In which the Caterist shows of his style, with Shanners and simpleton Simon also on hand to help out ...

 

Thrashed by Bangladesh!

The pond would love to meet proud warriors of Judaeo-Xian Western Civilisation to discuss the result, or perhaps some triumphalist white Xian nationalists proclaiming the ascendancy of the British empire, colonialism and Ming the Merciless ...

Wait, the reptiles of the lizard Oz are standing by ...

Alas, they've been distracted by the war on renewables, with Geoff leading the way with an EXCLUSIVE ...

EXCLUSIVE
Energy firms promise $40bn to win renewables scheme deals
Cash payments, Indigenous artwork commissions and free energy systems – the extraordinary price renewable companies are pledging for social licence under Chris Bowen’s secretive scheme.
By Noah Yim and Geoff Chambers

Just look at the richly comic portrait of their mortal enemy, a strategy worthy of the Reich in its glory days ...

And so on, there's more at the archive, but don't stop there, there's another reason to head off to the intermittent archive because indefatigable Geoff personally took a view and Chambered another round...

COMMENTARY by GEOFF CHAMBERS
It’s time to expose Labor’s secret renewables fund
Chris Bowen’s Capacity Investment Scheme is the most egregious of the Albanese government’s growing pile of ideologically-driven slush funds, subsidies and bailouts.

And waddya kno, as Geoff exposed away, there was another richly comic portrait of their mortal enemy at the head of the column, a strategy worthy of the Reich in its glory days ...

Wait, with just a few more lines, the pond could save a trip to the archive:

How convenient.

The other glaring problem with the CIS is the government’s omission of gas. As wind farms fail to deliver on the potential Bowen had hoped, and the “tax the gas” noise grows among left-wing MPs and supporters, Labor’s caucus is divided over the inarguable fact that affordable and abundant gas is needed to keep heavy industry and manufacturing jobs alive.

Australians, who were falsely promised by Labor at the 2022 election that their household power bills would be $275 cheaper, want reliable and affordable power generation.

If the Albanese government continues down a renewables-only path that excludes gas and zero-emissions nuclear, expect more Tomago smelter bailouts in the near future and fewer data centres.

Nuke the country to save the planet, if only the planet needed saving, what with climate science either a religious cult or a hoax! 

The pond regrets that Geoff really isn't up to much, and only knows how to regurgitate a few standard reptile talking points. Bring back the Riddster and Lloydie of the Amazon!

And so to other matters, and the pond regrets that it has become incredibly weary at the thought of tackling the Australian Daily Zionist News, so passed on by the top of the digital "news" ma ...

INSIDE STORY
Forensic inquiry or ‘tokenistic’: will Bell toll for antisemites? Will royal commission deliver solutions to antisemitism crisis?
With four months left, the antisemitism royal commission’s strongest proponents are questioning if it has sufficiently used its extraordinary legal powers – or let them go to waste.
By James Dowling

A 12 minute read?! Good luck on that journey, with the pond personally saving the outing to the intermittent archive.

The pond also passed on by Major Mitchell, if only for incessant and inane Zionism of the first water.

Hamas lies swallowed by the woke West
How Hamas outsmarted the UN and Western media in the Gaza propaganda war
Hamas strategically exploited Western media, governments and institutions after October 7 to convert Jewish deaths into Israeli guilt.
By Chris Mitchell
Columnist

How could the pond get past the inanity of the Major, in from the golf course, deploying "woke"?

Put it another way, perhaps substituting "Major" for "American", and "green fees" for the price of gas will do...

Luckily the pond could avoid talk of ethnic cleansing and genocide because the quarry whisperer was out and about, proclaiming his expertise, already firmly established in court actions marvelling at his credentials when it came to observing the movements of flood waters ...

The header: Few Australians see themselves in the people who sit in our parliament; Only a handful of MPs has engineering qualifications, which may explain Canberra’s naivety about energy and infrastructure.

The caption for the snap of a ragtag mob designed to trigger the Caterist: Too few Australians see people like themselves representing them in Canberra. Picture: Hilary Wardhaugh/Getty Images

For those who've forgotten the Caterist's credentials, please allow the pond to quote his wiki:

He graduated from the University of Exeter with an honours degree in sociology in 1980 and drove laundry vans for a year before joining the BBC as a trainee studio manager.

If that doesn't say rigorous scientist, expert in climate change, and yet humble man of the people, perhaps your standards are too high?

Now let the Pom import smote and smite away ...

