In which "Ned" and the Ughmann show how to bore the socks off the weekend ...

Anyone doubting that the Murdochians are more than One Nation curious, and are in fact swinging behind the party that supports the reptile agenda, should take a refresher course with the venerable Meade's outing yesterday ... As One Nation seeks donations to ‘fire the liar’, News Corp gives it front-page billing.

...Full-page coverage of the fundraising continued throughout the week, with headlines including: “Orange flood of cash as Pauline’s People rise up.”
The prime minister had the same reaction to the tabloid’s front page as we did, saying on Thursday that One Nation “had an ad for their fundraising campaign, effectively, free ad in one of the mainstream publications”.

That might have been in the Daily Terror, with the terrorists notorious for their wayward far right ways, but take a squiz at the celebratory tone in the lizard Oz, top of the world ma, splash this weekend ...

That header is meaningless nonsense. 

We're still in Canberra, and the entire point is that it's politics as usual, what with Hanson having been at the politics game since she first became an MP for Oxley way back in 1996.

What it does do is show how determined the reptiles are to celebrate the way that the Hansonists are on a triumphal march ... because what other party embraces the reptile agenda in such a comprehensive, devoted way?

Of course it's also an alarmist, hysterical troll, with nattering "Ned" sent in to numb the senses with an interminable ten minute bout of blather ...

The header: A nation divided as Hanson splits the right, harries the left; Anthony Albanese and Angus Taylor are scrambling to halt One Nation’s rise. It’s the relics versus the unconventional.

And sorry, the reptiles didn't provide a caption or a credit for that evocative piece of artwork, which featured Pauline clutching what might have been a pizza while "Ned" hit the highway to lightning central, so AI should probably take the blame.

It means about as much as "Ned's" seemingly endless tosh.

"Ned" spends his time posing as a non-Hansonite, but at the same time he spends a bigly amount of time dressing up the perils that Pauline poses...

Even that phrasing, that talk of "relics", is remarkable for a full-blown, card-carrying relic who seems to think he might have some understanding of the "unconventional"...
‘It’s the economy, stupid, it’s always the economy,” Anthony Albanese declared this week when One Nation sailed past Labor in the polls. But who is stupid? The voters defecting to One Nation or the Albanese government whose unconvincing economic policies have facilitated the flight?
The Albanese government and Australia have entered a new zone where a once marginal and renegade party under Pauline Hanson now heads both Labor and the Coalition as the most popular party.
Explaining the rot, Albanese said: “Many people feel the system isn’t working for them. They’re working hard, struggling to save, can’t get their own roof over their head.” Reverting to a diagnosis he has used since the 2022 election, Albanese said people felt “they’re working for the economy, not the economy working for them”.
This leads to his main pitch, virtually the essence of his leadership: that his job as Prime Minister is to improve the lot of people, to make life better. It’s mundane, nothing heroic, nothing inspiring, just getting the job done. But are his policies working?
Same message, same agenda
This is a conventional pitch. But it comes in an unconventional time. In his fifth year as Prime Minister, Albanese, while championing his reform budget, essentially has the same message selling the same agenda. Sitting on a massive 94 parliamentary seats, Albanese isn’t panicking about Hanson, who has two seats, but presents himself as the only centrist leader still left, calling Labor “the only mainstream party” in Australia. “I’m convinced that we will continue to be successful,” he told the ABC. The message: stick with Mr Reliable and Mr Conventional.

At this point, "Ned" decided to prove his relic status, by turning to a narcissist of the first water ... celebrated by John Crace a little time ago ...

...Politics is about power. And since I left No 10, the UK has become a second-class global power. So we need to stick close to the US. We need to be partners, not in opposition. Donald Trump is a great guy when you get to know him. Probably the best president since George W Bush. Someone who will be fully worthy of his Nobel peace prize. Just as I treasure the replica one I awarded myself. No one has done more to stop the wars he started.

Have I mentioned that I am the only Labour prime minister to have won a full second term? Not that I am in any way needy.

