In which Lord Downer goes biblical, the Caterist goes Ming, and Major Mitchell goes full Pauline ...

The pond had hoped to be able to put aside friendly atheist Easter banter and get back to the main sociopathic extreme far right lizard Oz reptile business - ruining the fragile condition of the planet even more than it is at the moment.

After all, if you happen to read the whole bible - which to its eternal shame, the pond has done a couple of times - after you've got past the begats and the dystopian vision of the old testament, there's only so long you can try to ignore the socialistic, almost full commie, fully woke talk in Christ's new testament teachings (especially if you ignore misogynistic late comers like St Paul, and note that Christ was even prepared to give hookers a fair go, and had not a word to say about teh gaze).

But then Lord Downer had to come along on Easter feria secunda and ruin it all...

The header: Why we must resist the progressive push to abolish our core Australian traditions; An ABC announcer’s reluctance to mention Good Friday while discussing fish sales has highlighted progressive efforts to diminish Christian traditions in Australian society.

The caption for the flag-waving snap: A Royal Australian Navy MH-60R Seahawk flies the flag on Australia Day. The progressive left has taken aim at the national flag and many of our traditions.

The pond was tempted to send this nonsensical blather straight to the intermittent archive - his effort was there early in the Mōnandæg morning -  but it's been acting kinda funny lately, and how could the pond deprive others of the chance to plunge into a dose of white Xian nationalism, His Lordship style, especially as it's all the fault of the ABC:

Last Friday morning an ABC announcer told us there was a big upsurge in sales of fish at the new Sydney Fish Market. When she was speculating as to why, she thought it was because last Friday was a public holiday.
She couldn’t bring herself to remind us that Friday was Good Friday, a day of huge significance to the large number of Australians who are Christians. It is the tradition for Christians on Good Friday to eat fish. That an ABC announcer should avoid any reference to Good Friday should come as no surprise. The ABC, particularly in Sydney, is run by the progressive left.

Dear sweet long absent lord, are we all tykes now? 

Back in the day, the pond can remember proddie swine giving tykes a terribly hard time about eating fish on Friday:

It sounds like the plot of a Dan Brown thriller: A powerful medieval pope makes a secret pact to prop up the fishing industry that ultimately alters global economics. The result: Millions of Catholics around the world end up eating fish on Fridays as part of a religious observance.
This "realpolitik" explanation of why Catholics eat fish on Friday has circulated for so long, many people grew up believing it as fact. Some, myself included, even learned it in Catholic school. It's a humdinger of a tale — the kind conspiracy theorists can really sink their teeth into. But is it true?

The answer at NPR here had this annotation ...

...after Henry became smitten with Anne Boleyn, English fish-eating took a nosedive.
You see, Henry was desperate with desire for Anne — but Anne wanted a wedding ring. The problem was, Henry already had a wife, Catherine of Aragon, and the pope refused to annul that decades' long marriage. So Henry broke off from the Roman Catholic Church, declared himself the head of the Church of England and divorced Catherine so he could marry Anne.
Suddenly, eating fish became political. Fish was seen as a " 'popish flesh' that lost favour as fast as Anglicism took root," as Kate Colquhoun recounts in her book Taste: The Story of Britain Through Its Cooking.

Well yes, they were still carrying on that way about fish-eating in the tykes v proddy wars in Tamworth in the twentieth century, but do go on ...

Fishermen were hurting. So much so that when Henry's young son, Edward VI, took over in 1547, fast days were reinstated by law — "for worldly and civil policy, to spare flesh, and use fish, for the benefit of the commonwealth, where many be fishers, and use the trade of living."
In fact, fish fasting remained surprisingly influential in global economics well into the 20th century.
As one economic analysis noted, U.S. fish prices plummeted soon after Pope Paul VI loosened fasting rules in the 1960s. The Friday meat ban, by the way, still applies to the 40 days of the Lenten fast.
A few years before the Vatican relaxed the rules, Lou Groen, an enterprising McDonald's franchise owner in a largely Catholic part of Cincinnati, found himself struggling to sell burgers on Fridays. His solution? The Filet-O-Fish.
While not exactly the miracle of loaves and fishes, Groen's little battered sandwich has fed millions around the world.

So there's the answer. Food that passingly resembles fish, but tastes like cardboard.

A treatise on fish eating was the last place the pond had expected His Lordship to take his readers, and yet here we are.

