In which there's just a serve of the Bjørn-again one, AI and nattering "Ned", but isn't that more than enough?

A minor form of tragedy struck the pond's lizard Oz coverage this morning with the intermittent archive deciding to go fully intermittent, AWOL if you like, or MIA. (Sorry, it hadn't come good at the time the pond went live).

UPDATED: intermittent archive links added.

Usually the pond would assign dedicated students additional reading, safe in the knowledge that anyone wanting brain damage could follow the link to read Brownie's EXCLUSIVE about Gina's handsomely perked and pampered puppet, and poor Barners, Tamworth's endless shame:

EXCLUSIVE
Islam ‘based on terror’: Hanson sparks concern inside One Nation (*updated)
Pauline Hanson says a lot of Islam is ‘based on terrorism’ in one of her biggest attacks yet on the religion, prompting Barnaby Joyce to disagree with his leader 
By Greg Brown

Moi, fearless medieval crusader?

The best the pond could do was offer the URL in the hope that the intermittent archive would come good, with the promise that the pond will check back in later in the day to see if the archive has returned to the fold:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation%2Fpolitics%2Fislam-based-on-terror-pauline-hanson-sparks-concern-inside-one-nation%2Fnews-story%2Fc6beec346a3c5900e70f407026b295c5?amp

Ditto several more stories, what with the reptiles always ready to seize on any renewables angle to terrify the hive mind and always ready to give TG folk a hearty bashing:

EXCLUSIVE
‘At what cost?’: Green energy project threatens 66 species (*updated)
NSW renewable energy project could hasten 66 species to extinction, scientists warn
The agency tasked with delivering NSW’s renewable energy future has been accused of bulldozing the very ecosystems the clean energy transition is meant to protect.
By Christine Middap

Aw, look at the liddle frog, how cute, and how caring are these reptiles, such dedicated environmentalist, and nothing at all to do with their deep desire to do down renewables, net zero and the whole damn thing, but sorry, this is all the pond has by way of access:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business%2Frenewable-energy-economy%2Fnsw-renewable-energy-project-could-hasten-66-species-to-extinction-scientists-warn%2Fnews-story%2F6e5205fc8f35d8466ed03ea1e1dc7c2d?amp

And the pond's refusal to indulge in TG bigotry means the latest example of Rice on the boil must go un-noted:

DEFAMATION VOW
‘Demonisation’: JK Rowling hits back at Amnesty report (*updated)
JK Rowling vows to fund lawsuits against Amnesty over trans ‘hate’ report

Even John Cleese has taken aim at Amnesty International which once pitted itself against tyrants over trans rights.
By Stephen Rice

Again apologies:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world%2Fjk-rowling-vows-to-fund-lawsuits-against-amnesty-over-trans-hate-report%2Fnews-story%2F5a4cf587d181002a0fe549ed6e71ea1a?amp

There was one true thing noted in the story:

Amnesty International Australia also supports the Trans Justice Project, an organisation founded by campaigner Jackie Turner, who claims that The Australian, among other mainstream media outlets, is part of the “anti-trans lobby”.

Well yes, and so anyone who can't access that boiling Rice can relax, because there'll be another TG hit piece on the morrow. When you're deep into transphobia, one serve of the Kool-aid is never enough.

Unfortunately the pond also tends to refuse to go along with items fresh from the Australian Daily Zionist News, what with this dog botherer offering typical:

Mr Williams, tear down this stonewalling partisanship (*updated)
All credit to the ABC chairman for fronting up to my Sky News show but his denial of Aunty’s biased, error-ridden coverage was astonishing.
By Chris Kenny
Associate Editor (National Affairs)

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation%2Fpolitics%2Fmr-williams-tear-down-this-stonewalling-partisanship%2Fnews-story%2Faae4458e77c85223fb695ec80f195205?amp

Astonishing really, that blather about "stonewalling partisanship" from a rag full of reptiles who offer nothing but.

