In which the pond is forced to visit Dame Slap but compensates by offering soporific "Ned" and his Neddicisms...

 

As an aging cop once explained to the pond, the job consisted of many moments of dull routine, interrupted very rarely by moments of stark terror ... (compounded in the US by the country being flooded by guns, which results in war zones, and many more moments of terror, a situation this country is again trying to emulate).

But the SovCit killing field carry on in Victoria was bumped down the lizard Oz page by a dire threat which required all hands on hive mind deck ...

Well you couldn't expect the reptiles to go full ambulance chasing SovCit at the top of the page, what with that deep weirdness being very adjacent to QAnon, MAGA, the NRA and Faux Noise ...

Iran was manna from heaven for the reptiles ...

STRIKE ON SOCIAL COHESION
Iran attacks us: web of spies, criminals behind attack on democracy
ASIO has exposed Iran’s role in orchestrating terrorist attacks on Australian Jewish targets, as Australians in Iran are told to leave as soon as possible.
By Ben Packham and Greg Brown

EXPLAINED
Ticking time bomb: How Iran’s attacks on Australia unfolded
As Jewish communities in Melbourne and Sydney were being terrorised, the PM was playing tennis.
By Sean Callinan and James Dowling

Naturally the bromancer was there to cluck and tut ...

Commentary by Greg Sheridan
Right move on Iran, but far too late
This demonstrates that Israel has been right all along in alerting the world to Iran’s role as the chief state sponsor of terrorism.

Why was it manna?

Well it came as a way to avoid other matters, outlined by John Hanscombe in this mornings The Echidna, under the header Israel's grim rendition of Oops!...I did it again... (no link, you need to subscribe).

You wouldn't normally associate Benjamin Netanyahu with Britney Spears. But yesterday, something the Israeli PM said triggered a persistent earworm.
The hook-line of the troubled pop star's 2000 hit song, Oops! ... I Did It Again, kept playing in my head after Bibi described the double-tap killing of 20 Palestinians, including five journalists at the Nasser Hospital in Gaza, as a "tragic mishap".
Oops, he did it again. Added five more to the toll of almost 200 journalists killed since October 7, 2023, and clumsily, almost cavalierly, expressed regret. As Jodie Ginsberg from the Committee to Protect Journalists told the ABC yesterday, a "mishap" is when you spill a cup of tea, not when you kill 20 civilians.
And it's certainly no mishap when the way you killed them was with a method most commonly employed by terrorists: the double-tap. That's when you strike with one explosion, wait until a crowd gathers to attend to the victims, and then detonate another.
The vision of the incident was hard to watch. Rescuers and journalists gathered on the outside stairwell just after the first strike. Moments later, they disappeared in a cloud of dust and smoke as the second strike hit home.
Another investigation has been promised, but Israel's record shouldn't raise any expectation that anyone will be held to account. A recent report by conflict monitoring group Action on Armed Violence claimed nine out of 10 investigations into alleged military abuses in Gaza have either found no fault or been left unresolved.
In the two decades the Committee for Protecting Journalists has been monitoring alleged Israeli abuses against the media, Ginsberg said there was rarely a transparent investigation undertaken. The war in Gaza has been the deadliest conflict for journalists the CPJ has monitored. The committee alleges that at least 26 people killed in Gaza have been deliberately targeted, a claim Israel rejects.
We'll never know for sure who coined the phrase "The first casualty in war is the truth" - was it US senator Hiram Johnson in 1918, Aeschylus, or Samuel Johnson? But we do know that in Gaza, an inordinate number of people who bring us the nightly footage and interviews from inside the besieged enclave, the truth as they see it on the ground in Gaza, have lost their lives doing so. That's why the press vest has now become a protest symbol at marches against the war around the world.

And so on, and that was accompanied by an infallible Pope, always a grand morning bonus mid-week...

The reptiles weren't for turning - easier to herd cats and dogs - so the hysteria continued over on the extreme far right ...

