After a brief fawning over SloMo, the reptiles decided to throw the clap happy liar from the Shire under the bus ...
The intermittent archive is more intermittent than usual this day, but what the hell ...
Morrison’s men threw me under Brittany bus: Brown
In explosive Federal Court documents, former Liberal staffer Fiona Brown has accused Scott Morrison and his senior advisers of silencing her and destroying her career during the Brittany Higgins scandal.
Stop right there ...
Even worse, the authors?
Janet Albrechtsen and Stephen Rice
Stop right there.
For months now, the pond has considered anything soiled by Dame Slap as unreadable, and only reproducible at the risk of promoting brain damage as a lifestyle choice...
This outing took a bigly thirteen minutes to plough through, or so the reptiles said, and the pond couldn't take it.
The pond is so far beyond matters relating to the Lehrmann scandal, as channeled by Dame Slap, that it took a considerable effort just to note this latest reptile venture.
The pond's ill-feeling towards Dame Slap was enhanced by her column this day ...
As John Howard’s prime ministership turns 30, Europe’s migration reckoning shows why his tough but fair border controls worked — and why elites ignore public concern at their peril.
By Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist
Could the pond summon the strength to indulge Dame Slap in lying rodent worship, with the bonus of bashing furriners?
Nah, that's way too much Slappingaround the head.
There's only so much bigotry the pond can stand ...
The challenges of migration – along with its costs and benefits – need to be tackled openly and honestly. When there is a vacuum at the top on issues that directly affect our lives, voters will look elsewhere for someone who speaks in plain English.
Actually the pond has always found French and Italian to be mellifluous languages, though perhaps an honest "bullsh*t" sounds more exotic in other tongues (*google bot aware).
C'est des conneries just doesn't have the right ring to it, even when the besotted Dame proposes to be open and honest, while la porcheria sounds like an insult to a loved animal.
Perhaps Sono tutte stronzate!" or "È una cazzata!"?
Whatever, the pond feels pleased that there have been other contributors to Australia than some Danish or Germanic blonde princess.
Luckily, after an extended absence (or so it seems) nattering "Ned" has returned to grind pond correspondents into the ground ...
With "Ned" clocking in at a mighty ten minutes, massive tedium and ennui was guaranteed. Here no ditties, no ditties here, and no hope either ...
The header: One Nation surge won’t save the right; it only helps Labor; Pauline Hanson’s surge is fracturing the centre-right — but it isn’t hurting Labor. History and polling show One Nation weakens the Coalition and entrenches Albanese.
The caption for the snap helping "Ned" promote attention to fake red hair: Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is surging in the polls, but its rise is weakening the centre-right rather than threatening Labor. Picture: Dean Martin
"Ned" erupting about Pauline?
Begin the great nodding off now ..
There is no secret about the consequences. They have been on repeated display going back 30 years to the 1998 election, when One Nation polled 8.4 per cent of the primary vote and briefly threatened John Howard’s re-election at the famous GST election.
After the election Liberal federal director Lynton Crosby calculated that 67 per cent of One Nation voters came from the Coalition but only 53 per cent preferenced the Coalition in return – so One Nation operated as a net voting transfer from Coalition to Labor. A relieved Crosby post-election said Labor tacticians had seen One Nation as the potential “vehicle to The Lodge” for Labor leader Kim Beazley. Nothing has changed fundamentally in nearly 30 years.
Yet the setting is different. Our politics is far more fractured today than in 1998, disillusionment with the established political system is greater, and hostility towards the so-called parties of government is far more potent. Most analysts would probably think One Nation will poll higher than 8.4 per cent at the next federal election compared with its 1998 vote.
During the 1998 campaign, the prime minister was campaigning outside Gladesville Public School in his electorate when a One Nation worker said to him: “I hope you win.” An exasperated Howard pointed to the preference recommendation against him in his own seat and asked: “Well, what are you doing this for?” The One Nation worker said he had to follow the preference allocation against sitting MPs. Howard shot back: “How can you do this and say you want me to get back?” He felt there was a collective madness at work.
The collective madness is still at work, only on a much greater scale.
It is on display every day scattered across the right-wing media and social media in this country. The right-wing shock jocks and their legions on social media loathe the Albanese government while praising and promoting Pauline Hanson; the assumption being that “shaking up our politics” as exemplified by Hanson’s surge is the best way to threaten or destroy the dominance of Anthony Albanese.
