In which there's a lot of riff raffs, an elbows up man, a defensive Shanners, and an alternative Switzer ...

 

There's nothing like the moral clarity of murdering a hundred or so schoolgirls to produce a thrill, and so the federal government was in a strong position to deliver a lecture on moral clarity this day ...

He's supposed to be "senior"?

Uh huh ... then that outburst could count as a senior moment and a splendid distraction...

The pond must look under the radar sometime because the pond has survived in this troubled world for some time without hearing anything of this riff raff, busy rapping away.

For those who care ...

EXCLUSIVE
‘Moment for moral clarity’: Labor swipe at ABC and Greens
Raff Ciccone defends stand against ‘brutal’ Iran, blasts critics’ ‘hypocrisy’
A senior Labor MP has launched a blistering attack on government critics, warning that neutrality against Iran’s ‘brutal regime’ represents a dangerous abandonment of moral principles.
By Sarah Ison

As the intermittent archive is having an off day at time of writing - so many days down and out - the pond supposes it should provide the closing lines of the raff doing his riff, a nonentity at other times, but this day out into the world to defend the killing fields..

...“This is not principled restraint. It is ideological reflex – choosing slogans over solidarity, comfort over courage and moral vanity over moral clarity.”
Debate over the conflict has mounted in recent days, with Canadian President Mark Carney telling Australian reporters on Wednesday that the US and Israeli strikes on Iran appeared “inconsistent with international law”.
But while agreeing civilian lives must always be protected and escalation avoided, Senator Ciccone said none of these factors “alter the fundamental truth”.
“The greatest threat to the Iranian people is not external pressure – it is the regime that rules them,” he said.
“The US and Israel have made clear they are not choosing who governs Iran. That decision belongs to the Iranian people. They deserve the opportunity to determine their own future, free from brutality, fear and blackmail.”
Senator Ciccone said the government’s position that it would “unequivocally stand with the Iranian people” was vital.
“This is a moment for moral clarity,” he said.
“We stand against a brutal regime. We stand against nuclear proliferation. And we stand with the Iranian people and their right to determine their own future, free from oppression.”

Sure, sure, speak to the hand ...

This riff raff rap was buried in a host of news from the killing fields, amid proud boasts of annihilation from the likes of Hogsbreath ...

Luckily there were other annihilations going down and they distracted Jack the Insider...

Why I won’t be mourning the loss of the Kyle Sandilands and Jackie ‘O’ duo
Melburnians are from Mars and Sydney is Uranus with some lovely beaches and Roger Rogerson. Someone should’ve explained to Kyle and Jackie O how hard it would be to crack the Melbourne radio nut.
By Jack the Insider

Strangle the pond in the shallow waters before it gets too deep.

Having never heard a nanosecond of the show - the pond would rather permanently damage its ear drums with an ice pick - the pond supposes Jack might be right, but thought it better to let the matter rest in the intermittent archives.

Some days it's good that what heads to the intermittent archive cornfield stays buried.

But as usual, this whittling down left fewer and fewer contenders.

The bouffant one was over on the extreme far right of the lizard Oz with this weird offering...

Sheesh, that's a mighty fine impression of the ancient mariner stopping one of three ...

The bouffant one could be found in the intermittent archive  ... if it bothered to work ... and you had to click on it to see that he was blathering on about political debate, and that it was just a lengthy and tedious doubling down in a defence of his attack on the beefy boofhead.

The bouffant one led with the line that he was "old-school"...

Talk about the parish pump ...

Relax, Shanners, relax agitated bouffant one. Everybody knows that the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way isn't the widest comb in the shearing shed, and that he's a placeholder waiting for a showdown with a passing lettuce and the pastie Hastie (we love clap happys and liars from the Shire0.

The only astonishing and terrifying aspect to the yarn was that opening snap of Shanners caught in some sort of Australian gothic pose.

Shanners was indignant in his short outburst, concluding thusly ...

