A big day for the reptiles, and not because of the ongoing assorted jihads ...
They won't let this one go until there's a scalp ...
Wells unrepentant as Greens catch family frequent flight fever
Anika Wells taxpayer-funded travel saga widens to include Greens Senators
WATCH | As Anika Wells refers her family’s travel to the expenses watchdog, Greens senators and Anthony Albanese himself face scrutiny over similar entitlements used for sports, music festivals, and protests.
By Noah Yim, Jack Quail and Liam Mendes
Speaking of which, how good is it to see Golding return after a short break?
Wells' actual policies were well down the page, and presented with proud defiance and comely enthusiasm:
We will stand firm against the tech giants: Wells
Communications Minister Anika Wells has vowed to defend Australia’s world-leading under-16 social media ban against tech giant legal challenges as the law takes effect.
By Sarah Ison
The lesser Leeser was on hand to help out ...
“It will also provide a much needed support to parents who have concerns about social media based on their children from on the ground experience of its effects,” he said.
While some Coalition MPs have raised concerns over the workability of the social media ban, opposition education spokesman Julian Leeser said he was supportive of the policy and would also be open to initiatives to limit smartphone use, as proposed by the SA government.
“Social media has become a tool for bullying and worse, and too many young people are being harmed by what appears on their screens,” he told The Australian.
Mr Leeser revealed that in a show of support for the policy, he would stay off social media between Christmas and Australia Day.
That must be a huge relief to victims of the lesser Leeser's insatiable appetite for social media ...
And speaking of Golding ...
Reality for ALP as coal will be needed until 2049, says AEMO report
Coal will be needed as an on-demand source to stabilise the energy grid until 2049 in an extraordinary 12-year-long extension threatening Labor’s 2050 net-zero target.
By Colin Packham and Richard Ferguson
Sing the song of coal Geoff ...
Utopian forecasts pave way to net zero future
The energy regulator has delivered a $128bn bombshell that threatens to derail Chris Bowen’s promise of cheap, abundant renewable power for all Australians.
And there was still much love for poor, endlessly suffering Linda ...
Linda Reynolds is not giving up the fight to receive a defamation payout of more than $1m from her former staffer Brittany Higgins, who claimed the former senator covered up her alleged rape by Bruce Lehrmann.
By Ike Morris
Poor pitiful her, what joy is there in persecuting a rape victim if there's no cash in the paw?
The long absent lord alone knows what the suffering readership makes of this peculiar obsession.
Meanwhile, over on the extreme far right, Dame Slap had abandoned Linda and found a new victim:
How much longer will Chris Minns countenance a chief prosecutor – and her office – being at the centre of a war with sections of the NSW judiciary?
By Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist
The pond tiptoed past planet Janet because the reptiles were also besotted by AUKUS.
Cameron was in the grip of a dangerous triumphalism, adrift with war criminals and grifters...
AUKUS sceptics need to get a grip and accept that Australia is getting nuclear subs after the Trump administration’s glowing endorsement of the plan
By Cameron Stewart
Chief International Correspondent
The more important debate now is how best to manage AUKUS. How does Australia fund such an eye-wateringly expensive enterprise without starving funding for other parts of defence?
The answer, of course, is to lift defence spending, initially from 2 to 2.5 per cent of GDP with an aspirational target of 3 per cent.
That is a debate the government will have to have, even if it is currently in a state of denial.
The AUKUS enterprise is bound to have huge challenges and setbacks in the years ahead.
Australia will struggle to find enough nuclear-qualified workers, not to mention welders and shipbuilders, to maintain and eventually build submarines here. The program is bound to be over budget and late, as they always are.
But let’s cut to the chase: AUKUS is happening and it’s time we stop pretending that it won’t.
Not so fast Cam, the bromancer was also on the scene ...
The header: AUK-ward truth: the sinking feeling behind our subs pact; Australia has paid the US another billion dollars for submarine manufacturing capability despite AUKUS facing production delays and Britain’s naval crisis threatening the entire partnership.
The caption for the carnival of fellow travellers with toadies and war criminals: Richard Marles, left, Penny Wong, Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth at the AUSMIN talks in Washington. Picture: Instagram
It took just 3 minutes for the bromancer to produce some saucy doubts and fears:
I’ve covered a lot of AUSMIN meetings over the decades and I can’t recall one in which the American principals, in this case Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, wanted to exit the room before taking a single question on the alliance.