Cameron was neutral in tone, but Rice was on the boil and very disappointed ...

How Iran exported terror across the world to target Australian Jews
When Iran decided to step up its terror activities after the October 7 massacre, few expected it would target Jews in Australia.
By Cameron Stewart
Chief International Correspondent

ANALYSIS
PM finally takes strong stand … would have been helpful when synagogue went up in flames
Anthony Albanese’s decisive move in expelling the Iranian ambassador has been welcomed by the Jewish community but stands in contrast to his muted response as the attacks occurred.
By Stephen Rice
Sydney Bureau Chief

For the pond, Wilcox put the capper on all that talk ...

As a result of all this, the pond was forced into the arms of Dame Slap, but with news of King Donald's decline, and descent into autocracy by cultivating civil war on the streets never featuring in the lizard Oz, the pond needed something to set the right tone for the Dame's arrival ...

JLL chief executive sacked amid cultural reckoning
In news that felt inevitable but still a bit sudden, JLL has sacked its Australian CEO — a full week after a culture of harassment surfaced at the firm.
By Yoni Bashan

Perfect, just the thing ...

In news that felt inevitable but still a bit sudden, global real estate giant JLL announced on Tuesday that it had sacked its Australian CEO Dan Kernaghan a full week after a culture of harassment surfaced at the firm, along with the mismanagement of these claims and, unexpectedly, a predilection among some of the bosses to unwind at a strip club named Kittens.
“We regret to inform you that after 20 years with JLL, Dan Kernaghan is leaving the firm,” said a statement signed by JLL’s capital markets CEO Richard Bloxam and its head of HR Laura Adams, both of whom sit on the company’s global management board.
Conspicuously absent from the statement was JLL global CEO Christian Ulbrich who presumably wants this embarrassment gone in time for Davos in January.
Announced at the same time was an “independent investigation” to be led by legal firm Clyde and Co into “recent employment matters”, which we guessed was the company’s polite way of describing the debaucherous strip club nights and all that talk of “nutting” on strippers, or into handbags, and other seamy conduct.
None of which involved Kernaghan himself, but it fell upon him, as CEO, to manage the complaints about this behaviour. And manage them badly he certainly did.
So badly, in fact, that Ulbrich had to forcibly stop Kernaghan this month from reinstating a Victorian manager who’d sexually harassed a female worker on his team in the Melbourne office.
A two-month inquiry substantiated the allegations against this chap, but Kernaghan wanted to keep him anyway, and keep him working in the same office as the woman who lodged the complaint.
At that time, Ulbrich may or may not have even known that Kernaghan had sat on an entirely separate complaint, from 2022, concerning two of JLL’s national managers who’d spoken of “nutting off” on a stripper’s back in a JLL group chat.
One of them threatened to “nut” in the handbag of a female colleague after she took umbrage with the language they were using.

Beyond perfect.

The time was beyond right for Dame Slap to nut on about progressives and all that killer political correctness in her own nutty way ...

The header: How virtuous extremists are killing off common sense with comedy, The wholesale abandonment of simple common sense by so-called progressives is the driving force of public policy failures.

The caption: South Australia’s Women's and Children's Health Network chief executive officer Rebecca Graham. Picture: supplied

The pond realised it would be exposed to Dame Slap's relentless demonising of TG folk - how she loves to nut in their handbags - but sacrifices had to be made ...