The argument is fallacious. Backing in the Hanson vote has two sure impacts – it weakens the centre-right of politics and it helps to consolidate Albanese. Have you watched Albanese’s response? He can hardly believe his good fortune. The right-wing support for Hanson isn’t hurting Albanese, it’s helping him. It’s a rare event when your enemies are helping you, but Labor today benefits from that rare event.
If you want to grasp the madness engulfing the centre-right in this country, here is a good place to start. One Nation is a catalyst for centre-right disruption, which cynics would brand as panic. It contributes to the devastating loss of confidence within the right, it exposes the weaknesses of Sussan Ley and, in particular, David Littleproud as leaders, it was the sinister chorus to the busting of the Coalition, and it accentuates the political civil war within the right wing over policy and belief.
What's profoundly disturbing isn't "Ned's"usual level of hysteria so much as the parsimonious way the reptiles only managed to interrupt with just three snaps, starting with this anodyne one, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, whose Labor government continues to benefit from preference flows as One Nation rises. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman
Perhaps the reptiles thought that the smirk would set "Ned" off, but does he really need that sort of prop?
Surely his desire to parade his preening pompous portentousness is a enough of a motiviation ...
The message is clear: Hanson’s revolution is primarily a vote transfer within centre-right politics against the Liberal and National parties and not a vote transfer from Labor to the centre-right. It is a crisis for the right, not a crisis for Labor.
Consider Newspoll over September to November last year when Hanson’s vote rose to the 11-15 per cent zone. At the same time Labor’s two-party-preferred lead surged to a massive 57-58 per cent to 43-42 per cent for the Coalition.
In the January poll, influenced by the Bondi massacre that saw Labor’s primary vote fall to 32 per cent while One Nation rose to 22 per cent (just ahead of the Coalition), Labor’s two-party-preferred lead was still the same as the May 2025 election. As the Bondi factor fades and Labor’s primary support rises again, the Albanese government’s two-party-preferred vote will lift again – and remember, such increases come on top of Labor’s greatest-ever result in 2025.
Consider the Financial Review poll this week that had One Nation’s vote at a mammoth 26 per cent compared with a dismal Coalition outcome at 19 per cent – yet Labor’s two-party-preferred lead was an immense 56-44 per cent, a better result than Labor secured at its 2025 victory. This was despite Hanson having the best favourability rating of any political leader – her net favourability was minus three, with Albanese at minus 10 and Ley at minus 32. The lesson: the higher Hanson goes, the more the Coalition falls and the stronger Albanese gets via the preference system.
Optimists arguing that the combined Liberal, National and One Nation primary vote shows the centre-right is threatening Labor are running a phony proposition. As explained by analyst Antony Green on his blog, it’s all about preferences. Labor enjoys Green preferences running at around 85 per cent or higher, and that’s entrenched over time. One Nation preferences to the Coalition parties don’t remotely match this. Historically, they have been in the 50s but at the 2025 election they reached 74.5 per cent, not enough to prevent a Coalition election wipe-out.
Green highlights the related problem – One Nation preferences to the Coalition parties are higher in Liberal and National seats, not in Labor seats they need to win. Here’s the arithmetic fact: the only way the rise of One Nation can become a centre-right plus is to achieve a much higher preference flow between the Hanson party and the former Coalition parties – and there is no sign of this happening.
Unfortunately, there is precious little satire about our politics today. Pity. One Nation invites satire as being a retirement centre for political has-beens and failures. It is the home for Hanson’s last grasp, for Barnaby Joyce in his desperate self-interested quest to stay relevant, and for the long forgotten Cory Bernardi, surely giddy from his repeated changes of allegiance.
Let’s confront the brutal truths. One Nation is not strong enough to have any role in executive government but it is strong enough to deny executive government to the former Coalition parties. It remains a grievance lobby and its recent success is driven by the rise of multiple grievances, notably anger about the divisions and ineptitude within the Liberal and National parties. It has no viable policies for office, but thrives on branding and slogans, thereby exploiting the demise of our national policy conversation while it seeks to leverage the alarming gulf between regional and urban Australia.
The prospect of a transformed centre-right with three parties – Liberal, One Nation and National – contains grave dangers for the country. It means One Nation looms larger on the centre-right in power, media and symbolic terms. It will compromise and contaminate the centre-right. While conservatives will declare centre-right voters are becoming more conservative, much of urban Australia will look at a Hanson-influenced centre-right and say “no thanks”.
Let's confront the brutal truth.
