Dame Groan, the onion muncher and Our Henry all on a Friday? Are you not entertained? How could you possibly want more?

 

This Friday the pond's cup overflowed, with a host of pond favourites on hand in the lizard Oz, but there are some outrages the pond simply won't tolerate, such as Jack the dropkick's attempt to downplay Count Binface, when the real joke candidate is Nige ...

Why joke candidates rarely win
Maybe it’s the ADHD talking but I find joke candidates get boring quickly. Binface has and will go the same way.
By Jack the Insider

Columnist

It took Jack until his final few lines to admit it ...

What is sustainably amusing is that Reform party leader Farage has played into the hands of his opponents. Win, lose or draw in Clacton, he will be forever diminished, a walking testament to the political axiom: When they’re screaming at you, you might be on to something, but when they’re laughing at you, you’re done.

There you go Jack, one way or another a joke candidate will win, the only question being which one has trousered five million pounds and counting ...

But what was Jack doing, hanging around on a Friday like a bad smell, cluttering up the far right of the digital Oz and distracting from the main attractions?

Why, the reptiles were in full fear of Jacinta, in carry on Jacinta Jihad mode ...

The snap featured an astonishing bit of cascading animation ...sadly not caught in the intermittent archive ...

EXCLUSIVE
Jacinda unlimited: taxpayers foot $80k tickets bill for Ardern gabfest
Top government agencies spend $80,000 on Jacinda Ardern summit amid calls to cut costs
Passes to hear Jacinda Ardern speak sell for up to $4499, almost triple that of Taylor Swift VIP Australian tickets. Months after being told to slash spending, mandarins have splashed out.
By Elizabeth Pike

Outrageous, and how right to be punked and piked by Pike. How the reptiles fear and loathe Jacinta and her insidious, invidious smile.

Why, those wretched cardigan wearers should be spending that money on advertising public service jobs in the lizard Oz, and thereby help keep the raft of reptiles afloat.

How else can they sustain attacks on the government?

Yes, there was another EXCLUSIVE, full of suffering ...

EXCLUSIVE
Labor’s budget ‘fix’ for the young makes them the biggest victims
Young investors face thousands in extra tax under new CGT rules
Baby Boomers and Generation X escape the worst of Labor’s tax overhaul, as new modelling shows the storm coming for younger adults.
By Anthony Keane and Will Seitam

And that variant on a keening Keane was immediately followed by Dame Groan, sent right off yet again by talk of Jimbo...

Commentary by Judith Sloan
It’s simply a mess when toddlers are set free in the fiscal candy shop
The reality is that the budget changes were badly thought-out and badly executed.

Correspondents know the form. Dame Groan will explain - this time in just a three minute groan - how we'll all be rooned by Xmas.

The reptiles will likely have to hand an incredibly funny snap of a woman looking particularly silly in a vacant, open-mouthed sort of way and sure enough there was a victim to hand: Treasury secretary Jenny Wilkinson says ‘revenue has to come from somewhere’. Picture: John. Feder

The situation was so dire that Dame Groan immediately ran with dot points ...

Economists are always keen to point out the unintended consequences of policies, those effects unrelated to the main objectives of policies being considered. Yet when it comes to the potpourri of tax changes announced in the recent budget, it was never clear what the intended consequences were.

• Were they mainly about changing the distribution of home ownership away from investors?
• Were they about punishing investors to raise the tax burden on capital while (perhaps) lowering the tax burden on workers?
• Were they mainly about raising more dollars, as Treasury secretary Jenny Wilkinson admitted when she declared that “revenue has to come from somewhere.”

The reptiles quickly flung in an apocalyptic audio distraction:

The Money Puzzle
Why property investing will never be the same again

And Dame Groan didn't need that sort of prompting to go full end times "we'll all be rooned" ...