News that senior South Australian health bureaucrat Rebecca Graham is concerned about the impact of miscarriage on – wait for it – the intersex and trans community is only the latest manifestation of the linear progression from progressive thought to extremist lunacy. At one level, Graham’s comments to a parliamentary inquiry that trans women be included in conversations about stillbirths – even though they are biological men incapable of being pregnant – is undoubtedly belly-laugh material.
However, the infestation of such ridiculous folly at the highest levels of political and bureaucratic life is no laughing matter. From gender ideology to education to the disastrous failures of immigration policy and many other areas, the wholesale abandonment of simple common sense by so-called progressives is the driving force of public policy failure.
Before I provide my top five examples where the laugh test (if grown adults would laugh at a policy idea, it’s probably something that should be dropped like a hot rock) would have killed an idea, we should first examine why such madness happens so regularly.
The silliest progressive ideas are almost always the product of good intentions married to abstract thoughts. If one starts by writing noble principles on a blank sheet of paper, then extrapolates from those ideals to arrive at some recommended policy proposal, without regard to practical questions about application, one is almost certain to end with a disastrous plan. An idea that sounds sweet in the abstract will be sold as virtue on a stick, usually alongside a dose of emotional blackmail, only to cause misery in the real world.
This is why Edmund Burke (among other great thinkers) admired the role of tradition and so distrusted abstract theory. That explains, at least in part, why Burke criticised the French Revolution. He believed the revolutionaries’ zeal for abstract principles – which they assumed embodied rationality – oversimplified the complexity of life and ignored the wisdom of ages. Burke was proved right as the revolution spiralled from Liberte, Egalite and Fraternite to the guillotine in few short and bloody years.
Tradition, Burke thought, is in effect the accumulated wisdom of the ages, the product of ideas that have been tried, tested, tweaked and persevered with because they work. Abstract theories justifying radical change lack the empirical testing of past experience and are much likelier to fail the laugh test, let alone the ultimate test of producing sound outcomes. That is not always true of course; experience itself teaches us some new ideas are genuinely groundbreaking and deserve to be adopted.

At this point the reptiles introduced petulant Peta to maintain the TG wars ... Sky News host Peta Credlin comments on whether a transgender woman is a woman according to Australian law, citing a case in which a women-only app excluded transgender woman Roxanne Tickle. “Is a trans-woman a ‘woman’ for the purposes of Australian law? A British court has recently declared that it's biology that determines our sex, not personal choice,” Ms Credlin said. “Last year, a single judge of the Federal Court held that it was unlawful for a women-only app to exclude a trans-woman, Roxanne Tickle, who of course, is also a biological male. “In the Tickle case, Justice Robert Bromwich found that, quote, ‘sex is changeable’. “But what was the point of far over a hundred years of female fight to be empowered, what's the point of insisting on complete equality of men and women, if anyone can claim to be a woman?”

Iran has so much to answer for ... as the pond realised it hadn't finished that nutty story about nuts ...

Apologies, and just for the sake of nutty completeness...

But, instead of firing them, or doing anything, Kernaghan, fearing a revenue risk to the business if they were terminated, didn’t act on the complaint. Nothing happened. And both of those men appeared to be entirely unaffected on Tuesday, even as JLL announced much sweeping cultural change to come and an independent inquiry into all this behaviour (an inquiry it resisted calling, for days, fearing the litigation that could arise out of it).
And so, it was all for nothing, wasn’t it? All that talk of championing values and women and inclusivity, and the ridiculous claim of being one of the “most ethical companies” on the planet for the past 18 years. More ethical than whom, exactly? Monsanto? James Hardie? Who was JLL being measured against? It’s not hard to look ethical when your nearest competition is British American Tobacco or Wilson Parking.
And that vaunted “zero tolerance” policy on harassment turned out to be very accommodating of harassment indeed, so long as the person doing it was good at making money.
Because the money is what really mattered, in the end; the money and the brand, which JLL’s leaders have entrusted with the rank amateurs at global comms agency Burson, whose people didn’t lift a finger all week. As their client felt a cataract of headlines and humiliation, Burson’s people sat around chewing gum and tossing a tennis ball at a brick wall wondering what to buy on ASOS. Easiest money they’ve ever made, these past few days, telling JLL not to bother dealing with the press.
And it explains why Kernaghan himself hasn’t said much at all throughout this saga, even if the most extravagant of mea culpas probably wouldn’t have helped him.
But, he might have said something, perhaps simply that he did everything his advisers told him to do. Are we so wrong to suspect a legal challenge out of all this?

