Oh dear, fancy forgetting to provide a title for the bromancer's and the dog botherer's outing ...

What with our Henry a dismal failure this week, the pond hoped that the A team at the lizard Oz would turn things around for the weekend, but had no expectations that they'd deliver in tremendous style.

Foolish pond, the A team were in splendid form.

The pond's attention was immediately drawn to the bromancer, second from the top in the day's agenda ...

Over on the extreme far right there were some grand offerings ...

Of course Polonius is best saved for a meditative Sunday and there were a few dullards to fill out the numbers.

He might briefly have been top of the world ma, but the pearls of wisdom man simply offered a repeat of Killer of the IPA's Friday outing...

Failing one-party state an ominous warning for nation
If there is one constant in Australian fiscal affairs, it is that the Victorian Labor government will spend excessively, mismanage major projects, swell the public service and inflate the state’s debt.
By David Pearl

Sorry, ever since comrade Dan left the scene it's never been the same.

And Dame Slap's attempt to do an Ancient Mariner and grab attention was a dismal flop.

Inquirer by Janet Albrechtsen
Guess which legal drama grabbed the nation’s attention …
While none of the live-streamed real-life legal battles in the Federal Court of Australia are as outlandish as Boston Legal, not everyone loves this new media development. 

For some inexplicable reason - certainly not modesty - in her listicle of law cases Dame Slap failed to mention her own stunning appearance in the Lehrmann matter, as noted in the Graudian's ‘I’ll send you the transcript’: emails and texts between head of Lehrmann inquiry and News Corp columnist revealed, Message chain shows Walter Sofronoff sent transcripts and ‘strictly confidential’ information to Janet Albrechtsen

Never mind, these errors, omissions and flops flops were more than compensated for by the bromancer and dog botherer in top hysterical, paranoid form.

The pond would like to set the scene, crank the temperature up to 11, and what better way to introduce the pair than with the opening of Ginsberg's Howl ...

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between, (much more here)

That's the vibe, that's the mood, and now, fully prepared, dive headlong into an extended Howl by the bromancer ...

The header says it all, readying reader for a full ten minute stay in the hive mind, so the reptiles timed it, Australia divided, misgoverned, in retreat: our nation in decline, Australia is a first-rate nation whose leaders just now are determining we’ll be second-rate. Across every indicator you can imagine – economy, living standards, social cohesion, health, military capability – we’re in serious trouble.

The pond should note and acknowledge the stunning artwork by Emilia ... The main players of Australia’s political present and future. Artwork by Emilia Tortorella

That graph line to nowhere over a parched and broken continent (island if you insist)! That assembly of main players, with a vast majority coming from those consigned to a fractured hinterland ...

What a perfect evocation of the bro's extended howl, what a top notch introduction...

Australia is a nation in decline. Across every indicator you can imagine – economy, living standards, social cohesion, crime, health, military capability, the creativity and virtuosity of the arts – we’re in serious decline.
This is not an anti-Australian statement. Australia is a first-rate nation whose leaders just now are determining we’ll be second-rate. Australia is a nation with a blemished but magnificent history, a nation once of ambition, achievement, accommodation, heroism, turning itself instead into a nation of mendicant mediocrity.
Nationals senator Matt Canavan launched his recent leadership challenge against David Littleproud because he sees that decline and wants something better. The agitation this caused led in part to the Nats deciding, temporarily, to leave the Coalition with the Liberals.
Canavan’s leadership bid was not born of personal ambition but policy frustration. He’s determined to force his party, and what he calls the “comfortable, coddled and second-rate political class of this country”, to confront the grave policy questions that both campaigns comprehensively avoided through the election.
The view of national decline is not confined to mavericks such as Canavan. The great National Party elder statesman, former deputy prime minister John Anderson, tells Inquirer he believes Australia is entering a sustained “structural decline”. He looks at the acres of red ink, the oceans of debt happily forecast in the medium-term future in Jim Chalmers’ budget, and makes a subtle point.
Australia’s national debt appears manageable now, though it’s much bigger than generally realised. But, Anderson believes, we’ve reached the point at which the nations we compare ourselves with, such as Britain and the US, lost control of debt, from which they cannot now escape.
It would be damaging if the Libs and Nats cannot form a Coalition. There would then be no coherent governing party alternative to Labor.
But the recent turmoil has one saving feature: it stems ultimately from policy disagreement. That’s the first sign of our political culture making any effort at all to come to grips with our national decline.
There’s one important paradox. Australia remains wealthy. Adam Smith observed, “there’s a lot of ruin in a nation”.

