The Zionist bromancer shunned? Fear not, the Caterist and Dame Groan step into the breach ...

 

The reptiles never-ending jihad against - or relentless, morbid, never-ending fascination with - comrade Dan reached a new peak early this morning ...

It was all there, glowering photo, and Liam Menzies, "reporter-at-large", doing Amazing Investigative Journalism in his own lunchtime, and luckily that's what the intermittent archive is for ...

Daniel Andrews living in luxury Mornington Peninsula home owned by Labor donor

When did Andrews resign? 

27th September 2023, and yet here the reptiles are, feeding One Nation's chant of "lock him up", a call too rich even for the dog botherer.

Of all the things in the world requiring the pond's attention, the location and lifestyle of comrade Dan ranks at the very bottom.

How bad is it getting in the spineless stakes of feeding the fake died hair ranga monster?

Another beefy boofhead job for the intermittent archive, with the note that we've seen this ICE show elsewhere ...

Angus Taylor turns to much lower migration target to fend off Pauline Hanson’s net negative plan

He's such a needlessly fawning chump, with the spine of a jellyfish.

And then came even more work for the intermittent archive.

The pond decided to consign the bromancer to that distant cornfield, and personally arranged a listing ...

Antisemitism is a reminder of left’s distorted world view

This was a painful step for the pond, what with the bromancer being a perennial favourite, but the pond is well over all offerings from the Australian Daily Zionist News and the relentless refusal to acknowledge or track the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, the West Bank and southern Lebanon.

The pond didn't even have enough enthusiasm to turn to Haaretz for a balancing story, but will offer a teaser trailer... spoiler alert, it's just a serve of the bog standard, ritualised flood of rhetoric, tinged with a kind word for a different religious cult. 

How the bromancer, and the reptiles in general, love cults, but then, being in the cult of the lizard Oz, why wouldn't they? 

Roll on ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank, the bromancer's got your back.

But did this leave the pond short? 

Fear not, there were old faithfuls, gushing like geysers ...

The header: By Nick Cater
Digital safety law risks overreach into censorship

The cry to listen to a bot: Listen to this article
6 min

The caption for the coupling which with extraordinary visual cleverness features logos and Grant: With social media in mind, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant has been allowed extraordinary powers. Picture right: NewsWire

The plea for attention in the intertubes jungle: Make us preferred on Google

It might startle correspondents, but the pond has a little sympathy for the quarry whisperer in this outing, because it's the pond's considered opinion - no defamation intended - that Julie Inman Grant is barking mad, with many bees incessantly buzzing in her noggin. (The pond's partner's personal contacts with her informs this view).

The Caterist took to his task with the vigour of a man who knew which way water rolled:

There’s little evidence that parliament had a clue what it was doing when it passed the Enhancing Online Safety for Children Bill in 2015. Its scope was relatively narrow: our children against cyber-bullying, a modern phenomenon parliament unanimously agreed was a very bad thing.
After more than a decade of mission creep and two substantial legislative amendments, the eSafety Commission now faces a far more ambitious task: promoting “safer, more positive online experiences”.
The eSafety Commission’s architects were not blind to the risk of institutional overreach. In his second reading speech, minister Paul Fletcher explicitly warned against creating a regulatory system that was “excessive or heavy-handed”.

The reptiles dropped Fletch into the mix: Former communications minister Paul Fletcher warned against a system that was ‘excessive or heavy-handed’. Picture: Matthew Poon

The Caterist took up the Fletch cry, and as an anonymised blogger, was the pond the right candidate to stand in his way?

Yet for all its qualifying clauses and soothing rhetoric, this well-intentioned legislation contained the seeds of its own expansion. An agency with an $11m annual budget to tackle a well-defined problem has morphed into a $60m-a-year behemoth, with the ambitious goal of making the internet safe for everybody.
The “sock puppet” clause in the proposed Digital Duty of Care legislation would further expand the agency’s powers. The eSafety Commissioner would be granted unchecked authority to assume false or fictitious online identities. Effectively, the regulator would become a law unto itself, run by unelected officials accountable to parliament in only the loosest sense.
The original legislation set clear boundaries between the regulator’s role and the police. The proposed legislation busts the lines wide open, granting the commissioner the powers of investigator, judge and executioner.
These extraordinary powers are granted, apparently, to protect our “safety”, one of the most elastic words in the political lexicon. Nobody can reasonably declare themselves against it, which makes it a potent justification for state power.
A positive online experience can be anything the commissioner decides it should be. Negative online experiences, on the other hand, are anything the commissioner decides we should be protected against. The danger lies not merely in the extraordinary powers parliament is being asked to give the eSafety Commissioner, but in the boundless remit within which they might be used.

Commissioner Julie Inman-Grant compares Digital Duty of Care to seatbelt legislation in the 1970s.
“The car industry pushed back,” she said. “But Australia stayed the course.” Yet a product safety regulation with a clear engineering solution differs from regulating the flow of information. A law that insists you buckle up to protect against the consequences of a crash differs greatly from a law that tells you where you may drive.

There came another reminder of the subject of the flood water-whisperer's ire ... Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant compares Digital Duty of Care to seatbelt legislation in the 1970s. Picture: NewsWire/ Tertius Pickard

The quarry whisperer, aroused by the sighting, embarked on a lengthy final rant:

Naturally, the commission’s expanded role requires hiring more staff. The commission’s headcount has almost doubled since Labor entered office, from 116 in 2022 to 222 in 2024-25.
If parliament agrees to the proposed expansion of power, we can expect the number to rise further.
Few would challenge police investigators’ right to adopt a false identity to investigate potential criminal behaviour, provided appropriate checks and balances are in place.

