The pond began the weekend listening to stories of increasing, and increasingly vicious, settler violence in the West Bank ...
Then came that story in the Graudian ...
Ethnic cleansing going as planned suh ...
But the pond has been restricted to potato peeling in the field kitchen this weekend, and you know what that means ...
Oh FFS...
Oh for crying out loud...
The pond had indulged the Lynch mob yesterday thinking it was surely the end of the plugging of ancient Troy's tome...
How foolish of the pond, because there was still prattling Polonius to go.
The tiresome old pedant is always last in the queue, always the last to arrive at the reptile shindig, yet he's traditionally opened the pond's Sunday meditation, ever since the Pellists and the angry Anglicans disappeared into the void ... (ah those Jensenists, where are they now?)
Well the pond can't break with tradition, the pond just has to grin and wear it ...
The header: Dodgy memories of the Dismissal taint real meaning of historic day, It seems that sections of the continuing Gough Whitlam fan club and its media supporters are intent on maintaining their rage.
The caption for yet another tedious snap from the archive: Gough Whitlam addresses the crowd near Parliament House, Canberra, after his dismissal by Sir John Kerr, the Governor General, on 11th November 1975. Picture: Ross Duncan
On the upside, the pontificating, ponderous pundit only manages a standard four minutes of prattle each week, and so it was this weekend ...
I have always regarded Remembrance Day, November 11, as important in honouring those who served in the First World War. Especially the 60,000 Australian dead and the many physically and/or mentally injured during the conflict. An Allied victory was essential to Australia’s security since Germany was a Pacific power with territories close to Australia.
It is unfortunate that, since 1975, Remembrance Day occurs on the same date that the governor-general, Sir John Kerr, dismissed the Whitlam Labor government half a century ago. As is widely known, the opposition led by Malcolm Fraser was intent on blocking supply and prime minister Gough Whitlam was intent on governing without supply. Kerr resolved the issue by dismissing Whitlam and appointing Fraser as caretaker prime minister pending a double-dissolution election in mid-December, which the Coalition won in a landslide.
Don't blame the pond.
The pond wanted to slip in a memory of the pond's grandfather, turned into an alcoholic and a wife beater by his time in the mud of the Somme while on machine gun duties.
The pond still has a portable communion box souvenired from the trenches.
The pond could have waxed lyrical about the pleasure of playing with a WWI grenade (relax, just the shell) and about the pleasures of watching grandad roam around the house shouting at pink elephants.
It was the reptiles who denied the pond that chance.
It was the reptiles who entirely overlooked Remembrance Day so they could flog ancient Troy's tome.
It's no good dressing in a snap now of the day, Governor-General of Australia, Sam Mostyn during the Remembrance Day National Ceremony at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman
As usual, Polonius has that classic form of amnesia that infests the hive mind.
Instead of pointing his bony, shrivelled finger at Troy's tome, he points his Ancient Mariner digit at the ABC ... as if that was a new trick for this aged show pony ...
It seems that sections of the continuing Gough Whitlam fan club and its media supporters are intent on maintaining their rage. This was especially the case on the 50th anniversary of the Dismissal last Tuesday.
Take ABC Radio National Breakfast, for example. It goes to air from 5.30am to 9am. On November 11, it ran 10 stories, not one of which covered Remembrance Day. This was an extraordinary omission, in that a domestic political argument in 1975, which was resolved within a couple of months, took precedence over a conflict in which the First Australian Imperial Force played an important role in some of the most significant victories in military history.
RN Breakfast presenter Sally Sara interviewed Prime Minister Anthony Albanese about the events of half a century ago, followed by former prime minister John Howard. Fair enough. In between, only Kerr antagonists were heard, along with a few neutral observers. Anyone who supported Fraser and/or Kerr was silenced.
It gets even sillier when the monolithic hive mind, obsessed with flogging Troy's tome, lines up to criticise the ABC for a lack of "viewpoint diversity".
That sounds alarmingly like DEI, something that notoriously sends the reptiles into a rage ... and yet Polonius was completely shameless, Sky News Australia's Media Watch Dog Columnist Gerard Henderson has criticised the ABC’s lack of “viewpoint diversity” when discussing Gough Whitlam’s dismissal 50 years on.
