In which Dame Groan doughnuts the pastie Hastie, Lord Downer stays WASP, and there's much more in the archive ...

 

There's a lot to cover this day by way of the archive ...

Inevitably the reptiles were devastated that King Donald wasn't given the opportunity to ritually humiliate Albo in public, so Geoff chambered a round at the top of the digital edition...

NO OFFICIAL NY MEETING
Trump snubs PM again, lashes recognition of Palestine
Anthony Albanese isn’t on the list for bilateral meetings with the President at the UN, as he prepares to give a speech tying Palestinian statehood with the struggle of ‘generations of Jewish people’ for a homeland in Israel.
By Geoff Chambers

Just below that Stewie clucked his disapproval ... what with the lizard Oz firmly in favour of genocide, mass starvation and ethnic cleansing ...

ANALYSIS by Cameron Stewart
PM walks yellow brick road to nowhere with Palestine recognition
Anthony Albanese’s blunt UN speech is divorced from reality, with conditions that will almost certainly never be met and a provocative comparison between Jews’ hope for a homeland after the Holocaust horrors to the hopes of Palestinians for a home.

Remarkably that left the bromancer in third place, a bit like an Australian in an athletics contest, also furiously clucking away in righteous indignation

Albanese’s staged morality won’t bring peace to Gaza
The Prime Minister is right to make measured criticism of recent Israeli behaviour, but there is no justification for Canberra to recognise a non-existent Palestinian state.
By Greg Sheridan
Foreign Editor

Yes, the pond at last sent the bromancer to the archive. It seemed the only decent thing to do ...

Don't let that blather about "measured criticism of recent Israeli behaviour" fool you, the bromancer is still on board, and there's only so much devotion to ethnic cleansing the pond can take.

Perry with his EXCLUSIVE scored himself an EXCLUSIVE pond award...

EXCLUSIVE
Woke-up call: Obama energy tsar draws us a road map to net zero
Ernest Moniz warns Labor must win over ‘unwoke’ voters to succeed with its renewable revolution, adding nuclear should be considered.
By Perry Williams

What a terrible pun, and it's no excuse that the reptiles were playing games with him, flipping it to non-woke wake-up in the archive...

Here's your reward Perry, wear it with pride.

And here's a tip to Ernest. Your home is burning, head back to fix that up before lecturing down under.

Poor old Fergie and the wayward member of the Epstein cult were also in the news ...so this one was for hive minders with a kinky royal fetish ...

NEW SCANDAL
Palace doors slam on Andrew and Fergie after new Epstein emails
The Duchess of York has been dropped by a raft of charities and exiled from the Royals as bombshell emails expose her grovelling apology to Jeffrey Epstein after publicly disowning him.
By Jacquelin Magnay

So many shafted while one-time best mate King Donald sails on oblivious, given the honour of dining with King Chuck himself ...

Finally Sarah right down the page clocked in with another EXCLUSIVE ...

EXCLUSIVE
Liberal colleagues question who is ‘feeding lines’ to Andrew Hastie after personal campaign launch
Liberal colleagues claim Andrew Hastie’s policies are ‘right from the Tony Abbott playbook’, as party insiders question who is really pulling the strings.
By Sarah Ison

Say what, suddenly being the onion munching mad monk is a reptile no no?

The pastie Hastie was defiant ...

Several MPs who spoke to The Australian all expressed their desire for Mr Hastie to ease up on his personal campaign, which includes both policy ideas and a publicly acknowledged desire for leadership.
“I’m not sure what Andrew (Hastie) is doing or up to, but the events of last week with the ­national climate risk assessment and 2035 targets, all of which have no costs provided – the government really has given us some stuff to try jump on,” one Liberal MP said.
“That’s where we should be ­focused right now.”

The reptiles even slipped in a traumatised AV session with the dog botherer... Sky News host Chris Kenny discusses Shadow Minister for Home Affairs Andrew Hastie’s potential withdrawal from the Liberal Party frontbench. “Andrew Hastie has called out the net-zero farce, saying he’d resign if the Coalition again adopted a net-zero target,” Mr Kenny said. “He’s revealed today that most Liberal MPs don’t agree with him. “That’s a worry.”

