for net zero is the Nationals.
How this will inflame the extremes on both sides doesn’t require much imagination. And considering the problem the Liberal Party has with women voters, the second contradiction is in the new Liberal leader’s decision to dump four of the most senior women from shadow cabinet.
Ley has rewarded her supporters, and the enemies she needed to, and has appeased as many transactional members as she could in a Coalition partyroom so diminished by its poll loss that few could have been left without a trophy.
She has also dumped another Victorian senator, former education spokeswoman Sarah Henderson, who had the temerity in the wake of the election defeat to challenge the party’s decision to shelve key education policies.
Considering the deals Ley had to make to shore up her leadership challenge against Angus Taylor, none of this should be a surprise.
Taylor loses Treasury but is rewarded with defence – the price for silence and compliancy.
Ley’s economic team is male-dominated. Not a single woman in a Treasury portfolio. And sidelining Jacinta Nampijinpa Price may work for a while, but the Band-Aid will eventually peel off.
Moderates dominate the leadership team, which makes Ley’s refusal to commit to a net-zero position more bizarre and reveals how spooked she remains about where the party needs to land on this issue.
The make-up of her frontbench is a highly defensive move by the new leader. She has sought to lock in her moderate support base but in the process has guaranteed there will remain a bunch of “pissed off other people”, according to one Liberal source.
“This just ensures there will be a round two in all this,” they said.
The new leader has punished one of the former Coalition’s most senior women, Jane Hume, by dumping the former finance spokeswoman to the backbench following the party’s admission that the work-from-home policy cost it votes. Hume, a senator from Victoria, has become the sacrificial lamb for a policy that had more than one author and was rubber-stamped by a leadership group that included Ley.
Queensland senator James McGrath is back in the tent, a member who claims to be conservative but is known to be a moderate organiser. Unsurprising were the elevations of Julian Leeser and Tim Wilson.
Part of the problem will be that this now constitutes a shadow ministry that represents the divisions going on inside the Coalition. The promotion of conservative West Australian senator Michaelia Cash to foreign affairs makes sense, considering Penny Wong is in the Senate. But rather than shutting down the outriders, Ley may only embolden them. This is true on the Nationals side as well.
Doubtless, things will now go quiet for a while but at some point the proverbial will hit the fan.
As leader, Ley’s task was to consolidate a sense of unity within the party. Instead, she risks institutionalising divisions. The new appointments and the equivocation on climate policy will guarantee a continually divided partyroom.
Having been papered over for three years under Peter Dutton, the divisions remain real and will become more apparent over time.
All to the delight of Anthony Albanese, who appears in a semi-permanent state of being struck in the backside by the same rainbow.

Nah, just bring on the bromancer, still bound in mental chains to his one true onion munching love ...

Amazingly, according to the reptiles, it was just a three minute read, suggesting just how little the bromancer or the rest of the hive mind cared about things ...

The header: Liberals’ bad position just got even worse, The new shadow cabinet — a weird selection of talent — is proof of the old adage: nothing is so bad that it can’t get worse.

Instead of featuring bromancer verbiage, the reptiles stuffed his short outing with repetitious visual distractions, all the while reminding us of the two at the centre of the follies: Sussan Ley and Nationals leader David Littleproud hold a press conference at Parliament House in Canberra Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

The pond really wished it could click heels and go elsewhere ... This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

The most notable feature was the way that the bromancer decided to do a simpleton Simon and dump on some and honour others, with the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way the first of the dumpees...

This is a weird selection of a shadow ministry and one that stores up bountiful troubles for the future.
Granted that short of complete self-immolation, which in fairness the opposition tried last week, nothing that Sussan Ley’s tribe does just now will make any difference to voters who aren’t paying attention.
There’s a noble illogicality, a determined refusal to use relevant expertise in relevant areas, and overall a studied commitment to incompetence about this shadow ministry.
Angus Taylor gets defence? Taylor as opposition Treasury spokesman in the previous term of parliament was the Coalition frontbencher most unsympathetic to making a serious financial commitment to defence.
He’s been the most sceptical of any senior Liberal about the ability of defence to make meaningful use of extra money.

Oh that can't be good for the beefy boofhead, as the reptiles immediately interrupted with an AV distraction featuring ... yes, them again, Liberal Leader Sussan Ley and Nationals Leader David Littleproud have announced the new shadow ministry after the Coalition’s break-up and reunification.

As well as the beefy boofhead, when it came to taking the cash or the box, the bromancer went with the box ...

Similarly, in government he did little about resilience or supply chain security.
He was surely as discredited as Peter Dutton by the election campaign and has now probably been leapfrogged in the leadership stakes by Andrew Hastie.
Michaelia Cash gets foreign affairs? This portfolio, like Treasury, is a huge opportunity in opposition because it’s always in the news.
Kevin Rudd used it brilliantly in opposition.

