In which Polonial prattle and the bromancer make up the Sunday meditation ...

 

Such august, exalted, rarefied company ...

Stupid reptiles, per WaPo...

A reporter for the Turkish newspaper Akşam signed the agreement, as did three individuals from the Turkish state-run Anadolu Agency and two Turkish freelancers. Other signers included a reporter for the Australian, a News Corp-owned Australian paper; an Afghan freelancer; and three lesser-known operations, AWPS News, the India Globe and a blog called USA Journal Korea.

Mea culpa ...

Cf Susan B Glasser in The New Yorker, Donald Trump’s Dream Palace of Puffery, The Pentagon’s ban on real journalism looks to be a preview of where the White House is headed.(*archive link)

Such a heady, albeit brief, moment of international fame

Speaking of snivelling lickspittle fellow travellers, Helen Lewis contributed a fun piece to The Atlantic, I Watched Stand-Up in Saudi Arabia, What the surreal Riyadh Comedy Festival foretold about the kingdom’s future (*archive link).

A teaser trailer:

...When he returned from Riyadh, Burr gushed about the experience on his podcast, Monday Morning. “My whole fucking idea of Saudi Arabia is what I’ve seen on the news,” he said. “I literally think I’m going to fucking land, you know, and everybody’s going to be screaming ‘Death to America!’ and they’re going to have like fucking machetes and want to like chop my head off, right?” However, “everybody’s just regular—like, shooting the sh*t.” (Blogger bot friendly) (His next special should be called Bill Burr’s Low Bar.) How could Riyadh be an ethically troubling destination, he added, when it was full of American food brands—Starbucks, McDonald’s, Chili’s? Nowhere with a Dunkin’ could be that bad, surely. He might not have known about Deera Square, a short drive from ANB Arena. Known locally as Chop-Chop Square, it’s the traditional location of public beheadings in Riyadh. Although the Saudis executed a record 345 people last year, public beheadings are now considered declassé, having been ruined by the Islamic State. I’m sure Burr could do something funny with that.
Burr’s words reflect the bland incuriosity that accrues with wealth. As I ate dinner one night at the Ritz-Carlton, in a Chinese restaurant overlooking the indoor swimming pool, I reflected that the promise of a five-star hotel is insulation, a cocoon against the outside world. A rich person—a successful comedian, say—could glide from the business-class lounge to the front of the aircraft to an air-conditioned limo to a luxury hotel where your dinner is interrupted by five different people asking if everything is okay. Live enough days like this, and the whole world becomes your bellhop. No wonder these guys like Saudi Arabia. The way that daily life bends around rich people is that little bit more obvious here.
After several days of backlash to his naive musings, Burr returned with another thought: His critics, he told Conan O’Brien, were “sanctimonious c*nts.” (*Blogger bot enforced) For me, the fairer complaint is that Western detractors were thinking about the festival the wrong way. They deemed it a PR disaster for Saudi Arabia because it exposed the regime’s hypocrisy about free speech and the performers’ cynicism. On the contrary, the festival said to middle-class Saudis: Do you need the vote if you have lots of money and Louis C.K.? That’s a trade-off that even many Americans would accept.
Burr also told O’Brien something that I fear is correct: that American society was moving toward Saudi illiberalism by “f*cking (Blogger bot censor) grabbing moms and dads and sticking them in a van for making illegally made f*cking tacos.” This, to me, was the greatest irony of the Riyadh Comedy Festival. With its Cheesecake Factory outlets and newfound interest in comedy, Saudi Arabia is becoming more American—just as America is becoming more Saudi. In the U.S., the government is stifling the media, due process is being eroded, the ruler’s relatives are sent on quasi-governmental missions, and businessmen make overt displays of loyalty. Donald Trump’s White House has given up lecturing other countries on their human-rights records and adopted a purely transactional approach to foreign affairs. Comedians are just following his lead.

Talk about laughs, and the lizard Oz reptiles were keen to follow Pentagon Pete's lead, at least for a little while, what with him being a must view for the troops ... Pete Hegseth's 'warrior ethos' speech is now mandatory viewing for the entire US military.

Why did the pond start with some comedy? 

