In which the pond dares to go there (warning, warning Will Robinson, petulant Peta alert) ...

 

For once, the pond decided to go there.

The pond has long respected correspondents' wishes to avoid being confronted by petulant Peta, an ugly sight early in the morning, but difficult at any time of day or night.

But consider this.

Early in the morning the pond offered the chance for correspondents to either indulge or walk on by, courtesy the archive ...

Hastie makes a stand for our core values
Andrew Hastie’s resignation from the opposition frontbench opens up a struggle for the soul of the Liberal Party. At a deeper level, though, it’s really a struggle for the soul of Australia.
By Peta Credlin
Columnist

That choice remains, and the pond is being as up front about it as a Tipper Gore warning label on a Frank Zappa album.

But the archive is a fickle, fragile thing, and frequently fails. And the pond has skin in the game ...

The pond reckons that petulant Peta will give the lettuce a bloody bigly boost, and that means an even biglier pay-off for the pond.

Finally, only the most devoted herpetology students make it to arvo classes, so where's the harm? They have hardened carapaces resistant to whatever acidic vitriol the petulant Princess might disgorge ...

To help soften the blow, to keep petulant Peta further down the page, out of sight, how about a warm-up from another place?

As Europe falls to the far right, Hastie and Ley are at odds about what it means for the Liberals
Matthew Knott

Well yes, when all you've got is fear, why not a bit of fear-mongering, as Knott went on to consider a knotty problem (or should that be nutty?):

...Hastie’s explanation for his resignation was straightforward: he believed that, under changes announced by Ley in letters to her shadow ministerial team, he would not have leadership over immigration policy. But he acknowledged there were bigger, and more profound, issues at play than a carve-up over portfolio responsibilities. Long discussed as a potential future Liberal leader, the former special forces soldier is deeply immersed in debates about the nature of modern conservatism and knows where he stands.
“I think the centre-right as a movement is fractured at the moment,” Hastie said. “We’re seeing the One Nation vote increase quite significantly. And I think one of the jobs we have to do as a Liberal Party is reconstitute that natural constituency if we’re going to win government. So I think that’s the task going forward. And that means listening to aspirational mainstream Australians who love their country, love their local community, love their families, who want to build a better life, but they feel like Labor has taken control away from them, and who feel like they’re going backwards, and that’s who we’ve got to win back.”
Hastie’s language echoes the 2016 Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom, where the Leave campaign won a shock victory under the slogan of “Take Back Control”. Almost a decade later, the immigration debate continues to roil the UK and reshape British politics. The arrival of asylum seekers on people smuggling boats has damaged Prime Minister Keir Starmer yet produced no pay-off for his Conservative rival Kemi Badenoch. Instead, Brexit champion Nigel Farage’s Reform party is in the ascendancy. The latest YouGov poll shows Reform winning 311 seats, Labour 144 and the Tories just 45 – a dire result for a party that has dominated post-war Britain.
Across the English Channel, polls show France’s far-right National Rally consistently leading in the polls as Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Renaissance movement flounders. Macron this week burnt through his fifth prime minister in two years as the populist right and left surge in support. Similarly, the latest polling in Germany shows the far-right Alternative for Germany leading the centre-right Christian Democrats despite being under surveillance by the country’s security services.
Liberal Party politicians are watching events in Europe closely, but are drawing different lessons from what they see. Moderates such as NSW Senator Andrew Bragg – and, in many ways, Ley – believe it is imperative for the party to boost its appeal to migrant communities and tack to the centre. Hastie and Jacinta Price, who was sacked from her frontbench role after making offensive remarks about Indian migrants, believe the Coalition must harness voter anger about high migration levels by embracing populism. Immigration, an issue that should in theory be problematic for a centre-left government like Albanese’s, is instead bedevilling and dividing his conservative opponents.
With his rivals in disarray, the prime minister looks remarkably at ease and in command of the political terrain. Albanese is about to take a week of holidays, his first meaningful break since the gruelling election campaign. Meanwhile, Liberal MP Mary Aldred is warning her colleagues that their status as a viable party of government is not assured unless they cut out the infighting. Political parties can be remarkably resilient institutions, but they can also quickly fade into irrelevance. Just ask the British Tories, and the once-dominant but now largely redundant Israeli Labour Party and French Socialist Party. Things seem permanent in life, until they suddenly aren’t.

Now contemplate this if you have the strength and the desire to produce a triumph of the will:

The header: Hastie makes a stand for our core values, Andrew Hastie’s resignation from the opposition frontbench opens up a struggle for the soul of the Liberal Party. At a deeper level, though, it’s really a struggle for the soul of Australia.