Sometimes just looking at the headlines revealing the lizard Oz's singular monoculture can be truly depressing.

One thing that was missing from the top of the digital edition? 

King Donald going full conspiracy theory loopy:

Thank you immortal Rowe for that chance to singalong, and now to get down wit it ...

The pond supposes all those reptile hacks hacking away constitutes a form of projection, but now would like to turn to another old favourite singalong, the Bjørn-again one, and in the process, also have a bash at Google's AI:

The header: Climate change isn’t taking food off your table; The headlines say climate change is wiping out your coffee and olive oil. The long-term data says the opposite.
One thing's certain: that image shows that AI is coming for the lizard Oz graphics department: The message is unmistakeable: Global warming is coming for your family’s dinner table.

What's the trouble with this? Apart from it being only three minutes long, so the distilled essence of BS was such a small portion?

Well if you look at the opening two sentences of the Bjørn-again one's screed...

No morning ritual is safe from climate alarm. The journal Nature just declared that coffee is “critically threatened by climate change” and described scientists racing to save your espresso from “extinction”. The New York Times blames sky-high coffee prices on climate-driven supply crunches in Brazil and Vietnam.

... you might end up being immediately triggered, and embark on a search, and this is what you will score, or at least it was the AI swill served up to the pond ...

And down below that you'll get links, and pretty pictures taken straight from the lizard Oz, and reminders of just how the Bjørn-again one circulates through the intertubes like algae in a reflecting pool...

What you won't get is a link to the Nature article referenced by the Bjørn-again one.

The reptiles resolutely refuse to do links to the outside world, they don't want anyone to leave the hive mind, but here's a teaser trailer for those who do ...

And you certainly won't get a link to an earlier Nature story, which in the usual way would have been saved to the archive, but is currently MIA ...

NEWS
16 January 2019
Wild coffee species threatened by climate change and deforestation (*sorry, not intermittent archive friendly, but try this paper, High extinction risk for wild coffee species and implications for coffee sector sustainability, and this ABC summary)

The extinction of wild species could jeopardize the viability of commercial coffee varieties.

Now the pond could keep doing this all day, but decided not to bother with doing the same to the Bjørn-again one's "olive" angle. 

The point is that both the Bjørn-again one, and little Sir Echo AI, are in the business of polluting the full to overflowing intertubes ...

And your olive oil? CNN and Bloomberg wail about a seemingly permanent “crisis”, with Mediterranean droughts foretelling a future in which an everyday staple vanishes for good.
The message is unmistakeable: Global warming is coming for your family’s dinner table, and only sweeping climate policy can save it. The message is also wrong.
Cut through the hype, and food is not only more plentiful but its inflation-adjusted cost also is near historic lows relative to any time since 1900.
Start with coffee, supposedly on its deathbed. This year, global coffee production is expected to set yet another record – more than double the world’s output of 50 years ago. Crops on the brink of extinction don’t deliver record harvests. And despite recent price bumps, the real price of coffee has trended downward since 1960. Adjusted for inflation, coffee this century has cost on average half of what it cost in the past century.

The reptiles compounded all this nonsense by reverting to the most banal stock images they could find admittedly a match for the nonsense being peddled by the Bjørn-again one, No morning ritual is safe from climate alarm. Picture: Getty Images

The Bjørn-again one kept on pushing the line of 'adaptation and improvement', as if that was the answer to it all, as if was the only way forward:

How do outlets such as The New York Times get it so wrong? By inexcusably ignoring inflation – comparing coffee prices from the 1970s, expressed in the dollars of that day, with prices expressed in today’s dollars.
By that standard, everything is at a record high, always.
Even Nature’s own reporting on coffee undercuts its ominous headline detailing “how scientists are fighting to save it from extinction”. Ethiopia keeps more than 12,000 arabica plants in living gene banks for breeding heat and drought-tolerant varieties.
“I believe we have enough gene pool to fight climate change,” the Ethiopian plant geneticist leading the effort says.
Farmers in hotter regions already are switching to hardier coffee species that professional tasters can’t distinguish from fine arabica. That isn’t extinction. It is what agriculture has always been: adaptation and improvement.
The supposed olive oil crisis collapses under the same scrutiny. According to UN food statistics, global olive oil production has tripled since 1961 and doubled since 1990. Last year and this year, together with the exceptional 2018 harvest, mark record highs for production of olive oil. Meanwhile, inflation-adjusted prices have not increased and have even slightly declined since 1990.

