In which fear of alien Kryptonians infests "Ned", and there's a bonus attempt to dethrone our Henry ...

 

As for hot-take reptiles, oh long absent lord, don't get them started on renewables...

Say what, today it's don't get them started on China?

Yep, it was China, China, China all the way... with so many EXCLUSIVES ...

EXCLUSIVE
One absent ambassador and two useful idiots for Xi’s parade
Australia’s ambassador to China will be more than 2000km away from Xi ­Jinping’s parade in Beijing on Wednesday in a ­pointed snub. Not so, two former premiers.
By Will Glasgow

EXCLUSIVE
Fears China will gatecrash Pacific Islands Forum
There is growing concern China will use its embassy in the Solomon Islands to skirt a ban and attempt to influence regional leaders.
By Ben Packham

EXCLUSIVE
Allan off to Beijing … to win over voters
Jacinta Allan launches ‘Dan-style’ China strategy by unveiling big delegation of Labor MPs to visit communist giant.
By Damon Johnston

Over on the extreme far right Jennings of the fifth form was also on parade ...

Why, he was a veritable mouse, roaring away in his inimitable style ...

ANALYSIS
Why Xi’s parade hides his military fragility
The most dangerous weapon on show in the Xi Jinping military parade will be aggressive nationalism but Australia doesn’t have to ‘tremble and obey’.
By Peter Jennings
Contributor

The pond can't remember the reptiles going into a similar collective panic over King Donald's feeble attempt at a parade, but never mind, because there was relief in sight thanks to Dame Slap ...

Seven questions that must be answered to solve this $2.4m Higgins whodunnit
The Brittany Higgins case is far from over as the heat turns on Labor’s payout. Nor can Sussan Ley ignore questions arising from a scandal that unfairly destroyed the careers of two Liberal women.
By Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist

The pond has only one question: will Dame Slap ever get rid of the Higgins bee in her alarmingly buzzy bonnet?

What a pleasure it is to pass, and leave her in her land above the Faraway tree ...

Simplistic Simon was another no contest in terms of the pond's attention, offering a bog standard bout of reptile fear-mongering...

Labor’s spending splurge is far from sustainable
If this government share of the economy remains as it is for the next couple of years, it risks becoming baked in and increasingly difficult for governments of the future to unwind.
By Simon Benson
Political analyst

There was nothing for it but for the pond to turn to this day's "Ned" Everest climb, as "Ned" did his best to draw attention to the Kryptonian aliens ruining the country ...

The header for Chicken Little down under, as we'll all be rooned: Australia’s vaunted immigration program will soon face serious tests, In Western democracies, immigration has become a frontline issue undermining public trust with the potential to ruin governments.

The confounding caption for a dire conundrum: A conundrum is arriving: large-scale immigration is likely to become more valuable for Western societies such as Australia yet simultaneously become more contentious and provoke more internal hostility. Picture: William West/AFP

On the upside, the reptiles clocked it as a modest five minute read, perhaps more K2 than Everest ...

When it comes to immigration, Australia must preserve its exceptionalism. Our successful immigration history is built, above all, on one central idea – an intake that advances the national interest – and whenever Australian governments fail this test, they risk electoral revolt.
A political hurricane is coming. Immigration in Western democracies has become a frontline issue undermining public trust with the potential to ruin governments; witness the present crises in America, Britain and Germany. By superior judgment and good fortune, Australia has avoided the fate of these countries but our immigration program is heading towards a daunting moment of truth.
Sticking by the test of the national interest is the key to Australia’s immigration future, yet there is a problem: what constitutes the national interest is now heavily contested.

It goes without saying that the reptiles seized the chance to give notorious bashers of Kryptonian aliens space, such as the Canavan caravan pulling up for a chat with the Bolter, Nationals Senator Matt Canavan claims the “attitude” of people who attended the March for Immigration over the weekend seeks to “divide our nation into tribes” and into “different classes”. “I think it’s a particularly regressive viewpoint that somehow you should be defined by your bloodline,” Mr Canavan told Sky News host Andrew Bolt. “We unite as Australians, as one people here in this big, great southern land. “Otherwise, we will have a divided and not cohesive society.”

The same illustration? Do the reptiles think that all that's needed is the repetition of that banner message?

Do they - or "Ned" - realise what they're enabling? 

