In which the pond skates over other reptiles to get to the bromancer, Killer and Dame Groan, and is unrepentant about doing the triple pike ...

 

The pond means no disrespect to Victorians, but the way their political class lives in the minds of lizard Oz hacks is tedious beyond belief ...

The pond could sort of cope with the Jacinta fuss and the revival of a meaningless "faceless" tag at the top of the digital edition ...

EXCLUSIVE
Faceless Ben coup: Daniel Andrews and Jacinta Allan Victorian Labor era implodes
Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan has refused to resign despite a cross-factional Labor revolt and a record Newspoll dissatisfaction rating, daring colleagues to ‘blast her out’.
By Anthony Galloway

The pond could even understand why the reptiles wanted to pretend comrade Dan was still in charge, and could play a disinterested bystander at a train wreck, as Fergo went feral ...

ANALYSIS
Worst I’ve seen: Allan devoid of ethics and talent
John Cain stands guard over Jacinta Allan’s odd take on accountability
A hypocrite who takes the moral high ground, the Victorian Premier is the worst Labor leader I’ve covered in 41 years of journalism.
By John Ferguson

John Cain? That pretty much defines the reptile demographic. Stop a vulgar youff on the street in Melbourne and marvel at the blank stare that name produces.

But ancient Cain phobia is mild compared to the way that comrade Dan still lives rent free in the hive mind ...

Ghost of Teflon Dan haunts Jacinta Allan
Jacinta Allan chose to ‘stand with Dan’. It may cost the Premier her job
A lack of political courage and a blind loyalty to Daniel Andrews leaves Jacinta Allan on the brink as Labor rips itself apart just 124 days from the election.
By Damon Johnston

Actually comrade Dan haunts the reptiles. ...

MARGIN CALL
Dan Andrews’ business connection with PM’s mega donor Felix Lee
Australia’s most secretive ex-premier has gone from the Socialist Left to advising billionaires – and almost nobody knows who is paying him.
By Will Glasgow

Uh huh ... just as it's always been, what with the pond's father convinced for years that Victoria had been the ruination of the country, what with their fancy airs, their aerial ping pong, and Ming the Merciless ...

The pond knew Dame Groan would have words to say - but the pond put her aside for the moment to wonder if the reptiles were aware what was happening in Europe.

You had to hunt like a seagull at an outdoor restaurant to discover a small peck of grain way down the page ...

FIRES RAGE
Hundreds of thousands flee as wildfires threaten cities
Bordeaux authorities are planning to evacuate the entire city as fires spread and the region faces soaring temperatures.
By David Chazan, Shanti Das and LaraBowman

This time it was a pick-up from The Times and this time it dared to mention "climate" twice ...

“Our whole town was evacuated. About 20,000 people left after we got alerts warning us to go late on Friday,” said Mr Lafitte, 52. “My son is with my parents in Pau. He’s lucky not to be here.”
He said the authorities had been ill-prepared for the wildfires. “With climate change, this is happening every year now. Our firefighting planes are made in Canada but France should be making its own.”

And again ...

...More than 150,000 hectares have burned across Spain this year alone, six times the area destroyed during the same period last year, requiring “a major public pact on the climate emergency” that would align central government and regional administrations, he said.
King Felipe VI said the wildfires had caused “incalculable” damage to the nation’s natural heritage during a visit to one of the reception centres for evacuees from the affected zone, where he spoke with people spending their second or third night sleeping in sports centres.
“Some have had a very bad time, some have been away from their homes for four days now, some have lost many possessions. Collectively, we have lost an incalculable amount of natural heritage,” the King told reporters.

Uh huh... as if the reptiles down under cared ...

And with that the pond turned to the far right of the digital edition for a little relaxation and pleasure.

First up came the bromancer ... always a treat, and here producing a splendid blend of both siderism and McCarthyist-1950s-red scare scribbling ...

The header: If you think the populist right is bad, wait until you meet the populist left; Many analysts see the rise of left-wing populism answering right-wing populism, but this left-wing populism is much worse.

The caption for an image designed to terrify the hive mind: Zohran Mamdani arrives at the NBC studios to participate in a Democratic mayoral primary debate.

Please admire the way that the bromancer ignores mad King Donald to invoke that terrifying commie threat, coming straight at you from the 1950s ...