The reptiles decided that a banal cup of coffee wasn't enough ... so they flung in a banal snap of olives fresh from the cheapest of stock footage archives ... The supposed olive oil crisis collapses under scrutiny. Picture: Getty Images

And yet in an idle moment the pond asked AI about olive growing in Greece and Spain, and this is what came back ...

This is how the world will end, not with a bang, but an AI whimper serving whatever swill has struggled to the surface, aided by the Bjørn-again one and the lizard Oz flooding the zone with BS.

A nanosecond after getting back to the Bjørn-again one, the pond was again triggered ...

Again, better farming and expanded cultivation outweigh any climate effect.

In that line the reptiles provided a link, naturally to a yarn within the lizard Oz hive mind, which the pond can only provide a URL for ...

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business%2Ftechnology%2Fdata-centre-boom-puts-21bn-of-prime-australian-farmland-at-risk%2Fnews-story%2F0e5dfa6728eae3c86aa0f2678480f678?amp

The pond can at least provide a teaser trailer ... and it can now provide an intermittent archive link...

WTF?

How does that help the Bjørn-again one's case, or make a case for AI?

And so to more both siderism, and a standard billy goat butt:

Food scare stories follow a formula: Take an isolated weather event, attribute it to global warming, skip inflation adjustment and ignore the long-term data. Natural year-to-year swings driven by economics, trade policy and subsidies get repackaged as apocalyptic trends. Rarely mentioned: Much of the real price pressure on food comes from fertiliser and transport costs – inflated, ironically, by climate policies that raise fossil fuel energy bills for the essentials of farming.
Never mentioned: the ways climate change helps crops. Carbon dioxide is plant food, which is why commercial growers pump extra carbon dioxide into greenhouses to produce more tomatoes.
NASA satellites show that the planet has been greening for four decades, meaning the world has added additional leaves with an area equivalent to that of at least two times the Amazon rainforest.
Climate change, on balance, will hurt agriculture. But its impact is dwarfed by rising productivity. One highly cited study in Nature finds that without any climate change, global food-calorie production will increase 51 per cent between 2010 and 2050. With extreme, unrealistic warming, it still increases by 49 per cent.
Across all models and scenarios, the difference in calories available per person amounts to one-tenth of 1 per cent.
That’s because humanity keeps getting better at growing food. Cereal production has more than quintupled across the past century while real food prices have more than halved. The Green Revolution of the 1960s turned famine-prone nations into exporters through the widespread adoption of high-yield crop varieties, alongside expanded use of chemical fertilisers and improved irrigation.

The reptiles kept up their pathetic visuals ... Cereal production has more than quintupled across the past century. Picture: Getty Images

And the Bjørn-again one rounded off his denialist screed ...

India, once written off as a basket case dependent on food aid, quadrupled its rice production between 1961 and 2023 and is today the world’s largest rice exporter. Daily calorie availability per person has climbed from less than 2200 in 1961 to more than 2900 now. Global undernourishment has plummeted from roughly one in four people in the developing world in the early 1990s to fewer than 10 per cent today.
The task now is to finish the job. Innovation should extend to under-researched crops such as sorghum, cassava and millet – staples for two billion people in the developing world that have been largely ignored by commercial breeders. Investment in biotech, precision agriculture and drought-resistant crop varieties will do far more for the world’s poor – and for your grocery bill – than any emissions target.
We can keep feeding more people, better, by doubling down on what actually works: innovation.
Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and author of False Alarm and Best Things First.

