In which the pond serves up a cold cut of prattling Polonius, accompanied by a sumptuous spread of garrulous Gemma ...

 

The pond blames the reptiles for turning the pond into a fussy eater this weekend.

At first the pond worried if it was turning anorexic, but it was simply an aversion to the food on offer.

The menu was extremely limited. 

The pond couldn't find anything much about King Donald insulting NATO troops (that got the UK agitated), nor anything about him withdrawing his invite to Canada to join his "peace board" in a massive sulk of mean spite, (elbows up Canada), nor his sending an armada to Iran ... (though no doubt the bromancer will turn up in exultant war monger mode in the near future).

Instead there was a lot of local fluff-gathering and navel-gazing...

Take Noel, for instance ...

We need a layer of unity that binds us all

We must defend multiculturalism from rising tide of nativism
The Australian achievement of multiculturalism will come under increasing attack if we do not answer its weakness.
By Noel Pearson

He's scribbling this for the reptiles? Home to nativists of the Caterist kind? (Which is to say Pom blathering about migrants).

He's forgotten that the lizard of Oz campaigned against the Voice, and yet here he is supporting their desperate paywall model attempt at survival?

He's gone all Tolkien?

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
In the Land of News Corp where the Shadows lie.

Off to the intermittent archive with him.

Similarly the pond could only take a peck at the craven Craven.

Usually when a craven Craven turns up the pond would feast, gorge, almost like that portly man in Monty Python wanting a final dinner mint.

And yet the pond baulked:

Reality of armed, vicious, racist, homicidal internal threat calls for new legal weapons to fight back
We must adopt extraordinary legal powers as a matter of defence against worse attacks.
By Greg Craven

The closing sermon helps explain why the pond could only pick at the serving ...

...In the context of violent antisemitism, this is what Anthony Albanese is attempting. The half-hearted response of the opposition led by Sussan Ley is a shame on it and the country.
Certainly, we will have to exercise vigilance over these extraordinary powers. This will put our constitutional system to the test, as did other defence crises.
Parliament already seems to be playing its role, forcing amendments to the legislation. A free press is scrutinising and reporting avidly on its contents.
The legislation certainly will be challenged in the High Court, which will determine its fate. Lesser but always independent judges will have to apply the law as cases come before them, remembering that penal legislation has to be applied carefully. The executive, from ministers down to office boys, will need to be restrained in its use of the laws.
In other words, our constitutional system will have to live up to the praises heaped on it by its defenders, including me.
These are not Cromwellian edicts striking at the heart of our system of government. They are laws necessary for the defence of our country against a vicious, racist and homicidal internal threat.
Greg Craven is former vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University.

The pond simply can't see how the new laws will tackle the internal threat posed by foreign owned News Corp.

It being invasion day season, the reptiles trotted out a little Liddle ...but the pond couldn't get past the headline:

More than ever, Australia Day is worth celebrating
Our national day is not a day for protest, nor a day to amplify and glorify division or discourse.
By Kerrynne Liddle

Say what?

Not a day to amplify and glorify discourse?

What's wrong with discourse?

Oh sure it's inclined to waffle and abstraction ...

Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of communication. Discourse is a major topic in social theory, with work spanning fields such as sociology, anthropology, continental philosophy, and discourse analysis. Following work by Michel Foucault, these fields view discourse as a system of thought, knowledge, or communication that constructs our world experience. Since control of discourse amounts to control of how the world is perceived, social theory often studies discourse as a window into power. Within theoretical linguistics, discourse is understood more narrowly as linguistic information exchange and was one of the major motivations for the framework of dynamic semantics. In these expressions, denotations are equated with their ability to update a discourse context. (The word even has its own wiki)

But then Liddle's own discourse was inclined to abstraction and pious waffle. 

Off to the intermittent archive with her.

The pond knew that it would suffer a severe bout of indigestion if it swallowed what prattling Polonius had cooked up, but what to do?

