In which the pond has nothing but Lord Downer, the floodwaters in quarries whisperer and Major Mitchell as placeholders ...

A correspondent reminded the pond of one last thing to do while still online - make sure that there's not a single mention of CBS and Paramount in any of the pond's subscription lists (though mentioning the genuinely funny Colbert in the same breath as the pond was way more than too much).

This is the penultimate pond post before the great darkness descends, though some cynics might suggest that the pond has spent its time full of reptile darkness, and at last there'll be a light glowing on the hill.

Off but mainly on, the pond has been online since way back in the late 1980s - the pond can still remember the pond's son, at thirty bucks an hour access, running up a very big bill to see very little.

How the pond descended into the reptile abyss after that must remain a solemn and sad mystery.

This will be the pond's longest outage, and given its druthers, the pond would like to have left a placeholder featuring some all time pond favourites - say the bromancer brooding about mad King Donald selling out Taiwan, Our Henry doing over the Thucydides trap, and Dame Groan announcing for the zillionth time that the end of the world is nigh. What a wrap that would be.

But the reptiles are rarely congenial in their programming, and the pond is likely to end up tomorrow with the sort of dross that littered the lizard Oz hive mind this morning.

First up comes Lord Downer, like a Colonel Blimp straight from the Adelaide Hills.

The header: Political malaise in UK a warning to our major parties; The Conservative and Labour parties have lost the trust of the public. There have been the scandals, but the real problems are deeper.

The caption for the snap of the chief UK villain (Kemi who?): Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Picture: Peter Nicholls/Pool/AFP

Being a dedicated member of empire, Lord Downer spent a bigly four minutes on the comforting illusion that the UK and Australia remain peas in the colonial pod, and as usual, his analysis revealed more about the dear old sod than anything about the two countries:

Given the affinity between the UK and Australia, events in Britain might help us better understand our own political challenges.
Ten days ago, Britons went to the polls in local government elections. Overall, the insurgent Reform party won 30 per cent of the vote, Labour 20 per cent and the Conservatives 15 per cent. So poorly did the Labour Party perform that the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, is now under serious challenge from within his own party.
We can speculate on whether Sir Keir will survive or, if he doesn’t, who will replace him. What is more interesting is why the two major parties that have dominated British politics since the 1920s have lost the support and confidence of the public.
Above all, the Conservative and Labour parties have lost the trust of the public. There have, of course, been the scandals, such as the Partygate controversy when Boris Johnson was prime minister and the Mandelson scandal under Starmer. Certainly, these events have upset the public, but the real problems are deeper.
First, there is the issue of immigration. This has several facets. Illegal immigration seems to be out of control. In the two years Labour has been in office, 200,000 illegal migrants have crossed the Channel into England. These illegal migrants are accommodated in hotels at great public expense.

Just to make sure the hive mind knew who could help, the reptiles slipped in a snap of Nigel making plans ... Reform UK leader Nigel Farage at the House of Commons chamber during the State Opening of Parliament on May 13. Picture: Toby Melville/Pool/AFP

It turns out that Lord Downer is deeply sympathetic to Nige's cause ...

This grisly trade began under the Conservatives, and it has only accelerated under Labour. Yet both parties swore black and blue they’d bring to an end illegal immigration. Neither of them did.
Legal immigration has also been controversial. Huge numbers of migrants have been coming into the UK over the past few years, in particular, to fill poorly paid job vacancies.
The perception of the public is that these migrants have changed the face of the country. Voters feel they have contributed to the increase in house prices and waiting lists for the National Health Service. They have also caused civil unrest, particularly over foreign policy issues such as wars in the Middle East. Migrants are also associated with the rise of antisemitism. Now, a lot of these perceptions may be partial truths or totally unfair. It is noteworthy that they are widely held views in the UK, and both the Conservatives and Labour are blamed for allowing all this to happen.

Then just to terrify the hive mind, a terrifying snap... Migrants wade into the sea to board a dinghy to cross the English Channel on August 25, 2025, in Gravelines, France. Picture: Getty

Lord Downer is also a Brexit devotee ...

