In which the swishing Switzer goes full Pauline, Killer of the IPA offers more Killernomics, and Our Henry, in being determinedly apolitical, ends up being fiercely political (go Israel) ...

 

It'd be a real tragedy for the pond if Lord Downer was dragooned into running the Liberal party.

Opening the week with his ancient bleats nicely bookends a week of reptile follies, with Our Henry's ruminations closing proceedings out on the Friday ...

Oh that's cruel ... please save His Lordship from that fate, for the sake of the pond and the lizard Oz hive mind.

The reptiles didn't seem to care. 

Instead it was onwards and upwards with the indefatigable Geoff celebrating the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way ...

It's always a relief to see signs that the reptiles still care ... and luckily the intermittent archive was working this morning ...

Angus Taylor’s not going to die wondering in fight with Pauline Hanson for centre-right voters
The Opposition Leader will use his first budget-in-reply speech to lay down economic and immigration gauntlets to Anthony Albanese, Jim Chalmers and Pauline Hanson.
By Geoff Chambers

Over on the extreme far right, Rodger took up the cause that was at the top of the lizard Oz "news" section (the pond uses the word loosely):

ISIS brides pose the mother of all political dilemmas
As another group of women and children returns from Syria, debate is intensifying over security risks, rehabilitation and political responsibility.
By Rodger Shanahan

The sandgropers also scored an outing, which the pond should note to boost its readership in that remote land from one to perhaps five:

Why Saffioti’s public service cuts barely touch WA’s growing debt
Western Australia’s $579m in belt-tightening sounds impressive until you realise the debt pile will grow 18 times faster than the savings.
By Paul Garvey
Senior Reporter

Meanwhile, the reptiles thought that roughing up the other Jimbo was jolly good fun and worthy of a whimsical headline:

Cor blimey, what a caper ...(and dig what friends of the rich and useful tools get to fly in) ...

Farrer by-election
Corflute blimey! Hanson ‘stands by her man’ in booth brouhaha
‘I’m going to shake his hand’: Pauline Hanson to meet volunteer who scuffled with James Paterson
Senator Hanson held a press conference beside the ‘sexy’ Cirrus G7 aircraft gifted to her by Gina Rinehart upon her arrival in Albury on Thursday afternoon, as the countdown begins for the high-stakes by-election.
By Elizabeth Pike

Perhaps it was the sight of the plane, and a fit of envy that brought out the swishing Switzer, and he celebrated Gina's new sock puppet in fine style:

The header: Why One Nation can no longer be dismissed as a protest sideshow; Pauline Hanson’s party has tapped into voter discontent ignored by the major parties — and the Farrer by-election may test its growing reach.

The caption for the jingoistic, flag-waving snap: Pauline Hanson’s One Nation continues to draw support from voters disillusioned with the major parties. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Whenever the pond sees a surfeit of flags, there's an immediate surge of nausea. If you grew up under empire, you had any number of reasons to avoid the Colonel Blimps wandering about, shoving flags up their rectums and those of others.

Not so with the swishing Switzer.

Still on his rehabilitation tour with the reptiles, those flags seemingly set him off, and he was all in on elevating Pauline to centre stage.

Apparently he just loves himself some fear of furriners, white Xian nationalism, and fossil fuels, or so it would seem from his bleating about "ordinary concerns":

Every so often, democratic politics is shaken by insurgent movements that give voice to grievances long ignored by the governing class. Sometimes such forces flare and fade. Occasionally they alter a nation’s political landscape.
Donald Trump did so with MAGA in the US; Nigel Farage did so in Britain through the UK Independence Party and now Reform UK. 

Um, be a little careful what you wish for?

In Australia, the most durable expression of this phenomenon has been Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. The instinct of the political establishment is usually to dismiss such movements as crude, backward and outrageous. They challenge assumptions long embedded in mainstream discourse and reopen questions elites would prefer closed.
For years, Hanson was treated in precisely this fashion. Much of the media and political class regarded her concerns about immigration, national cohesion and energy security as unworthy of serious debate. Yet Hanson’s appeal, including across (of all places) Victoria, has not been difficult to understand. She speaks for many Australians who believe politics has become managerial, remote and deaf to ordinary concerns. She gives voice to voters who feel looked down upon by those who govern them.
Many of those drawn to Hanson are lazily caricatured as racists and xenophobes. In truth, what often animates them is something different: the belief that the political class has become detached from the people, and that the nation is governed by men and women with little understanding of the concerns, interests or anxieties of Middle Australia.

