You are invited to a Monday morning brunch with a reptile ...

The pond realises that the concept of a brunch is hopelessly middle class, but in the revised schedule the pond is operating on, needs must, and the only dilemma is whether to chose a hearty heart attack meal laden with breakfast bacon or focus on a rabbit food lunch menu.

Naturally the pond chose the saturated bacon suitable for a reptile feast, with the swishing Switzer showing how to serve up a splendid pile of tosh.

The pond has made some sacrifices to go there.

The reptiles were cock a hoop this morning at the One Nation-isation of the country and the lizard Oz, with Geoff chambering an exclusive round.

EXCLUSIVE
Newspoll: Pauline Hanson’s One Nation in front of Labor, Anthony Albanese gets worst ever rating
In a watershed moment for Australian politics, core support for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is ahead of Labor as Anthony Albanese hits a record low.
By Geoff Chambers

Geoff chambered a double barrelled serve...

Commentary by Geoff Chambers
Mad as hell voters not going to take it anymore
Newspoll: Pauline Hanson’s One Nation revolution has exploded far beyond the populist’s dreams
Pauline Hanson has led an uprising many of her detractors believed was impossible.

The pond scurried past like a white rabbit, leaving it to the intermittent archive, pausing only to note that the reptiles' new heroine was on the march, and more importantly, that the swishing Switzer heard the call, ran up the white flag, and rallied to the cause ...

The header: Libs’ political reality means deal with Hanson only pragmatic; The longstanding sentiment that One Nation should be resisted could be outdated.

The caption for the bottled redhead supporting an alleged war criminal in a birds of a feather moment: Pauline Hanson attends event in support for Ben Roberts-Smith, Seventeen Mile Rocks, Brisbane. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen / The Australian

Before proceeding, the pond couldn't help noticing once again the astonishing similarities between Pauline and Martin, as identified on the weekend by the Ughmann.

How could the pond have missed it? 

Thank the long absent lord for the astonishing insights available to the hive mind.

And now on with the ongoing One Nation-isation of the lizard Oz and the hive mind, with the swishing Switzer showing the way ...

Former Victorian Liberal premier Denis Napthine is hardly alone in harbouring doubts about closer electoral co-operation with One Nation.
His intervention reflects a longstanding sentiment within sections of the Liberal establishment that Pauline Hanson’s party should be resisted even on a seat-by-seat basis.
Yet as One Nation’s support continues to grow, an increasing number of conservatives are beginning to ask whether that debate belongs more to the political circumstances of the late 1990s than to those of today.
True, preference co-operation is not cost-free politically or reputationally, especially in metropolitan electorates. But politics in preferential voting systems is ultimately about addition, not subtraction. Unless the broader centre-right learns to coexist electorally, it risks Labor remaining in office because its opponents are divided against themselves.
This is hardly an unfamiliar lesson in Australian history. After the Labor split of the mid-1950s, the fractured centre-left materially assisted Coalition dominance federally until the early 1970s. Robert Menzies was probably our nation’s greatest prime minister, but he and the Coalition undoubtedly benefited from a divided Labor movement and Democratic Labor Party preferences.
The same dynamic assisted long-serving Liberal premiers such as Thomas Playford in South Australia, Henry Bolte in Victoria, David Brand in Western Australia and Robert Askin in New South Wales. Today, there is a growing risk of the inverse occurring on the Australian centre-right.

What a wondrous sell-out and quisling this Vichy lad is, as the reptiles interrupted with a snap of Malware: Malcolm Turnbull has been vocal in bagging his old party. Picture: Martin Ollman

It's all Malware's fault! Now back to the apologetics, worthy of a Jesuit defending the Inquisition:

Hanson voters are not extremists. 

Of course they aren't. They're just climate science denying bigots afraid of furriners and pesky, uppity blacks, and therefore entirely in accord with the lizard Oz.

