In which the bromancer, Dame Groan, and pearls of wisdom are the day's entertainment ...

 

Are you not entertained?

That elegant King Donald design reminded the pond of Topol singing this lyric (slightly modified) ...

I'd build a big tall ballroom with bumps and columns by the dozen
Right in the middle of the town
A fine gold roof with real marble floors below
There would be one long staircase just going up
And one even longer coming down
And one more leading nowhere, just for show ...

As for the reptiles providing entertainment? 

Alas, it's not so easy this Tuesday ... with the bromancer out and about ...

At last it's finally dawned on the bromancer that things might be a bit tricky thanks to the deeds of King Donald and his minions, and even worse, encouraged by the chairman emeritus in his folly ...

The bromancer, being a 97pound weakling who always got sand kicked in his face on the beach, is ripe for a Charles Atlas course, and is obsessed with the usual nerdish, weakling stuff which fills up his snowflake whining on a regular basis ...

The header: We’re an energy rich nation that’s chosen to be weak; The Iran war is a full-blown global crisis, a crisis in oil, gas and fertiliser. It devastatingly demonstrates Australia’s vulnerability.

The caption for the triptych of villains: Anthony Albanese, Jim Chalmers and Chris Bowen hold a joint press conference at Parliament House regarding the national fuel security crisis. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

All the bromancer revealed in his four minute ramble is how easy it is to slip slide from his previous blather about a just war - neigh, an Xian white nationalist holy war - into wringing hands about the consequences, and blaming the wrong people for all that's gone wrong, is currently going wrong, and will keep going wrong for the foreseeable future ...

The Albanese government is floundering, as the nation is floundering, in response to the global economic crisis brought about by the Iran war.
Australia looks determined to learn every wrong lesson and make every wrong response.
Make no mistake. This is a full-blown global crisis, a crisis in oil, gas and fertiliser. It devastatingly demonstrates Australia’s vulnerability.
Two ominous new developments suggest this conflict may go on for quite some time. Donald Trump is sending thousands of US marines from several different locations to the region. This may be for negotiating leverage, but it may also mean he plans at least a limited ground operation.
The likeliest such operation would be to take Kharg Island, through which Iran gets 90 per cent of its oil income. That could take weeks and involve massive new conflict. The other big development is the Yemeni Houthis entering the war on Iran’s side.
So far they’ve only fired mis­siles at Israel and these appear to have been intercepted. But they could easily hit Saudi energy infrastructure, as they have in the past. Worse, they could again strike shipping in the Red Sea, especially the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.

How to describe the bromancer? 

The pond floundered recently trying to describe Dame Slap's pandering portrait of the beefy boofhead's wife, and so turned to John Hanscombe's recent effort in The Echnida to revive the term "drongo", which was once big in Tamworth, but has fallen out of favour ...

...Hanson was on song again last week, doubling down on her support for Trump, oblivious to the effect the war was having on her own constituency. Oblivious, too, to polling that shows most Australians do not support the war or Donald Trump. Most of us think he's the drongo-in-chief.
Then there was the Coalition call for the government to slash EV and home battery subsidies to fund a cut to the fuel excise. At the very moment Australians are reminded that solar power stored in batteries doesn't have to navigate the Strait of Hormuz and that EVs might be a better idea than diesel-guzzling utes, only a drongo would suggest making us even more dependent on fossil fuels.
The Nationals launched the No Fuel Here platform, encouraging users to report fuel shortages in regional areas. One problem was they had no intention of publishing the data collected, which instead would go to MPs. Another was the fine print saying that by using the platform, users agreed to receive material from the Nationals. In other words, a clumsy attempt at email harvesting from a bunch of drongos. (sorry, newsletter, no link)

Drongo!

The bromancer is exactly that sort of drongo.

Meanwhile the reptiles were offering a distraction from the bromancing drongo, featuring the Greater Israel campaign (sssh, don't mention the ethnic cleansing) ... A woman stands amid Hezbollah flags on March 29, 2026, in the Choueifat area on the outskirts of Beirut. Picture: AFP

The drongo of the moment kept blathering away ...

