In which "Seminarian Solution" Ughmann and the "Ned" Everest star, with a guest appearance by Ronnie Raygun ...

 

Heresy. Deep, dire, dank, threatening heresy ...

Look, there at the top of the page early in the morning in the weekend Oz, a heretic struts, running wild and free, exposing the hive mind to immense harm...

The pond did what any decent, right thinking cult member would do, and put the EXCLUSIVE in the archive ... (and if the archive's on the blink, so much the better)

EXCLUSIVE
‘We lost our way on climate’, says Ley’s Liberal ally
Liberal senator and Sussan Ley ally Andrew McLachlan has broken ranks to back Labor’s emissions target, warning his party has ‘lost its way’ on climate action.
By Greg Brown

All that needs to be added is a teaser, revealing the extent of the depravity, serving as a warning for any lost soul daring to visit the archive...

...Former prime minister Tony Abbott has escalated his anti-net-zero push by declaring “there is no climate crisis” ahead of a ­series of internal Coalition meetings on the issue in Canberra next week. But Senator McLachlan said the push to dump climate targets was out of touch with voters, business leaders and international markets.
While leadership aspirant ­Andrew Hastie is pushing for a new brand of right-wing politics in the mould of populist leaders Nigel Farage and Donald Trump who are opposed to the Paris agreement, Senator McLachlan said a “true conservative heart ­desires to be the best steward of nature”.
“You cannot call yourself a true conservative if you do not commit (to) leaving to the next generation a healthier world,” Senator McLachlan said.

Shocking stuff.

The pond was vastly relieved at the next EXCLUSIVE, which revealed an astonishing conspiracy, bad players scheming to prevent the goodies dishing out dinkum chunks of bad cholesterol and heart attacks...

EXCLUSIVE
Meat industry calls ‘bull’ on ‘ideological’ food guidelines shift, scientist’s axing
Australians may soon be officially advised to eat less meat to save the planet. Farmers suspect a fix by ideologues, as a top scientist is dumped – allegedly for dismissing the concept of a carbon-neutral Aussie diet.
By Matthew Denholm

The reptiles were right on to it:

Australia’s red meat industry is demanding the Albanese government intervene to head off “ideological” manipulation of official dietary guidelines to curtail meat consumption on climate grounds, as a top food scientist is “purged” from a key role for not being sufficiently activist.
Industry bodies have been urging the National Health and Medical Research Council to abandon plans to revise its official Australian Dietary Guidelines to factor in sustainability.
Cattle Australia and the Red Meat Advisory Council say the NHMRC should focus on health and nutrition and leave sustainability to other forums, arguing the complexities of food production are beyond NHMRC’s ken and remit.
Those calls have been ignored and suspicions of an “ideological stitch-up” heightened by the secret dumping of a leading food sustainability expert, CSIRO principal research scientist Brad Ridoutt, from NHMRC’s sustainability working group.

Shocking, these ideologies were everywhere and rampant, but the pond had to skip Stephen "Boiled" Rice offering yet another EXCLUSIVE, exposing the deviant teaching of children about terrifying "gender ideology".

Instead the pond headed over to the extreme far right ...

What a relief. Dame Slap blathering about "woke" yet again, and a solid line up, including but not limited to what cultists call "The Seminarian Solution" and a visit from the Bjorn-again one, not to forget the dog botherer blathering on in his unfortunately imitable way. 

The pond will do this mob slowly, as befits weekend relaxation, and will restrict this outing to just two reptiles.

Of course "The Seminarian Solution" had to be first cab off the reptile ranks ...

The header: Pivotal Madeleine King’s next job is educating colleagues on energy demands of the rare earths deal, Credit is due for something that could be consequential to the economy and national security, but there’s a long way to go and, for all the talk of environmental concerns, one big question looms.

The caption: China dominates every step that turns rock into the metals that power fighter jets and propel nuclear submarines. Artwork: Frank Ling

The pond realises it carps on endlessly about the dismal nature of the illustrations offered by the remnants of the lizard Oz graphics department, but this day's work by Frank was truly appalling.

It's bad enough to have to plough through an almost unendurable five minutes of "The Seminarian Solution", but to be put off at the get go by that sort of illustration - down there with King Donald's recitation of "person, woman, man, camera, TV" is too much for any bear to bear ...