Most are former Coalition voters who increasingly believe the Liberal Party stopped listening to them years ago. They saw Malcolm Turnbull – today an almost daily presence on the ABC bagging his old party – as embodying a breathtaking born-to-rule leadership style detached from the instincts of the Liberal grassroots.
No wonder he squandered the political capital won under Tony Abbott’s landslide in 2013. Coalition voters were later disappointed by Scott Morrison’s embrace of net zero and by the significant expansion of state authority during the Covid years.
Andrew Neil, the distinguished British journalist, has argued that centre-right parties across the democratic world cannot renew themselves until they acknowledge how deeply many traditional supporters feel they were let down while conservatives were last in power.
There is an uncomfortable truth in that observation; and it helps explain why so many former Coalition supporters have utter contempt for the likes of Turnbull.
The challenge facing Angus Taylor is therefore larger than simply refining the Coalition’s budget message or sharpening parliamentary tactics. It is whether the Liberal Party can rebuild trust with voters who increasingly see One Nation not as an aberration, but as a vehicle for frustrations they believe the Coalition ignored for too long.

Poor old beefy windmill fearing boofhead from down Goulburn way. Fancy dragging him into this mess ... Opposition Leader Angus Taylor must convince voters the Liberal Party can rebuild trust with them. Picture: Martin Ollman

The pond had wondered whether a "billy goat butt" would come and what form it might take, and at last the question was answered.

The swishing Switzer dressed it up as a "none of this means" but quickly followed that billy goat with another butt about "recognising political reality", as any sell-out king would do:

None of this means the Liberals should become One Nation. But it does mean recognising a political reality that sections of the Liberal establishment still appear reluctant to confront: a divided centre-right may simply entrench Labor dominance for another generation.
To say the stakes are high is an understatement. After four years of Anthony Albanese’s government, a clear majority of Australians fear the country is moving in the wrong direction. Australia has experienced weak productivity growth, stagnant living standards, housing unaffordability, persistently high migration and still-high energy costs.
Canberra’s fiscal approach has also fuelled unease among middle-income voters. Having already targeted successive pools of private savings – from superannuation to investment assets – there is growing concern that the family home itself may eventually come within the reach of an increasingly revenue-hungry government.
At the state level, the long Andrews-Allan era has similarly left many Victorians deeply disillusioned. The government’s record has been marked by repeated financial blowouts, mounting debt and costly infrastructure mismanagement.
Many Victorians also remain troubled by the severity and duration of the state’s lockdown regime during Covid, which became the longest anywhere in the democratic world.
Then there’s energy policy: Labor’s lengthy restrictions on onshore gas exploration reflected an ideological certainty that increasingly collided with the practical realities of tightening energy supply and rising prices across eastern Australia. Add to this the astonishing explosion in crime in Victoria, and it is no wonder the Garden State is widely seen as a national embarrassment.

Of all the wretches and miscreants to enlist in this blather ... Former Victorian premier Jeff Kennett says a divided centre-right risks entrenching the left by default. Picture: Luis Enrique Ascui

And then came a remarkable assertion, to which the pond could only think "pig's bum":

Jeff Kennett is right: One Nation should be part of a broader electoral effort to defeat both the Allan government later this year and the Albanese government within the next two years. The Coalition parties have yet to decide whether to pursue a preference arrangement with One Nation but, if the goal is to defeat Labor, the strategic logic is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore: a divided centre-right risks entrenching the left by default.
After all, Labor has never hesitated to co-operate electorally with the Greens, a radical left-wing party, in pursuit of power. It is becoming harder to argue that different rules should apply to parties on the conservative side of politics.

At the very end, there came a forlorn credit for the quisling hack.

Tom Switzer is presenter of the Switzerland podcast.

Never listened to it, never will.

The pond now must pause to celebrate Pauline's dream, one long shared by the reptiles at Faux Noise ...

The Caterist was also on hand to help...

The header: Labor’s productivity neglect like rocket fuel for One Nation; The scene is set for a three-cornered contest. It would be a brave person to predict who has the last laugh.