It's impolite to interrupt a poet in full flight, but the pond should note that the bromancer has been talking to the very best people, and seems to want to get on board the Canavan caravan, or at least get into the ute ...

What a splendid bigot to set before a bro, though the reptiles decided they'd feature Bid, what with her having an insider at work in the hive mind,  Nationals Senator Bridget McKenzie has defended Leader David Littleproud's position as party leader. It comes amid talks between Liberal Leader Sussan Ley and Nationals Leader David Littleproud about pausing the Coalition's split. "David Littleproud is our leader. The party room made a collective decision to leave the Coalition and we will come back together post the Liberal Party's meeting to discuss whatever comes out of that."

Oh yes, much to be proud of, if you want more than a little confusion and chaos.

Back to the bro and how the bro whined and moaned and keened and wailed and screeched and bayed and caterwauled and shrieked and ululated and cried out in tormented pain.

Stand aside Ginsberg, let a real hysteric show you how to do genuine listicle reptile hysteria ...

We’re a nation in decline but we’re declining from a high standard of living and national success. Because we’ve been so affluent we’re like the frog in the slowly boiling pot of water, increasingly uncomfortable but not sure why.
There’s no direct comparison, and the example is too stark. But tiny Nauru once had the second or third highest per capita income in the world. Then its luck ran out, meaning its phosphate resources ran out. It then became a much poorer country. Australia is a rich country because of its commodities – iron ore, coal, gas, gold, beef, aluminium, copper, wheat, sheep, uranium. How are we using those riches, will they last?
The OECD, the club of rich nations, conducts the Program for International Student Assessments. These show high school students in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore are about four years ahead of their Australian counterparts of the same age in maths. We’ve gone backwards.
In 2023, our 15-year-olds performed at the level of 14-year-olds 20 years earlier. According to our own NAPLAN tests, in 2024 one-third of our students failed baseline tests in reading and maths. We spend more than the OECD average per student for a below-average result. The more we spend, the worse the results.
We have far fewer students performing at a high level or studying a foreign language than high-performing nations do. Why are we now so comfortably second-rate?
At least we’ve got fresh air and healthy lifestyle, yes? No. We are obese and overweight, substantially beyond the OECD average. Worse than we used to be. In 2022, two-thirds of Australians were overweight or obese. We have long life expectancy by the standards of English-speaking countries. But in the past few years we registered our first, albeit small, decline in life expectancy. Chronic disease, obesity and mental health problems mean we’re unlikely to resume increasing our life expectancy.
Mental health is mysteriously disastrous. Suicide is the leading cause of death among Australians aged 15 to 44. The incidence of mental ill-health in the young has risen by 50 per cent in the past 15 years. A Lancet study shows Australia second only to the US in rising mental ill-health trends.
At least we’re a rich country, so we can pay the medical bills? Maybe not in the long run. The Nationals’ revolt, Canavan’s revolt in particular, arises mainly over energy policy and economics.

Yet again the Canavan caravan?

Even worse, the rant was only broken by a snap of the Sauron-ruled Mordor of the moment, Anthony Albanese has a mountain of economic and social issues to tackle in his second term.

Sheesh, look at those lips, look at that smug grimace. Talk about sending the bromancer off the deep end.

Now it's rude to interrupt a poet in full flight, but the pond found this irresistible:

The Nationals have established a small, high-quality think tank, the Page Research Centre, led by the impressive Gerard Holland. The next paragraphs draw on its snapshot of economic statistics.

Talk about a small, high-quality think tank in action ...

Oh yes, the finest of figures, culling the finest data by way of the phone.

Now do go on with the data, and make sure it sends the bromancer into an even more saturated hysterical frenzy ...