Donald Trump has taken to calling some of his US political opponents communists. This has led to a slew of tut-tutting articles from the bien pensants, accusing Trump of fomenting a red scare and once more paltering with the truth, if not outright lying.
There’s one problem. Some of the people Trump’s talking about are communists. Surely the most under-reported story in Western politics today is the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America and their incredible success in Democratic primaries, getting extrem­ist candidates up at the expense of mainstream Democrats.
The whole world, it seems, is distressed by right-wing populism – Nigel Farage in the UK, Pauline Hanson in Australia and many analogous figures across Western Europe. But Farage and Hanson are Eleanor Roosevelt reincarnated compared with the DSA. This column readily agrees Trump lies. But here’s the thing: a statement can be true even if Trump says it’s true.
The DSA itself is not purely communist but it is extremely left. However, structurally it’s a coalition and several members of its ruling soviet, I mean committee, are self-declared communists, members in good standing of communist organisations.
The communist label is not a Trump slander, it’s self-description. Hasan Piker, an influencer and social media star central figure in the far left’s surge among Democrats, recently declared that communist dictator Mao Zedong, who was responsible for the death by state famine and slaughter of tens of millions of innocent Chinese, “one of the great leaders of this world”.
It’s a tragedy of the political illiteracy of our age that communism’s staggering crimes against humanity are now little known. They hardly figure in school or university education.

In this context, Gina's pet seems like a blessing sent to relieve the huddled masses, Pauline Hanson meets up with Nigel Farage in the UK. Picture: Facebook/ Pauline Hanson

After that opening flourish, some might think that the bromancer had hit his stride, but he was just getting started on his rant.

He donned his special McCarthy garb and went full tilt ...

Yet communism is an ideology fully as evil and murderous as Nazism. Nazism was purely evil, communism was its moral equal, though at times less explicit about its grotesque intent.
Communism killed more people than Nazism. The Khmer Rouge, authors of the Cambodian genocide, were mainstream communists.
The DSA is associated with left-wing senator Bernie Sanders and also radical New York mayor Zohran Mamdani. Candidates the DSA has backed have won primary after primary in the Democratic Party.
The DSA is conscious that while it’s having great success, especially via social media, it’s also generating opposition. So it recently published a manifesto to show how warm and cuddly it is. But this is the most radical document to have mainstream political influence in America in decades.
It calls for an end to capitalism. It wants the abolition of the presidency and the Supreme Court, with a new executive to be chosen by an elected congress. It wants a 32-hour work week with full pay and benefits, universal free housing, nationalisation and permanent state control of all the biggest corporations, an end to all student debt as part of an end to all debt, and an end to US sanctions on Iran, Cuba and Venezuela.
It wants ultimately to abolish the police and defund the military. And of course it has the usual stuff about climate change, demonising Israel and demonising America itself.
In New York recently, three congressional candidates backed by Mamdani and the DSA defeated more mainstream Democrats, including two sitting members of congress. The DSA has not had universal success but a slew of candidates backed by it have won important Democrat primaries.

Who knew that the Bernie bros would get the bromancer so wild-eyed and delirious, but here we are, Bernie Sanders speaks during a campaign rally for Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan.

Even though he's disappeared from the scene, Platner still lives in the bromancer's mind ...

Yet in any normal age, association with a platform as clinically insane and monstrously wicked as DSA’s would be the kiss of political death. Many analysts see the rise of left-wing populism answering right-wing populism, but in my view this left-wing populism is much worse than much of the right-wing populism it seeks to combat.
Nonetheless, there is certainly an element of the dynamic of two extremes feeding off each other at work.
The far-left populists clearly want to ape many of Trump’s tactics: a concentration on social media, the absolute demonising of their opponents, a reliance on conspiracy theories, talking directly to voters – in this case often the young, which mainstream media has difficulty reaching – promising impossible benefits etc.
They don’t want to convert the middle. They want to anger and energise a base.
A fascinating case was Graham Platner, who until recently was the Democratic candidate for the Senate in Maine. Platner was discovered and recruited by a political agency. He was a former marine and oyster farmer who wore a beard and spoke with an attractive roughness. And espoused far-left positions.
The Democrats, aware of how they’ve lost the working class, have recruited a number of working-class hero candidates. Yet Platner’s working-class identity was essentially performative. He won most of his support within the Democratic Party not from working-class voters but from the college-educated elites who liked his left-wing policies and wanted to demonstrate how cool and hip they were by voting for someone who was a bit rough.