Then there’s the economy. Unemployment is low, but living standards have flatlined for years.
Taxes have increased, and government debt has spiralled to levels not seen since the Second World War. Both the Conservatives and Labour have tried to persuade the public they have brilliant plans to increase economic growth and the prosperity of the country. In both cases, their plans have been found wanting.
Some commentators will point to the Brexit referendum in 2016 as the cause of these woes. I doubt that that is remotely true. Certainly, Brexit contributed to an escalation in the political temperature from 2016 through until around 2022, but the deleterious impact on the British economy has been nothing like as great as Remainers claim.
For example, over the past 10 years the UK economy has grown by around 15 per cent, France by around 13 per cent, and Germany’s a mere 8 per cent. While none of these records is impressive, the UK’s economy has grown post-Brexit slightly faster than France’s, and at almost twice the pace of Germany’s.

Strange, this from December 2025 ... Brexit's impact on the UK economy ...

There's damned statistics, and then there's damned Lord Downer, as the reptiles slipped in an ancient snap, though they could have dug up a much more recent one, as featured in the Graudian report on a couple of recent marches... An anti-illegal immigration demonstration in August 2025 in Bournemouth, England. Picture: Getty

It being Lord Downer, a true member of the climate science denying hive mind, inevitably any hint of renewables produced a reaction equivalent to an attack of the hives ...

Having said that, the British public are upset about two familiar things. First, the persistent and unrelenting increase in the cost of living. Energy prices have increased alarmingly. For the average British household, electricity prices have doubled since 2016.
In Australia, we’ll be familiar with the reasons why. There has been a massive investment in windmills, in particular, and a reduction in the use of gas. All coal-fired power stations have now been closed. That means intermittent wind power has to be backed up with the remaining gas-fired power stations, as well as nuclear power. As in Australia, there has been a substantial decline in the productivity of electricity generation, and that inevitably makes electricity very expensive.
The British public were promised by both the Conservative Party and Labour that wind power was the cheapest form of power, and that by moving away from coal and gas, electricity would get cheaper. Well, exactly the reverse has been the case.
The public were also told it would help control the climate, but given the UK contributes only 1 per cent of global anthropogenic CO2 emissions, not surprisingly the sacrifices have achieved absolutely nothing.
One consequence of the climate policies of the UK government has been to transfer much of industrial production outside the UK. There’s only one steel blast furnace left in the UK, and much of the country’s steel is imported.
This is a familiar theme to any Australian. We stop industrial production because it emits CO2 as we try to reach improbable targets such as net zero by 2050. As a result, we have to import industrial goods, which are, of course, produced emitting CO2 but in another country. So, in terms of net CO2 emissions, it achieves nothing, but within the borders of an individual country the statistics look good. It’s just politics.
There are other pressures on prices, in particular caused by huge levels of government expenditure. In the UK, government debt is close to 100 per cent of GDP.
The government spends twice as much on servicing its debt than it spends on defence. Think about this. In the last financial year, the Labour government borrowed £130bn ($242bn) and spent £110bn just servicing debt!
This massive level of government expenditure, which has now reached record levels, has not surprisingly been accompanied by ever-growing taxation. British government expenditure is now 45 per cent of GDP.
Under the Tories the tax burden continued to rise, but that was nothing compared to the Starmer government. It increased capital gains tax, increased the equivalent of payroll tax and imposed a 78 per cent additional tax on profits from North Sea oil and gas. The results were obvious.
Fewer people sold assets and so revenue from the capital gains tax actually went down. Fewer employers took on staff so revenue from payroll tax declined. And extraction from the North Sea declined because of the huge supertax.
This is an abridged version of many UK policy failures but the moral of the story is brutal reality: if you don’t do a good job, don’t expect people to vote for you. So instead votes are atomising at the expense of the two major parties.

There's one moment of truth, one moment of insight in all that gibberish, and likely derived from Lord Downer's own experiences. 

If you don't do a good job, you'll score the royal order of the high heeled kick to the groin ...

And so to a survey of the rest of the reptile scene, and the pond regrets that the budget jihad is still going strong in the lizard Oz.