I am deeply honoured to be a member of Trump’s Board of Peace along with many others from the world’s most eminent list. Keir made a huge mistake by not joining the US in bombing Iran, because it can never be wrong not to go to war along with the US. Can it? There were weapons of mass destruction. I’m sure of it. There has to have been, we just haven’t found them yet.

And so on, and it's always fun to discover someone else who harbours even greater contempt for Tony Bleagh than the pond does... but not "Ned", not on your nelly ...

Listen, however, to Tony Blair in his recent manifesto to the beleaguered Keir Starmer government in Britain, delivering a big message: the conventional doesn’t work any more: “The people don’t want politics as usual. The real reason behind the rise of the leaders from Donald Trump to Giorgia Meloni to Javier Milei is that they answered this call. You can like them or dislike them, but their chief characteristic is they appear to be unbound, not constrained by conventional thinking.”
People in Western democracies these days think “anything is better than the agonising irritation of incremental change that never seems to deliver real change”.
Blair said the unconventional leaders “appear to have the ballast many conventional politicians lack – they have an attitude, a tribe and a project. They’re prepared to raise the middle finger to the part of the media which opposes them. And for protection they build a tribe – a core of support which will follow them, sometimes almost blindly.”

At this point the reptiles flung in a snap of the relic Bleagh...Former British prime minister Tony Blair. Picture: Getty Images

The pond much prefers this version ...

Now that captures the sinister malevolence... and now back to relic "Ned", managing to mangle Bleagh and Starmer, as if somehow all that fits down under ...

Unconventional versus relics
It’s easy to translate this diagnosis to Australia. Albanese and Angus Taylor are conventional leaders while Hanson is unconventional. This is the vital difference. The unconventional leader assails the status quo as discredited and attacks the conventional leaders tied to a conventional system. Albanese and Taylor are depicted as relics to be cast aside.
Blair says the unconventional leader must have a project – this vests them with “strength and purpose”. Hanson’s project is not defined. But its essence, grasped by many people, lies in the pledge: I’ll give you back the country you love that is being stolen from you.
That’s powerful. It resonates and it’s inclusive because most people will focus on something they think their country and their life is losing. What is Albanese’s project? He calls it improving the lives of Australians – it’s what prime ministers mostly say. But it doesn’t resonate much these days.
What is Taylor’s project? It has many dimensions: making life affordable, cheap and abundant energy, restoring aspiration, lower taxes, rejecting net zero and an immigration intake that puts Australians first. Yet these messages haven’t cut through; the Taylor project still awaits ultimate definition.
Blair says Starmer’s mistake before his victory was refusing to clarify Labour’s identity: was it New Labour, Old Labour, Blue Labour? The upshot is his government drifted and defaulted into the “party’s comfort zone”. It looks old-fashioned and leftist, unable to renew Britain. Blair warns that in these unconventional times the party that wins the next British election will run on a radical agenda.

Bleagh is the answer to it all? 

Then we're doomed, as the reptiles resorted to a reminder that the graphics department wasn't entirely dead, and that Emilia could stick it to AI ... As the One Nation wave gathers force, Anthony Albanese, left, and Jim Chalmers risk being seen as political relics. Artwork: Emilia Tortorella

Classic, Emilia, you could take that to the bank.

Now note how "Ned" manages to gloss over Pauline's flaws, and those of womanising drunk Barners, Tamworth's eternal shame, and the absence of useful policies, to portray the Hansonists as big winners, and even biglier dangers...