Home ownership, the essence of the Australian dream, for those under 40 is at record low rates. The median home price nationally is nine times the average annual income and in Sydney 13 times.
fertility rates have plummeted to 1.44 children per woman, the lowest in our history. This is below what demographers call ultra-low fertility. If that persists for a few years it’s almost impossible to recover from because the number of women entering child-bearing years becomes so small.
This is not women choosing career over motherhood. There’s overwhelming sociological evidence that people are unable to afford to have the number of children they want to have.
Australia’s federal government debt this year will reach $1 trillion. It’s actually worse than that because there are many billions of dollars of borrowed money in so-called “off budget” expenditures. These aren’t registered as normal government debt because they’re notionally investments that will generate returns. Classic cases such as the NBN never generate anything like forecast returns.
On top of all this, there are the states’ debts. The Victorian government’s debt alone will reach $200bn in the next few years. The commonwealth in effect, if not legally, guarantees all this debt.
Credit ratings agency S&P Global accused the Albanese government of hiding fiscal deterioration with so much off-budget spending and said Australia could lose its AAA credit rating. Australia has this rating because John Howard paid off all the national debt and establish­ed a sovereign wealth fund, and because high commodity prices boost revenue. But we can’t live forever off Howard, and commodity prices are on a downward trend. Losing the AAA rating would increase borrowing costs.
Already Australia will spend $27bn this year paying interest on the debt, which will keep rising.
Long-term Treasury estimates are wildly optimistic because they use ludicrous assumptions. They believe, on the spending side, the National Disability Insurance Scheme will rise by only 8 per cent annually, there will be unprecedented spending restraint across the rest of the budget, there will be no need for increased defence spending, and on the revenue side that productivity, having been disastrously negative for years, will shoot back up to 1.2 per cent positive growth, while governments continue to increase taxation via bracket creep.
Already Australia has a higher top marginal tax rate than the US or New Zealand, and this cuts in at less than twice average earnings, much lower than the cut-in level in the US or Britain. Our deficits and debt will be worse than forecast.

We'll all be rooned said bromancerhan, as the reptiles turned to that eminent think tanker chatting with the Bolter on Sky Noise down under, Former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce weighs in on the split between the Nationals and the Liberals. “What we need is an effective Coalition,” Mr Joyce told Sky News host Andrew Bolt. “I don’t want to go to war with the Liberal Party … I want to have a political debate with the Labor Party, not the Liberal Party.”

Time for some climate science denialism?

Of course, that's what the hive mind is for. 

Nothing to do with us, nothing we can do, just smile and talk of religious zealots, and if you happen to be a certified barking mad fundamentalist Catholic who believes in cannibalism, both wafer flesh and wine blood, you're the man for the job ...

Overall, productivity, that is output per unit of labour, fell by more than 5 per cent in the three years of the Albanese government. Per capita economic growth, higher living standards, are impossible without productivity growth. Productivity has now fallen for five consecutive quarters. In the 1990s reform era it often rose by 2 per cent a year. Australians’ real income fell by 8 per cent in the past three years, due to inflation, bracket creep and high interest rates. This was the greatest fall in average income in the OECD, or in modern Australian history.
Australia’s settled policies will make matters much worse. Much of the productivity increase in the Hawke-Howard years came from greater flexibility in industrial relations. All that momentum for flexibility stopped the minute Howard lost power in 2007. In the Coalition’s decade in office from 2013 it was too cowardly to attempt to promote any significantly enhanced industrial relations flexibility. The Albanese government is re-regulating the labour market and entrenching union power. These dynamics are the deadly enemy of productivity.
Traditionally, Australia’s two great economic advantages were abundant commodities and cheap energy. Now Canberra’s commitment to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 means we’ve much more expensive energy, a dreadful impost we’re placing on ourselves. Running a renewables energy system is vastly more expensive than one based on a mix of fossil fuels, nuclear power and renewables. Renewables work at scale in those countries whose topography and rainfall suit hydro-electric schemes.
Net zero is a fraudulent concept, as everyone knows. The idea that eight billion people can live, several billion of them at modern standards, without generating CO2 emissions, or just generating so few emissions these can be offset by planting trees, is utterly ludicrous.
Almost no one in the world really believes it. Almost no country in the world is acting to try to achieve it, only a few deindustrialising European powers and Australia.
The global south has a pass. China promises net-zero emissions by 2060 – these are the folks who promised never to militarise the South China Sea – and India by 2070. Beijing is deploying large amounts of renewable energy but, as Canavan says, it opens about two coal-fired power stations a week.
The US under Donald Trump has left the Paris Agreement and is promoting all fossil fuels. The biggest emitters – China, the US, India, Russia, Indonesia – aren’t remotely moving towards net zero. Even the share of global energy generated by fossil fuels has not shifted much despite decades of notional climate action. Many global south nations pay lip service to net zero but continue to expand fossil fuel use.
The evangelical fervour with which the Labor Party and many government-funded elites have embraced net-zero hot gospelling is really contemporary evidence of what critic AA Phillips in 1950 called Australia’s “cultural cringe”. Australian elites who claim net zero is a global consensus have a classically cultural cringe view of “global” as consisting entirely of San Francisco, New York, Paris and London; certainly not Delhi, Beijing, Hanoi or Jakarta.