Frank, "jet, sub, windmill, car, flag, rock" isn't an improvement ...

And with that, on with the Seminarian Science ...

Buried in the fuselage of every one of Australia’s US-built joint strike fighters is about 420kg of rare earth materials, much of it in the shape of powerful permanent magnets. Every nuclear-powered Virginia-class submarine has about 10 times that weight of the elements encased behind its hull.
To put the word powerful in perspective, a neodymium-iron-boron magnet is roughly 1000 times stronger than the ceramic one holding your shopping list to the fridge. A piece the size of a matchbox can lift around 100kg of steel.
Inside the fighter these rare earth magnets have several jobs: spinning something, holding something steady or sensing what is happening, all part of the invisible choreography that lets America’s most advanced aircraft fly, see and fight.
In an irony so profound words fail, almost every gram of those rare earth magnets has passed, at some stage of its manufacture, through a refinery in China.
Beijing controls about 60 per cent of global rare earth mining and more than 90 per cent of processing and magnet production. It dominates every step that turns rock into the metals that power fighter jets and propel nuclear submarines. So you don’t have to be a geostrategic expert to see that this wrinkle in the supply chain just may be a problem for the US and its allies.
Three decades ago, paramount leader Deng Xiaoping saw the value of these minerals to his nation. “The Middle East has oil; China has rare earths,” he said.
They are not called rare earths because they are scarce but because they are rarely found in concentrated deposits and are fiendishly hard to separate once mined. Vast quantities of rock must be dug up and crushed to extract a handful of usable minerals.
And that’s the easy part. The real work is in the refinery, where a chemical process dissolves, filters and precipitates the earth through a toxic bath of acids and solvents to tease out each element.

The reptiles decided to throw in another dire visual, The Golden Valley of Rare Earths industrial park on the outskirts of Ganzhou in Jiangxi province. Picture: Will Glasgow

The pond would have been much more taken by a visual showing off the latest King Donald folly, Trump’s Newest Time Cover’s Nazi Inspiration Revealed.

...the composition on the new Time cover is inspired by Arnold Newman’s 1963 photograph of Alfred Krupp, the German industrialist and convicted Nazi war criminal. That portrait, published by Newsweek, has long been considered among the most psychologically charged images ever produced for a weekly news magazine.
Voss appeared to confirm the reference by liking comments on Instagram where followers had asked him if the two images were linked. “Are you referencing Arnold Newman’s portrait of Krupp here?” one fellow photographer asked. Once Voss had liked the comment, Shayan Asgharnia replied again. “F-----g brilliant,” he said....

It's just like SBS programming, they can never get enough of the Nazis ...

Sorry, back for another serve of Seminarian Science...

Every stage demands heat, pressure and precision. The ore is roasted, leached with hydrochloric or sulfuric acid, then run through hundreds of solvent-extraction tanks where the elements are separated one molecular layer at a time.
The waste left behind is caustic, often radioactive, and hard to clean up. That’s why most of the world was happy to let China do it.
The process is also astonishingly energy-hungry. Refining rare earths requires sustained high temperatures, hundreds of degrees in the cracking and roasting stages, and constant electrical power to pump and separate chemical solutions. In China, that energy mostly comes from coal-fired plants and natural gas, which is why the country can process rare earths more cheaply than anyone else.
So, in a now routine observation by this column, once you lift the bonnet on just about any part of the “green transition” you find furnaces fired by fossil fuels.
The metal box that sits behind the blades of a wind turbine houses a ring of rare earth magnets that turns rotation into electricity. A large offshore turbine contains tonnes of magnets in its generator. Every electric car carries a few kilograms in its motor, where those magnets spin a rotor that turns electricity into motion.
Relying on the cheapest supply chain for these goods worked in a globalised free-trade world, even though it was strategically stupid in any age.

As if that wasn't enough, it was time for a reptile EXPLAINER, China already commands the world’s rare earths industry, the critical minerals that power smartphones, wind turbines and fighter jets. Now, through a state-backed merger, sweeping export restrictions and a rapid build-up of new high-tech facilities, Beijing is moving to lock in that dominance and use it as leverage on the global stage. As Washington scrambles for alternative suppliers, China is signalling that control of these resources is both an economic weapon and a geopolitical warning. The Australian’s North Asia correspondent, Will Glasgow, reports.