...Another source said Mr Hastie was “reading right from the Tony Abbott playbook” when it came to his conduct.
“I don’t disagree with what he’s proposing when it comes to the points made around energy security and national security … but some of this is harking back to a bygone era,” one MP said.
“One question I have is the politics of it, the seats this would actually work in and how this gets them back voting for us.”
Responding to the criticism from within the party and economists, Mr Hastie said he didn’t “mind copping a whack over the head with their dog-eared copies of Hayek – it proves that I’ve shaken them up”.
“People have missed the deeper point: we have very little industrial capacity in this country, and we are incredibly vulnerable to a strategic shock as a consequence. Why shouldn’t we be able to make things here like we once did? Why shouldn’t we use our energy abundance to our advantage?” he said.
“I don’t believe in luck; I believe in taking action to win. Taiwan isn’t a world-leader in microchips by accident – they chose to make it their comparative advantage.
“We have a choice to make in Australia: become more dependent on China, or take control of our future by investing in our industrial base.”
Mr Hastie described those worried about market intervention as “free-market fundamentalists” who had “blind faith” in their neo-liberal models.
“They work in abstractions, dislocated from the realities of life for many Australians’ he said.

Ah, so judging by all that, the lettuce is gaining ...

The pond was exhausted by the time it made it over to the extreme far right to see that ancient Troy was briefly top of the world ma ...

I read Kamala Harris’s book so you don’t have to
Kamala Harris argues Joe Biden’s ‘reckless’ ego cost her a shot at the presidency, and she does have a point.
By Troy Bramston
Senior Writer

Sorry, the pond sent ancient Troy to the archive so that it didn't have to talk about ancient Troy talking about Kamala. Isn't the cornfield great, but feel free to explore it while it's still there ...

A little later in the day Susssan turned up in service of ethnic cleansing...

PM’s shallow gesture diplomacy hurts our national interest
Anthony Albanese is taking Australian foreign policy decisions that advance the domestic political purposes of the Australian Labor Party over our national interest.
By Sussan Ley

With the lettuce clearly winning, and genocide so clearly in our national interest, the pond felt pleased to send her off to join the bromancer in the archive...

Susssan had displaced Eric's Optus yarn ...

Singtel never takes responsibility for failures of Optus
The Singapore owner of Australia’s most accident-prone telco can’t keep hiding. It needs to step up and take real accountability.
By Eric Johnston

Fun fact. The pond's partner switched the household to Optus to save money, and now the pond steps outside the house to make calls, thereby guaranteeing a connection at least 50% of the time. So there'll be no more talk of Optus for fear of adding to domestic tensions.

Last and least came Joe, lesser member of the Kelly gang ...

Forgiveness over vengeance: Erika Kirk’s message for a divided nation
Erika Kirk has called for Americans to choose faith over vengeance as she forgave her husband’s killer. The question is whether her appeal to Christian values will guide the nation’s response.
By Joe Kelly

Joe managed to find King Donald's message of hate vastly humorous ...

“Charlie wrote back to the staff member saying, ‘I’m not here to fight them. I want to know them and love them. And I want to reach them and try and lead them into a great way of life in our country’,” Mr Trump said. “He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them.”
Not without humour, he added: “That’s where I disagree with Charlie.”
“I hate my opponent. And I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry. I am sorry, Erika,” he said, to peals of laughter.
In so doing, Mr Trump demonstrated the instinct to cast himself as a leader with moral flaws while elevating the high principles championed by Charlie and Erika Kirk – something that was well understood by his audience.
But it was also an admission – forgiveness is hard.

Not without humour? But then Adolf loved his dog and was a vegetarian.

All the same, it'll be awhile before the pond, not without humour, forgives feeble-minded, addled Joe, lesser member of the Kelly gang ...

And now with that exhausting roll call complete, please allow the pond to indulge in its favourites.

Come on down Dame Groan, and lordy, long absent lordy, she was taking a stick to the pastie Hastie ...