What set the bromancer off? 

What sets all the reptiles off? 

Why the whale killers, shown shockingly on parade, and ruining everything ...Windfarms near Portland, in Victoria’s southwest. Picture: Alex Coppel

Sure it's also being pig ignorant about science and feeling more comfortable discussing science through the narrow lens of religion, tossing around "evangelical fervour", "hot gospelling" and inevitably "government-funded 'leets", but it's also a deep and abiding, never-ending love of sweet virginal innocent dinkum clean Oz coal ...

Even in London consensus is evaporating. British Conservatives have abandoned net zero by 2050. The more popular Reform UK of Nigel Farage, currently leading the polls, rejects net zero. Even Tony Blair distressed bien pensants by doing what he occasionally does – telling the truth. Net zero is irrational, he said, phasing out fossil fuels won’t work.
The Libs and Nats just got creamed at the election, so obviously they should sign up to net zero, or at least so all their enemies say. In fact, whenever the Coalition has fought net-zero nuttiness as an economic issue it has won. When it has gone along with net zero, it has lost. Public opinion for a long time strongly favoured the Indigenous voice proposal. Coalition senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price campaigned passionately against it and won the debate. Scepticism on net zero doesn’t require scepticism on climate change.
The Coalition could easily argue the cost of current policies is crippling, they won’t yield any benefit to the climate. Australia will make a no-regrets contribution to reducing its emissions and greening its environment but won’t be bound by a ruinous target.
To do this, it would have to campaign constantly and hard – something it seems to have lost the muscle memory for.
Canavan is urging that, or something bolder. The nation deserves this debate. It’s not an anachronistic “climate wars” indulgence, it’s a rational policy debate.
Australia is pursuing policies of industrial relations rigidity, increased business and corporate regulation, high wages, endless and proliferating universal welfare schemes and payments, and expensive energy. While our commodities exports give us enough money, we can lavishly subsidise some manufacturing in Australia, as the government is currently subsidising steel, but we’ll never reindustrialise, never re-establish manufacturing, with these policies.
Canavan points out we’ve recently lost, or mostly lost, three industries, Urea (fertiliser), plastics and nickel. As we lose companies and whole industries we borrow vast sums of money to pay for government paid workers and congratulate ourselves on job creation.
Our economy is bound to continue declining. This has security consequences. Even this briefest of surveys cannot omit our declining military capabilities. In 1990 we had 17 million people and 69,000 full-time members of the Australian Defence Force. We now have 28 million people and 59,000 full-time ADF members. We’ve gained 11 million people and lost 10,000 soldiers. We are militarily weaker now than when the Albanese government was elected.
We have the oldest naval surface fleet we’ve ever had. We’ve retired one antique and lightly armed Anzac-class frigate. Our six subs are elderly pensioners. We have one type of armed drone notionally in our order of battle. Modern armed forces have hundreds or thousands of different drones. Militarily, we are somewhere between asleep and hopeless.
The overall story of national decline is undeniable. A thousand other statistics could be added.

A thousand others? Oh FFS, the pond knows that Ginsberg's Howl is very long, but do we have to do a thousand other statistics?

Couldn't we just settle for a standard bout of "Orwellian"? 

After all, George is always the go to for any reptile in a storm, and never mind that he was a bloody socialist, a pinko prevert.