When federal police assume a false identity under Part IAC of the Crimes Act, each identity requires a separate written authority. Its use must be recorded, periodically reviewed, and audited at least every six months, with the number of identities and their use ultimately reported to parliament.
Under the government’s eSafety draft, the commissioner requires no outside authorisation to create a sock puppet. The legislation requires no register of the identities, no audit and no reporting to parliament on how many have been deployed. There is no restriction on numbers. The commissioner, or anyone to whom the powers are delegated, could create as many sock puppets as they wish.
A police officer who misuses false identities commits an offence punishable by up to two years in prison. A sock puppeteer authorised by the commissioner need only show they acted “in good faith” to gain immunity from civil action or any other proceeding.
Grant’s second five-year term expires next year, presenting an opportunity to pose the question parliament has conspicuously failed to ask: Why do we need an eSafety commissioner at all?
That is not to say criminal activity committed online should be unpunished. Yet fraud, intimidation or the distribution of intimate images without consent are matters best left to the police. Unlawful behaviour wherever it occurs should be dealt with by the courts, where the rules of evidence and rights to appeal are established by common law, not an unaccountable bureaucracy.
Parliament is perfectly capable of updating the criminal law when technology creates new ways of committing old offences.
Beyond that point, however, we have every reason to be nervous about outsourcing responsibility for our wellbeing to the state.
The draft bill has no trouble defining serious harms: child sexual exploitation, grooming, incitement to extreme or sexual violence, suicide and self-harm, terrorism and criminal offending.
Yet it is less clear on the content that might be described as lawful but awful, material that might be offensive or morally repugnant to many but may reasonably deserve protection under the principle of free speech. Other jurisdictions have wrestled with this challenge, to which there is no obvious answer. Yet leaving it to the discretion of the minister of the day through the power of legislative instrument, as the draft legislation does, is hardly a satisfactory solution.
Adults can decide for themselves what they wish to read, watch and hear. Parents should have the principal responsibility for deciding what their children encounter.
Technology companies should be encouraged to develop so-called “middleware”: filters, parental controls, blocking tools, privacy settings and third-party software for organising feeds. If popular concern about online safety is as widespread as the government seems to think, market demand will be strong.
The Digital Duty of Care bill has served an important purpose by demonstrating that top-down regulation of digital content is impractical and dystopian. Better to take our chances with the occasional online bully, crank or fanatic than with a state that claims the power to protect us from them all.

Only one note.

There was a link at the start of that last paragraph, and for a fleeting moment, the pond's heart leapt. 

Had the reptiles actually provided a link to the outside world? Would the hive mind be taken to the actual Digital Duty of Care bill? 

Fear not, it was just a link to petulant Peta ... Labor’s duty of care is really all about duty of control

Sheesh, must the pond fall into line with petulant Peta too? No way ...

For the actual bill, go here ...

That note? The reptiles are constantly pleading for Google's attention. 

Never mind the debilitating paywall, if they insist on carrying on like a religious cult of the Amish kind, shunning the world, staying inside the hive mind, why should anyone care?

And now credit where no credit is due:

The pond had to quickly step past Fergo, doing his best to maintain the lizard Oz climate science denialist rage ...

Forget Bowen’s pre-COP ‘A-team’ … this mob’s an F-team
Chris Bowen promised to bring the world to the Pacific for pre-COP. But the speakers in Fiji and Tuvalu look more like the Melbourne Writers Festival than the G20.
By Richard Ferguson
Canberra bureau chief

Writers? At a Writers' Festival?

As the real header made clear, it was bloody interfering womyn that were the problem:

Julia Gillard, Jacinda Ardern? Chris Bowen’s set-list of speakers for pre-COP is not up to scratch

How could those useless harpies, those irrelevant harridans, compete with the infinite wisdom of Fergo and the lizards of Oz?

Here, have more of a 'toon break, have an immortal Rowe celebrating a sojourn with a womyn:

And speaking of womyn, the pond turned with salivating expectation to the treat of the day, a serve of the Groaning ... (closely related to the Shining):

The header: Commentary 
By Judith Sloan
Bragging rights to relatively low government debt are all Costello’s; Labor has made it worse

The plea to listen to a bot: Listen to this article
7 min

The caption for the opening snap of Petey boy looking stern and Jimbo looking bewildered: Peter Costello must wonder why he bothered; Jim Chalmers thought he had all the answers when he claimed he could reinvent capitalism. Pictures: News 24

The plea for relevance: Make us preferred on Google

The pond must begin by confessing disappointment. 

Sure the pond did the usual build up, and attempted to lather up the crowd, but it was a bit like the way the mad King has seen falling crowd numbers and a marked lack of enthusiasm in his recent speechifying.

This was just a bog standard rant about why everything was wrong, grist for the lizard Oz mill, but unexceptional stuff for Dame Groan ...

On the upside, the pond could avoid notes, and end it quickly so it could get on with a serve of Weet-Bix ...

There must be days when former treasurer Peter Costello wonders why he bothered. Why repair the budget and deliver 10 surpluses? Why rein in government debt, pay it off and leave a legacy of negative net debt?
He must even wonder why he established the Future Fund, given the threats to this sovereign wealth fund that have emerged since the Albanese Labor government was elected.
When the current Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, brags about Australia’s relatively low government debt by international standards, Costello must surely be choking on his Weet-Bix. Look at the figures – it was all Costello; Labor has made it worse.
When Costello became our top money man, Australian government net debt stood at $96bn or 18 per cent of GDP. When the Howard government was voted out in 2007, net debt was minus $40bn or minus 3.4 per cent of GDP. It was a tour de force that was never supported by the Labor opposition.

Naturally Jimbo was the least of this trio. Just look at his hand-waving and the supercilious grin on his mugwump face. No wonder the hive mind cowered in fear ... Jim Chalmers’ changes to the ­Future Fund were denounced as 'fiscal vandalism' by John Howard and creating 'a political slush fund' by Peter Costello.

Dame Groan was starry-eyed about Petey "have a spawn for me" Boy, and way down on Jimbo, but the chanting of "we'll all be rooned" exceeded even Hanrahan's expectations ...

