In which the reptiles try to catch up, only to regress with our Henry and Killer of the IPA ...

 

Another day, another reptile miss ...

Sure you could find Stockdale in The Graudian, or at the ABC, and he sent the keen Keane in Crikey right off ... Stockdale Syndrome: Alan, resentful old blokes, and the Liberals’ talent crisis, Alan Stockdale’s ‘joke’ about assertive women was more than an ill-judged remark. It was reflective of the mindset of resentment that is embedded in the Liberal membership. (sorry, paywall)

“The women in this party are so assertive now that we may need some special rules for men to get them pre-selected”.
For a man with more square centimetres of eyebrow than there are federal female Liberal MPs, Alan Stockdale — showing the fine political antennae of someone last in active politics in the 20th century — sure knows how to upset people. Female people, particularly. The kind that aren’t found very much in his party. The kind that make up the NSW Liberal’s Women’s Council, to whom he made his hilarious jape.
“The women in this party are so assertive now that we may need some special rules for men to get them pre-selected”.
For a man with more square centimetres of eyebrow than there are federal female Liberal MPs, Alan Stockdale — showing the fine political antennae of someone last in active politics in the 20th century — sure knows how to upset people. Female people, particularly. The kind that aren’t found very much in his party. The kind that make up the NSW Liberal’s Women’s Council, to whom he made his hilarious jape.
Stockdale knows a thing or two about avoiding girl germs. In the last Kennett cabinet, of which he was treasurer, there were four women out of 20. Count ’em. When he finished up as Liberal president in 2014, he urged that there be more women in senior roles within the party, but rejected quotas. At the time, the Abbott cabinet had one woman.
One word in his ill-judged remark was especially poorly chosen: “Assertive”. Nothing, except rolling out “hysterical”, could have been more finely calculated to convey the image of a pale, male and stale reactionary being discomfited by uppity women who won’t stop talking. Sussan Ley rightly responded that she wanted more assertive women to join the party.
Stockdale, along with his fellow Victorian and successor as federal president Richard “Skeletor” Alston, are two of the gang of three imposed on the NSW Liberal division by Peter Dutton in the wake of the NSW party’s local election debacle. That imposition was resented by NSW moderates at the time and, now that Dutton has been dispatched into the outer darkness, is seen as the persistence of a very dead hand from well beyond the political grave — and one located in that graveyard of Liberal hopes, Victoria.
The problem for Liberal women, however, is that Stockdale was expressing, allegedly in jest, exactly what large numbers of old white male Liberal members think: that it’s high time everyone stopped talking about the rights of women, and people of colour, and trans people, and people with disabilities, and focused on their rights, instead.
Resentment is the fuel that powers the base of the Liberal Party, which like any party membership is more extreme than its parliamentary ranks. Resentment toward anyone not white and male, especially. It’s why fostering, and exploiting, resentment has been so appealing to Liberal leaders, Malcolm Turnbull aside, since the Howard years. It’s why Peter Dutton became leader, with the confident hope he could masterfully exploit resentment to throw Labor out. He was successful in defeating the Voice referendum, which became a vote for maintaining white privilege, but resentment can only get you so far in a cost of living election. Money goes a lot further, as Anthony Albanese demonstrated.
That old white membership is the single biggest impediment to the Liberal Party ceasing to look like a political documentary about the 1970s and looking more like Australia a quarter of the way through the 21st century. Urban Australia, with high numbers of voters born overseas, a more diverse array of economic activities, and a reliance on two-income households and thus working, often professional, women, is fast becoming terra incognita for the Liberals. They can’t get elected there, and they don’t look anything like the electorates they’re pursuing...

And so on and on, and he even scored a Wilcox ...

And so to the lizard Oz, home for the old white membership of the Liberal party, and at last the aged rag had caught up with the break-up of the bromance ...

Truth to tell, the pond hasn't the slightest interest in that lesser member of the Kelly gang, telling the tale. 