Please explain, infallible Pope, as we head back to the 1990s ...

Phew, lucky there's no one nervous about their Lebanese heritage in sight.

Never mind, "Ned" does his best to be both siderist, as if attempting to get into the NY Times...

The immigration landscape is being transformed by contradictory forces.
Fertility in Australia is collapsing, down to 1.5 babies per women (the lowest fertility being in the excessively privileged ACT), a figure far below the 2.1 replacement rate that, combined with the demographic revolution of an ageing population, will drive the need for strong immigration for years. Our fertility rate was above three throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s, pointing to a dramatic change across two generations, with vast consequences. Our population growth and labour force demands are even more dependent on migrants.
Yet strong immigration now intersects with a housing crisis, entrenched weakness on housing supply, steadily rising prices and an intergenerational fracture with no easy resolution. Immigration is neither the cause nor the major factor in the housing shortage but the housing factor fuels rising hostility towards immigration levels. This is part of Australia’s dilemma – how to manage population growth in our major cities, notably Sydney and Melbourne, where suffocating price, planning, infrastructure and inequity issues are diminishing the quality of life for many people.

At this point there came an illustration that sent the pond into another AI rage, Fertility in Australia is collapsing, down to 1.5 babies per women, a figure far below the 2.1 replacement rate.

So much visual slop in the world, and yet the reptiles persist ...

It's true that it's a fair match for "Ned's" verbal slop, but do the reptiles have to make the pond's eyeballs bleed on a daily basis?

Migrants have long been a source of economic and social strength for Australia. Yet immigration is now integral to our flawed economic policy with economists Ross Garnaut, Saul Eslake and Richard Holden, among others, explaining that GDP growth has been driven by sheer migration numbers as a substitute for productivity. Our recent productivity trend is the weakest for 60 years, so we have economic growth devoid of higher living standards or strong per capita income growth.
As a nation we are weak on the capital investment essential to raising productivity by choosing instead one of the highest migrant intakes in the OECD. Will this habit be broken? A nexus of high immigration and weak productivity won’t work for the Australian people, and will guarantee domestic aggravation.
Alarm about immigration, and Labor’s inability to control the intake, escalated after the inevitable surge in numbers post-pandemic. The reliable net overseas migration measure (arrivals minus departures) reveals extraordinary gyrations: after peaking at an annual 536,000 it fell to 446,000 in 2023-24. It is forecast to be 335,000 in 2024-25 and down to 260,000 in 2025-26.
The NOM is forecast to settle at 225,000 in 2026-27. That’s a further substantial reduction. Is it feasible? Can Labor deliver such a reduction? This figure is still high but broadly consistent with the NOM trend in the half dozen years before the pandemic.
As for the official immigration program, it is stabilised under Labor at 185,000 for the 2025-26 year, the same as the previous year. Labor has rebuffed pressures to reduce the program – with the Coalition at the election pledged to a sharp cut to 140,000. The message is manifest: Labor wants a strong immigration program; it will stand its ground; it believes this meets economic need and its political alignment with ethnic communities.

The reptiles inserted a group of flag-wavers protesting the presence of alien Kryptonians ruining the country, People at the March 4 Australia anti-immigration rally in Sydney on Sunday.

Perhaps the immortal Rowe is a tad more evocative ...

On with "Ned", cultivating his own version of that moustache ...

In short, Labor won’t be intimidated by the weekend protests variously opposed to immigration or calling for cuts in the program. Nor should it respond to such protests. But Labor is certain to face a far more difficult climate in which to navigate its ongoing ambitious immigration agenda. The economic, social and political drivers point to further public disillusionment with a high intake, sentiments only being accentuated by social media.
Western democracies are more fractured societies in the 2020s. The breakdown of shared values, domestic cultural polarisation and rising community frustration generate a profound atmospheric shift playing directly to immigration. Elites bring an astonishing arrogance to their outlook: they assume that tolerant liberal multicultural society is the natural destination point for human beings. That’s false – anybody with the slightest grasp of human history would know this.
Human beings are tribal – a truth totally foreign to political progressives. The pertinent recent warning came from American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who said “any nation that wants a multiethnic, tolerant, diverse, liberal society” will need “to work very hard to turn down tribal identities and inter-group conflicts”.
That is Australia’s challenge. The conundrum is arriving: large-scale immigration is likely to become more valuable for Western societies such as Australia yet simultaneously become more contentious and provoke more internal hostility. This is a different setting from the Hansonism of the 1990s.