That seemed to send the unreformed seminarian off into a deep panic ...and to a man, with an unfortunate name which required the pond to refuse to bring a Cadbury chocolate treat into the discussion ... (Cadbury's will need to fork out hard cash or a year's supply before any flakey fakery passes the pond's lips)

In a world of increasing geostrategic competition it is deeply dangerous because the Chinese Communist Party sits at the choke point of the modern economy.
In early October, Beijing tested its economic weapons system. In response to a US Commerce Department expansion of export controls on Chinese companies Beijing trumped it with new licensing rules for every stage of the rare earth supply chain. Any company using Chinese-sourced material or technology – from the mine to the magnet – would now need Beijing’s permission to sell abroad. As energy analyst Doomberg put it, this was China’s declaration of “economic nuclear war”.
That rocked the US, and President Donald Trump blustered about imposing 100 per cent tariffs on Chinese goods. This set the stage for Anthony Albanese’s triumphant visit to Washington. The White House needed the optics and the reality of what he was selling, even if the deal is still a long way from displacing China from its dominant role in the world supply of rare earth materials.
Perth USAsia Centre chief executive Gordon Flake hailed the agreement, saying the focus should be on extracting Beijing from processing in the defence supply chain, which is a small part of global demand.
“Our objective here is not to try to remove rare earth processing outside of China, not even to fully compete with China, but to ensure that a sufficient percentage of rare earth processing is done external to China, to guarantee supply for our defence, national security, defence industry and advanced communication needs,” Flake said.
“And also to deny China monopoly behaviour so that it doesn’t disrupt our needs in an era of geostrategic competition. That’s a much more manageable goal.”
It also made sense to spread the load across the broad alliance of like-minded nations.
“Right now, there’s a lot of places that do the initial phase, the mining, the extractions of initial cracking, leaching,” Flake says. “There’s a lot of countries that do the final metallisation, like Japan and South Korea. But there’s not a lot of places that do that midstream processing and that’s where the choke point is, because that’s almost entirely in China.”

Um, might there not be some other learnings to hand from China?

Why China Is Quietly Winning At EV Battery Recycling
Thanks to new techniques, some Chinese companies say they can recover 99.6% of the key battery materials.

It's part of what might be called a depressing "Seminarian Cycle".

Climate change is a hoax, so we don't need EVs, so we don't need rare earths, so we don't need to recycle rare earths, so we need to get caught flat-footed by stupid News Corp ideology ...

...Reuters noted back in 2023 that the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act included “a clause that automatically qualifies EV battery materials recycled in the U.S. as American-made for subsidies, regardless of their origin.” The goal was to incentivize EV battery recycling in the U.S., in an attempt to break China’s almost total global monopoly in the field. 
With the Trump administration now stripping back incentives for EVs, batteries and their supporting industries, it doesn’t look like China’s battery recycling leadership will be challenged anytime soon. As time progresses and more vehicles on the road become electric, and as the ones that are on the road today begin to age, the need for battery recycling will increase considerably.
Will the West's spent EV packs end up being shipped to China to be recycled?

Forget it Jake, have another snap, Resources Minister Madeleine King. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

And so to the last of the Ughmann...

There is no getting around the fact we will have to pay a premium for rare earths that bypass China.
“We don’t have the economies of scale that are sufficient for us to compete with China on a dollar-for-dollar basis,” Flake says. “So we need to understand that for national security purposes it’ll be more expensive than commercially available rare earth elements.”
The Prime Minister and Australia’s US ambassador Kevin Rudd deserve the credit they are getting for the success of the visit and for delivering something that could be consequential to the economy and national security.
But several people told this column the rare earths deal was driven by Resources Minister Madeleine King. She has been pivotal in developing the idea, which began to take shape more than two years ago at a meeting held at the Australian embassy in Washington.
Flake points out there is a long way to go and, for all the talk of environmental concerns, one big question looms over ramping up rare earths processing here.
“To build these facilities in Australia, where we are a very high cost of energy jurisdiction, is going to immediately beg the question, where does the energy come from?” Flake says.
Energy security is national security. That is something King also understands. She may need to hold remedial lessons for some other members of cabinet.

Will she also explain, in a remedial way, to the unreformed seminarian that there are other uses for rare earths than fighter planes and subs, and some of that demand comes from the understanding that climate change is real, and that solutions require renewable energy and rare earths?