The header: Bring back Aussie carmaking? Give us a brake, Mr Hastie The more worrying aspect of Andrew Hastie’s bonkers carmaking intervention is the clear trend among conservative politicians to ditch their belief in free markets and open international competition.

The caption for the image with the mysterious wording: In a video released on social media by Andrew Hastie on September 20, 2025, he demands Australia ‘make things’ and criticises previous Liberal policy on the car industry. Picture: Instagram

What fun to see Dame Groan get out her stick and give the pastie Hastie a beating ...

There is a variety of reasons to query the government objective of net zero by 2050, but bringing back car manufacturing to Australia is not one of them.
Coalition frontbencher Andrew Hastie is living on another planet if he thinks a fossil fuel-dominated electricity grid would be enough to persuade large-scale investment in local manufacture of passenger motor vehicles. It’s among several subjects he raises in a bizarre video that appears to be a veiled tilt at the Liberal leadership.
As for describing locally made vehicles as “beautiful pieces of craftsmanship” – give me a break. My parents had a series of Holden sedans and station wagons. They were terrible cars that always started to fall apart before they were traded in. By the late 1970s, they had given up on Australian-made cars, preferring instead the much higher-quality imported ones.

Sheesh, for once Dame Groan struck a chord. At one time, starting with an FX, the pond moved through the likes of an EJ and a HK, and they were all lemons in their own loveable way, and what a relief it is to have an EV, but the pond digresses ...

Even more hilarious is Hastie’s suggestion that “competition drove innovation in our industry”.
Would that be competition behind massive tariff barriers, quotas and government handouts? The car industry was one of the most coddled industries Australia has ever had, second only to textiles, clothing and footwear.
Let’s think of the basic facts. The Australian car industry was completely dominated by overseas companies, American and Japanese. They came here because the extraordinarily high tariff barriers imposed by successive governments meant local manu­facturing was the only way to access the local market.

The reptiles interrupted with an AV distraction led by that rowing against the climate change tide man, anything to give the lettuce a head start ... Former Liberal senator Hollie Hughes discusses the potential of shadow minister for home affairs Andrew Hastie becoming leader of the opposition. “They need to stop talking about themselves, for a start,” Senator Hughes told Sky News host Rowan Dean. “Andrew’s made it very clear he wants to be leader at some point … does he want to be leader now … or in the future?”

Back to the groaning ...

At first, there was a view that tariffs could be temporary – the infant industry argument – but each time governments attempted to wean the industry off high protection, there were complaints and threats of exit. Car industry executives excelled at seeking rents from Canberra even if they were not particularly good at meeting the preferences of consumers.
It took the Hawke-Keating government to sound the final siren on this racket. In conjunction with attempts to improve the competitiveness of the industry by becoming export-focused – that failed – as well as providing transition assistance for affected workers, the protection the industry enjoyed was slowly wound back.

The reptiles then showed that the hastie Pastie was in reality a Tamworth-type boofhead, equipped to do wheelies in Peel street with a grunt car that established he had the mind set of Bathurst somewhere in the 1970s ...

Did any wag think to add Dame Groan's outing as a comment? Not being on Instagram, the pond can't help out ...

Over time, all the overseas-owned manufacturers pulled out. The last one was Toyota, which had produced a reasonably popular car, the Camry. But the thicket of costly and untenable industrial relations arrangements – the rents had always spilt over to high pay for workers and extremely inflexible industrial relations arrangements – forced the hand of senior executives back in Japan. The cost of energy at the time was not a determining factor in the closure of the factories.
The collapse of the local car industry occurred under both Labor and Coalition governments. The case for free, open markets was a bipartisan proposition that held sway for some three decades.
So how should we interpret Hastie’s corny social media release? He tells us he doesn’t want us to become “a nation of flat-white makers” but rather he wants us to design and “make complex things” and “build things with our own hands”. But “it’s not just about the cars”, according to the high-profile member of the Coalition.

Corny? Egad madam, them's be fighting words in Maguire's pub no Peel street. 