Australia’s 48th parliament is the most diverse in the nation’s history, at least by conventional measures. The female, Indigenous, ethnic and LGBT+ communities have never had so many MPs and senators advocating their cause. Yet polling consistently shows voters have never felt so disenfranchised.
Measures of trust and satisfaction in elected representatives are at record lows amid rising anti-politician sentiment and record-low support for the major parties.
For a substantial cohort of disenchanted voters, the proclaimed diversity of parliament is bunkum. One Nation’s attacks on the so-called uniparty are gaining traction, despite the stark differences between a dreamily progressive Labor government and an increasingly hard-nosed conservative opposition.
It suggests the most important political divide is not between left and right but between the politicians and the people they claim to represent.
Yet by less fashionable measures of diversity – such as age, education and career paths – parliamentarians increasingly conform to type. More than 80 per cent of MPs and senators are university graduates compared with just 26 per cent of Australians at the 2021 census.
The focus of their studies leans heavily towards the arts, including law and economics. Only a handful of parliamentarians have engineering qualifications, which may help explain Canberra’s recurring naivety about energy and infrastructure.

Too true, the last thing we need is some bloody sociology-trained pundit blathering away with no more than a passing knowledge of applied science, especially if they don't know how to apply the science to the movement of flood waters in quarries ... Rebuilding an energy system from scratch demands more than a passing knowledge of applied science, yet Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen’s academic background is in economics. Picture: Thomas Traasdahl/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP

How disappointing is that snap? 

Sure, every reptile yarn about climate change has to have a snap of terrifying windmills, designed to put fear into the hive mind and into the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way, but what an opportunity was missed to show the baleful Bowen, in a way given unto Geoff.

That's better, that's how it should have been done, unless they could have combined that snap with the shot of those infernal bloody windmills ...

Never mind, back with the sociologist for an extended rant ...

Rebuilding an energy system from scratch demands more than a passing knowledge of applied science, yet Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen’s academic background is in economics. MPs and senators with trade certificates are few and far between. Which leads us to the frightening conclusion that most of the politicians who legislated targets for the transformation of our energy system couldn’t be trusted to change a light bulb.
Parliament, in other words, has become a hotbed of intellectuals, defined by Thomas Sowell as “a social class of persons whose economic output consists of generalised ideas”, as opposed to those with useful skills that can be used to actually fix things. To the extent that they are problem solvers, their inclination is towards social problems – fairness, equality, diversity and the like – rather than practical problems such as saving for retirement or addressing the cost of living.
Politicians also are concentrated in a relatively narrow stage of life, from their 30s to their mid-50s, when household finances tend to be dominated by earnings and mortgages rather than accumulated assets.
As the giant cohort of Baby Boomers retires, the number in parliament is slipping. In 2013, when Tony Abbott became prime minister, 48 per cent of parliamentarians were born before 1965. In today’s parliament, the proportion of Baby Boomers and older cohorts has fallen to 20 per cent, compared with 30 per cent in the general population.
The sole representative of the Silent Generation, those born before 1946, is the magnificently un-silent Bob Katter.
The ascendancy of the narrow graduate class has encouraged a political focus that is preoccupied with intentions and abstractions – climate targets and gender identity – while paying less attention to practical consequences: cost, feasibility and the disruption imposed on ordinary lives.
On the rare occasions when the preoccupations of the political class are put directly to a popular vote, as with the Indigenous voice referendum, the gulf between Canberra and the country becomes impossible to ignore.
Yet the political class has become adept at getting its way by stealth, covering its tracks with feel-good words. The cumulative frustration over changes that most voters abhor being made without consultation – let alone a vote – is fuelling the rise of populism.
The Australian Election Survey conducted after the 2025 election revealed that the conditions were ripe for political revolt. Barely one in three Australians trusts the people in government, compared with more than half in 2007.
The proportion of the population that agreed that “People in government look after themselves” has risen from about 40 per cent late last century to about 75 per cent.
None of this would surprise American political theorist Hanna Pitkin, whose 1957 distinction between descriptive representation (who representatives are) and substantive representation (what representatives do) serves as a useful correction for identity politics.
In The Concept of Representation (1967), she argued that representation was fundamentally about acting in the interests of the represented, not merely resembling them.
In a descriptive sense, women were woefully under-represented in the blokey parliament elected in 1996, in which four out of five MPs and senators were male and only one parliamentarian was openly gay – the newly elected Greens senator Bob Brown.
Yet around twice as many voters trusted this predominantly straight white male parliament to do the right thing, suggesting the quality of political representation should be judged by the content of one’s character, not the colour of one’s skin or one’s inherited chromosomes.