Why that piece almost sounds politically correct and disapproving, as if there was something wrong with nuttiness...

Back to Dame Slap, where nuttiness in the handbag will always own the libs.

Her Slapness did her best to sound virtuous about nuttiness by embarking on that aged and hoary reptile routine, the listicle ...

However, new ideas need thorough road testing at minimum. A “try before you buy” period, if you like. There have been many such ideas, progressive in name only, that would have most certainly sent us backwards if not tempered with, or in some cases completely binned by, common sense.
Here is my list of top five dumbest “progressive” ideas.
The earliest and most striking example in my career of watching the stupidity, and ultimately disastrous consequences, of an ill-conceived new idea that utterly failed both the laugh test and the evidence test culminated in the reading wars.
Idealistic educators thought the traditional way of teaching reading, by painstakingly grounding children in sounds and phonics, was not only boring but some kind of right-wing conspiracy. They preferred the “whole word” method of teaching reading, which was little more than asking children to guess at words. It was nuts. And it resulted in the reading wars.
To ivory-tower educators far removed from the classroom where illiteracy is measured, it sounded so lovely that little children would learn by osmosis, by being immersed in literature. The academics assured us children would be free to read critically rather than be hemmed in by traditional, paternalistic teaching.
The problem was obvious to anyone with a scintilla of common sense: you can’t read critically if you can’t read. The bunkum “whole word” theory lingered for far too many years, hurting the children educators claimed to care most about – the disadvantaged.

The reptiles threw in a snap of Nigel, making plans ... Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage. Picture: Leon Neal/Getty Images

That set Dame Slap off on a bout of self-pity and endless suffering  ...

I recall being pilloried as a troglodyte for joining others in putting forward an evidence-based proposition: children learn to read more effectively if they learn the sounds that make up words. This education horror story was all based on an untested theory championed by apparently smart people.
More examples of splendidly idealistic lunacy can be seen in the way other highly educated people – this time judges and bureaucrats – apply asylum laws.
Sweepingly noble principles set out in international conventions such as the UN Convention on Refugees and the European Convention on Human Rights have led courts and bureaucrats to eschew commonsense outcomes in pursuit of abstract principles.
In Australia there have been numerous examples of administrative appeals tribunals restoring the visas of non-citizens convicted of heinous crimes. They include a New Zealand man known as CHCY, convicted of raping his stepdaughter, and Charles William Davidson, a masseur convicted of 59 offences including seven counts of rape.
In Britain the abuse of the European Human Rights Convention, especially article eight guaranteeing a family life, has become a daily disaster.
The situation is so bad that the most bleeding heart of liberals, Prime Minister Keir Starmer, is looking at radically overhauling the asylum system. Meanwhile, the man who on current polls would be prime minister, Nigel Farage, is offering the solution Starmer no doubt wishes he could adopt – namely, withdrawing from the ECHR altogether.
A more idealist yet impractical way to deal with immigration issues than the ECHR could scarcely be devised. The road to immigration and asylum-seeker hell was indeed paved with the most noble intentions.

It's working out tremendously well in the United States, all this migrant bashing, but the reptiles helped distract by hauling in the dog botherer for a bit more TG bashing ... Sky News host Chris Kenny has slammed a South Australian health chief for mentioning trans women during an inquiry about the impact of stillbirth on grieving mothers. A parliamentary committee examining the impact of stillbirth on mothers has prefaced its evidence by acknowledging that men who have transitioned or are transitioning to become women should also be part of the conversation around the loss of babies during labour and pregnancy. “Yep, you heard right. She wants the term woman, in the context of this very tragic aspect of childbirth, to also apply to transgender women – that is biological males,” Mr Kenny said. “This is just such an insult to women."

At that point Dame Slap decided to revert to an old favourite ...