The pond has no idea how the the hive mind readership tolerates this monomania. 

The best the pond can do is link to the intermittent archive, where correspondents can romp to their hearts' content (an actually working archive permitting) ...

WeChat: A canary in the coal mine on Labor’s tax changes?
The sentiment across Chinese media and social platforms has been demonstrably more negative to the budget than mainstream English-language coverage.
By Simon Benson
Political analyst

It turned out that the billionaires and tradies and the Chinese community were being short changed by boomers ...

BUDGET MISCALCULATION
Ironically, Baby Boomers may quietly benefit the most

Budget risks alienating voters with three key wealth miscalculations

Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ fifth budget may ultimately be remembered for three political miscalculations.

By Chris Brycki

The indefatigable but generally unreadable Geoff was on hand to chamber his usual rounds ...

COMMENTARY by Geoff Chambers
Jim Chalmers gives Paul Keating a run for his money with unpopular budget
Jim Chalmers’ unpopular budget has helped Angus Taylor get back into the game.

That was just double dipping - they might be renewables cynics, but the reptiles love to recyle:

EXCLUSIVE
Newspoll: historic rejection of Labor’s big-taxing budget
Newspoll: Jim Chalmers and Anthony Albanese’s budget flops with every generation of voters
A special post-budget Newspoll reveals Jim Chalmers has handed down the most unpopular budget since 1993 and eclipsed the visceral reaction to Joe Hockey’s austerity budget of 2014.
By Geoff Chambers

A whole gaggle of reptiles, or at least a triptych re-enacted the Spanish Inquisition and made Comrade Albo confess ...

PM trips, then confesses
It’s a tax on trusts but not a death tax: PM
Anthony Albanese confirms tax on discretionary trusts set up for people’s last wills, but rebuffs it is a death tax
Anthony Albanese has admitted future inheritance trusts will face higher taxes after initially claiming all testamentary trusts were exempt from the policy changes.
By Greg Brown, Noah Yim and Lachlan Leeming

This was all pretty standard nattering negativity by the nabobs of the Murdoch press, but it was when the quarry whisperer arrived with an attempt at a positive spin that the wheels truly fell off ...

The header: Taylor channels Reagan with bold plan for reform; Angus Taylor’s inspiration is Ronald Reagan, who indexed income tax thresholds in 1985 as part of a program of tax cuts.

The caption for the cornball artwork credited Frank, when really to help his career, it might have been a better career option for Frank to credit AI or Alan Smithee ... Opposition Leader Angus Taylor. Artwork: Frank Ling.

Reagan?

Oh yes, he's back in the game of wild-eyed comparisons.

So preposterous was this idea that the quarry whisperer could only manage three minutes, and that felt like an interminable stretch ...

Angus Taylor’s conservative critics have been urging him to release his inner mongrel. Well, now he has, by unleashing the boldest economic reform since the introduction of the GST.
By committing to index thresholds, Taylor has drawn attention to bracket creep: a scam that has reaped countless billions of dollars over the years by creaming off cost-of-living pay rises.
The stage is set for a fight between collectivists and classical liberals. In one corner are socialists such as Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers, who believe governments were put on Earth to raise money and then spend it. They believe the state has a moral claim over private income. In the other corner is the party of Robert Menzies, under a leader who passionately believes individuals should receive the fullest possible reward for their labour and investment.
Chalmers’ confusion is evident from his claim that Taylor’s automatic annual tax cuts would “cost” $35bn over four years. Cost who exactly? Not taxpayers, obviously, who’ll have tens of billions of dollars more disposable income. The greatest cost will be borne by politicians forced to expend political capital by cutting spending or adding to debt.
On Thursday, Nationals leader Matt Canavan delighted Coalition supporters at a post-speech dinner by describing the indexing of income thresholds as the Ozempic of fiscal policy. It will reduce the appetite for big government by forcing politicians to take a bill to parliament to increase taxes, rather than relying on inflation-linked revenue-raising on the sly.
Taylor has been working through the challenges of reducing the public sector burden for years. His strategy to reduce government spending to the pre-Covid level of 24 per cent of GDP is to grow the private sector rather than leaning heavily on expenditure cuts, as Malcolm Fraser tried to do half a century ago.
Fraser at least tried, going to the 1975 election promising “an end to Labor’s tax rip-off” by fully indexing personal income tax for three years. Yet persistent inflation broke his resolve and, by the end of his term, indexation had effectively been dropped.

