A few housekeeping notes.
The pond regrets it can't keep the comments section open in the immediate future, and so the moderation bar will kick in after a few more days. That's because the pond has to take steps to moderate the content, or risk upsetting the google bot.
Unfortunately the pond will be offline in every way bar the phone, and won't be able to moderate the moderation in the near future.
Blogger wasn't really set up with mobile phones in mind (huzzah) and the pond never bothered configuring it as an operating system.
The pond will try to extend the moderation curfew with the odd post, but that will be tricky until the pond has made the shift and set up online shop in its new location.
Hopefully the pond will be back (the pond has been told some intruders are shot on sight at its new southern location), though if so, it'll likely be in modified form.
The pond's hours derived from the need to do the blog, then get on with work, but in the pond's new iteration work isn't an issue, so maybe the pond will set a more genteel and leisurely schedule.
Given the way that most correspondents seem to access the site, no one's that keen to get up early in the morning to enjoy freshly baked, piping hot reptiles served up for breakfast.
The pond might also limit exposure to the reptiles ... there are any number of wastrels and time wasters at the lizard Oz, and one reptile can be as amusing as three can, especially if the intermittent archive is available to offer samples of the others.
The pond would like to thank all the cartoonists for being unwittingly dragooned into the pond. The pond never attempted to score revenue out of the blog, and one of the reasons is that it didn't wish to trade off on the hard work of others. Rather the pond wanted to draw attention to the glories of local cartoonists plying their trade for the enjoyment of all.
And lastly the pond would like to thank all the pond's correspondents, a small, but trusty, hardy band who long ago graduated as doctors of herpetology studies, and who kept the pond slogging on simply to read the comments section.
Hopefully we'll all resume play, but for the moment, it's time for the last placeholder for a while.
Unfortunately, as expected, the lizard Oz didn't deliver a dream team of reptiles as the placeholder.
There's no Our Henry ... there's just this motley crue ... and yes, the budget jihad, the mother of lizard Oz jihads, was still in full swing.
In no particular order ...
Labor falls into tax trap in the valley of death
The desperation and vehemence of the denials and claims from the PM and Treasurer about scare campaigns are proof in themselves that the death tax debate is getting away from Labor.
The bouffant one took a trip back in time ...
Ye ancient cats and hounds, the reptiles are running really hard on the death and taxes routine, and there's a 'toon for that ...
The canny Cranston lined up for a crack ...
Surprise stamp duty bill looms after trust crackdown
Labor’s trust issues extend to a looming fight on stamp duty
As businesses and families across the country face the prospect of a tax bill if they are forced to restructure their trusts, the states prepare for a multi-billion-dollar fight over the revenue.
By Matthew Cranston
There was much wailing and quailing ..
Why Labor’s capital gains overhaul became an internet meme
‘Albo owns 47 per cent of my business’: Why Labor’s CGT overhaul became an internet meme
Small business owners are venting anger over reforms they say could deter investment and hit start-ups hard.
By Jack Quail
Rosie and Julie-Anne were suffused with fear, and happy to spread the fear mongering wide ...
Strike at wealthy hits low-income families
Jim Chalmers has defended Labor’s trust tax raid as targeting wealthy tax avoiders, but estate planners warn everyday families will suffer most.
By Rosie Lewis and Julie-Anne Sprague
Even Ancient Troy chimed in over on the extreme far right ...
The real intergenerational problem ALP, Libs missed: paying off debt bomb
Labor and the Coalition have condemned future generations to pay for record spending and debt.
By Troy Bramston
Senior Writer
What a pity none of them tackled the alternative ... a brave, bold back to the future ...
To be fair the reptiles also found space for an essential contribution to the Australian Daily Zionist News... with Frank top of the world ma over on the extreme far right ...
‘Change can happen’: Lowy’s soccer blueprint to tackle antisemitism
Frank Lowy’s powerful antisemitism submission: we changed soccer, and we can also extinguish smouldering racism
In a powerful submission to the antisemitism royal commission, Frank Lowy says change will require the same cultural shifts that saw ethnic divisions in soccer transformed into loyalty.
By Frank Lowy
Frank was also top of the "news" with a "love it or leave it" angle ...