According to the budget ­papers, only 7500 extra homeowners are expected because of the tax changes. And 35,000 fewer homes will be constructed over a decade, the modelling says.
Pushing up the tax on capital will result in less investment, which is particularly a concern when it comes to start-ups and entrepreneurship. The carve-out from the CGT change now being proposed is a compliance-heavy joke, and the government probably knows this.

The reptiles helped out by a killer blow aimed directly at Jimbo ... (still no rebrand for Sky Noise down under?) ... Opposition Leader Angus Taylor reflects on his meeting with comedian Dave Hughes to discuss Labor’s taxes. “It was great to speak to Dave, and he is a great person who is very angry about the situation here in Victoria and the situation in Australia right now,” Mr Taylor told Sky News host Paul Murray. “I think he shares the view that so many Australians do that this country is heading in the wrong direction and they’re angry.”

If he's so bloody angry, why is the prize doofus smirking at the camera? 

And why is the beefy boofhead doing the same? 

And how could they afford to waste their time and their precious dollars on a chow down?

And how did a bloody drongo comedian become a bloody expert? 

If the pond wants anger, irritation and a groaning, it will always turn to the Dame ...

An extra $17bn-odd over a decade is handy but needs to be considered in the context of the disaster of the revenue loss from the botched excise hikes on tobacco products, the out-of-control home battery and FBT exemption for electric vehicles programs and the distinct possibility claimed savings on the NDIS will never fully eventuate.
So without knowing what the precise objectives of the budget changes were – now legislated apart from the trust changes – it’s a tricky exercise to talk about un­intended consequences. To be frank, most of them look un­intended, or at least perverse.
Consider the impact of the loss of negative gearing for existing properties and changes to the CGT rules on both the level of ­activity in the real estate market and property prices. For state governments with a heavy reliance on stamp duty and land tax – often their main source of revenue – this impact is dire.
Within NSW, the state most dependent on property taxes, there was a writedown of expected revenue from this source in the recent state budget, it’s likely to be too ­little.
Lower levels of activity in the real estate market really carve into this source of revenue – more so than prices – and we are seeing this in the number of houses being put up for sale and particularly for auction.

For some reason, the reptiles decided Dame Groan needed back up, and they still hadn't managed a rebrand for Sky Noise ... GXO Strategies director Cameron Milner warns bracket creep is quietly costing Australians hundreds of billions of dollars, arguing governments cannot tax their way out of excessive spending. “The bracket creep that goes on because of inflation is hundreds of billions of dollars,” Mr Milner told Sky News host Caleb Bond. “The answer to out-of-control spending isn’t out-of-control taxing. “That’s a problem for the economy.”

The pond decided it should help out with an infallible Pope ...

There, reptiles, fixed it for you ... as Dame Groan delivered a final crushing blow to Jimbo ...

It is estimated that only 30 per cent of houses are now being put up for auction, down from around 45 per cent last year. In turn, this means homes take longer to sell.
It’s not as if any of the states, except for Western Australia, are well-placed to face a major reduction in this own source of revenue. With several states facing potential ratings downgrades – think Victoria, Tasmania and possibly Queensland – their fiscal problems will only become more difficult.
Will Jim Chalmers lend those states a hand? That’s unlikely, at least in the short term. But if things become calamitous enough, the Treasurer may have no choice.
We also can’t be sure how the distributional consequences of Chalmers’ cauldron of changes will play out.
Because negative gearing is grandfathered, existing investors have a distinct advantage relative to younger folk who might have been keen to copy the investment strategies of their parents.
We should not assume, as Jim was caught out doing, that young people are not investors, including in cryptocurrency and ETFs.
One estimate puts this proportion at close to 30 per cent for those in their 30s.
They will be particularly punished by the change to the CGT. For those who have held assets for a long time – older people – the impact is relatively muted.
The reality is that the budget changes were badly thought-out and badly executed.
The preferred approach was to start modestly – say, by eliminating negative gearing for existing properties – and assess the impact of this change.
Other changes could have been added to the mix in time.
Sadly, Jim preferred to act like a toddler set free in candy store.

