In which the pond ducks a few reptiles, but gets stuck with the bromancer brooding about mad King Donald, the Ughmann going full tyke, and nattering "Ned" offering "the judgement" ...

 

Sheesh, the reptiles are still waging a budget jihad, and with yet another wretched uncredited (AI?) collage as the centrepiece...

That's just the "top of the digital edition world, ma" stuff. 

There were seemingly endless reams more down the page, oodles of jihad, and the pond felt a deep weariness settle in like a yellow London fog in an Eliot poem.

A budget's just a bunch of assumptions and projections, and who knows what black swan will flutter in to change the given circumstances down the line, and yet the reptiles continue in their jihad to treat it as some kind of apocalypse.

Perhaps it was the pond being made to spend time with Sir Lewis Namier in the name of economic history (don't mention Poland or Zionism) that gave the pond a jaundiced introduction to the dismal "science", but the pond immediately turned to the bromancer to be rescued from the budget jihad ... as he wrestled for the umpteenth time with the legacy of his kissing American cousins ... mad King Donald ...

The header: Xi Jinping outplays weakened Donald Trump in Beijing; While Trump hunts for a PR win to save his midterms, Xi soaks up the flattery but ruthlessly pursues Beijing’s strategic interests.

There's no caption for the uncredited collage (AI?) which is just as well, because any human responsible for that surreal image should be shot out of hand.

Second thoughts, it's weirdly on song, as weird as the demented Donald himself, space walking through the decline and fall of the American empire.

As for the poor bromancer's mood, not helped by his war with China receding ever more, he was sounding decidedly jaundiced ...

The visit by Donald Trump and the leading figures in his cabinet to Beijing involves, notionally, a giant political and strategic play by the US President.
Trump could be attempting a complex double play with China, and especially its baleful President, Xi Jinping. Trump wants to weaken China by removing its access to Venezuelan and Iranian oil.
At the same time, Trump’s trying to reset relations with Beijing, to recruit China to the project of Making America Great Again, and to co-operating with Washington in reviving the US economy, and getting a deal Trump can live with in Iran. To that end, Trump en­gages in quite nauseating flattery of Xi, repeatedly describing him as “a great leader”, someone Trump is privileged to call a friend.
That’s the highfalutin’ interpretation. Is it real?
Here’s a more plausible interpretation: Trump has got himself into a mess in Iran and desperately needs a good news international story. Trump’s China foray is thus similar to Anthony Albanese’s “stabilisation” of relations with Beijing, as Albanese’s major foreign policy achievement.

The pond has just the cartoon for that ...

The reptiles preferred this snap ... Donald Trump walks with Xi Jinping at the Zhongnanhai leadership compound. Picture: AP

The bromancer is definitely on the turn; clearly mad King Donald isn't meeting his expectations ...

From Xi’s point of view, the summit represented Trump coming to heel. Trump said, preposterously, that Xi told him: “If I can be of any help at all (regarding Iran), I’d like to help.” Trump further said: “He (Xi) said he’s not going to provide Iran any military equipment.” Trump declared repeatedly that China has been overall “very good” on Iran.
This flies in the face of reality and simply doesn’t make sense. It seems to be Trump simply describing whatever reality suits his momentary rhetorical purpose.
Beijing not only provides Iran with continuing diplomatic cover at the UN, before the conflict it provided Iran with weapons. During the conflict it has furnished Iran dual-use technology that can be used as weapons. It has given Iran targeting information enabling strikes on US bases and Gulf Arab energy infrastructure. Beijing continues to buy Iranian oil. Days ago Beijing’s Commerce Ministry invoked a Chinese law compelling Chinese entities to flout US sanctions on Iran. To serve his domestic purposes, Trump, for the moment, ignores all this.

Lest the hive mind get too despondent at this turn in the bromancer's analysis, the reptiles flung in a "Victory" sign up there with that infamous one featuring George W. Bush: Xi Jinping offered China’s help to reopen the Strait of Hormuz during high-stakes talks with Donald Trump in Beijing. Trump said Xi signalled strong support for keeping the vital shipping route open amid the Iran crisis. The breakthrough marks a major diplomatic moment as Washington pushes global powers to pressure Tehran. China is one of the world’s biggest buyers of Iranian oil and holds major leverage over the regime. Trump has repeatedly warned Iran it cannot be allowed to choke off one of the world’s key energy routes.