The reptiles had to hastily pretend he wasn't actually a Peel street boofhead by giving him a suit look, though the shirt looked distressingly rumpled, and the collar far too wide for the very dull tie, Andrew Hastie during question time at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Dame Groan tried to include EVs in the mix, but her heart was intent on a Hastie bashing ...

Does Hastie have a point, even though he is way off base when it comes to the car industry? There is no doubt energy costs are a critical factor in determining the competitiveness of certain industry sectors – think here metal refining and smelting, steelmaking, concrete and cement, fertiliser.
Many of these activities are undertaken here because, in the past, relatively cheap and affordable power offset the high labour costs that our system of industrial relations imposes. The investments have been made, and the owners are likely to run them down.
If serious operating losses ensue in the meantime, the first port of call is to governments to provide subsidies to keep these operations going. This is already happening – think here the Nyrstar smelters in Tasmania and South Australia, the Whyalla steelworks, the Mount Isa copper smelter, and all the aluminium smelters, to varying degrees.
While the Prime Minister and the Climate Change and Energy Minister repeat the myth on high rotation that renewable energy is the cheapest form of energy, the sad reality is that both industrial and residential electricity ­prices continue to soar – up by more than one-third in the past decade.
Hastie would be well advised to give up his ignorant defence of local car manufacturing and concentrate on the rising cost of energy driving out local activities for which we can have a natural comparative advantage, in part because of the location of related ore bodies. It would also be helpful if he were to critique Labor’s misguided policy of directing investment through schemes such as the Nat­ional Reconstruction Fund.
This sort of policy is always a highway to failure as governments simply don’t have the information (or indeed incentives) to guide investment in the same way as market forces.
Just consider the commercial disaster of the National Broadband Network as a case in point, as well as all those disastrous years of state government experiments in active industry policy – WA Inc and the Victorian Economic Development Corporation are two examples.

The reptiles revealed they'd found their mortal enemy and amazingly he'd managed to find a working charger. 

Just don't try this around the middle of the Hume, because on any given day there'll be a bank of crucial chargers on the blink, Chris Bowen opens a new EV charging station.

And so to wrap up the Groaning ...

We are never going to have any local car manufacturing at scale. Indeed, many European and US car companies are now struggling, having drunk the Kool-Aid on the switch to electric vehicles and are now being seriously outcompeted by Chinese manufacturers. The reluctance of the senior leadership team at Toyota to focus on EVs now looks prescient.

Um, that's outcompeted by Chinese EV manufacturers, the future being EV, but never mind ...

The more worrying aspect of Hastie’s bonkers intervention is the clear trend among conservative/right-wing politicians to ditch their belief in free markets and open international competition.
You can see this happening in Britain under Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage, and in France under the National Rally’s leader, Marine Le Pen. These two influential politicians also have no time for fiscal rectitude or repair. They strongly argue the case for more government handouts for their preferred constituencies and strongly oppose any attempt to cut entitlements. Contrast this with the Howard-Costello years in which budget surpluses were the norm and government debt was fully paid off.
The debate on whether we should persist with the costly and unachievable net zero by 2050 is well worth having. And let’s point out here that there are clear signs that enthusiasm around the world is rapidly evaporating for what is essentially a holy grail – gosh, even the Europeans cannot agree on a target for 2035.
But let’s not cloak this debate in false premises that have an alarmingly protectionist feel to them. Campaigning for free and open markets and a limited role for governments is the preferred path.

Here, have a celebration of climate action, in preferred hive mind mode ...

What else? Well, you had to look beneath the fold for aged but not matured Lord Downer, but he was still there to be savoured, a reheated day old pie still being a pie, especially as his lordship was flogging a neo-Nazi horse for his sauce ...

The header: US, Europe ‘counter-revolution to hit our major parties, The ‘marches for Australia’ are signs of what’s already happening in the US and Europe – people have just had enough of new threats to their countries’ traditional culture and way of life.