What an incredibly witty put down by the old biddy! What sparkling form the Groaner is in!

As for housing, Wilcox was also to hand ...

And if all that wasn't enough, the reptiles also had that preening narcissist, the onion muncher, out and about, seeking another home away from home after his time with Viktor Orbán ran out ...

The header: Officialdom’s latest change-by-stealth: renaming seat of Franklin; Quite apart from the fact that important symbolic decisions should not be rushed, there are two key problems with renaming the seat of Franklin.
The caption for the illustration taken from a museum and so reptile dirt cheap: A pencil sketch of Tongerlongeter by Thomas Bock (1832). Picture: Queen Victoria Museum.

It wouldn't be an onion muncher outing without starting with a bald-faced lie. 

It isn't a change-by-stealth.

There will be a public consultation, for what it's worth, not that the pond much minds, because Franklin was no great shakes, as a quick read of his bio in the ADB - with its talk of "petticoat domination" - and his futile death in a North-West expedition, also noted in his wiki, will suggest ...

The onion muncher avoided any discussion of this ancient colonial relic, or offer any argument as to why he should retain his name on a seat ...

One reason many Australians are uneasy about the direction of our country is officialdom’s rush to make key changes without meaningful public input, either from voters or their elected representatives.
For instance, when did any elected government make a formal decision to almost double Australia’s immigration intake, to fly three flags rather than one on all government buildings, or to begin all civic events with acknowledgments of “country”? The Australian people have never been asked for their views on any of these developments despite their immense significance for the future and how we see ourselves as a nation.
Effectively, these changes have been made by the administrative state and then treated as “done deals” that could be questioned only by cultural troglodytes. This sense that far-reaching change has been foisted on a public that’s been kept in the dark helps to explain the rise of conspiracy theories and increasing support for previously fringe political movements.
The latest example of officialdom’s tendency to push change-by-stealth that alters how we see ourselves as Australians is the sudden push to rename the Tasmanian federal electorate of Franklin, a Federation seat, so-called after an early governor, later the famed if ill-starred Arctic explorer, after the Aboriginal warrior Tongerlongeter. This change was announced on Wednesday, with the public given scarcely five working days to make submissions-in-response by midnight next Tuesday.

What a flagrant, blatant liar he is, what a tragedy a proud warrior has to end up in his company ... The Aboriginal warrior Tongerlongeter by Thomas Bock (1832).

Eventually the onion muncher noted that there'd be a day of consultation ...which put the onion muncher in odd company ...

...Faced with the violent dispossession of lands and people - with hundreds of Indigenous men murdered, and women and girls abducted - Dr Clements said Tongerlongeter led the most "effective frontier resistance campaign in Australian history".
Eventually, in 1831, his decimated tribe reached an armistice and was exiled to Flinders Island, along with many other Tasmanian Aboriginals, where Tongerlongeter again assumed a leadership role.
"This is a phenomenal individual, someone everybody can look up to - not just Aboriginals - but everyone as this is our shared history," Dr Clements said.
In its deliberations, the AEC essentially agreed.
"Tongerlongeter's leadership during the Black War, his role in defending Country, and his enduring significance in Tasmanian history provide strong grounds for recognising his contribution through the naming of an electorate," the AEC panel wrote.
However, the Liberal and Labor parties don't believe the seat should be renamed.
Both parties submitted to the AEC that Franklin, named after Sir John Franklin, a British polar explorer and early administrator of Van Dieman's Land, should be retained.
The Liberals argued keeping Franklin would "minimise voter confusion" while the Labor party submitted a change "lacks compelling justification" given its heritage of over a century of use.
Ms Collins confirmed to AAP Franklin remained her preferred title.
"I support the submission that the Labor Party made to the redistribution consultation process, including about a possible name change," she said.
Dr Clements said he was sympathetic to those viewpoints but the "chequered" history of the current namesake, who kept skeletal remains of Indigenous people, ought to be considered.
"To rename the electorate after this extraordinary resistance fighter, who has this unblemished and storied history, compared to someone like Sir John Franklin, it's wholly appropriate," he said. (here)

A fighter, frontier resistance? Please, none of that.