If there's a Hormuz victory, it must not have made the bromancer's nuze:

China is inconvenienced by the interruption of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. But it’s much more a coal economy than an oil economy. It’s delighted to see Washington bogged down in Iran, thrilled to witness the depletion of US weapons stocks. It can see Trump’s historical low approval ratings, can see the Republicans facing devastation in November’s midterm congressional elections, and that the Iran war is immensely unpopular in America.
Beijing is happy to face a weakened president. It is still scared of America, scared of the American system. It’s no longer scared of Trump, who doesn’t carry out his threats, just as most deals he makes are only temporary.
In any event, Xi’s priority was Taiwan. Xi told Trump that Taiwan is the single most important issue in US-China relations. If it’s not managed well, by which Xi means the US moving towards Beijing’s policy that it will ultim­ately take control of Taiwan, it could lead to conflict and clashes between the two superpowers.
Trump secured some trade deals – China buying more Boeing jets etc. That’s why he brought such a senior delegation of chief executives, representing trillions of dollars of wealth. These deals are meant to reassure Americans of a bright economic future.
Some will amount to something. But the trade deals Trump announced with China, with great fanfare, in his first term, were never implemented.
The Chinese have internalised a key lesson in managing Trump. What he craves, what he gives concessions to receive, is the big, PR, announceable moment when he can be feted as delivering a uniquely fabulous deal. Implementation is unimportant. Trump’s messaging caravan moves on quickly.

Truth to tell, the gloomier the bromancer sounds, the more light-hearted the world seems to the pond, the more the pond could start the day with a cheery "hello world", as the reptiles flung in another AV distraction, with one of those astonishing framings that only reptile AI can manage: Yoni Bashan wraps up a busy day in Beijing where Trump is making his first state visit since 2017.

Belatedly,  the bromancer got around to that Thucydides trap reference which had been studiously ignored by the reptiles when it mattered ...

Xi notably called on Beijing and Washington to avoid the Thucydides trap. This refers to ancient Sparta’s concern at the rise of Athens that led, according to historian Thucydides, to unnecessary and devastating war. Xi loves this formulation as it casts China as the rising power – the Athens of its day – and the US as the paranoid, declining Sparta.
Trump even praised this, saying that Xi’s “elegant” reference to US decline referred only to the years when Joe Biden was president and was completely accurate.
For Trump to say China has been very good over Iran is frankly bizarre, especially given Beijing’s order that its companies must not comply with US sanctions.
That’s the substance, not the show. If Trump was in the anti-Beijing mood of his first term, this would be exhibit No.1 of Beijing’s perfidy. His rusted-on supporters would argue that Trump then had every justification to respond aggressively. But the Chinese increasingly feel they have Trump’s measure.
They will go to some trouble to keep the surface niceties nice. Trump and Xi are slated to meet four times this year. Apart from Beijing, they will meet at G7 and APEC summits, and Trump has invited Xi to visit the White House in September.
All this involves, from Trump at least, a seeming radical reversal of US strategic policy. In 2017 Trump issued a National Defence Strategy that elevated long-term strategic competition with China to the centrepiece of US policy.
This didn’t emanate from gratuitous nastiness in Washington. Beijing was engaged in the biggest military build-up since World War II, was expanding its nuclear weapons arsenal (now more than 600) at prodigious speed.

The reptiles flung in a final distraction, fortunately only a screen cap here ...

The bromancer then went into litany mode, outlining all his grievances, all the reasons there should have been a war with China by Xmas ...

It illegally occupied and militarised the South China Sea, conducted the biggest and most sustained cyber intrusions into US government and corporations, greatly strengthened a slew of US adversaries including Russia, Iran and North Korea.
Through cyber and other espionage, it stole hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of intellectual property from US government and corporations; it savagely repres­sed human rights internally, including a comprehensive elim­ination of religious freedom; it intimidated Chinese diaspora commun­ities; mobilised other nations to oppose US interests; had historically been involved in nuclear weapons proliferation; routinely cheated international trade rules; and constantly threatened the use of force against Taiwan.

And how did King Donald do when confronted by this litany? Not well...

Trump wanted to cut the US trade deficit with China, outmatch it militarily, restore manufacturing in strategic industries to the US, eliminate China from sensitive US and Western supply chains. Early in his second term Trump looked to be accelerating this approach. Last year, amid fiery rhetoric, he imposed tariffs of more than 100 per cent on China.
But Beijing discovered the perfect response. It stopped the export of rare earths and critical minerals to the US. This brought Washington to heel. Trump quickly organised a trade truce with Beijing and has never repeated his old threats. The 2026 US National Defence Strategy radically de-escalated strategic competition and focused instead on US supremacy in Latin America.
This was all designed, Washington sources suggest, to produce for Trump a glittering summit with Xi. At its face, it seems to be a huge strategic pivot.
But in fact Trump’s power is already ebbing. The next presidential election is less than 2½ years away. There’s no sign of any change in the hawkish US consensus, across congress and the public, on China, except in Trump’s own head.
Of course while in office he’s powerful. But Trump now perversely sits outside the strategic framework he himself helped create. Secretary of State Marco Rubio constantly reaffirms the continuity of US strategic policy.
It’s also the case that Trump has got exactly nothing from his serial infatuations with Stalinist dictators – nothing from Vladimir Putin, nothing from Kim Jong-un and nothing of substance from Xi. Naturally it’s good that US and Chinese presidents talk to each other. But this strange summit may turn out to have been one of the great diplomatic nothing burgers of our time. Of course, it could have been much worse.
Greg Sheridan is The Australian’s foreign editor.