Every American rag has been salivating over it, The Bulwark was in a frenzy, and the pond's inbox has been bombarded with agitated emails, often with a Paul Krugman "pox on both their houses" tone...

On Tuesday, after Elon Musk blasted out the screed above, a friend texted me: “I guess the worm has turned. Oh, wait, I guess that’s RFK.” Indeed. We don’t know exactly what set off this tweet and the series of whines that followed, but it may have been the ketamine talking.

Anyway, Musk happens to be right: The One Big Beautiful Bill Act — its actual name! — is indeed a disgusting abomination. But this is one of those cases where it takes one to know one. Few men have done as much damage out of sheer arrogance, ignorance and pettiness as Elon Musk. He has thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of deaths on his hands.

And even his parting blast is destructive, demonstrating that he has learned nothing from his abject failure as a policymaker. The OBBBA is terrible, but not at all for the reasons Musk claims.

There have been a number of articles about Musk’s departure that portray him as a “Mr. Smith goes to Washington” type, a well-intentioned naif thwarted by special interests. Gag me with a Cybertruck.

What actually happened was that a zillionaire who knew nothing about government marched in claiming that he could cut $2 trillion from the $6 trillion federal budget by eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse. This was obvious nonsense, but Musk has never showed any signs of being willing either to admit his mistakes or learn from them. The wild claims just kept coming, like his insistence that millions of dead people were getting Social Security.

Claims about budget savings by DOGE — the Musk-run not-actually-a-government department that has been running wild since Donald Trump took office — have rapidly shrunk over time. Still, DOGE has continued to put out “walls of receipts” purporting to document some of its achievements. Again and again, investigators going through these reports have found them full of ludicrous errors — the same canceled contract listed three times, an $8 million saving reported as $8 billion, and more.

Seriously, would any of Musk’s tech-bro friends have invested in a venture run by someone with such a record of making extravagant but completely unfilled promises, then following up with false claims of success?(or you can try his substack. How about We Are No Longer a Serious Country?).

The memes have also been raging ... with this one featuring on Ari Melber ...

The pond was pleased to see the immortal Rowe pick up on them ...

It's always in the detail ...

Oh dear that hapless sinking Tesler feeling...

Say what, the pond has entirely neglected its herpetological studies? 

Oh okay, what are they blathering on about in the extreme far right portion of the lizard Oz?

Sheesh, the pond would have been better off sticking with the 'toons ...

There was no way the pond could indulge another bout of transphobia...

How was this allowed to happen? Ruling raises questions on gender medicine

The public should know why gender-affirming care became the dominant practice in Australia without good quality evidence to support it.

By Bernard Lane

This says it all ...

Bernard Lane, a former journalist at The Australian, publishes Gender Clinic News.

Another reptile bigot with a bee in his hive mind bonnet. 

No wonder the pond's TG friends refuse to talk to the pond when the pond casually mentions its day job is to trawl through the lizard Oz, no matter the depth of the gutter.

Still, the pond must do its duty, though our Henry's transformation into an expert on defence must have startled the bromancer even more than the pond ...

Say what, not leading with a snap of drones in action? 

Was the recent Ukrainian foray entirely in vain as our Henry re-fights 'Nam?

Sure, spend more – but defence needs serious reform, The current focus on the ratio of defence spending to GDP risks ignoring efficiency and value for money.

It will take far more than a flood of taxpayer dollars to fix our defence force.

This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

The reptiles promised five unendurable minutes, but the pond hoped at least for a passing mention of Heracleides, or Themistocles, Leonidas, Pericles, Philopoemen, Alexander the Great, Marcus Agrippa, Scipio Africanus, or at least Julius Caesar and his splendid telling of the Gallic wars ...

Some years ago, Mark Thomson, the then senior economist at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, and I systematically examined the reviews that had been carried out of the efficiency with which the Australian Defence Force’s major weapons systems are acquired and maintained. Now, as pressures mount for what would be a near doubling in defence expenditure, the lessons that emerged seem timelier than ever.

