Best joke of the week: the unseemly elevation of Sharri (full disrespect), as recorded by the venerable Meade in her Weekly Beast column yesterday...Daily Telegraph unveils Sydney’s Power 100 list. You won’t believe who’s on it.
Unhappily the pond could all too easily believe it - it's the Terror after all, a Sydney joke - but the pond's never laughed so hard, better than a poke in the eye in a Three Stooges one reeler.
Best put down of the week? Helen Lewis's ravaging for The Atlantic, Olivia Nuzzi’s Tell-Nothing Memoir, Can American Canto turn scandal into literature? (*archive link)
It was cruel, as this short sample shows ...
I understand this impulse. As I write this, I’m visiting the Golden State. Yesterday, the air in the mountains smelled of pine, whereas November in London smells like pigeons and rain. The ocean here really is as blue and fathomless as Kennedy’s eyes, and the bougainvillea as red as his face that time he did pull-ups on camera with Pete Hegseth. This morning, I went whale watching, and the guide recommended that we “keep our eyes on the horizon and look for blow.” (This is also a good way to find RFK Jr.)
Best goss of the week? The catty Nine account of the lesser son's big bash The curse of Rupert: Lachlan Murdoch has a long way to go to match his dad (*archive link)
Not only was there a snap of Sharri, full disrespect, with some unremarked woman in yellow, but there was the Bolter looking old, Susssan in pink, Petulant Peta (with Paul Murray as her handbag) and the rest of the sordid 'leet gang (see the story for the full set of snaps).
There was also a series of snipes, including this one ...
The question for Lachlan is – ego aside – whether it is an issue for him, given how his father wielded political power to further his business interests across Australia, the UK, and later the US for more than half a century.
News Corp’s record share price this year has nothing to do with its financially struggling media business in Australia. Its success is anchored by the US Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal, its book publishing and Lachlan’s wildly successful bet on property group REA.
Worst moment of the week, or actually the weekend?
Waking up on Saturday with the realisation there'd be a bunch of indefatigable reptiles, embarking on stale, tired re-hashings of ancient jihads and ancient talking point, dragging down the profitability of the empire with their dull and boring desire to stay in the ruts like a donkey cart in ancient Rome ...
On with the donkey droppings ... and what a relief, as the harrumphing "Ned" decided to go there ...
By Paul Kelly
Editor-At-Large
The pond is so over it, and refused to go there, but what a great excuse to duck a "Ned" Everest climb, though the pond did feel a twinge that a man who is often presented as a political sage who has covered governments from Gough to the Marrickville mauler should turn out to be just another hack, another lizard Oz jihadist of the most base kind ...
It's there in the intermittent archive for anyone wanting to embark on their usual weekend "Ned" Everest, aka wallow in moralising cant and dung ...
With "Ned" doing the wallowing in moralising dung, Dame Slap could turn to other duties ...
The formidable force behind Joh Bailey’s 40-year empire
Marilyn Koch’s 40-year business partnership with hairstylist Joh Bailey has forged one of Australia’s most enduring small business success stories.
By Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist
That produced another pond pass, though there's a note on the Dame way down below.
The pond also did a pass on snappy Tom ...
From serving coffee to building wind farms, Australians now face a maze of more cumbersome and restrictive regulatory steps, highlighting the need for systemic changes on the path to productivity revival.
By Tom Dusevic
Policy Editor
Frankly the only thing that appealed in that outing was the appalling artwork by Frank (and AI?) and the canny way that the reptiles had introduced "Euro" as thumb click bait, when the internal header read 'Productivity killer': Experts call for regulatory reset:
The pond could feel itself suffocating under a News Corp-style jihadist overkill ... and left Snappy Tom to the experts, while wondering what had happened to the lizard Oz disdain for 'leets.
What else? Well Rice was on the boil with a standard bout of TG bashing, aided by the usual hideous graphic ...
Pride and prejudice: The lobby group that captured Australia
Inside ACON: The lobby group driving Australia’s trans rights revolution
A little-known former AIDS council is working to re-shape the way Australians think about sex and gender, sparking fierce backlash from the gay and lesbian communities it once served.
By Stephen Rice
The reptiles' ongoing attempts to demonise TG folk, a small minority, is one of the more repellent aspects of the hive mind.
Garrulous Gemma, a cult fav, was also out and about ...