A nothing burger with the only upside that it could have been much worse?

Take it easy bromancer, mad King Donald is busy preparing a fleet which will easily win your war with China ...

As for the rest of the reptile rabble, the pond immediately passed over Dame Slap...

...and consigned her to the intermittent archive ...

‘I was one of the lucky ones’: why being adopted was the greatest gift of my life
Our child welfare system has turned adoption into something unfashionable and rare, but as the chosen child of Danish migrants, my life is proof of the boundless love adoption can create.
By Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist

That outing might have some interest for those with a morbid interest in why Dame Slap has turned out the way she is, but the pond had been triggered earlier in the week when it came across this in The Atlantic ...

The Men Who Want Women to Be Quiet; A virulent form of misogyny has become the single most important force holding together the American right. (*intermittent archive link)
By Helen Lewis

This was what set the pond to brooding ...

A refrain I kept hearing over the past few years was that boys were being made to feel ashamed of themselves, as if they were stained by some kind of original sin. These years have seen a counterreaction, with the total abandonment of the #MeToo movement, conservative gloating over the fall of Roe v. Wade, and the return of straightforwardly sexist put-downs—“Quiet, piggy”—to public life.

The header should really be "the women who want women to be quiet" to fit Dame Slap, what with her incessant bashing of women who stick their heads above the parapet, not to mention her meddling in court matters or he routine bashing of difficult, uppity blacks ...

...Yenor’s suggestion that feminism—with its attendant horrors of work outside the home, birth control, and financial independence—has made women neurotic and dependent on pharmaceuticals is now an article of faith on the right. Anonymous online posters frequently bring up data suggesting that liberal women are most likely to report suffering from anxiety. But to attribute female unhappiness to feminism seems wildly ahistorical. Have these people never read, say, The Feminine Mystique, which exhaustively cataloged the despair of mid-century stay-at-home mothers? (“Many suburban housewives were taking tranquilizers like cough drops,” the author, Betty Friedan, wrote.) Across the manosphere, however, young people are told that before feminism ruined everything, women used to be cherished and pampered by their husbands. Now women are supposedly subsidized by government handouts or earning six figures in pointless “email jobs.” In the masculinist paradigm, every woman does HR for cats and every man is a plumber or merchant seaman.

While ostensibly it's about the manosphere, it happens to fit Dame Slap to a T.

She's never really been able to reconcile her donning of mad King Donald's cap with her attempts at sounding human, and she's never attempted to reconcile her desire to shut other women up, while refusing herself to retreat into the silence of being a domestic homebody supporting her man.

While the pond was at it, there was another reptile best left on the intermittent archive shelf this day ... cackling Claire, also busy on the personal reminiscences front ...

I grew up Labor. Now I see the real inequity. It’s not intergenerational
Claire Lehmann saw first-hand a bloated bureaucracy that ‘throws money down the toilet’. The budget confirmed productive workers continue to feed an uncontrollable public service beast.
By Claire Lehmann
Contributor

Why do all these reptiles sound so traumatised?

Sheesh, all these personal reveals, and the cries of "oh, the humanity", as if the private sector is anything to write home about ...

But cackling Claire was small fry up against the Ughmann's offering ...

The header: From monks to ministers, the politics of broken promises; The PM’s backflip on pledges on negative gearing and capital gains tax are exactly what he pilloried Tony Abbott for in 2014. It’s a fresh blow in the politics of broken promises.

Again no credit (AI?) for the truly pathetic collage with wrecking ball, an image that suggests the lizard Oz graphics department has been handed over to the bots, and is the worse for it ...

The Ughmann offered a full furious seven minutes of fulminations, and the pond couldn't go past it, because while it was ostensibly about the budget, it was actually deeply weird.

Those who never experienced Catholicism growing up can't really understand exactly how deeply it can fry impressionable brains.

The unreformed seminarian gives a terrifying insight into the consequences...