The reptiles were also determined to keep Platner alive in the hive mind. 

Conjure up a triptych: Platner, arts, university, and say no more! Graham Platner speaks at the Collins Center for the Arts on the University of Maine.

And stand by for a familiar litany, and you guessed it, as Europe burns, the bromancer disses climate change yet again ...

But in this attempt to create a Democrat version of Trump, the Democrats went too far. Platner had a Nazi tattoo on his chest. He was the subject of countless serious allegations from his past. Finally a rape charge from a former girlfriend led to Platner withdrawing his candidacy.
Sadly, today both sides of US politics are terrifically hypocritical. Democrats who would have excoriated any Republican with this many skeletons in his past supported Platner all along until it became literally impossible.
Of course, the fact that Democrat politicians embrace the DSA rhetoric and enjoy its support doesn’t mean they will try to implement its grotesque platform.
But they will trend in that direction. The DSA told Mamdani not to increase the size of the New York police force and he complied.
Democrats will likely score gains in the November congressional elections because of inflation and because the Iran war is so unpopular. DSA types will falsely claim this vote as ideological vindication. The DSA is already exerting a big and destructive influence on the Democrat mainstream. It is concerned with Gaza, climate change, identity politics, LGBTQI, inclusion.
Sounds something like the ALP national conference.

You see? Why would a reptile be concerned with climate change or any of that other stuff, it being incredibly destructive.

How dare anyone take away the pleasure of persecuting minorities? That's what the bromancer's god put them on this earth for, endless persecution ... and by golly, the bromancer is Her messenger.

And after that bromancer rant, the hive mind could completely forget all about what's really going down in those disunited states ...

Ah, the bromancer, ironically retro, and in constant fear of the filthy commie menace.

And so to the bonus, and the pond did think for a nanosecond about the indefatigable Geoff chambering yet another of his rounds ...

Lessons for Taylor: get back to basics, beat One Nation
One Nation could walk away from the Victorian election on November 28 without winning a rump of lower house seats, or potentially any.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

It was a potent rallying cry for Jess and the beefy boofhead ...

... but the pond had to make room for Killer, and Dame Groan was still waiting in the wings, always ready for a good groaning...

The header:  Sorry to say, for the young, super won’t be a golden ticket; It’s fashionable to beat up on Boomers, but actually it was their parents and grandparents who enjoyed the most salubrious investment conditions.

The caption for the truly hideous and thankfully uncredited graphic atop the Killer piece: ‘It turns out every generation since the Boomers has experienced progressively lower-risk adjusted investment returns,’ writers Adam Creighton

The pond can't rate this outing as a top class killer Killer outing, but it only runs three minutes, and remarkably Covid returns to haunt him yet again.

If only generations Y and Z were as exercised about compulsory superannuation as they are about housing affordability. Losing 12 per cent of their wages and salaries every week to untouchable accounts obviously makes buying a home or renting ever harder.
But it turns out it’s worse than that: the consumption and investment they’re giving up when they are raising families and fit enough to enjoy their incomes won’t necessarily deliver the vaunted honey pot of retirement savings they’ve been led to believe will come, which their parents and grandparents enjoyed.
It turns out every generation since the Boomers has experienced progressively lower risk-adjusted investment returns.
That’s according to a recently released landmark analysis of 150 years of Australian asset returns by four Bond University finance academics. “Consistent with current discussion around generational inequity, we document higher returns for prior generations of investors, notably for Baby Boomers in relation to equity and bonds and the Silent Generation for property,” the authors found in their paper, Long-Term Comparative Performance of Australian Asset Classes, published in April in the Pacific-Basin Finance Journal.
Baby Boomers, whose investment period was defined as 1975 to 2019, earned about 2.6 percentage points a year more on property than Generation X (investing from 1992 to 2020) and about 4.6 percentage points a year more than Generation Y (from 2007 to 2020).