Indeed we could, it's time to go the George and 1984 and all that jazz ...

We’ve embraced such very poor economic performance partly because the language of economic policy has been utterly corrupted in a George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four-style reversal of meaning. In particular three words – reform, investment and productivity – have been so prostituted of meaning that if anything they convey the opposite of their dictionary meaning.
Thus we get sentences like: The government will reform the care sector by making a greater investment in the workforce in order to lift productivity.
Translated into English that means the government will spend more on the care sector by spending more on workers’ wages with a theoretical increase in workforce participation by some beneficiaries of the welfare – thus the fraudulent productivity claim.
In reality it just means more workers in low productivity occupations. It may be good social policy but bears no relation to economic reform or investment and it lowers productivity.
We are in some measure re-creating the Australia of the 1960s when we weren’t a failing nation but we were slipping behind. Consequently, we couldn’t deal with the disruptions of the 70s.
In 1964 Donald Horne wrote, in The Lucky Country: “Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people’s ideas and although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events around them that they are often taken by surprise.”
The disruptions of the coming decade will be more severe than the 70s. Canavan has made a serious, laudable effort to get the nation at least to consider these challenges.
It’s more likely we’ll continue our recent practice; we’ll just look away and assume, without any justification, that decline will always be gentle.

It's deeply funny, how the reptiles berate those who accept climate science as being catastrophists, apocalyptic thinkers, end times doom sayers, but could any of them hold a candle to the bromancer in full featherless flight?

And all this because the infallible Pope had a little fun with a pair of gormless twits stuck up a tree, all while the bromancer was incapable of mentioning the current floods and mayhem?

And so to the dog botherer, and for those who think they've had their fill of climate science, think again, because he's also in one of those Ginsbergian moods, and he erupts into an epic howl of pain...

The header sets the tone, what with the dog botherer's extraordinary skills, insights and peer-reviewed scientific credentials on hand to talk of climate science: The climate science says we’re fooling ourselves, The cost of ‘climate action’ is high. If it did what the zealots pretend, saving our beautiful planet from impending doom, it would be worth the communal sacrifice, but there is no evidence or prospect of any benefit.

Luckily, that talk of climate was accompanied by a snap suggesting we've dodged a bullet, The A23a iceberg in the Southern Ocean, the world’s biggest iceberg, appears to have run aground, potentially sparing the crucial wildlife breeding ground of South Georgia from being hit by the behemoth.

There was the ritual injunction: This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

The dog botherer started in full gloom ...

In fervent meetings at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, corridor catch-ups between executive advisers in the White House, multi-party dealings in New Delhi and presidential briefings from Jakarta to Abuja, you can just imagine them speaking with relief about political events in Australia.

The reptiles hastily interrupted. 

Hadn't there been some floods somewhere?  Severe flooding in Tasmania has resulted in animal protection agencies moving Tasmanian devils from at-risk areas. Picture: Aussie Ark/Instagram

The dog botherer channelled the suffering devil and set off a flurry of floozies...

That island continent in the southern hemisphere, where fully one-third of 1 per cent of the world’s population lives, they would have noted earnestly, has just returned a green-left government and will get the global climate crisis under control.
Just like Barack Obama’s boast when he won the Democrat nomination in 2008, “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”. Australia’s Anthony Albanese was going to “deliver on climate change”.
The conceit and absurdity of our country’s political obsession with global warming is so bizarre that it is more Monty Python than Yes, Prime Minister. Yet it is an ongoing tragedy that is undercutting our prosperity and up-ending our politics.
Seldom have so many people sacrificed so much, trying to do so little, for no discernible gain. Futility meets delusion.
Yet here we are again. And it is about to get worse, with Labor doubling down on its failing renewables experiment and the Coalition returning to its climate wars like rats returning for cheese and an electric shock (if the wind is blowing).
From our political leaders we might expect policy assessments to follow the rational approach of cost-benefit analysis. Or we could appeal to their Hippocratic sensibilities to “first, do no harm”.
Instead, we have an emotive, even quasi-religious commitment to righteous climate actions, regardless of outcomes and largely for the sake of appearances.
We must be seen to do our bit, they sermonise, wilfully ignoring the burdens imposed on their fellow citizens or the cold, hard, scientific reality that their virtue-driven engineering can have no measurable effect on the mechanism they are aiming to control – climate.