With climate change, where does one start? A noble intention to save the planet has been hijacked by every manner of zealot and every mad extrapolation from that principle.
Australian progressives have been especially extreme. Their irrational refusal to consider nuclear power though it already produces about one-quarter of the world’s low-carbon electricity is typical revolutionary fervour. The zealots ignore the International Energy Agency and OECD Nuclear Energy Agency, both of which say that nuclear plays an essential role in achieving net-zero goals.
Though our proportion of global emissions is little more than a rounding error, the new revolutionaries demonise fossil fuels domestically while huge emitters such as China and India continue to frantically build coal-fired power stations.
A little less zeal and a lot more common sense would be nice, even if only to avoid the blackouts that now seem inevitable.

What, no mention of her glorious past, in the climate wars trenches, fighting alongside the likes of Ian Plimer, or the Lord Monckton-inspired triumphalism braying away in January 2010 ...

...Even The Guardian's resident alarmist George Monbiot admitted last November, "There is no point in denying it: we're losing. Climate change denial is spreading like a contagious disease."
It's neither denial nor a disease, of course. Just healthy scepticism. And it's growing in all the right directions for all the right reasons. Scepticism about the science: the revelation that scientists massaged data to suit their case has damaged the public's trust in the scientific community. Scepticism about the costs: after Copenhagen, we now know more about the grab for a new gravy train of foreign aid from developed nations set to flow to developing countries under the cloak of climate change. Scepticism about the government: the Rudd government will come under increased pressure to explain its rush to implement an emissions trading system ahead of the rest of the world. And scepticism about the role of a campaigning media: even the BBC Trust has called for a review of the BBC's cheerleading coverage of climate change. What took it so long? Large sections of the Australian media are no less complicit in the same kind of climate change advocacy.
In 2010, healthy scepticism will continue to rise against the global warming alarmists...

The pond felt inspired to recall the finest moments of Dame Slap as climate science denialist road warrior, off to Maitland for the cause ... (might be slow to load) ...

Meanwhile, Dame Slap was reminiscing about the joys of bashing the uppity,  difficult, tricky blacks ..

The voice to parliament is my next favourite example of a fine-sounding principle – giving voice to the downtrodden to enhance their outcomes – that was transformed into a grasp for massive power by a few within one minority group at the expense of all others. How any sensible person could have thought the permanent creation of a two-tier polity, embedded in our Constitution, was anything other than mad is testimony to the power of an ill-conceived abstract thought bubble.
That brings me back to women and pregnancy. From one fine sentiment – that we should respect trans people – a great deal of policy codswallop has followed. Not just from the bureaucrat who seriously thinks that men who identify as women should be included in discussions about stillbirth.
The Sex Discrimination Act, for example, appears to grant pregnancy protections to men who identify as women.
Our politicians and bureaucrats have become the living embodiment of the White Queen in Alice in Wonderland: “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
And, more’s the pity, we are paying them to be absurd.

These days we hear less about Dame Slap's devotion to King Donald, but she was there at the beginning, just as she was for the climate wars, and with never a no mind about the details ...

Meanwhile, over in the US, things are really starting to warm up ...

So there was an urgent need for chill, and what better way than a serve of "Ned", with the air frigid at base camp as intrepid pond regulars made ready for the usual "Ned" Everest climb ...

Oh dear sweet long absent lord, what has the pond done, even if there's a need for a bonus ...

Couldn't the pond have turned to ...

RICHARD GOES TO WASHINGTON
Marles gets last-minute meeting with Hegseth
Richard Marles also met with JD Vance on his trip to Washington but we don’t know what they talked about as a planned press conference was cancelled.
By Joe Kelly

That would have made for an easy segue to Golding ...

But we don't know what was said, so better say nothing, and besides the reptiles assured the pond there would be only five minutes in the hell known as "Ned's" insights ...

The header: Tax reform is essential for the country, but not for Anthony Albanese, There are over-arching realities about the tax debate. But the government has no mandate for major tax reform this term.