‘If you don’t like Australia, leave,’ says Lowy
Frank Lowy tells Bondi inquiry his soccer fix could help cure hate
Sir Frank Lowy says the same approach that ended ethnic conflict in Australian soccer could solve the antisemitism crisis – but those who won’t accept our values should face deportation.
By Stephen Rice
But what if soccer bores you senseless?
What if you've seen endless, inane stories of fans feuding and rioting in the streets?
What if you think that the only way to respond to the astonishing grift at work in the World Cup is to participate in a boycott?
Forget it Jake, that grift, that form of madness, is going to go on forever.
The reptiles did gratify the pond by featuring one of the pond's favourites.
It's lesser, minor bromancer, but the pond would have settled for any reptile writing about anything other than the budget, so this'll do reptiles, this'll do:
The header: Can anyone govern UK effectively – a question also for similar democracies, especially Australia; The UK faces having six prime ministers in seven years as Keir Starmer’s leadership crumbles amid a crisis that mirrors Australia’s own policy failures.
The caption: Protesters at a rally organised by Tommy Robinson pose in front of a banner featuring Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Picture: Carl Court/Getty Images
The bromancer spent a bigly four minutes diagnosing Britain's ills, beginning with a cornball joke that says a lot about his sensa huma ...
I remember in a country pub one fellow wanting a smoke and having trouble getting his match to light. In exasperation, he declared: “This match is the only thing in Britain that doesn’t strike!”
Britain’s problems are a bit different today but essentially they throw up the same questions as the 1970s. Can anyone govern Britain effectively?
This question, acute in Britain, can be asked with increasing pertinence about similar democracies, and especially Australia.
Long term, I remain a solid optimist about the Brits – their institutional and cultural inheritance is so great, although modern culture is trying to cut them off from their own legacy. Keir Starmer, in office less than two years, is a very poor prime minister. It now seems he has little chance of surviving more than a month or two.
The reptiles flung in snaps of Keir's rivals, Andy Burnham. Picture: Getty Images; Wes Streeting. Picture: AFP
The bromancer was in his element, dissing Labour ...
Streeting notionally comes from the Labour right, though that’s a long way left of normal voters. Burnham has no ideological fixed address. The joke is: a Blairite, a Brownite (follower of Gordon Brown) and a Corbynista (admirer of loony left Jeremy Corbyn) walk into a pub together and the barman asks: Mr Burnham, what would you like to drink?
To return to parliament, Burnham had to get a Labour MP to resign so he could stand at a by-election. The seat in question is Makerfield. In recent local elections, Nigel Farage’s Reform swept to victory there. Ten years ago, the electorate voted overwhelmingly for Brexit.
So Streeting declared Labour must seek to rejoin the EU. This is the conventional view among Labour lefties but the public hates the idea, even those people who think successive governments have made a mess of Brexit.
It’s also, mutedly, more or less official Labour policy.
There came an AV distraction ...
UK Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has dismissed speculation about a potential leadership challenge against Prime Minister Keir Starmer as "froth and nonsense." Political tensions within the Labour Party have continued following significant losses in local elections nearly two weeks ago. The issue of Brexit may become significant in any future leadership contest, as UK MP Wes Streeting and Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham have both expressed support for Britain rejoining the European Union.
The bromancer finally turned his keen mind to what ails Britain ...
It’s even barely conceivable Starmer could hang on for more tortured months of paralysis if Burnham loses in Makerfield.
Burnham is the only national Labour politician with a positive approval rating. That’s partly because as mayor he doesn’t have to take tough decisions and has no responsibility for issues ripping Britain apart, and for which he has offered no solutions.
Assuming Starmer goes, Britain will have had six PMs in seven years – Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, Starmer and Starmer’s replacement. Add in David Cameron before May and it’s seven in 10 years. That’s a sign of deeply dysfunctional politics, of a political system, and a society that can’t resolve its public policy contradictions.
People talk, justifiably, of the crisis on the centre right in many democracies. There’s an equal crisis on the centre left. Only three EU governments are left of centre, and they’re in trouble.
Britain’s problems are not mysterious.