The pond has been disturbed for some time now by the reptile desire to live in ancient times, and this didn't help ... US President Ronald Reagan in 1988.

Just to make sure everyone caught the full absurdity of this burst of hagiography directed at the beefy boofhead, the floodwaters in quarries whisperer doubled down ...

Taylor’s inspiration is not Fraser, but Ronald Reagan, who indexed income tax thresholds in 1985 as part of a program of tax cuts. Far from reducing revenue and increasing deficits, as critics predicted, Reagan’s tax cuts had the opposite effect, stimulating economic growth and instilling optimism that actually increased revenue. Monica Prasad’s account of that period in her 2018 book, Starving the Beast: Ronald Reagan and the Tax Cut Revolution, shows Reagan faced circumstances not unlike those faced by the Liberal Party today. Republican support was in the low 20s after Watergate. An editor at the Los Angeles Times mused: “Who can even imagine a Republican congress being elected in our lifetime or perhaps in our children’s lifetime?” Polls showed inflation was the No.1 concern. Bracket creep was sapping the confidence of workers and businesses.

The reptiles seem haunted by the head prefect, the squatter from Nareen, though he's long been gone ...Malcolm Fraser in 1977. Picture: Getty

And that was pretty much that, with the Caterist working hard to do a puff job on his prime serve of Angus beef ...

In his first televised speech as president, Reagan outlined his plan to constrain government expansion. “We can lecture our children about extravagance until we run out of voice and breath,” he said. “Or we can cure their extravagance by simply reducing their allowance.”
Unlike Reagan, Taylor will limit tax cuts to bracket creep, initially at least. Yet he is strongly persuaded by the supply-side arguments of economists who inspired Reagan, notably Arthur B. Laffer, whose thoughts were distilled on a paper napkin during lunch with Donald Rumsfeld in 1974, now on display at the National Museum of American History.
“If you tax a product, less results,” Laffer wrote, a phrase Taylor is fond of repeating. “If you subsidise a product, more results.”
The truth of Laffer’s observation was reinforced by Chalmers’ decision to remove concessions on capital gains, negative gearing and trusts. It is effectively a tax on entrepreneurial investment and, as Laffer predicted, we’re about to get less of it. On Sunday Chalmers painted himself further into a corner, claiming Taylor’s proposal was irresponsible and inflationary. Allowing workers to keep more of their income would “pump the most money into the economy when inflation is already at its highest”.
Yet tax cuts do not increase the amount of money in circulation. They merely change who gets to spend it. Chalmers’ logic is that if the government spends money, it isn’t inflationary, but if citizens spend their own money, it is. Experience persuades us the opposite is true: individuals tend to spend their money in the productive side of the economy, stimulating investment, increasing output and building confidence. Governments are inclined to spend money on unproductive pet projects, siphoning scarce capital to low-return or loss-making projects.
Which, ironically, helps Taylor enormously. Four years of lavish Labor spending have created a bucketful of projects few taxpayers would miss. Taylor listed some of them: climate change bureaucracies, sweetheart deals between governments and corporations, notably in the energy sector, transmission lines, electric vehicle subsidies. Cutting welfare for non-citizens, including subsidies for first-home buyers, will deliver a not insubstantial fiscal dividend. Plus, the government has pledged to cut $37.8bn from the NDIS over four years, enough to pay for Taylor’s tax cuts on its own. Not that Taylor should hold his breath on that one but, hey, you never know.

Desperate, desperate times.

Of all the angles offered by the reptiles - the suffering of billionaires was a particular pond favourite - this surely must be the most wretched and desperate of them all.

The Major was also to hand to offer more of the lizard Oz budget jihad, done in his usual manner by berating anyone who didn't share the Major's vision ... (that's why they never could find the Order of Lenin medal the Major proved was worn by Manning Clark).