It was a sweltering February in 1981 and a group of students from a variety of Catholic religious communities was wrestling with the bewildering matrix of various schools of Christian morality.
The topic of the moral theology tutorial that day was the book Honest to God, written by Church of England bishop and New Testament scholar John Robinson. The book had caused something of a sensation when it was first published in 1963 and went on to sell more than a million copies, as the faithful warmed to Robinson’s recasting of Christianity for the modern world.
But, as Catholics studying to be priests, brothers and sisters/nuns (there is a difference but it’s complex), we knew our task that day would be brutally analytical. Our professor, a diminutive priest with a towering intellect, would expect us to pick the carcass of these flaccid Protestant arguments clean to the bone.
There was one problem. A few of the students really liked the book.
Thinking of that classroom now is to step into a different century and an all but vanished world. The Catholic Theological Union where we were students was part of the Marist Fathers seminary in Sydney’s Hunters Hill. Sandstone buildings are sprayed across 3ha surrounding the neo-gothic church of Villa Maria. The church was consecrated in 1871 but the site has been the Australian headquarters of the French-born society of priests for 179 years. The remnant is still there today.
Gathered in one of the sandstone buildings that morning were young men and women dressed in garb drawn from a collision of centuries. We had two of the three varieties of Franciscans, the Capuchins and the Conventuals. This order began to fracture 700 years ago in a furious feud over how strictly to interpret the teaching of their founder, St Francis. The Capuchins were hardcore on poverty. The Conventuals were less inclined to sleep in the wilderness and talk to animals.
Their contrasting charisms were etched in their habits. The Capuchin vibe is easy for a modern audience to conjure because it screams central casting monk and was plagiarised by George Lucas to add a spiritual veneer to his Jedi knight costume. It is a single piece of rough, dun brown wool with a distinctive pointed hood that hangs down the back when not worn over the head. It is cinched at the waist with a white cord bearing three knots representing the wearer’s vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. All the Capuchins wore sandals and we speculated that underwear was probably optional. Or maybe seasonal.

That should immediately rule out the Ughmann commenting on the budget or pretty much anything else. 

Clearly he was driven insane at an early age, and never recovered, and yet he insists on revealing even more ...

The rocket nuns and the Star Wars bar
The Conventuals sported an ash-grey habit that looked as if it had been tailored by Giorgio Armani. The two groups of monks still viewed each other with suspicion.
There were a handful of sisters from various congregations in the class. One was the rare breed of black Josephite, another a Dominican. Both communities had moved with the times and updated their traditional austere and elaborate habits to a simple tunic and the Dominican had ditched the veil. There were two other women from an obscure society that clung to the old-world gear, which covered them from head to toe. The only exposed flesh was an oval of their face, framed like a portrait bordered by a stark white wimple. Their community’s name now eludes me but we called them rocket nuns and imagined them being launched like missiles into heaven.
The only uniform the Marist students wore was black pants and a white shirt, so we looked pretty much like waiters in the Star Wars bar scene. Anyway, I digress.
Before the tutorial on Honest to God, one of the Conventual Franciscans confessed he found Robinson’s update on Christian morality pretty compelling. The bishop had embraced situation ethics, which argued that deciding what’s right or wrong depends on the circumstances of each situation. Rather than following fixed rules, the goal was to choose the most loving or beneficial action for everyone.
Malleable morality
“Actions once considered wrong or sinful (such as sex before marriage) are not necessarily so once love becomes the standard that renders moral laws irrelevant,” Robinson wrote.
Here I began to appreciate why the Capuchins had a centuries-long beef with their lax Conventual cousins. While agreeing with the idea that just about all Christian denominations were too hung up on sex, it struck me then, as now, that this malleable morality could be used to justify just about anything. And is it any surprise that, as these ideas took hold, droves of the Anglican faithful found they had no use for the Church of England any more and walked out the door to join the serried ranks of godless Protestants that preach in today’s public square?
In the class that day students were reminded that traditional Catholic morality holds right and wrong are objective truths set by God, knowable through reason and revelation and not negotiable based on circumstances or personal judgment. And you should do the right thing for the right reason.

Eventually the Ughmann has to get to some sort of point, but having established how deeply weird his upbringing was, the attempt only compounds the weirdness ...

But in a secular society, no moral code binds everyone. So, in trying to assess the actions of politicians this column follows a simple rule: in a subjective world, the only objective test of conduct is whether politicians live by their own words and the standards they impose on others.
What a politician says should bind them, but it is an imperfect world, people make honest mistakes and circumstances change. If a course correction is needed politicians should admit they were wrong and explain why. If they propose radical revisions to policies with far-reaching effects then they should take the plan to an election, argue their case and let the people decide.

Of all the people to drag into this tyke morality tale ... Federal Treasurer Joe Hockey arrives at the dispatch box flanked by Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss, Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, Minister for Education Christopher Pyne, far right to deliver the 2015-16 Federal Budget. Picture: AAP

Confiteor Deo omnipotenti ...Peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo, opere et omissione 

Working for the ABC in 2014, I was scathing of the Coalition’s first budget because, I believed, it breached Tony Abbott’s election pledge: “No cuts to education, no cuts to health, no change to pensions, no change to the GST and no cuts to the ABC or SBS.”
How Abbott’s words were weaponised
That article speculated Abbott and his treasurer, Joe Hockey, would have a tough job persuading the public it shouldn’t dwell “on the awkward disconnect between today’s blunt prose and the election campaign’s poetic licence”.
Ministers argued “the most solemn promise we made was to fix the budget”. But this glossed over something Abbott had identified as the defining sin of the Rudd-Gillard era. In his campaign launch speech, he said: “The worst deficit is not the budget deficit but the trust deficit. This election is about trust.”
That column pointed out that, having set that standard, the Coalition would face a war on two fronts: defending the budget’s tough choices; and dealing with a sharp rise in the trust deficit.
The 2014 budget did Abbott permanent damage because his own words were weaponised by the opposition.
In a fiery speech to parliament in the wake of that budget, Labor’s Anthony Albanese listed the breaches of faith and added: “Rubbing salt into the wounds, (Abbott) has since insulted the electorate’s intelligence with Monty Python-esque claims that he hasn’t broken any promises.”