Costello also introduced the Charter of Budget Honesty that ensures that newly elected governments are no longer surprised by dishonest financial statements issued by displaced administrations. The Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Outlook has improved the quality of election campaigning – all parties are working off the same figures; it is a model that has been copied by the states.
(Mind you, the quality of all PEFOs is not the same. The one issued for the 2022 election was a shocker, forecasting a budget deficit for 2021-22 of $80bn when the actual figure was a deficit of $32bn, for example. The Albanese government has attempted to feast on this rotting carcass ever since it has been in office.)
The Intergenerational Report also emerged from the Charter of Budget Honesty. To be released every five years – Labor has shortened this interval for political reasons – the aim of the exercise is to look at the budgetary pressures likely to emerge over the next 40 years.
Costello never saw the IGR as a bragging exercise, but rather as a means of imposing fiscal restraint to ensure future pressures on the budget could be headed off at the pass. It was never a reflection of his “meanness” but rather his strong ethical position that it is inherently unfair for the current generation to rack up debt for future generations to pay off.
Let’s not forget that vocal advocacy for some of the government’s biggest current programs was around in Costello’s day – think here the NDIS, the Gonski school-funding model and the like. His firm response was “no”, followed by the obvious point that funding for disability, education and many other matters rests with the states.

The pond has noted before the tendency to feature Albo and Jimbo in gloomy postures, but the thumb snap for this AV distraction outdoes Pravda in its hey day, what with Albo looking befuddled and bemused, and some unhappy warrior lurking behind, hands on head. Jimbo, is that you?

Next video thumbnail
Support for Albanese and Chalmers collapses in wake of rate hike
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Treasurer Jim Chalmers' popularity has taken a hit in the wake of last week's interest rate decision.

Between ecstasy and despair is a thin line, and after the exaltation of Petey Boy came an even fuller flowering of "we'll all be rooned", possibly by Xmas ...

So, what has been Costello’s legacy? Nearly two decades later, net government debt stands above $600bn, with gross debt hovering around the trillion-dollar mark. As a percentage of GDP, our federal government position – we shouldn’t forget state government debt, however – is still low by the standards of advanced economies.
But the point here is that this outcome has nothing to do with the efforts of Labor governments. The Rudd/Swan duo spent up big during the Global Financial Crisis (2009 to 2012), adding to the debt. The four budget surpluses that Swan announced came to nothing. During the pandemic, Labor supported even more spending than the Coalition government splashed to deal with the situation.
Since assuming office in 2022, Labor has thrown out the fiscal rule book. Chalmers refuses to set out a strict set of numerical fiscal rules – even his former boss, Wayne Swan, had rules, though he failed to meet them. Sound fiscal rules could have ensured that the budget would currently be in surplus, an outcome recommended by important luminaries such as former Reserve Bank governor, Phil Lowe, and former treasury secretary, Martin Parkinson.
Chalmers also declined to impose a global tax cap on the budget. According to his thinking, “we’re not attracted to the government’s tax cap, and the reason we’re not attracted to it is because it seems to us like quite an arbitrary cap imposed for political reasons rather than good economic reasons.” The Coalition’s cap of 23.9 per cent has now been exceeded under Labor and it is still running a budget deficit!
Prior to Covid, government payments were under a quarter of GDP. This financial year, they are expected to come in at 26.8 per cent. This is a massive change, making the size of government larger than it has ever been outside war or a pandemic.
Annual government spending is now well over $800bn, having been less than $500bn before Covid. Government spending on the so-called “care economy” has risen by more than 50 per cent since the Albanese government was first elected.

The reptiles' choice of thumb illustrations is now beyond Pravda, almost comically Der Stürmer, with this AV distraction featuring a downcast Jimbo...so that the dog botherer could insert himself into Dame Groan's rant ...

Next video thumbnail
Chalmers called out for his ‘addiction to spending’ as Aussies prepare for a rate rise
Shadow Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister Dan Tehan says Treasurer Jim Chalmers has an “addiction” to spending that is driving interest rates up. “Everything points to Jim Chalmers' addiction to spending,” Mr Tehan told News24 host Chris Kenny. “As for the Labor Party and Anthony Albanese’s concern, that spending is just going to continue. This is really going to hurt Australians at this time. “They’re struggling as it is. The last thing they need is another interest rate rise.”

Dame Groan joined Jimbo in being downcast in her final gobbet of gloom and despair...

Don’t believe the budget forecasts of future government spending: growth of 0.7 per cent in 2027-28 and 0.9 per cent in the next financial year. As the say, pigs might fly, even if there is some success in restraining the growth of spending on NDIS. Labelling NDIS spending by another name, Thriving Kids, doesn’t reduce aggregate spending necessarily.
As for the Prime Minister’s claim that the government has achieved $178bn of budget savings, some other animals are needed to join the pigs in the sky. He earnestly tells us that “every single economic statement that we have handed down has had savings”.
This is just arcane budget trickery that shouldn’t convince anyone. The most credible estimate of the net addition that Labor has made to the budget comes from economist Saul Eslake, who puts the figure at just above $100bn.
And don’t you just love a bit of budget “reprioritisation”? It’s like Kim Kardashian bragging that she bought the expensive black handbag rather than the tan one. It’s irrelevant to the budget bottom line.
As hard-pressed householders sit around the kitchen table figuring out how they are going to afford higher mortgage payments, higher fuel costs and higher expenses generally, they must wonder how we got to this point.
As a firm believer in big government, Chalmers thought he had all the answers when he claimed he could reinvent capitalism. What he didn’t count on was the persistence of inflation and the role that excessive government spending plays in that outcome.
The cost of government debt is about to escalate. He talks about boosting productivity but can only cite trivial measures while avoiding the main game – energy and industrial relations. We are stuck with sub-par economic growth and no way of escaping.
It seems a long time since Costello held the fiscal reins.

Cheer up Dame Groan, if the reptiles keep on going on this way, soon enough Pauline will be PM, and what good times we'll see then ...

As for the credit where no credit is due? Sorry, there wasn't one. For some reason, the reptiles cut the Dame Groan thumb ...

