In which the reptiles fudge it, and the pond is left with the damp squibs of the cratering Caterism and the parroting Major Mitchell...

 

Once again the reptiles resiled from the riotous confrontation that is currently roiling King Donald and News Corp.

The top of the digital front page was full of EXCLUSIVES this Monday morn, in the usual reptile way, and bleating about TG folk, in the usual reptile way ...

One EXCLUSIVE sent the reptiles reeling...

EXCLUSIVE
Newspoll: Coalition support slumps to 40-year low
The Coalition’s primary vote has fallen to its lowest point since Newspoll’s inception in 1985, while Anthony Albanese faces poor approval ratings at the start of his government’s second term.
By Simon Benson

That created a huge task for simpleton Simon, who sheltered over on the extreme far right, trying to flip the news by seeing it as a problem for comrade Albo's mob ...

ANALYSIS
Icarus curse looms for high-flying PM as Libs implode
Outside war or natural disaster, neither Labor nor the Coalition are ever likely to recover 40 per cent or more of the primary vote.
By Simon Benson
Political Editor

Excellent, eggs over easy, and for a nanosecond the pond was tempted to admire the flipping.

Steady, no reason to get excited by a feat the reptiles perform on a daily basis.

Who else were keeping company with this simpleton?

Just the usual hacks, hacking away ...

Please allow the pond to draw a contrast. 

The riotous confrontation roiling News Corp saw the NY Times come out of its shell ... with these yarns top of the page...

Even though democracy went to die in a billionaire's pocket, WaPo managed a trifecta at the top of the page...

We'll have none of that sort of nonsense. Fancy scribbling about traumatic tariffs and ethnic cleansing and King Donald in the Epstein pooh.

The pond understands, in these troubled times, it's best for the lizard Oz to keep its head down, stay insular and isolated, gathering fluff while practising the ancient art of navel gazing...

So be it, the pond will indulge them, beginning with the Caterist, taking up a truly urgent issue ...

The header: Sorry, votes for the kids won’t help democracy, Adding 16-year-olds to the electoral roll speeds up the transfer of political legitimacy from those with judgment tempered by experience to those still untouched by let-downs and contradiction.

The caption: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s plan to enfranchise 16-year-olds feels cheap and opportunistic.

The relentless insistence on getting the hell out of here: This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

It was impossible for the pond to get excited. 

Of course the aged old fart, the quarry whisperer extraordinaire, was going to be against vulgar youff ...

Three years ago the British parliament voted across party lines to raise the minimum age of marriage from 16 to 18, following a long campaign to protect adolescent girls from coerced or forced unions.
In Britain today it is illegal to perform tattoo or gender-altering surgery on a person under 18, with or without parental consent. Under-18s cannot bet, buy tobacco, own a firearm, enter a sex shop or watch an X-rated film. Obviously.
Clinical evidence shows the prefrontal cortex – the part of the brain responsible for impulse control, planning and rational decision-making – is not fully developed in the average human until around the age of 25. Yet by the time of the next British general election, 16 and 17-year-olds may be casting votes.
Labour’s Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner told the BBC last week: “I’ve felt passionate about this for a long time. This is about engaging young people in what’s going to happen in the future.” Rayner insists this is not about trying to rig the vote in Labour’s favour. Yet it hardly needs spelling out that the Labour Party has an obvious interest in lowering the voting age.
Polling consistently shows that neurologically underdeveloped voters tend to favour parties of the left. That is to say voters under 25, the age at which the prefrontal cortex typically reaches full maturity, consistently prefer left-of-centre parties to those on the centre right. The latest YouGov survey in Britain, for example, found that Labour (28 per cent) was narrowly in front of the Greens (26 per cent) in the 18-24 cohort. The Conservatives (9 per cent) trailed in fourth position behind the Lib Dems (20 per cent).

The pond would worry more about the prefontal cortex if the quarry whisperer himself hadn't shown that he was completely clueless and not just on the matter of flood waters.

The reptiles hastily interrupted this chain of thought with a snap, Angela Rayner leaves Downing St.