They include: massive public debt; uncontrolled welfare spending; the desperate need to increase defence spending; massive disguised unemployment through huge welfare rolls; a loss of social morale and self-confidence; persistent Islamist violence; an education system dedicated to the idea that Britain is evil; a complete loss of trust in institutions, including the mainstream political parties; wildly expensive energy prices arising from net-zero commitments; and the separate but related problems of uncontrolled mass immigration and illegal immigration.
Strange, no mention of Brexit?
Could it be that the bromancer was all in on that ruinous strategy?
Is it true that the bromancer was something of a Boris and Brexit man?
Indeed he was, and the pond felt the need to send this to the intermittent archive, just for the fun of it...
Brexiteers fighting for liberty and the people’s will
Here you go, a little teaser trailer ...
Meanwhile, the reptiles were featuring a riot ... Anti-migration protesters riot outside Holiday Inn Express in Manvers, South Yorkshire, 2024.
And then the bromancer seamlessly shifted from Labour bashing to Labor bashing, so he too could join in the lizard Oz budget jihad, the mother of all reptile jihads ...
A columnist in The Times argued recently that the British people were at fault because they wanted a vast welfare state but didn’t want to pay the taxes to fund it. That seems wise but is actually quite mistaken. Britain, like Australia, is already a very high-tax society. The problem is that putting on even more taxes, especially at the level that would be needed to wipe out deficit spending, is just about impossible because it cripples the economy.
None of the new Albanese/Chalmers taxes will help the economy in any way. They just hinder growth. Britain is at an even worse point in this continuum. Governments have gone down the road of electoral bribery so far they have reached a dead end, where a flimsy but important safety sign warns there is no road ahead, only a cliff.
The Makerfield by-election has quickly become a two-horse race, Labour versus Reform. That’s bad news for the Conservative Party, whose leader, Kemi Badenoch, is immensely likeable and plainly doing a good job, but not yet registering big gains in the polls.
Have the voters deserted the Conservatives forever? Farage has welcomed a number of senior Tory defectors into Reform, and this has slightly reduced his outsider appeal and greatly increased the credibility of Reform as potentially a party of government.
Barnaby Joyce joining One Nation is a similar, though weaker, manifestation of the same dynamic.
Britain will muddle through, but what a mess. Mind you, the 1970s did give us Fawlty Towers.
Greg Sheridan is The Australian’s foreign editor
Please, a little 'toon balance...
The pond suspects that in a month or a year's time the reptiles will still be in the throes of their budget jihad, and the pond is pleased to be shod of it...
And so to the mother of all budget bashers, the old biddy herself ...
The header: Effects of budget shemozzle likely to get worse for Labor; It’s one thing to break a promise delivered 50 times; it’s another thing altogether to deliver a set of policies that can best be described as bungled.
The caption? None, and no credit for the crappy collage, because the graphic is as familiar and as aged as a pair of lizard Oz slippers.
Dame Groan spent a bigly four minutes ranting and railing in a way designed to produce a warm glow in her cult following:
Replete with high compliance costs and unintended consequences, the budget announcements demonstrate both the ineffectiveness and naivety of Treasury to provide advice of an adequate standard. It’s already a shemozzle and it’s likely to get worse in the coming weeks as the flaws and inconsistencies of the announced policy changes emerge.
Rather than representing some sort of gift to the younger generation, the way in which the changes will be grandfathered confers an ongoing gift on anyone who has negatively geared property or a testamentary trust, to give two examples, that will not be available to newcomers.
This facet of the policy may create a lock-in effect whereby those with negatively geared properties simply hold on to them and re-leverage over time. But because of the new capital gains tax arrangements, there will be a strong disincentive to improve the property lest the gains be eaten up in tax. While both Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers talk about improving the rate of home ownership for young people – “getting a fair crack” and all that – the CGT changes apply to all asset classes. You can just imagine the Treasury officials warning about uneven treatment of asset classes.
This is notwithstanding the acknowledgment by the Treasurer that the simple 50 per cent discount method being replaced favours property over shares. But by lumping them into the same method going forward, clear biases remain – particularly against high-growth assets held over relatively short periods of time. Let’s be clear here: what is being proposed is not a return to the Keating system of indexation. Under that arrangement, there was no 30 per cent minimum tax. Moreover, capital gains could be averaged over five years. What was announced in the budget is another beast altogether. It will also be costly to administer.