Nah, in truth, it isn't lazy to caricature them as racists and xenophobes.

If you haven't worked out where Pauline is coming from, what she uses as rabble-rousing triggers, you haven't been paying attention.

Dressing her up in Switzer's fine words  - donning the MAGA cap like Dame Slap did - is exactly the sort of nonsense that gave the world King Donald.

Now back to that bigotry ...

For decades, polling has shown deep unease about high immigration, particularly in working-class suburbs and regional centres already under economic strain. Whether one agreed with their anxieties or not, they were genuine. Many felt no major party – not the Liberals, not Labor and certainly not the teals or Greens – represented them. One Nation does. Their concerns are practical and immediate: stagnant wages, scarce housing, overcrowded schools, energy dependency abroad, mounting pressure on hospitals and public services, and a sense that Australia is losing control of its borders and direction. Yet too much of Australia’s political and media classes have often shown scant interest in these anxieties.
Too many inhabit a comfortable bubble, seeing chiefly the benefits of globalisation and the energy transition while rarely confronting the social strains borne elsewhere. Politicians such as Anthony Albanese, along with much of the commentariat, can appear quick to condemn those who challenge elite orthodoxies, and slow to understand why such dissent arises. Nor is this uniquely Australian. In Britain, prominent liberal intellectual David Goodhart argued years ago that large-scale immigration risked weakening national solidarity and straining the welfare state. Though he plainly was no racial ideologue, many within London’s political and literary circles treated him as beyond respectable opinion.

David Goodhart?

The Road to Somewhere author argues that the liberating impact of feminism has harmed our children in a book shot through with claims that don’t stand up to scrutiny

So it's not just furriners ruining everything, it's those bloody feminists, and poor old Malware must also share the blame ...

That helps explain why One Nation evolved from a protest vehicle in the late 1990s into a broader symbol of revolt against an aloof political class. Founded in 1997, it surged at the 1998 Queensland state election before fading. Its revival came amid disenchantment with Malcolm Turnbull’s prime ministership and the mood of the 2016 federal election.
Rather than reaching out to those voters, Turnbull largely behaved as though they scarcely existed. The strategy failed badly and nearly cost the Coalition power after just one term. Indeed, Turnbull’s patrician and often condescending manner helped drive many working-class and lower-middle-class Liberal supporters into Hanson’s arms.
Voters disillusioned by professional politicians, broken promises, identity politics and cancel culture are turning instead to a figure whose greatest asset is unmistakeable authenticity. Hanson may be blunt, but she has restored passion, argument and consequence to a political culture that too often seems bloodless and stage-managed.
For this, she has paid a heavy price. Hanson has endured relentless hostility from sections of the press and broadcast media, frequently portrayed not merely as wrong but beyond the pale. She has been labelled racist and fascist, compared with Hitler and even served time in jail. She has endured even more hostile media coverage than anything encountered by Malcolm Fraser, John Howard or Tony Abbott.
The reason for such visceral contempt is plain enough: Hanson has reintroduced something increasingly scarce in Australian life – genuine political opposition. On immigration, climate policy, cultural identity and the failures of public institutions, she challenges the consensus views long treated as settled.

About this time in the martyrdom of St Pauline there's usually a billy goat butt needed, and sure enough, it came in the form of "none of this requires romanticising" ...

None of this requires romanticising One Nation or pretending it offers the answers to our nation’s productivity malaise and chronic debt. 