At this point the reptiles had to explain a term which was completely mystifying to the reptile demographic, A teenager holds a banner with the words OK Boomer, a popular phrase among Generation Z to dismiss or mock Baby Boomer generation.

Um, so why didn't it say OK Baby Boomer?

Never mind, the pond understands vulgar youffs are completely clueless, not attuned to the fine nuances of meaningless attempts to define events by birthdays ...

Please allow the pond to take a break ...Generations and Generational Differences: Debunking Mythis in Organizational Science and Practice and Paving New Paths Forward ...

What a bunch of killjoys ...

Killer wouldn't have a word said against Boomers, what with them being the entire lizard Oz demographic ...

The ranking was the same in the sharemarket, where Boomers enjoyed nominal returns of 14.7 per cent while generations X and Y earned four and seven percentage points lower on average, respectively. Inflation narrowed the differ­ences only a little.
“Existing public policy tacitly assumes that the ability of an individual to prepare for retirement is not impacted by their generational circumstances, and therefore the asset class returns … are similar over time,” the paper’s authors write. But clearly the returns aren’t, and these are vast differences across a 40-year working life.
It’s fashionable to beat up on Boomers, but actually it was their parents and grandparents who enjoyed the most salubrious investment conditions. Across the whole period equities averaged 8.4 per cent a year after inflation and property 6.2 per cent. The so-called Missionary Generation (investing 1891 to 1935) lapped up 9.6 per cent a year on average in the stockmarket, while the Greatest Generation enjoyed 7.7 per cent a year after inflation in property across the 40 years to 1976.
“Almost every generation earned lower risk-adjusted returns than the generation before them,” the authors conclude.
The double-digit average past returns big Australian super funds like to advertise to their “members” – as if joining were optional – are before inflation, remember, which is steadily rising, as are interest rates, which also tend to reduce property and sharemarket values.
Moreover, the world has just lived through one of the greatest bull markets in history, thanks to falling interest rates, huge strides in technology stocks and relatively low inflation. In Australia the steady ratcheting up of the compulsory superannuation rate across the past 30 years to 12 per cent itself has probably boosted property and especially sharemarket values, which younger generations are now forced to buy every pay packet. The only sectors generations X and Y could have done best in were government and corporate bonds, which averaged about 5 per cent a year after inflation from 1992 to 2020 (the last year of data in the paper), much higher than any period since 1870.

At that point came a snap of a man who would play a minor role in the final gobbet, Historian John Hirst

Just like an acid flashback, Covid returned to haunt Killer. Not a mask, anything but a mask, and as for vaccines...

The Covid experiment would have up-ended that short-lived first prize, given governments have showered trillions of units of currency on their populations since then that will continue to push up asset and consumer prices for years. What else could explain the secular decline in returns, a result probably shared throughout developed nations broadly?
Certainly the genuine private sector here and around the developed world has been shrinking as the formal and de facto government sectors continue their inexorable growth.
Australia is one of the worst offenders in this regard and has produced some of the worst economic statistics in the OECD across the past few years. Perhaps the only good decision the federal government has made in more than four years is to align (as of June) payment of mandatory “employer” super contributions with payment of wages and salaries. The insidious genius of Labor’s system has been that employees have never paid attention to their own savings or typically misunderstand that their gross pay would be more than 12 per cent higher were the whole system abolished.
Even the government knows people are being forced to save too much. The Treasury’s 2020 Retirement Income Review projected that by 2059 $1 in every $3 paid out of the super system would be inherited compared with $1 in $5 then. The best thing the Abbott government ever did was delay the increase in the superannuation guarantee.
The next government should make at least part of it optional, amid uncertainty about future returns and the obvious need for income when workers need it most.
Something one of our greatest historians, John Hirst, said has always stuck in my mind. In a crisis he expected superannuation money, by now trillions of dollars tied in a legally distinct bow, to be nationalised or at least forced into government bonds.
Imagine how bad the returns would be then!
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute for Public Affairs.

So we'll all be rooned yet again, or at least vulgar youff will be, as if the pond cared.

The pond can't help thinking Killer might have been better off going full Hirst, and for those wondering about Hirst, he has a wiki here, and there's more than a whiff of some of his quaint notions at The Conversation.

Now be warned vulgar youff, back into your bunkers, no travel for you ...