Well today's Sunday meditation is tough going, what with Polonius's prattle covering the very same turf already covered by "Ned's" natter yesterday ...as if the pond hasn't already endured enough motivational speechifying, as if it was fair for the reptiles to try to ruin the lettuce's chances, as it battled suffering Susssan ...

The header: Liberals need to have their A-team on the frontbench, It’s all too easy for outsiders to give advice but in any contest – political or otherwise – it’s wise to have the best team on the field.

The caption for the mournful snap of a bewildered-looking Susssan (the more "s's" the greater the power and the karmic strength): The task for Sussan Ley and those who want Labor out of office is to be patient. Picture: NewsWire / Andrew Henshaw

On the upside, the reptiles had clocked the outing as just the usual four minute pontificating Polonial read...

The most memorable line in the 1880 comic opera The Pirates of Penzance’s Policeman’s Song is “A policeman’s lot is not a happy one”. The same is true of the leader of the Liberal Party in the modern era – currently Sussan Ley.
Only four Liberal leaders have become prime minister after defeating the Labor Party at an election – Robert Menzies in 1949, Malcolm Fraser in 1975, John Howard in 1996 and Tony Abbott in 2013.
Sure, Fraser was appointed to the role of caretaker prime ­minister in ­November 1975 after the then ­governor-general John Kerr dismissed Gough Whitlam’s Labor government. But Fraser won the sub­sequent election on December 13, 1975 in a landslide, ­indicating that he would have ­prevailed at the scheduled end of Whitlam’s second term in office.
Quite a few Liberal Party leaders have never made it to the Lodge in Canberra: Billy Snedden, Andrew Peacock, John Hewson, Alexander Downer, Brendan Nelson and Peter Dutton.
It’s all too easy for outsiders to give advice to the leader of a party in opposition. However, it’s not gratuitous guidance to suggest that, in any contest – political or otherwise – it’s wise to have the best team on the field.

On the upside, Polonius wasn't ranting about the ABC - oh frabjous joy to see such a rare day - and the pond held its tongue on its long-running Susssan v. lettuce routine, Shadow Attorney-General Andrew Wallace discusses the prospect of defectors within the Liberal Party. “It hasn’t worked well for others in the past and I don’t think it will work well for others … in the future,” Mr Wallace told Sky News host Danica De Giorgio. “I am absolutely fixed on ensuring that we toughen our laws in Australia. “I want to return safety and security to Australians.”

The reptiles allowed plenty of visual distractions, giving Polonius only two pars before inserting a couple of huge snaps of wannabes ...

The fact is that right now some of the most able Liberal media and parliamentary performers are on the backbench. I may have missed a few. But here’s my list in alphabetical order in the House of Representatives – Garth Hamilton and Andrew Hastie. And, in the Senate, Sarah Henderson and Jane Hume.
Senator Dave Sharma is an assistant minister but he is not in the full ministry. Senator Jacinta Price was dumped from the shadow ministry for failing to support her leader. And Hastie, the member for the seat of Canning in Perth, resigned in order to speak out on topics about which he disagrees with the Opposition Leader.

Cue the wannabes, Garth Hamilton. Picture: NewsWire / David Beach; Jane Hume. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Polonius stuck manfully to his motivational methodology (3Ms), and inevitably Ming the Merciless (2Ms) joined in ...

It’s not clear how the talented outsiders can be brought back into the team or onto the field. After all, this would require sacking some underperformers.
But the Liberal Party’s numbers in the House of Representatives are so small that it cannot afford to have good performers on the bench or in the ­seconds.
In the Coalition, the Liberal leader chooses the Liberal players in the ministry or shadow ministry. And the Nationals leader, currently David Littleproud, chooses his team. There are also some good performers among the Nationals who are not on the frontbench. This was also the case before the last election when Keith Pitt was excluded.
What opposition has in common with prison is that parliamentarians have a pretty good idea of when their time in opposition may end. The next election is scheduled for around May 2028. The task is to settle in for the long haul.
This week it has been reported that some of the Liberal Party’s right-of-centre MPs are thinking about breaking away from the Liberal Party and forming a Reform party, following in the steps of Nigel Farage in Britain.
This would be a waste of time and resources. As I documented in my 1994 book, Menzies Child, in 1944 Menzies drew together some two score of right-of-centre political parties and organisations to form the Liberal Party of Aus­tralia. This was, and remains, a ­federation.
The Liberal Party exists in NSW, Victoria, Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory. In Queensland, there is the Liberal National Party – it is part of the Liberal Party but LNP members and senators sit in either the ­Liberal of National partyroom in Parliament House in Canberra.
And then there is the Country Liberal Party in the Northern Territory. Its representative in Parliament House, currently Senator Jacinta Price, sits in the Liberal ­partyroom, having decided to ­vacate the Nationals room.
In view of this structure, the talk of some members and senators leaving the Liberals and setting up their own party would be a gigantic task that would likely fail.
It’s not easy to organise, let alone finance, a new political party in Australia.