Okay, okay, those with antediluvian memories will insist Bob Dyer always shouted "the money or the box", but anything for a way to relieve the tedium, as the reptiles offered a visual repetition as an interruption, Liberal Leader Sussan Ley and Nationals Leader David Littleproud have announced the new shadow ministry after the Coalition’s break-up and reunification.

Is that the best they can do?

Then it was time for the bromancer to celebrate his soft spot for Sharma ...

The Liberals have, in Dave Sharma, a superbly qualified professional diplomat, smart politically, embodies core Liberal values and knows foreign affairs intimately.
So naturally Sharma gets the smallest possible frontbench role.
All Liberal leaders seem to be instinctively hostile to colleagues who build independent media and professional profiles, which is why the great Jim Molan was never given defence.

The reptiles decided the time was right to remind the bromancer of the beefy boofhead ... Opposition defence spokesman Angus Taylor. Picture: NewsWire / Monique Harmer

Next came The Price is Wrong ...

A lot of these weird decisions store up certain future trouble.
Demoting and humiliating Jacinta Nampijinpa Price is surely the stupidest single thing Ley has done in her career.
Price made a mistake jumping from the Nationals to the Liberals. She put way too much faith in Taylor as a potential leader to replace Dutton.
Nonetheless, in a virtual cricket team that would struggle to field a suburban grade side, she is one of the only Coalition politicians to have scored a test century, so to speak.
Effective leadership means harnessing the talents of colleagues you might not necessarily like.
Keeping Price in Indigenous affairs would have been a kind of demotion, in that it wouldn’t have been a promotion.
But it would have ensured one of the Coalition’s only strong media and community performers remained an important national voice.

All that did was remind the pond of that Saturday Paper line ...

Tony Abbott was on a layover in Dubai when he phoned Natasha Griggs – the president of the Country Liberal Party – and set off a chain reaction inside the Coalition.
Hours later, Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price defected to the Liberals and a surprise leadership ticket was taking shape.

Such an onion-munching loss as ambition o'er lept itself and fell on the other side.

Back to the bromancer, still having trouble with the new team:

Ley has effectively chosen to leave Steve Waugh in the dressing room. This is monumentally stupid, morally ungenerous and will surely end in tears.
Tim Wilson is a good promotion. Dan Tehan in energy is a good choice.
And James Paterson was one of the better performers during the last term.
But the unresolved conflict over a target for net-zero carbon emissions remains in the Liberal Party. It is bound to explode in time, and it festers across the whole Coalition, as evident in the almost equally sub-optimal National Party frontbench choices.

That was the point at which the reptiles slipped in a snap of Senator Dave Sharma. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman, long after it mattered...

It wouldn't be a bromancer piece without one astonishing bit of luddite stupidity ...

By far the most policy competent and intellectually substantial National is Queensland senator Matt Canavan. He can’t be on the frontbench because he won’t support net zero.
A Nationals partyroom with the party’s two most effective politicians, Canavan and Barnaby Joyce, on the backbench is bound for trouble.
The one benefit of a Coalition split is we would have got a serious debate on net zero.
The Canavan position is probably shared by most Liberals.

Here we go again. Some things never change in the hive mind ...

The bromancer enlisted the hastie Pastie in the lost cause ...

On ABC’s Four Corners, Hastie, the hope of the Liberal side, declared he was breaking free of net zero, and the question was why Australians couldn’t use coal and uranium if it’s morally and politically OK to export these overseas.

More on that anon, but first another visual interruption, NT senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. Picture: Pema Tamang Pakhrin

Then came a reminder of how the bromancer, the reptiles at the lizard Oz, and the collectivist hive mind had managed to wreck a sensible discussion of climate science for a couple of decades ...

No doubt Hastie will toe a shadow cabinet line. But the Liberal Party is bitterly divided over this as centre right parties, like the Nationals in New Zealand, and indeed whole nations like the US, are abandoning the inherently fraudulent concept of net zero.

Um, is it wrong to point out that King Donald and his banana republic oligarchs aren't the whole nation?

And so to the closer, with a classic fudge ...

The problem is the Liberals lack the courage of their convictions – to mount a serious critique not of climate change but of the net zero target and to campaign for an alternative passionately.
But they also lack the courage of their lack of convictions – to pretend convincingly they believe in net zero.
The new shadow cabinet is proof of the old adage: nothing is so bad that it can’t get worse.

If you take climate science seriously, how on earth can you argue passionately for alternatives to net zero? 

You'd have to be some kind of frog in the grip of mindless distractions ...

And that's the reptiles done and dusted for the day.

Instead of more boiling of reptile stew, the pond decided it would give The Echnida another plug...

