Once upon a time the lizard Oz used to be known as the Australian Daily Catholic News ... but then came Zionism, to be followed by the new leonine Pope blathering on in ways most unsympathetic to the reptile stand ...
This year, I would first like to consider the importance of making room for the word through listening. The willingness to listen is the first way we demonstrate our desire to enter into relationship with someone.
Listen? WTF?
...I would like to invite you to a very practical and frequently unappreciated form of abstinence: that of refraining from words that offend and hurt our neighbor. Let us begin by disarming our language, avoiding harsh words and rash judgement, refraining from slander and speaking ill of those who are not present and cannot defend themselves. Instead, let us strive to measure our words and cultivate kindness and respect in our families, among our friends, at work, on social media, in political debates, in the media and in Christian communities. In this way, words of hatred will give way to words of hope and peace.
Refrain? Abandon words of hatred? Double WTF ... (here at the Vatican)
Sad to say, the alleged heirs of the Judaeo-Xian tradition were at it again today, as a way of starting off the week with a fresh round of hate speech ... with the reptiles marching to the drumbeat of the Major ...
Why do Western protesters who think they are speaking truth to power focus on Israel but stay silent about billionaire oil sheikhs and Iranian mullahs who run repressive regimes and fund terror?
By Chris Mitchell
Columnist
Never no mind, so long as the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank goes on, the pond refuses to indulge the Australian Daily Zionist News, and anyone interested in this spin must report to the intermittent archive.
Ditto that's where they can find this sort of quaint echo of a 1950s slur ... as if that was sufficient to distract from what's being implemented by the current government of Israel ...
The Soviet Union perfected antisemitism without antisemites. It also ended up in the dustbin of history. Let’s hope the recent visit of Herzog marks a turning point we’re out of the shadow of Bondi.
By Paul Rubenstein
A look at the tag was more than enough for the pond ...
Paul Rubenstein is the NSW chairman of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council.
So the fix was in from the get go ...
The pond also flung cackling Claire into the same basket...
Grace Tame and what happens when celebrity fades
Grace Tame’s chanting extremist slogans was offensive. But it also can be understood as an attempt to regain relevance after the media moved on.
By Claire Lehmann
Contributor
It's a fine example of the bitterness that happens when someone never had any celebrity outside of occasional appearances in the lizard Oz, and surely it's past time for this small portion of the hive mind to move on ... at least from quaint, Victorian, Thomas Carlyle notions of the "hero", and from the notion that someone might object to the ethnic cleansing being conducted by the Israeli government because they yearn, like Vlad the sociopath, for Soviet days, or because it's a way to stay in the cackling Claire spotlight ...
Meanwhile, the reptiles have flung themselves wholeheartedly into campaign mode - apparently we're going back to nuking the country again ...
Stop Bowen tariff, end mega spend: Taylor’s opening salvo
Angus Taylor to fight any carbon tariff as he seeks deal with Anthony Albanese on spending
Angus Taylor has sounded a warning on carbon tariffs, as he urges Anthony Albanese to establish a bipartisan taskforce to deliver a new deal between the major parties on spending cuts.
By Greg Brown
How weird did it get?
Asked if it would undermine Australia’s free-trade credentials and be viewed by the Trump administration as a tariff aimed at the US, Mr Taylor said: “Almost certainly. If you are pro-free-trade I don’t know how you can support these things."
King Donald is a free trader now, and we must seek to maintain free-trade credentials with him?
Pull the other 100% tariff leg, Faux Noise down under ...
But it's not just Brownie EXCLUSIVELY going the brown nose in the alleged "news" section.
As always, that third rate sociology student and expert in the movement of flood waters in quarries was on hand to help with the campaigning ...
The header: Taylor is a political outsider. He’s ran his own race against the political machine; Angus Taylor has a deep disdain for the sniping and factionalism that are entrenched in the culture of the political class.
The caption for the wild-eyed cackler, doing a Marlon Brando imitation as an outsider, sayeth the Caterist: Angus Taylor holds a press conference at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman
That still featuring the besuited, speckle-tied stern statesman reminded the pond of a competition it never got around to staging.