The caption for the man reared in a young earth, creationist, evolution-denying household: Andrew Hastie heads to the backbench during question time on Wednesday. Picture: NewsWire

It's the pond's contention that the barking mad far right in the Liberal party - the same mob that ruined the Victorian branch - now see a chance to take over at the federal level, and the mad monk and his dom, petulant Peta, are spear carriers in this cause, with the pastie Hastie a humble vessel for the cause, into which they can pour bile and bigotry.

See if this thesis is wrong:

If we can’t debate the big issues facing our society, we can’t adequately deal with them; and if neither political party will challenge contemporary left orthodoxy, it won’t be debated publicly.
Instead, concerns will fester below the radar until they erupt – often in ugly ways – as we have seen around the Western world. That’s the reality; if mainstream political parties refuse to respond to voter concerns, sooner or later new voices emerge that will.
The reason there has been no real debate about mass immigration and multiculturalism, despite the challenge they pose to prosperity and social cohesion, is that neither party has as yet been prepared to listen to what Australians are telling them: Labor because it is ambivalent about our history and wants to dilute our core Anglo-Celtic culture; and the Coalition because it’s frightened of being labelled “racist” or to risk losing the votes of migrants despite the fact most migrants want people to come here “the right way” and to do “the right thing” once here.
At one level, Andrew Hastie’s resignation from the opposition frontbench opens up a struggle for the soul of the Liberal Party. At a deeper level, though, it’s really a struggle for the soul of Australia, because if we continue on the present policy trajectory we will soon be a very different country.

That religious metaphor - the pond is still trying to locate "soul", as mystifying as scouring the heavens for "heaven" - was just an initial shot across the true believer bow.

Sure enough the reptiles wheeled in an unreformed former seminarian to take up the "soul" metaphor ... Sky News political contributor Chris Uhlmann says there is a “fight for the soul” of the Liberal Party which was exemplified by Andrew Hastie’s resignation from the frontbench over immigration. “There is a fight for the soul of the Liberal Party at the moment that is going to be over issues like this,” Mr Uhlmann told Sky News host Peta Credlin. “It is quite clear that whatever Sussan Ley imagined that Andrew Hastie was going to say about immigration was not going to sit particularly well with what she had to say about immigration.”

Behind it all, there's rampant bigotry and bile, and a goodly bit of denialism ...

Far from being some sort of populist “Trumpian outbreak”, Hastie’s eagerness to rethink mass migration and multiculturalism (and ditch net zero) is more a return to the old Howard formula of “economic liberalism and social conservatism”; the only formula, I might add, that has delivered landslide Liberal wins under him and, later, under Tony Abbott.

Oh come on, just because the onion muncher peddled his own brand of down under boofhead thuggery doesn't mean that King Donald's not an inspiration ...

You know, the fear of others, the loathing of minorities, the walling off of the enemy ...

Oh the lure of distracting 'toons, but the pond really does need them to make it to the end ...

For a long time it has been virtually impossible to debate either the size or the composition of Western countries’ immigration intakes without being labelled an economic troglodyte or an out-and-out racist.
For years, the Treasury line to government ministers (on both sides of politics) has been that immigration boosts economic growth, and therefore the tax take, so any reduction in immigration must be accompanied by politically difficult spending cuts.
But while immigration boosts overall economic growth, it doesn’t necessarily boost growth per capita, and it enables lazy governments to mask their inability to lift productivity.
Given all the players that feed off the migrant intake – the universities and colleges with overseas students as their business model and enterprises seeking cheap labour – only the very determined can take them on.

You see, it's migrant bashing time, hive mind style, as shown in the disunited states ...and isn't that going well ...

And so on, as the reptiles deployed an image designed to shock, outrage and terrify the hive mind, Graffiti on a billboard in Brunswick Street in Fitzroy Picture: NewsWire

All that did was make the pond think of the latest Wilcox cartoon ...

And so to the nub of the hate and the fear mongering ... those bloody pesky, difficult, uppity furriners, ruining everything...

Add in the community leaders eager to encourage chain migration to give their enclaves more clout with local MPs, especially those who’ve used local ethnic leaders to boost their factional numbers, and there’s the explanation for the bipartisan cone of silence.
All of these powerful and vocal lobbies have a vested interest in shutting down debate: even though sustained record migration is undeniably pushing down wages because it’s boosting supply, pushing up housing costs because it’s boosting demand, and putting immense strain on physical and social infrastructure because it’s boosting usage.
Then there’s the fact, demonstrated by attendees at pro-Hamas rallies, that at least some of our recent migrants have not left tribal hatreds behind. While post-war migrants were encouraged to integrate and then assimilate, more recent migrants have been encouraged to remain distinctively different, under the doctrine of multiculturalism and the unlikely notion that diversity is strength.
Multiculturalism has fostered the impression that, at least as far as officialdom is concerned, we have no culture of our own worth cherishing and protecting, as other nations like France and Japan protect their identities.

That dog left the building long ago ...