Not that old crap about innovation as the answer to it all.

The pond felt in the need of a bath, with that reading a bit like listening to mad King Donald ...

And so to the real reason the pond couldn't look at everything this day.

After a week of flogging his tome,  there again came "Ned", and even dedicated herpetologists might well stick up their hand and ask to leave the room.

The pond knows the reptiles deemed it important, because early on the weekend, it was top of the digital world ma ...

But as soon as the pond clicked on it, there came that familiar feeling of nausea at having to endure an endless bout of "Ned's" natter...

The header: Liberals’ looming battle for nation’s future; Liberal leader Angus Taylor’s path back to government depends on a gamble that hasn’t been tried before: differentiation.
The caption for the credited truly feeble collage. Just stop it Emilia, stop it: Angus Taylor’s dilemma is that he cannot get clear political air to attack Anthony Albanese because the stage is dominated by Pauline Hanson – yet if he cannot win the battle with Hanson to dominate the centre-right of politics then his ability to criticise Albanese is ruin­ed anyway. Artwork: Emilia Tortorella

This "Ned" Everest climb took at least 11 minutes to wade through and had some 12 visual distractions of some kind, and all because Gina's puppet Pauline had taken the lizard Oz agenda - climate science denialism, fear of furriners, dislike of uppity blacks, and assorted other forms of bigotry - and run with them, and now the reptiles and their pet, the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way, didn't know how to cope.

The next election should become a defining choice on what sort of economic and social model the Australian people want for their future. But this assumes the election will be a contest between the competing agendas of Anthony Albanese and Angus Taylor – a situation far from guaranteed.
Taylor’s dilemma is that he cannot get clear political air to attack the Albanese government because the stage is dominated by Pauline Hanson – yet if he cannot win the battle with Hanson to dominate the centre-right of politics then his ability to criticise Albanese is ruin­ed anyway.

At this point in the saucy doubts and fears saga came the second of the visual interruptions: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has advised Opposition Leader Angus Taylor to stand up to One Nation during Question Time on Tuesday. “My job isn’t to give advice to this bloke,” Mr Albanese said. “But my advice is, how about you stand up to One Nation on something?”

It was like enduring a therapy session:

Virtually every public performance by Taylor is bedevilled by this dilemma. Taylor, marketing his economic policy, is fighting on two fronts – as the formal opposition against the Albanese government and against Hanson, whose polling support threatens the survival of the Liberals.
This raises the question: how much should Taylor attack Hanson’s party and its policies? Some Liberals worry that being more aggressive against One Nation just alienates Hanson’s voters and keeps them locked into her.
In reality, the Liberals cannot ignore Hanson’s policy incapacity to meet the challenges facing Australia and that means they must prosecute an aggressive line against One Nation – along with the freak show being exposed on the party’s fringes from the activities of One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts.

But, butt, gigantic butt, billy goat, Malcolm Roberts is just a logical extension of the Bjørn-again one, the Riddster, Lloydie of the Amazon and all the other climate science deniers featured over the past couple of decades in the lizard Oz ... Hanson was called to repudiate Malcolm Roberts – who has frequently espoused fringe views during his parliamentary career – after it was revealed this week that he promoted the works of a renowned Holocaust denier in an essay. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Those aren't fringe views, those are the sorts of views you'll encounter every day in the lizard Oz when the reptiles take on the task of being One Nation's official policy newspaper ...