Actually if the pond might be so bold, the notion that human beans are tribal is noted by the pond on a daily basis, as it's the only way to understand the buzzing that emanates from the reptile hive mind, trapped in a cocoon down there with the silence of the lambs ...

Now toss in a snap of the sort that "Ned" is doing a lobster quadrille with, Neo-Nazi Thomas Sewell has crashed a news conference being held by Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan. The National Socialist Network leader claimed Ms Allan is restricting the right to protest.

Put it one way ...

Put it another. Enabling this sort with "Ned's generous attention, and soon enough you'll have a SovCit blazing away at cops ...

Yes, without a shred of irony, "Ned" proposes that there are good people on both sides, 

The weekend demonstrations are an omen of further protests. Anthony Albanese is right to repudiate the platform given to neo-Nazis, point out that many who attended were “good people” and uphold the principle of social cohesion. But Labor has much to learn and, above all, it needs to get tougher with extremists of the left and right.

We've been here before ...

... but at least the reptiles haven't been distracted by the current cavortings of the US good people ...

Back to "Ned" ...

Public criticism of immigration policy is only going to intensify. Labor must better explain its policies, demonstrate its management of the intake, deliver its pledged reduction of the NOM – since failure on that front would trigger a backlash – and avoid equating fair criticism with racism.
Australia has an advantage over many other Western nations because it has resolved the issue of asylum-seekers arriving by boat. Border protection is now a bipartisan Australian stance, the upshot of the electoral crisis that haunted the Rudd-Gillard government and provoked Kevin Rudd’s huge reversal when he returned as PM in 2013.
At that time, Tony Burke became immigration minister and implemented the policy – no boat arrivals would get permanent settlement, they would be transferred to PNG or Nauru, and every previous Labor humanitarian virtue was abandoned. Burke delivered and boat arrivals were substantially reduced. Given his record, nobody should be surprised by Burke’s ruthlessness in finalising the transfer to Nauru of most of the NZYQ cohort who have no legal right to stay in Australia.
There are many elements to Australia’s historical immigration exceptionalism – skills-based entry, non-discrimination, post-settlement policies and insistence on legal entry.

And then came an exceptional embrace by "Ned" of the Kryptonian alien theory, heralded by this snap ... A protester raises a portrait of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei across the Sydney Harbour Bridge during a pro-Palestinian rally last month. Picture: Saeed Khan/ AFP

Take it away "Ned", reveal your hidden love of genocides and ethnic cleansings and mass starvation, closely related to the Kryptonian aliens in our midst ...

The sustained size of our intake over many decades suggests Australia’s national interest approach to immigration has been almost unrivalled among Western nations.
But there is a related dilemma. For two years the principles of Australian multiculturalism have been trashed in pro-Palestinian demonstrations across our capital cities and relentless attacks on Jewish people, their synagogues and schools, necessitating permanent security protection that violates our multicultural claims.
Many Palestinians, and others, have properly exercised their right to protest. But many others fly the flags of terrorist organisations, back terrorist states, demand the elimination of Israel, and inject Middle East grievances into the heart of Australian politics. This is a frontal assault on our democratic values and our once-championed multicultural principles.
Yet the response of our multicultural champions, the Labor government and progressive leaders has been weak and compromised – and that comes with consequences. You cannot quarantine the abuse of our multicultural principles. You cannot turn a blind eye to violations by one section of the community.
At some point extremists of the right were going to mobilise, feel emboldened and, having seen the promotion of hatred with impunity by anti-Israeli and left extremists, decide it was time to unleash their own brand of hatred. Australia needs tougher laws and their enforcement.

He did it, he really did do it, he really did champion a love of genocide and ethnic cleansing, all in the guise of fear of the Kryptonian aliens ...

What a contemptible man he is in his enfeebled dotage ...

Ewww ....

As an aside, here's one story (archive link) you won't find highlighted in the lizard Oz, though you'll find it in the pond's correspondence...

What a great set of pickup lines, skilled, subtle, nuanced, sure to appeal to any woman...