There was no caption for the snap, so it was on with the quarry whispering Caterist spending four minutes doing his best to pump up the volume for One Nation:

Day 22 of the operation to salvage Jim Chalmers’ budget gave Katy Gallagher her chance to prove her worth as Finance Minister.
She squandered it, stonewalling the Senate Economics Committee with the weaponised indifference of a surly teenager. Like Pauline Hanson, a serial absentee from Senate committees, she clearly didn’t want to be there. Unlike Hanson, however, she had no choice.
Matt Canavan began with an easy question: “What elements in your budget help increase productivity?” Gallagher rolled her eyes dismissively. “There is a glossy A4 there,” she said. “There are 14, ah, 16 different measures. I was wondering whether or not you had read it?”
Labor’s best hope is that no one cares about productivity anymore, that the TikTokification of the policy debate has robbed the word of any meaning it once had. Reform is anything you say it is, neither more nor less.
A 15-minute exchange before the morning break on Thursday revealed the structural weaknesses in Labor’s economic management. A politicised Treasury and an uninterested Finance Minister have robbed the government of the institutional backstops every Treasurer and PM needs, leaving its economic policy exposed to groupthink and whimsy.

The reptiles flung in an AV distraction ... Finance Minister Katy Gallagher and Nationals Leader Matt Canavan have traded barbs in a fiery Senate Estimates clash over whether Labor's tax reforms will improve productivity.

Then it was on with the flood waters whispering Caterist channeling the Canavan caravan, because black coal matters ...

Canavan gave the Treasury secretary every opportunity to give a fearless and frank assessment of Chalmers’ budget when he asked whether the department had modelled the productivity impact of changes to capital gains tax, negative gearing and the tax treatment of trusts.
“Our assessment,” Jenny Wilkinson began cautiously, “is that, taken together, the reforms announced in the budget should help Australia move towards the long-run productivity assumptions that we have in the medium-term forecasts.”
How so? Until this government took office, the minimum requirement for economic reform was to reduce the overall tax take or spend it more efficiently.
Chalmers’ budget does the opposite, diverting an additional $80bn from the productive private economy into general review in the unproductive public sector.
The Finance Minister’s glossy brochure fails to explain this basic inconsistency. At least four of its 12 points (not 14 or 16) are basic housekeeping, reducing red tape and streamlining compliance. Others, such as accelerating foreign investment and environmental approvals, are pure wishful thinking.

Cue a snap of the man himself ...Nationals leader Matt Canavan.

The clueless Caterist didn't seem to understand, or care, that his celebration of the potency of Pauline might have some implications for the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way and Freedumb boy. It was enough that Jimbo was under the reptile hammer ...

Productivity figures reported in the National Accounts last week confirm the dismal trend in productivity that has accelerated under the Albanese government. Opposition Treasury spokesman Tim Wilson issued a press release pointing out that productivity had declined by 5 per cent since Labor came to power.
Chalmers saw the opportunity for a gotcha. “I checked out that number,” he told parliament. Wilson’s figure had included the March quarter of 2022 when productivity had fallen 2.3 per cent, he said. Labor wasn’t elected until May. In fact, productivity rose in the March 2022 quarter to a record high. The 2.3 per cent fall was in the June quarter. It is a moot point how much of the fall occurred in the first 10 days of April, before the Morrison government entered caretaker mode, or in the 40 days of the quarter from May 22, when Labor was in office. The substantive point is the same.
The four years of productivity decline under Labor are deeply alarming. Three decades of steady jobs growth and an almost unbroken rise in GDP have masked the structural declines in an economy that is running on the fumes of the genuine economic reforms in the 80s and 90s.

Quick, a snap of the villains, as a reminder that Pauline and the lizard Oz know who the real enemies are ...Anthony Albanese, Jim Chalmers and Katy Gallagher in Canberra on budget day. Picture: Martin Ollman

The quarry whispering Caterist continued to make the case for One Nation ...

Productivity data offers a reading on what has been happening under the bonnet. Between 1995 and 2005, productivity growth averaged 2.2 per cent, comfortably above the 1.6 per cent 60-year average. Between 2005 and 2015, average productivity growth fell to 1.3 per cent. Over the past decade, the average is 0.3 per cent.
Much of this has been attributed to the relative growth of the service sector, where productivity tends to be lower. The growth of government, however, particularly over the past five years, has put a significant drag on the productive economy.
The compounding effects of inflation have increased government tax revenue through bracket creep. Strong commodity prices have delivered an unexpected windfall, much of which has been foolishly frittered away. The budget measures are an ill-disguised tax grab, framed as reform solely for the sake of the narrative. Their practical effect will be the very opposite of the economically liberalising, pro-competition measures introduced at the end of the last century.
While Paul Keating continues to bask in the glory of those reforms, he was greatly assisted by independent, economically literate advice from Treasury and by finance minister Peter Walsh, who belonged to a generation of reformers who believed productivity was earned through competition, investment and efficiency. Their focus was on removing barriers, reducing protection and restraining spending. Today’s policy debate starts from the opposite end: how government can redistribute the proceeds of growth before asking where the growth itself will come from.