Virtually every political commentator recognises Taylor’s cut-through problem with his messaging. But Taylor will be the beneficiary of two big trends shaping the next 12 months. The first is the more intense scrutiny being applied to Hanson’s policies and behaviour, with evidence of a degree of internal unravelling likely to result over time in a further fall in her party’s vote.
The second is the grim economic outlook, with the entrenched structural defects from Labor’s policies now far more apparent, leading to weak economic growth, declining real wages, subdued produc­tivity and persistent inflation accentuated by the Middle East war that is exposing our vulnerabilities.
RedBridge director corporate affairs Tony Barry told Inquirer: “At present the Coalition is coming third. It needs to be coming second to be competitive. We are starting to see the contours shifting around the One Nation vote. I think we’ve seen the ceiling of her vote at 31 per cent but that the floor of her vote is going to be higher than people realise. I would think it is still in the teens and that it won’t collapse back to the 6 to 8 per cent levels.
“A recent poll we did showed 63 per cent saying Australia was heading in the wrong direction. The focus groups have people saying ‘my kids won’t have it as good as I did’ and that’s a statement about what’s happening now. There’s a protracted pessimism in the electorate. The key rule in politics is to differentiate from your opponent but the Liberals have still not sufficiently done this.”

If "Ned" cares so much, why do the reptiles always use a snap of the beefy boofhead that verges on the defamatory? Taylor is completely right to go bold on policy, but there are now signs of a tactical mistake by delaying rather than unveiling fresh initiatives. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Coach "Ned" thought the beefy boofhead had turned radical and far right, but really all he's doing is fitting in with the lizard Oz and its One Nation policies ...

Differentiation – this is now Taylor’s focus. Indeed, he is betting the future of the Liberal Party on his plan to build an economic, tax, immigration and climate policy that offers a dramatic structural difference from Labor’s ideology, possibly one of the sharpest policy differences for several decades.
This was apparent in Taylor’s recent speech to the Sydney Institute. It spanned four domains dominated by structural policy changes: lower personal income tax by indexing the rates – that’s an annual tax cut; smaller government driven by a Future Generations Fund that locks away 80 per cent of commodity revenue windfalls annually, which means they can’t be spent, with the proceeds going to debt reduction; tying lower immigration levels to housing construction; and dismantling Labor’s net-zero policies, its renewable energy targets, its EV tax rebate and its extensive bureaucracy, the Capacity Investment Scheme, the Rewiring the Nation Fund and its Net Zero Economy Authority.
This will develop as a comprehensive attack on the ideological foundations of Labor’s economic policy – the complete reversal of the Coalition’s 2025 election agenda. The strategy is to regain the lost Liberal Party strengths on the economy, tax and living standards. The purpose is to challenge Labor front-on and to marginalise Hanson’s party as irrelevant.
It is already obvious, this is a radical agenda with more to come. For instance, the combination of tax indexation and the Future Generations Fund means that fiscal drag is returned to individual taxpayers and commodity revenue surges are largely locked into debt reduction – eliminating the rivers of revenue gold that have financed Labor’s big government.
Like all radical agendas it comes with electoral risk. Taylor is completely right to go bold on policy, but there are now signs of a tactical mistake by delaying rather than unveiling fresh initiatives. Taylor, moreover, has made only limited progress with the public. He lacks skill and impact as a retail politician able to market the policy ideas his leadership has generated. The best policy agenda doesn’t work without communication cut-through.

Of course Gina's pandered pet and pawn makes for an easy target, as does Tamworth's eternal, never ending shame ... One Nation leader Pauline Hanson was this week spotted alongside Australian mining magnate Gina Rinehart at a $2500-a-night resort on the Sicilian coast; One Nation leader Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce in June. Mr Joyce has produced a party definition of an acceptable monoculture. Picture: Getty Images

But they're just doing what comes naturally to the mad King Donald, Nige and Emeritus Chairman class ... and "Ned's" cluck-clucking and tut-tutting won't change that ...