There was no shortage of documentation: in 2011-12 alone there were 22 defence-related reviews (though that was admittedly a year when the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government was doing its thing). While their quality varied greatly, those dealing with the selection, acquisition and sustainment of materiel were typically careful and comprehensive.

Virtually every review pointed to deficiencies in the Defence Department’s management systems. There were countless plans, but no plan; myriad accountabilities, but no accountability.

The result was a structure in which decisions were poorly integrated. Individuals knew what they were intended to do but were not fully responsible for its being done. Meanwhile, Defence’s tracking systems generated torrents of information, but its sheer scale, and the lack of tight connection between decisions on the one hand and what was measured on the other, drastically undermined that information’s usefulness.

Nope, nothing, nada, not even time on a medieval battlefield, and the reptiles didn't help with an AV distraction, featuring a ship yearning for a good droning, like the Moskva, flagship of the Russian Black Sea fleet, Labor has revealed it’s open to increasing defence spending and boosting military forces. Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy says $57 billion of additional funding has been made since Labor took office. Mr Conroy has criticised a new Cost of Defence report, which hints at the Coalition injecting more cash into defence, as well as suggesting the defence force is not prepared for near-term conflict. It follows remarks made by the US this week, which has called on Australia to increase funding to 3.5 per cent of GDP.

Our Henry busied himself with paperwork ...always wise when bone spurs get in the road of front line service...

For example, the Coles review of the sustainment program for the Collins-class submarines noted an instance in which “a junior officer (was) required to render a very detailed progress report every day, which was sent to over 100 recipients”. Few presumably read it, and even fewer would have felt any sense of responsibility for the progress it supposedly tracked.

Adding to the overall lack of accountability was the leadership’s reluctance to hold individuals to account for poor performance. Evaluation processes too often rewarded justifying problems rather than preventing them. The unsurprising consequence was a chronic failure to exploit opportunities for improvement, accompanied by periodic instances of acute breakdown.

The issues, it seemed, began at the process’s very start, when procurement decisions were made. Since the reforms introduced by Sir Henry Bland (secretary of the Defence Department, 1968-1970) and his formidable successor, Sir Arthur Tange (secretary of the Defence Department, 1970-1979), the goal had been to impose what Tange described as “a disciplined relationship between strategy and force structure within the constraints of what is financially feasible”.

The defence estimates would no longer be “an adding machine for aggregating the intentions of the army, navy and air forces, with limited knowledge of the purposes that expenditure is serving”. They would reflect a rational assessment of costs and benefits, based on trade-offs that were systematically evaluated and frequently updated. That scrutiny would extend to the defence industrial base, more carefully targeting support to critical requirements.

Inevitably a snap of a sub surfaced, Collins Class submarines in formation while transiting through Cockburn Sound, Western Australia. Picture: Department of Defence

Our Henry droned on, the next best thing to a drone attack ...

But despite an imposing machinery designed to undertake those assessments, there was little evidence in the reviews of that kind of careful consideration. Rather, the “lessons learned” study that a team from the RAND Corporation carried out of the Collins project would lead one to think that Mr Murphy, of the eponymous law, was an incorrigible optimist, at least as far as major defence ventures were concerned.

And as late as 2011, when the program was approaching its 30th year, the Coles review found that “despite the fact that virtually all senior people we spoke to were clear that the Collins-class capability is ‘strategic’ for Australia, there is no clear or shared public understanding of why this is a strategic capability, nor of the implications”.

Additionally, problems were frequently ignored, making them harder to fix. To take but one example, the review undertaken by Paul Rizzo of naval sustainment pointed to “poor whole-of-life asset management, blurred accountabilities, inadequate risk management, poor compliance and assurance, and a culture that places the short-term operational mission above the need for technical integrity”.

