In which the bromancer, Monsieur Dupont and "Ned's" natter set the Wednesday pace ...

What with King Donald promising boots on the ground in the form of thousands of paratroopers (so the reptiles said) and Jimbo warning of tough times ahead (so the reptiles reported), it was inevitable that the brave, bold, warrior known to intimates as the bromancer would duck for cover and decide to take it all out on the Europeans ...

The header: Anthony Albanese embraces his European ideals, glosses over the difference of a few billion between friends; Anthony Albanese has struck agreements with Europe that signal Australia’s dangerous drift toward the continent’s struggling economic and political model.

The caption for the snap of the dangerous duo: Anthony Albanese and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen in Canberra on Tuesday. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

The bromancer could only summon up three minutes of copy to warn against this dangerous drift towards those wretched European types, what with their cheese-mongering and fancy plonk, but a careful reading could reveal his yearning for King Donald and his amazing excursions ...

Anthony Albanese loves Europe; he loves its politics, its leaders, its food and especially its failed social model, which he is now imposing on Australia.
Nonetheless the Prime Minister is rightly happy about finally signing a free-trade agreement with the European Union, and a security agreement as well. FTAs are a good thing in principle, even limited ones like this, though they tend to be wildly over-boomed and never deliver anything like what is claimed for them.
The FTA with Europe, Albanese tells us, will add $10bn a year to the Australian economy. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, at the same press conference, says it might add “almost $8bn” to the Australian economy. Nobody takes figures like this too seriously, so what’s a couple of billion dollars in the headline figure between friends? But these agreements do in fact reveal the growing intimacy between the Albanese government and the European leadership.
Trade Minister Don Farrell has done a good job for the government. But Albanese is operating at an altogether deeper level. His government behaves very much like a European government. Australian politics is coming to resemble European politics, as Australian society itself looks increasingly European.

Shocking stuff. 

Increasingly European? The pond almost fainted with fright ...and the reptiles compounded the fear with an AV distraction featuring a hideous creature that came to walk amongst us ...

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen delivers a powerful address in the Australian parliament following the signing of a historic free trade agreement. “What we signed today will unleash a new era of economic and security partnership,” Ms von der Leyen said. “The distance has traditionally been a barrier to our relationship, but today geography is no more our destiny, and distance is no longer a protection or luxury.”

It turns out all that reptile blather about Western Civilisation, and the Judaeo-Xian heritage and such like counts for naught when it comes to the crunch, and what really matters is an unthinking embrace of King Donald's adventures.

Europe itself is a decadent cesspit ...

Once, when Europe embodied humane values, social compromise, hi-tech development and war-sobered democratic solidarity and national security responsibility, that might all have seemed a good thing. Now, not so much. Now, the European model embodies state incompetence, social stress and political fragmentation. Welcome aboard, Australia.
Europe is addicted to massive universal welfare programs (whereas Australia once targeted welfare through means testing) and wildly inefficient transfer payments that ensure crippling tax levels, lack of incentive and chronic, structural budget deficits. They also routinely strangle business in byzantine regulation.
Australia could be a leading member of the European All Stars on all these measures.
Like Europe, Australia has burdened itself with a hugely costly, ultimately unworkable energy policy that makes energy prices uncompetitive with the rest of the world and ensures that reindustrialisation can only occur with massive and unsustainable government subsidies.
The European elite has so consistently ignored the concerns of its people, especially on immigration, that the society has lost faith in normal democratic politics. The traditional political parties are losing support to new parties challenging on the populist right. Sound familiar?
The official ideology of the EU essentially rejects mainstream European cultural heritage and instead of a self-confident historical narrative of achievement and imperfection, promotes the delegitimisation of its own traditions, along with endless identity politics and grievance. Any echoes there?

Just to remind the hive mind yet again of the treachery at work ...Von der Leyen in parliament on Tuesday. Picture: AAP

Talk about fraught times for bromancers, forced to seek out the ugly truth beneath the glittering surfaces ...

Now we have the military co-operation agreement between Australia and Europe. The Albanese government actually does defence diplomacy pretty well. The problem is it virtually doesn’t do defence in substance at all, a very European combination.
Von der Leyen was an elegant, witty, respectful and positive presence in the national parliament. It was good that she spoke, and she spoke well.
Yet it is still the case that, even after four years of Russian war in Ukraine, Europe’s leading nations have not produced military forces, military platforms or military ordnance on anything like the scale that their grave security situation requires. Their budgets are in constant deficit because of the ever increasing demand for universal welfare payments, and they thus cannot make the decision to resource their own defence properly, instead relying, as ever, on the Americans, even as Donald Trump routinely mocks them for their derelictions. However, compared with the Albanese government the Europeans look like Godzilla after a Red Bull overdose.