The pond decided to let His Lordship have the rest of his say without any theological niceties intruding on the rant ...

Oh sheesh, not the whole bloody war on Xmas thingie again, in bloody April!

Let’s understand what members of the progressive left are trying to achieve. They want to deconstruct existing society and replace it with their conception of a utopian society. To achieve this quiet revolution they not only aim to direct control over the private lives of individuals but they want to destroy many of our traditions, be they public or private.
Some of the traditions they want to abolish are relatively minor and some are significant. Where once we happily sent cards in December wishing people a Merry Christmas, the progressive left just says “Happy Holidays”. Let’s abolish Christmas. In the progressive world, Christianity and Christian celebrations should be downgraded.
That applies to Easter as well. The Easter holidays are just an excuse to have two extra days off. The progressives wouldn’t want to mention why or the origins of these celebrations.
Progressives want to get rid of as many links as we have with Britain, despite the fact modern Australia has its roots in the UK. King’s Counsels are to become senior counsels. Judges should abandon their robes. The monarchy is to be abolished. The national flag should be changed or, if that’s too difficult, other symbolic flags should also be flown alongside it to reduce its status as a symbol of the nation. Australia Day should be replaced altogether. The list is a long one.
Interestingly, while progressives want to abolish most of the traditions of modern Australia, they nevertheless worship the traditions of other cultures. Our progressive Prime Minister acknowledged the beginning of Ramadan but totally ignored Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent. Indeed they don’t object to those non-European traditions being injected into our society as long as our more familiar traditions are abolished, such is the incoherence of the ideology of progressives. They are more defined by what they dislike rather than what they like.
This progressive agenda, which has increasingly gained traction in Australia, should be resisted. It needs to be resisted for two reasons. First, deconstructing existing society and trying to reconstruct it along the lines of some utopian model always fails. You don’t have to go back far in history to see that Robespierre’s France, Lenin’s plans for Russia, Pol Pot’s Cambodia and Hitler and Mussolini’s visions in Europe all ended in disaster. In every case they tried to build a model society, tearing down institutions and traditions to build something completely new in their place. To do that they had to compel people to abandon their way of life, and that involved brutal coercion.
Second, the societies that have thrived have been ones that have maintained strong traditions while embracing modernity and change to ensure society remains workable and prosperous. As circumstances and technology change, so too should institutions and traditions evolve.
Being open to modernity and evolution is common sense. Traditions are the important foundation for the durability and coherence of society.
In a world of constant and rapid change, traditions provide a sense of stability. Traditions anchor people. They connect the past, the present and the future so life doesn’t feel like a random sequence of events. Looked at another way, in a world where modernisation is inevitable and technological change is largely welcome, traditions provide continuity and grounding for society.
Traditions are more than that. They are also about identity. They tell you what group you belong to, whether that’s a family, a nation, or a culture. Without them, a country is just a group of taxpayers who happen to share physical space.

As befits a spray of white Xian nationalism (to hell with the Jews and the Islamics and the secularists), the reptiles featured a foreshadowing of later Anzac action as the sole remaining visual interruption... Abolishing Anzac Day would attack the heart of our national self-image. Picture: Evan Morgan

Perhaps Lord Downer is right, perhaps this tendency to modernity is ruining everything, perhaps people should look to traditional pursuits, which would place them in the mainstream of modern American 'looning ...

Oh you sly old devil, you eye-catching rogue ...

As for the rest, you've heard it a zillion times, and here it is for the zillionth and once time ...

Modern Australia has developed its own traditions across the past 238 years. We honour Anzac Day as the day when we remember those who have sacrificed for the nation. Abolishing Anzac Day would attack the heart of our national self-image.
Australia Day celebrates the founding of modern Australia. To abolish Australia Day is seen by many as a strike against our pride in our nation and its history.
We celebrate Christmas and Easter as Christian holidays because modern Australia was founded as a Christian society. In the last census 43 per cent of Australians identified as Christians, yet only 3.1 per cent identified as Muslims and fewer still as Hindus and Buddhists. While we respect traditions of other societies, we expect our traditions to be properly respected too and our traditions are steeped in history.
As a society we may not be as Christian as we once were – 39 per cent say they have no religion. But Christianity forms the foundation of our modern society; our morality, our human rights, our commitment to the equal value of all individuals regardless of their gender and ethnicity. In our society all these things are derived from Christian teaching.
Then there are the rites of passage: at birth there are everything from baptisms to baby showers. There are weddings and funerals. The format of these traditions has gradually changed. There are fewer weddings in churches and more at the beach. You’re likelier to hear a welcome to country than the Lord‘s Prayer at a wedding! But the institution of marriage has remained because it helps to provide continuity and certainty in relationships that may bring children into the world.
Members of the progressive left mock our traditions. They want to get rid of them. Some recognise politically that such changes will take a great deal of time but the ambition is there to get rid of our traditions. If they succeed they will hollow out our society and we will be nothing more than millions of individuals living on our vast island, disconnected from our past and disconnected from each other.