At this point the reptiles introduced the chief villains yet again ... Jim Chalemrs, left, (sic) and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese have cloaked their backflip as justified for the greater good. Picture: New Corp

And this is where the Ughmann gets truly weird.

The pond almost began to expect a learned treatise on the differences between venial and mortal sins (venial sins don't cut the soul's connection to a tyke's imaginary overlord, but if not repented, might lead to more serious sins).

Yes, we're in that sort of weird turf ...distilled essence of tyke humbug ...

A decade on, how are we to judge the chasm between the words and deeds of Prime Minister Albanese and his Treasurer, Jim Chalmers?
Before the election, Albanese promised no changes to negative gearing or capital gains tax. He grew irritated at having to repeat his rote denials. The 2025 budget breaks faith on both. The justification? It’s for the greater good: more housing, more affordable homes, a better future for the young.
This claim comes laced with the language of morality. There is no lie, no breach of faith, because the circumstances have changed and the common good demands it. This is a textbook application of situation ethics. The right action is whatever produces the most loving outcome, regardless of the promises broken along the way.
Lying dressed as virtue
When lying comes dressed as virtue we stand on dangerous ground. But virtue and vice in politics are now measured only by which side you back and whose lies you excuse.
The government clearly believes it will sail through this debate because it faces a dysfunctional opposition. The real risks lie in how the public views the policy shift and the movable feast of political morality.
What if young people don’t buy the core argument that the changes will deliver intergenerational equity? The Prime Minister and 19 of his cabinet ministers built their own wealth on property portfolios. They now have slammed the door behind them. They could end up looking less like Robin Hood than the Sheriff of Nottingham in a progressive habit.
What if rents rise, property prices fail to fall and investment evaporates? There is plenty of time between now and the next election for these things to be judged against outcomes. What will the excuse be then?
And even Robinson would take issue with the government’s moral argument if its motivations were not pure. What if Labor is simply wagering that the optics of taking from older property owners and giving to the young will bear electoral fruit?
What if the sum total is simply this: another brick removed from the foundation of trust, another reason to believe our political institutions care more about power than people, more about winning than truth?
The church I grew up in suffered profound damage when its priests and bishops betrayed the trust of the faithful. The throngs that once filled pews have gone. That loss of faith now extends to all institutions. In politics it can be measured in the collapse of the primary vote of the major parties.
Politicians, it seems, learn as slowly as bishops. Both major parties have now discovered the easy virtue of situation ethics. And the electorate, in turn, has grown weary of elastic moralising.

Oh FFS, what an epic waste of time ...won't someone give the ponce a dollop or two of Machiavelli ...

Could it get any worse?

Of course it could ...

The header: Labor and Coalition policy divergence signals the most decisive tax battle for decades; Labor abandons its promises, with sweeping tax reform targeting assets, while the Coalition fights back with radical policy changes.

The caption for the uncredited (AI?) collage, though why the reptiles bothered with labelling the visual inanity is anyone's guess: Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers have made an equity pitch to win younger voters while opposition Treasury spokesman Tim Wilson and leader Angus Taylor lay the foundations for a new centre-right political agenda.

The pond simply couldn't escape the budget, what with "Ned" nattering for a bigly ten minutes, thereby making this one of the dullest, most tedious Everest climbs the pond has encountered in recent times.

There was nothing for it but to set out from base camp, hoping not to pass out from an oxygen shortage too early.

"Ned" cranked the apocalyptic tone into top gear from the get go:

A revolution is coming to our national politics – a battle over conviction. That is the real meaning of a transforming budget week. The trajectory is set for the next election, dominated by a policy, philosophical and aspirational contest over taxation, the result guaranteed to shape Australian values and life.
In his Thursday budget reply, Angus Taylor acted on the irresistible logic of his party’s existential crisis – he went bold, offering a sustained alternative to Labor’s tax, economic, migration and intergenerational policies.

Perhaps realising the way that "Ned" sounded in an incredibly silly apocalyptic mood, up there with the worst of his Chicken Little carry-ons, the reptiles immediately offered a couple of predictable visual distractions: Angus Taylor opposes Labor’s centrepiece of increased taxes on assets. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman;Jim Chalmers’ budget offered a better-targeted method for income tax relief. Picture: Martin Ollman/NewsWire

Then "Ned" went into full ponderous, portentous mode ...