The caption: Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers holds a press conference at Parliament House after last week’s roundtable conference. in Canberra. Photo: NewsWire/Martin Ollman.

The pond decided to sleep in at base camp while "Ned" got on with the climb ...

The roundtable has opened a serious debate about tax reform, but in no way does it constitute political cover for action.
There is no consensus in our political system about tax reform. There was broad agreement at the roundtable about three main directions – as the Treasurer identified – but a direction does not equate to a policy in economic or political terms.
The Prime Minister has conspicuously played down the significance of the roundtable. For days he has repeatedly said it was not a meeting of the cabinet – and the cabinet will decide tax policy. Asked about the contributions, he said: “Academics talk in the academic world, what I do is live in the real world.”

The reptiles flung in a snap of AI assembled cash in the paw, it being best to avoid showing off the actual indie, a type usually left in Dante's outer ring, Independent MP Allegra Spender has commented on her attendance at the Albanese government’s Productivity Roundtable.

"Ned" did his very best to lather up dispute, dissent, difference, and diabolical disagreements ( he much prefers the chanting in unison of the hive mind) ...

There are over-arching realities about the tax debate. The government has no mandate for major tax reform this term, an obvious inhibition. With the budget still not sustainable, the pressure is to increase the tax burden overall or at least not decrease it. And the roundtable has left the government with competing goals – improving tax equity and improving private sector investment.
The tax reform debate is a test for Chalmers – of his tax reform credentials, his judgment on the best policy response and of his standing with Albanese. There is no sign the Prime Minister will replicate John Howard’s 1998 big-picture tax reform – a bold but dangerous venture. The message from Albanese at present is delivering on the 2025 mandate and emphasising Labor’s economic achievements on inflation, jobs and the election tax cuts.
Albanese’s themes are trust, consistency, stability and progressive progress. These are the virtues he seeks to embed in his leadership. He is neither a “crash through or crash” Whitlamite nor an epic reformer in the Hawke-Keating mould. Albanese’s election victory has deepened his authority within the government and he seeks to entrench a Labor ascendancy.
Chalmers has created expectations for himself in his post-roundtable comments, given his emphasis on intergenerational inequity. “I think our tax system is imperfect and one of the most troubling imperfections is best seen through an intergenerational lens,” he said. “And what I mean by that, really almost everybody around the table had a similar view, which is we take our responsibilities to the coming generation seriously.”
He said the intergenerational motivation underpinned Labor’s quest for climate action, housing supply and budget repair. Now tax has become integral to this goal.

After that blather about "over-arching realities" came a picture of a prof, Prof Bob Breunig. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

The pond offers "Ned" in the spirit of proving there's something even more dull than reading Dame Groan deliver one of her groanings about the economy...

The roundtable drew on analysis from Bob Breunig at the Australian National University and Aruna Sathanapally, Grattan Institute chief executive. They documented devastating inequity in the tax system. In analysis with co-authors, Breunig shows many Australians are retiring “with unprecedented levels of wealth” primarily held in housing, superannuation, dividends and investment property.
This is buttressed by tax breaks and concessions. Today the average Australian 75-year-old’s post-tax and transfer income is one-third higher than working Australians aged 18 to 30. Many people over 60 enjoy a post-tax income similar to that of mid-career working age people – yet younger people must assume the cost of raising a family.
This is untenable in terms of equity and budget sustainability. Government policy limiting housing supply drives up housing prices, increasing the barriers to entry. The working productive sector of the economy is financing the benefits for a group of older investment-oriented people – sure, not everyone fits into these categories, but the Breunig paper says government policy “must address this downward spiral sooner or later”.
In her presentation to the roundtable, Sathanapally said the tax system treated households on the same income “vastly differently” – the main driver being the absence of tax on superannuation for older people so that a retiree household earning $100,000 annually can pay less than half of the tax of a working household with the identical income. Very generous treatment of capital gains is important in contributing to tax inequity in incomes in working life as well. Her conclusion: policy change is essential so that higher taxation on older, better-off people can ease the ongoing tax burden on the working-age population.
This sets up the pivotal question for Chalmers and Albanese: how and when they address this intergenerational inequity. It cannot be deferred indefinitely. Yet action on capital gains and more moves on superannuation will be contested. Much depends on whether Labor seeks a wider tax reform or merely cherry-picks items the way it is taxing super accounts of more than $3m.
Opposition Treasury spokesman Ted O’Brien has drawn his line of attack: the Coalition opposes higher spending and will oppose the higher taxes to finance it. If this is the sole method of tax reform, the Coalition will re-run a version of the Morrison 2019 campaign.