Which snap of the besuited beefy boofhead best conjures up the gang of Mafia style conspirators?
The pond has always been in two minds .... each have their charms, and if your focus is on the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way, how can you separate out and prefer one image of the sneaky ferret gawking at the camera with a look of furtive suspicion and paranoia over the other?
Never mind, moving on ...
Even with the advent of TikTok, the narrative that brings down your political opponent should still contain an iota of truth. Taylor is not “just another Liberal”, which was the thrust of Labor’s pop-up attack ad last Friday, a clownish pastiche of the imagined sins of his predecessors, displaying their pictures with Taylor photoshopped into the corner.
More than 12 years after he entered parliament, Taylor, like Pauline Hanson, is still a political outsider. Hanson arrived in parliament at the age of 41, her outlook shaped by experience in the productive economy. Taylor, who was elected to parliament two weeks before his 47th birthday, grew up with the farmer’s instinct to fix the fence rather than sitting on the veranda bellyaching about who broke it.
In the era of professional politicians, where many parliamentarians have been in or around politics for their entire careers, Taylor and Hanson are oddities. They have succeeded within the system without becoming part of it.
Taylor is the opposite of Anthony Albanese, a creature of the machine, who was honing his factional skills while Taylor was making something of himself in a corporate culture where reward is inseparable from performance.
It goes without saying Taylor has the hardest job in politics. His KPI is to lead the Coalition into government but first he must stop Hanson from doing to the Liberal Party what it tried to do to her 30 years ago when it dropped her from the party ticket, assuming it would end her career.
He must stop the surge that has increased One Nation’s support base by 80,000 voters a week since the last election.
At this point the reptiles introduced a snap of the scarlet terror, One Nation leader Senator Pauline Hanson at a press conference in Brisbane. Picture: NewsWire / John Gass
The Caterist moved past the orange to celebrate the beefy Angus boofhead and his astonishing career ...
Taylor’s political instincts were shaped in his late teens at the frontline of the dispute between shearers, represented by the Australian Workers Union, then one of the most powerful unions, and graziers. Taylor, who had grown up in the company of shearers, recognised they were ill served by their shop stewards, intent on forcing a costly and sometimes violent dispute against a productivity-improving innovation: wide combs.
More than a decade before the advent of John Howard’s battlers, Taylor realised the Liberal Party, with its focus on aspiration, was a more natural home for the working class than an ideologically driven Labor movement.
It explains why, even at the Coalition’s historic point of weakness, Albanese is threatened by Taylor and why he will try to destroy him if he can. Labor knows Taylor’s track record as the member for Hume, a seat that included the once solid Labor town of Goulburn until it became part of Eden Monaro in 2024.
When Taylor won Hume in 2013, the Goulburn booths were among the most hostile to the Liberals in the electorate. In 2022, even under the pressure of a national swing against Scott Morrison, Taylor won the six Goulburn booths comfortably with 6440 primary votes compared with 3036 for Greg Baines, Labor’s hapless candidate. One Nation, for the record, polled 794.
At the last election, the western boundary of Taylor’s electorate moved more than 100km up the Hume towards Sydney, pushing it off the edge of the southern highlands. The eastern boundary brushes Liverpool and Campbelltown, encompassing the new mortgage belt of vast subdivisions that cluster around Western Sydney airport. It includes suburbs less than a decade old, such as Oran Park, where in 2021, before the rise in interest rates, more than half of households were making mortgage repayments averaging $2626, 30 per cent higher than the national average.
In 2025, Taylor survived the national swing against Peter Dutton in a radically redrawn electorate, becoming the only NSW Liberal to increase his majority.
The reptiles then decided to remind the beefy boofhead of his dismal failure ... The 2025 treasurers debate between Jim Chalmers (left) for Labor and Angus Taylor for the Coalitiion. (sic, the pond merely transcribes for the full reptile experience) Picture: NewsWire/David Crosling
Talk about ancient echoes ...
And then it was on to the last gobbet in the opening Caterist campaign ...