Did the Caterist just attempt to show Our Henry he wasn't the only one with a reference book, while explaining the urgent need to bash womyn for ruining everything? ... The lesson for the Liberal Party is that it should reject the persistent demand for sex-based quotas and focus on recruiting members from a broader constituency of working Australians. Picture: Hilary Wardhaugh/Getty Images

Eek, a bloody woman, and isn't there another one on the far right, making life extremely hard for the beefy boofhead?

As for Our Henry, let him try to buck at the Caterist citing Burke ...

The lesson for the Liberal Party is that it should reject the persistent demand for sex-based quotas and focus on recruiting members from a broader constituency of working Australians. Neither should it become obsessed with ethnic cohorts. We hardly need opinion polling or focus groups to tell us that the No.1 issue for most Australians, whether born here or migrants, is the cost of living.
If the party wants a targeted recruitment drive, it should target people who genuinely support Liberal values and have succeeded at something other than politics – not those whose career trajectory runs from a politics or communications degree to a staffer’s desk and thence up the party ladder.
It would eschew identity politics in all its forms, recognising that it has become a gateway drug to narcissism, encouraging politicians to lean into their personal narrative rather than quotidian concerns of the anonymous Australians who sent them to Canberra.
The more parliament sees itself as an assembly of identities, the less capable it becomes of speaking and governing in the national interest. The exhibitionist displays we sometimes see in the Senate, in which the chamber becomes a bear pit for competing grievances, serve as a warning for where this leads.
It calls for a return to humility – a dying virtue in contemporary politics – that underpins an equally unfashionable notion of public service.
Parliament will never regain public trust if it acts as what Edmund Burke describes as “a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests”. Instead, it must pursue a higher goal: “a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole”.

Eschew identity politics! Embrace the humility espoused by the Caterist, a veritable monk of reticence and modesty!

Of course, how else could enthusiastic members of the white nationalist Judaeo-Xian proponents of Western Democracy stay in charge (no minorities or womyn allowed).

And what a way to stop the immortal Rowe, busy hatching eggs ...

Is there an upside to all this? Well it seems that the reptile melongate fever has finally passed, unless you mistake those eggs for melons ...

For a bonus, the pond turned to the bouffant one. Luckily he usually only lasts for a couple of minutes, as do many Australian men, so it was a quick read ...

The header: How the Nationals leader is using food security to plot a comeback; After defections, splits and Barnaby Joyce joining One Nation, Matt Canavan has pulled the Nationals back from the brink – and new polling data could hand him an unexpected lifeline.

The caption for the AV distraction featuring Rita, meter maid, offered at the start in case nobody felt up the task of reading the morally uplifting yarn: ​Nationals Leader Matt Canavan says the media made a “total beat-up” of shadow Housing Minister Andrew Bragg’s National Press Club address. ​“He said it could be done; he didn’t say we’re going to,” Mr Canavan told News24 host Rita Panahi. ​“At least Andrew Bragg didn’t have to cancel a Press Club speech.”

Get ready for some adoring adulation:

Matt Canavan has brought the Nationals a long way in six months.

How could he bring them such a long way? Remember, he's got a ute ...

It was inevitable a reptile had to join the Canavan caravan, if only for appearances sake, and who better than Shanners?

From two recent splits with their Liberal Coalition partners, an unsuccessful leadership challenge against his predecessor David Littleproud and a slew of defections and resignations that included Nationals MPs becoming independents, joining the Liberals and, in the most spectacular action involving former leader and deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce, defecting to One Nation.
At the same time, Pauline Hanson’s popularity had pushed One Nation to unprecedented levels of support in the polls, not to mention successes at the South Australian election.
But this weekend Canavan managed a unifying – at times robust – Nationals’ conference that was not afraid to back conservative causes, such as criticising Labor’s gun laws, and left MPs feeling satisfied they were heading back on track.

"At times robust"!: Senator Matt Canavan managed to push his own agenda to revive the Nationals’ standing. Picture: NewsWire/Martin Ollman.

"Back on track"! A patriot! Staking out new territory!

And a reference to the pond's favourite poem, as the rustic from the north declared that we'd all be rooned, unless we voted for him, and if we didn't he'd be rooned ...