On another planet perhaps, not in one of the reptile lands above the Magickal Faraway Tree, wherein Dame Slap instructs her pupils on wokery ...

But the Ughmann was just the beginning of the suffering, so please allow the pond to set the theme and the tone ...

This day's "Ned natter" was a full, horrifically long 10 minutes, which was why there was no room for other reptiles ...

The header: After victory, the mission gets tougher, Call it the price of victory: Trump’s endorsement of Albanese and AUKUS is a historic alliance shift. But it’s not all smooth sailing: the test lies in Australia’s capacity to deliver on its promises.

The caption, with a reminder that all the pond does is faithfully transcribe: EMBARGOED FOR INQUIRER SATURDAY 25 OCTOBER 2025. 23 October 2025; a photo comp of Anthony Albanese and Donald Trump with a submarine and the United States Capitol building behind them with rare Earth minerals 'Yttrium' and 'Neodymium'. Artwork by Emilia Tortorella. Sources: iStock and supplied. Ratio 16:9 for PRINT.

Where to start Emilia? Well, forget the wretched attempt at fragmenting the image, why not wonder why 16:9? Why not 1.85? Or better yet 2.35?

The pond was startled to see a recent film offering turn up in 16:9, it seemed almost as old-fashioned as 4:3.

Okay, okay, it was a pathetic illustration, but the pond can only delay for so long before leaving base camp to begin the usual "Ned" Everest climb ...

The green light from Donald Trump is a singular political victory for Anthony Albanese – but don’t be fooled. This is the start, not the end, of the monumental challenge facing Labor.
The consequences of our transformed US alliance will shake the Labor Party to its political foundations.
Trump’s endorsement this week of Albanese as a leader and of his agenda may eventually be seen as one of the most significant exchanges between an Australian and an American leader in the history of the alliance.
It opens the door to potentially transforming opportunities.
The challenge is whether Labor can deliver on the nuclear-powered submarines and the critical minerals agenda. Here are the harsh truths: more of the same won’t cut it. The Albanese government will need to lift its game and address the costs, the manpower, the infrastructure and the politics that flow from this week’s success.
The current defence budget trajectory is hopelessly inadequate.
Our industrial and nuclear personnel programs are underdone. There is concern the facilities in Western Australia – at HMAS Stirling and the Henderson hub – are not being developed fast enough. The long-run critical minerals and rare earths agenda looks optimistic and deliverable only by smashing through the delays and regulations that beset Labor’s approach to resources development.

You see how it works? 

Last week "Ned" was a worry wart, today he's a Chicken Little worry wart, and tomorrow he'll be a "sky is falling" worry wart, rinse and endlessly repeat, in an endless cycle of blather ... occasionally interrupted by tedious snaps, US President Donald Trump greets Australia's Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at the White House in Washington, DC, on Monday. Picture: AFP

Sheesh, that was aeons ago, more than enough time to knock down an East Wing or three ...

In addition, the government is reluctant to make the strategic case for AUKUS to the public. Albanese is rhetorically shy of acknowledging its purpose – teaming up with the US to project force as a strategic deterrent against China. Labor doesn’t want to go there but Beijing isn’t reluctant to denounce what’s happening.
Albanese sells AUKUS on a different but legitimate basis: as an industrial revolution for the nation.
Recall his March 14, 2023, declaration: “The scale, complexity and economic significance of this investment is akin to the creation of the Australian automotive indus­try in the post-World War II period.”
Former Australian ambassador to the US and Defence Department head Dennis Richardson told Inquirer: “The political foundation for AUKUS has now been secured. In each of the three nations – the US, the UK and Australia – support is bipartisan. This is a powerful platform. The big challenge for Australia wasn’t getting Trump over the line – it’s the follow-up and delivery. It is within the very success of the PM’s visit that the great challenge lies. The test for Australia comes in the funding of AUKUS while maintaining our other defence capabilities, and that will require defence spending as a proportion of GDP to rise well north of 3 per cent of GDP.”
The question of dollars
Given that spending now hovers in the 2 per cent to 2.1 per cent zone, people don’t grasp the magnitude of this transformation. The Australian public is almost completely unprepared for making this nation into a nuclear-powered submarine navy. It will affect every household. Something has to give – either the huge near universal social policy agendas this country enjoys almost as a right or a hefty increases in the tax burden to finance this expanded war machine. Who will make the case and when? So far there are no volunteers.
At this point Labor has established neither the fiscal nor the political foundation for the AUKUS edifice. Yet the AUKUS timetable demands constant progress. Richardson said: “I have said that Australia itself represents the biggest risk to AUKUS, not the US or the UK. We need to get our act together. Essentially, we have a national enterprise being managed as a defence project – and that’s a serious problem.
“If the government doesn’t lift defence spending there’s a real risk the nation won’t have things ready for when the nuclear submarines arrive. We have to be ready at Stirling by 2027 for the rotational presence of US nuclear-powered submarines but the bigger challenge is having everything in place at Henderson by 2032 at the start of the planned arrival of the US Virginia-class submarines. The government has announced an allocation of $12bn but the estimated cost of the Henderson facilities is between $20bn and $30bn. We still have a long way to go. Unless things are ready the US won’t give us any Virginias as planned.”