As if that was not bad enough, the review noted that all the failures were “longstanding, well known to Defence, and the subject of many prior reports”. Nor is that unusual: the reviews almost invariably found that the issues had persisted for years.

There have, for sure, been many remedial efforts in response to those reviews and others. While the changes usually seem sensible, it is difficult, if not impossible, to know whether or not they worked, individually and collectively. In effect, reviews were rarely followed up, in the sense of retrospective assessments (“post-mortems”) that rigorously examined the effectiveness of the changes they had introduced.

A US comparator is telling. Over the period from 1989 to 2000, the American defence acquisition system experienced reform on an unprecedented scale: in 1995 alone, there were 23 major reform initiatives. Recognising that the impacts would take time to materialise, it was only in 2009 that an overall, bottoms-up appraisal was carried out.

The pond will concede the Americans are ahead of the game. 

Stripping a ship of its Harvey Milk name so that Captain Bonespurs can purportedly revitalise the warrior culture with the help of Champers Faux Noise Pete should make the Iranians tremble with fear (Milk served in the Korean war in the navy and scored an other than honourable discharge for his pains, Captain Bonespurs served in the black tenancy and Central Park 5 wars).

For reasons only the reptiles understand, they included one of those meaningless collages as a visual distraction, Former prime ministers (L-R) Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and Paul Keating.

Perhaps it was designed to make hive mind readers forget the likes of the onion muncher, Malware and the clap happy liar from the Shire ...

Back to the droning ...

The appraisal concluded that while some progress had been made, the initial problems tended to resurface, albeit in new, unexpected, forms, as well-intentioned changes in one area stymied changes in others. Understanding those interactions helped shape subsequent reform efforts.

There has been nothing in Australia that even vaguely compares to that appraisal. To make things worse, there has been no attempt, along the lines of the US Defence Department’s magnificent, recently concluded, five-volume history of defence acquisition, to comprehensively survey the evolution of defence budgeting, acquisition decision-making and implementation.

That would not only be an invaluable resource for those trying to navigate the system; it would make the successes and failures clearer. Without that institutionalised memory and reflection, we don’t have 50 years’ experience of modern defence procurement; we have one year, 50 times over.

It would be useful too if there were regular comparisons between our approaches and those of best-practice performers, such as Israel, whose capacity to develop and adapt new weapons systems remains extraordinary. As Bismarck observed long ago, “Fools learn from experience; wise men learn from the experience of others”.

That's it, that's all he wrote? 

One solitary reference to Bismarck? 

No invocation of the 300 Spartans stationed in Darwin ready to defy the Chinese invaders? 

Oh finish it quickly, do finish it now ...

No one could reasonably expect Defence to be a paragon of efficiency, optimally matching current capabilities and future contingencies. On top of all the infirmities that bedevil the public sector, it suffers from factors that greatly hinder its task – including formidable technological and operational complexity, the inherent uncertainty of the threats that will have to be met, and the perpetual clash between an organisational culture that prizes stability and a strategic environment that is increasingly chaotic.

It was nonetheless clear from the reviews that we could do better – much better. Judging by the information publicly available, that largely remains the case. The risk the current focus on the ratio of defence spending to GDP creates is that instead of tackling the root causes of the shortcomings we will, as in education, simply throw money at the symptoms.

That would be about as sensible as turning up the volume on a faulty amplifier. Yes, there are, as ASPI has compellingly argued, dangerous weaknesses in our defence capabilities. But it will take far more than a flood of taxpayer dollars to set them right.

In all that whining and moaning, not a single suggestion as to what to do, not even a wise investment in slings and rocks from ancient times ...

And so to Killer, not because the pond wants to, but because he's there:

Political ineptitude, bloated unis fuel immigration chaos, Of the almost 205,000 foreigners in Australia on temporary skilled work visas only 3 per cent have skills in home building trades.