Polonius couldn't help boasting about his being the inside man, with the inside gen, as if that was some form of "viewpoint diversity" ...
Fifty years ago, the anger of the Whitlam supporters was directed initially at Fraser for blocking supply, and then at Kerr for dismissing Whitlam. Some demonstrators depicted the Liberal leader as a fascist at best and another Adolf Hitler at worst. However, over time, Fraser palled up with Whitlam and the protesters directed their rage at Kerr (who died in 1991).
The anti-Kerr hostility took off with the publication in 1987 of Philip Ayres’ book, Malcolm Fraser: A Biography. The work was sympathetic to Fraser and critical of both Kerr and Fraser’s one-time treasurer, John Howard.
I believe I am one of the few people alive with whom Kerr discussed the Dismissal during the final years of his life in Sydney – apart from his family, I assume. It was widely known that around 10am on November 11, 1975, Kerr phoned Whitlam and Fraser to ascertain whether they were sticking to their positions. Both replied in the affirmative. Kerr maintained in his book, Matters for Judgment (Macmillan, 1978), that his call to Fraser only raised the issue of whether the Coalition was intent on blocking supply. He recalled that Fraser answered in the affirmative and that no other issue was discussed.
Just to add to the pond's irritation, the reptiles flung in an audio distraction ...
Polonius prattled on ...
Kerr’s memory of 1975 was supported by a contemporaneous private note he had written on November 19, 1975. The senior Liberal Party politician at the time, Bob Ellicott, was present in the opposition leader’s office when the call was made. He advised me that it was very brief and not long enough for Fraser to take notes.
However, in 1987, Fraser told Ayres that during the phone call Kerr asked him whether, if appointed caretaker prime minister, he would accept certain conditions. This meant, in effect, that Kerr had tipped off Fraser of his intention to dismiss Whitlam some hours before this occurred. Hence the allegations that treacherous Kerr betrayed Whitlam.
Kerr maintained that he gave the conditions at Government House after he had dismissed Whitlam. In any event, Fraser had no option but to accept them. Fraser told Ayres he had misplaced the note on which he wrote down the conditions. So, in 1987 Fraser was acting in accordance with his memory.
Is there an upside?
Of course there is. The head prefect was so subsumed by guilt that he became even more leftie than the leftists, and so became a constant irritation to Polonius ...
And the cur Kerr was upstaged at the Tamworth show ...
Polonius wrapped up with a tedious rehashing of the events, without giving the cow proper and fitting credit for having made the right call ...
That’s where the problem commences. In his “additional note by Malcolm Fraser”, which the author contributed to his book Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs (MUP, 2010), Fraser referred to his “notoriously fallible” memory. Which raises the question: Why should anyone take at face value the recollections of someone whose memory is “notoriously fallible”? This does not mean Fraser consciously lied. But it suggests he could have had a clear “recollection” of an event that never happened. Memory is an unreliable historical tool.
In his book, November 1975 (Allen & Unwin, 1995), Paul Kelly, who is a Kerr antagonist, reported that Fraser had recovered his misplaced note. As I illustrate in my book, Malcolm Fraser: A Personal Reflection (Connor Court, 2025), the handwritten note at the top of the paper is dramatically different from the signature, date and timing at the bottom of the page.
This would suggest Fraser postdated the document to bring it in line with his memory about events of two decades earlier. In other words, the timing on the document of “9.55am” does not appear to be contemporaneous.
Within just over a decade after the Dismissal, Fraser was criticising Kerr. In The Political Memoir he described him as “weak”. Fraser’s apparent recovered memory took pressure off Australia’s fourth-longest-serving prime minister and placed it on Kerr. In time, Fraser was the recipient of standing ovations at left-wing literary festivals.
It is understandable why there is a genuine disagreement over whether Kerr should have counselled Whitlam before he dismissed him. There is a case for and against. The latter position turns on Kerr’s fear that if Whitlam had been fully aware of his intentions, he would have approached the Palace to have Kerr dismissed. Whitlam’s apparent intentions on this matter are confirmed by his one-time adviser, John Menadue, in his Things You Learn Along the Way (David Lovell, 1998).
Moreover, Kerr’s dismissal letter of November 11, 1975 (available on the Australian National Archives website) suggests Whitlam was well aware of the prospect of his dismissal.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of Kerr’s actions, there is no convincing evidence that he betrayed Whitlam – unless you believe Fraser’s “notoriously fallible” memory.