Ah, it's all the fault of those deviant uppity blacks, carrying on as if they were first in country.

Thank you Lord Downer ...

Before proceeding further, the pond should note a splendid new bit of visual cleverness in the reptile's "news" coverage.

A bifurcated, loosely animated set of rotating images! Look, AI magic, an AI marvel ...

Oh dear, not One Nation again, as Geoff chambered a round and Brownie was so desperate he turned to comrade Bill ... (what next, comrade Dan makes a comeback? Desperate times)

Sorry, the pond had to send them to the intermittent archive, because the Caterist was loose in a quarry and inspecting the flow of floodwaters again ...

The header: Political leaders trade clarity for data-driven clicks in digital era; In an interconnected world in which we rely on a global energy market, the idea we can stand apart is a comforting fiction.

The caption for that sneering man: The messaging of the Prime Minister made a persuasive case for nothing. Picture: Martin Ollman

At the moment, the pond would settle for nothing, with nobody a close second ... but go on, do the Ming the Merciless trick we love so well ...

In the era of TikTokification, political leaders seldom talk to people. They talk to the algorithm, the invisible hand of the digital communications market that rewards not what is true or important but what is likeliest to hold attention.
Anyone who expected Anthony Albanese’s address to the nation last week to be imbued with the gravity of, say, Robert Menzies’ 1939 declaration of war was bound to be disappointed.
Menzies’ radio broadcast was delivered live as an unskippable, unclippable speech, marshalling facts in logical sequence to make a persuasive case for war.
Albanese’s speech, by contrast, was a grab-bag of brief, search engine-optimised statements, making a persuasive case for nothing while failing to resolve competing propositions.
The Prime Minister’s insistence that Australia is “not a participant” in the conflict is not so much wrong as beside the point.
In an interconnected world in which we rely on a global energy market, the idea we can stand apart is a comforting fiction.

The reptiles made sure to note where the fault lay, and a grievous fault it was ... Anthony Albanese failed to spark the nation with his address. Picture: David Beach

That snap of the downcast man inspired the quarry cultist to new heights ...

More important, it avoids the more difficult question: where, in strategic and moral terms, does Australia stand?
Iran is not a distant or neutral actor. Its conduct, including hostile activity on Australian soil, is that of an enemy. A government with a clear strategic compass would recognise the war against Iran is in Australia’s interests. It would acknowledge without equivocation the longstanding basis of its support for Israel.
While the analog era rewarded clarity and conviction, the digital world encourages content banks of safe, repeatable and context-free fragments.
The trend towards data-driven, emotionally calibrated messaging, accelerated by artificial intelligence, helps explain why political language often feels formulaic, repetitive and risk-averse. At consequential moments such as this, that becomes a problem, particularly in the democratic world, where leaders require consent for sacrifice.
In his televised address at the start of the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, John F. Kennedy delivered one of the finest and most persuasive speeches of his presidency. The build-up of Soviet missiles had been secret, swift and extraordinary, he said. The US didn’t seek conflict but it had been taught a clear lesson in the 1930s: aggressive conduct, if left unchecked, ultimately leads to war.

Hmm, the pond is getting more than a faint whiff of war mongering, backed by this interrupting snap, and Xian messaging from a notorious flogger of Chinese-manufactured bibles ... US President Donald Trump delivers a message on Holy Week – ‘Happy Easter to all, may God bless you, may God bless the United States of America’. Picture: X/WhiteHouse

Some faint sense of reality about the mad King finally entered the flood-water divining Caterist picture ...