...Yet new One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce, who only got one question, asked about fuel supplies and the impact on regional Australia, mining and agriculture – not radical Islam.
“It was an obvious question because if this conflict goes on and we don’t get fuel, our iron ore, beef and wheat industries will stall and the Aussie dollar will fall through the floor,” he told The Australian.
“One Nation supporters are interested in the economy and the cost-of-living first,” he said and noted he got half a million responses to his Facebook report on his question.
When I wrote that not asking a question on any of the priority issues and concentrating on so-called ISIS sympathisers and radical Islam was a strategic mistake, one-time Liberal leadership contender and frontbencher Andrew Hastie complained on the ABC that it didn’t “make it wrong”.
In parliament, Albanese responded to Taylor’s first question on the economy in three sitting days by gloating that he knew he was going to get the question because “Dennis Shanahan said it was going to be ‘economy day’ ”.
Questions telegraphed are questions made redundant.
Labor’s freedom from any penetrating economic questions – despite a perilous increase in government spending in the national accounts – continued as the Coalition simply asked the same question on living standards with the same “smart alec”, self-defeating political kicker about “the buck stopping” with Albanese that allowed a broad brush, detail-free ­response.
As the opposition Treasury spokesman, Tim Wilson didn’t fare any better, tilling the same soil and was subjected to an even bigger attack than Taylor over buying “short shares” that made money when the Australian economy faltered.
It was a third day in a row that the Coalition failed on all the traditional parliamentary and political measures with only one day left in Taylor’s first week as leader.
Now, I’m happy to buy Albanese a beer and give a big thumbs up to Hastie if that helps improve the outcome for the Australian people in the national interest.

How to stifle a yawn in a polite way?

Talk about small beer in times of war. It was down there with news of Kyle...

And that, early in the morning, left the pond with just two contenders ... with the first from the land of maple syrup and moose:

The pond has a golden rule about only featuring politicians in their native habitat with great reluctance, all the more so because this outing - more speech than column - was a bigly seven minutes long.

But it was astonishing to see a Canuck in the lizard Oz.

The Canucks been in the ice hockey wars of late, and there is a war going down about the 51st state, and no matter that the GOP finds it hard to say the word "war",  with some liking to dress it up Vlad the Sociopath style as a "special military operation".

The pond is always inclined to send an "elbows up", especially as they find themselves on the border of a demented narcissistic king prone to fits of pique, but the pond only lasted as long as this gobbet ...

There was a little bit more on the topic ... pearls before fellow travelling lickspittle riff raff swine ...

We call for a rapid de-escalation of hostilities and prepared. Were prepared to assist in achieving that goal. Because resolution of this crisis will ultimately require a commitment to a broader political solution, an engagement to avoid a wider and deeper conflict.
Middle powers like Canada – and I would suggest Australia – should recognise that the rupture in the international system represents just that, a clear break from the past, and we need to act decisively to secure our shared future.
Civilians must be protected, and all parties must commit to finding enduring agreements to end both nuclear proliferation and terrorist extremism, and we’ll continue to pursue this approach with like minded countries and participants across the continent.
I’d now like to turn from that to what I originally intended to address more fulsomely. And don’t worry, I’ll try to keep to time to the broader challenge that exists to sovereignty and prosperity.
The good news is we have the capacity to build important elements of that new order, an order that encompasses our values, including respect for human rights, sustainability, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty and territorial integrity.

And that was that, and then he went into listicle PowerPoint presentation mode ...

Let me highlight three principles that would help achieve this goal. 

Must we?

At that point the pond thought it enough to note that the speech in its entirety is easily available on YouTube here, and on the ABC channel here and at shorter length at the APT's channel here ...

That put local riff raff in their place and paid some attention to the hapless Canucks, still under threat from King Donald, but there's only so much the pond can bear, especially as the reptiles decided to do one of their "summaries" for what was already available ...

CALL TO ACTION
Canada’s PM urges Australia to join new power alliance
Middle powers must unite or be ‘on the menu’, Canada’s leader tells Australia
Mark Carney has delivered a stark warning to Australia about the ‘rupture’ in international relations, warning Anthony Albanese that middle powers must unite or be ‘on the menu’.
By Ben Packham and Sarah Ison

Truth to tell, the pond only went there so it could find a showcase for the infallible Pope of the day ...

Sorry Canucks, elbows up and all that and best of luck, but the pond had to fit in the swishing Switzer, on his endless rehabilitation tour, with this the latest stop in his campaign.