As AUSMINs go, it was a snooze fest, like Jofra Archer turning up to an Ashes cricket Test with a pillow. It’s still an Ashes Test, but there’s something fundamentally wrong – a mismatch between pillows and ashes.
The Albanese government is showing itself to be quite good at alliance diplomacy. It manages to get the senior Americans in the room, at least briefly, and they don’t beat up on us, in fact they say nice things about us.
But although Richard Marles and Penny Wong joined Rubio and Hegseth in declaring AUKUS is “full steam ahead”, the facts supporting that proposition are extremely thin on the ground.
The reptiles interrupted with an explanation of the wisdom of pouring vast sums of money down a black hole, Australia and the United States have agreed to go “full steam ahead” for the AUKUS pact during high-level bilateral talks in Washington DC. Defence Minister Richard Marles has refused to explain what changes President Trump’s team is seeking to make. “The review is essentially looking at ways in which AUKUS can be done better,” Mr Marles said.
The bromancer wasn't convinced by it all ...
History has a pretty bitter lesson here. When reality contradicts the declaratory policy, it’s reality that prevails, not policy.
The only really substantial announcement out of this AUSMIN was that Australia would pay the US another billion dollars to contribute to its nuclear submarine manufacturing capability. This is the functional equivalent of the donations the Australian colonies used to collect to subsidise Britain’s Royal Navy, in the expectation that it would look after us.
AUKUS is adrift, and even if everyone on the planet says “full steam ahead”, it doesn’t change the underlying realities.
In the years leading up to World War II, Australia was convinced that the Singapore strategy – relying on Britain’s “impregnable” naval base in Singapore – provided for Australian security.
It was used by Australian politicians as an excuse for radically underspending on defence.
Australia entered World War II in much worse shape militarily than it entered World War I. Fortunately, the Americans saved us. The Singapore strategy worked superbly until it was exposed that policy didn’t match reality.
Something similar is happening with AUKUS today.
The US companies involved have been stubbornly unable to meaningfully lift the rate of production of nuclear-powered submarines. By 2032, when Australia is scheduled to get its first Virginia-class submarine, the US will be gravely short of such boats.
Elbridge Colby, the Under Secretary for Policy at the Pentagon, is inclined to face that reality now and talk about it clearly. But doing that explodes the happy fantasies of AUKUS, which for now suit all the players. So Colby was overruled in the report he could write.
Britain, the third member of AUKUS, is in the midst of a shocking naval capability crisis.
Britain’s First Sea Lord, Marine General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, declared this week that Britain was closer to losing control of the Atlantic to the Russians than it has been at any time since World War II. Despite the Ukraine war, he said, Russia had invested “billions” into its maritime capabilities, which Britain can’t match.
This follows a devastating intervention in the debate by Rear Admiral Philip Mathias, who was at one time head of nuclear policy at the Ministry of Defence.
He said the UK was no longer capable of running a fleet of nuclear submarines.
The latest British nuclear sub to enter service, HMS Agamemnon, took a catastrophic 13 years to build.
Admiral Mathias said: “The SSN-AUKUS is a submarine which is not going to deliver what the UK or Australia needs in terms of capability or timescale.”
Acquiring nuclear submarines is prodigiously expensive, even for an economy as big as Britain’s.
The Albanese government’s defence budget is manifestly, wildly inadequate.
It’s also virtually inconceivable that the Brits will actually be building nuclear subs with Australia in Adelaide in the 2040s.
So why is the Trump administration appearing to be so relatively relaxed?
All that AUKUS provides for now is that we give the US several billion dollars for its submarine industry, send sailors to serve on their ships, create a maintenance base for them in Perth and slowly expand military co-operation in northern Australia.
All good, but nothing of a new capability of our own.
The US doesn’t even make a decision about providing a Virginia-class sub for us until 2031 or 2032 at the earliest.
Nothing much is happening in Pillar Two of AUKUS – defence technology co-operation.
Given how irrelevant we’ve become, the Americans are willing to continue to accept our money with good grace.
That’s the summit of Albanese defence achievement so far.
So we're just another grift, and king grifter King Donald is happy with the grift?
Before moving to the next reptile, perhaps a little holyday interruption from the infallible Pope?
Yes, he really did suggest starting a new sport, learning a new instrument or readinga book that's been sitting on your shelf for some time.
It's going to be a long summer, explaining to the partner that Albo wants new role models for teens.