Conservative Kemi Badenoch delivered the most refreshing political speech in years. She told the hapless Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves what every frustrated woman knows: stop blaming misogyny for your failures.
By Gemma Tognini
Columnist
Kemi lecturing on competence?
Where's the cracking Crace when he's needed? Spoilt for choice, Conspiracy Kemi grabs wrong end of every stick
The pond had done that extended survey without a single chance to segue to a cartoon ...
Never mind, the pond knew its mournful duty this long suffering day.
Having surveyed the scene and offered alternatives by way of the intermittent archive, there was nothing left but a serve of climate science denialism.
Come on down unreformed seminarian Ughmann ...
The header: Australia’s energy sins: the truth behind our soaring power bills, Recent articles by Simon Holmes a Court and Rod Sims, marked by ‘sins of omission and commission’ in the debate, fail to reveal the true costs of renewable power.
The caption for the truly hideous graphic, what with the lizard Oz's illustrations getting more dire and pathetic by the hour: The promise of cheap wind and solar power often exists only in ‘model land,’ disconnected from real-world costs and reliability challenges.
Buckle up, this is a 9 minute torture, and as you might expect of an unreformed seminarian more interested in sin than science, it takes the form of a litany, or if you will a Mass ...
The Introit, or Introductory Rites if you will, involve the selection of sinners for denunciation and stakes out the need for deliverance ...
A sin of commission is what you do; a sin of omission is what you choose not to do: the truth withheld or the duty neglected. In some ways a sin of omission is more insidious because the fault hides in the gaps of a good life.
This week, two articles on what is pushing energy prices ever higher contained both kinds of sin.
The first article was by millionaire weathervane moralist and political dilettante Simon Holmes a Court in The Australian Financial Review; the second was by seasoned economist Rod Sims in these pages. Both claim that wind and solar generators are innocent bystanders in power price hikes, despite the evidence written in your bill and the experience of every country attempting to gather most of their fuel from the heavens.
The Holmes a Court article says more about the author than the subject. He wasted most of his column inches in insults aimed at perceived energy transition heretics, including the 18-year-old founder of Nuclear for Australia, Will Shackel. One day that young man will cast a long shadow over the puerile taunts of the Luddite left.
Holmes a Court embodies the evolution of the bunyip aristocracy: immense inherited wealth wrapped in a Messianic sense of self. Even his name carries the faint perfume of old money and his tone rings with the hauteur that comes from being slow-marinated in cash. He plays at the energy transition as if it were polo, a pastime for the rich whose Sisyphean stables are mucked out by the poor.
Sims is a former chairman of the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission and his arguments deserve a serious response.
His starting point is that in 2005 “Australia had some of the lowest electricity prices in the world”. This is beyond dispute and this huge competitive advantage on the east coast was built on black coal in Queensland and NSW and the dirt-cheap brown coal from Victoria.
As well as greetings and penitential acts, it's always good to celebrate with a Kyrie or a Gloria, this day performed by the dog botherer ... Sky News host Chris Kenny states that "the reality” of renewables is that there is no instance where their adoption has led to significant and lasting reductions in energy prices. “Despite prices hitting record levels, and warnings about blackouts to come, the climate and energy minister is out there again today, doubling down on his plan,” Mr Kenny said. “That's the reality. There is no argument about what has happened. The only question is what we do about it.”
Of course hideous whale-killing windmills were going to feature, as the Ughmann moved on to the Collect:
First, it is the highest-cost generator running at any given moment that sets the wholesale spot price on the eastern national electricity market.
Second, while wind and solar do deliver nearly zero-cost power when they generate, they are off more often than they are on. They almost never set the wholesale price at times of peak demand because those moments come when the sun is rising or setting and the breeze is fading.
Third, wholesale costs make up only about one-third of your bill; you pay the total system cost, which includes network and retail charges and the permanent green subsidies.
The cheap coal-fired power we enjoyed in 2005 cost between $30 and $50 a megawatt hour. The Australian Energy Market Operator’s latest figures show that in the third quarter of this year, brown coal delivered electricity at $37/MWh and black coal at $81. But when demand rises, or the weather turns, the market is forced to higher-cost plant: hydro at about $111/MWh, gas at $167/MWh and batteries at $185/MWh. Ponder this and fear the future: the highest prices are being delivered by resources essential to turn a flukey wind and solar-dominant grid into an electricity system.