And so Killer had paved the way for Dame Groan, and the rooning filled the air with despair ...

The utterly despairing header: No Labor leader can fix Victoria’s catalogue of failures; Replacing Jacinta Allan with another Labor stooge won’t make any difference.

The caption for the opening snap proving that Comrade Dan still lived rent free in the hive mind: Anthony Albanese and Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan tour the Burwood Suburban Rail Loop. Picture: Jay Kogler / Newswire

It was way back in September 2023 that comrade Dan abdicated, but how the reptiles still fear and loathe him.

The reptiles rated this Dame Groan rant as a five minute read, but the pond reckons it's really a classic 'we'll all be rooned' outing, which even found time for Dame Groan to mourn the loss of the Commonwealth Games.

Who knew the old Groaner was the sporty type, keen to see squillions spent on a bunch of minor former British colonies, arranged so that Oz athletes could rule them all, at least until an Olympics or world games produced some real competition...

As leadership speculation consumes Spring Street, it appears the Victorian Labor government is on borrowed time. Replacing Jacinta Allan with another Labor stooge won’t make any difference. No matter the result, it’s a long road to recovery for Victoria.
It’s worth remembering that, had everything gone to plan, regional Victoria currently would be hosting the series of events that make up the Commonwealth Games. But the only thing the state has to show for the reckless proposal of the Labor government to stage the Games is a bill close to $600m, with $200m simply handed over to the grateful Glaswegians.
The initial cost of staging the Commonwealth Games in Victoria was put at $2.6bn. This figure has been criticised by the Victorian Auditor-General as understating the total costs and the risks. At the same time, the benefits were massively overstated by the key department.
According to the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office, the relevant public servants “did not advise government to delay a decision on hosting until a fit for purpose business case could be provided”.
But bear in mind the event was to be perfectly timed to meet the political objectives of the Labor government. Months out from the 2026 election and located in wavering regional electorates, the Commonwealth Games would have provided the perfect springboard for the government’s re-election campaign.

It was a conspiracy! And yet here we are, as the smirking comrade Dan haunts the reptiles, Commonwealth Games Australia boss Craig Phillips has warned Dan Andrews’ ‘rubbery’ cost figures have spooked state governments from hosting future Games.

And so to more pleading for the fun of bunging on a Commonwealth do ...

When Dan Andrews finally decided to pull the pin, he staged a further stunt by declaring the cost of the Games had blown out to $6.9bn. Let’s be clear here, this figure was simply invented or, in the more polite words of the Auditor-General, “overstated and not transparent”. It included sums of money that were already recorded as contingencies as well as items that had nothing to do with the event.
The obvious purpose was to convince Victorians that such a ludicrously large sum of money meant it would be irresponsible for the Games to proceed.

And with that springboard, Dame Groan leapt into the air like an artistic gymnast intent on demolishing Victoria, carrying off the Nagornyy triple pike in style ...

The saga of the Commonwealth Games is illustrative of the appalling quality of governance in Australia’s second largest state by population. A politicised bureaucracy, inadequate attention paid to policy and project development, and the wanton handing out of favours to politically favoured groups – these are the core features of the way Victoria is governed. Add in the high and rising tax burden placed on Victorians and it’s not a surprise that the Victorian economy is lagging the rest of the country.
According to the most recent labour force figures, unemployment in Victoria is 5.1 per cent compared with 4.4 per cent nationally. The rate of underemployment – people wanting more hours of work – is 7.3 per cent in Victoria and 6.5 per cent Australia-wide.
In 2024-25, output in Victoria per capita fell by 0.8 per cent compared with a fall of 0.3 per cent in Australia. Across the past decade, per capita output in Victoria has fallen from 93 per cent of the national average to 88 per cent. It’s not even clear that Victorians are still richer than Tasmanians.
The ongoing revelations of gross mismanagement and cost blowouts of Victoria’s Big Build infrastructure projects are simply excused by the Allan government as the result of inflation. No one is buying this as the examples of favouritism and pay-offs to preferred unions, as well as extortion on the part of organised criminal gangs, pile up. The fact Allan refuses to call a royal commission is really all you need to know. The power to compel witnesses to testify and to extract vital documents is essential. It is only through a royal commission that the full facts will ever be known.