How much better it would have been if he'd stuck to writing about World War I, or perhaps explaining how it was the ABC that led to the defeat in Vietnam ...
Then it was on to the bonus, and here there was a real problem.
With the bromancer still MIA - perhaps lost in some field after valiantly falling in the war on China - there were few exciting choices.
The pond supposes it could have gone with the Angelic one...
Stable middle-income families are the building blocks of Australia’s future. Why is the government not looking at the family as a whole, rather than just childcare and women’s work? Redesigning tax would be a start.
By Angela Shanahan
But when she goes into Catholic families mode, the Angelic one is perhaps best left to the archive, even if the pond had to be the first to do the archiving...
Similarly the pond baulked at the dog botherer, seizing on the latest chance to bash the cardigan wearers ... (a trick that Polonius surprisingly failed to play)
The BBC’s disgraceful delinquency over the Trump speech was no surprise, and neither was the ABC’s. Both reveal a rotten core.
By Chris Kenny ...
This was what made the pond draw the line ... and send him off to the archive, to howl in support of King Donald, well known stager of an attempted coup ...
The ABC’s edit might not seem as egregious, but it committed the same sin to suit the same end.
The fit was on, the concrete boots were prepared, and the irony at the end was a marvel ...
Objective journalism, editorial policies, codes of conduct, basic human fairness, or even just respect for audiences – however you describe or define it, journalists have an obligation to relay reality, honestly. If they cannot commit to delivering that fundamental service they cannot be of much assistance and their interpretation, analysis and opinions will be worthless.
What a worthless pile of hypocritical garbage, fully hive mind, and without even a shred of self-awareness, let alone a stab in the dark at irony.
What we have here is a lack of "viewpoint diversity". The entire point of the dog bothering exercise was to fit the ABC up, using the BBC as the excuse.
Together with some King Donald worship of the most abject, forelock tugging, knee bending, grovelling, pandering, simpering kind ...
I have detailed in these pages and on Sky News for years the rampant misreporting and demonisation of Trump. When he talked about a “bloodbath” for the auto industry it was reported as threatening post-electoral violence, comedians have paraded around his fake severed head, celebrities have joked about having him assassinated, and pundits like the ABC’s Barrie Cassidy have prematurely written him off, Cassidy famously tweeting “Trump cannot win, the nightmare is over” on election night 2016.
To these journalists Trump is an evil, fascistic demagogue intent on destroying democracy and up-ending the global order. We are all entitled to our opinions, but the trouble is this cartoonish assessment clouds all their coverage.
Across the Western world the political bias has been so strong that it has materially misinformed vast audiences. Sometimes their deceptions are major, such as telling audiences Trump could never win, Brexit was doomed, Trump could never return, or that developed economies can operate on renewable energy and reach net zero.
Other deceits are minor and daily, usually fitting into one grand ideological sweep of history or another. When they dismiss the Wuhan lab leak story, ignore the Hunter Biden scandal or dishonestly snip up speeches to fit an anti-Trump narrative, no doubt it is justified in their minds as the pursuit of a grander “truth”.
Sure. Epstein, Epstein, Epstein ...
The pond could have run the whole piece and used it as an excuse to run a King Donald cartoon, but can do that without the DB's help ...
Maintaining the climate denialist rage, the pond was titillated by the lizard Oz editorialist, which even got dressed up with a snap of the lettuce, sorry, with Sussssan ...
Ley’s priority must be to educate brainwashed youth
The Opposition Leader faces a daunting task arguing that she puts the interests of ‘Gen Z and Millennials’ as her top priority in climate policy but the message must get through on their energy costs.
Editorial
3 min read
November 14, 2025 - 5:14PM
Sussan Ley faces a daunting task. Picture: NewsWire / Flavio Brancaleone
Brainwashed youth?
Points will be awarded to anyone spotting the Bjørn-again one, font of reptile climate science, being quoted by the brainwashed lizard Oz climate science denialist editor ...
Cutting through the post-truth world of climate change politics is the challenge that confronts Sussan Ley and her Liberal Party colleagues as they seek to restore a much-needed sense of cost priority to the energy debate.