This followed what Jim Chalmers called his most important and ambitious budget. Take the Treasurer at his word. He brought down a budget that increased taxes on assets, rebalanced tax between income and assets, and offered a better-targeted method for income tax relief – enshrined with a generational impulse in favour of the 25 to 45 years voting cohort.
This looms as the most decisive tax battle for decades. Taylor opposes Labor’s centrepiece of increased taxes on assets while exceeding Labor with higher gains for income earners by indexation of personal income tax rate scale over four years, a reform to eliminate the tax “steal” and protect income earners from inflation. Chalmers, in turn, spurns tax indexation as a remedy.
The era of Labor and Coalition duplicating each other is finished. Ideological conflict and disputes over values are returning to our politics. They will dominate for the rest of this term leading to the election. That’s a good thing – bringing sharp policy disputes to the table between parties that seek to govern the country.
Both sides are marching to this showdown with conviction, sure of the electoral pull of their offerings. Yet their positions are vastly different. Anthony Albanese and Chalmers operate from strength, ready to repudiate past election promises, confident they will prevail and resetting Labor policies for the 2028 election with a heavy emphasis on equity.

Those familiar with "Ned" will already know where this climb is heading ... a pompous judgment on the chief villain, caught in a pose beloved by the reptiles ... Anthony Albanese during question time on Wednesday. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

"Ned"tries to start off in classic "both siderist" vein, but it's easy to spot the thumb's on the scales already ...

The Opposition Leader, by contrast, engages in a high-risk effort to lay the foundations for a new centre-right political agenda, going with a blend of radical policy and populist appeal, striving to win back One Nation voters, challenging Labor on core beliefs and, above all, aspiring to see the Coalition resume command of the centre-right of politics – the only hope for Liberal Party revival.
This is a Labor-Coalition fight over many issues – equity, personal tax, investments, assets, generational support, housing and energy. Chalmers has defined his mantra: “We’ve delivering a fairer tax system for workers – this will help rebalance a system which is more generous to assets than it is to labour.” In reply Taylor identified his core goals: “Just as I want more investment in Australia, I want Australians to keep more of their income.”
Two decisive events occurred this week. Albanese and Chalmers abandoned their mask of caution, invoked Labor’s faiths and embraced tax redistribution in a partial resurrection of Bill Shorten’s losing agenda from 2019 – while Taylor, confronting a survival crisis for himself and his party, pledged genuine tax reform, structural changes to immigration leading to a much lower intake, radical surgery on energy policy, an assault on welfare to non-citizens, and a series of pro-investment reforms.
The policy contest over tax is focused on three areas – a sharp conflict over the tax treatment of all assets, a dispute over the best method of income tax relief, and differences over how to deliver intergenerational fairness.
In the related conflict over the housing market, Taylor breaks from history to tie migration to housing construction, a solution repudiated by Labor that continues to overshoot its net overseas migration numbers.
The philosophical contest is sharp – while Labor seeks to rebalance taxes between assets and income in the cause of equity, the Coalition prioritises lower taxes on the investment class in the cause of higher productivity and economic growth.
Taylor has given Labor plenty of targets to hit. Albanese and Chalmers will oblige, but Taylor had no choice. Playing safe is no option in this crisis. Both Taylor and Nationals leader Matt Canavan know this. The real significance of Taylor’s speech lies elsewhere – it shows the extent of poor policy and political vulnerabilities embedded in the utterly dominant Albanese government, the paradox of our age.
Whether the centre-right of politics is capable of uniting behind the Taylor agenda looms as the decisive issue. It may be too much to expect. If the Pauline Hanson brigade of influencers and media backers dump on Taylor and persist with the fabrications that he lacks conviction or is too close to Labor, then the Liberals are probably doomed as a party and Albanese will remain politically ascendant.

Ah, so it's all the fault of Pauline ...

The reptiles preferred a different visual distraction, one of those meaningless stock images of nothing much ... The return to surplus in a decade depends almost entirely on NDIS savings. Picture: NewsWire / Brenton Edwards

At this point, the real "Ned" emerges to parrot the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way ...

Taylor’s pitch is to household affordability, business activity and cultural tradition. He accuses Labor of dividing the country and the generations but Taylor has his own method of division – between citizens and non-citizens.
He pledges to repeal Labor’s asset tax rises, warns against big government, offers a $50,000 annual instant write-off for small business, promises a Future Generations Fund and signals a sustained attack on net-zero policies and subsidies.
But Taylor’s attack on Labor for “funding welfare for non-citizens as soon as they arrive” in the country is a double-edged political sword. He pledges to reserve the National Disability Insurance Scheme and 17 welfare programs – including JobSeeker, Youth Allowance and Family Tax Benefit – for Australians. While saving “taxpayer billions”, this stand will provoke a backlash and send more traumas through migrant communities. What are the full consequences of this pledge in financial and electoral terms?
Taylor’s centrepiece, the Tax Back Guarantee, involves indexing the bottom two tax thresholds from 2028-29, thereby protecting 85 per cent of income earners with relief of $250 in year one growing to more than $1000 in year four. From 2031-32 the top two tax brackets will be indexed.
This is a $22bn pledge across four years to trump Chalmers’ budget initiative, the $250 annual Working Australians Tax Offset, a new method of offering personal tax relief that goes only to working income earners. Chalmers signalled he intends to offer more tax support to combat bracket creep, presumably before the 2028 election, using this method.