And as sure as night follows day, a token billy goat butt must be immediately followed by another than renders the first one pointless:

But protest parties need not be competent ministries to exert political importance. Their role is often to expose failures that established parties would rather ignore.
The Farrer by-election on Saturday may mark a milestone. Should One Nation perform strongly, it will become harder to dismiss the party as a ramshackle sideshow. It may instead claim its place as Australia’s principal insurgent force in a volatile political age.
Finally, a confession. I long underestimated both Hanson’s wider appeal and One Nation’s capacity to emerge as the principal vehicle of opposition to the Albanese government. I placed greater faith in the ability of the Coalition parties to recover and resume their traditional role as the country’s main alternative administration.
That may still happen. For now, however, circumstances are changing. Across much of the democratic world, established centre-right parties have weakened or splintered. As British journalist Andrew Neil has observed: “The mainstream right is out of kilter with the tenor of the times. In government, it often let conservatives down by not being very conservative.” No wonder insurgent populist movements have grown in strength. Australia may not prove immune to the same realignment. Hanson increasingly reflects that broader trend – one that could gather considerable momentum should One Nation capture Farrer this weekend.
Tom Switzer is presenter of the Switzerland podcast.

So we should be making plans with Nigel, King Donald and Pauline?

Oh come now, under the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way, the Liberal party is thriving and brand new guardians are standing by to usher in a new era...

And so to a rather short dose of Killernomics:

The header: Why Labor’s CGT reform plan looms as another bungle; Capital gains tax speculation has revived debate about inflation, housing affordability and whether Labor could accidentally lower tax revenue.

The caption for that snap of that dreadful Jimbo person, always pointing and harassing the reptiles: Treasurer Jim Chalmers faces growing debate over possible changes to capital gains tax settings. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Devotees of Killer will recall that he was very big on suggesting Australia follow Argentina and Milei.

The pond wondered how that was going and luckily a few days ago the Financial Times ran an update:

Argentina’s Javier Milei battered by scandals and slowing economy
President’s popularity falls as officials face graft allegations and unemployment climbs (*intermittent archive link)

There's lots of graphs and things, but the pond thought the wrap-up was an encouraging sign of the times:

We don't hate journalists enough? 

Lucky that Killer is from the IPA and so excluded from the cull?

And now, before plunging in, the pond should note that this day, for all the columnists noted herein, the reptiles provided absolutely no visual distractions, whether snaps or AVs.

The pond has no idea why, but will follow suit.

Stand by for a huge gobbet of Killernomics, IPA style ...

After last year’s federal election, I tried to look on the bright side: Perhaps a Labor government with a large majority might have the courage to simplify the tax system or slash federal spending, prioritising the nation’s long-term interests over the risk of losing a few far-left marginal seats in the capital cities.
Jim Chalmers’ fifth federal budget next week is likely to confirm, unfortunately, that nothing of the sort has or will happen any time soon, except in one intriguing case: capital gains tax.
It is possible that poor financial literacy among the left-wing commentariat could see the government actually improve the tax system, however modestly or accidentally. It appears poised to reform CGT in a way that could reduce rather than increase tax revenue.
For months Labor figures have been fuelling speculation the so-called CGT discount would be pared back, perhaps to 33 per cent from 50 per cent, as part of the government’s plan to “do something” about “intergenerational equity”.
Far from trimming an obviously unfair concession, such a policy would have led to a massive increase in tax, so it’s been pleasing to read speculation that the government won’t be doing that after all. It will instead, apparently, be reverting to an earlier method that taxed only real capital gains (after accounting for inflation) that was introduced by the Hawke government in 1985.
That would actually be an improvement over the prevailing and widely misunderstood CGT discount introduced by the Howard government in 1999, which has been accused of providing an unfair advantage to housing investors in particular.
Yet despite its name, the CGT discount is often not a discount at all compared to the previous indexation method, despite widespread perception that the earlier method was a tougher regime. Which is better depends on how well an investment has performed relative to the change in the CPI over the investment period. Obviously, the indexation strips out inflation, while the discount method taxes the entire nominal capital gain, albeit after applying a 50 per cent discount.
Intuitively, if inflation is high relative returns (specifically, if it makes up more than half the nominal gain), the previous 1985 system, which adjusted the purchase price for inflation, would offer the lower tax rate for investors. To be sure, the CGT discount represented a big reduction in tax for most investors when introduced in 1999. Back then, inflation hovered around 2 per cent, where it stayed until the Covid era. At the same time, major asset classes such as property and shares were belting out great returns, often above 10 per cent a year.
Even under those conditions, it wasn’t always better than indexation though, as IPA research recently illustrated. Consider the unfortunate investor who sold a typical investment property in late 2012 after holding it for five years, during which national dwelling prices gained 7.4 per cent while the CPI increased by 14.5 per cent. That seller would have made a significant real loss, yet still owed capital gains tax.
Under the indexation method, by contrast, he or she would have paid zero tax. Blue-chip ASX200 share investors who sold in June 2025 after four years would have faced a similar tax fate with stockmarket returns failing to keep pace with the CPI.
All this is why the speculation about a revival of indexation is puzzling, if promising. The sort of high-inflation environment we are entering would in fact make the prevailing “discount” more punishing than the old Hawke-Keating system. Moreover, asset prices are at record levels in many markets, potentially pointing to a period of weak nominal returns.
If the government is hoping to raise more revenue than it currently forecasts to raise from CGT, this is a very strange way to go about it. Whatever the theoretical merits of reviving a CGT that allows for inflation, doing so will do next to nothing to improve “housing affordability” or “intergenerational equity” – the two meaningless political goals of our age. Who wouldn’t want homes to be more affordable or generations to be treated more fairly?