Ah a woman in red, that explains everything, the shameless hussy, as the Caterist ranted on ...

The debate over whether voting should be confined to citizens capable of managing impulses, weighing trade-offs and engaging with complex decisions was lost long ago. Yet the shift towards enfranchising younger teens has little in common with earlier voting age reforms, which were grounded in detailed inquiries and principled arguments.
When Britain lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 in 1969, it did so on the recommendation of the Latey Committee’s 1967 Age of Majority report, which examined civil law provisions affecting young adults. The report recommended that 18 be the minimum age for entering contracts, making wills, consenting to medical treatment and other markers of adult legal responsibility.

For no particular reason, the reptiles offered another AV distraction. 

Clearly this issue is of great moment on Sly Noise down under, what with other matters off limits, Sky News host James Macpherson discusses Monique Ryan’s push to lower the voting age across Australia. This comes as the UK has committed to lowering the voting age, allowing 16 and 17-year-olds to vote across the country. “Teal Monique Ryan is pushing for the voting age to be lowered after the UK government announced last week that 16-year-olds would be given the vote,” Mr Macpherson told Sky News Australia. “I’m not sure whether you want 16-year-olds making decisions on fiscal policy, foreign affairs and what we should do about the energy grid. “This is all about getting their vote before their idealism is ruined by reality.”

That begs the question of the reptiles' reality ruining reality, not to mention ruining the planet. Perhaps a little idealism might help, as a way of balancing tiresome cynicism about climate change and renewables ...

The 26th amendment to the US constitution, ratified in just three months in 1971, lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 in direct response to the Vietnam War draft, which conscripted nearly a million 18 to 21-year-olds. In Australia, the Whitlam government’s 1973 reforms were adopted with bipartisan support – accompanied by more than a little embarrassment from opposition benches that they hadn’t moved earlier.
By contrast, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s plan to enfranchise 16-year-olds feels cheap and opportunistic – devoid of serious rationale, absent any considered review and unsupported by evidence that it will strengthen democratic engagement. It is the policy equivalent of a mood board: a few social media talking points, a vague appeal to progress and a sanctimonious air of redressing past wrongs.
The Conservatives may huff and puff but they’ll almost certainly support the measure in their desperation to appear modern and relevant to a generation that is never going to vote for them anyway. If there is any justice, it may yet backfire: the rising Greens vote, the potential for a Corbynite breakaway party and the surprisingly strong youth support for Nigel Farage all suggest the youth vote is not the reliable left bloc it once was.

Such fear, time to bring in comrade Albo's mob, with a snap weary from reptile overuse and abuse, Anthony Albanese speaks at a press conference after a Steel Decarbonisation Roundtable in Shanghai, China.

The pond began to wonder why the reptiles hadn't employed a 16 year old to write on the topic. 

They couldn't have done a worse job than the fear-mongering Caterist (eek, Corby, eek Farage, as if they hadn't been around without the help of 16 year olds).

Then it came time for the Caterist to reveal a surprising amount of self-awareness ...

Which brings us to Australia, where Anthony Albanese will be watching developments with interest. What would stop Labor from amending the Commonwealth Electoral Act to add 16 and 17-year-olds to the electoral roll before the next election? Only a sense of shame about breaking yet another pre-election promise – not, it must be said, a high bar.
Labor backed a Senate inquiry into lowering the voting age in 2018 and endorsed its findings in principle. Its hesitancy came down to the question of whether voting under 18 should be compulsory.
Cantankerous Sky News commentators will grumble into their lapel mics (this one included), but the political incentive to go along with it may prove irresistible to the opposition. Resistance would carry a social cost: the appearance of being out of touch with a generation raised to believe that youth equals truth.

At last a flash of insight ...

Cantankerous Sky News commentators will grumble into their lapel mics (this one included)

That rare moment was swept away by the caption to the next Sky Noise down under clip, Teens comprise a small but informed portion of voters, experts told Reuters on Tuesday (July 17) as Britain announced plans to give 16 and 17-year-olds the right to vote in all UK elections in a major overhaul of the country's democratic system.

So the reptiles know how to reference Reuters...