Boldness is the order of the day in Western politics – the culture of the unconventional translates into radical policy prescriptions. The people who criticise Taylor for moving right are clueless, totally uncomprehending what is happening to our politics.
Hanson’s rise constitutes a historic challenge to contemporary Labor’s successful electoral model – its three-way synthesis of tertiary educated, progressive-oriented, high-income earners; female and young voters; and traditional lower-income ALP voters with a class consciousness.
As Labor’s primary vote sinks to 30 per cent the critical question becomes: can Albanese hold this voting alliance together for the 2028 election? He probably can, but it is eroding and Hanson will erode it further. So expect more class consciousness messages from Albanese and Jim Chalmers.
Give Albanese his due. He decided six months before the budget that status quo politics in Australia wasn’t working. He saw that events were moving fast, that his government had to embrace new policies to keep setting the agenda for 2028. Hence the budget’s initiatives restricting future negative gearing to new builds, imposing an inflation indexation system for capital gains tax along with a 30 per cent minimum rate on assets and trusts, jus­tified by economic theory and equity.
The big danger for PM
Albanese presents himself as a reformer for the times, taking the tough decisions and recruiting intergenerational equity as his sell. “Hard decisions cannot be put on hold for easier times,” he says. “The challenges confronting Australia are too urgent to hang back.”
But the danger is obvious: that Albanese called the politics right but has got the economics wrong. Can his government deliver the economic gains for people to keep the One Nation wolf from the door?
It isn’t going well. The tax changes – a point of Labor conviction – are attacked as anti-aspirational, anti-investment and anti-entrepreneurial, enabling critics to brand Labor not as a government of renewal but as a redistributional, high tax, high spending, deficit obsessed, workplace regulation, weak productivity government presiding over weak economic growth.
At this point Albanese’s economic and social vision comes together. He wants to fight One Nation on “the economy, stupid” but the risk is that Labor’s grand economic vision is misconceived, that it looks a study in old-fashioned Labor convention, an ideology from the past, not a Hawke-Keating growth agenda but a return to big government and state intervention.
Polls show Hanson is the big winner from an unpopular budget. She will exploit every economic grievance for the next two years. And if the economy enters a further economic growth and living standards slump this will only prolong Hanson’s momentum.
How much of Blair’s critique of Starmer applies to Australia? He says Starmer won office not by election acclaim but as the “default option” to a discredited conservative government. He says British Labour came to office without any proper plan to address how the world was being transformed. He says Starmer is governing “from an essentially traditional Labour ‘soft left’ position” that gravely mis­judges the times.

Still harping on Bleagh, still implying that Pauline is Nige down under? No wonder the reptiles felt the need for an audio break ...

Does relic "Ned" have the first clue how his framing, how his ponderous, pompous discourse elevates Pauline?

Probably not. In the manner of Tony Bleagh, these relics aren't inclined to self-examination ...

Albanese and Chalmers may yet be vindicated with their budget and economic policies – and Albanese is a far superior political leader to Starmer – yet the economic omens aren’t looking too good at present.
While One Nation’s rise reflects mainly on the failures of the Coalition, Albanese cannot escape any responsibility. The Hanson eruption occurred on his watch, under his government and his government’s economic policies. The risk Labor faces with its current rhetoric – there’s plenty of good economic news from low unemployment, stronger living standards than in most OECD nations, the success of renewables driving 43 per cent of our electricity and tax reform to address the housing crisis – is that such assurances are not heard or only anger potential One Nation voters.
Have no doubt, the culture is changing. Policy debates seem less important. Our society is split into competing bubbles, separate tribes though sometimes overlapping, each morally convinced about its version of truth, possessing its own view of the world – the Hanson tribe, the progressive tribe, the conservative tribe, the climate change tribe, the disenfranchised tribe, then feeding into chaotic voting patterns. The broad-based, widely shared Australian culture is eroding – and that’s the opening for a substantial campaign from the right.
Fed up voters
The torment of our age is obvious: people want change, they’re fed up, they want relief and improvement, but there’s no consensus, no agreement, no shared understanding of what sort of change. The gulf between voters in the up-market urban teal seats and voters in regional Australia has never been greater. Growing tribalism means a fractured community but a community that cannot resolve its way forward. This is Australia’s dilemma.
Albanese’s approach to One Nation is to avoid personal criticism of Hanson, avoid criticism of One Nation voters but hammer the idea that Hanson’s policies don’t help the battlers, that she is tied to Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart, and that his opposition now comprises “three right-wing parties” increasingly bound together and fatally compromised by Hanson.
But Albanese and Taylor are jointly handicapped by the personalisation of our politics. The more politics is shaped by culture, the deeper are the divisions and the more difficult to find common ground. The rise of social media reinforces the cultural fracture.
People these days are expected to speak their minds. The old days of personal restraint and self-discipline as a virtue are fading. Politics is being driven more by emotion and sentiment, it’s about how you feel, what you like and what you don’t like, what makes you angry and how the political class has let you down. Venting your views often makes the individual feel good, gives them standing and is often seen as justified morality.