It will be noted that the pond didn't interrupt the carping "Ned" and his stooges. 

Sometimes the only way to get to the top of Everest is to put head down, and focus on one step after another, and never mind the visual distractions, Dennis Richardson says the political foundation has been secured for AUKUS. The dollars haven’t. Picture: Picture: Martin Ollman

It was the usual full-on panic and hysteria, and the sniffing of risks in the ether...

Defence expert Marcus Hellyer at Strategic Analysis Australia told Inquirer: “All the challenges still lie ahead. Nothing has actually changed. There are a number of risks around AUKUS and none of those serious high-level risks have yet been retired. They still exist. Just because Donald Trump says it’s all good and it’s going ahead, that doesn’t remove the risk.” Hellyer said the major risks relate to the US submarine production line, the vast increase in Australia’s manpower needs over time, the infrastructure demands in the West and the requirement under US law that in the 2030s the US president be required to certify that transferring Virginia-class submarines to Australia would be in the US national interest.
Hellyer has said that funding AUKUS along with meeting other defence capability needs might add up to 3.5 per cent of GDP.
The Trump-Albanese meeting is a political watershed for the US alliance. What was often seen as a face-saving event for Albanese has turned into a Trump-authorised long-run industrial, military and strategic agenda.
As this paper has argued, nearly everybody involved in the domestic debate before the meeting misjudged the deeper institutional roots of the alliance and fell into the trap of thinking the different backgrounds and philosophies of Trump and Albanese would undermine any meeting.

Hang on, hang on, is "Ned" now the lizard Oz? Has he become "this paper"? As in ...

"As this paper has argued"?!

That paper, to use the word loosely because it's impossible to find a copy of the paper version these days, has been full of loons who thought that the different backgrounds and philosophies would undermine any meeting.

The bromancer went on Sky Noise to explain ...

The Australian’s Foreign Editor Greg Sheridan discusses how Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has not been able to secure “a single meeting” with US President Donald Trump. Penny Wong landed in Washington ahead of the Quad Foreign Ministers’ Meeting – sharing a photo online alongside ambassador and former prime minister Kevin Rudd. “Maybe Albanese is scared that he can’t handle a meeting in the White House, that he will end up like Zelensky,” Mr Sheridan told Sky News Australia. “But that’s a pitiful position if the Australian prime minister is scared that he can’t finesse a meeting.”

And the bromancer also put it in print ...

The Albanese government is a dismal failure on both these measures. Famously, Anthony Albanese has not even met Trump, and doesn’t seem to want to go to Washington and perform in the Oval Office. Partly, this must be because Albanese simply has no attractive story – nothing positive to say to or offer Trump.
If Albanese had a good personal relationship with Trump, that wouldn’t guarantee a good outcome for Australia, although a personal relationship certainly worked well for Britain’s Keir Starmer. In any event, it would give us a chance. A failure to develop any relationship at all is akin to criminal negligence. It gives lackadaisical hubris and political complacency a bad name.

It was there in this story ... (see the archive or Reddit)

Sorry, the pond promised not to interrupt, but sometimes the ponderous, pompous humbug is just too irritating in his pontificating ...