The past week has further exposed Hanson as unsuited to any role in executive government. Hopes that Hanson might change her behaviour to appeal to a wider public have been spectacularly trashed. There has always been a recklessness about Hanson, who has long traded on the shock value in her populism, and this is confirmed yet again.
Pity Barnaby Joyce in his quest to impose discipline and coherence on One Nation’s policies, a task even more forlorn.
In Britain, Hanson teamed up with convicted criminal, thug and racist Tommy Robinson in a campaign of mutual praise and support, provoking a devastating critique from Sky News host Andrew Bolt. It is past time Hanson was held to account for her behaviour. Can you imagine the calls for their resigna­tion as leaders if Albanese or Taylor behaved like this? It prompts another question: For how long will a number of prominent Australians persist with their support or apologies for Hanson as an acceptable figure in a future government?

Sheesh, no rebrand yet for Sky Noise down under, and yet it's home to the weird sight of the far right Bolter berating Gina's pet for being far right? Sky News host Andrew Bolt accuses One Nation Leader Pauline Hanson of failing to effectively address the issues of multiculturalism and mass immigration. “Pauline Hanson has blown it, and I am so frustrated. Mass immigration and multiculturalism, we finally had a chance to discuss these important issues seriously,” Mr Bolt said. “What an opportunity is being thrown away. I mean, who seriously thinks the Liberals will now dare to talk about multiculturalism … I think the air is going out of the Hanson balloon. “Things may change … but they will change a lot unless Hanson drops the stunts and learns that for her to just be normal will now be mad enough.”

She's a failure because she doesn't know how to do Bolter bigotry the right way?

Only in lizard Oz la la land.

The reality is that the beefy boofhead, and the reptiles, don't know how to deal with a wild card who's taken the reptile agenda on board, and run with it ...

Hanson retreated from Britain to Sicily for a luxury break associating with her prime financial backer, Gina Rinehart, while lamenting the cost-of-living pressures on ordinary people. Hanson has become a cultural celebrity, revelling in its benefits but highly vulnerable to its risks. Above all Hanson, while politically clever, never changes her core character.
Don’t doubt, however, the obstacle she poses to the Liberal Party’s revival. Interviewed last Monday by Sarah Ferguson on the ABC’s 7.30, Taylor kept hesitating before finally ruling out any prospect the Liberals would consider a form of coalition government with One Nation. “There is no plan,” Taylor kept saying, “no plan for a deal with One Nation to form government”.
There is no more critical question for the Liberal Party’s future. Would the Liberals govern with One Nation, as many Hanson supporters delude themselves into believing? Taylor won’t even entertain such an idea. Finally, he told Ferguson: “I’m ruling it out.”

As if you could believe any ruler this man touched, let alone whether he's using the ruler to rule things in or out ... Opposition Leader Angus Taylor addresses his attack on Pauline Hanson’s policies, claiming a One Nation government would deliver an “eternity of pain” for Australians.

The pond doesn't blame the beefy boofhead, who isn't the sharpest long horn in the back paddock. The pond blames the festering far right culture the reptiles have fostered ...

The only plan is for a Liberal and National Coalition. Frankly, Taylor needs to keep ruling it out until everybody gets the point. The Liberals have an obligation to make clear to the Australian people who they are prepared to govern with and who they won’t govern with.
That means a veto on governing with Hanson. If that upsets some One Nation voters it can’t be helped. It also means rebutting Labor’s propaganda that the Liberals would only form a government in partnership with Hanson. Of course, having One Nation offer confidence to a Liberal-National Coalition government is a separate and understandable position; likewise preferences arrangements.
Nobody could doubt Taylor’s real attitude towards One Nation given his Sydney Institute speech. Having declared Australia is “in the grip of an economic crisis”, Taylor lumped Hanson with Labor and the Greens as leading a party that will “only make things worse”.
His message was defining and defiant – that One Nation is the problem, not the solution. Taylor listed One Nation’s policy sins: that the party “would send us broke”, that its real beliefs reside in “big government interventionism” (like Labor) and spending tantamount to an extra $1 trillion over 10 years, that its promises would trigger higher inflation, the jacking up of interest rates, punishing the household budgets of ordinary workers and provoking a financial crisis with an explosion of spending and debt. Taylor warned voters that “an eternity of pain” would follow a One Nation government. He invoked a truism: when governments cannot finance their policies it is the citizens “who ultimately suffered the consequences”.
Most reactions to Taylor’s speech missed the point. Many people seemed to think he was merely putting some tactical distance between himself and Hanson – and that this was most unwise. Yet his real point was obvious: the Liberals would not tolerate Hanson’s economic policies. This was a rejection of One Nation on policy and philosophical grounds.