Of course there had to be a snap of the chief villain: Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen/Courier Mail
It was classic "we'll all be rooned, and well before Xmas" territory for the old groaner, as she contemplated the dire suffering of the rich:
The fact neither the Treasurer nor Treasury understand the role trusts play in the commercial world has been on full display. Many small businesses are set up as trusts, often in association with bucket companies, because this is the most effective and least costly arrangement for them. There are several reasons for this choice, including asset protection as well as managing tax. But evidently Treasury thinks it knows better.
There is a section in the budget papers that comes close to providing commercial advice to business owners, telling them companies are better than trusts. There is no acknowledgment of the hefty costs associated with restructuring, including the payment of stamp duty to state governments. This impost alone will deter many business owners from considering any change.
There is also the complication of franking credits, which arguably was the issue that determined the outcome of the 2019 election. Where a bucket company is attached to a discretionary trust, the franking credits will not be transferable, implying very high rates of effective tax. This may become an issue the government has to deal with. And why would Chalmers opt to include discretionary testamentary trusts within the scope of the new taxation arrangements for trusts? Again, this is completely bizarre.
These trusts are incorporated in wills often to protect young children in the unhappy event of both parents dying at the same time. They are also a form of asset protection to ensure disgruntled creditors or ex-partners cannot access the proceeds of an estate. As for noting that fixed testamentary trusts will not be affected, this advice is again naive in the extreme. Fixed trusts are, by definition, inflexible and unable to accommodate changing circumstances, and are rarely used.
Trust the pond, the pond's trust is suffering almighty.
Is there a timetable for things to get better?
The pond can't imagine Dame Groan following that prescription, not when there's groaning to be done:
The reality is that investment in new apartments in Melbourne and Sydney over recent years have been complete duds. The capital gains have been minimal – 10 times less than the capital growth of stand-alone houses – and many new apartments have defects that must be remedied, often at the expense of the owner. There are also significant problems with the body corporate arrangements a new owner has to deal with.
Of course, anyone who understands basic economics could have predicted this outcome.
A great deal of the gains from investment in property is the return on the land on which it is built. In the case of apartments, there is very little land and there are often few restrictions on new apartment buildings being built close by. It’s a case of buyer beware when it comes to buying new housing stock, something not being mentioned by the government. Evidently, negatively geared owners of new residential real estate will feel a warm inner glow because they are doing something for the nation. It just won’t show up in personal bank statements.
The government is also on thin ground when it boasts about the uptick in home ownership predicted to result from the tax changes – 75,000 over a decade. That’s a mere 7500 a year, which hardly shifts the dial for what is a major shake-up of tax arrangements.
There is also only one direction for rents – and that’s up. The fact is universal negative gearing effectively subsidises renters by shifting some of the costs on to the taxpayer. This impact will be largely lost with the changes, save for new properties and grandfathered investments. There is a lot of water to go under the bridge. The fiasco of the 2014 budget played out over time; this is likely to be repeated in this case. The government will have to tweak several of the settings in response to the information it is given and the likely perverse outcomes.
In the meantime, the only sure winners are accountants, lawyers and valuers.
Is there any upside?
Well for once Dame Groan identified some winners, though surely she should have included herself and the rest of the reptile jihadists and the lizard Oz as a sure winner.
Endless columns are now guaranteed, much shrieking, moaning and whining and groaning about budget chaos, and well beyond Xmas, with Dame Groan's "we'll all be rooned" taken up by the rest of the reptile jihadists, her gracious legacy to all...
And that, preserved in gelatinous aspic and the dubious functioning of the intermittent archive, is the reptiles this day, and it will have to serve as a placeholder for anyone turning up to marvel at this weird blog... and the even weirder world of the lizard Oz hive mind.
All that remains to do is to wish everyone well, and turn to the immortal Rowe - alas too early in the week for the infallible Pope to join him - for a farewell 'toon ...
Why they can play that game up until Halloween ...
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