The pond is only in this because it put a motza on the lettuce, and now we're into February and the lettuce is badly wilting, and Susssan is feeling the power of "s", Coalition leaders Sussan Ley, pictured, and David Littleproud face mounting pressure as One Nation siphons votes from the centre-right. Picture: Thomas Lisson
The poor lettuce, fancy knowing your hopes had faded to the point where the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way was your last hope...
Why it's a fate worse than that of a whale stranded on the Hume highway, and exposed to fiendish windmills.
Sadly, that was the last visual distraction, and yet somehow "Ned" seemed to think that the pond should join the hive mind and care about the fate of a party that in recent years had tossed up an NBN harming Malware, an onion muncher gone nuts for knights, and a clap happy liar from the shire as ways to ruin the country?
With a shrug, with a gesture of bewilderment and sense of loss, the pond realised it had nowhere to go but "Ned's" verbiage ...without even the distraction of a giant-sized popcorn bucket needed while watching a movie about Melania... the saltier, the butterier, the more heart-attack inducing, the better ...
Reconstituting a viable Coalition, if possible, is one of many steps needed to salvage centre-right politics.
There is no secret about the consequences. They have been on repeated display going back 30 years to the 1998 election when One Nation polled 8.4 per cent of the primary vote and briefly threatened John Howard’s re-election at the famous GST election.
After the election Liberal Federal Director, Lynton Crosby, calculated that 67 per cent of One Nation voters came from the Coalition but only 53 per cent preferenced the Coalition in return – so One Nation operated as a net voting transfer from Coalition to Labor. A relieved Crosby post-election said Labor tacticians had seen One Nation as the potential “vehicle to the Lodge” for Labor leader, Kim Beazley. Nothing has changed fundamentally in nearly 30 years.
Yet the setting is different. Our politics is far more fractured today than in 1998, disillusionment with the established political system is greater and hostility towards the so-called parties of government is far more potent. Most analysts would probably think One Nation will poll higher than 8.4 per cent at the next federal election compared with its 1998 vote.
During the 1998 campaign the prime minister was campaigning outside Gladesville public school in his electorate when a One Nation worker said to him: “I hope you win.” An exasperated Howard pointed to the preference recommendation against him in his own seat and asked: “Well, what are you doing this for?” The One Nation worker said he had to follow the preference allocation against sitting MPs. Howard shot back: “How can you do this and say you want me to get back?” He felt there was a collective madness at work.
The collective madness is still at work, only on a much greater scale.
It is on display every day scattered across the right-wing media and social media in this country. The right-wing shock jocks and their legions on social media loath the Albanese government while praising and promoting Pauline Hanson, the assumption being that “shaking up our politics” as exemplified by Hanson’s surge is the best way to threaten or destroy the dominance of Anthony Albanese.
The argument is fallacious. Backing in the Hanson vote has two sure impacts – it weakens the centre-right of politics and it helps to consolidate Albanese. Have you watched Albanese’s response? He can hardly believe his good fortune. The right-wing support for Hanson isn’t hurting Albanese, it’s helping him. It’s a rare event when your enemies are helping you, but Labor today benefits from that rare event.
If you want to grasp the madness engulfing the centre-right in this country, here is a good place to start. One Nation is a catalyst for centre-right disruption, which cynics would brand as panic. It contributes to the devastating loss of confidence within the right, it exposes the weaknesses of Sussan Ley and, in particular, David Littleproud as leaders, it was the sinister chorus to the busting of the Coalition and it accentuates the political civil war within the right-wing over policy and belief.
Its real impact is revealed in the recent Newspolls and the Financial Review Redbridge/Accent Research poll that show despite the doubling and then tripling of One Nation’s primary vote, Labor’s overall lead on the two-party preferred vote – the vote that counts – has either increased or been maintained from its huge May 2025 election victory.
The message is clear: Hanson’s revolution is primarily a vote transfer within centre-right politics against the Liberal and National parties and not a vote transfer from Labor to the centre-right. It is a crisis for the right, not a crisis for Labor.
Consider Newspoll over September to November last year when Hanson’s vote rose to the 11-15 per cent zone. At the same time Labor’s two-party preferred lead surged to a massive 57-58 per cent to 43-42 per cent for the Coalition.
In the January poll, influenced by the Bondi massacre that saw Labor’s primary vote fall to 32 per cent while One Nation rose to 22 per cent (just ahead of the Coalition) Labor’s two-party preferred lead was still the same as the May 2025 election. As the Bondi factor fades and Labor’s primary rises again, the Albanese government’s two-party preferred vote will lift again – and remember such increases come on top of Labor’s greatest ever 2025 result.