The header: An alternate history: What if Costello had replaced Howard in ’06? Counterfactuals cannot be proved. But it is at least arguable that, had Costello been given his chance, Australia might well be a stronger and better governed country today.

The caption for the wretched credited collage: Peter Costello and John Howard. Artwork by Emilia Tortorella.

Really Emilia? You want a credit for something taken from the slop bucket?

As for the rest, the pond has always suggested that the swishing Switzer is a prize maroon of the first water, and this is only useful in providing further evidence:

History is the study of what happened. But our understanding of the past also can be sharpened by considering what did not happen – what is called counterfactual history. We can never be certain what would have unfolded had events turned out differently, yet that uncertainty does not stop us from wondering.
What if, for example, the driver of Archduke Franz Ferdinand had not taken a wrong turn in Sarajevo in 1914? What if the July 1944 plotters had killed Adolf Hitler? What if Lee Harvey Oswald had missed in Dallas in 1963?
The 30th anniversary of the election of the Howard government invites a similar exercise in Australian politics: what if John Howard had stepped aside after a decade in power in 2006 and allowed his deputy, Peter Costello, to assume the prime ministership more than a year before the 2007 election?

This sort of counter history is really only useful for sci fi scribblers, TV and movie types in search of a fatuous storyline, and columnists too desperate for words, and sub-editors wanting to recycle ancient photos ... Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophia as they leave Sarajevo City Hall to get into their car, minutes before their assassination on June 28, 1914. Picture: Historical Archives of Sarajevo, AFP

What on earth is the point of it, save to distract the hive mind from the killing fields?

There is little doubt that Costello would have succeeded Howard. The momentum behind him was overwhelming and he would have been enthroned without a party-room contest. Yet he waited. Much to the regret of supporters, he was not bold enough to attempt a coup – and too conscious of the stain of regicide to force the issue.
As we now know, Howard indulged in hubris and miscalculated the succession by pressing on to the 2007 election. He was defeated by Kevin Rudd, a politician whose global ambitions were often matched by his appetite for publicity. In the process, Howard lost his own seat, becoming only the second Australian prime minister to suffer that fate.
Had the leadership changed in 2006, the Coalition would have faced the electorate under a fresh prime minister – unburdened by questions of tenure and age, yet able to claim continuity with more than a decade of economic growth and political dominance.
It is a fair bet that Costello would have defeated Rudd – or Kim Beazley, had Labor’s leadership remained unsettled. At 50, the same age as Rudd and nearly two decades younger than Howard, Costello would have blunted Labor’s claim that the Coalition was tired and out of time.

Oh sing a song of "what if?" until the cows come home and "Ned" appears like some monstrous Jonathan Pryce vision, fresh from doing a Welsh accent in Under Salt Marsh (great landscapes), Paul Kelly joins Claire Harvey to discuss the 30th anniversary of John Howard's election

Please don't expect the pond to lift a little finger to comment ...

Had Costello been in the Lodge in 2008, the first great test would have been the global financial crisis. Labor later argued its stimulus measures saved Australia. Yet its capacity to spend amid collapsing credit markets and plummeting confidence rested heavily on the strong public finances Rudd had inherited from Costello. No Australian bank suffered a systemic failure and the major institutions retained top-tier credit ratings, suggesting that the regulatory system entering the storm was sound.
Costello – Australia’s longest-serving treasurer and arguably its most consequential – had delivered repeated budget surpluses well before the commodities boom of 2003-04. His instinct was for fiscal prudence, not expansion of the state. He still would have supported temporary stimulus, but likely designed it to unwind more quickly and return the budget to surplus once the danger had passed.
The longer-term consequences would have been significant. A more restrained fiscal response would have meant lower structural deficits in the early 2010s, a steadier debt trajectory and no dodgy schemes such as the school halls and home insulation programs that Rudd would carelessly implement. All the government programs whose share as a percentage of GDP have been skyrocketing since the Gillard era – the National Disability Insurance Scheme, Gonski school funding, the care economy – would have been rigorously subject to fiscal scrutiny.
The upshot here is that although Australia would not have escaped the crisis, its political aftershocks – and the culture of permanent budget alarm – would have been milder.

How pathetic does it get? John Howard looking at his watch in parliament, September, 2007.