The Houthis have limited missile stocks but appear to have plenty of drones. Without a navy and without much national infrastructure, the Houthis during the Gaza war provided what US naval commanders described as the most intense naval battle the US had fought since World War II.
The lethality of asymmetric warfare waged by drones has increased exponentially. The disruption to global energy markets could yet get much worse.
Australia’s situation is intensely vulnerable and constitutes a species of the theatre of the absurd. We possess the natural resources of an entire continent, just for us, a mere 28 million people, yet our hallucinogenic, Green-dominated politics has become so self-damaging that we import the vast majority of resources we use.
The Albanese government responds as it does to all national challenges – it will just spend loads more money.
Let’s deal with this at first principles. We’re rich because we export coal, iron ore and natural gas. Some other stuff, too, but those are the big three. Our crippling commitment to the fiction of net zero means we won’t develop any of these resources at home.
We insanely use the money we make from exporting fossil fuels to subsidise hugely expensive non-fossil fuel sources of energy domestically, but then because our economy still actually runs on fossil fuels we import vast quantities of refined fossil fuel.
Thus, we are a diesel economy. We export billions of dollars worth of coal to China. As the Page Research Centre’s brilliant new report, All at Sea: Fuel, War and Australia’s Achilles’ Heel, points out, we could easily make the diesel in Australia but we choose to import it.
China burns hundreds of millions of tonnes of coal a year to make diesel out of coal. We don’t do that ourselves because it produces a lot of emissions.

Ah, the old war with China routine, and never mind that China is taking leaps and bounds to turn itself into that new fangled notion of an electrostate.

Hanscombe was interesting on the origins of "drongo", though it's familiar enough for those who care and easily found online... (with more "d's" here, and never mind the asbestos lady's attempts to ruin the institution) ...

...from stage right, comes another drongo, Clive Palmer. Failing at the last election, he's re-entered the populist political fray with new sickly yellow advertisements. Last time it was the Trumpet of Patriots; this time it's the "New Deal", borrowed from Franklin Roosevelt's Depression-era reconstruction program. If at first, second, third or fourth, you don't succeed, try and fail again.
Which takes us neatly back to the origin of the expression drongo. Drongo was the name of a 1920s racehorse which never won a race after 37 starts and became the butt of jokes. A century later and the old slang word has a whole new currency.

Don't think the lizard Oz can match the drongo power of Clive?

Get past this meaningless snap ... A general view of the Port of Kharg Island Oil Terminal, 25 km from the Iranian coast. Picture: Getty Images

...and you can enjoy the drongo powers of the drongo bromancer in full flight ...

At least one Australian company believes it could do it with much lower emissions, but governments won’t go near any research on technology like that because of our net-zero commitments and obsessions.
At much lower levels of emissions, we could make diesel from gas. We are always going to be a diesel economy. There’s no substitute.
We’re already in a mess in this crisis yet the crisis hasn’t really begun. We have more oil than before the war began. But any oil we’re receiving now was dispatched on its long voyage well before this war began. Yet we’ve had hundreds of service stations without fuel and costs have shot through the roof.
This is especially so for artificial fertilisers, which are central to agricultural production and based on hydrocarbons.
The fertiliser itself is now much more expensive. The cost of transporting it is much more expensive. Some farmers, therefore, won’t plant cereals this year.
The whole world is still completely dependent on hydrocarbons. Renewable energy has added to fossil fuels but not made any significant impact in replacing them.
The Australian government’s own Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water website reports: “Fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) accounted for 91 per cent of Australia’s primary energy mix in 2023-24.” The primary energy mix goes beyond just electricity generation and includes transport, mining, agriculture, industry and the rest.

What a hoot. Embedded in the promo for the AV distraction is the immortal line "says expert", and just as you're expecting a real expert, you're served up the bromancer blathering to petulant Peta, two drongos, or numbskulls if you don't want to be dinkum ...

Sky News contributor Greg Sheridan says the US going to war with Iran is an “acute dilemma” with “no easy solution”. “This is an acute dilemma, and there’s no easy solution … Iran has proved itself to be worse than we thought,” Mr Sheridan told Sky News host Peta Credlin. “What other regime has just slaughtered 40,000 of its own citizens, what other regime is attacking desalination plants on which human lives depend in neighbouring states which are non-combatants, what other state has 400kg of uranium, illegally enriched to 60 per cent? ... This is a fanatical, devoted, regime, with an ideology that celebrates suicide.”