As if a couple of world wars had turned them into a bunch of pathetic wimps ... how the Reichsmarschall des GroßAustralisch Reiches yearned for a real man, doing manly things with his bone spurs ... US President Donald Trump. Picture: AFP

Sorry, whenever King Donald appears, the pond is contractually required to celebrate with a worshipful cartoon ...

Ahh, you won't find any of that nonsense in Europe, unless you happen to visit Hungary with the bromancer's best buddy, the onion muncher ...

And so to the bromancer wrapping up his despair ...

Von der Leyen confirmed that European leaders had said they would send ships to help the US open the Strait of Hormuz. However, she added, this would only happen after hostilities had ceased. In other words, the Europeans would make a military contribution when there was no longer a military need. They would work to open up the Strait of Hormuz after it was already open.
A very European military commitment. However, even that was more than Australia under Albanese would offer. When asked whether Australia would send a naval vessel to the Strait of Hormuz the Prime Minister simply dodged the question. That’s because, apart from the implausible case of the two air warfare destroyers currently notionally in service, the Australian navy possesses no ship that could realistically be sent to the Strait of Hormuz.
The key to understanding the security agreement between Australia and Europe is that it can’t amount to much. European nations and their militaries can’t cope with Europe’s security challenges, much less make a big ­contribution in the Indo-Pacific. Australia has a tiny number of exquisitely complex defence platforms, so tiny in number that they cannot in themselves make any strategic contribution anywhere, even in the defence of Australia, much less the defence of Europe.
Tokenism, speeches and symbolism on the other hand – the EU and the Albanese government do all that very well.
Australia now rejoices in its participation in the Eurovision song contest. This surely makes the Albanese government yearn for more. How comfortable it would be in the European Union itself!

Indeed, indeed, how much better to dance along to the sounds of that ear worm YMCA ....

And now to an apology. 

In recent times, the pond has taken to sending reptiles to the intermittent archive where correspondents can inspect them at their leisure, but for whatever reason, the archive hasn't been itself these last few days.

So the pond can only show its homework and show what it decided to miss out on.

First up was Dame Slap doing a standard bit of black bashing ...

That's more than enough black bashing.

The pond also decided to miss out on Mandy, even though she was talking about a matter and a country the reptiles have studiously ignored ...

Thanks for raising the matter, Mandy, and anyone wanting follow-up could head off The Diplomat's Why Pakistan Is Desperate to Avert an Iran-Saudi confrontation, or perhaps to AlJazeera for Pakistan 'ready to host US-Iran talks': Can latest peace push work?

Call the pond weird - many do - but the pond's taste runs to reptiles in full hysterical overload, cranked up to eleven ... and Monsieur Dupont was exactly what any loon doctor might order ...

Damn those 'leets. 

Why every day the lizard Oz featured an attack on sociopathic Vlad the Impaler's excursion into Ukraine, and every day the pond kept blinking and missing it, but here he is, in the usual company ... Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, China’s President Xi Jinping and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un arriving to a military parade in Beijing. Picture: AFP

It seems deeply unfair to avoid featuring the biggest war monger of them all at the moment - Cuba next? - but the pond will go with the flow, as Monsieur Dupont readies the country for war ...

Real-world events have shattered the illusion that the generational peace Australians have long enjoyed would continue indefinitely.
Europeans who smugly proclaimed that war on their continent had been consigned to the dustbin of history received a rude shock in 2022 when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in pursuit of his imperial ambitions. This should have been a wake-up call that Pax Americana was fracturing and we needed to lift our game on defence. Again, nothing was done. While Europeans and pacifist Japan ramped up their defence spending, ours flatlined despite warnings from Defence Minister Richard Marles that our strategic circumstances are the most challenging and dangerous since the end of World War II.
Putin’s invasion was followed in short order by the murderous Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023 supported by Tehran and its proxies, igniting a series of linked conflicts across the Middle East leading to the current US-Israeli strike against Iran.
Warning lights should have been flashing red in the National Security Committee of cabinet spurring serious attempts to immediately increase fuel reserves, identify supply chain risks, move from “just in time to just in case” planning and redouble efforts to make more of what we need in this country – otherwise known as sovereign capabilities.
But apart from laudable efforts to support Australian critical minerals miners, the government hasn’t done nearly enough to build the resilience needed to mitigate rising geopolitical risk. We have wafer-thin petroleum reserves. Anthony Albanese hasn’t delivered on his promise to build a strategic merchant fleet that could carry oil and other essential commodities in emergencies. Perversely, he now appears to be considering higher taxes on gas exports when the world is facing a critical gas shortage, risking a collapse in new investment.

