In which Our Henry badly bungles Laïcité in his usual pompous way, while Killer holds a kind of Konnor Kourt ...

The pond would like to claim its joining the boycott of Eurovision next year, but as the pond has never watched a single show, that would be a bit of a stretch.

Not that news of that kind troubled the lizard Oz reptiles this day, as the claims about EXCLUSIVES reached absurd, extravagant heights ...

EXCLUSIVE
High-stakes battle over skyrocketing doctors’ fees
‘All options on the table’: Labor takes on specialist doctors’ fees
Out-of-pocket costs for specialist doctors are crippling consumer budgets. Now Labor is declaring ‘all options are on the table’ as it contemplates unprecedented action.
By Natasha Robinson

In what bizarro alternative universe was that an EXCLUSIVE? 

The ABC read the same report, just to make sure it could continue its role as reptile little Sir Echo, Value of private health insurance 'eroding' as doctors urge reform

There were other EXCLUSIVES as well ...

EXCLUSIVE
‘Designed to defame me’: Judge’s stunning accusation against ODPP
Judge Penelope Wass’s stunning accusation against ODPP
A NSW judge has called for the potential removal of chief prosecutor Sally Dowling SC, alleging she orchestrated leaking confidential information about an Indigenous child to damage the judge’s reputation.
By Ellie Dudley

Call the pond a stunned mullet as the EXCLUSIVES went on and on:

EXCLUSIVE
Inside the Fox family’s secret development ambition for Melbourne’s Capital Golf Club
Speculation is swirling among Melbourne’s richest golfers over exclusive $1m memberships at the Fox family’s new golf course – and the massive profits that could flow from secret plans.
By Damon Johnston

The pond can EXCLUSIVELY report that these EXCLUSIVES hold absolutely no interest for the pond.

The more the reptiles disappear up their EXCLUSIVE fundaments early each day, the less inclined the pond is to pay attention.

Ditto this ongoing reptile jihad:

Labor damned by subterfuge on ISIS brides’ repatriation
The Albanese government is adopting a ‘repatriation by stealth’ approach to returning women and children.
By Rodger Shanahan

Just to vary the recipe a little, the reptiles stepped outside the tent and dragged in an author and Middle East analyst.

The pond also passed on this beat up ...

Migrants and nation pay for failure of skills recognition with productivity fail
No matter where you stand on migration numbers, creating a more affordable, efficient and fair system for recognising overseas skills and qualifications is the kind of reform that makes sense.
By Martin Parkinson

That was the work of another fellow traveller ...

Martin Parkinson is chancellor of Macquarie University. He served as Secretary of PM&C and Treasury...

...and he concluded with the sort of deadening blather that litters the rag ...

No matter where you stand on migration numbers, creating a more affordable, efficient and fair system for recognising overseas skills and qualifications is the kind of reform that just makes sense. It is a political no-brainer.

Unfortunately that meant the pond had to stand with the usual Friday suspects ...

The header: Furore over burka unmasks Senate’s lack of courage; The case against the burka must be discussed because difficult issues can only be addressed through frank and open debate.

The caption for the narcissistic clown attention seeker: Pauline Hanson parades herself in a burka in the Australian Senate in November. Picture: Getty Images

Yes, this day our Henry went Pauline, but don't worry, there will be the usual portentous array of pompous references to justify his allegiance to the fish and chips supplier ...