The pond had to look elsewhere in the lizard Oz to ensure that attention was paid ... she's not to be allowed to fall into her grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.

Go team... and the pond might have featured this one before, but it seems a nice capper for the Groaning...

How many more loons could anyone want?

If His Lordship Alexander Downer and Major Mitchell bore you silly, there's always Noah's Ark ...

 

If anyone a few years ago had suggested the pond would open by quoting Bill Kristol quoting Eco, the pond would politely but firmly have suggested a psychiatric examination, yet here we are ...Not To Alarm You, But Trump’s Brain Is Melted And Hegseth’s neo-fascism is out in the open.

...I want to call on the novelist and critic, Umberto Eco, who provided one of the most helpful guides to this kind of politics in his great 1995 essay, “Ur-Fascism.” (*intermittent archive link)
Eco provides a list of certain key elements or features of Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. A couple of these are particularly relevant to the emanations of our secretary of defense: Irrationalism, and machismo.
Here’s Eco on irrationalism:

'Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism. . . . Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.”'

And it’s no accident, Eco further points out, that “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
And side-by-side with Hegseth’s embrace of irrationalism is his exaltation of machismo.
As Eco explains,

"Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons—doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise."

Eco makes clear that his essay was not intended as merely a historical or diagnostic enterprise. Eco wrote in order to warn that fascism is not a thing of the past. Fascism is a permanent human temptation. It speaks to certain human passions and exploits certain human weaknesses that are always there to potentially be activated.

Why open this way? What's Pete Kegsbreath, and the rest of mad King Donald's craven minions got to do with herpetology studies?

For some reason, not so ineluctable, the pond was reminded of the reptiles of the lizard Oz ...

And so to Lord Downer ...

The header: By Alexander Downer
Slick political machines are driving us nowhere

The promise of a bot voice: Listen to this article
7 min

The caption: Anthony Albanese and Victorian Premier Ben Carroll in West Footscray. Picture: NewsWire / Ian Currie

The pitiful plea for attention: Make us preferred on Google

Of all the fatuous topics by the most fatuous of politicians, why did Lord Downer decide to blather about "slick political machines"?

Is he just some innocent rustic from deep in the Adelaide hills? Or is he a comely slick dresser with no time for machines?

Whatever, one thing is sure. Lord Downer won't be taking the opportunity for some self-reflection and copious apologies for his past life as a failed politician ... Why the Iraq war was right (sssh, don't mention WMDs)...

Do begin, please do ...

Over the past two decades, politics has become more professional, but the same cannot be said of government. Politicians and their minders have become extraordinarily sophisticated at winning elections and rather less accomplished at doing anything worthwhile once they have won.

Political parties can identify swinging voters, discover their anxieties and deliver carefully tailored messages to their phones. They can test a slogan before breakfast and discard an unpopular policy before lunch. The machinery of persuasion has never been more impressive. But to what purpose?
Increasingly, the purpose is simply to acquire power and retain it. Improving the country is something to be considered afterwards, provided the focus groups approve. I doubt there is any retreat from these techniques; no party will abandon technology that might help it win.
But we should recognise what happens when research ceases to inform judgment and starts to replace it. We get government by perpetual opinion poll. We get populism. By populism, I mean the habit of telling people what they want to hear rather than explaining what they need to understand. Conviction becomes a liability. Difficult reform becomes an electoral risk. Leadership gives way to the endless recitation of reassuring platitudes.
Consider the politician who announces a listening tour. Really? With all that polling, research and social media monitoring, are we supposed to believe the party has no idea what people think? The listening tour is just a stunt. Perhaps the more useful expedition would be an explaining tour.
None of this is an argument against listening. It is an argument for exercising judgment afterwards. The public have jobs, families, mortgages and lives to lead. They cannot spend every evening studying budget papers or assessing infrastructure proposals. Representative government exists precisely because we elect people to undertake that work on our behalf. Their responsibility is to make sound decisions, explain difficult choices and sometimes resist popular demands. Otherwise, we might as well replace cabinet with a market research company.

Really? At this point the reptiles decided they'd provide the needed focus ...Workers on the tracks at the Tottenham Rail Yards after Anthony Albanese and Premier Ben Carroll announced the Airport Rail Link project. Picture: NewsWire / Jason South

That's it? There are much better examples whereof His Lordship speaks ...

At this point His Lordship veered off into croweater matters, as if what happens in Adelaide - oh Adelaide - is of earth-shattering relevance ...

Instead, voters are encouraged to believe that governments can provide ever more benefits, tax somebody else and borrow the difference indefinitely. The bill is always somebody else’s problem, preferably after the next election.
Infrastructure offers a particularly revealing example. Everybody likes a new road, a railway or a bypass. Politicians like them especially. There are announcements, photographs in fluorescent jackets and, eventually, ribbons to cut. The benefits are visible. The costs are more conveniently dispersed.
Take Adelaide’s South Road. The Torrens-to-Darlington project carries a price tag of $15.4bn. That is an enormous commitment. Now consider how such spending is presented. A state government can announce an operating surplus while borrowing heavily to build infrastructure. The construction cost is recorded as an asset, with depreciation charged over its useful life, rather than being treated immediately as an operating expense. That is conventional accounting. The political sleight of hand comes when an operating surplus is presented as proof that the government is living within its means, without comparable emphasis on its cash requirements and rising debt.
Nor should we confuse state operating balances with the commonwealth’s cash balance. Federal infrastructure grants generally affect its deficit when paid. The distinctions matter. But none of these accounting treatments makes the resources free. A road cannot pay the government’s interest bill merely because it appears on a balance sheet.