Finally there came a snap of the reptiles' new heroine herself ...Pauline Hanson.

The pond expects everyone will immediately spot the resemblance to Martin Luther, as the Caterist wrapped up proceedings with a sudden realisation that he was helping Pauline and selling his old comrades down the river...

The Coalition and Labor face opposite challenges. Angus Taylor must turn a dry reform agenda into an appealing political narrative. Albanese and Chalmers must adapt a social equity narrative to something approximating genuine reform. All the while, the party ahead of both is banking on the idea that no one cares about this stuff anyway and that Labor’s casual broken promises are symptomatic of the political class as a whole. There is little sign that Pauline Hanson’s studied absence from Senate committee hearings has damaged her standing. Indeed, it may have enhanced it.
The scene is set for a three-cornered contest between a Labor Party on the populist left, the economically conservative Coalition and One Nation, with its rudimentary policy development but devilishly good satirical cartoons.
It would be a brave person to predict who has the last laugh.

Hopefully we'll all have the same Gina laugh they're currently having in those disunited States ...

And now to continue the One Nation-isation of the lizard Oz and the hive mind with the help of Major Mitchell:

The header: Climate activists lose their voice in the face of facts; Australia’s climate media has ignored a landmark IPCC shift scrapping the doomsday warming scenarios that underpinned decades of costly government policy and public scaremongering.

The caption for one of Satan's renewables loving minions: Federal Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen. Picture: Martin Ollman

Major Mitchell helpfully prepared a position paper for One Nation on the matter of climate science.

One Nation has long been saturated with climate science denialists and so has the lizard Oz, and so it was inevitable that the two would join forces.

(The pond understands that Major Mitchell's scribbles might well become part of One Nation's platform on climate change).

The Major began by citing that well-known and reliable in-house resource, Lloydie of the Amazon:

Being a climate activist – whether scientist or journalist – means never having to say you’re sorry.
On May 14, The Australian’s Graham Lloyd reported on a new scientific paper that challenges worst-case scenarios on possible future climate change, and dramatically cuts the forecast warming of the planet by the end of this century.
The new pathways put forward by the scientific paper will feed into the upcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change AR7 assessment, due in stages by 2029.
Incredibly, more than five weeks after the new pathways were accepted by the IPCC, most climate writers and government-backed climate bodies in Australia have not even mentioned the changes, which eliminate the doomsday scenarios many have been pushing for decades.

Sorry, the pond must interrupt here to note a brazen lie, a distortion and a fraud. 

The Major's headline blathered about "a landmark IPCC shift", but on a closer reading, the Major modified this to blather about one scientific paper "feeding into" the IPCC.

Contemptible really, but entirely fitting for One Nation and the Major:

Lloyd wrote: “It does not suggest that climate change is not happening but it is a reality check for how climate science has allowed itself to be hijacked by what has resembled a death cult of catastrophe.”
A couple of scientists in Australia, including one who wrote a piece on The Conversation website, tried to spin the scrapping of the most extreme pathways – known to scientists as RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5 and SSP3-7.0 – as a sign that actions taken globally, especially the rise of renewable energy, were working. It was self-serving rot.
The truth is that most people who closely follow the arcane world of the IPCC and its feed-in science groups knew the extreme warming scenarios were always a fantasy.
The so-called business-as-usual scenario, RCP 8.5, involved an eight-fold increase in coal burning for power, which at the time the pathway was accepted was five times proven global coal reserves.
Nor did this scenario take account of the rise in gas globally as a cheaper, less carbon-intensive source of power than coal, especially after the rise of fracking for shale gas in the US in the early 2000s.
The scenario was based on the population increasing from the present eight billion to 12 billion by 2100. It now seems global population will hit 10 billion mid-century and fall to as low as seven to nine billion by 2100.
So why is all this important?
Most scaremongering by global warming catastrophists such as King Charles, Greta Thunberg and our own Energy Minister Chris Bowen was built on predictions drawn from RCP8.5. This includes predicted sea level rises of 1.1m and a rise in average global temperatures by 5C by 2100. Results from the latest scenario modelling suggest about 2.5C of warming since pre-industrial times.