It's a long time since the pond has thought of Winston, but how splendid of Monsieur Dupont to look across the dutch for advice,  New Zealand's Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Rt Hon Winston Peters. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Indeed, indeed, it's deeply alarming that the current leadership of the United States is united in its desire to unravel a rules-based order, but here we are ...

Ironically, it took a New Zealand foreign minister to bell the cat. Winston Peters has admitted his country and Australia ought to have been better prepared for the Iran war oil crisis and made “serious mistakes” in allowing fuel refineries to close because they were “too cocky” about the state of the world.
It should have been obvious that an unusually peaceful period in world history has ended and we are returning to the historical norm. The respected Peace Research Institute Oslo reports that the world is experiencing a surge in violence not seen since World War II. Sixty-one conflicts were recorded across 36 countries in 2025. PRIO research director Siri Aas Rustad warned: “This is not just a spike – it’s a structural shift. The world today is far more violent, and far more fragmented, than it was a decade ago.
“Conflicts are no longer isolated. They’re layered, transnational and increasingly difficult to end. It is a mistake to assume the world can look away.”
And this may be only the beginning. The next decade could see escalating conflict around the world that will directly impact on Australia, the most serious of which would be a military confrontation between China and the US over Taiwan. To borrow from the late Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, that would be the “mother of all battles”, dwarfing the supply chain and geopolitical upheavals of recent weeks.
It’s no surprise that revisionist powers China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are united in their desire to unravel a rules-based order crafted by the US and fellow democracies that has served Australia well. But few foresaw that an American president would actively participate in the dismantling of this order. Serial interventionist Donald Trump has led a revolution “against the very world that America made”, says Carnegie’s Stewart Patrick.
If you think that’s a stretch, read the 2026 US National Defence Strategy. It dismisses “the rules-based international order” as a “cloud castle” abstraction.

Just the USA Monsieur Dupont?

Isn't the call coming from inside the house? You should really keep up ...

And so on, and oh dear, and the next snap is no consolation,  Richard Marles

At that point, Monsieur Dupont spluttered out, but not before urging on the war with China, preferably by Xmas, as reptiles are wont to do at the drop of a war mongering excursion hat ...

Dispelling the false assumption that geography will continue to cushion us from overseas shocks is a task of government. But the message isn’t getting through often or sharply enough.
When the Ukraine conflict first broke out, complacent elites, who should have known better, asserted that a conflict in distant Europe wouldn’t affect Australia. That was patently wrong. Global supplies of key agricultural products, energy and metals were severely disrupted. The drone war with Russia revealed a potentially fatal structural flaw in our defence force. We have no effective counter-drone capability.
The same people continue to argue that we shouldn’t get involved in a Taiwan conflict because it’s far away and doesn’t concern us. That canard should be rebutted. Much of our trade and energy goes through the South China Sea. If simmering tensions over Taiwan erupt into military conflict, war will come to our shores whether we like it or not. Our geography won’t protect us.
The question is: Does the Albanese government have workable contingency plans in place for such an eventuality?

Just one final flourish. 

Monsieur Dupont warned the hive mind at the start about the dangers of leets and then signed himself off this way ...

Alan Dupont is chief executive of geopolitical risk consultancy The Cognoscenti Group and a nonresident fellow at the Lowy Institute.

The Cognoscenti Group? 

Why that's up there with the Illuminati ... or perhaps the Rosicrucians ...

And so to "Ned", still in a state of hysteria about the croweaters ...

Poor "Ned", and yet the pond will always turn to him, even if he manages to drag some ancient toad relic out of the dustbin of collective memories... Peter Beattie inside Queensland Parliament, August 1998.

"Ned" was in a state of dire panic ... apparently forgetting that the readership of the lizard Oz had been trained for years to embrace the climate-denialist, Islamophobic, minority fearing and loathing, ways of the redhead's mob...