Of course that's just country of birth ... if you do the ethnic routine, it's getting closer to 50-50 by the year ... (see source for footnotes).

The horse has long bolted, and for some reason the pond was reminded of the pond's now long departed mother, who feared and loathed Islamics, until an Islamic woman began arriving to act as her day carer, and suddenly she discovered she was just dealing with another human being, and that she wasn't so bad at all.

That's why the pond tries to keep its atheism friendly. No need to get into an incessant brawl with god botherers of assorted traditions ... provided they avoid proselytising, so will the pond, but inevitably petulant Peta is only interested in conflict and hate and fear ...and a yearning for some mythical golden age, usually located in Ming the Merciless's 1950s, what with two world wars and a great depression making previous times a little tricky, not to mention what it was like to be a worker before unions started to organise ...

It’s way past time for a serious national figure from within one of the parties of government to call for this to be re-examined. Yet Hastie’s reward for wanting a fundamental rethink of Coalition policy (despite the hollow words of the leader who says she wants all policies reviewed) was to have his portfolio gutted and then be white-anted by colleagues adept at leaks but little else that involves the intellectual hard yards needed to get out of opposition.
The difference between Hastie and most of his colleagues is that he is a believer in a certain sort of Australia: one that is open and welcoming, sure, but also one that is recognisably the country he was willing to die to defend. Let that sink in before you question his motivations.
As a university student, he was so moved by the Islamist attacks on 9/11 that he changed the direction of his life to become a soldier for our country: first in the regular army, then in the SAS, and now in the parliament. For him, politics is not a matter of working out what people want and giving it to them; it’s more a matter of working out what people need, and what Australia needs, and then fighting to win them over.
And yes, he appreciates that pushing against several decades of leftist indoctrination won’t be easy; but soldier that he is, he’d rather fight the good fight than die wondering. Importantly, and this is what most of the commentariat have missed, given they’re almost all observers rather than participants with a deep vocational call to politics, Hastie can see the popular revolt that’s happening in the US and Britain and wants to head it off before rusted-on Liberals give up on their party as recent polls suggest may already be under way.

Then came a line which is beyond the valley of the vile dog whistle ...

The multiculturalism that pervades official thinking is an abandonment of the Anglo-Celtic core culture and the Judeo-Christian ethos that have made our country great – and, indeed, are what have made it so attractive to migrants.

Yeah, yeah, many have caught that time machine ...

And so to a bit of Islam bashing of the sort that some reptiles deny the lizard Oz does ... as if anyone would believe that kind of nonsensical denialism ...

Hastie gets, in a way that few of the careerists who now fill the Liberal ranks do, that a growing Muslim population unable to leave their hatreds behind are a challenge to the character of our society – not because Muslims are inherently bad people but because their religion is very hard to reconcile with the pluralism and individualism that have long been at the heart of the West.
I can’t put it any plainer than this. Radical Islamism is the challenge of our times, and we need to be upfront about that if we are to have any chance of ensuring that Australia stays peaceful and cohesive. Other countries have missed opportunities to deal with this issue and may have saddled themselves with social problems that are close to insoluble. We still have a small window of time to learn from their mistakes; and most critically, their denial of what was happening and their silencing of anyone speaking out.
If Muslims are to be good citizens in a country like Australia, they must face up to the evil that has been done in the name of their faith – in the same way, I suppose, that Catholics like me have had to face up to and disown the epidemic of clerical sex abuse. Because it wasn’t Jews who flew planes into the World Trade Centre and killed almost 3000 people. It wasn’t Christian suicide bombers in 2005 who blew up the London Underground, killing 52. It isn’t Buddhists who have murdered 7000 Christians in Nigeria this year alone. Or cut the throats of priests saying mass in France. Or murdered journalists over a cartoon. Or abducted schoolgirls because females getting an education so offended Boko Haram. Or burnt alive a Jordanian pilot in an Islamic State cage. Or bombed nightclubs in Bali, killing 202 including – as we know – 88 Australians.

That's about as close to hate speech as the pond has gotten in recent times ... and by the pond's reckoning the sum total of petulant Peta's hate speech managed to insult a good half of the Australian population.

Good luck with that strategy ...

And so to the closing par ...

The difference between Hastie and many of his so-called moderate colleagues is that he has the honesty to admit this and the guts to have a debate about it before we sleepwalk into disaster. If the debate that Hastie wants the Coalition to have is prematurely shut down, it won’t just be the Coalition that’s the loser but all the Australians worried that our country has lost its way.

And so the pond can finally reveal why it went there, why it wallowed in the pestilent, pernicious Peta mud. 

It was just for the chance to run a few 'toons and for the immortal Rowe to wrap up this day's karnival of krapulent klowns ... the kkk of the Liberal party, as it were ...

As always it's in the details ...

The pond particularly enjoyed this detail ... a beady eye still casting a pall over the petulant Peta proceedings ...