The sort of immigrants we need to supercharge the nation’s housing supply simply aren’t here. Photo: Brett Wortman / Sunshine Coast Daily

This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

Didn't they just allow Killer back in country?

The only interest Killer's bog standard bashing of pesky, difficult, uppity furriners held for the pond was when the Great Replacement theory would get a run ...

At first Killer danced around the notion, though it was lurking in the subtext...

Australia’s federal and state governments are constantly banging on about the need to supercharge the nation’s housing supply, but rarely do politicians address the central issue behind this problem: the sort of immigrants we need to achieve this urgent increase simply aren’t here.

Of the almost 205,000 foreigners in Australia on temporary skilled work visas, only 6000, or 3 per cent, have skills in home building trades. A cynic might think the CFMEU was behind the ridiculous fact. In fact, it turns out the CFMEU is not leaning on the Labor government to keep foreign tradesmen out and local construction workers’ wages up, because that absurd percentage, according to data provided by the Housing Industry Association, has never exceeded 3.4 per cent in a decade.

The reptiles interrupted with a meaningless AV distraction, Sky News host Paul Murray discusses how Australia is in the grip of a housing crisis. “The inner west of Sydney is a place which is filled with absolutely stunning homes, but they are normally smaller homes,” Mr Murray said. “They end up being … basically little two storey terraces.”

What a stupid man, and those houses don't look like the inner west, and why no mention of Lindfield or Gordon or such like?

Never mind the pond regularly has to deal with Woolahra/Vaucluse bigotry, so must move on with the recanting Killer ...

In short, it appears the entire political class is deliberately trying to increase construction costs and worsen housing affordability, not to mention lay the groundwork for a breakdown in social cohesion as immigration spirals out of control. It’s a kakistocracy.

Seven years ago, I argued for a “big Australia” in a public debate against my colleague, Judith Sloan, and Mark Latham hosted by the Centre for Independent Studies. But it turns out I was on the wrong team given how the migration system has evolved since.

More than 2.5 million people in this country – almost 10 per cent of the population – are on temporary visas of all sorts. It was almost 600,000 more than five years ago.

Immigration is no longer serving the interests of Australians but rather the immigrants who come here, and powerful vested interests, including the tertiary education sector and the big businesses that benefit mechanically from a larger population.

Australia’s economic standing is in free-fall, as evidenced by this week’s national accounts, which showed GDP per capita had gone backwards for nine of the past 11 quarters.

ANU economist Matthew Lilley says every additional immigrant household pushes up house prices. “Summing up this price effect nationwide, renters are collectively $1m worse off whether they keep renting or choose to buy,” Lilley tells me. “Obviously immigrants from less developed nations benefit from coming here, but this influx pushes home ownership out of reach of young and poorer Australians.”

The immigrants I’d hoped for in that 2018 debate were those who would make Australia more prosperous and confident. Instead, we’ve become poorer, and more divided, as we drastically reshape the nation’s cultural makeup by importing vast numbers of people from developing nations from non-English speaking backgrounds. A 2024 research paper published by economists at ANU found migrants who didn’t speak English well faced a 28 per cent income penalty and were less than half as likely to report an income “over $20,000”.

Ah, there you go, vast numbers of people from developing nations from non-English speaking backgrounds, the Great Replacement theory in action, or perhaps a line borrowed from the 1950s of the two Wongs don't make a white kind (good on ya gravel-voiced Artie).

 

Inevitably the Bolter turned up to embrace the Cantaloupe Caligula, and never mind that he was the child of migrants and took his third trophy wife despite her having dodgy entry credentials, Sky News host Andrew Bolt says many politicians in the West have “refused for too long” to talk about how mass immigration is changing their countries. US President Donald Trump has signed a proclamation banning foreign nationals from several countries from entering the United States. The ban fully restricts and limits the entry of nationals from 12 countries, including Afghanistan, Haiti, Iran, Sudan and Yemen. “Because of their cowardice to look at some of the negative sides of that, the blowback now is coming, and at times it's extreme,” Mr Bolt said.