Say what? Isn't that exactly what Faux Noise has done, and the News Corp tabloids down under do, and so do the reptiles at the lizard Oz?

Isn't the entire point of the reptiles to make readers angry and generate a venting rage machine?

Now pause for another pumping up of the Pauline volume ...Having turned up the heat on the Coalition, Pauline Hanson is now taking the blowtorch to the Albanese government. Picture: Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman.

Must they keep reminding the pond of her uncanny resemblance to Martin Luther?

Uncanny. 

Thank you Ughmann, the pond will treasure that comparison for all eternity ...

And now, exhausted by "Ned", a final humungous gobbet ...

The Hanson voters are invariably presented in terms of what they oppose. But what does Hanson really represent? That seems mired in confusion. Does One Nation actually aspire to form a government under Hanson, a remote possibility for a political movement with a set of disconnected policy positions that in no way constitutes a viable governing agenda?
The more likely meaning of One Nation is obvious from the polls – it wages a revolutionary culture war within the right, its real purpose being to expose and replace the Coalition parties that it dismisses as historic failures. The polls document this reality, the latest Newspoll showing One Nation on 31 per cent and the Coalition on 18 per cent. The internal voting transfer within the right is massive. Unless the Liberals can reverse this trend and claw back voters, One Nation will become the official opposition at the 2028 election.
In this sense, the eruption of Hanson’s party remains a winning ace for Albanese.
Last week Hanson turned her blowtorch on the Albanese government, anxious to deflect the truth about her spectacular explosion – that One Nation will damage the Coalition far more than it will damage Labor. The creation of division and chaos on the centre-right becomes a permanent gift to the Albanese government. Indeed, Albanese pointed out that despite One Nation leading the field, Labor would still win an election on these polling numbers.
The tragedy of the right is apparent from Newspoll. The total right vote (One Nation plus Coalition) is 49 per cent while the total left vote (Labor and Greens) is 41 per cent. In theory that means the right can win. In practice it means the opposite since the right is locked into two wars – trying to defeat Labor and an internal survival war over which party will dominate the centre-right of politics. Remember: “Disunity is death.”
Pains big call
This situation creates panic among Coalition MPs; witness the statement this week from frontbencher and South Australian Tony Pasin, who broke ranks to say the Liberals should sit down with Hanson to negotiate the seats in which Liberals and One Nation should run so they didn’t compete against each other. This was a declaration of Liberal surrender: giving up its claim on seats to Hanson’s party.
An exasperated Taylor dismissed it: “We’re not going to be doing that.” Frontbencher James Paterson was equally emphatic. If such defeatism penetrates the Liberals, their future as a governing party is finished. Albanese didn’t miss, saying the Liberals were becoming “a fringe party”.
Yet many deluded commentators on the right are filled with “surrender” plans, usually taking the form of the Coalition and One Nation working together. It’s truly weird: asking to Liberals to co-operate with the party that openly seeks the destruction of their entire purpose over the past 80 years and ambition to govern the country.
Paterson also warned that talk of preference deals was premature. Who on earth would be the One Nation candidates? However, recent comments by the new federal president of the Liberals, Tony Abbott, about preferences have raised concerns; namely, that Abbott is learning too far towards an accommodation with One Nation. This is treacherous political terrain.
The conundrum on the centre right is whether policy matters anymore. Consider Taylor: he has supported the radical reform of tax indexation, denounces Labor’s higher taxes on assets, promises lower immigration by tying the intake to built houses, opposes net zero, supports more fossil fuels and will end tax breaks for electric vehicles, rejects Labor’s big government, pledges to reserve future welfare for Australian citizens, will savagely cut the National Construction Code, abolish the safeguard mechanism, reform migra­tion to fit Australian values and lift defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP. None of this so far has made the slightest difference to One Nation’s momentum.
Taylor cannot be cast as a sellout or running a Labor-lite agenda. Those days are over. The policy differences between Albanese and Taylor are immense and growing. The battlelines over a conviction-based Labor-Coalition policy contest reflecting radically different visions of Australia are now being drawn. Nobody following politics could doubt this.
What is the problem? Maybe it’s Taylor’s lack of media cut-through and weak electoral impact. Are One Nation voters aware of such Liberal policies or do they even care? Perhaps they don’t. Maybe the cultural Zeitgeist has prevailed over policy assessment in today’s world. Maybe Blair was right saying the conventional political leader gets no traction in our longing for the unconventional leader. If so, Western democracies are heading into big trouble.