Naturally Greta posed an extreme, dire threat to the Caterist's climate science denialism ...

That belief has deep cultural roots. In 2018, 15-year-old Greta Thunberg told a UN plenary session: “We have not come here to beg world leaders to care. We have come here to let you know that change is coming.” Once, Thunberg might have been reprimanded for her impertinence. Today, she is celebrated as a prophet, untainted by com­promise or corruption, her moral clarity held up as a rebuke to adult failure.
The romanticisation of youth has rarely ended well. In Maoist China, teenage Red Guards, convinced of their moral superiority, were unleashed to purge counter-revolutionary thinking – with catastrophic consequences.
In revolutionary France, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideal of the “natural child” – untainted by social corruption – fed the moral absolutism of the Reign of Terror.

To help, the reptiles produced a most unflattering snap of Nige, There is surprisingly strong youth support for Nigel Farage.

Actually there's surprisingly strong support for Nige from old farts, and the US managed to elect King Donald without any help from vulgar youff, but there you go, and there the Caterist went ...

In our own time, the teenager with a selfie stick and an Instagram account is granted the platform and status of an emerging moral authority.
Extending voting rights to this cohort accelerates the transfer of political legitimacy from those whose judgment is tempered by experience to those still untouched by disappointment and contradiction. None of this is to suggest that young people should be excluded from civic life. Their energy and passion are vital, and political awareness in adolescence can lay the foundations for lifelong engagement. But awareness is not the same as judgment and fervour is not a substitute for wisdom.
Democracies depend not just on the will of the people but on the capacity of the people to weigh complexity, anticipate consequences and govern themselves.
As I was writing this column, news broke of the death of John Stone, aged 96. Reflection will give us a clearer picture of the substantial contribution he made to civic life as a passionate, intelligent and patriotic reformer.
This much is clear, however: Australia is a more prosperous, fairer and more hopeful country than it might have been had Stone not pursued a career in public policy. He is sorely missed.
Nick Cater is a senior fellow at the Menzies Research Centre.

If Stone is an example of what age can produce, bring on vulgar youff ...

And now to a correction or at least an amplification. 

You see, the lizard Oz editorialist did waste a few words on King Donald this day...

That's it? That's the best they could do?

Talk about mealy-mouthed, and that link at the very end led to a reprint of a WSJ story already covered by the pond, and buried in the Oz, well away from the front of the digital edition.

They really are running silent, if not so deep, and so was the Major ...

The header: Albanese must be wary of Xi but also of of Trump, Anthony Albanese needs the China trade relationship because of our coal and iron ore exports but he must not kowtow to a country which imposed unconscionable trade sanctions. 

The caption: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese speaks with media during a stop at Chengdu in China. Picture: Joseph Olbrycht-Palmer

The relentless desire to be elsewhere: This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

Punters might have hoped that Major Mitchell would drop in to the nineteenth hole and deliver a blinding study of the matter confronting News Corp, what with him being trumpeted as the rag's media expert.

Nah, he's still stuck on China ...

Our media’s polarised reporting about President Donald Trump is blinding some journalists assessing Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s handling of our trade relationship with China and defence ties to the US.
The starkest differences are between Whitlam generation journalists on social media who were starry-eyed about Albanese’s visit to China last week and Sky News After Dark hosts, many of them fill-ins during school holidays, for whom Trump is a genius and China a pariah. 
To be fair some of Sky News’ more experienced hosts – most notably Andrew Bolt who has been on leave – have been very critical of Trump this year. 
Albanese has spoken publicly about his trip in the context of Gough Whitlam’s 1972 recognition of China.

Cue another snap much overused and abused by the reptiles, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and partner Jodie Haydon at the Great Wall of China. Picture: AAP

The Major spent a lot of his time "to be fairing", a rough equivalent of trotting out billy goat butts ...