Could it truly be a reptile science denying piece without showing demonic solar panels?
Of course not ... Wind and solar farms are limbs without a heart. They only supply energy when the weather delivers it and they cannot form a functioning 24/7 electricity system on their own. Picture: Supplied
And at this point, the Ughmann moved on to the Liturgy of the Word, with sundry readings and disputations of readings from the pulpit ...
The great sin of omission in this debate is the omission of reliability created by a weather-dependent grid, the one thing a power system cannot live without. Wind and solar leave massive supply gaps. Filling those gaps comes at immense cost. Sims unintentionally underscores this when he notes “the four most severe price events of the past seven years were driven by unplanned coal generation outages”. Those events were not a warning about keeping coal; they were a warning about losing it.
The sin of omission here is that those price shocks prove that wind and solar cannot step up to meet demand when a dispatchable unit fails. They will give whatever the weather delivers, not what we need.
Whether it was the Victorian heatwave in 2019, Queensland’s coal-fired plant explosion in 2021, the June 2022 market suspension or the NSW spikes in 2024, the pattern was identical. When the system came under stress the weather-dependent fleet routinely clocked off as everything that could be directed into supporting demand was working overtime.
Could it possibly be an Ughmann piece without a celebration of sweet, virginal, dinkum, clean Oz coal?
Relax, that's just a rhetorical question: Coal-fired plants like Callide have historically provided Australia’s cheapest and most consistent power, but their exit poses significant challenges for grid stability and electricity prices. Picture: Supplied
The costs of the system Sims champions go well beyond the cost of wholesale electricity. He notes that most people do not realise transmission makes up “around 45 per cent” of a household bill and points to big price increases between 2005 and 2015 coming with the “gold-plating” of the network.
“This self-induced problem saw Australia go from having relatively low to relatively high electricity costs by OECD standards,” he wrote. “Household prices doubled in real terms.”
But Sims then falls silent on what this means in a weather-dependent grid. Moving from dense, dependable coal to widely dispersed, unreliable wind and solar demands a far larger geographical footprint of generators linked to distant cities.
If gold-plating a compact, coal-centred grid doubled household bills, what happens when you apply the platinum coating of 10,000km of new high-voltage lines to service wind and solar farms scattered from sea to shining sea?
But wait, there is more. The market operator has warned recently that shutting coal-fired plants also means unplugging the system strength and stability services that come as a free by-product of their generation. Inside each unit is a huge steam-driven wheel spinning at 3000 revolutions a minute. That spinning mass sets the system’s heartbeat and acts as a giant shock absorber. Without that beat the electricity organism dies.
Want another terrifying image?
Sure thing, a desolation up there with The Last of Us, A supermarket aisle during a power outage. Without reliable baseload power, Australia’s grid faces increased risks of blackouts and violent price shocks. Price: Nine News
Come on reptiles, go the full hog ...
And so to a lengthy Liturgy of the Eucharist, and a smattering of the Eucharistic Prayer ...
This transition is not swapping one machine for another. It is creating an entirely new organism, one that is inherently less stable and less predictable than the coal-fired system it replaces. It demands new Renewable Energy Zones, new interconnectors, new substations and new system-strength equipment. All of it is fixed cost, added to your bill at a regulated rate of return and locked in for a quarter of a century.
And all of it must be backed up by a shadow system that runs on gas and diesel.
The astounding network costs of overbuilding, stabilising and providing 100 per cent backup for a weather-dependent grid are a design feature. This is why South Australia led the nation in high electricity prices. It is why crippling electricity bills go hand in glove with the weather-dependent grids in Britain, California and Germany.
Sims points to gas prices linked to international markets as the culprit in driving electricity costs from 2015 to 2025, because gas often sets the wholesale price when wind and solar clock off.
But omitted from this story is what drove the international gas price surge after Russia invaded Ukraine. Germany had built one of the world’s most weather-dependent grids and was shutting its nuclear plants. This system could not function physically or economically without pipelines linking it to cheap Russian gas.
When the pipeline was cut, German demand flooded into global liquefied natural gas markets, pushing prices to unprecedented highs as it scrambled to secure every available molecule.
To any sane observer, this should have been a real-world lesson in what not to do.