His Lordship desperately tried to extract a more universal juice from the parochialism:

The scale extends far beyond Adelaide. Infrastructure Australia’s 2025 assessment identified $242bn in major public infrastructure projects over five years. That is a pipeline, not an annual spending figure, but it illustrates the magnitude of the commitments being made. Borrowing for productive infrastructure can be justified. A well-chosen project may reduce transport costs, improve productivity and generate benefits for decades. The question is whether those benefits justify the costs, and whether building it now represents the best use of scarce resources. Popularity cannot answer either question.
There is another cost that rarely appears in the announcement: what cannot be built because government has commandeered the people and materials. Engineers, electricians, concrete suppliers and construction machinery are not available in unlimited quantities. Public projects compete with private investment and, where their requirements overlap, with housing construction.
When governments accelerate enormous building programs in a constrained market, they drive up wages and material prices, delay other projects and make new homes more expensive. Announcing a housing target does not conjure another electrician into existence.

Might not examples be culled from the time when His Lordship strutted the roost? Why only that ranga? Pauline Hanson at the One Nation campaign in Melbourne. Picture: NewsWire / Luis Enrique Ascui

She can't be blamed for recent cost rises, but there's no mention of who can be ...

There remained one final outburst from His Lordship, with a desperate attempt at economics, never his strongest suit ...

Of course, infrastructure spending is not the only cause of expensive housing. Planning restrictions, regulations, land availability and weak construction productivity matter too. Nor does every tunnelling worker become a house builder if a road project is postponed. But these qualifications do not abolish competition for resources. Governments should stop promising to build everything simultaneously and then claiming some war thousands of kilometres away is the cause of prices rising!
The Reserve Bank has highlighted renewed capacity pressures in construction. Politicians should take those constraints seriously before announcing the next grand scheme.
What is needed is a return to economic rationalism: rigorous assessment, realistic sequencing, transparent borrowing and the courage to defer projects that cannot justify their demands on the economy. The test of leadership is not whether a premier or prime minister can announce another project. It is whether they can explain why another worthy proposal must wait its turn for funding.
We also need leaders willing to explain that a project can be desirable without being affordable today. There is nothing heartless about setting priorities. The alternative is allowing inflation, higher taxes and debt servicing costs to chew up more of our resources. That’s what’s happening now.
Lionel Robbins famously placed scarcity and competing uses at the centre of economics. Politics does not suspend that reality. Winning an election does not increase the supply of skilled labour or repeal the cost of capital.
Australia needs politicians with convictions, including the conviction that prosperity must be earned through productivity and sensible choices. Let us make economic rationalism popular again.
Otherwise, the choices we refuse to make voluntarily may eventually be imposed by creditors and circumstances. That would be a miserable verdict on a political class so accomplished at winning power and so reluctant to use it responsibly.

As for the copious thumb career the reptiles provide for their contributors? This was the one accorded His Lordship. Alas and alack, here it is in full ... Alexander Downer Contributor

Have an immortal Rowe for making it this far, with Freedumb boy featuring ...

One of the revived joys of the pond's posting is that the intermittent archive has been restored,and so the pond can reference Mein Gott without going into him at great length.

Australian banks review their $2.58 trillion property exposure as falling values squeeze borrowers

All that's needed is a teaser trailer, and punters can decide if they think a visit to the cornfield is worthwhile ... 

The pond must confess that it was only the opening, uncredited, likely AI art, that stirred the pond ...

Ditto Simpleton Simon ... Albanese not our most unpopular PM ... yet

This is the sort of simplistic time waster and Albo basher that the pond might match by proposing that Simpleton Simon is not the most unpopular lizard Oz scribbler ... yet ...

The presence of the liar from the shire reminded the pond that it's better not to look back ...

That clearing of the decks allowed room for the pond to cope with Major Mitchell ...

Michael Shellenberger?

A reminder of a couple of his achievements, per his wiki (links and references at the original):

On April 3, 2024, Shellenberger published the "Twitter Files – Brazil", resulting in a formal Congressional inquiry, and two Congressional hearings, at which Shellenberger testified.Investigative journalists subsequently highlighted multiple errors in Shellenberger's reporting. In September 2024, Shellenberger appeared with Bill Nye at an event entitled "Can Science Save the World?" hosted by New College of Florida. The event "seeks to advance civil discourse and engagement through facilitating events that foster open discussion and debate on relevant public policy issues."
Shellenberger has faced accusations of "bad science" for his comments on climate change in Apocalpyse Never; he has also been criticized for arguing with prominent climate scientists on social media and "apologising" to the world on the behalf of environmentalists. A panel of scientists organized by Climate Feedback analyzed the claims he made in his "apology" article, concluding that they were "inaccurate or mislead readers by contradicting available evidence or using scientific data out of context."A Snopes article, which consulted multiple scientists that Shellenberger had cited, was similarly critical; Michael Mann called one of Shellenberger's central arguments "completely wrong," and found it was also contradicted by the very IEA source Shellenberger used to support it.

There's the Major again, always referencing the dubious, and while talking about payouts and corporate responsibility, must the pond go there again?

News Corp celebrates more than a decade of paying zero tax in Australia (possible paywall)

Despite its pretensions to lecture Australia about its values and how it should be run, the Murdoch family’s News Corp really has nothing to do with Australia. It is a foreign company, and it serially pays no tax here, despite earning billions in revenue on our shores.
In 2024-25, according to the Australian Tax Office’s corporate tax data released today, News Australia Holdings — the official name of News Corp’s Australian subsidiary — racked up 10 years of paying precisely zero tax. For that year, it earned $1.89 billion in revenue, made more than $300 million in profit (a record for the past decade) and paid nothing in tax.
Indeed, there’s a peculiar steadiness to News Corp’s tax dodging. For the past four years, it has earned around $1.8 billion in revenue and paid no tax on around $300 million in profits in 2023-24 and 2024-25, and $200 million in profits in 2021-22 and 2022-23.
You can go all the way back to when the first corporate tax transparency data was released for 2014-15 — the result of a Rudd-Gillard government initiative (opposed by the Coalition) — and find News Corp’s main company has paid no tax across those years, on revenue of, in total, $23.9 billion and profits of $1.38 billion.
The only News Corp entities to pay tax in that time were an investment company, which paid $200,000 (sic) in 2017-18 on $291 million in profits, and a pay TV financing arm, which paid $8 million in 2015-16. Real estate listing oligopolist REA Group, which News Corp part-owns, paid $246 million in tax.
Otherwise, News Corp’s only contributions to Australia are social division and the fostering of hate and resentment.