The pond had to enlarge that so the "says expert" can be seen.

Anyone can call themselves an expert at the lizard Oz ...

And so to a final word from the reptile expert drongo in chief ... doing the standard reptiles renewables schtick, with a grudging admission that maybe we should make a token gesture towards climate science ... but not too much, because who believes in climate science when we can blow the joint up, thanks to King Donald and the Emeritus Chairman ...

It’s reasonable to try to run a clean environment and even reduce greenhouse gas emissions on a per capita basis. But we’ve decided, insanely, to ape the worst of West European policy in trying to convert to an entirely renewables energy basis. We can’t do it. It won’t ever happen. And we can afford, even temporarily, the grotesque indulgence of it all only because of our exports of raw fossil fuels, which other people then add value to.
The Nationals’ Alison Penfold made the blindingly obvious point in parliament: “If these fuels are important enough to stockpile, they are important enough to produce.” Her Nationals’ colleague, Anne Webster, quoted Geoscience Australia estimates we could have 17 billion barrels of oil we haven’t developed. Our shale oil alone could supply us for 43 years.
Australia is uniquely vulnerable and uniquely culpable for its vulnerability. We are at the end of the world’s longest supply chains. We face many potential choke points beyond the Strait of Hormuz or the Red Sea.
Yet despite our vulnerability, we have among the smallest fuel reserves of any OECD nation. The Albanese government has been in office for four years and has no right to blame this on the admittedly woeful performance of the Coalition government before it. And we have no merchant fleet to move energy. And no defence force to protect it.
Our economic problems are supply problems. We’re perhaps the only nation in the world that could be energy self-sufficient but has chosen not to be.
The opposition, having finally rejected net zero, must campaign furiously on the issue if Australia is to have a chance of preserving its sovereignty.

But the bromancer gave up his sovereignty long ago to an American-owned company, with its Emeritus Chairman encouraging King Donald to embark on a folly. 

Of such supine stuff are drongos made...

And so to the Groaning of the day ...

The header: Expect Jim’s ‘reform’ budget to come with some big caveats; Using the false cloak of intergenerational inequality, Chalmers may still decide to push on with his ill-considered changes to tax.

The caption? Yet again the reptiles forgot to tag it, but everyone knows it's the chief villain, the main heel, Dame Groan's bête noire, and the reptiles loved that image of his grim mug so much, you can see it repeated down the page.

This was a standard four minute groaning, and truth to tell, these days the sighing and the whining and the whingeing and the groaning tends to be water off the pond's duck-like back.

The pond really only persists with the Dame because of her cult following ...

The conflict in the Middle East has thrown the preparation for this year’s budget into disarray. Jim Chalmers had been talking it up as the statement that would finally deliver real reform.
He even went to the trouble of classifying its contents into spending restraint, tax reform and productivity. At this stage it looks unlikely he’ll deliver. Using the false cloak of intergenerational inequality, Chalmers may still decide to push on with a series of ill-considered and ill-timed changes to the taxation of capital/savings.
The pressure to be seen as a reforming Treasurer may be sufficient to prevent common sense from prevailing.
One issue that came to a head on Monday following national cabinet was the reduction in the petrol excise rate to compensate households and businesses for the impact of higher fuel costs. Apart from the budgetary costs of doing so, there is also the vexed issue of whether this action would add to underlying inflation when inflation is running well above the annual target band of 2 to 3 per cent. This will make it even likelier that the Reserve Bank will lift the cash rate again before the May budget.
The Coalition pushed for the excise to be cut, suggesting it be funded by eliminating some other spending. The government has not proposed any saving offsets.

Nothing to see here by way of visual distractions ... Anthony Albanese holds a joint press conference at Parliament House. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman.

There are likely some might care, but this was a siren song the pond had heard too many times. 

There was no reason to be strapped to the mast...