What's the problem with the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way?

He's a dropkick, and now he has the onion muncher roaming around, determined to make sure that he's the biggest relic on the block ...

Meanwhile, Snappy Tom was also present pumping up the joys of rage ...

Fed-up Aussies are embracing the joy of rage
Voters feeling held back or left behind swing to populists
Politicians are copping it right now, but big business shouldn’t be let off the hook — corporate Australia has been missing in action, too.
By Tom Dusevic
Columnist

Given that the intermittent archive is currently working, the pond thought that a teaser trailer would suffice ...

They really won't stop until they lodge Pauline in the Lodge ...

Some reptiles apparently aren't aware of the ways that they're pumping up the volume, but it seems the ones held back and left behind are swinging to populists, hence snappy Tom's rousing closing line ...

...consenting adults will swing with the joy of rage.

And the reptiles know all about the joy of rage, what with it having been their business model for decades.

Speaking of consenting adults, the pond then went looking for a closing contribution, but the ongoing transphobia jihad ruled out several contenders ...

Court redefines what ‘woman’ means
In the highly contentious Giggle vs Tickle case, it is regrettable that judges adopted the terms used by one side.
By Catherine Carew

The always boiling Rice joined in with an EXCLUSIVE ...

EXCLUSIVE
Court ‘overreach’ in ruling on ‘a woman’
‘Extraordinary overreach’: Former judge slams gender ruling as case set for High Court
Sall Grover was punished for saying a man cannot become a woman. Now she’s appealing to the High Court — and a top former judge says she might just win.
By Stephen Rice

And Dame Slap, being a standard MAGA-cap-donning ravager of the law, decided to expand on failing judges with a piece proposing a pox on the lot of them:

Commentary by Janet Albrechtsen
‘Ashamed’: lifting the veil on the conduct of our judges
Federal Court judge Ian Jackman just lifted the veil on the conduct of judges
We are all too familiar with Australian judges falling for the cheap smell of their own self-importance. This week, we got a glimpse at something far darker.

But where was a reptile truly out there, like the Ughmann last week comparing Pauline to Martin Luther?

Where was the Ughmann?

Sadly the reptiles had allowed him to slip out a day earlier, and all he offered was a standard bit of renewables bashing, not nearly up to his eccentric seminarian-wrecked standards, but wotthehell wotthehell, Archy, i m toujours gai toujours gai, i know that i am bound for a journey down the sound with the bromancer and prattling Polonius tomorrow, so the Ughmann will have to do ...

The header: Australia’s renewables push creates a new China dependency and fails to cut costs; Labor promised cuts to power bills but Chris Bowen’s latest slogan masks the same broken pledge.

The caption for the two villains designed to ruin a reptile day: COP 31 President-Designate Murat Kurum of Türkiye, greets COP 31 President-Designate of Negotiations Chris Bowen in Bonn, Germany. Picture: X

A new China dependency? As opposed to the old China dependency that made Gina great again?

The Ughmann spent a bigly six minutes denouncing renewables and celebrating ongoing hydrocarbon sovereignty - where would the hive mind be without sweet, virginal, dinkum, decent clean Oz coal? - but it was standard reptile jihad fare, entirely lacking the flair of his last outing.

Perhaps he should have compared devotion to renewables to the Spanish Jesuits devotion to the Inquisition?

On with the torture ...