How badly are the reptiles haunted by comrade Dan? Beyond badly, Street artist Jarrod Grech unveils his artwork near Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne, spray-painting the word Dictator across the face of former Victorian premier Daniel Andrews. Picture: NewsWire / David Geraghty

Sheesh, did the pond mention that Melburnians are rooned? If only there was a way to stop comrade Dan continuing as premier of Victoria ...

There is scant evidence that the current Labor government has learnt any lessons from the mistakes made during its terms in government. Pressing on with the vastly expensive Suburban Rail Loop is an act of sheer madness, but the Allan government is intent on locking in future elected governments to the project. At the same time, it will keep the unionised workforce in highly paid jobs for years to come.
For example, a lucrative maintenance contract involving unionised workers has already been signed a decade into the future. This is the sort of depth to which this government is prepared to stoop. Contracts worth billions of dollars also have been signed involving a Chinese-owned construction company.
This is notwithstanding the fact the Suburban Rail Loop has not met any transparent business case or been recommended by any infrastructure authority. The first stage linking Box Hill and Cheltenham, a route that is rarely travelled, makes little sense.
At one stage, an attempt was made to market the SRL as a housing project, with Melbourne becoming a city with centres. There was even a naive view that some of the vast costs could be recouped by capturing some of the enhanced value of these centres for property developers. It’s now back to being a transport project.
One astonishing aspect of the SRL is the financial support given by the federal government. It is part of a broader under-the-table bailout of the state, although the Allan government has promptly spent more than the value of the additional money received from the federal government. Victoria is now a net recipient under the GST distribution given its parlous situation.

What a relief. An open mouthed villain who isn't comrade Dan, Jaclyn Symes at the Victorian State Labor Conference at Olympic Park in Melbourne. Picture: David Crosling

And so to the final gobbet, and Dame Groan reverting to a couple of her favourite fear and loathing topics. 

Regular correspondents will know immediately what they are...

State government debt is rapidly approaching $200bn, with the rate of deterioration in the fiscal position of the state setting an unwelcome record. The Department of Treasury and Finance provides unconvincing cover for the fiscal profligacy of the government by assuming low rates of expenses growth in the outyears of the forward estimates and optimistic forecasts of state output.
In this way, the inexperienced Treasurer, Jaclyn Symes, claims that the ratio of government debt to gross state product will level out and then fall. The notion that the state can grow its way out of debt is unpersuasive. The ratings agencies are watching carefully. In any event, net interest payments will account for at least 10 per cent of government outlays by the end of the decade.
It’s also worth mentioning the damaging energy policy implemented during Labor’s terms in government. Based on a great deal of wishful thinking and the determination to decarbonise the state, the result has been a patchwork of subsidised renewable energy installations coupled with the hidden costs of taxpayer support for the continuation of coal-fired plants.
Gas was demonised until it wasn’t. Offshore wind farms were praised but have failed to pro­gress. Energy-intensive manufacturing plants have shut, with barista and Uber jobs replacing those jobs lost. Opposition to intrusive transmission lines and renewable energy projects has grown but has been largely ignored. Draconian laws have overridden the rights of private landowners.
Victoria, in effect, has become a laughing-stock, a crime-ridden place with falling living standards. Its main distinguishing feature is high population growth based on excessive immigration. It is overtaxed, overregulated and extremely poorly governed. No new Labor premier is capable of fixing this sorry mess.

Damn you climate change, and damn you filthy vile furriners for ruining everything.

But hang on, damned if the cockroaches will allow those deep southerners to snatch away the title of the crime state...

The total number of police proceedings recorded in 2024–25 were:

• 197,902 in New South Wales
• 146,690 in Queensland
• 114,432 in Victoria

Go cockroaches! Watch out for the deep north toads! (And for those keen to do a per capita calculation, NSW's population at the end of 2025 was 8,641,1000, while Queensland had 5,712,100 and Victoria 7,121,900)

What Victorians need this summer is a healthy, enjoyable European experience, say Rutherglen transformed into Bordeaux ...

And so the way is paved for the fundamentalist far right TG bashing Xian nationalist Liberal party to seize the moment and return the state to the glorious days of Jeff ... 

Great days indeed...

Thought about becoming a bear instead?