How to waste a holyday Monday with the lizards of Oz, featuring the cratering Caterist and Major Mitchell ...

 

As the United States tears itself apart, the reptiles marked the news down and led with ...

EXCLUSIVE
Morrison’s call to arms: Budget or bust for the Coalition
Scott Morrison outlines pathway back for Coalition, hits out at Labor scare campaigns, and supports higher defence spending, after being awarded a King’s Birthday honours gong.
by Geoff Chambers

Inevitably there was a thumb of the liar from the Shire, and next came a snap of King Chuck with ...

FULL LIST
See the full King’s Birthday honours list
Here’s who has received an Order of Australia, Distinguished and Conspicuous and Meritorious public award for 2025.
The Australian

and King Chuck was followed by...

MEDIA
TV’s highest earners in crosshairs: Stars to face big pay cuts in purge
The salaries of some Australia’s highest-paid TV stars are under scrutiny following revelations some of them rake in more money per minute they are on air than most people make in a month.
By Steve Jackson

As if the pond cares a jot or whit about FTA TV ...

Don't believe the clunk-eared lack of interest in what their kissing cousins at Faux Noise had helped spawn? 

See for yourself ...

Over on the far right this holyday Monday, it was just as weird...

What was the pond to make of this pearl of wisdom?

What Dr Jim failed to learn from his mentor, Mr Swan
By ruling out any retreat on his proposed paper profits tax on super earnings, Chalmers is tempting fate. While there are obvious differences, the parallels between his current tax misadventure and Swan’s mining tax one are striking.
by David Pearl

No pearl-clutching for the pond, especially this brand of pearl-clutcher ...

PM must explain why AUKUS pact advances US power
The submarine component of AUKUS is at risk if Anthony Albanese continues to rebuff US requests to increase defence spending.
By John Lee

That's supposed to force a bending of the knee to King Donald? The pond is supposed to be devastated by the fate of never never subs? Wasn't the bromancer hot to trot on drones, or was that just him droning on?

And so, despite the lure of the revival of the liar from the Shire offering his wisdom, that's how the pond ended back in the arms of the old stagers and hacks, trying to cope with the passage of time and vulgar youff ...

Oh dear: Political class dismisses Gen Z despair at their own peril, Baby Boomers eyeing their superannuation savings and property portfolios may rightly point out that they, too, started with nothing. Yet they were blessed to spend their formative years in an era when everything seemed possible.

The unhealed wound: 21-year-old Charlotte Walker announced as winner of last senate seat in SA after weeks of counting after the Federal Election.

Damn you croweaters, you've set the Caterist off, wouldn't you like to be anywhere else but here? This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

It turns out that the best way to deal with vulgar youff is to sneer at them and talk down to them, and the Caterist is a dab hand for the job ...

Charlotte Walker turned 21 on election day. In July she starts a new job on a salary of $233,000 a year representing South Australia as a Labor Senator.
“None of the sitting members knows what it is to be 21 right now,” she told the ABC. “I do because I am living through that.”
Entering adulthood is no longer the propitious moment it once was, the gateway to independence charged with the thrill of possibility. The challenge is to survive, as the senator-elect explains in an Instagram post endorsing Labor’s offer to reduce student debt that she recorded while applying her makeup.
“Five and a half grand might not seem much to Peter Dutton and his mates in big business,” she says. “But to a uni student that can make the difference between eating dinner or not.”
It is easy to mock Generation Z’s TikTok videos and Instagram loops as they stare into the front-facing camera of history and lament the hardship of growing up amid historic prosperity in an exceptionally peaceful and affluent country.
Yet Walker’s contributions in the Senate will deserve serious attention since her arrival symbolises generational change. As the first parliamentarian born in the 21st century, she bears the scars of a generation whose aspiration was beaten out of them before they left school.

Just to rub it in ... Charlotte Walker

So young.

Please think of the Caterist as he weeps into his gravy...