Oh pull the other philosophical leg, as the reptiles visually defamed the beefy boofhead again ... The implication from Taylor’s remarks is that One Nation’s economics are worse than Labor’s. Picture: John Gass

How desperate did it get?

Comparing Gina's pet to the greenies? Even "Ned" had to come up with a distancing You can agree or disagree with Taylor...

Taylor said Hanson’s party was “a lot like the Greens” – they made irresponsible promises because they had no governing mentality. You can agree or disagree with Taylor, but there’s no dispute about what he meant. Casting One Nation as a problem for Australia meant any prospect of forming a coalition government with Hanson was inconceivable. While Taylor didn’t say this, the implication from his remarks is that One Nation’s economics are worse than Albanese’s.
In the moral and intellectual turmoil of centre-right culture, many people will no doubt conclude such sentiments mean Taylor should be ditched as Liberal leader. Yet the warning signs are flashing on Labor policies where it is trapped by its beliefs. Its commitment to bigger government has throttled productivity levels. The recent budget revealed Australia locked into slow economic growth fluctuating about 2 per cent but this weak performance now looks too optimistic.
The recent Deloitte Access Economics report predicted the longest stretch of sub 2 per cent growth since the 1990s recession and identified the vulnerabilities of rising inflation, weak living standards and the resurgent energy crisis from the Iranian war.
Deloitte partner Stephen Smith highlighted the nation’s structural weakness: “For too long, strong population growth has masked a weak underlying productivity performance and lifted aggregate growth while doing less to improve living standards. Years of insufficient investment in housing, infrastructure, energy and the economy’s productive capacity have left the supply side of the economy struggling to keep pace with demand. The result is an economy more prone to inflation pressures at lower rates of growth.”

Still the entirely meaningless visual distractions kept flowing, Australia’s consumer confidence has fallen. Picture: NewsWire / John Appleyard

Coach "Ned" did his best to help the beefy boofhead:

The OECD has recently found that since 2021 Australia’s post-Covid decline in real wages reached 5 per cent, one of the worst results among developed nations. Australia desperately needs a productivity boost, hence Albanese’s new commitment to artificial intelligence – yet the same risks are apparent: regulatory overkill that limits the benefits.
Pivotal to Labor’s entrenched legacy is its prioritisation of redistribution over growth, an instinct that seems embedded in contemporary Labor; witness the recent budget. Meanwhile the Parliamentary Budget Office has punched a hole in the budget’s credibility, warning that even the long wait to return to surplus in 2034-35 is unlikely and based on unrealistic assumptions.
All these are rich political targets for Taylor and the Liberals. How could they get this wrong? Well, we know the answer from past failures.
Taylor holds the Albanese government to account for initiating “a radical restructuring of Australian society”, its nexus being how much bigger government embeds low productivity and stagnant living standards.

And then came the explicit endorsement of the climate science denialism that Gina's pet has run with .. There has been a seismic shift in the electorate’s thinking about climate and energy policy since the second Trump administration and the conflict in the Strait of Hormuz.

You might think that "Ned" would want to talk about the way that mad King Donald has helped focus minds on EVs, just as assorted heat domes and climate disasters and wild fires in Canada have focussed minds on climate change, but no, Gina's pet has the policies that Dan "the man" Tehan also loves ...