How many times must the pond warn the reptiles that fragile minds, when exposed to snaps of infernal wind machines, are likely to snap, and head off into full-blown hysteria?... Power-generating wind turbines at the Capital Wind Farm, at Lake George, near the town of Bungendore.

Stop it, just stop it, or the next thing you know, the dog botherer will be quoting Dorothea Mackellar at the world ...

We still have heatwaves and bushfires. They claim we have more of them, but the data bears that out only if we revise downwards what has transpired previously.
They say we have more cyclones, but the record stubbornly begs to differ. And even though they said our dams would dry up and our rivers would not run again, we still have floods, bad floods.
None of these observations is to deny the science. Quite the opposite; it is a plea to stick to scientific fact.
I challenge any Labor, Liberal, Nationals or teal politician to commission the parliamentary library to provide a total estimate of local, state and federal government spending on emissions reductions policies. The rebates, subsidies, grants and taxes; the solar panel giveaways and electric vehicle incentives; the transmission lines, wind turbines, solar farms, community and large-scale batteries; the demand management payments, feed-in tariffs, conferences, overseas delegations and foreign aid projects; the advertising and marketing campaigns; the redundancy payments to former coal-fired power plant workers and the compensation payments to keep some coal-fired generation running – the whole shebang.
The tally would certainly top $100bn, possibly $200bn or even $300bn, and we have only just begun. Reputable estimates suggest the entire “transition” – assuming it can ever happen – will cost $1 trillion.
And then there is the opportunity cost.
What else could have been done with all the money, what companies and industries might have stayed and invested on our shores if we had not imposed escalating energy costs, turning our natural energy advantage into our achilles heel?
What of the families and small businesses burdened by unprecedented electricity prices? What difficult life decisions or missed chances might they have avoided without this power price pressure?

Sensing that the dog botherer was about to blow a gasket, the reptiles flung in an economics prof, a certain Gigi, always handy when discussing climate science, UNSW Economics Professor Gigi Foster discusses the need for a “re-evaluation of economic literacy” in Australia. “Where are the mechanisms?” Ms Foster told Sky News host Chris Kenny. “I think we need to have a re-evaluation of economic literacy and reality … in this country.”

Gigi can also be found at the IPA...

On the other hand, This article needs other features and inputs which are only available on the web , Take me there.

Oh dear, that's only going to send the dog botherer even more off the deep end ...

Why this matters
No matter how uncertain Antarctica’s future may be, one thing is clear: this frozen frontier is crucial to the stability of our global climate.
The Antarctic Slope Current was once a steadfast guardian of the icy continent. But now the current is being transformed by the very ice it protects.
Humanity must act fast to preserve the current, by cutting carbon emissions. When it comes to Antarctica, this action isn’t optional — it’s the only way to hold the line.

And if you follow the environment tag there's even more to upset the dog botherer and get him agitated.

Yep,  there he goes, with that word much beloved by reptiles, a zealot ranting at other zealots ...

The cost of “climate action” is high. If it did what the zealots pretend, saving our beautiful planet from impending doom, it would be worth the communal sacrifice, but there is no evidence or prospect of any benefit.
The aim of reducing emissions has been met, with the latest quarterly report showing Australia’s emissions down by 29 per cent since 2005. But, scientifically, this can do nothing to achieve the aim of making the climate more benign. And let us be clear, this is the only aim of the policies.
As Albanese put it in Tasmania in October 2022, “with more frequent and intense natural disasters occurring … we need to act on climate change”.
In the ABC’s election debate in April the Prime Minister said there was a “cost to our environment of not acting on climate change” and that his government was “acting on it” and would “deliver on climate change”.
This is nonsense.
Nothing Albanese or his government has done or will do will have the slightest impact on our climate – this is the great lie of all this rhetoric and wasted effort.
Global emissions continue to rise, so that the destruction of our once reliable and cheap electricity grid has had zero impact on the climate.
We need to stop kidding ourselves. Alarmists often say the cost of not acting is higher than the cost of acting, but they provide no figures or facts to back up this glib line.
Back in 2018 Alan Finkel, the nation’s chief scientist at the time, said if we shut down our whole country so that no human being in Australia produced a single gram of greenhouse gas emissions the impact on the climate would be “virtually nothing”.
No scientist could honestly say otherwise; it is the scientific fact in a country that produces 1 per cent of global emissions.
All around us is a national political, media and academic delusion that playing around with solar panels is changing the climate. Yet the same people, with no hint of irony, say we should follow the science.

