In which the pond draws a compleat reptile blank and only valiant Louise saves the day ...

 

The day had to come, and Thursday was always the most likely day.

The day that finally came is the day that the pond had not the slightest interest in reading or presenting portions of the lizard Oz.

The absence of petulant Peta didn't help. 

In the event of a total bust, the pond would have dared to go there. Except there was no there there and visible this day.

The lead story had all the appeal of a sighting of Pauline in a burqa ...

EXCLUSIVE
Revealed: Tony Burke’s secret talks over returning ISIS brides
The Home Affairs Minister held secret talks with Save the Children and asked a public servant to leave for ‘frank’ discussions, leaked meeting notes reveal | READ THE SECRET MEETING NOTES
By Greg Brown and Liam Mendes

The pond realises that the reptiles were doing their best kind of eggbeater - EXCLUSIVE, SECRET - but the pond had not the slightest interest in the resulting omelet.

Over on the extreme far right, Dame Slap finally abandoned her Linda obsession, only to descend into an Orwellian abyss, with her usual misogynist routine ... (can a reptile female scribbler hate women? You betcha):

It’s business as usual for the Big Sister racket
This target-setting exercise is little more than a vast social science experiment whose only certain outcome will be to drown productivity in paperwork.
By Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist

She really has become an unreadable pile of bile.

The pond will grudgingly do a litany of all the try hards and losers and dropkicks trying to summon attention, compleat with intermittent archive links, so that those outside the lizard Oz paywall can share the pond's gruntlement, or not, as the case may be.

The economy was one routine.

One angle was the "we'll all be rooned" routine ...

Businesses, workers caught in the eye of an economic storm
When you get under the hood of the fragile national economy, there is a chasm between the Albanese government’s rhetoric and real world experience for millions of Australians.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

On the other hand, news that the GDP was growing produced a different angle on the "we'll all be rooned" routine, so it's either an economic storm of no growth or an economic storm of too much growth:

ECONOMIC GROWTH
‘Spend and grow’ raises rates fears as GDP jump fastest in two years
Australia has recorded its fastest economic growth in two years, but economists warn excessive government spending could trigger inflation and force interest rate rises.
By Matthew Cranston

There was also Jack the Insider, complaining about there not being enough policing of internet sharks, an odd angle given the way that the tired old sharks in News Corp are always circling, and the only policing they've ever copped is the occasional slap with a warm lettuce leaf (here no taxes, no taxes here):

Hopes hosed down on child social media ban
Anika Wells declared ‘we can’t control the ocean, we can police the sharks’, which is odd given that some platforms have been exempted where there are a lot of dorsal fins circling.
By Jack the Insider
Columnist

At least that allowed the pond to do a segue to the infallible Pope:

A certain Langford was wheeled in to tackle defence:

Make-or-break moment for Defence reform
We risk repeating history unless the government confronts a simple truth: capability is delivered by the military, not the bureaucracy.
By Ian Langford

Just to prove that the pond read to the end of this word salad:

...Transition is complex. Bureaucracies resist change. New structures can obscure accountability just as easily as they can clarify it. And if capability ownership and delivery responsibility are not aligned and publicly visible, Australia will be no better off than it was under the DMO.
The truth is this: these reforms can work, and they may be the last chance to get acquisition right before the strategic environment forces our hand. But success will depend not on structure alone but on whether Defence finally accepts that accountability cannot be shared into insignificance. Someone must own the requirement. Someone must own the delivery. Someone must answer when it fails. If this reform accomplishes that, it will be remembered as a turning point. If not, it will join the long list of inquiries, reviews and restructures that changed everything and fixed nothing.
Ian Langford is executive director of Security & Defence PLuS.

The truth is this sir. 

You are no bromancer. 

The bromancer would never have scribbled The truth is this: these reforms can work.

Hang your head in shame sir.

Or perhaps good luck in your quest to be that someone.

The pond realised it had to make some kind of effort, and so settled on Louise as a token offering:

The header: One-size American political philosophy is wrong fit for us, Parts of the NatCon agenda feels less like a home-grown evolution and more like a shiny import from an American intellectual subculture.

The caption showing a King Donald in catchy gear: Some of the NatCon nat-con agenda feels less like a homegrown evolution and more like a shiny new import from an American intellectual subculture. Picture: Angela Weiss/AFP

Now Louise is no petulant Peta, and some might ask, why Louise?

Well there's a clue in this profile, where you can also see the changes she personally made to the beefy boofhead's wiki listing ...