To be fair, exceptionally keen Keane, they also like to foster panic, fear, and alarm on a daily basis ...and quote loons who like to put in a good word for Vlad the sociopathic invader ...

Here we go again. The pond is constantly irritated by the way that the reptiles plead for Google attention, and then resolutely refuse to stray outside the paywalled hive mind by providing a link.

If you want that link the pond is happy to oblige. If reading the both siderist NY Times is your thing, here you go ...

Humanity Has Avoided Apocalypse Before. Let’s Do It Again. (*intermittent archive link)

Heck, the pond will even throw in a teaser trailer. Could it be any worse than spending time with the Major?

Sigh, back to the Major ... (remembering that it was the feeble efforts of the NY Times and their like that helped produce mad King Donald's age of lead)

What, no link again? Must the pond do all the work?

Religious Scholars Met With Anthropic. What They Heard Stunned Them.
In a series of private meetings, the company consulted religious scholars to help instill morality into its A.I. models — and make the case that Claude could be conscious.

That was saved to the intermittent archive under a different header:

Is Claude Conscious? Inside Anthropic’s Spiritual Quest

The pond doesn't give a toss what religious leaders think. 

The pond's idea of fun is being off with loons determined to raise shekels by proposing they're about to discover Noah's Ark ...a riff that has sent Faux Noise and other Murdochians into a speculative frenzy ... and recorded with a simpering, credulous stupidity ...

At this point the pond realised it had managed to filibuster its way through the Major's piece ...

Is there an irony there, that eternal bagging of the full to overflowing intertubes, what with the reptiles now pleading in each column for Google relevance, and the pond being digital, and so too the lizard Oz, save for the very few luddites that still read the tree killer edition?

But why has productivity fallen? Surely at least one reason is that punters must waste time checking on the Major's sources, when having a cup of tea and a biscuit might be more productive.

Credit where no credit is due ...

And now to that better version of the infallible Pope's weekend cartoon, promised by the pond...

And for a bonus, a reminder of what the mendacious Minns mob has produced ...

Speaking of Noah's Ark, Dan McClellan has been having a field day with mind-numbing details ...

In which Polonius, Dame Slap, snappy Tom and the Ughmann compete for attention, but the pond's heart is with tricky Dick and American justice mad King Donald style ...

The pond realises it's doing a Tootle off the lizard Oz tracks, but talk about being Robert Redford/Dustin Hoffman irresistible...

Decades After Watergate, Justice Department Reviews Whether Nixon Got a Raw Deal (*intermittent archive link)

As Nicolle Wallace said, Making Crooks Great Again. (YouTube link)

And that link in the WSJ yarn? 

How could the pond resist? Probe of Trump Foes Heats Up Under Acting Attorney General (*intermittent archive link)

Throw in Keystone Kash ...

Is There Anything Kash Patel Won’t Do for Trump Before the Midterms?
“The president wants indictments. He wants people in handcuffs.” (*intermittent archive link)
By Sarah Fitzpatrick

How good is the DOJ and the FBI? How good is American justice? How good are "Western values"? How much does Vlad the Sociopath still have to learn?

The pond confesses that it needed to do a little "making justice great again" stuff before tackling Polonius's prattle for its Sunday meditation...

The header: By Gerard Henderson
Croatian Six still haunted by failures of judicial system

The promise of a bot voice: Listen to this article
6 min

The caption for a borrowed snap: Vico Virkez on a farm in Yugoslavia in 1991. Picture: ABC / Four Corners

The desperate desire to stay relevant behind a paywall: Make us preferred on Google

This was an outlier for Polonius, but at least it veered away from the usual malarkey of recent weeks, and so the pond was willing to go with the flow ...

And then there were three. The reference is to the Croatian Six who were convicted in 1981 of engaging in a conspiracy two years earlier to bomb targets in Sydney. The motive for such criminality was not adequately explained by the prosecution.
This was one of the longest criminal trials in Australian history. It ran for 10 months and the jury was out for an extraordinary 68 hours.
However, on February 9, 1981, Maksimilijan Bebic, Vjekoslav Brajkovic, Ilija Kokotovic, Joseph Kokotovic, Mile Nekic and Anton Zvirotic were found guilty and sentenced to a maximum 15-year term of imprisonment. They were released after less than 10 years.
The outcome of these convictions has been contested for close to half a century – and the case is not closed. There have been a number of appeals and inquiries, most recently in June, when Acting Justice Robert Allan Hulme handed down his report on the Inquiry into the Convictions of the Croatian Six.
The Hulme inquiry was set up following a finding in August 2022 by Justice Robertson Wright that there were doubts about their guilt. In March 2023, Chief Justice Andrew Bell chose Hulme to undertake his inquiry.
The outcome of the Hulme inquiry was well explained by journalist Hamish McDonald (not to be confused with Hamish Macdonald of the ABC) in his address to the Sydney Institute last Wednesday, titled “The Croatian Six and Terrorism: Where are we at?”. McDonald is the author of Reasonable Doubt: Guns, Police and the Croatian Six (Doosra Media, 2019).
Reasonable Doubt is a devastating account of the failures of the Australian judicial system – all the way from the NSW Supreme Court to the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal and on to the High Court of Australia. And now the matter is going back to the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal.
After his lengthy inquiry, Hulme found that “no reasonable doubt arises as to the guilt” of Bebic, Brajkovic and Zvirotic. However, Hulme found that “there is reasonable doubt as to the guilt” of the Kokotovics and Nekic (who is deceased). A surprising decision, to be sure. Since, with respect to one finding, he refers to the Croatian Six as being “implicated … in the conspiracy”.
Hulme has referred his findings with respect to the three to the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal, which is expected to consider whether these convictions should be quashed. Not those of the other three who, as McDonald points out, “continue to protest their innocence”. He added that Croatian Australians are “finding it hard to accept half-exoneration”.
Half a century ago, Croatia was part of Yugoslavia. It was a communist totalitarian regime ruled by dictator Josip Broz Tito in Serbia. Yugoslavia broke up in 1990 and became independent of the other parts of the former federation – the largest of which was Serbia, followed by Croatia.