A new term has entered the political lexicon: sovereign renewables.
It may not have been manufactured in the slogan factory that is the office of Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen but he is its chief salesman.
“We’ve got the best sun and wind in the world, and we’re using sovereign renewables to shield our grid from global energy volatility and bring down your energy bills,” the minister said in a statement in early June.
At the time of writing, Bowen was in the German city of Bonn, filling his role as president of negotiations in the run-up to this year’s global climate jamboree. For those who came in late, this job is a recent innovation. It was given to Australia as a consolation prize for the tragedy of missing out on hosting the event to Turkey.
Bowen has confirmed this role will cost taxpayers $50m and likes to make spurious comparisons to massive international events Australia actually hosted to pitch it as a bargain. Only someone marinated in the culture of waste that is Canberra could find this argument compelling.
For the benefit of delegates in Bonn, Bowen deployed his rhetorical gifts to create a verbal tableau of how renewables deliver electricity sovereignty.
“Solar energy must travel 150 million kilometres from the sun to the Earth, but it does not have to travel the 150km through the Strait of Hormuz,” he said. “The wind cannot be sanctioned.”
The observant will have already noted that the rotation of the Earth interrupts sunshine every single night. Doldrums still the wind. You could cover the continent in solar panels, and several trillion of them harvesting zero sunshine at midnight still would add up to zero power.
And wind and sunlight do not gather themselves into electricity. That requires solar panels, wind turbines, inverters, batteries, transformers and synchronous condensers. Calling that sovereign energy is akin to declaring a Chinese warship Australian because it is bobbing around off our coast.

You see? He's clearly struggling. When the seminary doesn't give him the right sort of Martin Luther metaphor, he's forced into blather about Chinese warships.

It was past time already for a visual interruption, and in these outings, it's always the job of the graphics department to come up with an outlandish shot of renewables at work, designed to terrify the hive mind. Come on down A partial view of a molten salt tower solar thermal power station in China, where spending on green energy has soared. Picture: Getty

It was so terrifying that the pond thought it should be shown in a bigly way ...

Meanwhile, the Ughmann was getting worried by the way that China had stolen a march on the world, and especially on that prize maroon, King Donald ...

China’s grip on solar power
We are all now familiar with the numbers that describe the choke point that is the Strait of Hormuz. Roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil and gas trade is locked behind that narrow passage. But that pales beside the lock Beijing has on the machinery that turns the weather into sometimes-there electricity.
China controls more than 80 per cent of every stage of solar panel manufacturing, from polysilicon to wafers, cells and modules. It also dominates battery manufacturing, rare earth processing and critical minerals refining.
Beijing also dominates the global wind industry, with its manufacturers accounting for around three-quarters of new turbine installations worldwide. But the real choke point is the specialised magnets buried inside the generators. China manufactures around 90 per cent of the world’s rare-earth magnets, giving it an extraordinary degree of control over one of the most critical components in the renewable energy supply chain.
So how sovereign is a system whose construction depends almost entirely on factories controlled by a strategic rival? What might a regional war do to this supply chain? And when all this kit is assembled here, how sovereign do you think it will be when its brains are coded offshore and can be updated at will, with the now not entirely academic possibility of an effective off switch in Beijing?
Where are the electric planes, Minister?

Poor Ughmann. He probably thought that was a killer question.

Why didn't he ask where the methane is Minister? Don't worry, it's here ...

Beyond that, Bowen’s recent role as diesel diplomat has clearly not sharpened his world view into the central role liquid fuel plays in driving our economy. Despite the hype about electrifying everything, we are a short way down a very long road. Electric vehicle numbers will rise, but even if every new car sold from today were electric it would take more than a decade for the national fleet to turn over.
Then you have to work out how to electrify heavy transport, agriculture, aviation and mining. Norway is often offered as an example of success. Two points. You can fit two Norways in NSW and diesel trucks still make up well over 90 per cent of that country’s heavy vehicle fleet. Where are the electric intercontinental passenger planes?
Hard to abate means what it says on the tin. If it were easy, someone would have done it.
Then there are the more than 6000 products that flow from a barrel of oil, from plastics to the petrochemicals that are the base for most of our medicines.
There is no energy sovereignty without hydrocarbon sovereignty.
Bowen also believes that endlessly chanting the claim that wind and solar generation delivers cheap electricity will make it true. If it were, the federal government would not have needed to spend billions of taxpayer dollars on energy bill relief to hide the bill shock.
Unpicking Labor’s broken power bill promise
Since Labor promised to deliver a $275-a-year cut to power bills relative to December 2021 prices, costs have marched ever upward. Every time a model hints at a future cut to electricity prices, Bowen claims it as vindication, despite the growing chasm between what he pledged and what actually happened.
Let’s underscore this point. Models do not pay electricity bills. Australians do. And consumers do not pay the wholesale cost of power; they pay the total system cost. We are conducting a real-world, real-time experiment on the eastern electricity grid and the only metric that counts is the retail power bill.
This is not a debate about forecasts. It is an audit of outcomes against Labor’s promise. So far, the verdict is clear: it is an abject failure.
Bowen’s latest victory dance had a tiny bit more substance than usual as it came after the Australian Energy Regulator handed down a determination that will result in the safety-net price of electricity falling in some jurisdictions in July.