Marrying Angus Taylor in about 1994/5 Louise went to New Zealand with her new husband while he sorted out the New Zealand dairy industry. When the family returned to Australia she had a family of four between 1998 and 2005. The children were, conveniently, ‘boy-girl-boy-girl’. At the same time, she continued her legal career and the family lived in Sydney. 
When Angus was recommended to the Party apparatchiks by John Howard and approached to stand for Parliament in 2013, the family moved to a farm near Goldburn and Louise seems to have been left at a loose end. 
In 2014 Louise ceased her legal life and became a full time press secretary and campaign aide for her husband.

There's a whole lot more there in that listing - the wiki war is particular fun:

Delicious, and that's just a sample.

There's way more, and there are footnotes as well, and her diligent work for the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way surely makes her thoughts worthy of a savouring.

The pond thinks what Louise has to say, if not part of the sinister Big Sister movement, at least fits into the Big Brother cause.

Louise shows particular skill deploring the disunited states way, while expertly cherry picking all that's currently roiling King Donald's reign:

There is a new tendency on the right – popular in the US – that brands itself as “post-liberal” or “national conservative”.
Some of this is appearing in Australian political discourse through the efforts of the new National Conservative Institute led by my friend Dan Ryan. Good on the nat cons; fresh thinking about the centre-right’s future is essential at this existential moment.
But the adoption of nat-con thinking – without careful consideration of its origins and objectives – means the time has come for genuine debate, in good faith.
The nat-con impulse to kill off some excesses of our liberal (that is, progressive) society is one I share. Just for starters, diversity, equity and inclusion and identity politics are a scourge; the chemical mutilation of children will go down in history as an unfathomable tragedy; and the ideologically driven energy transition inflicted on rural Australia by the most authoritarian and incompetent government in the nation’s history must be exposed and reconsidered. But we don’t need a nat-con switcheroo to address this and more.
Some of the nat-con agenda feels less like a homegrown evolution and more like a shiny new import from an American intellectual subculture. Conservatives in Australia have spent too long being deferential to the left’s cultural fashions. But the answer is not to imitate the left by building our own moralising state. We don’t need American nat-con cosplay – we need confident Australian conservatism: freedom, responsibility, pluralism, thrift, respect for institutions and confidence in ordinary Australians to build their own lives.

You see? Louise deplores those bloody Yank furriners, but happily berates TG folk, DEI, and climate science.

It's kinda King Donald lite.

To help Louise, the reptiles dragged in talk of Marge and a sighting of Sleepy Don in drooping eyelids mode, no doubt after a five hour truthing binge: Sky News US Analyst Michael Ware claims Marjorie Taylor Greene’s resignation symbolises a fracture between Trump and the MAGA movement’s “core principles.” “She represents the MAGA drive for affordability, which President Trump, in all the polling, is completely underwater on,” Mr Ware told Sky News Australia. “His polling is so underwater; a snorkel wouldn’t help him right now.”

Having Louise on board at the pond at least provided some spacing for a 'toon cavalcade, starting with yesterday's infallible Pope ...

Of course if you relied on the lizard Oz for information, you wouldn't have the foggiest clue what that 'toon joke was all about ...

Back to Louise, arguing her case with the skill of a barrister:

Real conservatism begins in gratitude: for political inheritance, institutions that evolved rather than erupted and freedoms exercised quietly. The conservative is wary of the grand project. Edmund Burke reminds us society is too complex to be redesigned by rational abstraction; too precious to be engineered through ideology.
Most famously he said: “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.” But then: “A state without the means of conservation is without means of its change.”
The nat-con instinct runs in the opposite direction, in the US at least. They correctly lament the modern liberal (that is, progressive) order as hollow and corrosive but wrongly conclude that the remedy is a state willing to assert a single moral and cultural vision. That’s a radical idea for any liberal (in the good sense) democracy.

By golly, a reference worthy of our Henry, and to help, the reptiles showed an actual portrait of the man ... Edmund Burke reminds us society is too complex to be redesigned by rational abstraction; too precious to be engineered through ideology.

The pond isn't saying that it's genuine, certifiable Our Henry - Friday is only a sleep away - but it's good imitation Our Henry, a sort of philosophical fairy floss version ...