Contrast that with Donald Trump’s eight-minute video posted on Truth Social announcing the start of hostilities against Iran on February 28.
The underlying reason for action – to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons – was the same yet the tone was different. Trump promised “a massive and ongoing operation” against “a very wicked, radical dictatorship”. It would raze Iran’s missile industry to the ground, annihilate its navy.
Unlike JFK, Trump has failed to convince nonpartisan Americans to rally around the flag. In 1962, the administration’s action had broad support among Republicans and Democrats. In 2026, support for US action falls mainly along party political lines.
Almost alone among democratic leaders, Trump has embraced social media boldly and provocatively.
His predecessor, Joe Biden, took the more common path of cautious and repetitive framing, using words that would remain safe when clipped and were therefore insufferably bland. His platform-friendly statement to Americans that “we’re going to be OK … making progress … building back better” were easy to remember and even easier to forget.

Boldly and provocatively?

The pond is always impressed by the Caterist's way with words. Others might call it Batshyte Crazy ...

Trump Triggers 25th Amendment Calls With Unhinged Easter Meltdown (intermittent archive)

Oh dear, and then we'd get JD ... out of the battered fish frying pan into the battered fish griller.

But the pond gets the Caterist point.

Why not join this sundowning weirdo on a little excursion, a little journey, even if the Poms are a tad reluctant and yearning to overturn Brexit? British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has also taken a risk-averse approach. Picture: Getty Images

Talk about scaredy cats ...get down with the bold, brave Caterist, always up for risk-taking and bunging on a do ...

Britain’s Keir Starmer has taken the same safe path and is now widely considered to be in his death throes as Prime Minister: bloodless, managerial, risk-averse to the point of opacity.
Like Starmer, Albanese keeps his animating vision, if he has one, close to his chest. Last week’s National Press Club speech bore the hallmarks of modern industrial political communication: modular construction, repetition and emotional calibration. It cycles through the empathetic settings of concern (“I understand”), reassurance (“commonsense approach”) and communal obligation (“looking after people”, “working together”), hiding its moral vagueness under a blanket of emotional warmth.
Albanese’s lips were moving but what was he saying? Was it a war speech? A fuel crisis and national resilience speech? Was it a Future Made in Australia speech, a gambling reform speech or a budget preview? It was all of them and none of them at once. Its core weakness was its failure to answer the hard questions it raises.
Albanese says the degrading of Iran’s military capacity is “a good thing” but doesn’t explain why when Australia is not an active participant, as we have been in other major wars in which the US has engaged. He calls for de-escalation but it is not clear whether Australia supports continuation of the campaign and Trump’s threat to “rain hell” on Iran or if he believes action is strategically justified beyond its original objectives.
Crucially, he does not say what costs Australians should be prepared to bear in return for a noble victory, if there can be one.
Instead the Prime Minister finds himself wedged, like Shakespeare’s Prince of Denmark, caught between passive suffering of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and taking arms in the war it entails.

A noble victory? That's what they're calling war crimes these days? The reported wreckage and remains of targeted and crashed US aircraft in central Iran on Sunday. Picture: Sepah News/AFP

For some reason, at that moment the careening Caterist careered off into the digital era...

If the tech-savvy, smart young things who advise Albanese thought their boss would be basking in adulation by the end of the week, they clearly underestimated popular intelligence. At a moment of genuine consequence – global instability, supply shocks and the risk of inflation tipping into recession – people expect leadership.
Yet the PM had almost nothing to say about the cause of the oil shortages that were the ostensible reason for commanding three minutes and 13 seconds of prime time: the US and Israeli military action against a despotic regime that presents a real and present danger to the peace-loving world.
Instead, he seeks to befog the debate with a checklist of policies that conveys a sense of busyness. His government is acting to keep Australia moving, to make the country stronger and fairer, stronger because it is fairer, recognising there is no security in maintaining a status quo that doesn’t work for people. On and on it goes, the rhetorical equivalent of hotel lobby music: short sentences and simple syntax, heavy in emotional legibility but low in analytical density, full of sound and fury and symbolising nothing.
It’s tempting to arrive at Byung-Chul Han’s dismal conclusion in his 2022 book Infocracy: Digitisation and the Crisis of Democracy, which argues democracy will not be defeated by censorship but by overload of information that fragments attention and dissolves shared meaning.
However much technology may dominate our lives, we must be wary of such deterministic narratives and remind ourselves that the pursuit of freedom that inspires democracy is not an ideological construct but a response to human nature.
The political leadership to navigate a path through the digital era in a way that strengthens rather than erodes democracy will one day emerge, even if it is not immediately apparent among current global leaders.