Righto, it was time for nattering "Ned" to take the stand with a pompous, albeit modest, 5 minute rant channeling the thoughts of the French clock devotee ...
The header: Trump has one virtue alone – he may prevent a World War III: Keating’s assessment of new world agenda; Donald Trump’s national security strategy abandons global leadership for Western hemisphere dominance. Former PM Paul Keating hails it as a historic turning point terminating the post-World War II era.
There was no credit for the wretched collage, sensibly so, because who would take a credit when AI could be blamed? Paul Keating, left, and US President Donald Trump. Pictures: News Corp/AFP
"Ned" wasn't happy with King Donald but took seriously the notion that the US was now non-interventionist, even as assorted war criminals committed murder on the high seas and King Donald's minions plotted an assault on Venezuela ...
Both testify to the Trumpian transformation, now formalised in a White House approved blueprint enthusiastically embraced by the wider MAGA movement.
Its heart, as this paper has highlighted, is the embrace of a “protect our homeland” Western hemisphere primacy – branded a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine in the same spirit as the “Roosevelt Corollary” under which president Theodore Roosevelt asserted unilateral US dominance of the Western hemisphere.
This is tied to a “predisposition to non-intervention” in foreign conflicts or setting “a high bar for what constitutes a justified intervention” – a repudiation of what Trump brands the obsession of past US elites to conduct forever wars and “to shoulder forever global burdens”. The policy denounces past “destructive bets on globalism and so-called free trade” that, it claims, hollowed out the US middle class and its industrial base.
The central idea is the renewal of American sovereignty, the elevation of the “America First” principle and the acceptance of the sovereign power of all nations against progressive post-national elites. It declares “the era of mass migration is over” and envisages an America that champions trade protectionism to rebuild its economic strength and its industrial base. It assumes a long-run global revolution.
The reptiles threw in a snap of King Donald, surprisingly with his eyes open ... US President Donald Trump’s strategy cements ‘America First’. Picture: AP
"Ned" offered a detailed synopsis - so much easier than searching for an original thought:
The overarching concept is that “the days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over”. This buries the previous vision of America as the “indispensable nation” for the global order.
On Ukraine, the document seeks a “strategic stability across the Eurasian landmass” but is devoid of any criticism of Russia or its manifest aggression. Likewise, on China – the strategy says America cannot allow any nation to “threaten our interests” but then runs with the massive qualification that the US won’t be “wasting blood and treasure to curtail the influence of all the world’s great and middle powers” – surely music in Moscow and Beijing. The implication: expand your power but don’t threaten America.
The document frames Trump as “The President of Peace” who seeks to stop regional conflicts “before they spiral into global wars that drag down whole continents”. He believes in the doctrine of “peace through strength” and therefore is pledged to ensure the US has the strongest economy, the most advanced technology and the world’s most capable military.
On Asia policy, the blueprint aspires to two ultimate goals – successfully competing against China in economic and technological terms but also strategic deterrence “to prevent war in the Indo-Pacific”. Significantly, it says allies and partners have a major role. Allies are expected to increase defence spending, with Australia specifically named.
Then came another reminder of the King, with a minor courtier, President Donald Trump speaks with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in the Oval Office when the pair met in October. Picture: White House
Still strapped for an original thought, "Ned" sought out the French clock maker to help him with his natter:
This document is probably the most lucid summary of the meaning of Trumpism. Like most inter-agency documents there is almost something for everybody. But what comes through is the sheer US domestic electoral appeal that radiates from every page along with the massive policy contradictions between the ends and the means. Actual delivery is improbable.
Keating’s view
There is a big message for Australia: America is changing; don’t think all this will be swept aside post-Trump. His ideas, good and bad, are taking institutional form. Don’t be fooled by the success of the Albanese government in dealing with Trump so far, and the dispensation he gave us on defence spending. America is heading into new directions that will profoundly challenge Australia and for which we are unprepared.
There will be many different Australian responses. One of the most interesting comes from Paul Keating. Long an advocate of Trump’s strategic transformation of America policy, going back to his first term, Keating hails the new US national security strategy as a historic turning point terminating the post-World War II era.
Keating told this column: “Just as Nixon alone was able to sign America up to an anti-Soviet strategy with China, Trump alone and by executive decision is removing America from its 80-year role and burden as global hegemon to reassert itself as the dominant power in the Western hemisphere, extending, formally and forcefully, its reach into Latin America.