What better way to help than introduce the Bolter having a jocular moment with Jimbo, Sky News host Andrew Bolt discusses James Patterson’s suggestions for the Liberal Party. “Trump has won an election, and Farage is so far ahead, he might have the biggest landslide in our lifetime, I think if you followed some of the things he’s saying, you might not be in this stook,” Mr Bolt told Sky News host James Macpherson. “I think his point is this: you can’t just lazily copy a policy that works overseas and neglect the local conditions over here. “You can’t just be poll chases.”(sic)

Polonius then did his final gobbet best to help out ...

In recent times, only three minor parties have had a reasonable political life. They are the Democratic Labor Party, which split away from/was expelled by the Labor Party in the mid-1950s; the Democrats which, under Don Chipp’s leadership, broke away from the Liberal Party in the mid-1980s. And now there is the Greens political party.
None of the above have ever scored much more than 10 per cent of the political vote and the DLP and the Democrats lasted for only two decades.
The Australian system of preferential voting favours large parties. In the 2024 British election, Labour won 33.7 per cent of the total vote and 63.2 per cent of the seats in the House of Commons. The Conservatives won 23.7 per cent of the vote but only 18.6 per cent of the seats. The Tories’ problem is that the Farage-led Reform UK won 14.3 per cent of the vote but only 0.8 per cent of the seats.
It’s not impossible that Reform UK could prevail over the Conservatives in time. However, it’s unlikely that a Farage-lite party could succeed in Australia in a preferential voting system unless it had substantial support.
The task for those who want Labor out of office is to be patient. The Labor Party’s combined political success depends on the state of the economy in general and the standard of living – especially the cost of energy – in particular. To the extent the economy deteriorates and unemployment increases, the Liberal Party can recover.
In recent times, good advice had been provided by such Liberal Party identities as Angus Taylor, as well as senators James Paterson, Andrew Bragg and Sharma.
The task is to work hard and present well.
After Whitlam’s defeat in December 1975, the Bulletin magazine ran a cover story raising the question as to whether the Labor Party could survive. It was back in office under Bob Hawke’s leadership in early 1983. The same was said when the Coalition lost in 1993. It was back in office under John Howard’s leadership in 1996.
What the Hawke and Howard oppositions had in common turned on the fact that they had their most talented on the field. It made their lot easier.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute. His Media Watch Dog blog can be found at theaustralian.com.au

It's a small point, but the pond will make it anyway. 

The lizard Oz no longer carries the Polonial media hound, wherein Polonius frequently thinks he's a dog. 

As the thumb bio makes clear, it was shifted over to Sky Noise down under ...

Gerard Henderson is an Australian columnist, political commentator and the Executive Director of The Sydney Institute. His column Media Watch Dog is republished by SkyNews.com.au each Saturday morning. He started the blog in April 1988, before the ABC TV’s program of the same name commenced.

The pond won't provide a link, it's more just to wonder why the reptiles are so slack around this tedious droner and his boring offerings ...

Instead of Poloniuts, it was left to the dog botherer to do the reptile rant about the ABC this week, and for a nanosecond the pond thought of making the offering the Sunday bonus read ...

Just a nanosecond, because it was the usual sort of stuff the pond has come to expect from The Zionist Daily News ...