Thank you quarry meister and the pond will pay attention to all the digital lessons to be learned in the King Donald era ...

Forgotten already, her noble work already just digital fush and chups wrappings?

And here the pond was faced with an agonising choice, a bit like a mother caught between choosing one child over the other, when truly both are blessed...

Cruel, inhuman fiends for forcing the pond to make a choice...

Sadly the pond had to send simpleton Simon to the intermittent archive with a god speed and a teaser trailer ...

What a wondrous snap of a bemused, quizzical, perhaps a tad startled beefy boofhead from down Goulburn.

 How the pond was torn, how the pond would have loved to have stayed on with simpleton Simon, and shared the snap that immediately followed...of a man in proper, prayerful, gesticulating Easter form ...

Ye ancient cats and howling dogs, what ghostly figure is that in the background?

But the Major called, and the sacrifice was worth it, because Major Mitchell was dealing with the crisis in his own inimitable way ... by writing a stump speech for Pauline, outlining all the ways she could succeed, if only she followed his Major thoughts ...

The header: How economic decline and voter anger are fuelling the rise of One Nation; Political analysts once dismissed One Nation voters as globalisation’s losers, but the party now threatens to reshape Australian politics.

The caption for that leering Jimbo: Treasurer Jim Chalmers needs backing to use the May 12 budget to stimulate productivity and begin budget repair. Picture: Martin Ollman

The Major was in bigly five minute read form, and for once there wasn't much to appeal to readers of the Australian Daily Zionist News ...but it should produce oodles of converts to the Pauline cause ...

Thirty years ago, political analysts thought One Nation voters were the economic losers of globalisation.
Today globalisation is dead but One Nation is on the rise, polling a quarter of the vote.
Its rise reflects the decline in our nation’s political, media and business culture.
The timidity of both sides of politics since John Howard’s November 2007 election loss is eating away at their electoral support.
This column on February 8 quoted former ABC election analyst Antony Green suggesting Pauline Hanson’s party could win up to 25 federal seats if its support held up. That piece warned Labor might be the big winner as One Nation cannibalised Liberal and National Party seats.
Fast forward to the South Australian election on March 21. One Nation picked up three or four Lower House seats and the Liberals lost 11 to finish with five. Assorted independents won four.
Peter Malinauskas’s Labor government won seven extra seats to finish with 34 in the 47-seat Lower House.

The reptiles interrupted with a snap of that woman, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party has reeped (sic, the pond only records, and never corrects, being in something of a typo glass house without the wonders of a spell checker) the benefit of working class abandoning Labor. Picture: Martin Ollman.

The Major did his very best to make a good stump speech for Pauline and One Nation ... so many Major talking points...

The pattern could be repeated in Victoria on November 28, where One Nation seems certain to win seats and young Liberal leader Jess Wilson is being hurt by her party’s limitless propensity for self-harm, this time over the preselection of pro-women campaigner Moira Deeming.
It would be a travesty were Labor Premier Jacinta Allan to win with what is easily the worst record in government, state or federal, this century.
Former NSW premier Mike Baird in this newspaper on Wednesday said the economy had been growing at an average 2.5 per cent a year since 2011 but debt had been rising 3 per cent a year. This had left all levels of government with a $48bn annual interest bill.
This “is 2½ times what we spend on policing across the country, it is more than we spend on aged care, it is enough money to upgrade the Bruce Highway six times, build three WestConnex motorways or three Melbourne Metros each and every year”, Mr Baird wrote.
Australia is languishing with poor productivity and high population growth.
These problems disproportionately affect lower socio-economic demographics in the outer suburbs of our large cities, regional towns and rural Australia.
These are One Nation hot spots, and federal Labor knows it too could lose seats in places such as the Hunter.
Yet concern about high immigration is treated by much of the left media as a trojan horse for racism. Never mind few leaders in media, business or politics live in areas where new schools, roads, public transport, hospitals and jobs are not keeping up with population growth.
ABC journalists are more interested in non-means-tested welfare handouts than budget repair.
Productivity is treated as a way to squeeze more from the poor. Journalists have forgotten the 30 years of uninterrupted growth the productivity improvements of the 1980s and 90s gave Australia.
Kos Samaras, from the RedBridge polling group, in The Australian Financial Review on March 30, described the rise of One Nation as a “story about what happens when a significant cohort of Australians spends nearly two decades watching its world dismantled, its concerns dismissed and its votes treated as a problem to be managed rather than a signal to be heard”.
Samaras cites the closure of the car industry in Victoria and South Australia as the beginning of the end of Australian manufacturing.
Rapid declines in steelmaking, textiles, abattoirs and canneries shook the faith of “people with TAFE qualifications, trade certificates and decades of embodied knowledge the market, suddenly, had no use for”.
Samaras rejects the idea that One Nation voters are being manipulated.
“They have lived, for nearly two decades, through the managed decline of the world they were promised, and they have watched the institutions charged with their welfare either accelerate that decline or look away.”
For many, the bipartisan commitment to net-zero emissions is as big a threat to jobs as mass immigration is to living standards.
Labor’s primary vote is near historic lows, despite holding 94 of 150 federal seats. Facing an oil shock that will lift inflation past 5 per cent and could dramatically slow growth, our cautious PM needs to give Treasurer Jim Chalmers room to use the May 12 budget to stimulate productivity and begin budget repair.