Consider the Financial Review poll this week that had One Nation’s vote at a mammoth 26 per cent compared with a dismal Coalition outcome at 19 per cent – yet Labor’s two-party preferred lead was an immense 56-44 per cent, a better result than Labor secured at its 2025 victory. This was despite Hanson having the best favourability rating of any political leader – her net favourability was minus 3, with Albanese at minus 10 and Ley at minus 32. The lesson: the higher Hanson goes, the more the Coalition falls and the stronger Albanese gets via the preference system.
Optimists arguing that the combined Liberal, National and One Nation primary vote shows the centre-right is threatening Labor are running a phony proposition. As explained by analyst Antony Green on his blog, it’s all about preferences. Labor enjoys Green preferences running at around 85 per cent or higher and that’s entrenched over time. One Nation preferences to the Coalition parties don’t remotely match this. Historically they have been in the 50s but at the 2025 election they reached 74.5 per cent, not enough to prevent a Coalition election wipe-out.
Green highlights the related problem – One Nation preferences to the Coalition parties are higher in Liberal and National seats, not in Labor seats they need to win. Here’s the arithmetic fact: the only way the rise of One Nation can become a centre-right plus is to achieve a much higher preference flow between the Hanson party and the former Coalition parties – and there is no sign of this happening.
Unfortunately, there is precious little satire about our politics today. Pity. One Nation invites satire as being a retirement centre for political has-beens and failures. It is the home for Hanson’s last gasp, for Barnaby Joyce in his desperate self-interested quest to stay relevant and for the long forgotten, Cory Bernardi, surely giddy from his repeated changes of allegiance.
Let’s confront the brutal truths. One Nation is not strong enough to have any role in executive government but it is strong enough to deny executive government to the former Coalition parties. It remains a grievance lobby and its recent success is driven by the rise of multiple grievances, notably anger about the divisions and ineptitude within the Liberal and National parties. It has no viable policies for office, but thrives on branding and slogans thereby exploiting the demise of our national policy conversation while it seeks to leverage the alarming gulf between regional and urban Australia.
The prospect of a transformed centre-right with three parties – Liberal, One Nation and National – contains grave dangers for the country. It means One Nation looms larger on the centre-right in power, media and symbolic terms. It will compromise and contaminate the centre-right. While conservatives will declare centre-right voters are becoming more conservative much of urban Australia will look at a Hanson-influenced centre-right and say “no thanks”.
The Liberals will not survive unless they regain seats in urban Australia and the higher the One Nation profile, the more Hanson looks as a rival conservative leader, the more the Liberals will be contaminated in a centre-right troika where they need to separate themselves from Hanson yet also win back the voters they have lost. Reconstituting a viable Coalition, if possible, is one of many steps needed to salvage centre-right politics.
Sheesh, there goes the pond's ratings for the day.
Done and dusted ... but try to cobble a ditty out of that bulk-sized serve of malarkey...
What a dismal life it is for the pond these days.
The reptiles at last turned to the Epstein files, but only because they could have a go at Mandelson and former prince Andy, and then only via "agencies", when the Graudian is handing this sort of stuff out for free ...
And the late night comics have been making a meal of it all on YouTube ...
At last a chance for some revenge on the indignities suffered over the years at the hands of Microsoft, but what's taking the punishing of Apple so long?
The pond wouldn't like punters to reel away as empty handed as their heads must be feeling...
The pond was tempted by an amazing gif accompanying Mattie's yarn, featuring oodles of cash splashing and a rotating Jimbo ...
The Reserve Bank has shattered Jim Chalmers’ economic credibility, forecasting the exact opposite of what the Treasurer promised to deliver this year.
By Matthew Cranston
Economics Correspondent
Uncredited AI slop surely has a place in the world, but in the end the pond decided to pass ... let the intermittent archive deal with that (but sorry, no epic gif in the archive).
Ditto the bouffant one attempting to do a "Ned" ...in just two feeble minutes ..
A rate rise on the first scheduled sitting day for 2026 was a reprieve for the opposition. Yet the depth of frustration, anger and desperation in the Liberal ranks left Labor, incredibly, with a parliamentary win.
By Dennis Shanahan
On the other hand, the pond will always make room for Dame Groan and her groans and sighs...