Even the most partisan analyses suggest shifting the CGT rate would have a price impact on dwellings of a few per cent at most. New Zealand has had among the highest house price growth in the world in recent years without any capital gains tax at all. It is disappointing the government hasn’t adopted more creative tax reforms that could have increased revenue and housing supply, such as adopting a US-style step-up in basis.
In Australia, inheriting assets doesn’t trigger a change in the cost base to the time of the previous owner’s death, as it does in the US. This creates a capital gains “lock-in” effect at death that discourages families in Australia, for instance, from ever selling their assets, lest they trigger a CGT event that is massive.
Such a reform here could see a dramatic increase in the number of home sales that boosts housing supply and, in turn, possibly government revenues too. Alas, any such move would be seen as a sop to the rich, and so is unlikely to ever emerge.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

Trust the IPA to offer a sop to the rich in the guise of benevolence for all? Sure can.

The pond can't recall the last time that the pond presented a reptile without any visual (or verbal) interruptions, and felt an urgent need for some relief ...

That's better.

And now maestro, drum roll please, because it's the turn of the hole in bucket man to take the stage and rant into the ether in a decidedly political way about how politics should not apply to y'artz ...

The header: The Biennale of hate, folly and mediocrity; When politics takes over, artistic quality sinks into a stinking canal.

The caption for the stinking art: The Venice Biennale has been engulfed in controversy over politics, censorship and artistic freedom. Picture: AP

Anyone expecting any more illustrative snaps of the artworks on hand will be bitterly disappointed. Again the reptiles exercised their new "no distracting snaps" rule.

And those wondering what set Our Henry off - he hasn't ever shown signs of being bigly into the y'artz - should look no further than Israel's extensive efforts at ethnic cleansing, and the fuss that has caused in Venice. You don't have to scratch hard to find the politics lurking on the surface.

But Our Henry plays it cool and is relatively sotto voce about that aspect.

Instead he comes at it crab style, so Mussolini comes in handy ...

The Venice Biennale did not so much open this week as lurch into crisis after its jury – chaired by Brazil’s Solange Farkas – resigned on the eve of its launch.
Beneath the rhetoric lies a stark asymmetry. Farkas, a far-left activist with longstanding links to Russian cultural institutions, pressed for Russia’s return (it had withdrawn in 2022) and Israel’s exclusion. The Biennale’s leadership baulked; the European Union, backed by the Italian government, threatened to withdraw its €2m ($3.25m) subsidy. The jury walked out, invoking, as is now de rigueur, “artistic freedom”, while pursuing its own selective ban.
None of this is sudden. It is the culmination of years of encroaching politicisation, and it recalls something no less disquieting: the period in which the Biennale willingly served Benito Mussolini’s regime, its claim to universality enlisted in the service of ideological orthodoxy and vicious antisemitism.
Founded in 1895, the Biennale was brought under direct fascist control in 1930, when Antonio Maraini – secretary of the Fascist trade union of fine arts – was installed as its secretary-general. A 1938 decree completed what its architects hailed as the exhibition’s “genuinely Fascist” transformation, with prizes for “Maternity”, “the poetry of labour” and the “March on Rome” soon displacing aesthetic judgment altogether.
The 1938 laws excluding Jews from public life dealt the final blow. Having visited the 1937 Munich exhibition, Maraini urged Mussolini to impose a Nazi-style tightening of cultural discipline. He then purged Jewish artists and critics from the Biennale’s rolls, rendering it entirely “Judenfrei”. With the outbreak of war, the exhibition became a mere arm of Fascist propaganda.
The 1948 Biennale, the first post-war edition, set out to decisively turn the page. Its content was conspicuously non-political, dominated by Peggy Guggenheim’s collection – Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Piet Mondrian – and master retrospectives. Oversight was vested in brilliant Italian critics, including the recently returned Lionello Venturi, whose orientation was unapologetically aesthetic. And the prizes – Georges Braque (1948), Henri Matisse (1950), Raoul Dufy (1952) – honoured artists Fascism had despised.
However, two decades later, politics roared back. The immediate catalyst was the anti-American protests that convulsed the Biennale in 1968. But the underlying causes ran deeper than a reaction to Vietnam, civil rights or feminism.