The header: Jim Chalmers pulled the wool over the eyes of a gullible press; More than failing on its self-defined central task, the budget lacks any growth plan for the nation’s future.

The caption for the fully wired villain Jimbo: Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Picture: Getty Images

The Major's piece ran for an exceptionally tedious five minutes, but then when it comes to a murmuration of reptiles, the Major is always a reliable voice.

You see, he's a world-weary trooper, ready to explain things to younglings lacking the Major's infinite, hard-won, boots-on-the-ground, shop-soiled experience ...

Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ budget last week pulled the wool over some young journalists’ eyes with talk of intergenerational equity.
Many lapped up Jim’s crumbs about the wealthy elderly, but the budget will do almost nothing to boost housing supply for the young and will almost certainly push up rents and interest rates. It also leaves the young with a total federal deficit about to pass $1 trillion. Not much intergenerational equity in any of that.
Chalmers inadvertently highlighted why more thoughtful journalists are disappointed when he answered a question at the National Press Club on Wednesday afternoon with a jaundiced reflection about aspiration.
His political opponents always had aspirations for a shrinking number of older Australians while ignoring the legitimate aspirations of the young, he said. In other words: it’s just politics.
So what’s missing from what Chalmers claims is bold reform? Today’s older Australians were young when reforming Labor treasurer Paul Keating and Coalition treasurer Peter Costello made tough decisions that grew the national pie.
Keating, in The Australian on Thursday, reflected on the 40th anniversary of his 1986 “banana republic” statement and the tough budget decisions he had to make then in the face of plunging terms of trade.
Journalist Troy Bramston quoted him saying excessive spending to maintain living standards and running up debt that burdens future generations was “Australia’s great policy lie” in the post-war period. He was not aiming that at Chalmers but the point holds.

Hard, hard yakka.

Desperate, desperate stuff. 

The pond ran that ancient Troy piece, and correspondents will remember that there was nary a word from the Swiss clock man about the current budget or Jimbo, and so the Major is forced into blather of the "but the point holds" kind... Paul Keating. Picture: Max Mason-Hubers

No, the point doesn't hold and any youngling trying that trick of the trade - introducing the notion of a banana republic by nefarious means - should be hounded out of journalism school.

It's down there with the Major's next opening flourish:

Keating didn't say it ...

If Keating didn't say it, why is Keating's name in the sentence?

Keating didn’t say it but today’s young Australians will also get much more benefit from compulsory superannuation than the Baby Boomers who were middle-aged when he introduced the national system in 1996.
The Australian Financial Review on Thursday spoke to two former Treasury secretaries, John Fraser and Ken Henry, who thought the budget was too expansionary and should be in surplus. Yet Chalmers continues to deny government spending is affecting inflation.
To be fair, Tuesday night’s budget was better than Chalmers’ previous four, but it was not the bold reform The Guardian, Nine newspapers’ economics editor Ross Gittins and some journalists at the ABC claimed.
In fact, the budget’s “intergenerational equity” narrative is just a lazy way of taking money from one group, the elderly, to make another group, the growing youth vote, appear better off.
Chalmers and Albanese had hoped this equity spin would provide cover for ditching their pre-election promises not to change the capital gains tax treatment of investments or alter negative gearing. At least former opposition leader Bill Shorten had the courage to take the same policies to the 2019 election, where they were defeated.
Many older Australians live on welfare and don’t own a home. And while home ownership is harder today than in the Keating-Costello reform era, not all of that is driven by concessional investment taxes or negative gearing. Much is down to state governments’ development imposts.
Budget numbers show the latest housing changes won’t fix the problem. House prices will grow but by 2 per cent less than otherwise. Only 75,000 extra first-home buyers will benefit over the next decade but 110,000 will be trying to get into the market each year.
Chalmers’ “tough reform” is a far cry from Keating cutting the top marginal tax rate from 60 to 49 per cent in 1988, or the company tax rate from 49 to 39 per cent the same year, and again to 33 per cent in 1993.
Nor have Chalmers and Albanese shown the courage of Costello and then PM John Howard, who went to an election in 1998 to win support for junking their “never, ever” GST promise before the 1996 election.