Because the excise is a flat tax, the higher price for fuel does not raise any additional revenue. Higher volumes will have that effect, but this surge in demand may not last. There will be additional GST revenue because of the higher fuel prices but this ends up with the states. Some environmentalists have seized this opportunity to call for the elimination of the diesel fuel rebate that applies to off-road use by miners and farmers, in particular. But the purpose of the rebate is widely misunderstood; it is for off-road use only and avoids a distorting tax on tax.
By this stage of the year, the Treasury will be close to finalising many details in the budget, particularly in relation to the domestic and international economic outlook contained in Statement 2, Budget Paper No.1. The final figures in the tables and commentary will have to be delayed to the last minute, although these figures find their way into the estimates of the receipts and payments over the forward estimates.
The Treasurer’s recent interest in spending restraint contrasts with his record as the top money man. When he first took the reins, government spending was $627bn or 24.3 per cent of GDP. This financial year it is expected to reach $787bn or 26.9 per cent of GDP.
And note that these figures don’t include the massive ramp-up in off-budget spending. It’s a wonder Chalmers hasn’t attracted the moniker: Hey, Big Spender. He still likes to quote the meaningless figure of $114bn of savings and reprioritisations the government has achieved. That of course is a gross figure, with actual spending rising by $160bn since 2022-23.
Chalmers also makes the ridiculous claim that government debt is now lower under Labor even as it floats past the $1 trillion mark. Trying to make a pointless comparison with something written down in 2022 in the pre-election economic and fiscal outlook smacks of desperation, although the fact he is not picked up by journalists is also depressing.
According to the most recent figures, the fastest growing spending items in the budget include debt servicing, the National Disability Insurance Scheme, hospitals, aged care, childcare and defence. There will be talk about restricting the growth of outlays on the NDIS, in particular. But without significant structural reforms it’s impossible to see spending being kept below the growth of the economy.

The pond only perked up as Dame Groan revealed her socialist inclinations by endorsing a road tax ...and even approved of employing cardigan wearers to work out the how of it ...

There have been rumours that a national road user charge is being contemplated, which will become more important if electric vehicles increase in popularity. There are technical limits on the ability of the states to do this; it will be up to the federal government to enact such a scheme. But whether the timing would be fortuitous is unclear. The best approach is probably to commission a practical review and to seek constructive input from those most affected.

Pause for an AV distraction ...

Treasurer Jim Chalmers says Australians are paying a “hefty price” for the impact of the war in Iran. “The war in the Middle East is doing a great deal of damage to the global economy, and Australians are paying a hefty price for that,” Mr Chalmers said during Question Time. “What we’ve announced today are additional steps to try and ease some of the pressures that Australians are feeling as a consequence of that war in the Middle East.”

Then Dame Groan could resume by having a go at EVs.

The pond takes it as a sign that EVs are at last taking off, and so the reptiles are threatened.

Again it was formulated in a way cultists would love ... "tax the rich", a mantra the reptiles seem to love in principle, but rarely in practice ...

One policy begging for reform or elimination is the fringe benefit tax exemption for novated leases of EVs. This is one of the most inefficient schemes around; it favours those on higher incomes and is costing the budget billions of dollars in forgone revenue. The cost has more than tripled from earlier estimates, with a figure of nearly $3bn in 2028-29 alone.
Unsurprisingly, interested parties, including those providing novated leases, have been trying to dissuade the government from making changes. But if Chalmers is serious about making real budget savings, this looks like low-hanging fruit. As cheap China-made EVs flood the market, it’s not clear that any form of subsidy is required for potential EV buyers.
There is also the Cheaper Home Batteries scheme that was so badly designed that its estimated costs tripled shortly after it was introduced. At one stage a figure of more than $7bn was estimated as the cost of subsidising relatively well-off households for installing oversized batteries.

Yep, EVs are on the move, and batteries and solar and reptiles of the Dame Groan kind are suddenly socialist...

My advice is to lower your expectations about the forthcoming budget. The reform will be piecemeal and arbitrary and won’t make any material difference to the budget’s bottom line, at least in the short term, but will annoy a group of voters who typically don’t vote Labor.
There will be a few heroic assumptions about reining in spending that won’t come to pass but may impress on the day. Any future economic downside will be the fault of events outside the control of the government, a point Chalmers will be keen to emphasise. Just don’t mention stagflation and falling living standards.