ABC finally reports Hamas executing Gazans – to blame Israel and Trump
In two years the ABC reported once on Hamas murdering Gazans. This week that changed when the executions cast doubt on Trump’s deal. Such sunlight on the reality of the terror group is welcome, but fair reporting should have been standard practice from the beginning.
By Chris Kenny
Associate Editor (National Affairs)

The pond is well over the rampant Zionism in the Oz, and the refusal of the reptiles to contemplate the wanton destruction and the ethnic cleansing that's gone down in Gaza,.

Each day the reptiles insist on offering this sort of Benji-loving tosh (spoiler alert, it's the climax to the DB's rant) ...

That's as much as the pond could take.

Here, have an immortal Rowe for making it this far ...

That happens to set the tone and the feel for the bromancer's offering, the bonus for this Sunday's meditation...

The header: All this, and rare earths too: the PM’s pitch to Trump, As he heads into face-to-face talks with Donald Trump, our PM has an unexpected edge: the Chinese Communist Party and Hamas have uniquely conspired for Australia to win US favours.

There wasn't really a caption for the astonishingly weak gif style caption which saw the two leaders pop up into frame with a Batman-style sparkle behind them:

To be fair, each day the pond is astonished by the abysmal reptile graphics; each day seems to get worse.

As for why the pond selected the bromancer, rest assured it wasn't for the insights. 

Given the turf and the subject matter, the bromancer gave the pond the chance to fling in some random 'toons, just for fun ...

That said, buckle up because the reptiles rated it a 9 minute read, and so of interminable, ennui-inducing length ...

Anthony Albanese has the help of two acutely unlikely friends in his effort to make a good impression on his first date with Donald Trump on Monday night Australia time.
The Chinese Communist Party and the Hamas terrorist outfit have both uniquely conspired to help the Australian win the favours of his American counterpart.
If Albanese doesn’t have a successful meeting with Trump this time, he surely never will.
Beijing chose just now to announce a whole bevy of export controls on rare earths. China is the rare earths superpower.
As its legendary leader, Deng Xiaoping, decades ago committed to and forecast, China has become to rare earths what Saudi Arabia was to oil, only more so.
Australia’s ambassador to the US, Kevin Rudd, has been trying to get a rare earths deal with the US ever since the Australian election. Beijing has just made the logic of such a deal very powerful.
Hamas, by agreeing to Trump’s ceasefire, has done two useful things for Albanese.
First, it provides a context in which Albanese, Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Defence Minister Richard Marles can all lavish praise on Trump without upsetting their left-wing base.
It may be a temporary situation.
The peace deal may not last. However much that is Hamas’s fault, Albanese, Wong and Marles would surely go back to demonising Israel if it resumed military action.
But the ceasefire will surely last beyond Monday, so the government in Canberra can keep singing Trump’s praises, the right way to maximise chances of a good Oval Office meeting.
The second Hamas gift is that Canberra’s foolish decision to recognise a Palestinian state when no such state exists will no longer be of any consequence in the context of the Trump-Albanese meeting.

The reptiles interrupted with a snap, The selfie game may be strong, but Anthony Albanese has less influence with Trump than any Australian prime minister since World War II has had with an American president. Picture: Instagram

The rictus grin! And so the pond seized the moment ...

Back to the bro ...

The Albanese government is making every concerted effort to make the Prime Minister-President date night a night to remember; to make it, if not magical, at least warm and fuzzy. It’s re-announcing all its defence projects, pretending it’s spending and doing much more than it is.
Yet it’s still the case that Albanese’s singular lack of serious ambition, focus and purpose in foreign affairs and strategic matters will likely lead to, at best, a mediocre outcome.
Albanese is not the worst Labor Prime Minister you could imagine.
Gough Whitlam nearly destroyed the US alliance.

Hang on, hang on, didn't ancient Troy in his endless book promotion tour scribble US alliance never in danger despite Whitlam-Nixon spat, Kissinger revealed, In an interview before his death, Henry Kissinger downplayed suggestions the US-Australia alliance was ever materially at risk during Gough Whitlam’s government.

He did, he did:

The Australia-US alliance was never at serious risk during the Whitlam government, revealed former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, and disagreements with Gough Whitlam were as much a factor of personality differences as they were about policy.

In one of his last interviews in the year before his death, Kissinger said differences such as that over the bombing of Vietnam and outbursts from Whitlam and his ministers caused concern in the White House but there was never any concerted move to cease ­military co-operation or end intelligence sharing.