The pond had boxed itself into a corner, and anyway Sydney Institute is a kind of nativist Taco Bell ...

The header: For racist colonial project, we’ve rubbed along OK; As polling support for January 26 hardens, protests intensify. This paradox exposes a widening cultural divide over history, identity and whether Australia should celebrate or condemn itself.

The caption for the snap: Invasion day protest in Melbourne CBD on Australia Day in 2025. Picture: David Crosling

What was remarkable was that was the sole visual distraction, which allowed the pond to swallow the entirety of the prattle in one gulp ...

It’s a paradox, for sure. As support for the celebration of Australia Day on January 26 increases, so does the intensity of “invasion day” demonstrations.
The recently published Roy Morgan Poll asked this question: “On January 26, 1788, Captain Arthur Phillip landed at Sydney Cove. In your opinion, should January 26 be known as Australia Day or Invasion Day?” Seventy-two per cent of those polled took the Australia Day option. As to whether the date of Australia Day should be altered, 60.5 per cent did not want it changed – up slightly from when last polled in 2024.
It’s much the same with the recent poll commissioned by the Institute of Public Affairs. Seventy-six per cent of respondents supported the January 26 option.
On the evening of January 21, ideologically motivated vandals destroyed or damaged two historical statues in Melbourne’s Flagstaff Gardens. The Pioneer Monument was erected in 1871 to commemorate the settlement of Melbourne. It was sprayed with an inverted red triangle, the symbol of the radical Islamist terrorist organisation Hamas, and the words “Land Back” were written near the inscription. The nearby Separation Monument suffered a similar fate. It was erected in 1950 to celebrate the centenary of the separation of the colony of Victoria from the colony of NSW.
To complete the sense of alienation, the words “Death to Australia” were written on the base of the Pioneer Monument. Clearly, the vandals favour the destruction of contemporary Australia – one of the freest and most prosperous nations on earth.
In a completely unrelated event, January 21 marked the launch of what the ABC calls its “new sharp satirical special Always Was Tonight” presented by Tony Armstrong, who is described as a Gamilaroi man. According to the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster’s media centre, the program brings “a fearless First Nations lens to the stories that are shaping the country”.
This is mere spin. It is false to imply that there is “a First Nations lens” on any matter. Like other Australians, Indigenous Australians do not have a single view on anything. The format of the show is essentially that of ABC TV’s The Weekly, with Armstrong filling the role of Charlie Pickering.
The jokes are of the usual fashionable leftist kind with political conservatives the targets and the focus on Aboriginal issues. Presenter Brooke Blurton (who identifies as Indigenous) has this to say at one part of the program: “Sky News will announce a competitor to Triple J called Triple K. They will celebrate Australia Day by taking the hood to the hood with the hottest of 100 crosses.” Here a logo is shown featuring a Ku Klux Klan hood. How funny is that?

Okay, okay, the pond is sure that Polonius would love himself some Melania. 

How funny is she? 

Polonius kept on with his tut-tutting and clucking ...