Now marvel at the way Louise manages to disavow King Donald, Marge heresy-lite:

The irony is that nat cons accuse progressives of indulging identity politics yet they manufacture their own: a thumping new politics of national identity, cultural identity, masculine identity, religious identity. Where the left confects its categories out of race, sexuality, gender, indigeneity and grievance, the “post-liberal right” confects its categories out of heritage, a claim to moral purity and cultural conformity. The polarities change; the logic remains. Identity politics in a different guise is still identity politics.
Likewise with cancel culture. Many of us have spent years pointing to the left’s illiberal policing of dissent. Yet on the American new right we see loyalty tests, purges of rhetorical deviation and shutting down of inconvenient speech. What was once pilloried by conservatives is now mimicked. We’re also seeing the factions splintering and hijacked by currents of anti-Semitism. That’s what happens when you attempt ex post facto to build a new political philosophy around a single person such as Donald Trump, who doesn’t have one.
The same one-size-fits-all nat-con posture extends to economics, where fawning over America First protectionism does not inspire confidence. Trump’s tariffs have seriously raised grocery prices, smashed US farmers and achieved none of the promised industrial revival. And that is in an economy of continental scale with 110 million households. Australia – a small, outward-facing trading nation – would be crippled by such policies.
If the centre-right party in Australia becomes a party of big government, interventionism and picking winners, we end up on Labor’s turf – and Labor will always outbid us in that game. The result is a soft-socialist equilibrium, not a liberal-democratic one. Australia’s prosperity has always come from openness: selling what we are good at, importing what others do better, and letting private players, not governments, allocate capital. By definition the nat-con agenda would trounce this.
There is another point: the political and cultural objectives of the MAGA right – including the nat cons – are deeply American in temperament. As Laura Field shows in Furious Minds, the movement draws on the elitist Straussian tradition in US academe, the Christian-integralist tradition of pre-Vatican II theology and an American instinct towards heroic “virtuous” statecraft coupled with a romantic notion that a strong yet passive nation can somehow withdraw from strategic obligations.
There is an elitist, undemocratic and highly prescriptive streak in all of this. None of these currents translates to Australian soil. Our political traditions are modest, secular, highly democratic, pragmatic and suspicious of grand ideological crusades. We do not – and could never – build political identity around belief systems.
Young Australians need economic hope and personal freedom, not ideological policing from left or right. They need the ability to work, create, choose, compete and thrive without being dragooned by any faction. They do not want a 1950s restoration.

Stirring stuff, and for a minute there, the pond thought that Louise might be berating the much loved Australian Daily Catholic News (alternating with the Australian Daily Zionist News);

...the movement draws on the elitist Straussian tradition in US academe, the Christian-integralist tradition of pre-Vatican II theology

Take that bromancer and onion muncher... no Latin mass for you lot.

To help stir the pot a little more, the reptiles dragged in the Bolter ... Sky News host Andrew Bolt is joined by ‘Triggered with Samara Gill’ host Samara Gill to underline the political right shaking up global politics. “Donald Trump in the US, Nigel Farage in Britain,” Mr Bolt said. “The latest polls show a big drop in support for Farage’s Reform Party … but the Conservatives have now got off the floor and nearly caught up with Labour.”

Making plans for Nigel?

Shaken but not stirred, though perhaps a little triggered, and what a good chance to catch up with TT and sleepy Don ...

Now it's true that the reptiles this day completely missed out on the real excitement currently going down in the disunited states, the argument about war criminals doing war criminal business, and so did Louise, but for that there are the 'toons ...

And so to the wrap up, and aw, shucks, look, at the very end Louise manages to invoke the holy trinity of Burke, Mills and Ming the Merciless ...

Nat cons wish to restore faith and cohesion. We would all hope for this. But this can come only from our own little platoons, not the impulse for prescription. The left wants an interfering moral-administrative state. National conservatism proposes another version of it. The nat-con project doesn’t liberate, it substitutes one form of top-down cultural management for another.
The Liberals’ Burke-Mill-Menzies inheritance provides all we need and more to campaign to dismantle a fantastical energy and climate regime that is destroying our economy, reduce immigration heavily in the national interest, revitalise defence and national security – with new policies to support families and social cohesion. Rather than throwing out the baby with the bathwater for a wobbling US intellectual fad, we should have the courage to know we can and will win the arguments if we remain focused on and actually fight for the core values of the inheritance we have been given, in our own Australian way.
Louise Clegg worked as a barrister specialising in public law and employment law.

All that was missing was a 1950s picket fence, or perhaps a sojourn in Victorian England.

Say what you will, but after reading Louise, the pond is aware that the lettuce felt empowered, could sense a sudden surge in its chances.

If this can be taken as a sample of what the beefy boofhead down Goulburn way is offering the nation, why it's surely going to be a leafy word salad by Xmas?

Unfortunately Louise didn't seem too wired on all the best that's going down in foreign diplomacy at the moment, but that's what the 'toons are for, with the immortal Rowe standing by to fill in the gaps ...

Such a fine portrait ...

... and so many details ...

... and if you made it to the end, feel free to inhale a free Diet Coke ...