Nobody thought to consult the onion muncher ...

The Australian Electoral Commission will then hold one day of public consultation at the end of the month before finalising its decision.
Australians should indeed know more about Tongerlongeter and about what have become known as the “Black Wars” that took place in Tasmania in the 1820s. For the first decade or so after the establishment of the Tasmanian colony in 1804, while it largely remained a convict settlement and sealing station, relations between the settlers and the local Indigenous people were relatively peaceful. Indeed, another future warrior, Kickerterpoller, seems to have worked on a small farm owned by one of the colony’s first doctors, in one of the many instances of co-operation as well as conflict on the frontier of settlement. That changed once pastoral expansion pushed out beyond the Derwent Valley to settle what had previously been local peoples’ hunting grounds.
In Professor Henry Reynolds’ sympathetic and carefully researched account, Tongerlongeter was the main leader of the organised Aboriginal resistance, which was far more effective and sustained than anywhere else on the Australian frontier.
Exploiting Aboriginal peoples’ superior bushcraft and agility with spears and clubs, resistance steadily scaled up from the killing of isolated shepherds to raids on farmhouses that could readily be rushed while the defenders were reloading their weapons. By scouring contemporary records, Reynolds and his fellow researchers reckon that Tongerlongeter’s bands killed some 180 settlers and seriously wounded as many again. Understandably, this created uproar in a settler population then numbering scarcely 20,000.

The reptiles then flung in a snap of an ancient monument, Henry Reynolds.

Dear sweet long absent lord, is he still around? 

The pond had expected to be wearing a black armband in some kind of remembrance, what with the lying rodent and every other racist and his dog attacking Reynolds for his role in the history wars, only for the onion muncher now to deem him 'sympathetic', and capable of producing a carefully researched account.

What is it with these dingbats? Do they think a zapping, Men in Black style, means we forget everything?

The reptiles even had the cheek to link to a Reynolds' piece, naturally in the lizard Oz ...

Yes, that great betrayal was actually begun by the onion muncher...and to be fair, he stays true to that form ...

In response, governor George Arthur declared martial law and organised the infamous “black line”: a force of 2000 soldiers, police and settlers that tried to emu-bob much of the island in an attempt to kill or apprehend the warriors terrorising the settlement. While this was a comprehensive failure, bands of settlers inflicted even heavier casualties when they came upon Aboriginal camps.
One of the more brutal participants was John Batman, later a founder of the new Port Phillip settlement across Bass Strait, who records in his diary killing two wounded Aboriginal prisoners no longer able to accompany his party. In yet another of the paradoxes of those much harsher times, Batman did take some Aboriginal orphans into his family.
Eventually, with the Tasmanian Aboriginal population vastly reduced, by disease, by starvation due to the loss of hunting grounds, and by fighting – sometimes internal as well as with settlers – from some thousands to some hundreds, in a parley arranged by Kickerterpoller, Tongerlongeter led some 30 of his remaining armed warriors in a parade through Hobart to meet with the governor to settle the war. While Arthur had some good intentions, the subsequent two-decade exile to “safety” on Flinders Island resulted in the deaths of hundreds more Aboriginal people from sickness and despair. The tragedy continued on their return, with Truganini, then said to be the last of the Tasmanian Aboriginals, dying in 1876.

At this point the onion muncher - always the dimmest bulb in the racist, colonial, ten pound Pom house - seemed to realise he might have gone too far, so he flung in a billy goat butt, dressed up as a "there's no doubt" ...with a bonus "doubtless" ...only to ruin the effect, by flinging in another "butt" for the invaders ...