He's looking at his watch like he's a Dr. Who Timelord?

Oh sweet absent mother of mercy, say it ain't so, say it hasn't come to this.

Luckily there was no credit for that wretched AI slop as the meandering prize maroon carried on ...

A Costello prime ministership would have softened some of the harder edges of the Howard era. Ratifying the Kyoto climate protocol, issuing a formal apology to the Stolen Generations and recalibrating the Work Choices industrial relations regime would have signalled generational change without ideological rupture. Such moves might have deprived the opposition of its most potent moral and political weapons.
The longer-term effect could have been a less polarised public-policy debate in the 2010s. If energy policy had been reset swiftly and pragmatically – rather than through the tortured sequence of emissions trading schemes, leadership spills and carbon taxes – Australia would have avoided the decade of policy whiplash that hurt investor confidence and deepened partisan mistrust.
At the same time, Costello would have retained credibility with conservative Australia. His Sydney Institute speech on multiculturalism in 2006, controversial in some quarters, articulated a principle that would grow only more salient in the decade ahead: liberal democratic norms are non-negotiable. “There are countries that apply religious or sharia law: Saudi Arabia and Iran come to mind. If a person wants to live under sharia law, these are countries where they might feel at ease. But not Australia.”
In the years that followed – marked by global jihadist violence and fraught debates about integration in Europe – such clarity would have helped frame Australia’s own discussion in firmer but less reactive terms.
On border protection, a Costello government almost certainly would have maintained the Howard-era architecture, including the Pacific Solution. Had that framework remained intact after 2007, the resurgence of people-smuggling networks would have been averted. The tens of thousands of unauthorised arrivals and hundreds of deaths at sea between 2008 and 2013 would never have happened, restoring a measure of policy continuity to one of the most combustible areas of public life.
Costello was also ahead of many contemporaries in recognising the structural implications of demographic decline. His 2004 exhortation to couples to “go home and do your patriotic duty tonight” and “have one for mum, one for dad, and one for the country” – delivered alongside the baby bonus payments to parents of between $3000 and $5000 per child – reflected a sound concern about ageing and fiscal sustainability. Even modestly higher fertility through the late 2010s could have eased long-term budgetary pressures and moderated Australia’s increasing reliance on high immigration to sustain growth.

He didn't have the ticker, so all the rest is a wank of the first water...and speaking of wanks, Labor Leader Kevin Rudd with wife Therese at Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane as they celebrate victory in winning government in 2007 federal election.

At last there came this wimp of a needy closer ...

As with any government, setbacks would have been inevitable. Yet even here the counterfactual is suggestive. Costello possessed parliamentary skills of a high order, drawing comparisons with Robert Menzies and Gough Whitlam. He could be, as even Labor partisans recognised, hilariously funny – an immensely valuable quality when debate turns sour – but he also possessed a keen sense of theatre and, at his best, the ability to rally dispirited colleagues during a crisis.
A prime minister able to dominate the chamber and steady his partyroom during difficult weeks would have reduced the appetite for internal coups that came to define the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd cycle. (Though how any leader, however formidable, would have managed Malcolm Turnbull – Canberra’s most durable solo act – is a question best left to braver historians.)
Counterfactuals cannot be proved. But it is at least arguable that, had Costello been given his chance, Australia might well be a stronger and better governed country today.

What a waste of time and space. Is he pretending that all that gunk has something to do with history, as opposed to pap designed to fill a small hole in the hive mind?

And this sign off was deeply weird...

Tom Switzer was opinion editor of The Australian from 2001 to 2008 and deputy opinion editor of the Australian Financial Review from 1998 to 2001.

What was that? Some preening attempt at gravitas, and a career, and yet the reptiles had to go back to before 2008 to find it?

And no promo? This is how he usually signs off ...

Tom Switzer is presenter of Switzerland, a podcast about politics, modern history and international relations.

Forget it Jake.

This is his inescapable past, which no rehabilitation tour or alternative history crap can fix...

What if he hadn't acted like a prize gherkin? 

What if there were alternative histories to hand?

Nope, just ancient realities ...

Speaking of what if's, what if the pond just ended it all with a 'toon ... so that the riffing raff could do another rap with his yap ...