You can always rely on the Bolter for a goodly dose of racism, but Killer of the IPA isn't far behind ... because it's about time to do an Enoch Powell, or as the Brits know it these days, embrace the inner Sir Keir, worried by the way Nigel keeps making plans (albeit losing a chairman on the way) ...

Research from Denmark, published in The Economist in October 2024, found immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, even those of prime working age, were overall a net drain on public finances. In those seven years, more than 620,000 South Asians have moved to Australia permanently, more than 10 times the number from the UK over the same period.

Over the same period, more than 122,000 East Asians, largely mainland Chinese, have settled here. Australians have been remarkably and admirably tolerant, despite this rapid change in national demography, showing little of the interracial strife increasingly evident in Europe and the UK, where foreign-born populations remain much lower than here.

Anthony Albanese hasn’t yet had to copy British counterpart Keir Starmer, who recently warned the UK was becoming an “island of strangers” owing to immigration that was “pulling our country apart”.

Never mind the response he garnered, and the hasty retreat that followed, show a snap of the man, Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer Keir Starmer, who recently warned the UK was becoming an “island of strangers”. Picture: Getty Images

What a relief, he looks thoroughly white ...but then the pond began to wonder.

Why was Killer so agitated? After all, it's a well-known fact, that sinking feeling ...

Then just to make it clear ...

Buckingham University’s Matt Goodwin recently estimated the white British share of the UK’s population will fall below 50 per recent by 2063, and plummet to 34 per cent by the end of the century. Australia, with a larger share of foreign-born residents, an increasingly anaemic native birthrate – and a proportionately much larger intake of migrants from South and East Asia – is on track to beat it by decades.

Did you get it?

the white British share of the UK’s population

As for Australia, did the Aboriginal people ever wonder about the white British share foisted on them?

Never mind, on with making Killer's racist intent even clearer ...

The universities, which depend on foreign students to maintain their increasingly bloated bureaucracies, deserve much of the blame for the immigration dysfunction. They increasingly launder work rights and residency by selling vocationally useless pieces of paper. The number of international students in Australia has increased by 70 per cent since 2022, to 608,262 in July last year. Incredibly, the number of so-called bridging visas on issue has exploded from 195,000 in 2018 to almost 380,000, driven largely by students who haven’t yet gone home, or refuse to, which puts enormous pressure on rents and public infrastructure.

How unified will Australia be in 2050 if it ends up being composed of three large groups: European, South and East Asian? We’re far more likely to achieve net-zero social cohesion than in greenhouse gases. No one can blame immigrants for wanting to move to Australia, which, while beginning to regress in economic and cultural terms, remains a wonderful place to live. But no fair-minded person could conclude the current rate and composition of immigration is helping native-born Australians.

Who? What?

native-born Australians.

Nah, he's not talking about the indigenous population, he's talking in the bog standard hive mind nativist no nothing way about the last 237 years of migrants...

For all the talk about curbing immigration in the lead-up to the election there’s little sign of it. In just the nine months to March, net permanent and long-term migration of 366,100 had already exceeded the government’s earlier budget forecast for the full 2025 financial year of 335,000, according to recent IPA research.

Australia isn’t the only nation running this grand experiment in economic and social destruction; Canada is doing much the same. At least its government has the good sense to list numerous home building trades on its skilled immigration list.

The main skill shortage we appear to have in Australia is intelligence – and that problem resides primarily in Canberra.

Adam Creighton is the Institute of Public Affairs’ chief economist.

Actually if the pond might be so bold, the problem clearly resides in Killer, the IPA, Gina, and the reptiles at the lizard Oz.

You can only swap bigotry for intelligence for so long before the last signs of intelligence evaporate into the air.

For some reason Killer's nativist ranting made the infallible Pope of the day that little bit more poignant ...perhaps it was the crown that set the pond off...