Baby Boomers eyeing their superannuation savings and property portfolios may rightly point out that they, too, started with nothing. Yet they were blessed to spend their formative years in an era when everything seemed possible and personal indolence was the only barrier to success.
Today’s young adults grew up under the cloud of catastrophism amid the normalisation of decline.
We should hardly be surprised at the revelations in Monash University’s 2024 Youth Barometer survey, which found that 62 per cent of young Australians anticipated being financially worse off than their parents.
Economic decline has been hard-baked into public policy for the next 40 years. The Treasury’s 2023 Intergenerational Report forecasts that GDP per capita growth will fall from its historical average of 3.1 per cent to 2.2 per cent by 2063.
Even that expectation looks hopelessly unrealistic after three years of a Labor government, during which the per capita GDP declined by 1.7 per cent. The IGR’s two-year-old forecast of government spending also requires an update. It predicts that spending will increase by 3.8 percentage points as a ratio to GDP, from 24.8 per cent in 2023 to 28.6 per cent in 2063. After a term of Labor, it has already reached 27 per cent.
The forecast for productivity growth, which Treasury downgraded from 1.5 per cent to 1.2 per cent, will likely be reduced further in the next report.
In other words, the outlook for Generation Walker is bleaker than Treasury’s pessimistic assumptions suggest. Their life chances are certainly less auspicious than those enjoyed by the oldest member of parliament, Bob Katter, when he turned 21 in the 1960s. Annual GDP growth averaged 5.1 per cent, productivity was growing by 2.5 per cent and a prudent government was spending less than 15 per cent of GDP.

There has to be a villain, so cue a snap, Jim Chalmers

And then the cratering Caterist did what the reptiles do so often these days in their misery. He turned back the clock to Ming the Merciless...

The modest expectations of the government at the time were a legacy of Robert Menzies, who rejected the welfare state mentality that had taken hold in Britain in the 1940s.
Bit by bit, however, Australia’s resistance to the alluring vision of cradle-to-grave entitlement has eroded. Like boiled frogs, we are discovering that we are living in a dystopian state in which the answer to every obstacle in life is the government.

Actually Ming he Merciless led the way in creating a welfare state, something imports like the Caterist always forget ... but do go on, condescending and sneering at vulgar youff ...

We can hardly blame Walker for thinking that way. She spent her late teens in the Covid era when healthy, active people were paid to stay at home and paternalist governments took over our lives, allegedly for our safety. It is little wonder that she thinks students are entitled to a few thousand dollars to ease a debt burden they willingly took on to enhance their job opportunities.
She sees no need to consider whether students deserve the money more than, say, a pensioner on $574.50 a week, queuing at a food bank, who has paid taxes over a lifetime.
The facile, fiscally illiterate approach to public policy now in vogue doesn’t concern itself with trade-offs since the government will pay for it all.
Treasury assumes the bloating of government is a given, a factor that politicians seemingly can’t control.
Health spending is forecast to rise from 4.2 per cent of GDP to 6.2 per cent by 2063. Aged care will increase from 1.1 per cent to 2.5 per cent, the National Disability Insurance Scheme from 0.9 per cent to 2.1 per cent, and interest payments from 0.9 per cent to 1.4 per cent. Together these items represent a 77 per cent increase in public spending as a share of GDP.
One day, it might dawn on Generation Walker that they’re the ones who will have to pay for this, not the baby boomers and Gen X whose superannuation savings the Treasurer wants to tax. They may realise that Jim Chalmers is engaging in intergenerational pilfering by discouraging people to save for old age, since every self-funded retiree relieves future generations of a burden they’re otherwise expected to carry.
With the right incentives, the $4.2 trillion invested in super would act as a giant future fund, allowing people the dignity of funding their retirement, health and aged care. Instead, the government is intent on taxing the thrifty to cover the growing costs of the services most people would readily fund themselves if given the opportunity.

And then just to show how tuned in to Gen X the Caterist is, there came a snap certain to be plastered all over TikTok and Instagram, Robert Menzies addressing Tasmanians ahead of a referendum in 1944.

Really? Again?

Poor hapless, hopeless reptiles locked in mindless memory of a lost golden age, and this is how they're going to turn things around?

This is how economic and moral declinism begins. Self-reliance is no longer a virtue but a fiscal inconvenience.

Say what? Moral declinism?

The pond could barely restrain a guffaw and went off to consult the wiki on the word ...

Declinism is the belief that a society or institution is tending towards decline. Particularly, it is the predisposition, caused by cognitive biases such as rosy retrospection, to view the past more favourably and the future more negatively.
"The great summit of declinism" according to Adam Gopnick, "was established in 1918, in the book that gave decline its good name in publishing: the German historian Oswald Spengler's best-selling, thousand-page work The Decline of the West."

FFS, even more ancient than Ming the Merciless and Oswald Spengler of all people as an inspiration?