Labor media supporters would normally be the first to criticise China’s civil rights violations against the Uyghurs and Tibet, and its bullying in the South China Sea of Vietnam, the Philippines and Thailand. But hatred of Trump trumps all China concerns in their world. 
Even clear-eyed China critic Peter Hartcher in the Nine papers was starry-eyed about the green metals opportunities allegedly opened up by Albanese’s visit. Never mind the technology does not exist yet. 
This column reckons Albanese has to walk and chew gum: he needs the China trade relationship because China’s imports of our coal and iron ore are our only economic success story since the election of the Rudd government in 2007. 
Yet Albanese should not kowtow to China after its unconscionable 2020-21 trade sanctions against us at odds with our free trade agreement. Nor should he apologise for Liberal prime minister Scott Morrison’s criticism of China’s handling of Covid-19. 
To be fair, Albanese has been standing up for Australia on China’s live-firing exercise in the Tasman Sea in February and his government’s decision to force the sale of Darwin Harbour, owned by Chinese company Landbridge. 

Over it all loomed the unspoken, the orange ogre, US President Donald Trump. Picture: AFP

He now needs to dispel US doubts about his government’s commitment to the American alliance.
The failure to secure a meeting with the President is not the catastrophe the populist right media imagines, but sending the US a clear signal we remain committed to the Alliance is critical. 

Hang on, hang on, the reptiles bored the pond into terminal ennui last week with incessant harping on the US alliance, and what a catastrophe it was. 

Is the lizard Oz now to be exempted because it's not part of some weird Major world involving "populist right media"?

'Tis passing true that the lizard Oz isn't very popular and so it's attempts to be populist are futile gestures, but why can't the Major just admit that the bromancer is routinely an hysteric of the first water?

Never mind, carry on ...

The US will have noticed how China and its media organs have used the Albanese visit to send a message that China has influence over one of America’s closest allies.
Why wouldn’t the US want some assurances given Albanese’s history of criticising Trump and cosying up to China? It is planning to hand over the keys to the jewel in the US defence crown – the Virginia-class submarine, the first three of which should start its journey to a new home at HMAS Stirling north of Perth in 2032.
Albanese was clear in China last week that Australia’s position on Taiwan has not changed. He was verballed by the China Daily, which claimed the PM had told Xi “Australia adheres to the one China policy”. 

The Major backed this up with a few snaps, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese with President Xi Jinping. The China Daily newspaper the following day.

For reasons best known to the Major, he reverted to strategic ambiguity...

The Taiwan issue arose after US Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Elbridge Colby in the Financial Times on July 13 said the US needed a firmer commitment from Australia and Japan over the possibility of the US going to war against China in support of Taiwan. 
Yet our position is the same as America’s. We support the strategic ambiguity formulated by president Nixon and Henry Kissinger in 1971. We do not formally recognise Taiwan or its claims to independence, we maintain informal ties with the island as a self-governing entity but we do not support China’s ambitions to absorb the island. 
The US itself has never committed to military action in support of Taiwan and Colby could hardly expect Australia to, even as this arises during Colby’s review of the 2020 AUKUS agreement between the US, UK and Australia.
Xi in contrast has threatened Taiwan formally several times. Last year at a banquet in Beijing to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Communist China’s founding he said reunification was “a cause of righteousness” and an “irreversible trend”. 

So the pond wasted an entire week attending to reptile hysteria, and a deep fear of this man, US Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Elbridge Colby

At that point the Major decided on a history lesson ...

Some journalists have argued Australia has no national interest in defending Taiwan. They may not know Taiwan is not historically Chinese.
Nor was China the first settler state to covet Taiwan, formerly known as Formosa and occupied by Dutch and Spanish colonisers.
Not only is Taiwan a democracy like Australia with a similar-sized population, it is also home to the descendants of original inhabitants who would usually merit the sympathy of the left journalistic class. These people, referred to as Taiwanese Aborigines, have lived on the island for 15,000 years. Officially classed Austronesians, they number about a million and have more in common ethnically with Melanesians, Polynesians and Southeast Asians than with mainland Chinese. The Han and Qing dynasties settled parts of western Taiwan and the Qing dynasty ruled there from 1683 to 1895 when the island fell to Japan. 
Mainland China’s ambitions, while distinctly communist, nevertheless reflect China’s imperial world view. For some Chinese, even Vietnam and Korea remain rightful spheres of influence.