“It’s conceivable (that) people said, ‘This kind of rhetoric should be penalised’,” Kissinger recalled in mid-2022. “It never reached an operational point. And I think it is inconceivable today.”

And so on, and the pond wishes that the reptiles got their stories straight, as the bromancer pressed on regardless ...

When his attorney-general, Lionel Murphy, ordered a Commonwealth Police raid on ASIO headquarters, this led to Washington cutting off intelligence sharing with Australia. The British and Canadians did the same.
Albanese is nothing like that.
Provided he doesn’t have to do anything substantial in Australia’s own defence, Albanese wants the US alliance to continue and to succeed.
This is a kind of minimalist, base-camp level of credibility in Australian national security. But it’s not nothing.
Given that Australia has no independent strategic capability at all and that we are living in, as the government and its agencies have told us, the most challenging strategic times since World War II, it would be literally insane for a Canberra government to oppose the US alliance or to allow it to fall into danger.
PMs and Presidents past
Nonetheless, Albanese has less influence with Trump than any Australian prime minister since World War II has had with an American president.
Trump is one year into a four-year electoral cycle and Albanese has met him only once and then very fleetingly.
The contrast with the past is damning for Albanese.
Richard Nixon wrote with unabashed admiration of Robert Menzies. Lyndon Johnson regarded Harold Holt as a close friend and came to Australia to visit him, and then came again for Holt’s funeral.
Paul Keating overstates his influence with Bill Clinton but there’s no doubt that Clinton sought Keating’s input and advice of regional issues. George W. Bush and John Howard were closer than the occupants of their respective positions had ever been and much of the structural integration the Australian system enjoys with the US today came from the Howard-Bush partnership.

The pond gets the strategy. 

The bromancer's piece is littered with snaps of PMs and Presidents, in an attempt to normalise the current reign of King Donald, and this strategy began with the French clock devotee and the sexual relations man canoodling...Paul Keating and Bill Clinton at The White House in September, 1993.

But these aren't normal times, and it's hard to normalise the new King...

The bromancer next resorted to his good/bad Trump routine ...

Rudd as PM was influential across the American political and bureaucratic system and had a generally good relationship with Bush. Barack Obama didn’t like Tony Abbott’s climate policies but had Abbott on speed dial when he wanted a favour. Both Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison did well with Trump in his first term.
But Albanese has been substantially a void in national security, and specifically American, policy. The Economist recently described the Starmer government in Britain, which so much resembles the Albanese government, as “aimless”. In strategic matters, the same adjective applies in Australia.
For although this will likely be a satisfactory meeting, though you can never be sure of anything involving Trump, it will suffer from Albanese’s lack of ambition in strategic and regional matters.

Oh you can pretty much be sure of many things with King Donald ...

The bromancer blathered on ...

Albanese has been motivated on the US alliance in part by domestic political considerations. Albanese comes from the left of Labor but he has been around a long time and he has seen the desperate damage Labor has done to itself whenever it looks like it’s undermining the US alliance.
A new raft of polling by the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney bears this out. Australians reject Trump overwhelmingly, but only 17 per cent think we should end the alliance. Almost half think the alliance more important than ever.
Trump is unpopular in Australia, the alliance is still strongly supported.
Australians have always distinguished between a president they don’t like and an alliance they treasure.
Nixon was unpopular in Australia but not the alliance.
Bush was deeply unpopular in Australia, but the minute Labor leader Mark Latham attacked Bush in a way that looked as though it might hurt the alliance, his ascendancy in the polls disappeared.
Bill Hayden as opposition leader briefly flirted with a policy banning visits by US nuclear-powered or armed ships. He quickly realised that given a choice between the US alliance and his leadership, Australians would choose the alliance.

Cue the next normalisation strategy, because all the way with LBJ and run the bastards over now feels like a very polite conversation, The PM Harold and then-US president Lyndon B Johnson. Picture: Supplied

Protests have come a long way since those days ...

Where's the shark?

Next the bromancer decided to devise a mission statement...