In an age that sacralises identity, the burka poses a stark paradox. It proclaims a highly distinctive religious identity; yet, by concealing the face it effaces the personal identity of its wearer, interposing an opaque barrier between the individual and the world.
But the Senate’s reaction to Pauline Hanson’s attention-grabbing gesture was no less paradoxical. One might have expected the Greens – who disdain religious freedom, vaunt their devotion to eradicating patriarchy and rarely encounter a prohibition they dislike – to leap to the barricades, excoriating the burka’s suppression of female individuality. Instead, masking hypocrisy beneath choreographed outrage, they responded with cries of indignation whose intensity would, in more decorous eras, have been reserved for the most revolting forms of public indecency.
Labor’s reaction, though more restrained, was no less at odds with the principles it incessantly espouses. As for the Liberals, the best they could muster was to murmur that the matter might be worth debating – while showing little appetite for engaging with its substance.
But it is hardly as if there is nothing to discuss. There is, after all, no part of the body more crucial in defining personal identity than the face. Far more significant to humans than to any other species, the face is so central to social interaction that an entire, biologically costly, region of the brain, located in the fusiform gyrus, is dedicated to recognising faces and deciphering the constantly changing signals their expressions convey.

Actually, if the pond might be so bold, whenever the pond is confronted by religious garb of any kind ...

... the first thing the pond sees isn't the face, it's the garb, which comes with a realisation that many people inhabit strange alternative worlds.

But more of that anon as Our Henry will try to wiggle out of his determination to ignore other religious garb while berating Islamics ...

The reptiles decided to soften the debate by having Susie have a chat with the dog botherer ...

News Corp’s National Education Editor Susie O’Brien voices her concerns about One Nation Leader Pauline Hanson’s recent political stunt, where she chose to wear a burqa. “I’m sure it plays right into the hands of her voters … as far as I’m concerned it’s a cheap and nasty political stunt at the expense of Muslim women,” Ms O’Brien told Sky News host Chris Kenny. “You can have that debate, but you don’t need to do that dressed as a Muslim woman with the face covered in the floor of parliament.”

Now on to the pompous references ...

Little wonder, then, that Dante called the face the “balcony of the soul”, “the lamp lit in the world” by the subject who stands behind it. And little wonder too that we “unmask” lies and deceptions, “face” facts and “face up” to responsibility: its uniqueness underpins our accountability as agents who think, decide and act. To be condemned to facelessness is to stand only a few steps short of social death.
That, of course, is precisely what the burka historically was – and remains – designed to achieve. By rendering the woman unidentifiable, it erases both her defining features and her public existence, reducing her to an object that is a mere extension of her husband. Moreover, in doing so, it imposes formidable costs, dramatically restricting the wearer’s social intercourse, narrowing or eliminating opportunities for gainful employment, and rendering many physical activities difficult or impossible.
To this, there is a standard liberal reply – one as intellectually lazy as it is misleading. If the woman consents to the submission, the argument goes, society has no more right to intervene than it does to impose the wearing of Mao jackets. The reality, however, is that liberalism is not only committed to personal autonomy; it is equally committed to preserving the conditions that make that autonomy possible.
That is why John Locke – who forged the modern liberal conceptions of personal identity, political equality and individual freedom – was the first philosopher to insist that one cannot renounce one’s moral standing by consenting to become another’s slave. The duty to take, and answer for, one’s own decisions is, Locke argued, an inalienable aspect of human agency. It follows, he concluded, that there must be limits to the scope of individual choice.
Liberal societies have therefore always intervened to restrain even voluntary acts that would destroy the autonomy they supposedly express – acts that damage the individual or erode the civic values and foundations on which freedom depends. Nor does the fact that the burka is worn for religious reasons exempt it from those limits, any more than it exempts polygamy, pubescent marriage or female genital mutilation from legal restriction.
The uncertainties and ambiguities surrounding “consent” only strengthen the case for prohibition. Feminists have long emphasised the ways in which entrenched social norms constrain the choices women make, especially when refusal to submit carries heavy personal or communal penalties. And the 658-page official report that preceded the French ban in 2010 highlights just how often the decision to wear the burka was shaped by intense pressure – including threats and actual violence – that stripped it of the essential elements of freely given consent.

Not bad, from Dante to Locke, with a dash of Mao, and the reptiles helped out with a cheap snap from the archive ...John Locke.

The next set of references was a little more downbeat.