The pond knows little about the matter, and cares less, and struggled to find another title published by Doosra Media, but whatever, let's have another snap from the cardigan wearers, The ‘Croatian Six’: Max Bebic, Vic Brajkovic, Tony Zvirotic, Joe Kokotovic, Ilija Kokotovic and Mile Nekic. Picture: ABC

A more interesting question, perhaps, than the matter of contested guilt is why Polonius decided to hare off down this rabbit hole? 

Was there nothing in American justice to command attention? Must we attempt an antipodean counterbalance? Must it turn out to be another contribution to the Australian Daily Tyke News?

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the left-wing faction of the Labor Party – led by Jim Cairns and Lionel Murphy – was hostile to the Croatian Australians who were not only anti-communist but, in the main, Catholics. This is documented in a chapter by Denis Strangman in Les Shaw’s 1974 edited collection, The Shape of the Labor Regime.
Murphy and Cairns in the late 1960s and early 1970s alleged that, under the Coalition government, ASIO was covering up terrorism by Croatian Australians against Serbian individuals and properties in Australia. This was not true. Sure, some Croatian Australians wanted to go to war. But against the communist regime in Serbia, not democratic Australia. However, it is acknowledged that Tito’s secret police force – the UDBA – was running false-flag operations by attacking Yugoslav properties in Australia – and elsewhere – and framing Croatian Australians.
The overwhelming evidence shows that the Croatian Six were the victims of a UDBA false-flag operation. The conspiracy commenced when Detective Sergeant Roger Rogerson raided a property in Sydney and arrested some of the Croatian Six. Rogerson died recently in prison having been convicted of murder.

Cue another snap ... One of the ‘Croatian Six’, Vjekoslav Brajkovic, gave evidence at a judicial inquiry into his convictions, 44 years after he was charged.

For all of Polonius's powers of persuasion - some might think them limited - in the end he didn't seem to come up with much ...

At the time, the NSW police contained individuals who bashed those they arrested, planted “evidence”, invented confessions and so on. This was to be the fate of the Croatian Six. It was a part of the criminal world, which some prosecutors and judges never fully understood.
Moreover, in the book Reasonable Doubt, McDonald makes the case that the trial judge, Alan Victor Maxwell, was hostile to the accused. And that when the six appealed to the Court of Criminal Appeal the chief judge was Gordon Samuels, one of Maxwell’s closest friends.
The principal evidence against the Croatian Six was supplied by Vico Virkez. Chris Masters, then an ABC Four Corners reporter, interviewed Virkez overseas in 1991. Virkez told Masters that he was not a Croat or a Christian, and that he had committed perjury at the trial of the Croatian Six. He was a Tito agent.
It seems extraordinary that after what Virkez told Masters, not everyone has conceded that there was at the very least reasonable doubt as to the safety of the convictions. By the way, Masters endorsed Reasonable Doubt.
The NSW Court of Criminal Appeal may quash the convictions of Nekic and the Kokotovics. It is unclear what, if anything, may be done with respect to the others.
And then there is the High Court. In March 1986, the High Court decided on an application for special leave to appeal in Mile Nekic and others v The Queen. Chief justice Gibbs and justices Mason, Wilson, Deane and Dawson considered the case.
At 12.07pm the court took an adjournment. At 12.16pm it returned and Gibbs said that “a majority of the court has reached the conclusion that if special leave to appeal were granted, the appeal would certainly fail”.
But would this have been the case? After all, the minority did not hold this view. That is, either one or two of Australia’s leading jurists at the time. It is possible a further application could be made to the High Court.
ASIO does not regard the Croatian Six as terrorists and it is better informed on such matters than the legal profession. It’s time for – and then there were none.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

As usual when the pond knows nothing, and can't hope to discover anything, the pond passed on making a comment, but did want to update the Polonial bio, which strangely lists him as a News24 man. Apparently turning up once a week in the lizard Oz doesn't count. He's been consigned to the Siberia of pay cable TV ...

Gerard Henderson News24 Columnist
Gerard Henderson is an Australian columnist, political commentator and the Executive Director of The Sydney Institute. His column Media Watch Dog is republished by News24.com.au each Saturday morning. He started the blog in April 1988, before the ABC TV’s program of the same name commenced.

While on the theme of innocence and guilt ...

And so to a couple of cheats.

Thanks to the revival of the intermittent archive, all the pond has to do is provide a link and a teaser trailer, and then correspondents can decide if they want to head off to the cornfield, and miss the rest (and they won't be missing much) ...

What happens when the legal club closes ranks

This just Dame Slap doing internecine legal warfare.

In its time the pond has seen some of that kind of fighting - lawyer on lawyer action - up close, and its ugly stuff when they turn their claws on each other.

Still the pond is updating its profiles, and should note Dame Slap's qualifications as a claw master...

Janet Albrechtsen Columnist
Janet Albrechtsen is an opinion columnist with The Australian. She has worked as a solicitor in commercial law, and attained a Doctorate of Juridical Studies from the University of Sydney. She has written for numerous other publications including the Australian Financial Review, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Sunday Age, and The Wall Street Journal.

In a similar vein, the pond skipped much of Snappy Tom's offering.

Albanese struggles to adapt in world of shocks

About the only thing that appealed was the remarkable collage by Emilia, who proudly refused to blame AI for her work ... it's the sort of image that would be at home in Pravda in its heyday, or Der Stürmer, with a shifty Albo looking startled and a shifty Jimbo looking glum and downcast ...

Well played Emilia, you lifted Snappy Tom's hatchet job out of the reptile ruck.