Albanese will never knowingly walk into that trap.
He will support the alliance. Not only that, the alliance suits him politically.
Australia is completely, 100 per cent reliant on the US for security.
In accepting that dependency so comprehensively, Albanese Labor frees itself of any responsibility for providing for Australia’s own defence or even having any strategically difficult conversations with the electorate.
Australia is a classic free rider on the US for defence. This allows Albanese to maximise social spending and minimise defence spending. Ugly policy. Irresponsible. Dangerous. Politically effective.
PM’s main mission
There will be four main objectives for Albanese’s meeting with Trump. The first is just to get a Trump benediction for the alliance and the relationship generally. No modern American administration has been so utterly dominated by its president and staffed by people who follow every presidential word as though they were Vatican altar boys following the pronouncements of the Pope.

So to another attempt to normalise the abnormal, Former Australian Prime Minister John Howard and former US President George W Bush when the pair were each in power in 2004. Pucire: Auspic/NAA

Why not show a more apt historical parallel, one that Colbert made a meal of in his monologue (YouTube link)...

Everybody loves an arch, from the Caesars through Napoleon to Adolf and King Donald, and the bromancer loves to see the need for benediction ...

Therefore, some sort of presidential benediction, encompassing Albanese personally, is essential. Objective two for Albanese will be to get a similar presidential benediction specifically for AUKUS. The AUKUS agreement is eccentric and strange in the way it has displaced ANZUS as the key acronym, or single word, symbolising the US alliance. It involves the UK. It’s right that Australia relates closely with the UK, and the US and UK together will notionally provide technology for Australia eventually to build nuclear submarines, although I remain very sceptical that any subs will ever be built in Australia.

Speaking of benediction ...

Did correspondents catch up with the latest move of the Woke Marxist?

Oh dear, what will the barking mad Catholic fundies make of that?

And speaking of barking mad Catholic fundies, the bromancer was praying for AUKUS...

But AUKUS, in emphasising the relationship with the UK, valuable though that is, actually takes away from the region and key security partners such as Japan. The moment of truth with AUKUS comes in 2031, after Trump has left the White House, when whoever is US president has to decide whether to go ahead and in 2032 transfer a Virginia-class nuclear submarine to Australia.
There’s every chance Australia won’t be ready to operate and base its own nuclear submarine by then. And there’s no chance the US will feel it has enough Virginias. My prediction is the president at that time will not say a flat-out “no” to Canberra, which will already have spent many billions of dollars on the project, but rather will say “not yet”. You’re not ready yet, we can’t spare one yet.

Then came another attempt at normalistion, with that parade of PMs and Presidents, featuring the onion muncher pretending to smirk at the Kenyan socialist. It looked more like a sinister sneer, in Then PM Tony Abbott meets US president Barack Obama in the White House in 2014.

The pond was still stuck on fundamentalist Catholics of the Nazi-loving, couch-molesting kind...

Always strange to see grown men well above the age of consent described as boys and kids ... but liars got to joke around ... while the bromancer spruiked the deal ...

In any event it would be crazy for Trump to walk away from the deal right now because Australia pays billions of dollars directly to the US to bolster its submarine industrial base, provides eventually hundreds of sailors to serve on US boats and, albeit very slowly, constructs a nuclear submarine maintenance facility in Perth that the Americans can use.
Even Trump couldn’t have organised a better deal for America than that.
Congress strongly supports AUKUS, in no small part due to prodigious, effective work by Rudd and his team.
The third big objective is a critical minerals and rare earths deal. Rare earths are not that rare but you need to find them in sufficient concentration to make mining and processing them economically viable.
Australia has rare earths in abundance. It also has a lot of mining and processing expertise. Australian company Lynas enjoys a partnership with Japan that Tokyo undertook to have a non-Chinese source of supply.

Hang on, hang on, speaking of that alleged processing expertise, didn't the lizard Oz editorialist downplay Australia's potential only yesterday?

...this is not a problem Australia alone can solve. China has monopolised the market because it has used government policies to make it uneconomical for others to compete. Building a rare earths mining, processing and supply industry in Australia will require other nations to step up with financing and firm commitments to buy products that may be more expensive than what has been on offer from China.

(S)he did, (S)he did, and the bromancer had to fall into line ...