Always Was Tonight concludes on a serious note about Indigenous children in prisons and a call for all Australian governments to raise the minimum age for criminal responsibility to 14. But its essential message is that Australia is racist.
Sky News’ The Bolt Report on January 21 ran a clip of Armstrong’s appearance on Network Ten’s The Project where he said: “This country still can’t accept that it’s a racist country … that it’s built off the back of slavery … of dispossession. It’s built on the back of rape and pillage of Indigenous people.”
The first sketch presented by Armstrong centres on the claim that the early settlers intentionally infected Aboriginal people with smallpox. No evidence is presented for this most serious allegation.
For an Indigenous Australian in an allegedly racist nation, Armstrong has done remarkably well in sport at the highest level and in the media. He was reported in the Daily Mail in June 2022 as saying that he was raised by his white single mother and does not know his Indigenous father.
Armstrong was educated at Assumption College in the Victorian town of Kilmore, which was founded by the Catholic Marist Brothers. Armstrong’s single mother managed to pay the school fees and her son completed year 12.
After that, there has followed a brilliant career. Yet the host of Always Was Tonight reckons he lives in a racist country built on the back of dispossession. But there’s the difficult point. Without colonisation, which Armstrong states led to dispossession, he would not have been born.
Addressing The Sydney Institute in February 2017, Stan Grant said: “I am drawn from the Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi of NSW, my story also comes from the green fields of Tipperary.” He spoke of an academic of Indigenous-Anglo-Asian heritage who saw himself as both “coloniser and colonised; black and consummately white”.
Any Indigenous Australian with non-Indigenous ancestors owes his or her existence to, yes, colonisation. When former Greens and now independent Victorian senator Lidia Thorpe, who identifies as Indigenous Australian, said on October 2023 “we’re in a war” with non-Indigenous Australia, she was talking about going to war with herself.
Certainly, in the decades after 1788, the Indigenous population suffered grievously from imported diseases and frontier violence as settlers moved away from the centres of colonial government.

Don't you just love that "certainly"?

But wait, there was happiness and bliss, and never mind the occasional massacre ...

But there was also co-operation between settlers and the Aboriginal people and many partnerships, even marriages, occurred.
But all that is now long gone and the British, for all their faults, were perhaps the best colonisers.

Oh indeed, indeed, it's all long gone, all off in the distance, and life has never been better for Aboriginal Australians.

There's nothing like being ravaged and pillaged by the Poms, and didn't they leave the world, and especially the Middle East, in fine shape?

The pond was tempted to slip in another 'toon, but decided that it was best to get it over with ...

The evidence suggests that majority support for maintaining Australia Day – and not introducing “invasion day” – is at least steady and probably slightly increasing. Australia Day is opposed by some Aboriginal people, alienated leftists, radical Islamists and more besides. This group is not going away.
But neither is the group – consisting of diverse backgrounds – that likes Australia. I would make Australia Day the last Monday in January, as it was before 1990, but I acknowledge that this is not the majority view.
On Australia Day this year, I will be reading parts of the recently released Commemorative Book to Mark 50 Years of Vietnamese Refugee Settlement in Australia. It was very much influenced by former South Vietnamese diplomat in Australia Tuong Quang Luu, who became a refugee.
The cover contains a photo of four Vietnamese women carrying a placard declaring “Thank You! Australia” who are followed by the NSW Police band. That’s a good reason to celebrate January 26, in a paradoxical way.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

In a paradoxical way?

The pond will settle for a plain way ....

Such was the pond's desperation, the need to take a bite of something, anything, the pond decided to swallow a chunk of grating Gemma ...

It's been a long between drinks with garrulous Gemma ...

The header: Fed-up voters seek political home in rising One Nation; One Nation has surged to 22 per cent, leaping over the Coalition by addressing issues the main parties dismiss at their peril: cost of living, immigration, and for many, Bondi.

Not really a caption for the rocket, but it'll have to do: January feels like a long year already. Can I get a witness? How many of us limped across the line at the end of 2025? The year of the snake carried an almighty sting in its tail.

The real reason the pond went with Gemma?

Unfortunately the intermittent archive doesn't capture the hoot of seeing that rocket flash across the background in a truly tragic gif ... but the pond did want to celebrate how this header ...

One Nation’s rocket-fuelled rise shows voters are looking for a new home

... got turned into a literal rocket, like a ten year old illustrating a class assignment.

But at least the pond could note it, even if the price was a five minute soundscape of Gemma grinding away ...

Gloomy Gemma was, like all the other reptiles, oblivious to the way that the lizard Oz had helped make the current mess ...