Actually it's the solar panels on the pond's new digs that helps pay the electricity bills, and how the pond is enjoying that novelty.

Meanwhile, the reptiles resorted to an old gripe ... Former Snowy Hydro CEO Paul Broad claims Energy Minister Chris Bowen wanted to blame the project’s massive cost and timeline blowouts on the Morrison government. “When the [Albanese] government came in, and Chris Bowen became the Energy Minister, he was hellbent on knocking me over and rewriting history,” Mr Broad told Sky News Australia. “He wanted me to go out and bag [Morrison-era energy minister] Angus [Taylor] and make all the problems his.”

Um ...

And with that it was time to wrap up the Ughmann ...

It should be noted that the same regulator now has warned twice that a wall of capital expenditure is coming at consumers in the form of higher transmission and distribution charges, which could swamp any falls in wholesale costs and be baked into bills for years. And a close reading of the latest default market offer seems to be bearing that out.
The biggest price cut was in coal-heavy Queensland while the retail price for some residential customers rose in South Australia, the most wind and solar-dependent jurisdiction in the land. That was driven by rising system security costs. Unfortunately, when you dismantle old coal-fired plants, you also remove the essential frequency-control services they delivered as a by-product of the big spinning machines at the heart of their steam-driven generators.
Elsewhere, the ACT’s independent regulator approved a hike in power bills because a fall in wholesale electricity costs was trumped by rising network costs and the expense of the territory’s green policies.
Power retailers absorbing the risk
It also seems clear that retailers are being forced to absorb more risk by the regulator. AGL has objected to its wholesale price calculations, arguing that retailer exposure under a fixed price cap is asymmetric: losses during price spikes are immediate and unrecoverable, while gains in lower-price periods are competed away. It warns of the possibility of retailers going broke.
Origin has attacked the regulator’s treatment of network charges, arguing it is not supported by any logical, analytical or legal basis and risks undermining the credibility of the default market offer process.
Victoria has its own regulator and it also has lowered the safety-net price of electricity. But the default prices there and in the federally regulated states apply to only about one in seven or eight customers. It will be intriguing to see what happens to the cost of electricity when the other 90 per cent get their market offers.
And one swallow does not make a spring; the trajectory of electricity prices is up.
Is it too much to ask the evangelists of the so-called energy transition that they be honest about the costs, trade-offs and risks? That includes not just the politicians but the vast ecosystem of bureaucrats, subsidy hunters, billionaire energy hobbyists, activists and carpetbaggers who swarm around this debate. People can read the results in their power bills, and the blizzard of shopworn slogans about cheap wind and solar is just another reason there is a revolt against politics as usual.
We need real energy sovereignty, not bumper sticker slogans.

Feeble stuff, more bumper sticker rant than insight, a rote parade of standard reptile renewables coverage, what with their lust to see climate change wreak havoc on the planet.

After all that, the pond wondered if it had missed something, and then it dawned on the pond that certain matters had gone AWOL.

Amazingly early on the Saturday, the reptiles didn't find any top of the page space for news of King Donald, Iran, the latest talk of peace, and the whole damn thing.

The pond hadn't expected nipplegate to reach their august pages, but surely they should have been down with the war, or at least the latest in US cultural events?

Must the pond always rely on the cartoonists?