Good old Ted, Opposition Treasury spokesman Ted O’Brien. Photo Patrick Woods / Sunshine Coast Daily.

... though the pond remains vexed that the SMR promised for the pond's backyard has yet to arrive. 

How to save the world from a cult religion if there's no SMR for the backyard?

Meanwhile, carry on, and do what you can to ignore all the bodies littering the higher reaches of Everest ...

In reality, if Labor wants to help the working-age population it needs to cut or ease personal income taxation. Indexation of the rates would do the job, but Labor isn’t interested in that option.
Chalmers said a “fair go” for working people was a central principle. But there is no way more taxes on the wealthy will sufficiently honour a “fair go” for people battling in the labour market. One problem is that Labor has long since ditched any belief in the tax-mix switch – lifting the GST to cut personal income tax – an option that was assessed and abandoned under the Turnbull government.
Yet a few weeks ago Richard Holden and Roselind Dixon from the University of NSW released their report A Progressive GST. It proposed raising the GST to 15 per cent and removing a range of exemptions on food, education, health and childcare, generating a revenue surge. To meet the equity issue they provided each person 18 years or older with a $22,000 a year “GST-free threshold” upfront.

Realising the pond was now snoring in an unseemly way, the reptiles dropped in a reference to "concerned", down there with being "unhappy" or perhaps "troubled", Business groups have expressed concern following Labor's economic reform roundtable. The Business Council of Australia is supportive of the three main principles that stemmed from the summit, but only if they work as a package. It is warning against cherry picking them individually – insisting on an 'all or nothing' approach. Economist Saul Eslake believes the roundtable has only granted the government a license to lock in tax reform already on the back burner.

And lo the pond had done it, finished the climb with nary a thought offered, just endless "Ned" and his Neddicisms ...

According to costing from the Parliamentary Budget Office the bottom 60 per cent of income earners would be better off, even before income tax cuts were introduced. When introduced, the highest marginal tax rate would be 40 per cent. There’s a catch: the additional GST revenue would need to go to the commonwealth.
In her brief, Sathanapally, said: “All roads lead to the GST.” She said if you seek to boost productivity by switching the tax mix “the clearest case in point is Australia’s relatively low reliance on the GST which is a relatively efficient way to raise revenue”.
Given the states must agree to changes to the GST base and rate, that necessitates a wider dialogue with the states to assess tax reform at the state level. The Albanese government won’t be interested but the Coalition ought to investigate the options in a revisited and progressive tax-mix switch.
The joker in the pack is Chalmers’ goal for a tax reform that “attracts more business investment”. Having accepted this principle, how do Chalmers and Labor proceed? The four main business groups were emphatic after the roundtable, issuing a joint statement: the test for tax reform is whether changes are made to lift business investment “across the economy to boost productivity”.
Without this, business deems the productivity and tax reform agenda to have failed. Presumably, this will be a similar position to the Coalition.
In her conclusion Sathanapally offered sound advice. Australia needs to do better on tax. Compromise will be essential. The best tax reform won’t have the best design. It will be “the one that actually happens”. Have no doubt, Albanese will decide the extent of the project.

And with all that done and dusted, and the pond feeling incredibly productive, it was time to wrap up proceedings with the recently returned immortal Rowe ...