It should not be controversial to point out that Labor’s renewables-only transition model has so far resulted in a 40 per cent increase in electricity prices. Or that households and businesses struggling with unaffordable energy bills would willingly take more time to cut emissions if it meant cheaper power. Voters should know it is trite to argue that Australia can have a meaningful impact on global emissions when it is responsible for only 1 per cent of the global total, which is still on the rise.
But as Ms Ley seeks to tackle the economic and emotional damage being wrought by Labor’s false promise, her opponents remain focused on the misguided zeitgeist of climate action absolutism. The evidence is that many former true believers are walking back their enthusiasm for net zero because of the difficulty and cost of the transition.
This includes former British prime ministers Tony Blair and Boris Johnson, who have both admitted the cost and difficulty are more than they had imagined and households should be expected to bear. For many in the developed world, the remedy to climate change can be worse than the disease. This applies for the world’s poor as well.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates is the latest to discover that if you scratch the surface on the more extreme claims of pending climate Armageddon, they almost always melt away. This is what you would expect from a post-truth world in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals and personal beliefs.
While detractors might argue this describes the world now inhabited by Ms Ley and her colleagues, the evidence tells a different story. Take, for example, the algal bloom in South Australia that was quickly adopted by the most senior political correspondent at another national newspaper as an “ecological apocalypse” that would be a “stigma” on Anthony Albanese’s hopes of hosting a meeting of the climate change glitterati in Adelaide next year.
There was a quick consensus that the algal bloom was the result of higher-than-usual ocean temperatures and therefore linked to climate change. But the latest evidence, reported in the journal Science, is that “the factors that caused the bloom haven’t been nailed down”. One suspect is the flooding from the Murray River and, more recently, a long episode of coastal upwelling that churned nutrients into surface waters.
Scientists are trying to understand why the bloom was dominated by an algal species that prefers relatively cool water and a narrower range of temperatures than what had initially been considered to be the suspect. This all makes the diagnosis of elevated sea temperatures due to climate change problematic.
As Bjorn Lomborg has written, across the past half-century environmentalists have predicted countless calamities. Extreme predictions typically were wrong and draconian countermeasures turned out to be mostly misguided. Lomborg rightly argues we need to keep this history in mind as we are inundated with stories of climate Armageddon.
A recent peer-reviewed study counts almost 100 environmental doomsday predictions that environmentalists have made across the past half-century. Two-thirds of them predicted doom before August 2025, and all of these have turned out to be false.
This is information Ms Ley must learn to popularise if she wants to succeed in breaking the accepted narrative that no action on climate change can be too extreme. Anthony Albanese’s first line of attack on the Liberals’ decision to drop its net-zero target was that the Coalition was walking away from climate change action and was fundamentally dismissive of the science of climate change. Independent MP Allegra Spender said dumping net zero is akin to “abandoning climate action”.
Ms Ley must convince voters that focusing on the cost of taking action when better alternatives may exist does not constitute a radical departure from common sense. She is right to point out that younger generations are entitled to think beyond the institutional brainwashing they have been exposed to on climate change.
Ms Ley is not saying we should do nothing. She nonetheless faces a daunting task arguing, as she did on Friday, that she cares about the climate and puts the interests of “Gen Z and Millennials” as her top priority. But the message must get through that changing the priorities on energy may be the right thing to do for Gen Z and Millennials who can’t afford to buy a home, can’t pay their power bills, and are looking at a government that is set to deliver them a worse standard of living than their parents.
What a classic:
Ms Ley is not saying we should do nothing.
This isn't going to get old any time soon ...
Better do something Susssan but is something another way of saying nothing?
And so to another bonus, more motivated by a desire to waste space than produce any insight:
The header: Andrew Hastie’s post-Liberalism is a challenge to the old guard, Some Liberals are beginning to sense an ideological realignment that they can’t control.
The caption for another entirely wretched and exhausting collage by Emilia, still refusing to blame AI for her follies: Andrew Hastie, top right, is a reminder that liberty without duty is not freedom but pathology. Artwork by Emilia Tortorella
The pond isn't sure as to Nick's game. Is he a John Curtin mole, up for a bit of sly sh*t-stirring (*blogger bot approved), or is he just playing both sides to arrive at a mindless middle?