The caption: Anti-immigration protesters and counter protesters clash on August 31 in Melbourne. Picture: Asanka Ratnayake/Getty Images

His Lordship seemed not to mind that his toffy Adelaide ancestors had at one point come out to indulge in a little land theft ...

Political fashions, like fashions in clothing, change every so often. For quite some period now, we in Australia have gone along with the current Western political fashion that was crafted by the global financial crisis in 2008 and extended by the dramatic reaction to dystopian predictions of “catastrophic” climate change.
The extreme and illiberal reaction to Covid only exacerbated these trends. Prior to these events, the fashion was liberalism – economic liberalism, where decisions on investment and consumption were driven by public preferences, and political liberalism, where the rights of individuals to chart their own courses were regarded as supreme. To be frank, that was the fashion I really liked. It was the era of rationality.
This orthodoxy has been replaced with what we might call a social democratic orthodoxy where liberal markets are now seen as dangerous and unpredictable and need to be heavily regulated by the state.
The climate change issue has led to massive state intervention in the most sensitive part of any economy, its energy supply. Traditional cheap forms of energy have gradually been closed down and more expensive so-called renewables have replaced them.

His Lordship beat a very familiar reptile drum, There has been a very rapid increase in energy prices as traditional cheap forms of energy are gradually closed down, replaced by 'so-called renewables'.

Sheesh,  some days the pond regrets showing affection for some forms of AI slop. That arrow should be pointed in the other direction to show where lizard Oz illustrations are heading ... (if only the pond could believe in a cleansing hellfire)

Lord Downer then shifted to DEI...

The result has been a very rapid increase in energy prices, which has had substantial consequences for the living standards particularly of low- and middle-income people. This has also been coupled with a rapid expansion in expenditure on welfare. Every Western country, including our own, has run up eye-watering debts.
Added to this, the state has increasingly started to both directly and indirectly regulate social behaviour. Hate speech laws have been expanded to cover offensive material in social media. Corporations have been forced into downgrading the profit motive and replacing it with ESG (environmental, social and governance) targets.
Employment policies, which were once seen to be at least in principle based on merit, have been replaced with DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) objectives, which have substituted one form of perceived discrimination with another.
The trouble with this model, which came to dominate the US, Europe and, more latterly, Australia, is that it has failed to deliver the rising living standards the previous liberal orthodoxy delivered regularly. What’s more, the demand for appropriate language driven by universities, elements of the media and some politicians has caused a significant proportion of the community to roll their eyes in silent contempt.

What a contemptible man he is, though the reptile graphics managed to be even more bizarre and even more deeply contemptible, Many people ‘have just had enough of it (DEI objectives)'.

Deeply weird, but it helped Lord Downer in his aim - black-bashing without overtly and obviously bashing any particular black person, just a horde of variously coloured shapes and sizes...

This new social democratic orthodoxy has certainly taken hold in Australia. But there’s no doubt in the US, and now in Europe, a substantial proportion of the general public have just had enough of it. They just don’t want to hear of it anymore. This is manifest in several ways. And it’s worth our while noting this in Australia because these counter-revolutionary trends haven’t yet emerged on a large scale here. But just as the fashions of America and Europe have always spread to Australia, this one will as well.
In the US, the counter-revolution has been manifested in the Trump phenomenon. But it goes far deeper than that. Look at the huge reaction there has been in the US to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. That’s not about Trump but about the counter-revolution.

The reptiles then dropped in a hagiographic reminder of Charlie, Huge reaction in the US to the assassination of Charlie Kirk is also linked to the counter-revolution.

Is Lord Downer aware that Charlie's followers might take a jaundiced view of nancy boys doing a bit of cross-dressing?

Just asking for Adelaide folk ...

On the pond trudged, marvelling at the way this well-trained parrot managed all the talking points, an Adelaide attempt at doing a Nigel...