The Major might have mentioned that the total population is currently some 23.36 million, and there's very little to be said in favour of Chiang Kai-Shek's invasion and regime...

...in 1950, he ultimately chose to initiate a major reform effort within the KMT, launching the Party Reform Program (國民黨改造方案) and establishing the Central Reform Committee (中央改造委員會).
The committee aimed to emulate aspects of the Chinese Communist Party's organizational structure, seeking to create a highly disciplined, centralized, and people-supporting party apparatus that could exert top-down authoritarian control while incorporating grassroots feedback. The reform plan called for rapid party expansion, increasing membership from 80,000 to 500,000 within five years, and implementing KMT branches within public institutions such as schools. Additionally, Chiang sought to root out corrupt officials and establish a meritocratic system, mandating that government positions be filled primarily by technocrats selected from top universities.
The first decades after the Nationalists had moved the seat of government to the province of Taiwan are associated with the organized effort to resist Communism, which was known as the "White Terror"; about 140,000 Taiwanese were imprisoned for their real or perceived opposition to the Kuomintang.[138] Most of those prosecuted were labeled by the Kuomintang as "bandit spies" (匪諜), meaning spies for Chinese Communists, and punished as such or "Taiwanese Separatists" (台獨分子).

In those days, the idea was for the Taiwanese government in waiting to re-take China.

The reptiles interrupted with another much used and abused snap, Australia’s national flag flies at Tiananmen Square last week. Picture: VCG

Talk about a feeble distraction, but in truth, Chiang Kai-Shek was the perfect example of China's imperial chauvinism ...

China’s imperial chauvinism is similar to Russian President Putin’s longing for the Soviet empire. Return of empire ambitions extend to Iran’s longing for the return of the Persian empire and Turkish President Erdogan’s for the Ottoman world. 
While critics at The New York Times regularly lampoon Trump’s imperial ambitions, his Make America Great Again movement comes from a long history of US isolationism. Remember the US was late to both world wars. 
Trump wants peace and prosperity. To the extent he ruminates about seizing Greenland it is for the minerals there. Trump wants to stop wars and insists his allies pay more for their defence.
Yet he presents a singular challenge for his allies. He seems often more hostile to longstanding democratic friends than to totalitarian dictators. 
The damage to allies is compounded by his tariffs.
But Australia needs to take the long view. A new President will be elected in November 2028 and Australia will still need the US alliance.
Revelations by The Australian that former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, a “miserable ghost” if ever an ex-PM were one, has been lobbying Colby for years against AUKUS only to persuade this column that its own positive take on AUKUS is correct. 
Turnbull’s preferred French diesel-electric submarines, abandoned by Morrison, would have presented little deterrence capability. Nuclear-powered subs that can travel much faster under water and stay below the surface for months without the need to resurface to charge diesel-electric batteries are at the pinnacle of defence technology globally.

Luckily for the Major neither he nor the pond will be around to test the truth of what he's proposing, because the chance of actually getting a sub between now and 2050 is likely to be slim, verging on none, not least thanks to King Donald, President Donald Trump

Sheesh, are there no new reptile illustrations under the sun?

So to a few final words from the Major, doing his best to sound right wing populist ...

Truth is much of the media here is too soft on China. Good on Jack Quail for revealing here on Friday that companies controlled by the family of a Shanghai businessman linked to the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign influence arm have bought two properties near proposed AUKUS bases here.
Yet Albanese must also be wary of Trump. Long-time defence hawk and friend of Australia John Bolton told Joe Kelly here on Friday that Albanese would be wise not to meet Trump in person until after the AUKUS review lest a meeting go the way of Trump’s February White House debacle with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and AUKUS become a casualty.

It's impossible to get any sense out of the reptiles, veering this way, tilting that, and all with a deep fear which can't be tackled or expressed, as their fearless leader goes to war with the glowering beast and his cross-wearing young thing... Exploring Trump’s Creepy Female Entourage: ‘They Look Like Melania’  (*archive link)

Faux Noise helped create this monster, and now the reptiles must try to live with their creation ...