Andrew Hastie has done something unusual for a contemporary Liberal: he’s tried to have a real argument about the party’s ideas. Some colleagues sniped anonymously but not so, to their credit, Liberal moderate elders such as former senators Amanda Vanstone and George Brandis. The latter on Monday scolded Hastie for “channelling liberalism’s enemies”, effectively saying: stay in your Menzian lane, talk abstract freedom, don’t touch the free market, don’t sound too patriotic, and certainly don’t go borrowing from dangerous “Red Tory” playbooks.
Now as gorgeous George's name was taken in vain at the very get go, the pond thought it would be useful to do a long detour into George's rather stale piece, which ran under the header This man wants to lead the Liberal Party. He won’t if he keeps savaging the ‘liberal’ bit (*archive link).
The pond won't interrupt, but will strip out the visual distractions:
Andrew Hastie likes to quote Edmund Burke. In speeches and opinion columns over the years, the former SAS soldier has burnished his credentials as a conservative intellectual with frequent references to the great parliamentary orator of the late 18th century commonly called the father of conservatism. (That reputation largely rests on Burke’s brilliant critique of the French Revolution in his 1790 tract Reflections on the Revolution in France; it overlooks the fact that he was a leading parliamentary supporter of the American revolutionaries and sat not as a Tory but a Whig.)
The warrior-scholar is an attractive public persona, which has served some of the greatest political leaders well. Both Winston Churchill and John F. Kennedy got their start in politics through celebrity earned by wartime heroism: Churchill as an escapee from a Boer prison camp, Kennedy as a PT boat commander in the Solomon Islands. Both subsequently acquired gravitas as writers. Churchill’s many volumes of popular history earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature (not, as is often thought, Peace); Kennedy, as a rising young senator, won the Pulitzer Prize for his book Profiles in Courage.
There have been distinguished ex-servicemen on both sides of Australian politics, including Anthony Albanese’s mentor Tom Uren, and a few important writers, such as Paul Hasluck – a serious historian and poet. But the warrior-as-scholar is not a political type familiar among Australian politicians. If there is anyone in recent politics who comes remotely close, it is Hastie.
Since his departure from the opposition frontbench, Hastie has sought to mark out a political space on the Liberal Party’s right. As he seeks to build his reputation as a conservative thinker, he needs to be careful of the company he keeps.
His recent intervention in the immigration debate – that Australians were becoming “strangers in our own country” – used the very same language as Enoch Powell’s infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968.
Hastie’s latest substantial contribution is a speech in Perth on October 24, in which he appeared to subscribe to the view that postwar liberalism is dead: “[T]he world has changed, and our political vision must change with it … We can no longer dine out on the post-Cold War peace dividend, where Francis Fukuyama famously declared the end of history and total victory for liberalism.”
He went on to claim that “the economic and political ruptures of the past two decades” had proven the “folly of that ideology … but our party has unthinkingly hung on to most of the same beliefs and policies … The Liberal Party must not take refuge in our established ideas.”
The speech goes on to critique free market economics, lamenting the influence of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, and argues for a more interventionist dirigiste view of the role of government, which John Howard subsequently described as “madness”.
While Hastie’s remarks on immigration may or may not have been a deliberate nod to Enoch Powell, it is hardly likely he intended to channel Vladimir Putin. Yet his view that postwar liberalism is dead is eerily similar to observations Putin made in a rare interview with a Western newspaper, The Financial Times, in June 2019: “The liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the overwhelming majority of the population …” said Putin. “[T]he so-called liberal idea … has outlived its purpose.” Putin referenced multiculturalism as among the reasons Western liberalism had failed.
As Trump dominates both American politics and the world stage, his admirers on the right of politics in Australia sigh for a leader just like him. But Liberals make a grave error if they see the party’s future in the embrace of a kind of antipodean variant of Trumpism. As the federal election showed, in this country, Trump is electoral poison.
Hastie, undoubtedly an asset to the party that he aspires one day to lead, makes a serious mistake if he disrespects its values in a foolish embrace of figures such as Trump and Nigel Farage and a style of politics alien to Australia. You cannot become the leader of the Liberal Party if you make yourself an acolyte of enemies of liberalism.