Sheesh, there the reptiles go again, always triggering the dog botherer, Windfarms near Portland, in Victoria’s southwest. Picture: Alex Coppel

Oh what to do, what to do? 

Why do nothing, except perhaps burn a lot more coal and gas, and keep on with oil, and everything will be for the best in the best of all possible reptile worlds...

The science says our actions are inconsequential. The only argument to support our suite of policies is to claim a kind of first mover’s advantage in leading the way for global action – but that is just not happening.
We persist with our UN-inspired net zero by 2050 evangelism while the largest emitters in the world – China, the US, Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Iran – are not signed up to that target. These countries make up more than 64 per cent of all emissions – almost two-thirds of global emissions – and their emissions continue to rise, swamping our cuts many times over and rendering our efforts ever more meaningless.
Given our size, our natural energy advantage and the prosperity we have built across the past two centuries, our smartest move would be to watch global action, reduce emissions where we can and act in our own best interests rather than those of the UN poseurs. If carbon neutrality remained imperative we would take our time and switch to proven and reliable nuclear power.
Instead, we continue to inflict pain on ourselves for no gain. If carbon dioxide emissions are changing the climate in ways that are deleterious for us, we might be better off spending $1 trillion on mitigating infrastructure such as dams, irrigation and sea walls.
Or we could keep sending our money to China so they can use our coal and ore to manufacture solar panels and wind turbines to sell back to us.

Strange then that the reptiles should show the dog botherer celebrating the Snowy scheme, when what's the point? 

It's all meaningless futility, or perhaps just new engineering standards, Former Snowy Hydro chief executive Paul Broad praises the Snowy Hydro 2.0 project, referring to it as “phenomenal”. “This is a really good project. The engineering going into this project is phenomenal,” Mr Broad told Sky News host Chris Kenny. “At some point, someone will step back from this and say what has been achieved on this site in 10 or 15 years’ time will set new engineering standards.”

Now some may say they've heard the dog botherer doing this sort of blather so often that they're nauseated by the sights and the sounds, but wait a moment, this is poetry day, and you haven't heard from Dorothea yet, and surely "woke" must also make an entrance, if only so the pond can mention its standard response...

Believe, have faith, the hive mind is full of fuckheads ...

Our climate sanctimony has us, economically and environmentally, urinating into the wind. It is difficult to comprehend how sentient beings could devise such inexplicable self-harm.
Teal MP Zali Steggall says if we all took the attitude that our cuts made no difference “we would fail to limit warming to a safe level” – but we are achieving nothing. Steggall also says that because of the threat of bushfires “we urgently need plans to protect our communities” – well, yes, but what do you think will protect us best from bushfires: firebreaks and fuel reduction or renewable energy?
This weekend across South Australia, much of Victoria and western NSW severe drought grinds on. On the other side of the Great Divide some areas of the NSW coast are experiencing their worst flooding on record, wreaking havoc and taking lives.
To deal with these vagaries we need reliable energy and economic resilience.
Instead, we get climate alarmism – where the only response to a perpetual climate challenge is to accelerate an expensive and unwieldy transition to renewables that increases the expense of everything, undermines the reliable supply of energy, makes our economy weaker and, for all that, cannot make a jot of difference to the climate.
You could not make this up. Dorothea Mackellar needs rewriting: I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains, of ragged mountain ranges, of droughts and flooding rains. I love her vast transmission lines, turbines far as eyes can see, her solar farms and blackouts, the woke, virtue-signalling land for me.

The pond regrets that in all that bromancer and dog botherer pissing into a verbal void the only mention of King Donald was the bromancer's enthusiastic embrace of the mango Mussolini's attitude to fossil fuels ...

So much else to celebrate, and the pond will leave the immortal Rowe to the celebrations ...