And here we go again, with the Major, just like all the other reptiles, living in the past, celebrating past glories ... John Howard and Peter Costello in 2004.

It's almost as if the reptiles didn't have any faith in the beefy boofhead and his current mob, and so must direct the hive mind readership to ancient times, and by association, imagine the beefy boofhead has somehow been exalted and risen to Valhalla ...

This column argued on February 22 that there were reasons to alter the tax treatment of investment homes and to focus negative gearing on new homes. But it said neither would raise much money or solve housing affordability for the young. Tuesday’s documents confirm those judgments.
But more than failing on its self-defined central task, the budget lacks any growth plan for the nation’s future. There are rats and mice on productivity but nothing to give the young the sort of crack at prosperity Keating and Costello gave their parents.
Instead, the young will face decades of national debt plus limits to the sorts of tax and property arrangements their parents, and Albanese and Chalmers, benefited from. They’ll also get falling per capita GDP, papered over by very high immigration.
Chalmers and Albanese are selling this highly political generational equity line because for the first time the Boomer generation is outnumbered by young voters who don’t vote Coalition.
So how did the media’s budget coverage go? As usual, The Australian and The Australian Financial Review had the best political and economic analysis, even though they are criticised as conservative by the left cheer squad at The Guardian Australian and the ABC, who have never seen a tax increase they don’t support.
The most credulous pieces were by Annabel Crabb on the ABC website and Guardian Australia’s Greg Jericho and Tom McIlroy. All thought Chalmers had done the really big stuff, even though the intergenerational changes raise little revenue in the early years and the main road to budget repair is through a very dubious NDIS repair plan.
They conveniently gloss over likely rent and interest rate rises that will follow this budget.

The Major really decided to test the pond, but given a choice, the pond would rather listen to Crabb than the Major ... Annabel Crabb. Picture: ABC

Okay, in an ideal world, the pond would have to endure neither ... as the Major powerfully suggested that the pond really should be tuning back into the ABC so that an alternative reality might be observed ...

The worst media performance was by ABC 7.30 host Sarah Ferguson, who talked over Opposition Leader Angus Taylor all through their Thursday night interview.
Ferguson clearly disapproves of Taylor’s plans to cut immigration, even though the government proposes to do likewise. And she was sceptical of his promise to index PAYE tax thresholds to return bracket creep, something economists have supported for decades.

That reminded the pond of this ...

And so to the Major parading his choice of reptiles, from Pearls of wisdom, to of all people, that tired old hack Shanners ...

Like clockwork, Keating’s reform-era ally, former ACTU secretary Bill Kelty, in Friday morning’s Daily Telegraph, called for the top PAYE tax rate to be cut to 39 per cent from its present 45 per cent plus 2 per cent Medicare levy.
This column thought the most incisive analyses of the Chalmers budget’s economic underpinnings were delivered by former Treasury assistant secretary David Pearl in The Australian and AFR economics editor John Kehoe.
Picking up early on the banana republic anniversary, Pearl said Chalmers had failed his first real test at his equivalent of Keating’s big moment.
“Jim Chalmers had one job and one job only in this budget. The fiscal lever had to be pulled hard to take demand out of the economy,” Pearl wrote.
Kehoe said: “This is the budget Chalmers has dreamt about delivering for more than a decade since Labor’s 2016 election manifesto for higher taxes on assets.”
In The Australian on Thursday, journalist Elizabeth Pike reported on the 20 Labor cabinet members who maintained investment properties that can still be negatively geared under the budget’s grandfathering arrangements. Albanese and Chalmers are pulling up the drawbridge to prosperity.
Dennis Shanahan, The Australian’s national political editor, called out the hypocrisy on budget night: Albo himself has risen up the ladder from meagre beginnings and is now a very wealthy man with multiple homes. Millennials will find it much harder but that won’t be the fault of their parents.

Oh go moan to the Emeritus Chairman, who has done as much to protect the status of billionaires as any story in the lizard Oz about their suffering ...

And so to the immortal Rowe revealing what's really fuelling the reptile nightmares and hysteria ...