“Trump, all by himself, is employing his mandate to alter America’s post-war strategic direction to both acknowledge and accommodate other great powers in a manner last comprehensively articulated by Franklin Roosevelt.
“Trump has one virtue and one virtue alone – he may prevent a World War III.”
Keating interprets the US security strategy as signalling Trump’s determination to avoid a future military conflict with either Russia or China. He has long argued that China’s immense strength as an industrial power means the US cannot defeat China in any war in East Asia or over Taiwan.
For helping out, the French clock lover scored his own snap, Former Australian prime minister Paul Keating. Picture: Getty Images
"Ned"was startled:
“Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognisable in 20 years or less,” the policy says. “As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies.”
It says this demise of self-confidence is “most evident” in Europe’s relations with Russia.
European nations enjoy “a significant hard power advantage over Russia by almost every measure” (save nuclear weapons) yet “the Trump administration finds itself at odds with European officials who hold unrealistic expectations for the war”.
Apropos of all that the reptiles featured another lowlight, though it was only put together by anonymous hacks:
The US President launched a scathing attack on Europe over migration, political correctness and the war in Ukraine.
by Staff writers and AFP
Between time in a French café in Paris and time with dozy Don in Florida, the pond knows where it would rather be.
Amazing that so much attention must be paid to a dozy Don deep into dementia, but the Putin sycophant was at it again ...and thanks to the reptiles, there came another reminder of his devotion: US President Donald Trump, right, reaches out to shake hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin in August. Picture: AFP
"Ned" kept experiencing anxiety attacks.
Perhaps being kissing cousin with Faux Noise wasn't the best way forward ...
It offers a patronising justification for US intervention in Europe’s domestic affairs, following the Munich speech by Vance early this year.
“Our goal should be to help Europe correct its current trajectory,” the document says. “America is, understandably, sentimentally attached to the European continent – and, of course, to Britain and Ireland. We want to work with aligned countries that want to restore their former greatness.
“Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European. As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the US, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter.”
The document professes a concern to save Europe from itself while suggesting the foundations for NATO are eroding. That’s good news for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump’s distaste for much of Europe is visceral. He doesn’t see Australia as being contaminated by the European malaise. That’s good. But here’s a question for Australia: are we becoming more like Europe?
The question that might have been better to ask?
With all the neo-Nazi ratbags and lovers of authoritarianism currently out in the wild, are we becoming more like the United States, eager to be ruled by grifters, charlatans and epic liars?
The pond felt the need for a break, a little pacing, provided by the Wilcox of the day ...
Speaking of devotees of authoritarianism still getting away with it, the onion muncher was also out and about this day:
The header: Key to conservative revival: Drop climate change fixation, end mass migration; The conservative movement risks extinction as disenchanted voters flee to fringe parties, but strong policies and clear alternatives offer a blueprint for revival.
The uncredited caption for yet another wretched collage: Britain’s Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch, Liberal Leader Sussan Ley and Republican President Donald Trump. Pictures: AP, Getty, Newswire.
It was a four minute read, but the poor lad is now so adrift in a sea of irrelevance, it was good to see the reptiles give him a home.
Then he could blather on about the "Anglosphere", and climate science denialism and Nige and Viktor and all his barking mad mates.
The pond only offers this time for the onion muncher so that correspondents can do a good hating,
Or not.
There are plenty of other ways to waste time than keep company with an irrelevant loon, his time long past, still shouting into the void, though others might like to think of him in his karaoke days, a time of low comedy ...
Stand back, let the clown sing his song, even though he's clearly lost his timing at this point in his non-career ...
Australia’s Liberal-National Coalition and Britain’s Conservative Party have just crashed to their worst defeats; and in Canada a likely Conservative landslide turned into a narrow loss due to a downside of Donald Trump, namely heavy new tariffs on friends and allies. Some conservative voters are leaving the mainstream for disrupters, supposedly more truly conservative and untainted by failure.
There is no mystery to the conservative eclipse: revolving-door prime ministerships, careerist MPs, policy incoherence and a sense of impotence against the unelected and unaccountable administrative state. We have to face up to the fact it’s not our opponents’ brilliance but our own deficiencies that are to blame.
The US is a good time for conservatism?
The US is a mess, but the reptiles just had to bring up Susssan v. the lettuce, didn't they? Former prime minister Tony Abbott comments on the Liberal Party’s recent meeting on net zero and the party’s leadership under Sussan Ley.
The pond isn't going to single out anything in the onion muncher playlist. We've heard this out of key tuneless harping many, many times before ...