Sadly, the pond finds it can leave Dame Groan's advice parked at the door ... especially as she offered piecemeal and arbitrary advice in a column more dismal than usual ...

Heck, just fang it ...

And now for completists, thanks to the intermittent archive working early this morning, the pond is able to range over reptile offerings with teaser trailers ...

Excise cut a repeat of Covid-era handouts
The inflation dragon was never slayed. Instead, it is now hovering over Australia, blowing fire storms across the regions and cities.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

Geoff could only manage a couple of minutes of time wasting...

One thing the pond will note ... on the weekend, the Hume highway was exceptionally quiet ... 

Only EVs and a few trucks dared roam the range last Sunday, as the pond discovered this incredibly cute offering in Gundagai ...

So far from home ...

And so to another offering, this one again just two minutes ...

Please explain: Why Anthony Albanese should get on the phone with Donald Trump
A call to the White House is perhaps more difficult than giving away $2.5bn to try to appease the punters on petrol.
By Dennis Shanahan

This is the reason the pond doesn't pay much attention to the lesser drongos on the far right just offering filler for the day.

The bouffant one ended with a word salad ...

...public concern and growing doubts and confusion about the aims and cost of the Trump ­attack on Iran have led Albanese to publicly complain about a lack of clarity over the US actions, which doesn’t put Trump off side but qualifies the Australian ­position.
“I want to see more certainty in what the objectives of the war are, and I want to see a de-escalation. So, a de-escalation is in the global economy’s interests,” the Prime Minister said as he added $2.55bn to the budget bill.
Making his position on Iran clear he declared: “I have nothing but contempt for the Iranian regime.”
But, listing the shifting objectives of the US military action, Albanese said “what is going to occur” needs to be spelt out.
The last time Albanese had a “warm” conversation with Trump was on March 10, at 2am, to discuss the fate of the Iranian women footballers who were seeking asylum at the time.
And, although there is regular contact between the administrations there hasn’t been a leaders’ conversation since then and nor has the US yet appointed an ambassador to Canberra.
Given Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong once suggested the then prime minister, Scott Morrison, should just get on the phone to Trump, perhaps the present Prime Minister should do the same, but that’s probably more difficult than just giving away $2.5bn to try to appease the punters on petrol.

As if you can reason with a mad King, or do deals, knowing he lies all the time, and breaks deals as easily as he lies.

The pond got rid of the canny Cranston even more quickly ...

Here we go again … Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers spend their way out of Iran War fuel crisis
The fuel excises cut is a clear signal the budget will include more new spending justified by an attempt at saving the economy from a Covid-style recession.
By Matthew Cranston

Of course the reptiles face a problem in all this, as does the government.

It was the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way wot suggested it, as noted in his Facebook video ...(a link does not endorse Facebook or suggest anyone should visit)

Finally, Labor has taken our advice and halved the fuel excise tax. It’s a step in the right direction, but it raises another big question, why is the Prime Minister always the last to lead in a national crisis?

Awkward, so all the reptiles can do is raise saucy doubts and fears, and conjure up the inflation dragon, and talk of Covid days and such like, while downplaying the way the big spend was something both sides agreed on.

But mention of the beefy boofhead did remind the pond that tucked below the fold were some pearls of wisdom.

The pond usually doesn't pay attention to these pearls, but this one raised some interesting questions for the beefy boofhead ... though it came by way of an attack on the pasty Hastie ...

A class war?

Was the dropper of these pearls of wisdom aware that Dame Groan had suggested ... gasp ... taxing the rich? Or at least the EV/solar rich...

Before the pond could get onto the question of whether the pasty Hastie endorsed Dame Groan's views, there was a visual interruption featuring the usual villains, chortling at the thought of their evil deeds ... Jim Chalmers and Anthony Albanese during Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Then the irritating grain of sand in the flesh kept on ...but what did it all mean?

The pond took it as a sign that the pasty Hastie scored a big hit with his ABC interview, and the reptiles are now in panic mode ...

Or take Hastie’s assertion that America’s Iran war is a “huge miscalculation”: a big call to make at this stage of the conflict.
If this is Hastie’s considered military view, it is certainly worth listening to. But this line has been taken by US isolationists and anti-Trump Democrats who are desperate for this enterprise to fail.