There’s no doubt that Tongerlongeter and his warriors should be remembered and honoured as doughty fighters for their peoples and for the way of life they knew and cherished. Doubtless, this will soon take place in the new galleries to be dedicated to “frontier wars” at the expanded Australian War Memorial. But provided they fought by the reasonable standards of their day, so too should the settlers who prosecuted what they also saw as an existential conflict.

Cue a snap of William Crowther.

Crowther?

There's the ADB version, and then there's the story ... Why is William Crowther, whose statue was toppled in Hobart, such a divisive figure?

Nothing like a little skull snatching to gladden the colonial "scientific" heart.

What's funny is that some might have residual memories of the onion muncher in his prime, parading about and pretending to be at one with indigenous folk.

He even dressed himself up as Prime Minister for Aboriginal Affairs... and then gutted $500 million from vital Indigenous community service programs in his first Budget, despite a pre-election commitment to maintain funding that targeted Closing the Gap activities.

You can't expect that sort of leopard to change its Crowther-like spots ...

Quite apart from the fact that important symbolic decisions should not be rushed, there are two key problems with renaming the seat of Franklin after Tongerlongeter. First, it’s against the AEC’s standard procedure, which is to preserve the names of seats that have existed since the time of Federation. Second, and much more important, if Batman has been retired as the name of a federal parliamentary seat because of his unsavoury personal conduct, isn’t it a double standard now to commemorate in this way Tongerlongeter, whose many casualties (understandably enough under the circumstances) included women and children?
Quite properly, the names of parliamentary seats these days acknowledge significant Aboriginal people who have “rendered outstanding service to Australia”, such as William Cooper, Vincent Lingiari, Neville Bonner and Truganini herself, as well as Bennelong. But if it’s really necessary to have an Indigenous name from Tasmania, what about relocating the seat of Truganini from the ACT to there and finding another Indigenous person to honour in Canberra?
As for lionising Tongerlongeter, what about erecting a statue to him, with an explanation of the tragedy that was inevitable in the clash of two then very different and mutually misunderstood cultures, perhaps to stand alongside the restored statue of premier William Crowther, as a reminder of our shared flawed humanity. Better that than posthumously recruiting him into the culture wars that are dividing and demoralising our nation.
Tony Abbott is the federal president of the Liberal Party. He served as Australia’s 28th prime minister.

What a gigantic dropkick, and if that's helping the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way get elected, then the pond will make a bet on Pauline ...

Sadly that meant that there was no way the pond could segue to the infallible Pope of the day ... 

Be real, comparing the onion muncher to Darth would be a defamation of that heroic galactic crusader, as C-3PALBO and his tin pot beeping sidekick face down his wrath...

Meanwhile, the Australian Daily Zionist News was at it again.

Those who want a warm up before tackling Our Henry - in astonishingly pompous and pretentious academic mode - could visit the intermittent archive to enjoy the meretricious Merritt ...

Islamophobia envoy wants power to tell pollies what to say
Special envoy pushing for religious motivation to be removed from terrorism’s definition
Australia’s Islamophobia envoy is championing political free speech but wants to create a commissioner who regulates what politicians can say. He can’t have it both ways.
By Chris Merritt
Legal Affairs Contributor

There was also a contribution from a certain Schwartz:

What the Royal Commission did not ask
The current malaise did not begin with antisemitism, and it did not happen overnight. It has been unfolding for decades.
By Steven Schwartz
Contributor

It goes without saying that the meretricious Merritt and the certain Schwartz are rank amateurs up against the hole in bucket man, who was in stupendous form ...

The header: Overpaid vice chancellors parade their ignorance; As if the facts about campus antisemitism were not bad enough, the world most highly paid vice-chancellors show no grasp of what academic freedom means or why it matters.
The caption for the standard snap designed to terrify the hive mind into submission: Pro-Palestine protesters gather at Melbourne University. Picture: Jason Edwards

Our Henry managed a full five minutes of rhetorical flight, dragging in all the requisite arcane references from medievalists and so on, and with the added bonus of shedding a specious tear for the Riddster ...