Taylor has a deep disdain for the sniping and factionalism that are entrenched in the culture of the political class. He has never taken up the habit of briefing against his colleagues, passing the buck or playing the victim card, although many have not given him the same courtesy. There may be merit to the criticism that he has yet to prove himself as a retail politician. Yet his first speech as Opposition Leader showed he has absorbed the lessons from Tony Abbott’s 2013 landslide on a platform of intelligent policy responses to pressing problems distilled into three-word slogans.
Taylor also has absorbed the wisdom of Howard, who weathered the first wave of Hansonism by governing according to his own convictions rather than opinion polls. After Hanson’s maiden speech in September 1996, Howard ignored the press gallery’s incessant demands that he join the conga line of condemnation. His judgment was vindicated in 2001 with the crisis over illegal boat arrivals and in the aftermath of 9/11, when his robust stance on border protection brought many conservatives who had flirted with One Nation back into the fold.
Taylor will succeed if he can recover the Liberal Party’s home turf, restoring the reputation it gained under Howard as the best party to protect borders, manage the economy and offer hope to Australians, young and old, that the next 30 years will be even better than the last.
That's the best they've got for the new piano player? Perhaps the honky tonk needs a tuning ...
The pond looked around for a bonus and thought simpleton Simon deserved at least an honourable intermittent archive mention ...
After more than three years with his hands on the levers, can the Treasurer honestly look Australians in the eye and say they’re better off than they were before Labor was elected?
By Simon Benson
Political analyst
All hands on the reptile deck, all part of the new jihad which will fill the pages for weeks, as the reptiles nuke the news ...
Luckily the pond had an alternative - the enduring ghastliness of the swishing Switzer...
The header: The enduring ghastliness of Malcolm Turnbull; From The Guardian to the ABC, Turnbull delivers poisonous and deeply personal broadsides against Liberal leaders and the party he once led. The former prime minister has become the miserable ghost of Australian politics.
The caption for Malware, destroyer of worlds, or at least the NBN ...Malcolm Turnbull delivering the 2023 Australian Institute of Architects Griffin Lecture at the National Press Club of Australia in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman
The pond doesn't have much time for Malware, but it has even less time for the swishing Switzer.
The pond might even have been better off with the Zionists, but whenever the swishing Switzer bobs up, the pond is reminded of this yarn ... (*archive link)
Loons in glass houses, the dangers of stone chucking, and all that ...
Turnbull remains the only federal party leader to have lost the leadership twice in partyroom ballots, and he is widely known to attribute both downfalls to conservatives who resisted his positions on the emissions trading scheme in 2009 and the National Energy Guarantee in 2018.
Turnbull’s interventions are too often cheap and unbecoming of a former leader of a great political party. Instead of reasoned argument, he defaults to abuse and denigration. The judgment may sound severe, but no former prime minister has descended so readily to this level. Hardly a week passes without him airing his grievances in public. From The Guardian to the ABC, he delivers poisonous and deeply personal broadsides against Liberal leaders and the party he once led.
At times, his bile borders on the comical. Consider his March 2019 interview with the BBC’s Andrew Neil, when Turnbull claimed his party defenestrated him in August 2018 because colleagues knew he would win the next election. An incredulous Neil replied: “You’re telling me your own party didn’t want you to win the next election? That’s not credible.” He then reminded Turnbull he had lost 40 consecutive polls in the lead-up to the coup.
Only someone as self-regarding as Turnbull could sustain the belief that victory was within reach; in his telling, after all, no one was quite as capable a leader as he. That, he insists, is why the party removed him – and why it instead gave Scott Morrison the chance to salvage the government, which he proceeded to do in May 2019.
The reptiles dragged in another snap ...The official prime ministerial portrait of former PM Malcolm Turnbull is unveiled at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman
Meanwhile ... Think tank accused of ‘retaliatory action’ after staffer complaint about high-profile director (that's an intermittent archive link)
The pond realises that the swishing Switzer is desperate to be taken seriously, to come in from the cold ...but there's something bizarre about him rabbiting on about Malware doing damage to his reputation, as if doing damage to the NBN under orders of the onion muncher hadn't set him on the path of becoming a new kind of Ancient Mariner, a Malcolm Fraser in drag if you will, in a never-ending quest for redemption ...