Just to ram "Ned's" point home, note the tone of the caption for the next AV distraction, Opposition Leader Angus Taylor outlines a vision for a “freer and fairer” Australia for all in his budget reply speech.

On and on "Ned" channeled the beefy boofhead, while souring on Jimbo ...

“It will force government to respect your money,” Taylor said of indexation. Yet it is expensive for the budget and before the next election Taylor will need to demonstrate how he finances the commitment. But indexation has another huge consequence – it puts a brake on government spending and imposes a tight discipline on governments because it denies them the hidden gift of automatic extra revenue via bracket creep. But here’s another warning – it needs to be marketed effectively, otherwise people miss the point.
The immediate hip-pocket advantage Taylor enjoys is that bracket creep eats up much of Labor’s tax offset.
While Chalmers in his National Press Club speech pledged to “to return more of this bracket creep” in future, Taylor’s policy does this job in advance. At this point it is obviously far superior.
With this budget Chalmers has put a defining stamp on Labor’s economic policy. In many ways it is the budget he has longed to deliver; just witness his remarks on its ambition. It is a clarion call to Labor’s True Believers and it reveals Labor’s vision for the nation, both what it has done and failed to do.
The budget remakes negative gearing, limits the concession to new builds from July 2027 but existing investors will be protected. The Howard government 50 per cent discount on capital gains for individuals, partnerships and trusts will be abolished from July 2027, replaced by an inflation indexation system, the aim being to tax “real capital gains”. There will be partial grandfathering for asset holders. Investors as individuals, trusts and partnerships will face a minimum 30 per cent tax on real capital gains. There is a strong economic rationalist and equity justification for these reforms. Treasury offers a long analysis that the current model contributes to higher house prices, favours the top 10 per cent of earners and doesn’t tax “real capital gains”.

Then came another snap illustrating three fifths of nothing ... Treasury expects its reforms will have a major impact on the 10-year decline in home ownership. Picture: John Appleyard

"Ned" carried on in Chicken Little apocalypse mode ...

But the philosophical heart of the tax changes lies in Chalmers’ declaration that the purpose is to “rebalance a system which is more generous to assets than it is to labour”. What comes next in this rebalancing ideology? Albanese praised the budget, saying the result was a system “fairer in the way it treats income from assets and income from labour”.
Taylor and opposition Treasury spokesman Tim Wilson will launch a political campaign around this philosophy. They will promote the alternative Liberal model – saying that ordinary Australians aspire to gain assets as well as income, that investment must be taxed more lightly than income because investment is the engine of innovation, entrepreneurship, aspiration and productivity.
The Liberals see the impact of the changes – making Australia one of the highest capital gains tax regimes in the world – as a negative, not a desirable outcome. They will exploit the fact that the budget resembles Bill Shorten’s 2019 election policy, apart from the franking credits issue, that cost Labor the election. Albanese and Chalmers believe the nation has moved on and is more receptive to this type of tax package but wisely shun Shorten’s class warfare selling pitch from seven years ago.
For Chalmers there is no escape from the medium-term narrative in the budget – over 10 years it raises extra taxes of $77bn, an irrefutable judgment on Labor’s values. At the same time Labor engages in one of the great fiscal gambles in our history by investing the NDIS with an entirely extra purpose – it has become the mainstay of Labor’s budget savings across the decade.
Indeed, on these numbers the return to surplus in a decade depends almost entirely on NDIS savings. These savings are gigantic, reaching $184.9bn out to 2036-37 (yes, there’re savings) with NDIS growth estimated to average only 2 per cent across the forward estimates. This task verges on the improbable. If the savings aren’t delivered, fiscal policy doesn’t work.
Chalmers is correctly proud that the budget shows the return to surplus involves savings from spending restraint running three times as much as savings from higher tax. All good, but wait on – again that’s because of NDIS savings with their sheer improbability.

Another snap of the leading villains... Anthony Albanese flanked by Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Finance Minister Katy Gallagher at Parliament House in Canberra on Monday. Picture: Martin Ollman / NewsWire

"Ned" was, pace the Ughmann, gathering himself in a way that would allow him to pass judgment like an Old Testament prophet ... with talk of hubris as one of many sins ...