Rarely has the proposition that a fish rots from the head been more starkly confirmed than earlier this week, when the vice-chancellors of Australia’s most prestigious universities appeared before the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.
There were the predictable claims of having been caught unprepared and struggling to respond: concessions cloaked in the sham humility of ritual self-criticism, whose purpose was to cast repeated failure as the inevitable imperfection of any large institution. Accompanying them were the equally predictable assurances of lessons learnt and improvements made.
None of it was remotely convincing. The Group of Eight’s performance has been so abject that not one of its members appears among the universities Greg Craven, in his report for Jillian Segal, identified as deserving special commendation for their response to antisemitism.
Yet that record understates the problem. The failures exposed by the commission’s hearings are merely symptomatic of something more fundamental, as the report of the Group of Eight’s Expert Advisory Committee on Combatting Antisemitism, released shortly before the hearings, makes abundantly clear. The report’s most revealing feature is not what it says about antisemitism but what it reveals about its authors’ profound misunderstanding of the very idea of academic freedom.
Explaining the concept’s history in full would take too long. What matters here is that it has always rested on two foundations: that universities govern themselves; and that the nature of that self-government, along with the obligations it entails, is determined by the university’s mission.

The pond understands that universities have problems. Just recently the pond read Stefan Collini's cry of pain in the LRB, Squadrons of Pigs, Stefan Collini on the university system. (*intermittent archive link).

But this is Our Henry, and so he makes it vindictive and personal, Vice-chancellors Mark Scott, Attila Brungs and Glyn Davis

And so to Our Henry parading his learning.

Want a little medievalism? Want arcane references? Want a serve of Weber, and a pretentious bit of Latin?

You've come to the right place ...

The Go8 itself defined that mission in 2018 as “the pursuit of truth, the advancement of learning and the acquisition, dissemination and preservation of knowledge for the common good”. Once that proposition is taken seriously, the implication is immediate. The maintenance of order on campus is not merely an administrative responsibility. It is a constitutive requirement of the university’s mission.
That understanding is as old as the university itself, embedded in the charters granted the ancient universities in the 13th century. When Wilhelm von Humboldt refounded the modern university on the premise that knowledge advances on an infinite frontier, he did not relax the demands of order – he intensified them. The unimpeded research, teaching and learning that are the substance of truth-seeking could flourish only in an environment that was, in his words, free from every form of disruption and leeres Geschwätz (“empty chatter”).
Max Weber put the point more firmly still. The university had to remain “the house of the intellect”, not “a nest for fanatical sects”, for a university that became the latter destroyed the open-minded inquiry and ongoing intellectual exchange on which its purpose depended. The university’s right to take all the measures it needed to insulate itself from those forces of chaos – thus ensuring the “tranquillitas scholarum” (scholarly peace) that made serious learning possible – was therefore an essential component of “academic freedom”.
Nothing in the Go8 report suggests the faintest appreciation of that tradition. For its authors, good order is merely a question of “wellbeing”, to be weighed against academic freedom rather than recognised as its indispensable condition. The report’s own language is unequivocal. It proposes to entrench “the duty to balance academic freedom against actual or potential harm”, and to strengthen “the duty to foster the wellbeing of staff and students”.

Then there came an AV distraction ... During the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, a Melbourne University student has broken down as she described having to strip herself of her Jewish identity to be safe on campus.

Our Henry kept on staying up his fundament ...