He'll be missed, the pond is sure he'll be missed, though they might still give him a home amongst the Quad ranters ...

For a bonus, the pond had an almost irresistible urge to head off to Olga Khazan in The Atlantic, musing on The Big Lebowski Friendship Test, The stress of introducing something you love to someone you care about (*archive link)

“So, should we Lebowski, or should we not Lebowski?” I asked my friend Alex as we finished our pizza and wine on a recent evening.
I felt like I was asking her if she wanted to make out. The Big Lebowski—the 1998 Coen-brothers movie about bowling, pot, and mistaken identity—is one of my favorites, and I was nervous about introducing it to her. I like to use Lebowski quotes as a way to assert myself while, like Jeff Bridges’s character, “the Dude,” not taking things too seriously. There’s a Lebowski-ism for virtually every tricky situation: Asked to work on a Saturday? “I don’t roll on Shabbas.” Someone does something outrageous? “This is not ’Nam … There are rules!” Disagree about something? “That’s just, like, your opinion, man.” Whenever life has been especially difficult, I’ve returned to the movie and found solace in its “whatever, man” ethos. When I was addled by postpartum depression and my baby would cry nonstop, I would watch Lebowski clips on YouTube and savor a rare laugh.

Relax Olga, the pond thinks “That’s just, like, your opinion, man” every day of the week, especially when confronted by "Ned" or by someone attempting to do a Henry, as if anyone could match the hole in bucket man for evocations of times past ...

The header: Off with its head: What Jason Clare and Henry VIII have in common, Rich universities are at risk from reformation led by AI and a peasants’ revolt. But will they get the message before it’s too late?

The caption: If the era of university power is ending the main cause will be the same as when Henry VIII reigned.

Can the pond be honest here? 

The pond has absolutely no interest in this Matchett attempt at a hatchet-job, but did find those two contrasting images a real rib tickler...and besides, attention should be paid to anyone daring to attempt to usurp our Henry's crown, inventor of many famous laws, such as..."When citing historical sources, always ensure you include sufficient persons and verbiage to camouflage your exclusion of any inconvenient facts that do not support your arguments.”

Step into the ring, Stephen ...

Jason Clare looks nothing like Henry VIII but the most powerful institution in the Education Minister’s policy principality could be at the beginning of its end, along the lines of the Catholic Church in 16th century England. The difference is then the king and the printing press did the changing but this time it is AI plus a peasants’ (as in ordinary Australians) revolt.
A few years back Glyn Davis compared the state of universities now to monasteries in Tudor England which Henry VIII, short of a schilling, effectively nationalised, to fund his wars in France and assert his authority over the church. In a speech to a UK university audience, Professor Davis suggested that like the monasteries then universities now are at risk because they do not “pledge allegiance to local concerns” and “speak to a global scholarly audience with values that frustrate government”.
It was classic Davis, erudite, amusing, the work of a scholar-prince. Professor Davis is twice a vice-chancellor and when he got tired of that he stepped back to become Anthony Albanese’s Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. As an example of where a humanities/social science education can take graduates, Davis delivers.

Even better, the reptiles trotted out a full version of the Cromwell killer, Illustration by Ivan Lapper depicting King Henry VIII of England, based on the portrait of Henry by Hans Holbein the Younger. In the background is the gatehouse of his residence, Hampton Court Palace. (Photo by English Heritage/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Okay, okay, it's not distilled essence of Henry, no one can match our Henry, but it'll do as a placeholder until Friday comes around ...

But he understated the comparison. Like monasteries then, universities now have their own hierarchies and set their own objectives and assume that taxpayers should accept their intellectual authority, adhere to the doctrines they propound and support them in an even greater style than that to which they are accustomed.
Plus, Davis inverted his risk list. The threat to the autonomy and authority of rich universities and the people they confer with income and status does not come just from the state – it is challenged by two far more potent forces, popular opinion and markets for knowledge being transformed by technology.
Unlike the monasteries, a government takeover is the least of Australian universities problems. While Henry VIII made himself head of the national church Mr Clare will not declare himself hereditary chair of lobby group Universities Australia. Even so, he is creating a governance framework that could erode their independence. The university regulator is to have more, yet unannounced, powers and the new central planning agency, the Australian Tertiary Education Commission starts next year. But this is merely rearranging deckchairs on the galleon compared to the three big risks universities face.
One is to their power to make and enforce opinion through their courses and a compliant media. Like the 16th century clergy, academics lay down the liturgy on what all right-thinking people must believe on everything from economics to the environment, gender to government.