The tobacco-funded, fox-hunting Roger Scruton is definitely of the second rank ...

But the reality is grimmer still. The report found that permitting the burka not only made it harder for individual women to resist domestic pressure; it increased that pressure. Refusing to adopt the burka, in areas where burka-wearing prevailed, meant choosing to stand out: to reject what other women were conspicuously doing. As Patrick Weil, a member of the commission that later examined the headscarf ban, put it, the larger the number of women who conformed, the more those who did not were denounced as “ ‘whores’ who ought to follow the example of their sisters who respected Koranic prescriptions”.
Allowing the burka consequently enables coercion and involuntary submission. In making it possible for some to freely consent, it facilitates forcing others to do so against their will, just as would permitting polygamy, pubescent marriage and female genital mutilation in allegedly “consensual” cases.
The damage, however, does not end with the women themselves. As the European Court of Human Rights found when it upheld the French ban, concealing the face “call(s) into question the possibility of open interpersonal relationships, which form an indispensable element of community life”.
Roger Scruton once observed that “the ‘wealth’ of the ‘public life’ lies not in self-determination or collective action but in the multi-stranded liveliness and spontaneity arising from the ongoing intercourse of heterogeneous individuals and groups that can maintain a civilised coexistence”. Echoing that insight, the court concluded that “the barrier raised against others by a veil concealing the face” fundamentally violates “the right of others to live in that space of socialisation which makes living together easier”.

For no particular reason, Our Henry also dragged in Hannah Arendt.

Then came the worm wriggle:

In the end, the burka would be far less serious if its proponents were – like the Amish, the Mennonites, ultra-Orthodox Jews and nuns and monks in cloistered communities – quietists, whose goal is not to alter our way of life but to peacefully withdraw from it. 

Hang on, hang on, the pond is all for Laïcité, as much as the next baguette carrier, but if you're going to go down that path, it's not just one in, it's all in ...

Ban 'em all, or else you end up on the slippery relativist slop of favouring one bunch of fanatics over another ... and the next thing you know you're in a school molestation crisis.

Since when has the abortion-banning, hectoring, interfering, relentlessly campaigning Catholic church earned the label of quietest? And ditto the Zionists urging on the ethnic cleansing of Gaza?

The wretched nuns who smacked the pond across the chops and went around measuring skirt lengths on eight year olds wasn't in some cloistered community.

Sure they've been beaten back, but they can still be found in certain places in abundance. 

The pond remembers being surrounded by a pack of them in St Peter's square, inducing a dire case of PTNSD, a flashback to tortured Fellini films where black-robed crows scuttled across the screen ...

That's the debate Our Henry dares not have. 

Bashing Islamics is easy peasy, but bashing fundamentalist tykes and fundamentalist Jews in the same sentence is entirely outside the remit of the Australian Daily Catholic Zionist News ...

But Salafists are not retreating from the Earthly City to patiently await the City of God. Their radical separatism, of which the burka is the paradigmatic expression, aims to fracture and ultimately overthrow a society deemed terminally corrupt, while dismantling the liberal freedoms its proponents stridently invoke whenever their right to do so is questioned.
That is the shadow that falls across this debate – and which polite evasions cannot dispel. It must be discussed, as must the objections to the arguments set out here, because difficult issues can only be addressed through frank and open debate.
A warning Hannah Arendt drew from her experience in interwar Europe makes that debate all the more important. The demagogues, she noted, “possessed an unerring instinct” for the controversies elites sought to suppress. “Everything hidden in silence became of major significance; and the mob really believed that truth was whatever respectable society had hypocritically passed over.”
Yes, these are tough problems. And yes, the easy option is to stifle debate. But no Senate can bury the risks they create or the tensions they inflame. If senators don’t have the moral courage to face them, they should make way for those who do.

Pathetic really, and worse, there was again no chance to segue to other stories involving hypocrisy of a stunning kind ...