By reducing Humboldt’s tranquillitas scholarum and Weber’s “house of the intellect” to competing interests in a managerial balancing exercise, the report necessarily implies that some measure of harassment, intimidation and threat is compatible with the university’s mission. That trivialisation of a constitutive principle into a bureaucratic trade-off can only generate trivial remedies. Little wonder, then, that the report’s flagship recommendation is a one-word amendment to the Model Code set out in Robert French’s 2018 report on academic freedom.
Nor does the Go8 grasp the second obligation the university’s mission imposes. That mission does not merely bind university administrations; it places exacting obligations on academics too. The founding declaration of the American Association of University Professors, the canonical statement of academic freedom, made the logic explicit: because “there are no rights without corresponding duties”, the freedoms of academics “entail correlative obligations” – chief among them, the duty to “set forth justly, without suppression or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators”.
Those correlative obligations distinguish academic freedom from ordinary freedom of expression. The distinction between them underpins Edward Shils’s 1967 report, which laid the intellectual foundations for the University of Chicago’s celebrated statement on academic freedom. As Shils observed, while “cranks and demagogues enjoy the right of freedom of expression”, academic freedom has never protected the right of scholars “to make arbitrary assertions without regard to the evidence, methodically and critically assessed”.
It is precisely that distinction Mark Scott recklessly obliterated when he declared: “We do not believe, nor understand, how our campus can be a place where people are less free to speak than they are in the wider world.” But universities are not the wider world. They are self-governing institutions constituted for a distinctive purpose, and academic freedom is the right to fulfil that purpose – not a licence to disregard the intellectual standards on which it relies.
Rather than being ancillary to the university’s purpose – as the Go8’s offhand recognition of the need for “balance” in teaching implies – holding academics rigorously to account for objectivity, seriousness and intellectual honesty is the means by which universities fulfil their social role of seeking the truth. Yet in a report of some 14,400 words on academic conduct, the word “truth” does not appear once, nor are the consequences of a commitment to truth-seeking accorded any weight in what is little more than a bureaucrat’s view of the world.

For no particular reason, the Riddster entered the scene... Drew Pavlou; Peter Ridd

Oh the suffering of climate science denialists, and devotees of Western Civilisation ... (the pond's Chinese-manufactured EV is remarkably efficient, getting around at a rate of 11kWh, way better than the 16kWh the pond's previous EV managed)...

Not that our universities have ignored these issues altogether. But their actions provide no comfort. The University of Queensland savaged Drew Pavlou for misconduct that pales beside the behaviour our elite institutions routinely tolerate from pro-Palestinian militants. James Cook University sacked Professor Peter Ridd for a breach of confidentiality far less serious than the doxxing of Jewish academics that the University of Sydney has brushed off with barely a murmur.
The inference is inescapable. Pavlou and Ridd paid the price for being on the wrong side. Calls, steeped in antisemitism, for Israel’s destruction are tolerated. So is unashamedly blending “research” with advocacy that celebrates Hamas. But peacefully opposing China’s murderous repression of dissidents, as Pavlou did, or questioning climate change orthodoxy, as Ridd did, are not.
The consequences of that approach are visible in the Go8’s response, if one can call it that, to the mayhem that has marred campuses since October 7, 2023: since then, intellectual confusion has become outright complicity. Flagrant outrages, such as the invasion of Professor Steven Prawer’s office at the University of Melbourne, have gone effectively unpunished; the rare disciplinary sanctions imposed have been far too trivial to deter; and – despite the Go8’s fine words – not a single academic has been disciplined for replacing teaching with antisemitic preaching.
If this is what taxpayers buy with the world’s highest academic salaries, they are paying Rolls-Royce prices for intellectual bankruptcy. And if the royal commission allows the scandal to continue, it will be a sure sign that the rot has spread far beyond the head.

Sssh, whatever you do, don't mention Gaza ...

And there you have it, and the pond thanks the long absent lord that Our Henry managed to avoid the urgent need to maintain a jihad on TG folk, not that there's anything wrong with cross-dressing, at least if you follow the immortal Rowe ...

The pond will treasure that image for a bigly time, what with that jam jar still in hand...

Now here's an Our Henry adjacent moment ...