Spengler was an important influence on Nazi ideology. He "provided skeletal Nazi ideas" to the early Nazi movement "and gave them a respectable pedigree". Key parts of his writings were incorporated into Nazi Party ideology.
Spengler's criticism of the Nazi Party was taken seriously by Hitler, and Carl Deher credited him for inspiring Hitler to carry out the Night of the Long Knives in which Ernst Röhm and other leaders of the Sturmabteilung (SA) were executed. In 1934, Spengler pronounced the funeral oration for one of the victims of the Night of the Long Knives and retired in 1935 from the board of the highly influential Nietzsche Archive which was viewed as opposition to the regime.
Spengler considered Judaism to be a "disintegrating element" (zersetzendes Element) that acts destructively "wherever it intervenes" (wo es auch eingreift). In his view, Jews are characterized by a "cynical intelligence" (zynische Intelligenz) and by "money thinking" (Gelddenken). Therefore, they were incapable of adapting to Western culture and represented a foreign body in Europe. He also clarifies in The Decline of the West that this is a pattern shared in all civilizations: He mentions how the ancient Jew would have seen the cynical, atheistic Romans of the late Roman empire the same way Westerners today see Jews. Alexander Bein argues that with these characterizations Spengler contributed significantly to the enforcement of Jewish stereotypes in pre-WW2 German circles.

Yep, there's your moral declinism in action...

What a clueless git the the cratering Caterist is, always grasshoppering from one trendy word bauble to the next, and ending up - the pond keeds not - with Tennyson ...

We have passed beyond the nanny state to something far more insidious: the helicopter state where the government hovers, micromanages and intervenes, not just to protect but to pre-empt and infantilise.
Generation Z has grown up in a world of regulated choices, apparently incapable of navigating life without ministerial intervention.
The antidote to declinism is aspiration, the belief that with the right incentives, individuals and families can build a better life and, in doing so, build a better nation.
We must trust 21st-century Australians to respond with the same irrepressible energy as their 20th-century predecessors if they’re offered a stake in the country’s prosperity: a home to buy, a family to raise, a business to grow and a future in which to invest. We must revive the spirit encapsulated in a line from Tennyson’s Ulysses to which Menzies alluded in his Forgotten People radio address: “to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield”.
Nick Cater is senior fellow at the Menzies Research Centre.

The ponds eyes had glazed over, and so most likely had any Gen X'er who'd made the mistake of piercing the lizard Oz paywall.

And so to the Rowe for the day ...

It's always in the detail, and what a gang of ruffians are on board that golf buggy ...

That golf buggy display is relevant, because the Major was briefly top of the reptile commentary world ma, having drifted in from the golf course to offer his own patented brand of political wisdom, and the reptiles helped out by showing old stagers and irrelevancies in abundance ...

Come on Major whack it out of the rough, use your wedgie ... (or perhaps a wedge iron?)

Dear sweet long absent lord, not this: With a bit of political nous, Coalition will be back in the game, If the conservative opposition is to claw its way back to relevance, policies to appeal to middle Australia’s hopes and dreams are the place to start.

And to begin? A snap of an irrelevance and a dodderer, Conservatives must appeal more to John Howard’s battlers than Peter Dutton achieved at the May 3 election. Picture: Getty Images

On the upside, it wasn't a snap of Ming the Merciless, so the pond could be taken off to Kansas, This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

Want to know how suffused in the past the reptiles are?

Check out the snaps that accompany this keening and wailing text ...

Many journalists have been predicting the end of the Coalition since its May 3 election loss.
Yet it’s a story that’s been written in previous decades by left-leaning hacks: during the Howard-Peacock-Howard period of opposition in the 1980s and ’90s when Labor led under Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, and again after Kevin Rudd’s federal Labor win in November 2007.
To survive this time the Coalition will need to learn the lessons set out in the excellent review into its disastrous 2022 loss by Scott Morrison to Anthony Albanese. That review was ignored by former opposition leader Peter Dutton.
The Coalition campaign this year was too light on policy and too quick to emulate every Labor announcement. Why flick Albanese if Dutton was just following Labor’s script?

Cue a snap of the chief villain, the reptile nemesis, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had the good fortune of Peter Dutton ignoring the 2022 election loss review. Picture: Philip Gostelow

Go on, Major, do a cratering Caterist and make an appeal to vulgar youff...

The 2022 review by former party director Brian Loughnane and former Liberal frontbencher Jane Hume argued the Coalition was becoming a party for baby boomers, it needed to target more women and young voters, and had to preselect more and better female candidates.
Last month, its vote was concentrated in men over 55.

And what's the demographic of the lizard Oz? 

By the pond's calculation, it's those of an age who can remember Ming the Merciless and understand why he retained the nickname Pig Iron Bob for many years ... but do go on ...