The SA result reflects the opinion poll trend across the nation: there is a massive vote transfer within the centre-right. It confirmed what we knew: that One Nation can ruin the Liberals, but it cannot win enough preferences to stop Labor being the net winner against a broken Liberal Party.
The numbers are telling: the stronger the Hanson vote, the weaker the overall centre-right vote. Hanson isn’t interested in governing; her brief is sabotage, laying political landmines. If One Nation remains a strong force in future, the consequences are guaranteed. It will assist NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns to be re-elected in March 2027 and then assist the re-election of Anthony Albanese in 2028.
Given that most One Nation voters loathe the Labor Party and the Albanese government, this suggests a disconnection between their emotional disposition and the consequences of their vote. (The qualification, of course, is that some One Nation voters just want to wreck the two-party system.)
If One Nation succeeds in usurping the Liberals and the ­Coalition as the major party of the centre-right, that becomes a devastating event for Australia – Hansonism as the alternative to Labor. It would terminate centre-right politics as it has long been practised in this country.
It is astonishing that the Liberal Party has been confused about whether One Nation is a friend or an enemy. Seeing Hanson openly seeks to destroy the Coalition vote, such confusion is inexcusable folly. The iron law that should govern Liberal Party attitudes towards One Nation is obvious: whatever maximises its vote against Labor, given the goal is to defeat Labor.

Can't we just nuke them? It's good enough for the country, so why not them? Or should we embrace dunderheads keen to destroy writers' festivals? Chris Minns; Peter Malinauskas

It turns out that "Ned", in his usual way, doesn't have much of a clue, might even be part of the problem ...

The Liberals, therefore, should strive to weaken Hanson’s primary vote and to maximise the flow of One Nation preferences to the Coalition. That’s both a primary and preference strategy. It rules out either simple-minded attacks on Hanson or alignments with her. The Liberals need to differentiate themselves from Hanson, avoid turning her into a defiant heroine but make preference decisions solely based on vote maximisation.
More than 30 years ago, ANOP pollster Rod Cameron, who guided the Labor Party for so long, said Hanson thrived on criticism from elites, and “the more criticism she gets, the better she travels”.
Too many people have forgotten this. The golden rules are: don’t criticise her personally, don’t call her a racist or a fascist – that just confirms the dogmatism of her supporters.
Stress instead that she can never govern, she only sets one Australian against another Australian, and, as Matt Canavan said recently, she has never delivered anything worthwhile – not a ­“single dam, single road, single hospital”. A vote for Hanson is a wasted vote.
The Liberals need to avoid a counter-productive binary debate about whether to move to the left or right to combat Hanson. They need, instead, to act as a governing party.
That imposes two requirements. First, remember Hanson is your opponent. The Liberals are not in a team with Hanson, they are not in a coalition with her, and they will never seek to govern with her. Those conservatives who dream of a governing partnership – Liberals, One Nation, Nationals – are deluded since these three parties are too fundamentally different to form a troika. The Liberals who champion this approach risk killing their own party.

And what of the reptiles who joined in the cheerleading? The ones who did their very best to normalise the redhead? 

Isn't the call coming from inside "Ned's" house? Didn't the reptiles celebrate the way the redhead had caught up with the right hive mind attitudes?

And so on and on, a heady reptile brew of immigration fear and loathing and climate science denialism.

The twin planks of the lizard Oz this past decade. 

It doesn't leave much room for a beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way, what with him coming to fame by shouting at windmills. Not much of a distinct brand there ... Leader of the Opposition Angus Taylor during Question Time. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

All "Ned" had to offer him  was the chance to sound like Pauline ...

Second, the Liberals need to show their cultural credentials as the party of tradition. Much of Hanson’s success lies in fighting the cultural hegemony of the progressive left in its commitment to identity politics, contemporary tribalism, excessive immigration, weakening Australian identity, and undermining national unity.
Every position advanced by Hanson is tied to the pitch that “I’ll restore the country you are losing” and, in this sense, Hanson targets a genuine affliction in this country.
The irony of election night is that Premier Peter Malinauskas in his victory speech invoked patriotism and the flag as the necessary virtues to stop Hanson’s inroads into the Labor vote. Targeting One Nation, he said pride in country can’t be co-opted by any single party. “The cultural question must be top of mind,” Malinauskas said. “It comes down to: are you for Australia?”
He said One Nation must be met with two responses – economic gains and national pride. The Premier’s message was anathema to left-wing progressivism in this country, but as an ­election winner, he was beyond criticism.
This was an invitation and a lesson for the Liberals. They need to stand up and present themselves as the party of flag, anthem, patriotism, duty, honour, family, personal responsibility, and unity in diversity. And if the moderate wing of the Liberals can’t abide this essential step to halt Hanson, then it also risks killing the party.

Say again?

They need to stand up and present themselves as the party of flag, anthem, patriotism, duty, honour, family, personal responsibility ...

They need to sound just like patriotic, flag-waving Pauline? 

... and then throw in a token reference to "unity in diversity" as the only difference? 

This on the very day that Dame Slap returned to her standard black bashing form?

Completely clueless ... please allow the infallible Pope ot help ...

And now, as everybody knows that Moby is a d*ckhead supreme, (*google bot aware),  the pond felt inclined to celebrate ...