Inevitably the reptiles dragged in more alarmist talk about the Kryptonians invading the country, thanks to Ming the Merciless devotees, Menzies Research Centre Chief Economist Nico Louw says the government has fallen short on making significant changes to migration policies that would help address the housing crisis. “It seems that most of our vice chancellors, particularly at the elite universities, seem to think that their job is to run an export business to bring in international students,” Mr Louw said. “It's impossible to have a realistic debate about it in this country. “Every time you say anything to do with international students, the Vice Chancellors act as though it’s the end of the world and the universities are all going to fall over.”

If we're going to do historical comparisons, have the reptiles really moved much beyond Phil May in The Bulletin in 1886?

What to add? Except perhaps "not on the rug, man! ... It really tied the room together ..."

On with the p*ssing on that damned rug, an epic fit that would be unseemly to interrupt ...

And they argue the orthodoxy so loud and hard that it appears to outsiders as if it is unquestionable authority in humanities and social science courses. As ideological auto-da-fes demonstrate, now is not a good time on many campuses for cultural conservatives let alone believers in free speech, free markets and freedom for Australians who are not Indigenous from having to apologise for being settler-colonialists This drives plenty of people nuts – President Donald Trump’s campaign against elite universities did not create popular hostility towards them, it reflected anger among voters that they are dismissed as stupid. The campaign for the voice was dogmatically tin-eared in pitching itself as the only way to help disadvantaged Indigenous Australians. The referendum may well have been won if its strategists had remembered how Martin Luther undid the intellectual authority of the clerical establishment in 1517 by publishing his arguments in plain German pitched to ordinary people.
Another is the way their power to make careers is eroding. Like joining a holy order in the Middle Ages, a university degree in the later 20th century was sold as a path to prosperity. No longer – a big reason universities are retrenching staff is because student demand for career-creating courses is not growing as fast as they assumed. If the training system sorted itself out and universities lost their power to accredit their own professional qualifications they would get smaller fast – who says only a traditional university can train a teacher or a doctor, an engineer or an accountant?
But if the era of university power is ending the main cause will be the same as when Henry VIII was able to milk the monasteries – technology. Then it was the printing press. Once literacy stopped being a magical skill and books started being published in English it was all over for the church’s authority.
Now it is computing power. At first it was online access to information resources, which aren’t only in physical classrooms and libraries anymore. And now universities are losing their core authority to teach students and assess their work. Is students prompting large language models to write essays or solve equations for them cheating? For any education model we now have, too right it is. Will ways to incorporate the tech into teaching be found? For sure. Will employers quickly work out which graduates they hire can’t do what their degrees infer they can? No doubt. But for now, university teachers are watching the degradation of their expertise and their marking-power over students. No wonder they are terrified – the digital door of the university is being kicked in and academics with no other employment skills will be out in the cold like monks and nuns 500 years back.
Talking before AI arrived, Professor Davis had a plan to save universities from the “creative destruction” of the market economy, or being ransacked by government – “engagement: creating meaningful links between a university and its many constituencies, and communicating the fact that this is what we do”.
“When we engage, we encourage local forces to defend the value of universities whenever politicians stoke resentment,” he said. “We make clear the campus offers more than qualifications and traffic – the university is, in a real sense, part of the community.”
Regional universities get this – vice-chancellor who miss the need are not around for long.
But for most big-city campuses their communities are more digital not physical and their constituents want to know what universities can do for them, not what they can do for academics who think their jobs are vocations that are rightly theirs for life.
Just like congregations in monasteries did until Henry’s boys kicked down the front door.

What a marvellous, truly wondrous bout of fear-mongering, apocalyptic thinking, and evocation of the looming arrival of an academic rapture, which will see AI spirit away hapless begowned souls like a medieval king (renaissance if you insist on the enlightened beheading of wives).

Our Henry is on notice, he really will have to work a bit harder than usual to match that level of concentrated drivel ...

And so to end with a Wilcox, straying off the reptile tracks outlined above, but celebrating everything the pond loves about living as a cockroach with a deep fear of Kryptonians ...