The reptiles decided to fling in a snap of King Chuck, because everyone knows talking tampons don't do science: King Charles has been vocal about global warming. Picture: Getty Images

Before proceeding to the next Major gobbet, the pond would like to drop a few notes on the Major's sources.

First there's this ...

Article by Michael Shellenberger mixes accurate and inaccurate claims in support of a misleading and overly simplistic argumentation about climate change

And way back when Damian Carrington wrote The four types of climate denier, and why you should ignore them all for the Graudian, which began this way ...

A new book, described as “deeply and fatally flawed” by an expert reviewer, recently reached the top of Amazon’s bestseller list for environmental science and made it into a weekly top 10 list for all nonfiction titles.
How did this happen? Because, as Brendan Behan put it, “there’s no such thing as bad publicity”. In an article promoting his book, Michael Shellenberger – with jaw-dropping hubris – apologises on behalf of all environmentalists for the “climate scare we created over the last 30 years”.
Shellenberger was named a hero of the environment by Time magazine in 2008 and is a loud advocate of nuclear power, but the article was described by six leading scientists as “cherry-picking”, “misleading” and containing “outright falsehoods”.
The article was widely republished, even after being removed from its first home, Forbes, for violating the title’s editorial guidelines on self-promotion, adding further heat to the storm. And this is why all those who deny the reality or danger of the climate emergency should be ignored. Obviously, I have broken my own rule here, but only to make this vital point once and for all.
The science is clear, the severity understood at the highest levels everywhere, and serious debates about what to do are turning into action. The deniers have nothing to contribute to this.

Hopefully that helps decontaminate what follows from the Major ...

As American author Mike Shellenberger wrote on the Public website on May 27, “the worst-case scenario that has anchored climate science for 15 years describes a world that cannot exist. Scenario RCP8.5 and its successor SSP-8.5 generated more than half of the references in the 2018 US Fourth National Climate Assessment.
“They accounted for 60 per cent of the references in the IPCC’s Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere.”
The hysteria generated by a scenario many people argued was impossible when it was adopted has made many countries poorer. The UK and Europe have committed to net zero by 2050 on the basis of predictions the IPCC now accepts are way off kilter.
Europe has lost much of its industrial base to China. Much manufacturing in Australia has also moved to China, and taxpayers are forking out billions to keep metal smelting operators open because they are unviable with high power prices driven by the renewables transition.

Regarding the next Major source, he's been around for a long time. See this recommendation in Grist back in 2009 ...

The fantastical falsehoods of Roger Pielke, Jr.

Now that they’ve shut down his original blog, Roger Pielke, Jr., is desperately trying to remain relevant in the blogosphere.  Pielke’s preferred strategy – as it has always been – is to utterly misrepresent what people say and then attack that misrepresentation in the hopes of garnering media attention.  Baselessly smearing the professional reputation of hundreds of leading U.S. scientists means nothing whatsoever to him – if it gets him press coverage (see details here).
These days, the main “media” paying attention to Pielke, Jr. (as with Pielke, Sr.) are the global warming deniers (see “Uber-denier Inhofe gives big wet Valentine’s kiss to Pielke – go figure!“).  So it’s no surprise that Pielke Jr.’s latest distortion was immediately picked up by Swift Boat smearer Marc Morano, much as the main person pushing Pielke Sr.’s climate disinformation is anti-science blogger Anthony Watts (see “Like father, like son: Roger Pielke Sr. also doesn’t understand the science of global warming – or just chooses to willfully misrepresent it“)...

See the original for links, see Skeptical Science for "Climate Misinformation by Source", and now see the Major...