To have any hope of bringing down the wholesale price of electricity on Australia’s east coast in the system under construction we need cheap, abundant gas.
Given pipeline constraints from Queensland, getting cheaper gas would be best achieved by developing more domestic supply in NSW and Victoria. But the same people demanding a wind and solar-dominated grid have campaigned against the one fuel that could stabilise a weather-dependent system, halve the emissions of coal and, if abundant, lower the cost of power.
Instead, we now face the absurdity of paying international prices for LNG through import terminals in both states.
Near the end of Sims’s article there is a mortal sin of commission. “Firmed renewables are not weather-dependent,” Sims writes. “Batteries, pumped hydro and low-capital-cost gas peakers can fill any gaps.”
This is simply false. The fuel is the wind, the sun and water. All depend on the weather and all are susceptible to short and long-run droughts. Batteries are not a fuel source. The only technology in this mix that does not depend on the weather is the gas peaking plant. Alas, global demand for fast-start turbines has exploded as system operators twig to the fact that wind and solar-heavy grids cannot work without them and data centres soak up supply. Delivery times have blown out. If you can find one, buy it, because you will make a fortune on the first cold, still night.
Sims has no issue with lifting the ban on building nuclear power but says no one will invest in it because it is too expensive. So let us put that to the test. If the antinuclear brigade actually believes that argument, it has nothing to fear.
Nuclear is no more expensive than offshore wind and it actually delivers reliable power. And if cost is the worry, nothing touches pumped hydro. Snowy 2.0 began life in 2017 as a $2bn project. By 2020 it had climbed to $5.9bn. In 2023 the Albanese government reset the budget to about $12bn. Independent analysts warn the true cost could push well past $20bn. If that is the real-world benchmark for a weather-dependent grid backup project, then nuclear starts to look positively cheap.
Ah of course, the redemption of nuking the country to save the planet, though the last time the pond checked, according to the reptile Mass, the world had no need for salvation, what with the weather and the climate being absolutely spiffing.
Come on down, nuke snap, A nuclear power plant in Cofrentes, eastern Spain. Nuclear is no more expensive than offshore wind and it actually delivers reliable power. Picture: AFP
What a fine and noble sight ... with the pond deciding to skip the Communion rites, the breaking and eating of the fleshy bread and the drinking in cannibal fashion of human blood, and to move on to the Ughmann's Concluding Rites ...
As this column revealed last week, the market operator’s 2040 system plan vastly underestimates a worst-case wind drought where generation never falls below 14 per cent of its capacity for eight consecutive days. Yet at the moment the model was released southern wind collapsed to half that level. If conditions similar to those in 2024 recur in 2040, the system AEMO has designed would risk blackouts across five states, so its next plan must account for the higher costs of surviving a far deeper wind drought.
This week the Australian Energy Market Commission released its latest Residential Electricity Price Trends report. In just 12 months the commission has gone from saying electricity prices would fall 13 per cent across the next decade to saying they will fall by about 5 per cent in the first five years, then rise 13 per cent in the second five, and end up higher overall.
That is not a minor correction; it is a complete rewrite of the story. What happens next year?
That is the problem with model land. When the assumptions are wrong, they are catastrophically wrong.
The true cost of re-engineering the grid is unquantifiable because there is no single public ledger that captures federal grants, state subsidies, certificate liabilities and off-budget financing vehicles; the bill is scattered across government budgets, network charges and consumer electricity bills. One way or another, you are paying for it.
But we do know this: despite endless pledges of cheap power, both federal and state governments have poured billions into electricity bill subsidies to artificially suppress the pain. And each time a subsidy is removed the price spikes towards its true cost.
The Albanese government now faces a choice: whether to ladle more cash on top of the $6.8bn already sunk into the Ponzi-like recycling of taxpayer dollars into retail electricity bills. If it does maintain the subsidy, it will underscore the government’s lack of confidence in its claim that more wind and solar add up to lower retail power costs.
If the government really believes what it preaches, it should lift the subsidy and let the price speak for itself. Show some faith. After all, the greatest sin is to deceive yourself.
Much blather about sin, but the Ughmann is no saviour.
What a dismal and pathetic preacher he is, leaving the pond with no excuse for slipping in another 'toon ...
With the Ughmann around, sad to say the dog botherer looks just as bad, though perhaps even more boring in his predictability...