In Europe, large sections of the population have quietly joined their American counterparts in saying enough is enough. In the UK, the foreign country that is socially most like Australia, the public are flooding away from both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party because they see them as being the parties of the failing social democratic political consensus. The conservative heartland is abandoning the Conservative Party because it wasn’t seen as sufficiently conservative.
On the left voters are abandoning the Labour Party and drifting to a combination of the Greens and Jeremy Corbyn’s new far-left party. In continental Europe, the traditional parties of the centre-left and the centre-right, which in varying degrees embraced the social democratic orthodoxy of the era, are gradually being abandoned. For example, the Socialist Party is now almost non-existent in France and the Republicans, their conservative counterparts, have pretty much disappeared as well.
In Germany, the Social Democratic Party’s support is in single figures, and the conservative Christian Democrats, who lead the current government, are struggling to keep ahead of the insurgent Alternative for Deutschland. In Italy, the old traditional parties of the left and right have ceased to exist. Giorgia Meloni and her Brothers of Italy party have swept the country.
So, what does this all mean for Australia? We will catch up with this trend. You can already see signs of it. The Marches for Australia, condemned by the orthodox left as far-right and neo-Nazi, brought out more people than I could imagine.

Never mind the neo-Nazis, get with the far right and the neo-Nazis, and celebrate, Multiple protests against migration, racism and corruption kicked off across Australia last month. Picture: NewsWire

And so it was on to the final flourish from a man so full of ponce that he could well become the king of poncedom ...

These marches, like their British and American counterparts, are portrayed as anti-immigration. In each case there is indeed concern about high levels of immigration. But what the public are really concerned about isn’t the race or religion of the migrants, so much as the impact immigration is having on the traditional culture and way of life of their country. It’s one thing to accept migrants but it’s another for migrants to demand that the traditional culture of the host country be changed to accommodate the practices they bring from abroad. People resent that, although they don’t very often say so publicly.

Ah, good old bigotry in action, and how astute to not actually spell out thoughts such as "Jews will not replace us" and what we need to preserve is decent dinkum wasp values of a medieval English kind, the sort where CVs might read ...

In 1928 Downer went up to Brasenose College, Oxford (BA, 1932; MA, 1947), where he studied philosophy, politics and economics, and took a diploma in economics and political science (1932). After reading law in London, he was called to the Bar at the Inner Temple in 1934.

 Wot wot old chap, but please, old boy, jolly well try to be a bit quicker and do wrap things up ...

There’s more to the counter-revolution than that, though. The counter-revolutionaries have had enough of high energy prices and scare campaigns about climate change. They’ve had enough of being lectured about the language they can use. They’ve had enough of stories about transgender women winning women’s sports competitions and using women’s changing rooms and lavatories.
They’ve just had enough of all this. In Europe and America, the counter-revolution is being driven by conservatives and classical liberals. It has not been driven by Nazis, fascists, homophobes and misogynists. The more they are accused of that, the more passionate they will become in their counter-revolution.
How will this manifest itself in Australia? We will see over the next couple of years. Will any of the current political parties be able to modernise and thereby capture the counter-revolutionary zeitgeist, or will new political forces emerge?
Either way, my prediction is that there will be a counter- revolution in Australia just as there has been in America and Europe. It will take longer in Australia partly because fashions emerge here later than in America and the UK. But it’s partly because, so far, no leader of the movement has yet to emerge. But it will happen whether you like it or not. The counter-revolution is coming.

Yeah, the pond can sing along to that ...

Come writers and critics

Who prophesize with your pen

And keep your eyes wide

The chance won’t come again

And don’t speak too soon

For the wheel’s still in spin

And there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’

For the loser now will be later to win

For the times they are a-changin’

Come senators, congressmen

Please heed the call

Don’t stand in the doorway

Don’t block up the hall

For he that gets hurt

Will be he who has stalled

There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’

It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls

For the times they are a-changin’

Oops, the Nazis have won, King Donald rules, but at least Lord Downer prepared the way for this day's immortal Rowe, with too many details to list ...

If the pond had to pick out a detail, this one's a treasure, featuring a splendid emperor descended from migrants and with a migrant wife ...

...but what about the services available to these strangers in a strange land as they wander the strange streets?

Forget the Homan services, the pond thinks it prefers the other side, even if it's only kash only, and the Kimmel bar was unexpectedly closed ...