Canavan managed to push his own agenda to revive the Nationals’ standing, stake out a conservative territory, declaring he was not afraid to say he was a patriot, and, perhaps most importantly, raised a new and vital debate about food security, water policy and the prospect of Australia becoming a net importer of supermarket vitals such as chicken, pork and dairy.
Munching on an apple in his opening speech, Canavan demonstrated no fear of the theatrical and flair, declaring apples would be on the import list as well.
“By the year 2040, Australia may not produce enough cheese, eggs, butter, chicken, pork and apples to feed ourselves,” he warned his colleagues and the public.
“The reasons for this are all the same. Production levels staying still but population rapidly growing,” even as farm production should hit $100bn a year for the first time this year.
Canavan was doing more than whingeing and declaring “we’ll all be roon’d” because he was linking what is a decline in food and fibre production in Australia’s food bowl to the crucial political issue of population growth and immigration.
Just as Angus Taylor has linked the housing crisis to immigration levels, Canavan has linked food security to population growth.

Quick, another snap, so punters in the hive mind might have the foggiest about the mortal enemy rustics should fear: As he campaigns without talking about Pauline Hanson, Matt Canavan may have another boost to his otherwise dismal outlook – the absolute Labor and Greens rejection of One Nation. Picture: Hilary Wardhaugh/Getty Images

Let them reject Gina's pampered pet! Let the Canavan caravan hit the road with Pauline!

And so to a final flourish of triumphalism, hitting the hive mind with Shanners' best shot:

As he campaigns without talking about Hanson, Canavan may have another boost to his otherwise dismal outlook and one that has not been recognised – the absolute Labor and Greens rejection of One Nation.
New qualitative polling from Australian Institute for Progress has found that when asked about preferences after casting their first preference, 99 per cent of Labor and Greens’ supporters will refuse to put One Nation ahead of the Coalition.
This opens the scenario of compulsory preferential voting federally actually giving Coalition candidates victory even if they finish below One Nation on preferences.
This is a long shot for Canavan but, at the moment, he is taking all the shots he can.

Splendid stuff, but the pond decided it hadn't reached peak thrills, and decided there should be a bonus to the bonus, while managing to give property prices a rest ...

Instead of having an anxiety attack about falling house prices helping out vulgar youffs - shed tears for property investors - the pond turned to simpleton Simon acting as advisor and coach to the beefy boofhead, in his hour of Pauline peril.

The header: Labor has used the Greens to stabilise the power of the Left; The Liberals’ failure has been spectacular. It is as if it hopes its hero Robert Menzies will one day provide an answer from the grave.

The caption and credit for another splendid outing by Emilia: Anthony Albanese, Angus Taylor and Pauline Hanson are trying to come to terms with their popularity with voters. Art: Emilia Tortorella

Simplistic Simon took a bigly four minutes to help the struggling boofhead from down Goulburn way, and for those who doubted the pond's invocation of the 1950s and Ming the Merciless, Simon was on hand to wash away their saucy fears ...

One would have to cast one’s mind back to what seems a distant time to recall when either of the major political parties had a four in front of their primary vote while in government.
For the Coalition, it was June 2021. For Labor it was more than 16 years ago.
There have been sporadic episodes since when both have managed to achieve this benchmark in opposition, but these have been oddities; fleeting in their longevity and rare in occasion.
Today the Coalition struggles to get a two in front of its primary vote and Labor can barely muster a three. It is questionable that either side will ever get to the 40s again.
The ALP worked out long ago that to contrive a path to government meant an accommodation on the left and inner-city voters lured by its radical affiliate.
As much as the Greens have proven problematic for Labor, so too have they become its useful idiots. This is now a well-tested mathematical proposition considering for the past two elections only a third of voters have got the government they claimed as their first choice.
The Liberal Party’s greatest failure has been its inability to foresee that it too would one day face an analogous schism. And its failure has been spectacular as it persists in a beleaguered belief that Robert Menzies will provide an answer from the grave.

Take that, Bangladesh cricketers, there will be a second coming, have no doubt of it, The Liberals are hoping that Sir Robert Menzies will guide them from the grave.

But was Ming the saviour, the redeemer speaking from the grave, telephoning down from a heavenly Cinque ports?

How simpleton Simon brooded ...

The circumstances or events that have led to the recent collapse in support for the Coalition are still contested. But the foundational decay that allowed it to happen in the first place has come with plenty of warnings. How this has come as a shock to the Liberal Party reveals the depths to its delusion.
It would be absurd to assert that Pauline Hanson could suddenly become popular by a singular event such as Bondi and in a time frame that defies logic. By her own admission, Hanson says her views are unchanged over 30 years.
So is it Australians who have changed, a response to the circumstances in which most people find themselves – poorer and ignored?
Last week’s Newspoll showed support for Labor dipping below 30 per cent for the first time since the Gillard era, proving Labor is facing a new challenge as well. Having established a franchise model of electoral power on the left, it must make adjustments to stop leakage to populism.
The key to electoral success now depends on which side has the greater comprehension of, and the ability to manipulate, a simple fact: Australians live in a preferential political world. This is why Labor’s primary vote of 29 per cent would indeed appear abysmal if not assessed by normative standards.
The latest Newspoll heralds a new yardstick for Anthony Albanese. Under his leadership, primary support has fallen to levels that characterised the level of contempt voters held Labor in following the deposition of Kevin Rudd. It should be noted that under Julia Gillard the primary vote for Labor at one point was higher than it has ever been under Albanese.