The header: Roll out the fact check on the real cost of renewables, ABC’s 7.30 host Sarah Ferguson claimed the rollout of renewables is not the cause of high power bills. But the data, experts and even basic logic prove otherwise.
The caption for the grit in the reptile oyster, producing no pearl: ABC's 7.30 host Sarah Ferguson.
The pond apologises in advance.
This was an almost unendurable 6 minute outing, with the dog botherer taking on the role of Polonius and doing some fearsome ABC bashing, up there with Homer on snake day ...
Normally this would be left to a Sunday, but here we go ...
It was uttered on the ABC, by the ABC. Is this why we pump more than $1bn into the national broadcaster every year, so it can corrupt public debate with politically charged falsehoods?
This statement is patently untrue. Even renewables-zealot-in-chief Chris Bowen would never go this far, preferring to play word games about renewables providing the cheapest new generation, talking up other price factors and promising future price drops, but not being silly enough to claim the renewables transition has not increased prices.
Only ideological barrackers would make this mistake. If you take as gospel the political rhetoric of Labor, Greens and teal politicians, and refer to statements by agencies charged with implementing the government’s net-zero agenda, you might draw this fallacious conclusion about prices.
The person who said renewables are not the cause of price increases was one of the ABC’s most experienced and prominent journalists, 7.30 host Sarah Ferguson. Risibly, it was the key finding of what she promoted as a “fact check”.
For no particular reason, the reptiles decided to remind the pond of that lettuce v. Susssan competition, Leader of the Opposition Sussan Ley speaks with Sarah Ferguson on 7:30. Picture: ABC
The dog botherer howled on, barking into the wind ...
Anyone following this issue closely across the past decade would have just nodded at this unremarkable observation, but Ferguson took exception and pledged to fact-check Ley.
Notwithstanding the irresistible point that we do not see interrupting, contradiction and fact checks when Ferguson and her ABC comrades interview government ministers, or even when they hear wildly absurd climate and energy hysteria from Greens and teal politicians, and notwithstanding Ferguson and the ABC have not held Labor to account for broken electricity price promises or shambolic grid management, it is still an admirable journalistic practice to express scepticism about a claim and vow to check the details.
Could it possibly be a dog botherer piece, without the reptiles doubling down, and introducing the dog botherer as an AV distraction from dog botherer scribbling?
Why do you ask? Sky News host Chris Kenny says the ABC keeps coming up with “egregious transgressions”. “Today on social media I saw a so-called fact check … of course it was misleading,” Mr Kenny said. The ABC claimed renewables are not the cause for escalating power prices as Mr Kenny said it will “only get worse”.
That looks like a handsome promo for the ABC, with lissajous brand and all ... as the dog botherer ploughed on ...
Power bills are not just high but at record levels, doing so much damage to the economy that taxpayers are funding rebates for all consumers and directly to many large users such as smelters. Annual household bills have risen by more than $1000 a year since Anthony Albanese won office promising to reduce them by $275.
In her fact check Ferguson correctly outlined the two major inputs of retail electricity bills: the wholesale cost of producing power and the network costs of distributing it, each making up about 40 per cent of charges.
Ferguson blamed increased wholesale costs on the Ukraine war (seriously) and its effect on coal and gas prices, claiming gas prices had tripled across the past decade. Coal and gas prices certainly spiked sharply at the start of the war but they soon returned to levels not far above where they were a decade ago, so this argument is a gross exaggeration.
In the manner of an ABC finance report, the dog botherer introduced a graph designed to settle everything with a visual flourish ...
Call the hive mind completely convinced, or at least glazed in the eyes, as the dog botherer carried on...
But it got worse. On the network side Ferguson focused mainly on transmission costs, which make up about 6 per cent of retail electricity bills, and rising.
Ferguson dismissed this – “only a tiny proportion of the network costs now go to pay for the transmission costs of renewables” – although she did admit these costs would rise as the transmission build-out continued. Still, even though Ley had specifically mentioned “poles and wires” too, Ferguson glossed over the rest of the network costs that also are escalating, largely because of the increase in rooftop solar and how it forces higher network costs on to non-solar customers.
Still haven't had enough ABC branding?