As a nation, we were traumatised by the massacre of 15 innocents at Bondi Beach, gunned down by hate-filled terrorists who police say were inspired by Jew-hating ideology that is maniacal and foreign to who we are.
Australia never used to be a place where support for terror groups such as Islamic State could incubate in secret. Neither was it a place where Jewish teenagers were chased through the streets by brazen thugs shouting Nazi slogans, as if it were the days of the Weimar Republic.
This whole time, our Prime Minister hasn’t put a foot right. Anthony Albanese is unwilling or unable to lead; who knows? Either way, it was no surprise that he and his government were punished in opinion polls published this week. They got told, but that’s not even the main event.
The main game has shifted, and it’s now the rocket-fuelled rise of One Nation in the polls. It would seem that Barnaby Joyce played a blinder; from mainstream outcast to political heir apparent in a few scant months.
When Joyce and Pauline Hanson finally confirmed the news, there were obviously many questions. How does one cook a steak in a sandwich press? And: why? How long had this political courtship been in play? Was it a bolt from the political blue or just two old colleagues who, after many years, realised they had more in common than the fact they were both flaming redheads and decided to make each other honest.

The other reason the pond was drawn to this gruesome Gemma feast?

Good old Barners, Tamworth's eternal shame, was on the menu, while Pauline whipped up a meal like the good hausfrau she is ... Hanson preparing a wagyu steak on a sandwich press; Pauline Hanson dines with Barnaby Joyce.

Charming and with a level of devotion you won't find many other places, though there are some ...

Gloomy Gemma watched it all from the stalls ...

The mind boggles. As most of you would know, I’m not part of the political machine. Not a member of any party. I’ve no dog in the fight, in the sense that I’ve no interest in preselection. Don’t need a favour from anyone. I am just a humble observer, friends. A frustrated taxpayer who swings between rage and resignation at the idiocy of those in charge, both of the government and what’s left of the opposition.
Which brings me back to the most recent published polls, which has One Nation leaping over the federal Coalition like high-jumper Nicola Olyslagers but with less of a joyously radiant smile.
One Nation surged to a whopping 22 per cent primary vote in Newspoll, a jump of seven points across the past two months. Others will go into the minutia of that, which way the sexes are skewed, the demographic according to location, occupation and earning capacity. There will be many an autopsy on that data.
My take is from the cheap seats in real life. It’s not empirical data but if there’s one skill I think I’ve refined in the past few years it’s being a pretty solid listener to the world around me.
I know many people who have joined One Nation in the past six months. And they’re normal folk in a range of professions, ages, men and women, single and in relationships. At first it felt a little bit like Fight Club in that the rule seemed to be that if you’d joined, you certainly didn’t talk about it.
Not any more. Conversations I’m hearing are out and proud. Loud and defiant. The reasons are all fairly unremarkable. Frustration with a terrible government and a useless opposition. Cost of living, unvetted mass immigration. One person told me they’d never been a member of a political party before and that Bondi was the breaking point for them, the proverbial last straw along with issues such as stagnant productivity, bloated government and social engineering. This person is not alone.
Objectively, and because I’m old enough to remember, the party and its eponymous leader are not the same as they were when One Nation burst on to the scene in 1998. They have changed. The country has changed, and not for the better in my view. Watching and listening, I see middle Australians being talked down to, by my own side and by the elitists on the left. Is it any wonder voters are looking for a new home?

The reptiles couldn't get enough of the new, if slightly odd, couple, Barnaby Joyce and Pauline Hanson at the Bondi Pavilion. Picture: Daily Telegraph / Monique Harmer

      

Despondent, downhearted, disconsolate, melancholic Gemma kept quietly weeping ...

No, wait a second, she's been tempted by Tamworth's shame, and never mind his drinking to excess or his womanising.

He's just a good old Tamworth boy, and he's found a new disciple ...      