The header: Rate decision raises questions over not just Jim Chalmers, but Michele Bullock too; As Jim Chalmers seeks to avoid taking any blame for rate rise, it’s now at the point of questioning whether Michele Bullock was really a good choice for the top job at the central bank.
The caption for yet another snap savaging: Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock on Tuesday. Picture: NewsWire
To be sure to be sure, Dame Groan was in fine form, even though it was just a three minute squawk which struggled to get up to the level of a decent groan:
No specific mention there of the role played by excessive government spending, so he’s off the hook, or so he thinks.
He’s like the boy in the orchard stealing apples. By hiding them behind his back, he thinks he won’t be caught. Who, me? he declares. It’s just no one believes him.
I’m pretty sure that the 3.3 million mortgage holders don’t give a toss about the official statement.
For them, the higher cash rate will feed into higher mortgage rates. The period of respite – the three cuts last year – has now come to an end.
The length of this easing cycle may well be a record – the shortest ever. There are very real prospects of further rate hikes this year. This is reinforced by the bank’s forecasts of inflation for the rest of the year, which put it well above the target band.
In fact, it is not until mid-2028 that underlying CPI growth is expected to reach 2.5 per cent, the bank’s preferred target!
To be sure, the statement notes that “growth in private demand has strengthened substantially more than expected, driven by both household spending and investment”.
But even though the decision to hike was unanimous, bear in mind here that the board members no doubt carefully consider the wording of the statement and make some “helpful” drafting suggestions.
Also bear in mind that growth in private demand is adding to total aggregate demand, which includes government spending. In other words, it’s the relationship between the growth of aggregate demand, including government spending, and the growth of aggregate supply.
But talking about light-fingered children in the orchard, the governor of the Reserve Bank, Michele Bullock, looks to be lurking among the trees too.
Did anyone expect anything different? The pond has now heard so many Groans that they all blend in to one, leaving the pond with the sense that we'll all be rooned by next weekend, and it's all the fault of Jimbo, and no one having the foresight or wisdom to make Dame Groan head of the RBA, Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers during question time at Parliament House in Canberra on Tuesday. Picture: AAP
The pond has no idea why the reptiles gave Mattie the whirling, rotating gif and left Dame Groan plain and dowdy in a tattered coat of many whining colours...
She seems to be hiding some apples as well and asking the same question: Who, me? Let’s be clear, in terms of the bank’s brief to keep inflation within the annual target band of 2-3 per cent, the bank’s record has been extremely disappointing.
Prior to Covid, it was quarter after quarter of undershooting the band; it’s now quarter after quarter of overshooting, with two exceptions.
It’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that the bank has been far too timid in recent times in knocking inflation on the head while prematurely initiating an easing cycle.
The contrast with other central banks around the world is telling.
In most developed countries, core inflation is now under control and interest rate easing is in progress. Aggressively targeting inflation with rapid and substantial rate hikes has paid off in many instances.
The idea that the gains in unemployment had to be preserved here at all costs sits very uneasily with the governor’s own exposition of the costs to everyone of persistent, elevated inflation.
Oh we're not back to this again, are we?
The pond is already there, but at least it's going to be over quickly this day ...
It’s got to the point of questioning whether Bullock was really a good choice for the top job at the bank.
Sure, she has spent her whole career there, but mainly in the payments side.
Her reluctance to deal with the impact of government spending – she tells us fiscal policy is independent and she doesn’t get involved there – indicates a lack of strength when it comes to meeting the goals set under the legislation.
The real advice coming out of the bank’s decision, and the subsequent press conference/Q&A held by the governor, is to hang on to your hat.
While she is adamant that she doesn’t provide forward guidance, the forecasts on inflation point to at least two more cash rate increases this year.
The sclerotic supply side of our economy and the increasing size of government mean that weak economic growth is likely to hang around too. Welcome to 2026.
Once again the pond has missed out on everything amusing and droll in the disunited States, with peak Marge madness still going strong ...
Poor Marge ...poor Kennedy centre ... but grifters gunna grift, grifters gotta grift.
As one wag put it somewhere on the full to overflowing intertubes, the Magis' gifts magically turned into the MAGA grift, with this latest, revised accounting recently featuring in The New Yorker ...
In August, I reported that the President and his family had made $3.4 billion by leveraging his position. After his first year back in office, the number has ballooned.
By David D. Kirkpatrick (*archive link)
Never mind, it helps put things in perspective ...
Perhaps an acquired taste, only for those with a refined taste for loonacy? (Pity about the interrupting ad)
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