Allow the reptiles to help ... Rennie Executive Director, Matt Rennie, claims that the renewable rollout is causing the ‘average’ energy price to rise. “I’d say that mathematically it is the cause for higher prices,” Mr Rennie told Sky News host Chris Kenny. “Renewables of all kinds are more expensive than coal.”
Still the clarion call for clean, dinkum, virginal Oz coal?
Of course ... with CIS turning up to the affray ...
Matt Rennie, a Brisbane-based independent energy consultant (who, by the way, is all-in on the renewables transition) told me on Sky News that the renewables push “mathematically is the cause for higher prices”.
Rennie focuses on the huge impact of rooftop solar creating a “solar spill” into the grid in the middle of the day that keeps coal and gas out of the market until sunset approaches and they are needed, when they charge higher prices, especially if the wind is not blowing.
“Renewables of all kinds are more expensive than coal with the exception of baseload solar, which is essentially free,” Rennie told me, adding, “there’s no doubt” the renewables push has forced prices up. “We’ve had the advantage of decades of very low-priced coal-fired power … the lowest and most reliable form of generation going around, with the technical life and economic life of coal-fired power there will be a changeover to a new system, most likely renewables and storage with a little bit of gas and hydro, but there’s no point saying it’s going to be cheaper because it’s not.”
This is precisely the opposite conclusion to what Ferguson proffered in her “fact check”. Expert energy consultant Rennie said prices would continue to rise for another five to 10 years before plateauing: “It’s a cleaner system, but it’s a more expensive system compared to what we’ve had.”
This is not a theoretical argument. Australia is conducting a world-first experiment in turning a reliable and affordable fossil-fuel based energy grid in a developed country into a predominantly renewables-plus storage model, without nuclear energy. No other country is trying this. But given this transition has been under way for two decades we have real data and real costs to inform us.
With up to $200bn spent on renewables investments, subsidies and grants, our electricity reliability has plummeted, leading to repeated warnings about blackouts, and our electricity prices have escalated to unprecedented levels. State and federal governments now subsidise every input and output of the grid.
If we produced electricity as readily as the government provides subsidies our problems would be solved. Jokes aside, this is the actual problem – we do not have an electricity grid and market where the most efficient and affordable providers succeed; rather, we have government interventions corrupting a market so the energy sector can be used to meet UN emissions reduction goals.
The project is a farcical exercise in national self-harm, especially given global emissions continue to rise, so that even if we eliminated all our emissions it would make not a skerrick of difference to the climate. While our nation undermines itself, our policies provide significant benefits to China, where they burn our coal to turn our iron ore and bauxite into steel and aluminium as they build renewable energy kit to sell back to us.
Chinese state-owned enterprises even invest in our renewable projects underwritten by our government through the Capacity Investment Scheme. Yes, it is that absurd, our taxes subsidise investments by communist China in schemes that make our power more expensive.
And we have a $1bn a year public broadcasting behemoth polluting national debate, which is the opposite role for which it was created. If ever there were a debate where we needed facts instead of spin, then securing our energy future would be it, yet our national broadcaster misleads. We are funding green-left propaganda.
Ferguson’s fallacious fact check examined the Opposition Leader’s claims on the most telling political and economic issue of the moment and accused Ley of being wrong when, in fact, Ley was right. Ferguson and the ABC were wrong. ABC viewers were misled. And we all pay for it.
The pond has done its duty, and wants to end on a mournful note.
Just because the pond passed up a chance to dance with Dame Slap this day is no reason to ignore the latest tragic outing in her origin story.
You see, planet Janet was given the nickname after the character in The Magic Faraway Tree ...
But over time, Dame Slap transmuted into Dame Snap ... as if Dame Slap would stop her slapping and bitching and Mean Girls ways ...
Sadly this woke nonsense has continued into the movie due for release in March next year ...
It's mortifying. Disappointing. Humiliating. Agitating. Deeply upsetting.
A throwaway line in the trailer reveals that Dame Slap has stayed the fully woke Dame Snap.
Dame Slap will stay Dame Slap in the pond's heart forever.
Stay strong Planet Janet, eternally revolving above the Magic Faraway Tree ...
"The question for [Albo] Lachlan is – ego aside – "... is when will Newscorpse and scibblers be registered as POLITICAL LOBBYIST's!
ReplyDeleteOut loud and proud... "his father wielded political power to further his business interests across Australia, the UK, and later the US for more than half a century."