The Coalition in 2022 lost nearly all its inner metropolitan seats: six to Labor, five to the teals and one to the Greens.
It held only three of the top 30 seats nationally for professional women.
Its only positive in metropolitan Australia on May 3 was the win by Tim Wilson over teal incumbent Zoe Daniel in Melbourne’s Goldstein.
It won only four seats in greater Sydney, none in Adelaide and one – Andrew Hastie’s – in Perth.
John Howard in his 2023 book A Sense of Balance criticised Morrison for his 2020 attack on former Australia Post CEO Christine Holgate. Howard told this newspaper’s Troy Bramston in August 2022 that Morrison’s political management “was often defective”.
Howard was withering about the rise of factional warlords in the party, especially in NSW where some seats were without an endorsed candidate only weeks before the 2022 election. The NSW division last year failed to nominate candidates for council elections statewide.

Then came undiluted comedy in the revival of Malware, The biggest problem on the conservative side has been a lack of political nous since Malcolm Turnbull won the leadership in 2015. Picture: AAP

Just to be fair to the caption writer, that line came from Major Mitchell himself ...

All true but for this column’s money the biggest problem on the conservative side is a lack of political nous since Malcolm Turnbull won the leadership in 2015.
Turnbull, the ABC’s go-to conservative for criticism of the Coalition, lost 14 seats in a flat, eight-week 2016 campaign.
Turnbull did face an outrageous Mediscare campaign. Texts sent to millions of Australians claimed the Coalition wanted to privatise Medicare, as if any business would want to own it.
Turnbull failed to call out the scare until after the poll. That taught the Coalition nothing.
Dutton failed to counter his own Mediscare campaign this year when Labor linked health cuts that were never contemplated to the Coalition’s “$600bn nuclear power plan” which was never going to cost that much.
The Coalition’s leadership should have workshopped in advance the possibility of a second Labor attack on Medicare, given Labor had already been alleging Dutton cut federal spending as health minister. He did not.
This column argued on March 17, 2024, that Dutton’s nuclear plan was a political time bomb, even if nuclear was sensible policy. That piece reckoned the Coalition might drop the policy before polling day. Given the opposition’s wider failure to prosecute a detailed pro-nuclear strategy, it probably should have.

Aw, we're not nuking the country, but thank the long absent lord the Little to be Proud of mob were, as recently as May, holding on, as reported in Nationals MPs '100 per cent' back nuclear being kept ...

Stay true and firm and hard rustic lads, as the Major weeps over the fallen, Peter Dutton, flanked by wife Kirilly and John Howard, failed to counter a Mediscare campaign linked to his nuclear power plans. Picture: Getty Images

Can the Major brood any more about the past? After all, we've yet to see a snap of the onion muncher or even Comrade Bill?

Hold the Major's beer ...

It should at minimum have run ads attacking Labor’s Medicare and nuclear costing lies. Instead, it ran dead, even though polling showed young voters were open-minded on nuclear.
Labor’s national secretary, Paul Erickson, was not timid about negative ads. Speaking at the National Press Club on May 21, he credited “a lethal ad campaign” dragging down Dutton for Labor’s landslide.
Erickson also criticised the Coalition for withholding policy detail until far too late in the campaign.
Dutton was not the first to make the mistake of letting his political opponent define him. Morrison was just as passive after his miracle one-seat win in 2019 against Labor’s Bill Shorten.

Hang on, hang on, the liar from the Shire was head of the reptile news this day offering EXCLUSIVE advice. Now he's a passive fool who lucked in to a miracle win thanks to the long absent lord? Do go on ... because it turns out that the mutton Dutton was also a fool ...

Rather than stand up as PM against false media allegations about sexual misbehaviour in his government, he foolishly fed into a story about a couple of junior staffers.

And then came a Major insight, It may have been better had Scott Morrison had lost the 2019 election to Bill Shorten. Picture: AAP

This bizarro world of Major alternative reality gets truly weird ... the winning by losing thingie ...