Roger Pielke Jnr, a former professor of environmental science at the University of Colorado and a controversial analyst of the economics of climate action, explains the impact of RCP8.5 in a Substack post of April 29. The abandoned scenarios “are not just academic constructs”, he writes. “They are embedded in the policies and regulations of most of the word’s largest economies, found across the world’s most important multilateral institutions, and used in climate stress tests that govern hundreds of billions of dollars of bank capital.”
Yet from our alarmist climate writers in mainstream media, this column could find not a single word. After years of overheated forecasts in their news and opinion pages, only crickets when the scenario on which those scares were based fell over.
Pielke published the new climate pathways on The Honest Broker site on April 29. On May 9 he surveyed the global media’s response.
The Dutch and German media were out front, not unexpectedly given Dutch scientist Detlef van Vuuren was lead author of the paper that announced the new scenarios. But nothing in The New York Times, Guardian or BBC.
The Conversation published an op-ed by Andrew King, associate professor of Climate Science at the University of Melbourne, on May 27.
He noted President Trump had taken an interest in the scrapping of RCP8.5.

Mad King Donald is also enrolled in the Major's science team? US President Donald Trump has taken an interest in the scrapping of RCP8.5. Picture: Getty Images

That's got to be worth a climate 'toon...

What else to say, except to suggest that this will suit the Major's position paper for One Nation, so that we might make Australia grovel to the mad king yet again ...

“But the removal of this high-emissions scenario isn’t, as Trump and other climate sceptics have claimed, a sign of failed modelling.” Rather it was testament to the success of the policies already introduced to mitigate against climate change, King argued.
It was the line Van Vuuren et al used in the paper to explain the dumping of the extreme scenarios.
Never mind Pielke and others had published papers pointing to the overblown assumptions that underpinned the high emissions scenarios.
Never mind fossil fuels still dominate global power, and never mind emissions of CO2 from those fossil fuels are still rising globally.
Anticipating the blowback from the lowered climate scenarios, Van Vuuren et al wrote: “High emission levels (quantified by SSP5-8.5) have become implausible, based on trends in the costs of renewables, the emergence of climate policy and recent emissions trends.”
Journalists have been talking about the need for governments to act against “misinformation” and “disinformation”. Yet they say nothing about the stream of false prophesies trotted out by climate scientists.

And now those familiar with the pond knew it was coming.

How could the Major resist quoting the Bjørn-again one, a legend in his own lunchtime but otherwise largely irrelevant, unless you happen to be reading the lizard Oz:

Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg last month showed how the latest European statistics on heat-related deaths in the elderly represented no more than the increase in the numbers of elderly as life expectancy rose. Lomborg has showed many times that cold weather remains a bigger threat to life than heat.

The reptiles thought so highly of this reference that they threw in a snap ...Bjorn Lomborg is a Danish political scientist, author, and the president of the think tank Copenhagen Consensus Centre.

The pond has already covered the Bjørn-again so many times that ennui would ensue if the pond contemplated his irrelevance again, and so to the Major's denialist wrap.

The Major can say with some pride that it's a perfect summary for One Nation, a Major position paper for the ages ... or at least until next week, when the Major will either by Zionist Central, or continue as the Klimate King ...

Shellenberger said the IPCC now needs to correct the record on other climate scare campaigns, namely “sea level rise, hurricanes, fires, polar bears and extreme weather”.
Yet reporters happily quote politicians or the UN attributing every fire, flood or tropical storm to climate change.
Lomborg has shown how the historical evidence proves land lost to fires has fallen since the start of the 20th century. Tropical storm numbers are declining even if there is some evidence some are becoming more intense. Much flooding is linked to changed land use near coastlines and rivers.
There is no evidence polar bear numbers are falling.
And let’s never forget we were told by the UN Environment Program in 2005 that sea level rises would create 50 million climate refugees by 2020. An Auckland University study in 2018 found many South Pacific atolls were in fact growing.
But climate activists – journalists and scientists – are never accountable. It’s about their good intentions, not the facts.

The facts? As always, the Major and facts aren't one, but rather two ... and never the twain shall meet.

And so to wrap up by catching up with the immortal Pope, who happens to be foreshadowing the pond's post tomorrow ...