Indeed, that should be the mark of a conservative political movement: we address the issues facing our country and try to make what’s bad better, in ways that voters might be expected to support, in line with principles that have been proven to work.
It’s pragmatism based on values. Voters expect us to deliver more jobs with higher pay, lower taxes and better prospects for young people to buy a home and start a family. So, to succeed politically, our job is to stop what governments are doing to make that harder; to adhere to the cardinal principle of politics: First, do no harm.
Let’s start by dropping the climate change fixation and the commitment to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, which even former British Labour prime minister Tony Blair has said is “doomed to fail”. As the US Energy Secretary has said: “There is no climate crisis and there is no energy transition.”
Sure, we have only one planet and should pass it on in better shape to our descendants. And climate does indeed change, as shown by the ice ages, for instance. But why do we assume that mankind’s carbon dioxide is the only or even the main factor in climate change; and even if it is, why are we turning our economies upside down to decarbonise given that China, India, Russia and now America, too, have made no commitment to reduce their emissions to net zero by 2050?
Actually we're not turning our economy upside down, we're busy shipping gas and coal overseas at a jolly good price, but never mind, time for Nigel to make an appearance, bashing furriners ,...
Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage says a cluster of problems affecting the population of the UK has occurred under the Conservative government. “As I've been saying, dire economic problems, rising unemployment, persistent inflation … mass migration making us poorer,” Mr Farage told Sky News host Paul Murray. “And that was just under the Tories.”
How soon can we deport the onion muncher back to England, what with him making the IQ of the country diminish by the day?
Then let’s end the mass migration that is driving down wages, pushing up housing costs, putting massive strain on infrastructure and services, and in some places making citizens feel like strangers in their own country.
Australia is the only country that has ended a wave of illegal migration by boat. Then there’s Hungary, under Viktor Orban, which has managed the harder task of ending a wave of illegal migration by land plus insisted that legal migration, too, be controlled so that Hungary keeps its culture.
In becoming citizens, migrants to Australia have to swear that “from this time forward, under God, I pledge my allegiance to Australia and its citizens whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I respect, and whose laws I will uphold and obey”. They need not just say it but also mean it.
The migrants we should welcome are those who are committed to joining our team, not just taking advantage of life in a free country.
And as for the argument that migrants are needed to fill the jobs locals won’t do, then improve the incentives for work, through higher pay or ending virtually unconditional welfare payments.
As conservatives, we need to break the something-for-nothing entitlement mindset that is so corrosive of societies’ morale, as people in low-paid jobs deeply resent their neighbours earning almost as much from welfare as from work.
For people under 50 who had been unemployed and on welfare for six months or more, the Howard government in Australia introduced something called work for the dole – they had to do two days’ work experience every week to keep getting their money. It meant that younger unemployed people had to go back to work, preferably for a wage, but if not for the dole. And it distinguished our side as the real working-class party while our opponents – who hated it – were exposed as the welfare-class party.
Given the way that the reptiles have ghosted Barners and his new affair, it seems odd that they should have put Tamworth's shame into the onion muncher's rant, but there he was: Sky News host Steve Price questions whether One Nation Leader Pauline Hanson had told Member for New England Barnaby Joyce of her plan not to step down for another two terms. “I wonder if that was part of the negotiations that she was going to be in charge until she’s 83 years old and Barnaby’s going to hang around as her deputy,” Mr Price told Sky News host Sharri Markson. “The big problem here is for the Coalition and the conservative side of the Coalition. “It’s a disaster for the Coalition to lose Barnaby.”
It's a disaster to lose Tamworth's shame?
No wonder Sharri scores full disrespect.
Meanwhile, the onion muncher had reached the end, with another gobbet of irrelevance:
These are fraught times. But as Margaret Thatcher famously observed, the facts are conservative. Before the lights go out, people will wake up to the climate cult. Before passing new blasphemy laws, people will finally grasp the folly of mass migration. And right before the International Monetary Fund is called in, we’ll rein back the welfare state.
But in the meantime we’ve got to “fight the good fight, stay the course, and keep the faith”. If mainstream conservative parties keep failing, it won’t just be fringe parties of the right that supplant us. Unhappy voters will keep replacing incumbents even if it means jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. That’s why pluralist democracy under the rule of law needs its champions to be strong – that’s us – if it is to survive.
There came a final tragic note:
Tony Abbott was prime minister of Australia, 2013-15.
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