Whether or not you agree with me is irrelevant. Numbers don’t lie. What people are seeing in One Nation is simple. It doesn’t seem to hate Australia or systemically seek to undermine Australian values. It is not afraid to raise uncomfortable issues even if the methods can be a bit crude. It wants to revive the economy and reduce government spending. There is a pride in Australia, an imperfect country that hasn’t always got it right but once was the envy of the world. The truth is, everyone knows what this team stands for and that is a rare thing indeed. The Liberal Party continues to break my heart, like an old flame that descends into addiction or can’t seem to ditch the booze and ciggies. You have affection for the person they were, try to remember when they were young, fit and healthy, but seeing them in this state is just painful. They couldn’t organise an intimate encounter in a house of ill-repute.
Waking up this week to news that the leadership of the NSW division of the Liberal Party is backing a radical plan to exclude men from some preselections, among other things, proves my point. That’s not policy. That’s revenge. Excluding men does not make up for the many years in which women were kept out and it reduces us to the sum total of our reproductive organs. Show me one place, one jurisdiction, in which this kind of strategy has worked.
Of all the wins I’ve been blessed with in my career, not one has been because capable men were excluded.
Being a woman doesn’t make you a better leader any more than being a man does. Putting purpose over preference, being able to draw disparate parties into unity, having an authority that commands respect, doing what you say: these make a leader.

Quick reptiles, save Gemma from her gloom, another snap of the happy couple if you please... One Nation surged to a whopping 22 per cent primary vote in Newspoll. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Poor Gemma, despite her yearning she really couldn't go all the way there, and yet for some strange, perverse reason, watching her struggle and cry out to the existential void, caused the pond's own gloom to lift.

Perhaps the pond could take a final bite and at last enjoy the feast ...

This plan is just the politics of exclusion in reverse. There is nothing bright or innovative or compelling about it – the same of which can be said for the Liberals’ current policy offering, in fairness.
My kingdom for a policy platform. A policy milk crate. Just imagine if the Coalition could nail the childcare brief. It would be unstoppable. This government has removed choice and agency from parents, making institutionalised care the only option. It ignores best practice data from around the world about the involvement of close family members such as grandparents for those who have that option. Imagine developing a policy that says to parents: you get to choose what’s best for your child. Be still, my giddy aunt.
As the Coalition imploded again this week, we voters remain short-changed. While the Liberal Party obsesses about gender quotas and implodes with factional infighting, the worst government in a generation gets to act with impunity.
As I said to someone the other day, I want to be part of the solution on the conservative side, but I don’t know how. I’m certainly not going to run for parliament, and let me let you in on a little secret: They wouldn’t want me. I’m not known for being compliant in the face of foolishness. Will I join One Nation? Nope, I don’t think so. I can’t really articulate why. Perhaps it’s because, true to form, I have hope that things will turn around for the once great Liberal-National Coalition. That said, I think it’s best I don’t hold my breath.

Go on, hold your breath, and enjoy the fun ...

And so to a few odds and sods for the weekend stocking, provided by the lizard Oz editorialist ...

There was a reason the pond ran with that one. It's been a while since the pond gave this Godwin Law an airing ...

Speaking of woke declining globally, what a triumph that has been ...

But wait, there's more lizard Oz editorialist, offering fresh pasture, or at least a ley, to Ley ...

Well played reptiles ...

When Sussan Ley chose to politicise the Bondi atrocity to damage Anthony Albanese’s political dominance, and News Corp and the Nine newspapers egged her on in the hope of either doing the same or achieving some form of regime change, some outcomes could have been predicted.

Yes, not a single reptile, and especially the lizard Oz editorialist, would have the first clue about what the keen Keane was on about ... 

And yet, with the leadership in chaos and confusion, now apparently is the time to get into "policy action".

So it continued to the bitter end ...

They want to balance the books?

They can't even balance an egg for a leadership egg and spoon race ...

On the upside, News Corp might have helped the opposition shoot itself in the foot, but it's a flesh wound compared to the way that Faux Noise has helped shoot the United States in the head ...

Elbows up Canada ...

Consternation for Brits and Canucks ...