LOBBYING FOR PROFIT.
The above paragraph would and should and needs to be reassessed by... Albo. Ala PM&C, as the rules for lobbying say...
"5. The rationale for establishing different requirements is that in the case of employees of major companies or peak industry bodies ‘the very nature of [the lobbyist’s] employment means that it will be clear to ministers and others whose interests they will be representing’.
6 Other exemptions apply so the Code does not ‘impede day-to-day communications with government’.
7 By requiring third-party lobbyists to register their details (including the identities of their clients) and complete a statutory declaration attesting to their integrity, honesty and independence from politics, the government aims to provide transparency to Government representatives about whose interests the third-party lobbyist represents.
PM&C is responsible for: administering the registration of lobbyists; confirming the accuracy of the information provided by registered lobbyists; receiving reports and assessing breaches under the Code; and removing lobbyists from the Register.
...
"Management of the Australian Government’s Register of Lobbyists"
PUBLISHED Wednesday 14 February 2018
https://www.anao.gov.au/work/performance-audit/management-the-australian-governments-register-lobbyists
Proof, evidence and gun at foot... effing lobbyist!
"The curse of Rupert: Lachlan Murdoch has a long way to go to match his dad
...
"the clearest indication of the Murdoch empire’s waning power over its spiritual homeland. Something that may equally apply to all media.
"The question for Lachlan is – ego aside – whether it is an issue for him, given how his father wielded political power to further his business interests across Australia, the UK, and later the US for more than half a century.
News Corp’s record share price this year has nothing to do with its financially struggling media business in Australia. Its success is anchored by the US Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal, its book publishing and Lachlan’s wildly successful bet on property group REA."
Ughmannn: "Catholics of a certain era know there is a smorgasbord of sins that can stain the soul, but all fall into two broad categories: sins of omission and commission."
ReplyDelete"In an interview for California Sunday, Tucker described his "vision of freedom" by recalling a view over São Paulo by night: "As far as my eyes could see, there were lights and buildings and civilization burgeoning — an awesome amount of human knowledge, energy, innovation, creative capacity right in front of me. I began to turn, and it was true over here, and over there, and in every single direction, and I thought, 'That’s it! This world will never be governed. It cannot be governed.' It was beautiful."[23]
...
Personal life
Formerly a Southern Baptist, Tucker is a convert to traditionalist Catholicism.[29][30] He was managing editor of the Church Music Association of America journal Sacred Music from 2006 to 2014.[31][32]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Tucker
AnonymousDec 6, 2025, 8:02:00 AM
Ah yes GB.
And to answer Chadwick...
"I will add that I am not familiar with most of the names following Gigi"...
https://loonpond.blogspot.com/2025/12/in-which-our-henry-badly-bungles.html?showComment=1764968553834&m=1#c3368797254525654856
And on it goes...
DeleteVia nakedcapitalism links today...
"Pandemics
Americans More Likely to Accept Guidance from AMA than CDC on Vaccine Safety The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania
NHS England: “It will not be possible to halt the spread of a new pandemic virus, and it would be a waste of public health resources and capacity to attempt to do so.”
This has got to be one of the most [Oh! Emoji] things I’ve ever seen written down in an official document. https://t.co/s0v8GWduGY
— Cat in the Hat (@_CatintheHat) December 4, 2025
While ‘the Bunyip Aristocracy” is a fine old 19th Century term of derision (and thus almost modern by Lizard Oz standards), I’m not sure it’s wise for the Ughhman to deploy it, given the hereditary management structure for which he scribbles. It’s possible that didn’t occur to him, as he appears dazzled by his own brilliance at finally merging his twin obsessions of the evils of renewables and doctrinal Catholicism - possibly of a pre-Vatican II variety. Or to put it another way, he’s bleating the same old propaganda, though in a new but exceedingly stupid manner.
ReplyDeleteAt least ed can provoke a wry smile. Who can repress a hollow chuckle at the sight of a loyal Reptile with decades of loyal service managing to express moral outrage? It’s nice of him to join in the jihad, spelling Dame Slap so that she can try to score a free wash, trim and colour job?
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of the Dame, I learned of the upcoming “Faraway Tree” film a couple of days back, and am horrified at your confirmation that the “Slap” name isn’t being used. Surely the producers could partially atone for this travesty by casting our own Dame S in the role?