The reptiles then slipped in a snap of Peter in the sort of head gear you need when taking pot shots of a Glock 9mm kind at writers' festivals ... Re-elected South Australian Labor Premier Peter Malinauskas. Picture: Eleni Tzanos (When I hear 'culture', I release the safety catch on my Browning!)

Then the Major carried on in reliable reptile renewables bashing way ...

It’s a nightmare for a Treasurer who looks like going into a slowdown with the prospect of at least two more interest rate rises this year.
After the GFC and Covid, Labor really should have been squirrelling away money from the mining boom to prepare for the next economic shock. Unfortunately its idea of reform has been about raising more tax and giving away more money.
Last week it signalled it is looking at the capital gains tax discount on investor housing. This may temporarily quiet complaints about housing affordability but is likely to raise much less money than the Greens claim, while investors will ramp up rents to offset the increased costs of tax changes.
The government – like Nationals leader Matt Canavan and Liberal frontbencher Andrew Hastie – talks about supply chain resilience and making more of what we need here.
Unfortunately, Labor’s Future Made in Australia policies look like an old-fashioned case of picking winners.
We were told last term that Australia was going to lead the world in green hydrogen and green steel. Albanese earmarked a billion taxpayer dollars for the “solar sunshot” plan to make solar panels here but little has happened.
It wold (sic, the pond merely transcribes) be far smarter to boost productivity in things Australia is good at: selling iron ore, coal, gas and uranium.

How about opening gas exploration in places such as Victoria?

Indeed, indeed ...

The fuel crisis shows the energy future3 has arrived. All Barnaby Joyce and One Nation have to offer is bluster ...

From early birds to emerging butterflies: UK shows signs of earliest spring on record ...

See where flowers and leaves arer emerging early after record-warm March ...

What could go wrong?

Trump wants to remake the way we fight wildfires. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

The new Wildland Fire Service will consolidate all Interior Department firefighting efforts as a lacking winter and ongoing drought promises a bad fire season. (Sorry, last two links to intermittent archive)

Well the pond did begin by wondering when we could return to getting back to turning an already dire planet into a worse one, in accordance with the lizard Oz's climate science denying agenda, and here we are, as the Major finishing scribbling his stump speech for Pauline ...

The Australian’s editor-at-large Paul Kelly on March 27 discussed the economic headwinds: inflation – already too high – being further pushed up by oil prices, growth constrained to 2 per cent, and productivity that Chalmers himself says will reach 1.2 per cent annual improvement, but not for another five years. Productivity growth in the Hawke, Keating and Howard years averaged 2.2 per cent.
Albanese and Chalmers have done too little to curb the cost blowout in the National Disability Insurance Scheme.
They encouraged trade union activism in a return to sector-wide industrial bargaining.
Now they plan universal child care rebates for all, up to a family income of $530,000 a year.
They handed out free money in power bill relief and are doing the same with the 50 per cent cut in petrol excise, which will only lift inflation. They used federal money to underwrite wages in aged care and child care, and boosted prices for consumers in the process.
Chalmers tried to hobble the Reserve Bank with a new oversight board: the RBA was then too slow to lift rates and too quick to cut them before last year’s election.
Labor has shored up bulk-billing with a package that delivers doctors $3 for every dollar saved on service delivery to patients.
Australians paying for this folly are moving to a protest party that at least acknowledges their problems.

Oh yes ...

... and the boot stickers were right there for the Major ...

Great days for the far reich ...