If you subscribe, chances are a Broelman or an infallible Pope will pop up in your inbox ...

That always puts the pond in a good mood, and there's always a read attached, and this day John Hanscombe had the pond with this line ...

The same old arguments for not acting to reduce emissions are trotted out in the Murdoch press, oblivious to the fact they sent conservative politics into the wilderness for at least two more terms. Doesn't matter what Australia does, it won't make a difference, the cardigan and cravat crew bleat in the pages of The Australian and to the dwindling audience watching Sky After Dark.

Well yes, though the pond hadn't really thought of the bromancer as being part of a cravat crew, though "cardigan" did capture the mind set ...

Never mind ...

The day arrived sickly yellow. Where the escarpment stood there was now just a faint outline. It was hard to breathe and the eyes stung. South Australia's crippling drought had delivered choking dust to the continent's east coast.
With the physical discomfort came a reminder of the unfairness. Large tracts of NSW had just been submerged by floods only to be shrouded in dust from a parched place that hadn't seen meaningful rain in months.
Offering what comfort he could, the Prime Minister told the country that we'd been warned extreme weather would become more common and more intense with the changing climate. It certainly seems that way.
What we knew as one-in-100-year floods recur every few years. Lismore's turn in 2022 becomes Taree's in 2025. The pattern of cold fronts, which usually bring winter rain to South Australia and western parts of Victoria, has changed, with those fronts held at bay by high pressure systems we normally associate with summer.
Those who suffer the worst of the climate's caprice are typically farmers and regional Australians. In one week, we saw dairy farmers in tears for very different reasons. Those who had lost stock to floods and those who could not feed theirs because their pastures had turned to dust thanks to drought.
And in the midst of this double-edged sword of suffering, the very people who claim to represent these Australians - the Nationals - are still quibbling over climate.
Barnaby Joyce demands to know the cost of the commitment to net zero by 2050 while his party's constituents count the cost of not acting on climate - a last hurrah as he finds himself relegated to the nosebleed seats up the back of a depleted and demoralised opposition alongside the other other former deputy PM Mickmack McCormack.

That reminded the pond how that inimitable pair had been lost to the bromancer and to simplistic Simon ...

Well done Tamworth, once the centre of the known universe, now barely a flickering match ... but what an inspiration for the immortal Rowe to invoke a horse's arse ...

Then came that line, worth repeating in context ...

The same old arguments for not acting to reduce emissions are trotted out in the Murdoch press, oblivious to the fact they sent conservative politics into the wilderness for at least two more terms. Doesn't matter what Australia does, it won't make a difference, the cardigan and cravat crew bleat in the pages of The Australian and to the dwindling audience watching Sky After Dark.

And then Handscombe came to a point which - if you happened to accept climate science and the need to curtail emissions - would have given the bromancer, and other reptiles, and the opposition, a handy stick with which to bash the government ...

Australia is a huge exporter of fossil fuels. The stuff might not be burnt here but it still contributes to global emissions. Arguing that it's beyond our control is a bit like saying a drug dealer can't be held responsible for how the product they sell is used. In other words, poppycock.
Which brings us to the Albanese government and its rank hypocrisy in giving preliminary approval for extending the life of the north west gas project off the WA coast for another 45 years.
Here's how Greg Bourne described the decision: "They've just approved one of the most polluting fossil fuel projects in a generation, fueling climate chaos for decades to come. This single project will unleash more than four billion tonnes of climate pollution. It undoes the good work they've done on cutting climate pollution and betrays the mandate Australian voters just gave them."
Bourne is BP's former north west shelf manager, who now devotes his time to advocating for a transition away from fossil fuels.
"It is rubbish to say that Australia needs this gas when the lion's share is marked for export and none of it will be used on the east coast," he says. "It's bad for the climate, bad for Australia's economy, and completely out of step with where the world is heading."
The decision to extend the project until 2070 is grotesque for its timing alone.
Barnaby Joyce is at least consistent in his climate lunacy. But for the PM to one day say, hand on heart, natural disasters are the price we're paying for climate change and then approve a major contributor to it the next beggars belief.

Well yes, but thanks to decades of climate science denialism, the coalition is completely clueless when it comes to using climate science to give the government a hard time ...

Given the chance to sound sensible, they immediately revert to bromancer and Barners lunacy, and the chance is always lost lost...

Was there any upside at all to this relentless bout of reptile navel gazing?

Yes indeedy ...

At least the pond avoided this pathetic attempt to justify mass starvation and ethnic cleansing ...

A chaotic start but new Gaza aid plan will weaken Hamas
You may be tempted to think the new US-backed aid system in Gaza is yet another disaster to befall Palestinians, given the criticism which international agencies have hurled at it. Think again.
By Cameron Stewart
Chief International Correspondent

Think again? That implies some thinking was done in the first place ...