What a classic. Now it's not a war, nor even a special military operation, nor even an excursion. Now it's an enterprise, and no doubt soon will be applying for Pty. Ltd. status.

But do go on ...

And when Hastie declares “multinationals and big business” in Australia “have lost their social licence”, is he backing the left’s view that Canberra’s politicians and bureaucrats should assert more control over them?
Hastie suggests neoliberalism is all but dead. In this regard, at least, he is on a unity ticket with Anthony Albanese and the modern Labor Party, which in the late 1990s under Kim Beazley denounced the Hawke-Keating policy legacy.
Yet if he’s worried about our dire economic predicament and wants to see young people climb the ladder of opportunity, he should be directing his rhetorical fire at the Albanese government’s neo-socialism.
Let’s discard the undergraduate labels and consider what neoliberalism means in practice.
It was the policy model embraced by Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Howard in this country. It was not an ideological project but a pragmatic one. By dismantling protectionist barriers, deregulating our domestic markets, means-testing welfare and lowering income tax burdens, they aimed to unlock the economy’s growth potential. It was the original abundance agenda.

The reptiles used the moment to try to flog their wares, but the wretched illustration was more than enough to put the pond off ...

PREMIUM
Andrew Hastie's hit-back at Trump
Become a member to access our premium video content

Really reptiles? You can't even get the distracting snap's proportions right, and yet you want people to splurge their shekels?

And so to even more panic:

As the fiscal, regulatory and taxation footprint of government was wound back, the scope for individuals and companies to aim big and prosper increased.
The growing economic pie this created weakened the politics of envy and class division in this country, strengthening our social cohesion and national pride.
And as our economy become more flexible and resilient, our ability to ride out global economic and security shocks increased.
It is no accident that as we’ve progressively dismantled the policy legacy of Hawke, Keating and Howard, the economic and social foundations of this country have been weakened and, with them, our ability to defend ourselves from foreign and local threats.
When Hastie rejects neoliberalism, does he have in mind a right-wing version of the Albanese government, junking net zero but pursuing some other centrally devised vision or plan?
Tony Blair was wrong. In politics, there is no third way. If you demonise the market system, you must by default be a supporter of statism. If Hastie merely means that, in a more fractured world, we should strengthen our national defence force and develop some sovereign capabilities while remaining a market-based economy, that is another matter.
But in that case, the “look at me” neoliberal critique does not have to be made.

What a sublime black and white approach.

The reptiles flung in a final distraction ...

Bondi Partners Senior Adviser Peter McGauran says Shadow Industry and Sovereign Capability Minister Andrew Hastie has the “gift of clarity”. Mr McGauran told Sky News Australia that Andrew Hastie is “an issue” for Opposition Leader Angus Taylor. “He’s definitely getting into areas that are the province of others.”

And there followed one last pearler of alarm...

Hastie is clearly rattled by the rise of One Nation. He is right to challenge a Liberal Party that is in denial about the existential threat it poses. But is he offering a coherent, carefully thought through way forward for conservatives or is he an ideological bowerbird, picking up ideas from wherever he can find them, including JD Vance and the Labor Party?
Perhaps Hastie’s many pronouncements are his way of working out just what he thinks, a bit like a teenager who says they are a socialist one day and libertarian the next. That is not necessarily a bad thing – unlike so many of his peers, Hastie is thinking about the world and responding to popular frustrations, but at some point he needs to find his political due north.
If he wants to be a future leader of the Liberal Party and this country and not just a gadfly at the margins, it needs to be sooner rather than later.
David Pearl is a former Treasury assistant secretary.

It needs to be sooner rather than later?

The pond had thought the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way was pretty safe for the moment, what with Dame Slap writing up uxorious, gushing texts about his partner in life, and the other reptiles sounding all in, but suddenly rattled reptiles are calling for another leadership challenge, and the sooner the better.

Bring it on, there can never be enough entertainment when it comes to prime Angus beef.

Second thoughts, haven't we got enough entertainment already?

Finally, he's not the best talent talking to camera, but compared to the lizard Oz's practitioners of the dismal science, he's not entirely wrong either ...(there's a transcript here for those that find that easier)