At this point the hole in bucket man's theories about y'artz really kicks into gear ...helped by the delusion that somehow art  can be tidily cleaved from politics and never the twain should mix, and what you need is "beauty, expression and formal mastery", because, you know, an exquisite portrait of Marie Antoinette has absolutely no political meaning. 

Nor do any portraits of clerics or royalty or nobility, they're just more examples of beauty and formal mastery ...

Repudiating the past and binding itself to the imperative of incessant novelty, a new generation of radical artists dismissed beauty, expression and formal mastery as inherently reactionary.
Emptied of intrinsic interest and stripped of aesthetic moorings, the art object required a new substrate. Leftist politics – emancipation, anti-capitalism, identity – supplied it, offering inexhaustible content, a standing warrant for novelty, and a claim to relevance that aesthetic judgment alone could not sustain.
Where religious art once served the church, secular art would now serve a political theology, with quasi-sacred authority transferred from revelation to revolution. And the more transgressive the works, the keener the market proved to be.
The 1973 reform of the Biennale’s governing statute did not arrest the radicalisation; it ratified it by granting artists, curators and arts administrators an unprecedented degree of control.
The reform’s underlying assumption was that the arts community would champion quality, variety and creativity. Yet artists are no less susceptible than anyone else to the impulse to impose their convictions on those who disagree. Once the arts-curatorial complex accepted the claim that the idea of an art world “isolated from broader social and political issues” was, as feminist art historian Whitney Chadwick put it, “a fiction” – and that refusing engagement endorsed an imperialist, patriarchal and racist status quo – space for deviant opinion rapidly disappeared.
The consequence is that rather than being the victims of political repression, artists, curators and arts administrators have become its most zealous enforcers. Operating as agents of exclusion, they ruthlessly police orthodoxy through grant denial, no-platforming and reputational ruin. And when challenged, the art-curatorial-bureaucratic ensemble hypocritically cloaks the demand for unswerving ideological alignment in the language of freedom of expression.
The damage is first to the social fabric. It is utter nonsense to claim, as so many do, that “art has always been political.” Until recently, no more than 5-10 per cent of leading works carried an explicit political message, even at the Venice Biennale.

Butt, billy goat butt, explicit political messages are entirely beside the point when any artist worth their salt can load up a work with implicit messages.

While Picasso might paint a Guernica in protest, his allegedly apolitical works can be read as containing loaded political meanings.

Whatever an artist might think they're doing, the viewer (or the reader) will come to their own viewpoint on the meaning of a work.

You don't have to go the full Godard:

The problem is not to make political films, but to make films politically. (here)

That way lies meretricious nonsense and full-flown Maoism.

But in its day Breathless was determinedly political too, embracing a desire to sweep away the old order, conjure up a filmic revolution, and embrace a peculiarly French form of nihilism.

And speaking of that, the pond recently caught up with a traditional French gangster offering made just before Breathless, starring Belmondo in a supporting role, Claude Sautet's Classe Tous Risques

It too offered a form of gangster nihilism, and apart from a desultory, off hand ending, it made sense by having a start, a middle and an end, and in that order.