Creating a non-Chinese source of supply is quite difficult. The technology involved in extracting rare earths, turning them into oxides, alloying them, smelting them into a metal and finally turning out magnets is exceptionally challenging, complex and hard. It’s different for different rare earths. So-called light rare earths are involved in all manner of everyday technologies. So-called heavy rare earths are particularly prominent in defence technologies.
It’s a sign of the complete dereliction of Western governments and the madness of applying the free market model to critical national security supply chains that China dominates 90 per cent of this trade. To make the weapons that it might need to use against China, the US has to buy Chinese rare earths.

Dumb? You think?

Beijing, following, it must be said, something like Washington’s example, has announced that from December it will apply new export restrictions.

Dereliction, madness and the war on China by Xmas in a Catch-22 mode, and perhaps, to the bromancer's despair delayed until well after Xmas?

Who'd have thunk it? Who'd have known? Who could have reported it?

Well at least the reptiles can sign up to ways of keeping such sordid matters hidden ... and earn plenty of bones in the process.

Speaking of compliant woofers, the reptiles flung in a snap of US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Picture: AFP

That's got to be worth a rich man 'toon ...

The bromancer stayed strong ...

Any component with even a speck of Chinese rare earths will require Chinese approval to be sold. So if one US company makes a hi-tech component to sell to another US company it will need Beijing’s approval.
How would Beijing enforce such a rule? Simply by refusing to export to a company, or indeed a country, that doesn’t follow this rule. Trump hit the roof when he heard about this. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent responded by saying the US and its allies should decouple their economies from China if China goes ahead with this rule.
Trump and China’s Xi Jinping are likely to have a meeting on the sidelines of the APEC summit in South Korea in November. Beijing’s new restrictions are scheduled to go into effect in December. So it may be that the extravagantly unreasonable and aggressive move by Beijing is, again a la Trump, essentially a negotiating position.
Trump has certainly been clearing away all sorts of irritants to allow him to make a Big Deal with Xi. However, almost everyone in the US system understands that this dependence on Beijing for critical technology is extremely dangerous.
This is where Australia could come in.

Say what, we can come in, join up, with radical forces seeking to end the reign of King Donald?

The pond keeds, it keeds ... there's some serious bromancer strategising going down ...

The problem is that China can always undercut any other supplier on price. Beijing, with Indonesia, destroyed much of the Australian nickel industry this way. Incidentally, to do this they built a slew of coal-fired power stations in Indonesia.
The problem with a strategic deal between Australia and the US on rare earths is that the trade is carried out by private companies. The companies building the hi-tech equipment will always go for the cheapest price, unless directed otherwise by their government or in receipt of a subsidy.
On rare earths, China has massively outplayed the West. The US has known about all this for at least 15 years but very, very little has been done to counter Beijing’s dominance.
Rare earths exports are only worth about $15bn for Australia this year, but the potential, if anybody actually does take security seriously, is vast.
Albanese’s final objective for the meeting should be to try to get Trump interested once more in the Quadrilateral Dialogue involving the US, Japan, India and Australia. Trump’s mismanagement of the India relationship, apparently because Narendra Modi won’t nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize, is the most counter-productive and irresponsible element of his entire foreign policy so far.
Australia’s key interests with the US are to maintain the alliance and keep the US involved in our region. A more ambitious prime minister would try to get Trump more actively involved regionally because in his administration the only things that get serious traction are the things Trump takes a personal interest in.

Yes, yes, regional involvement, it's just what we want and need ... how else to score the right laughs?

Hard to choose, they both do great comedy stylings, whether it's a Qatar base or baseless defences of neo-Nazis.

And that just about finished the bromancer, and it certainly finished the pond ...

Australia has huge natural advantages with the US. Washington needs our geography to disperse its forces in the Indo-Pacific. It has rare earths the US wants. It has a big trade deficit with the US. It’s going to spend 70 per cent of its defence acquisition budget on US kit. And Australia is popular in the US. There’s no natural MAGA constituency to beat up on Australia as there is with France or even Canada. Anyone who doubts this should watch the screamingly funny Netflix series The Residence.
Given all these enormous advantages, surely Albanese gets a good result with Trump?

Indeed, indeed, perhaps we can get the same good result the disunited states are currently getting ...