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is facing heat over a strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean, said in 2016 that he believed in “consequences for abject war crimes.”
“I do think there have to be consequences for abject war crimes. If you’re doing something that is just completely unlawful and ruthless, then there is a consequence for that,” Hegseth said during an event with the Liberty Forum of Silicon Valley in April 2016.
“That’s why the military said it won’t follow unlawful orders from their commander in chief. There’s a standard, there’s an ethos, there’s a belief that we are above what so many things that our enemies or others would do,” he added. (The Hill)

Sheesh, and the pond had just the 'toon for it ...

And where's that damned war on Xmas? 

Must it be left to King Donald to desecrate the holyday?

Deeply weird, fully sick ... what with Sleepy Don acting more demented by the day.

And what happened to the war on Bad Bunny?

And Crikey had a note that sent the pond into a deep cringe ...

Nauseating, and to crank up the nausea past 11, the pond turned to Killer for the Friday bonus ...

The header: Daniel Andrews and Jacinta Allan prove voters get what they deserve, Does a 1.7 per cent reduction over four years to a massively bloated state public service really sound like ‘slashing’ or ‘axing’ to you?

The caption: Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan in question time in Victorian Parliament. Picture: NewsWire / Luis Enrique Ascui

The pond immediately regretted it, as the pond always does with Killer, whether he's intent on Killernomics Argentine-style, or crusading about masks and jabs.

The lad has never recovered from his Covid obsessions, but this day there came a publishing distraction.

First the set-up, an attempt to exorcise the demonic comrade Dan, still buzzing around in the hive mind:

Any notion that Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan was governing more respectfully of taxpayers’ money than predecessor Daniel Andrews ended this week after her government revealed its pathetic response to a long-awaited review of its bloated public sector.
It was very disappointing to see words such as “slashed” and “axed” used in the media to describe a plan to trim the state’s bureaucracy headcount by 1000 people over four years. This is a government with consolidated state debts on track to exceed $230bn within a few years, and one that should be doubly frugal amid speculation interest rates could rise next year.
Victoria’s bureaucracy under Andrews and now Allan has swollen 51 per cent since 2015 to 57,345 last year. The broader public sector workforce has similarly grown at multiples of population growth, by 38 per cent, to 382,823. Over the same period the total cost of public sector wages and salaries has roughly doubled to $40bn. Almost one in 10 Victorians work directly for the government. Given all this background, does a 1.7 per cent reduction over four years sound like “slashing” or “axing” to you?
Indeed, the supposed “cuts” were even more paltry than the headline suggested after CPSU Victorian branch assistant secretary Mitch Vandewerdt-Holman told The Guardian that 619 of the 1055 jobs to be removed had already gone. Shockingly, even he, a public sector union chief, conceded there was “definitely more room” to cut the number of senior executives, whose ranks had tripled since 2014, when Andrews came to power.

The reptiles boldly featured some defacing of the street, though there seems to have been a little trouble with the shutter speed, Street artist Jarrod Grech’s new artwork near Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne. Picture: NewsWire / David Geraghty

Good to know that street art and graffiti and the like is now fully reptile approved, as Killer turned to doing a promo ...

Allan clearly wasn’t fibbing when she revealed last month in an interview that she regularly sought advice from Andrews. He may have resigned as premier in 2023 but his governing philosophy, including a thriving contempt for taxpayers’ money, lives on.

Ah, and so to the real point of the Killer exercise:

A new book, launched this week in Melbourne, The Dark Legacy of Daniel Andrews, is a timely reminder of just how socially and economically destructive Andrews has been, and clearly, continues to be. Andrews became deservedly infamous around Australia and the world for his draconian response to Covid, which must figure as the biggest peacetime policy disaster in Australian history once all the costs are appropriately accounted for.

Yes, Comrade Dan still lives rent free in Killer's head ... apparently almost as bad as a nun torturing school kids ... l'horreur, l'horreur, quelle horreur ...