 It made the pond realise that much was lost as fools and the pond blindly rushed to embrace the Godardian revolution.

Whether politics is implicit or explicit, it's always present.

The pond digresses, but the same can be said for Our Henry, because embedded in this tirade, this rant, aka this celebration of the allegedly apolitical, is a deeply political wail about Israel and the persecution of Jews (damn you Islamics):

Ostracism was rarer still: Pablo Picasso the Communist and Georges Braque the apolitical formalist not only coexisted but collaborated, readily participating in a broader, politically diverse, artistic world. The exclusion of Jewish artists, now spreading in the West, was confined to Muslim countries, where intolerance prevailed.
For the visitor, politics was incidental. Exhibitions offered instead a rare republic of taste – a space in which citizens of irreconcilable convictions could find themselves momentarily united in their response to beauty, the sublime, or formal achievement, sustaining what Alexis de Tocqueville called a sinew of freedom: a realm of non-political sociability that holds a liberal society together against the centrifugal pull of identity and interest.
But once exhibitions become another arena of contest – in which works are judged by alignment rather than achievement – that function is inverted. Art generates division where it once dissolved it.
The cost to aesthetic quality is just as severe. Conformity, unlike excellence, requires no talent; it is more reliably produced without it. The result is that the young artist is now rewarded not for mastery but for the right claim of ancestry, the correct opinions and, most of all, self-asserted victimhood; the curator for the outrage a work proclaims and provokes; and the arts bureaucrat for disguising favouritism as fairness while directing public funds to kitsch tarted up as subversion.
The effects are evident at this year’s Biennale. Spain’s display presents a montage of old postcards that supposedly constitutes an “act of resistance that challenges traditional modes of cultural legitimation”. Mexico’s pavilion purports to dramatise “urgent issues such as ancestral memory, epistemic justice, decolonisation and relational ecology” by treating “indigenous cosmogonies as living matrices of thought”, while the UK’s “addresses race, history, feminism, cultural memory and identity to challenge dominant Eurocentric narratives”.
Denmark alone provides inadvertent light relief: a pavilion devoted to “activism” centred on “a large-scale video work featuring porn star Nicolette Shea as a laboratory scientist in a sperm bank”. Amid the nonsense, the US pavilion is one of the few that strikes a sober, unambiguously aesthetic, note – and it is being angrily boycotted by anti-Trump “artivists”.

At this point some readers might be starting to miss the usual bigly array of pompous, portentous references, showing off Our Henry's astonishing ability to misread the point of texts.

Please hold the hole in bucket man's beer...

From Giorgio Vasari’s Accademia del Disegno (1563), which freed artists from the guilds, to Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790), which grounded contemporary aesthetics, securing the autonomy of art from politics was the hard-won work of centuries.
Max Weber and Theodor Adorno regarded this as an extraordinary civilisational achievement: by allowing art to flourish on its own terms of aesthetic judgment and technical mastery, it produced the unparalleled succession from Impressionism, through Cubism, Expressionism and Surrealism, to Abstraction – a flowering no era of political control has rivalled.
Now, at what Lionel Trilling called the “bloody crossroads where art and politics meet”, that autonomy lies in ruins. And, with its appallingly mediocre pavilion, Creative Australia has not used your money and mine to defend art; it has used it to hasten art’s destruction.

Gibberish and nonsense. 

Just because Jackson Pollock urinated in Peggy Guggenhim's fireplace didn't mean he didn't appreciate the advantages of a filthy rich patron advance his causes... (here)

As for hastening art's destruction, the pond has noted such cries over the centuries, and yet somehow art in some form or other has managed to survive. What it does suggest is that Our Henry's doom-saying millenarian streak is now a mile wide and rapidly expanding, an old codger attempting to hold back the tide, incapable of understanding the old, while resolutely rejecting the new ...

And so to close celebrating another sublime supporter of y'artz and architecture ...

Warning: there is absolutely no politics in this clip. 

Any mention of a pending civil war should be treated as clickbait. 

Instead admire the "beauty, expression and formal mastery" and the wan aestheticism of dying on a battlefield ... and be outraged at the temerity of the curator suggesting that the clothes in the painting actually have political signs and meanings ...