This misjudgment reached its peak in the farcical campaign conducted by the Coalition for most of this year, warning that Albanese had compromised the alliance, that he wouldn’t relate to Trump and that Kevin Rudd was the real problem and needed to be withdrawn.
When the time came Trump praised Albanese as a “great prime minister” and said of Australia as an ally, “there’s never been anyone better”.
Referring to Trump, Albanese told an audience: “We like each other.” That’s enough to send the left into therapy.
The upshot is that Albanese, once a left activist, having completed his seventh visit to the US as Prime Minister, now presides over one of the most ambitious political and strategic expansion plans since the formation of the alliance that – if fully realised – will become a turning point in Australia’s security and defence history. The stakes are high and this guarantees that opponents of AUKUS will only redouble their efforts.
This meeting has further entrenched Albanese’s trajectory as a likely long-run PM of significance, the feature of such leaders being how they adapt to the times and revise their thinking in response to events.

Say that again ...opponents of AUKUS will only redouble their efforts.

Nobody has to do anything.

King Donald just has to go through one of his mood swings. 

Perhaps the cankles play up, or perhaps it's just the canker at the core, and next thing you know, one minute Ukraine's getting Tomahawks, and next there's a meeting in Budapest, and he's good chums wth Vlad the Sociopath, and then there's not, and then there are sanctions, and then ...“Just because Donald Trump says it’s all good and it’s going ahead, that doesn’t remove the risk,” warns Marcus Hellyer. Picture: Supplied

On and on "Ned" blathered, twisting and turning himself in the King Donald breeze ...

President Trump’s unqualified endorsement of AUKUS is an omen.
In reality and in retrospect, his endorsement was easy. Australia is giving a transactional US President a lot: helping to fund its submarine production line, building facilities in WA for US operations and now joining in a critical minerals compact, the intent being a plan to contest China’s control of this strategic resource of the future. Hellyer said: “Essentially the US is going to get something it has always wanted – which is a submarine base on the Indian Ocean.”
Don’t be fooled by Trump’s remarks about China. This alliance deepening is near totally driven by China’s assertive rise.
At the joint media conference Trump agreed that AUKUS was a deterrent against China but delivered his vital postscript: “I don’t think we’re going to need it” because “we’ll just be fine with China” in relation to Taiwan. He boasted, saying the US “is the strongest military power in the world by far, it’s not even close.”
Decoded, Trump sees himself as a peace President.
He doesn’t believe there will be war over Taiwan and he doesn’t want to fight such a war. He sees China’s President, Xi Jinping, as a dedicated rival but an autocrat with whom he wants to cut deals. Yet he underrates the danger over Taiwan and his remarks betray the divisions in the Trump administration over China deterrence and Xi’s determination to incorporate Taiwan.

Then came an illustration which almost made the pond give the game away, Referring to Donald Trump. Anthony Albanese said “we like each other”. Artwork: Frank Ling.

Not helping Frank.

If the pond wanted a serve of glittering gold halo, it'd head off to the Catholic church ... or wait until all that gold glitter in the new ballroom turns up, with footage of farmers and pigs having a right old barn dance.

Meanwhile, "Ned" turned to Hogsbreath ...

Earlier this week Paul Keating told The Australian Financial Review that Trump’s peace diplomacy would prove vital for the region and that he would not fight China under any circumstances. But US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and US Under Secretary of Defence for Policy at the Pentagon, Elbridge Colby – who has inspired the Pentagon’s review of AUKUS – have warned of Xi’s instruction that his military be equipped to take Taiwan by 2027.
Hegseth says Beijing is prepared to use military force to alter the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific. Colby has said deterrence of China must become the focus of US strategic policy.
One likely consequence of Trump’s comments is you can forget any prospect the Trump administration will seek a trade-off promise from Australia in relation to participation in a war over Taiwan as part of the AUKUS deal.
But don’t think the Pentagon’s review of AUKUS will be all smooth sailing. It may come with tough messages for Australia. Hellyer and Richardson issued warnings on that front.

The pond got the message ...

... but do rabbit on ...