Come on down, Dan "the man", help out "Ned":

The convoluted state of our politics seems to misread a truth about the Albanese government – that Albanese plays the long game. While the left and many progressives agitate about Albanese being too cautious and devoid of uplifting reforms that excite the true believers, his method is the steady, slow march to reorient the nation.
If Albanese serves three full terms, have no doubt that Australia at the end of this period will be a far different nation from 2022 and stamped with an indelible Labor brand.
Hence Taylor’s campaign to attack what he sees as the root cause of our malaise – the shift from free enterprise to a command-and-control model. He says the public wants change, but the key question is: What sort of change? Taylor identifies three options: sticking with the evolving Labor model; falling for the Hanson trap and blowing up the joint; or backing an aspirational Liberal agenda of lower tax, lower immigration, restrained spending and lower energy costs.
Opposition energy spokesman Dan Tehan told Inquirer the Liberals would engineer a sweeping new energy policy: “I believe energy sovereignty has become a key factor in the public’s attitude. There has been a seismic shift in the electorate’s thinking about climate and energy policy since the second Trump administration and the conflict in the Strait of Hormuz.
“Labor’s energy policy means higher prices and is making the nation poorer. Under our policy, the EV tax rebate (providing an FBT exemption for electric vehicles) will be abolished as well as the New Vehicle Efficiency Standard that is basically a carbon tax (to boost the supply of fuel-efficient and electric vehicles).
“We have oil, gas, coal and uranium reserves that we are more than happy to sell to the rest of the world but put serious limits on their use in Australia. This doesn’t make sense. We will lift the ban on nuclear and establish a commission to advise on a private sector led nuclear industry with strict government controls over safety and capital. We won’t pursue the policy from the last election of six nuclear power plants, government-funded and run.

Still with nuking the country to save the planet, except that in reptile bizarro world the planet doesn't need saving, and according to "Ned", it seems that mad King Donald hasn't been dissuaded from his latest bit of off-the-cuff policy making ... Economists warn Donald Trump's plan to charge a 20 per cent levy on cargo shipped through the Strait of Hormuz could increase the price of fuel by at least 10c per litre in Australia.

Luckily mad King Donald backed away from making liddle Marco, JD and all the rest blathering about international law sound like epic fools,

And luckily that was the last illustration, the last collage, and luckily it was uncredited, because it's likely AI, another way the reptiles are trying to ruin the planet ...

"Ned" left it with Dan "the man" Tehan, sounding like he was channeling Gina's pampered pet ...

“On coal, our policy is to sweat the existing plants as is being done by some state governments. We will let the market be the determinant on new coal, the point being our policy will be absolutely technologically neutral.
“We reject Labor’s ideological pursuit of 82 per cent of renewables by 2030 and net zero by 2050. Nobody believes the 82 per cent is achievable. While the Albanese government wants us to lead on emission reductions, our policy is to run emission reductions consistent with what OECD nations are doing. That means we will wait some time and only go into the details closer to the election since many nations are not meeting their targets.”
Tehan said the Capacity Investment Scheme would be abolished. He branded it “a secret fund set up by Labor where taxpayers had no knowledge and no understanding of the liabilities being incurred” given the scheme operated as a commercial-in-confidence support for selected projects.
Branding the scheme a “disgrace” Tehan said in office a Liberal government would make public its overall liabilities (not of individual projects). He said the opposition wanted a policy not just for wind and solar but that prioritised baseload power and technological neutrality.
He said the Net Zero Economy Authority and the Rewiring the Nation Fund would go. Tehan said the RTN providing low-cost finance to build new transmission lines operated “without any social licence and had governments riding roughshod over communities”.
“The bigger point here is that this government won’t put an estimate on the cost of getting to net zero by 2050,” Tehan said. “It pursues an ideological agenda, won’t reveal its cost to the economy and shows no concern about the cost.”

And so the spirit of Gina, Pauline, and the Bjørn-again one continues to run rampant through the lizard Oz ... as if the reptiles were taking their cues from mad King Donald and Faux Noise ...

And here's an oddity the pond's logarithms turned up ...