In hindsight, it would have been better for the conservatives had Shorten won in 2019, forcing Labor to deal with the Covid pandemic and then to fight a Covid-induced global inflation breakout in the middle of Shorten’s planned $300bn expansion of federal outlays.
While polling last year showed Dutton was damaging Albanese, voters on election day had clear reservations about Dutton’s character and leadership style. That’s unsurprising.
On August 27, 2018, after Dutton’s two failed challenges against Turnbull who eventually lost to Morrison, this column wrote: “Even if Dutton could have lifted the Coalition vote in Queensland … what damage would he have done (to the Coalition vote) in NSW, Victoria and South Australia.”
The Australian’s editor-at-large, Paul Kelly, on May 7 wrote: “The lesson of election 2025 is that the public will endorse a lacklustre Labor government if the alternative is weak and unconvincing. The Liberals cannot win on Labor’s mistakes; they need to win on their values and policies.”
The conservatives were expert at criticism but lacked “the language and cultural ability to explain … their values to fellow Australians”.
This fits with Howard’s mantra: good politicians need strong advocacy skills.

Sad really, the Major spending all this time explaining how useless and irrelevant Murdochian media were, and then came the final retrospective triumph, the authoritarian-loving onion muncher himself, Tony Abbott engaged voters but had the instability of the Rudd-Gillard governments to capitalise upon. Picture: Martin Ollman

One thing seems to be certain. If the Liberal party keeps listening to the neighsayers in News Corp, they'll be doomed to an endless cycle of little Johnny, the liar from the Shire, the onion muncher and Ming the Merciless ... and much bellybutton-gazing in search of sellable fluff ...

No Coalition leader since Tony Abbott has had the ability to engage voters, but Abbott had the advantage of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd leadership instability.
It’s less about moving left or right than having a clear message voters can support.
This requires an underlying philosophy Coalition progressives and conservatives can sign up to. In Howard’s time, it was aspiration and personal choice.
Hence policies that supported decisions by stay-at-home mums with family tax benefit Part B or encouraged young families into inexpensive non-government schools.
Can readers point to the underlying philosophies of Turnbull, Morrison and Dutton?
For the party of small business and the family, policies to appeal to middle Australia’s hopes and dreams are the place to start. And the Coalition needs to be as sharp as Labor on negative ads. Think Abbott’s “Kevin O’Lemon” ads from 2010.
Liberals should see new Australians, especially Chinese and Indian migrants, as natural constituents. Many are in small business and believe in reward for hard work rather than government redistribution.
It should always champion lower taxes. Dutton went to the election with higher taxes.
On climate, the Coalition needs to be smarter. Voters, especially wealthy ones who get all their news from the Nine-owned newspapers and the ABC, will not oppose Albanese’s policies until power prices soar further and it becomes clear the rest of the world is walking away from net zero.

Uh huh, maintain that climate science denialism, even as it becomes clear the world is stuffed, and getting even more stuffed by the day ...

‘It was our hope spot’: scientists heartbroken as pristine coral gardens hit by Western Australia’s worst bleaching event

WA reefs experiencing 'worst coral bleaching event' ever to hit state – video

And this ...

DBCA marine scientist and PhD candidate Tahlia Bassett said widespread coral bleaching was present across the region and observed at all the sites they visited.

“Bleaching was really variable between and within sites and across the different types of corals themselves. Some are already showing signs of partial mortality as a direct result,” Ms Bassett said...

...Dr Inês Leal said it was important to also monitor invertebrates as they are the base of the food chain.

“Essentially, fish predate on invertebrates and then another animal will predate on the fish. So, without this community, you wouldn’t have food to sustain a balanced ecosystem,” Dr Leal said.

“We have found about 60 different species of macro-invertebrates during this latest monitoring, which is in terms of diversity, it is on par with what we found previously. However, in terms of the abundance of each individual species, there were differences."

Seawater in the Kimberley began to hit temperatures likely to cause significant heat stress and bleaching in corals in December 2024. Heat stress expanded into the Pilbara and Ningaloo regions in January 2025 and has remained abnormally high since.

Extensive coral bleaching has now been reported or observed by DBCA staff in the Kimberley, Ashmore Reef, Rowley Shoals, Montebello and Barrow Islands, Dampier Archipelago, inshore Pilbara, Exmouth Gulf and Ningaloo. Bleaching over such a wide extent has never previously been recorded in WA during a single event, and the intensity of bleaching at most locations is unprecedented.

Keep on yammering Major, and hoping vulgar youff will embrace the reptile hive mind, or go full toad of the deep north ...

For those sure that Labor has another six years, remember the Queensland election of Annastacia Palaszczuk in 2015. She went from seven of 89 seats to 44 seats and the support of independent Peter Wellington to form government after one term in opposition.

FFS, it's a holyday Monday, and the pond would have settled for some peace and quiet, instead of reading rowdy boofhead reptile boys doing the usual rough house stuff  ...

Leave those bloody posters on the wall ...

Was it all so yesterday to the hive mind?