After losing the leadership in 2018, Turnbull branded Morrison “deceitful”, “duplicitous” and a “liar”. In the lead-up to the last federal election, he labelled Peter Dutton a “thug”. And shortly after Friday’s Liberal Party ballot, true to form, he dismissed the new leader, Angus Taylor, as “the best-qualified idiot” to lead the party.
The only Liberal leader he has refrained from denouncing is, it seems, Sussan Ley – perhaps because they share a similar small-l liberal worldview, one that, according to the polls, has struggled to resonate either with the party or the broader electorate.
All this is surprising because many people once regarded Turnbull with genuine fondness and knew him, in private, to be capable of kindness and decency. As someone who previously praised his China policy – it was his government that enacted foreign interference laws and banned Huawei from the 5G network – I take no pleasure in saying that he is now doing real damage to his own reputation.
I have little doubt that Turnbull’s attacks on his former party form part of a deliberate strategy.
His apparent aim is to marginalise the Liberal Party’s traditional conservative wing and refashion it into a politically sanitised, quasi-teal vehicle. If that risks alienating large numbers of longstanding Liberal supporters, then so be it; the impression he conveys is that such losses would be a price worth paying. In this cast of mind, there seems scant room for dissenters from his positions on net zero, identity politics or mass immigration.
I confess to a measure of sympathy for Turnbull. He achieved more as prime minister than his critics ever conceded. He did, after all, win the 2016 election – notwithstanding his inspired decision to call a double dissolution that vaporised Abbott’s 19-seat majority and sent roughly a million conservatives drifting toward minor parties.
Turnbull also delivered a memorable election night address, memorable chiefly for reviving the republican activist at his most graceless. In his late-night rant that was hilarious in unintended ways, he had taken the unusual step of calling in the AFP over an opposition scare campaign – the sort of rough-and-tumble tactic long familiar to Australian elections. As Tanya Plibersek observed on an ABC election night panel: “Malcolm might lose the election, so he calls the police.”
Perhaps the pond should feel a measure of sympathy for the swishing Switzer, as the reptiles dragged in another feather duster, Former opposition leader Sussan Ley inside Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman
But no ... not when he produced disingenuous blather about having a card up his sleeve ...
And so to the final gobbet ...
I have long held great respect for John Howard, one of our nation’s most consequential prime ministers. Yet his gravest misjudgment in retirement was to dissuade Turnbull from leaving parliament in 2010, as he had planned after first losing the Liberal leadership. That decision allowed Turnbull to continue destabilising colleagues inside the partyroom on his path back to the leadership – and later to direct his sharpest barbs at those who succeeded him.
The unhappy reality is that Turnbull won’t be remembered as a great statesman or political leader. His tenure was marked by a tenuous grasp of his party’s philosophical foundations, a detachment from the instincts of a clear majority of voters, and a conspicuous confidence in his own judgment.
Who could forget the former merchant banker’s advice in 2016 to young Australians struggling to buy their first home – that their parents should simply “shell out” for them? Or his 2009 demand that the treasurer and prime minister resign over what proved to be a fabricated email supplied by an eccentric bureaucrat?
Before the 2024 US election, Foreign Affairs magazine ran Malcolm Turnbull’s character sketch of a presidential contender: “Like most people, he is often wrong. Unlike most people, however, he is never in doubt. A powerful narcissistic self-belief has given him the strength to defy not just his many enemies but even reality itself.” He was describing Donald Trump. But the description lands with the force of irony, for it doubles as a precise study of Turnbull himself.
Uh huh ...Think tank apologises for ‘significant distress’ after sexual harassment complaint
And where is he now, apart from turning up in the glass reptile hive mind to carelessly throw stones?
Tom Switzer is presenter of Switzerland, a podcast about politics, modern history and international relations.
A desperate name for desperate times, with more desperate times sure to follow ...
As always, it's in the details, and what a fine bed it is ...
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