Sheesh, not Juliar, did the reptiles run out of chaff bags? The primary vote for Julia Gillard was higher than it has ever been under Mr Albanese.

And where would the hive mind be without a simplistic history lesson, filled with alarm and trepidation?

The more important measure is what Labor’s primary vote was compared with the other side. When Labor’s primary vote was last at 29 per cent, the Coalition’s primary vote was at 48 per cent. The Liberal-Nationals combina­tion could be assured victory even before preferences were counted.
Today, against a primary vote of 29 per cent for Labor, the Coalition is at 18 per cent. The picture has fundamentally altered. And it demonstrates that while Labor’s primary vote appears dangerously low in isolation, context is everything. It looks bad, but when compared with its traditional opponent it is far less so.
Labor’s primary vote was as low as 26 per cent in 2012. In April that year, the Coalition went as high as a 51 per cent primary vote against a Labor primary vote of 27 per cent.
The absence of One Nation was not a significant factor considering before that its primary vote was less than 5 per cent.
By 2017, with One Nation’s re-entry, the minor right-wing party was polling as high as 11 per cent, which was higher than the Greens. Malcolm Turnbull was prime minister and Labor’s primary vote was higher than the Coalition, in the mid to high 30s, getting as high as 41 per cent in the immediate aftermath of Morrison-Turnbull leadership spill.
By the 2019 election, the Coalition had settled under Scott Morrison and One Nation’s primary vote dropped back to about 3 per cent. It is a different story today, obviously, but there were signs some time ago of the potential for a dramatic change in direction for the broader body politic because of an emerging instability in the electorate.

Want a reminder of the glory, or should that be gory, days? How about a snap of a clap happy? the (sic) Coalition had settled under Scott Morrison by the 2019 election. Picture: Getty Images

What a chance to drag an infallible Pope out of the archives ...

Then came a final gobbet, and dare the pond say it, the notion that the reptiles' hero might be rooned, at least for the moment ...with the pond's appetite for a bout of relativism on a Monday finally sated ...

These signs, ignored at the time as the Coalition began to obsess about the teals, were evident in the post 2022 election review by the Liberal Party. It wasn’t the size of the One Nation vote that was concerning, although it had increased 60 per cent on the 2019 result; rather, it was where the votes were coming from and how they were being returned in preferences.
The review found 36 per cent of One Nation preferences flowed back to Labor. This tilted more in favour of the Coalition in 2025 but not by a significant margin.
The point is that the pool of conservative voters being harvested by One Nation was already starting to grow years ago but more than a third of them ultim­ately helped Labor. This is not the case for the centre-left, where Greens preference flows have been steadily rising across the past three decades and peaked last year at 88 per cent to Labor.
In other words, the preferential system offers electoral reward for strategic voting behaviour, which is evident among Greens voters who know they end up with a Labor government anyway.
This is the fundamental difference that denies the Coalition from replicating on the centre-right what Labor has achieved on the left. The One Nation voting motivation is self-evident; they dislike both major parties and preference only because they have to. There is ample evidence of that when preferential voting is optional – as it is in NSW, where it will be tested in March next year – and where most Greens voters are still disciplined enough to preference Labor but One Nationvoters are much less obedient.
The problem for the Coalition is potentially aggravated also by Liberal voters refusing to preference One Nation and potentially even putting Labor ahead of it.
Unless the Coalition can reverse the tables as they stand today and get ahead of One Nation on primary vote, it will be its prefer­ences that get distributed rather than the other way around. While Labor would appear to be in trouble with a primary vote so low, the fact is that this is structurally mitigated by conservative voters refusing to play by the rules.

Structurally mitigated!

What a simple lesson from simple Simon. Do a deal with Gina's pampered pet, swing to the mad far right, or perish ...

And so to end with a remarkable tribute to a remarkable Xian ...

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. 1 Corinthians 13:1-13

He saith unto him, Which? Jesus said, Thou shalt do no murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness. Matthew 19:18

He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. 1 John 2:4

And how goes Vlad the sociopathic invader's world? (Steve can never resist a tinkle)