Who can forget the rubber bullets fired at Victorians protesting against lockdowns and vaccine mandates, the pregnant woman arrested for her Facebook posts, or the absurd daily press conferences where “doughnut days” were the only thing that mattered?
But the book’s nine chapters, including one by me on fiscal policy and one by Peter Jennings on foreign policy, make clear how damaging Andrews’s impact has been across practically every dimension of public life.
Former Public Service commissioner John Lloyd in his chapter outlines how the once impartial Victorian public sector became politicised and divorced from economic reality.
Its 2020 enterprise agreement, for instance, included 27 different types of paid leave: gender transition (four weeks paid), cultural and ceremonial leave (four days paid) and (separately) First People’s Assembly attendance leave (10 days paid). No wonder the number of Australians claiming Aboriginality has exploded! And naturally this comes on top of the right to work at home two days a week for Victorian bureaucrats.

The reptiles helped out with another distraction, featuring the sort of witch no five hour Hollywood musical could redeem in Killer's mind ...Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan has spoken to the media ahead of the introduction of new crime laws in the state.

That sent Killer off on his favourite topics - union bashing and Covid and climate science denialism ...

Meanwhile, the union movement has become so powerful within the government that the Victorian Trades Hall Council was approving government contracts to security firms, as revealed in the Covid-19 Hotel Quarantine Inquiry. Andrews’s energy policy has been a disaster too and provided a taste of what was to come nationally once Labor returned to power federally in 2022.
Victoria once enjoyed among the cheapest electricity prices in the world, thanks to its plentiful reserves of brown coal, but that natural advantage has been squandered. The sudden decommissioning of the Hazelwood coal-fired power station in 2017 triggered an 85 per cent surge in wholesale electricity prices and permanently higher price volatility. The Andrews government also brought forward the closure of the giant Yallourn power station from 2032 to 2022, and Loy Yang A from 2045 to 2035, both of which could easily have been extended to provide many more years of relatively cheap power.
These closures are meant to pave the way for the scientifically and economically unattainable goal of “net zero” emissions in Victoria by 2045. There is even a state plan for 95 per cent of electricity to be generated by “renewables” by 2035 – that won’t happen but the damage caused in trying will surely be significant.
Andrews’s war on gas included dumping in 2022 the requirement for new dwellings to be connected to the state’s gas network, which had been introduced years earlier to ensure households could avail themselves of the state’s large, accessible gas reserves.

At this point the reptiles made even clearer the real point of the exercise with an actual snap:

Couldn't they have noted that Killer was flogging a Connor Court tome?

What a motley crew!

Sorry, no link, if you want to p*ss thirty bucks up against a Connor Court wall, you'll have to do it on your own time and dime ...

Satisfied he'd one his policy duties for Connor Court, Killer wrapped up proceedings, with a nod to petulant Peta's generous participation ...

Indeed, his government also introduced a constitutional ban on fracking in a state with extremely plentiful gas reserves – enough to power every home in Australia for 94 years, according to separate IPA research, not to mention generate much-needed royalties for a heavily indebted state. The book, edited by Morgan Begg and launched by Peta Credlin on Wednesday, catalogues Andrews’s pernicious influence in law and order and education too.
It can’t be denied that Andrews won three elections, but his political success serves as a reminder that destructive policies can be wildly popular. Political observers have often declared something like “voters get it right in the end”. Well, they certainly didn’t in Argentina, where voters for decades supported big-spending socialist governments that destroyed their nation’s prosperity.
They clearly haven’t in Victoria either, and if Andrews’s legacy isn’t retired to the history books at the next state election in a year’s time they will have erred again. A better aphorism is voters get the governments they deserve.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

They never give anything a rest ...and they never provide the sort of real entertainment on hand in the disunited states and celebrated by the immortal Rowe this day.

There's nothing like extrajudicial killings, bloody murders and war crimes as a way of pandering to the new Nero ...