But the biggest warning came from US Navy Secretary John Phelan, who said in the leaders’ meeting that “ambiguities” within AUKUS needed to be addressed. Hellyer said of the Colby review: “It might involve an honest assessment about progress in Western Australia, asking whether Australia is picking up the infrastructure fast enough and whether it will have all the systems in place that you need to be a responsible operator of nuclear-powered submarines.”
Richardson said: “It’s quite possible the Colby report will recommend some changes on the way the three nations work together on AUKUS. It won’t jeopardise AUKUS but it may make recommendations that are painful for Australia and the government needs to be prepared for that.”
The Colby report is expected to highlight the role of AUKUS as a deterrence against China. That risks becoming a sensitive issue for Albanese because it will define the purpose of AUKUS in relation to China in language Albanese won’t use. But he will be stuck with it. Under repeated questioning by the media after seeing Trump, Albanese said AUKUS “is about a more secure and peaceful Indo-Pacific and region”.
He won’t say it’s about China. When asked about Trump’s comments on China, Albanese just said: “I’m not going to comment.”
Albanese, it seems, has made several pivotal political judgments: deepening the alliance is fundamental to his prime ministership; he will do everything he can to reconcile this decision with economic ties with China; he sees the industrial edifice behind AUKUS as fitting perfectly into Labor’s economic vision; and he wants to finance AUKUS as much as possible without massive reprioritising of the budget.
The final goal might prove to be the most difficult.
Richardson said of Albanese: “People misread Albanese when they focus only on his rhetoric and not his substance. He has authorised our naval vessels to engage in joint exercises in the South China Sea, he has aligned with the US on critical minerals, he has reaffirmed the alliance and he pursues a policy that basically says: ‘We want a close economic relationship with China but we won’t compromise our politico-strategic interests and alliance with the US.’ He wants to be friends with both but is an ally of only one – America – and he knows what that means.”
Trump was emphatic in making clear he would transfer Virginia-class submarines to Australia. That’s a decisive remark. Under AUKUS Australia is supposed to get three or up to five Virginia-class boats. Trump as President sets the cues for the US system, and the system will head towards that result. But Trump won’t take the final decision. That will be made by whoever is president in the early 2030s.

The pond is sometimes comforted by the thought that the pond will be long dead before the first subs arrive (if they ever do), and that there's a bigger chance of the pond acquiring a Chinese-manufactured EV than of Australia ever going to war with China armed with a couple of subs, but whatever, at this point, it's time for the sort of glossy snap needed to sell the notion ... The AUKUS submarine deal is advanced, but it may not be all smooth sailing. Picture: Supplied

And that fortunately, was the last snap, and this was the last "Ned" gobbet ... because there's only so much hand-wringing and posturing anyone can endure ...

Under the current law, before the US sells Virginia-class submarines to Australia the president must issue a certification for the transfer. Hellyer said: “The risk is that a US president in 2031 or 32 may not certify to congress that it is in the US national interest to transfer submarines to Australia. Similarly, there is a risk the US submarine industrial base won’t be able to ramp up sufficiently to produce enough submarines. That risk is actually being realised.
“There’s no way there’ll be more submarines in 2032 to provide for surplus ones to give to Australia. It’s pretty clear that the submarines the US provides to us will be taking away from the US Navy. The challenge for whoever is president in the early 2030s is to explain to congress how it is that taking a US submarine and giving it to Australia is not degrading US naval capability.”
The reality, however, is that AUKUS is a political arrangement. The US understands the commitment and the arithmetic. There is strong support for AUKUS in both the congress and the executive. It will be untenable for America to walk down the pathway with Australia and withdraw from the deal at the final moment. There are many factors to consider: the benefits to the US from facilities in Australia, alliance interoperability and strategic competition with China based on allied co-operation.
One thing is certain: this presidential certification will become one of the most important decisions any US president has made about Australia.
Albanese highlighted the unfolding nature of AUKUS, saying: “What is very clear is that there is agreement about AUKUS and what is also clear is that as you build a major project – we’re talking about a project with considerable cost – it’s not simple, it has stages to it. Inevitably, of course, as you go, you’ll constantly have an assessment to make sure you’re getting everything right.”
Only too true. By its nature AUKUS will be plagued with questions, doubts and reviews. That’s its nature. But the political momentum is strong.

The momentum is strong?

Only as strong as the next mood swing.

And speaking of mood swings, for no reason, except perversity, the pond decided to finish with the Ontario anti-tariff ad which made Trump "terminate" trade talks with Canada ... if only for the splendid irony of offering Ronnie Raygun, as a reminder that memories of the ancient GOP are now long dead and buried ...

How weird could it get?

As weird as you like ... (and in case that ad is taken down) ...