An outstanding feature of the week was the way Albanese and Chalmers readily agreed, indeed boasted, they had changed their policies (though never conceding their broken promises) not to impose new taxes on capital gains and negative gearing.
Their hubris is unmistakeable. Past election promises are in ruins. But no matter because, as Albanese told ABC 7.30, “we couldn’t sit back and continue to watch young people being frozen out of the housing market”. The Prime Minister poses as champion of “the Australian dream of home ownership”, especially for younger people. Chalmers said Labor couldn’t “leave a broken status quo in place”. But Labor has incurred a trust deficit. In the first term it broke its promise about not changing the stage three personal income tax cuts inherited from the Coalition; now in the second term it breaks its promises about not changing the CGT and negative gearing.
Albanese already faces the problem of denying further tax changes next term, for example, on death duties. It is unlikely Labor would act on this front, but Albanese’s credibility on denials is all but shot. The opposition, however, has already identified a potential death duty in the new taxes on trusts, with Taylor saying post-budget we “keep finding new taxes”.
Labor, of course, had good reason for confidence in its budget decision-making: it faced a near broken Coalition, a housing market biased against first-home buyers and an apparently winning pitch on intergenerational fairness with Millennials and Gen Z now outnumbering older generation Baby Boomers.
What could go wrong?
Two things. Labor has created two vulnerabilities for itself. It has tied its tax changes to improvement in the housing market for young people. This is the repeated justification coming from Albanese and Chalmers. “We’d thrown everything at housing,” Albanese said. Now it was time to throw a lot more, the electoral purpose being to achieve a seismic event with Millennials and Gen Z. (Don’t believe for a moment Labor’s insufferable claims the budget was not shaped by politics.)

How could the reptiles not mention the 'death tax', though for some reason, it couldn't be a straight death tax, it had to be, air quotes please maestro, a 'death tax': The Albanese government has blindsided the financial sector with a surprise ‘death tax’ on wills and estates, triggering urgent calls for clarification from wealth advisers.

Fresh from the reptile school of fear mongering, 101.

Time now for "Ned" to drag in sundry "experts" who can reinforce his point of view:

Yet the budget’s own figures mean housing progress by the time of the 2028 election will be marginal at best. While the tax changes are predicted to shift the housing ownership mix towards more owner-occupiers, this results in only 75,000 more owner-occupiers across the full decade while rents will rise and Treasury estimates housing prices will fall by about 2 per cent in a couple of years. In addition, lower housing price growth weakens supply and there are likely to be about 35,000 dwellings fewer compared with the no tax policy change scenario.
The point is that asking the public to judge the tax reforms in 2028 according to progress in the housing market becomes an invitation to electoral failure. Taylor sees this and is already running on that impending failure. It will merely help the Coalition in its campaign against the tax changes.
Deloitte Access Economics senior partner Stephen Smith told Inquirer: “The intent of the government’s changes on the CGT discount is good. This is a relatively modest but meaningful reform. In my view, however, the government has created a rod for its own back by linking this change to intergenerational fairness – the economics stands on its own.
“The potential payoff for intergenerational fairness is also dubious, given it will take a long time to unwind the effect of the 50 per cent discount in the property market – this change won’t make it any easier for a young person to buy a home next week or next year, but it likely will next decade.”
This leads directly to the second vulnerability. While running on intergenerational equity sounds brilliant politics, it may prove far more difficult than Labor imagines. The risk for Labor is that the budget turns the Baby Boom generation more hostile towards Labor while failing to win a comparable level of support from the younger generations now expected to reward Labor.

Cue a snap of an agitated fellow traveller ... Mortgage broker Samuel Buckley blasted the budget, arguing sweeping changes to capital gains tax and negative gearing will force rents up and squash aspiration for young Australians. Picture: John Feder

And so after that interminable climb, "Ned" draws himself up to deliver "the judgment":

Younger people will have divergent views on the tax crackdown on assets. They won’t necessarily applaud Labor for diminishing the asset returns of their parents, nor might they appreciate being denied the access to the capital gains and negative gearing benefits available to past generations.
The big picture remains in the shadows for Labor. Albanese said post-budget that Labor “is the only political movement in Australia now that occupies the sensible centre” and declared: “I want to be a mainstream leader in a mainstream political party that seeks to govern for all Australians.” This is an excellent statement. But Labor does not deliver for all Australians.
The budget shows since the mid-year update that spending increased by $18bn for 2026-27, a forecast of obvious interest to the Reserve Bank given governor Michele Bullock’s warning about government spending making the anti-inflation task more difficult.
This budget shows ongoing weak productivity, meaning a drag on living standards, a decade of budget deficits, and a failure to deliver serious personal income tax reform – while suggesting something next year.
Given Labor’s political dominance, the judgment on this budget is that Labor’s reforming vision is too narrow to meet the economic challenges that Australia faces.

Note that delusion of grandeur:

the judgment on this budget 

The judgment? 

Who appointed "Ned" sole arbiter, judge and jury wrapped up in one pompous conceit?

The pond will miss much of the reptile comedy when forced offline, but it won't be missing these "Ned" Everests ...

And now to an echo of the bromancer's woes ...