This might tempt correspondents to abandon ship and head off to the intermittent archive for the full bashing with a blunt fiscal instrument (where's the talk of SI?)...

Tom Dusevic Columnist
Tom Dusevic writes commentary and analysis on economic policy, social issues and new ideas to deal with the nation’s most pressing challenges. Formerly policy editor, he has been The Australian’s national chief reporter, chief leader writer, editorial page editor, opinion editor, economics writer and first social affairs correspondent. Dusevic won a Walkley Award for commentary and the Citi Journalism Award for Excellence. He is the author of the memoir Whole Wild World and holds degrees in Arts and Economics from the University of Sydney.

As we're speaking of pollies struggling to cope with shocks ...

And so to the Ughmann.

The story here is a simple one, which is why the pond reverted to screen caps.

The unreformed seminarian is a relentless hater of renewables, a devotee of dinkum pure, innocent, clean, virginal Oz coal, and a climate science denialist, and arguing with him is a bit like taking on some fanatical member of Opus Dei or the Jesuit fraternity.

Completely pointless...but before plunging in, the pond suggests that correspondents take a quick squiz at this AP report ... Households will pay more for energy because of federal policy changes, think tank says

Households in the contiguous United States will pay thousands of dollars more for energy through 2040 because of federal policy changes since President Donald Trump returned to office such as canceling new clean energy projects, according to modeling released Friday by a nonpartisan think tank.
The Energy Innovation analysis found that households will pay an average of $6,500 more for energy, cumulatively through 2040. In five states, households will pay roughly $9,000 more: Oregon, Mississippi, South Dakota, Virginia and Wyoming.
The California-based think tank said there will be more demand for natural gas for electricity because the administration is canceling new wind, solar and hydrogen projects and there will be more gasoline demand for transportation because Trump and Congress are revoking policies that incentivized efficient and lower-emissions vehicles. Higher demand increases prices.
Energy prices are elevated in many countries. The International Energy Agency said after Russia invaded Ukraine, record prices were observed between 2022 and 2024 in the European Union, the United Kingdom, Japan and Korea. In many countries, the rise has outpaced income growth and inflation since 2019, including the European Union and the United States.
In some areas of the U.S., demand from data centers is being blamed. The Iran war has sent oil and gasoline prices sharply higher, too. The Energy Information Administration expects residential U.S. customers to pay about 18.6 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2027, compared to 17.3 cents in 2025 and 18.2 cents in 2026.
The independent research firm Rhodium Group has also examined the issue, saying in April the U.S. has entered a new period of rising electricity prices. It cited increasing price volatility in natural gas, which is increasingly used to generate power; needed grid improvements; inflation; storm recovery and wildfire mitigation; and shifting policies.
Absent significant policy action, electricity prices likely will continue their significant rise over the next five years, the firm said.

Delicious, especially that line about costs rising because the administration is canceling new wind, solar and hydrogen projects.

Now please allow the Ughmann to go full Donald:

The pond will concede a certain rat cunning, as in the Ughmann flung in AFL for the aerial pingpong mob, while also appealing to the nerds with his treatment of that falling apple ... Newton’s apple: The real story:

It is the manuscript for what would become a biography of Newton entitled Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Lifewritten by William Stukeley, an archaeologist and one of Newton’s first biographers, and published in 1752. Newton told the apple story to Stukeley, who relayed it as such:
“After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank thea, under the shade of some apple trees…he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself…”

More importantly did everyone put their money on the very short odds that there'd be a snap of fiendish windmills in the story, for the tilting at by Chris "Don Quixote" Ughmann?

If you bet the right way, get ready for a big win ...

Would the mango Mussolini be reprimanded for the way his war of choice has plunged the world and the Unites States into pain and misery? 

Not likely ...

Extra points and shekels for anyone betting on dinkum, sweet, innocent virginal coal making an appearance in the snaps - how the reptiles love a coal-fired power station - though the pond suggests it's unlikely that anyone could have tipped the next visual outsider, a snap of a crowd wandering about to no point, though it does evoke the substance of the Ughmann's style...

The pond has no idea why the "journalists" are labelled "journalist". It hardly adds to the allure, the appeal, or perhaps explain who was conducting the inquisition, or is that a jihad?

The pond didn't want to do a spoiler on that exquisite Sean image, especially as the brave lad didn't try to foist it onto AI (or even SI), but instead nobly took the credit himself. 

Way to go Sean, way to elevate the tone of the lizard Oz, way to go with giving the Ughmann all the gravitas he deserves ...

As for the "journalist", the next gobbet gave a tantalising clue, but was it the Ughmann or the dog botherer or some other Chris? Who can say?

The pond covered Michele yesterday thanks to the immortal Rowe ...

The Ughmann is more than a match when it comes to beating a climate science-denying drum... because all that blather ultimately is in aid of returning the country to coal, with perhaps a little nuking thrown in for good measure ...

Credit where credit is due ...

Chris Uhlmann Columnist
Chris Uhlmann is a Walkley Award winning journalist and broadcaster, having begun his media career at The Canberra Times and as a radio producer for the ABC in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He was most recently the ABC's political editor on its flagship 7.30 program.

Strange, no mention of his time as an unreformed seminarian, nor any mention of his impeccable credentials in climate science.

As for the tolling bell, it's tolling loud enough, and not too far in the distance.

Maybe, in fact, that bell is tolling right now ... May heatwaves, deaths, ruined harvests: study of Europe’s summer paints grim picture for the future

And the Ughmann does the Labor party a disservice.

They really are trying their level best, especially the mindless Minns mob, with a certified cretin as their leader ... Matt Kean warns climate crisis ‘isn’t someone else’s problem’ as largest coal project in NSW history greenlit

There'll be a better version of this infallible Pope to hand later, but it seemed to be relevant, so the pond rushed to include it ...

And so to conclude on the usual note of 'toon optimism ...

As for AV distractions, this?

Or this, which seems much more in tune with the times ...

Or maybe this is the new model for the Reich, with the same lasting power ...