Paul Kelly, eminence grise of Australian journalism, wrote recently of the populist right: “This group loses virtually every battle of ideas it fights … It is obsessed about its own obsessions, weak on Australian history, out of touch with how Australia has changed, incompetent in policy formation, brilliant at alienating sector after sector in the community, inept in understanding cultural power, disastrously bedazzled by Trump’s success … [I]t will consign the Liberal Party to permanent opposition, if not worse.”
Such people make a lot of noise – in particular through outlets such as Sky After Dark – but they represent a tiny slice of opinion on the very margins.
Before he ruins his chances by jumping onto their bandwagon, Hastie might care to reflect on another wise observation of Edmund Burke’s.
Writing about the populist agitators he so despised, Burke said: “Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that they are many in number; or that they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.”
Andrew Hastie should stick with Burke and stop channelling liberalism’s enemies.
That was a long detour, but handy in that it offers a few sign posts, not least Enoch Powell, Vlad the Impaler, and even "Ned" ...
It also helps clarifys Nick's canny, fully NY Times "both siderist", routine, wherein he can kick as many cans as he dislikes, taling up the pastie Hastie by way of a series of billy goat butts ...
All of this is music to the ears of Anthony Albanese’s ascendant Labor government.
Hastie’s post-liberal challenge is a reminder that liberty without duty is not freedom but pathology. It’s a progressive disease of societies that prize rights without responsibilities. More than a decade ago, picking up Lord Maurice Glasman’s Blue Labour provocation, I wrote about how liberalism was “alive and killing us”. Economic and social liberalism had become too thin to bind people together and provide meaning. Since the 1960s, they had both delivered choice without security, diversity without solidarity, free markets without reciprocity. That argument was made in 2014 – not 1954 – and it was aimed just as much at Labor as the Coalition.
Brandis misses that post-liberalism is not fringe Trumpian cosplay. It is a mainstream response – of the left and right – to economic insecurity, cultural churn and eroding democratic trust, trends battering both major parties’ bases.
Jobs, homes, health and civic order
Post-liberalism starts from a simple insight: people want to be protected as much as they want to be liberated. They want good, steady jobs, not just “opportunities”; homes they and their kids can afford; migration set at a level infrastructure and wages can handle; their country to make things again; a healthier environment for their grandkids to inherit; and civic order, not permanent cultural revolution. Post-liberalism pays homage to both Edmund Burke and Eduard Bernstein – respectively the fathers of modern conservatism and social democracy – conserving what matters most while daring to reform what’s broken.
Hastie has been saying this out loud as a Red Tory rather than a market-worshipping Thatcherite. He speaks of reindustrialising Australia and warns of big tech-corporate power. That’s not “illiberalism”, but an attempt to rethink failed orthodoxies and restore a sense of shared national purpose in an era of fractious geopolitics, exposed supply chains and brittle social capital.
Actually Nick, that's pretty much rampant stupidity, but there's probably a good home for you in Vlad the sociopath's Russia is you want civic order rather than cultural change.
And if you think you can return to the 1950s, feel free ... because the reptiles have arranged a Price is Wrong distraction just for you ... Liberal Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price respects Liberal Senator Andrew Hastie’s decision to step down to the back bench. “I have a lot of respect for Andrew,” Ms Price told Sky News host Paul Murray. “I think that he has certainly shown he is a man of principle and conviction. “They’ve brought in 1.2 million people in their last term of parliament, and housing supply hasn’t kept up. That’s just a fact.”
Just because the Liberal Party has the word “Liberal” in its name doesn’t mean it must forever prioritise freer markets, high migration and hyper-individualism. Is anyone who questions the cocktail mix unfit to lead? Liberal doyen Robert Menzies’ achievement was precisely a fusion – of liberal aspiration and conservative belonging – not neoliberal autopilot. A party thumped at the last election, with Sussan Ley’s leadership unravelling before our eyes, is obliged to reconsider its purpose, personnel and very place in a country that’s moved on without it.
The Hastie threat
Hastie is a threat to Labor too because he speaks to the same outer-suburban, patriotic, economically interventionist voters it depends on. A Liberal who says “rebuild industry, control borders sensibly, take culture seriously and reward work” is harder to caricature than a climate-culture warrior from Queensland. That’s also why some Liberals – Brandis and Andrew Bragg – are keen to police his thought. They sense an ideological realignment they can’t control.
The roadblocks Hastie faces in trying to remake the Liberals echo Labor’s own struggle for ideological renewal after the Hawke–Keating years. A gold-standard government in policy and governance terms became ideologically untouchable, even as the world moved on. The irony is that Hawke and Keating themselves were revisionists who had distanced themselves from Whitlam’s chaotic, if reformist, government to rebuild Labor’s credibility. Whitlam, in turn, had earlier reimagined the party through Fabian social democracy, reviving its intellectual core after decades of drift. Mark Latham tried to update Laborism but lost his bearings in the process. It took a new generation – figures like former leader Bill Shorten, with intellectual ballast from Jim Chalmers and others – to cautiously modernise Labor’s 21st century mission, a project that culminated in Albanese’s steady, unifying 2022 election pitch: not revolution, but renewal.
Comrade Bill was just a cautious moderniser?
Comrade Mark just lost his bearings? As opposed to his marbles?
Cue a distraction, Mark Latham infamously shakes the hand of then-prime minister John Howard on the election hustings. Latham tried to update Laborism but lost his bearings in the process. Picture: John Feder
That doesn’t mean Hastie is right on every policy. His hard line on net zero won’t fly in metropolitan electorates.
Oh there's a rat cunning in that billy goat butt.
You see, never mind the actual climate science, return to shilling for the creationist ...
Yet contesting climate policy from the perspective of energy reliability and working-class bills is not extremism – social democrats and liberal conservatives are arguing over this across the West.
And that's how the boosterism works. A little billy goat butt ...
Then there’s the risk of alienating key “small-c” conservative constituencies of ethnically and religiously diverse Australians by invoking the inflammatory language of becoming “strangers in our own country”. Hastie’s project will fail if it defines these citizens as strangers rather than as allies and fellow builders of our shared national home.
...but then a "butt" in the form of a "still":
Still, it isn’t intellectually honest to pretend that “liberalism” is some timeless philosophy. What Brandis is defending is a pre-Global Financial Crisis settlement: high financialisation, mass inward migration as an economic lever and tool of wage suppression, and an uncritical embrace of globalisation. That settlement broke down years ago – post-liberals simply saw it first.
So you're actually okay with Enoch Powell and Vlad the sociopath?
And what the flying f*ck (*blogger bot approved) does post-liberal actually mean?
Just checking ...
The real divide in politics now
In this sense, the so-called Liberal centre and the progressive left are mirror images: both worship the self, mistrust the past, and deride ordinary virtues of continuity and common sense. Whether it’s mindless consumerism or social media-driven identity politics, the story is the same. For all their mutual loathing, they belong to the same post-communal, post-Christian order that measures progress by the distance travelled from obligation.
That’s why the real divide in politics is no longer strictly left versus right but liberal versus post-liberal: between those who still fantasise over a society of atomised individuals and those who want to rebuild a common life.
From my side of politics, the most interesting thing about Hastie is not that he once wore camouflage but that he keeps circling back to collectives: family, church, community, nation. When he says leadership is a battle of ideas, he means it and knows the Liberals cannot be the party of big business but for the people who work, raise, build and serve. That’s a Labor insight too, and why Team Albo should treat him as seriously as Brandis and co-evidently do.
Say that again:
family, church, community, nation
Not much room in that mix for a single or a divorcee or an atheist or minorities of any kind who find it hard to fit into cornball definitions of communities, let alone into notions of nations that think patriotism comes out of the barrel of a gun.
Say that again ...
work, raise, build and serve
Yeah, been there, read that, seen that ...
Put it another way ...
The pond has no idea what's going down in the Curtin Research Centre, but suspects that Curtin might be rolling in his grave ...
Nick Dyrenfurth is executive director of the John Curtin Research Centre.
It's either a cunning troll, or next week Nick will announce there's a lot to like about MAGA down under, what with it being a vehicle for ordinary virtues of continuity and common sense.
Oh and good luck with the roll out of the ordinary virtues of continuity and common senese in December ...
The age assurance technology trial found errors are inevitable – meaning users might have to provide other ID or appeal against wrongful bans
No doubt it's part of an embrace of communal Christian order that measures progress by the increasing the wealth of billionaires ...
And here's one for the road, so Nick can offer an each way bet on the virtues of dementia ...
Finally the week in review, the good, the bad and the ugly ...
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments older than two days are moderated and there will be a delay in publishing them.