In which the pond does its duty and covers Killer Creighton and Our Henry, but succumbs to climate heresy and the need for a little mad King comedy ...

 

Retreating, collapsing glaciers? 

Could that have anything to do with the disaster? 

Could climate change and global warming be involved?

Surely not. The pond has faithfully learned the lessons of the lizard Oz team. The Great Barrier Reef is in top notch shape, and so is the weather everywhere.

Sure it gets a little hot at times, but back in 1908 it was very hot, and there was a flood. QED. Climate science is a religious cult.

As for the world's climate, is there really such a thing?

Trust the Beeb to offer up heresy ...

Collapsed glacier likely caused devastating Nepal-Tibet floods, scientists say

Even worse, the pond came across this further down, and began to wonder if the science found in the lizard Oz resembled the science of Ken Ham's young earth creationism...

And so on, and what a relief to turn to Cameron's 'top of the digital page, ma' coverage of the disaster ...

Fresh flood warning for Himalayas as search continues for 34 missing Australians
Nepal’s disaster authority has issued a new alert for the Himalayan border region, as the death toll from Wednesday’s catastrophic glacial flood climbs to 389, and 34 Australians remain unaccounted for.
By Cameron Stewart and Elise Williams

... and find this as the sole mention of climate ...

Experts warned that rescue ­efforts could be hampered by the threat of a second flood in the region. Qianggong Zhang, head of climate and environmental risks at the Kathmandu-based Inter­national Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, said: “With a blockage still lodged ­upstream on the Nepal-China border river, authorities warn a second flood may occur.”

And it was the same for the earlier version saved to the intermittent archive.

How about the story immediately below that one, another Cameron effort, written as an evocative colour piece, far from the site of the catastrophe?

INSIDE STORY
Seconds to flee: From Himalayan trek to a tsunami of terror
A global tragedy unfolded faster than anyone could run or think. Dams, power plants and bridges were swept aside in moments.
By Cameron Stewart

Here Cameron excelled himself. Not a single mention of "climate" or "change" or any of that folderol, just a brief mention in an accompanying graphic that "a collapsing glacier may have caused the flooding"... (not in the archived version, but hinting at a climate heresy that will likely remain a mystery to the hive mind) ...

The pond will wait patiently for the lizard Oz explanation that this disaster had absolutely nothing to do with climate change, and in the meantime looked to the infallible Pope for a comment ...

The pond then looked over on the extreme far right and found the usual jihad in play ...

Blaming Aboriginal culture for harm to kids lazy and wrong
Departmental administrative failures, unreturned phone calls, and systemic barriers are preventing willing Indigenous grandparents from caring for kin.
By Megan Davis
Contributor

The pond personally saved that offering to the intermittent archive so it could get on with Killer Creighton's contribution, but what a disappointment it was.

The header: Struggling workers watch their money sustain super rort;With forced savings robbing workers of purchasing power, giving Australians the choice to take 3 per cent as wages is a no-brainer.

The caption for the tired artwork wheeled out by the reptiles again: Senators Pauline Hanson and Andrew Bragg have reignited national debate over Australia’s 12 per cent compulsory superannuation rate. Pictures: News Corp/iStock. Artwork: Debbie Schipp

The pond's disappointment and sense of déjà vu began with the recycled illustration. 

The pond thought it had seen it before, and did a visual search, and discovered it had been used in at least one dog botherer story ...

The pond hates to use AI - just a little power and five drops of water used up in a question and the next thing you know glaciers are collapsing in Nepal - but it's everywhere ...

If even AI, dopey most of the time, feels tired and bored and suffused with ennui, imagine how the pond feels.

And that sadly was the only illustration the reptiles deployed in what turned out to be a standard IPA-driven attempt to destroy superannuation.

The pond stood back, the offering being on a par with Killer's Covid fear and panic about masks and vaccines ...

Whatever their personal differences, Pauline Hanson and Andrew Bragg have two admirable things in common: a willingness to speak their minds and the confidence to question one of the great sacred cows of Australian politics – compulsory superannuation.
It’s really no surprise they’ve been attacked. More than $160bn in wages and salaries is siphoned into super accounts every year, generating roughly $34bn in annual system-wide fees. In short, it’s the biggest racket in the country.
Those fees, equivalent to about half the defence budget or the entirety of Victoria’s health spending, may not be counted as taxes, but they might as well be. They sustain a vast bureaucracy that otherwise wouldn’t exist. Most of the $3 trillion in APRA-regulated funds is actively managed when much of it should be sitting in ultra-cheap indexed options, which are conveniently buried in the fine print.
Now, more than ever, the case for reform is overwhelming. Workers are being forced to save too much during the years when they most need that money – to buy a home, raise a family and enjoy life while they are still young enough to do so. The so-called working man’s paradise has increasingly become an economic purgatory, where purchasing power is steadily eroded by higher taxes, inflation and forced saving. Amid the biggest fall in living standards in a generation, the least we could do is give people the option to save a little less now.
Former Treasury secretary Ken Henry – the last truly exceptional and independently minded economist to hold that office – concluded in his 2009 tax review for the Rudd government that the compulsory saving rate should remain at 9 per cent. “This strikes an appropriate balance for most individuals between their consumption opportunities during their working life and compulsory saving for retirement,” he wrote.
That judgment has been vindicated in spades, yet it has been ignored by both major parties, too lazy or too beholden to vested interests to resist the inexorable rise to a ridiculous 12 per cent.
The government itself knows the rate is excessive. In its 2020 Retirement Income Review, Treasury found that when retirees die, most leave behind the majority of the wealth they had at retirement. Members who died had left about 90 per cent of the balance they held at retirement. In other words, retirees tend to live off the income from their assets, not the assets themselves.
Treasury also projected that aggregate death benefits would rise from around one dollar in every five paid out by the super system in 2019 to around one in every three by 2059. That is an absurd outcome. It suggests Australians could enjoy a better quality of life when they are young without materially sacrificing their incomes later in life.
Henry also made a devastating point about the public finances. The system, he said, is a “net cost to government even over the long term”, puncturing the common claim that forced saving somehow saves taxpayers money. As he put it, the loss of income tax revenue from the various concessions would not be fully offset by higher super tax collections or lower Age Pension costs. Put plainly, all other taxes are higher than they need to be because of this system.
There is also a serious governance problem. Big super funds now control almost 40 per cent of the Australian sharemarket, creating an unelected parallel government that votes on company direction according to environmental and social fashions the vast majority of members are unlikely to care much about. As Bragg asked in his National Press Club speech, why tolerate all this complexity when “there is no public finance benefit and minimal personal benefit”? Even “minimal” may be generous.
None of this will be easy to change. Compulsory super is one of the few policies that unites the two most powerful vested interests in the country: the union movement and the finance sector.
But if there were ever a time to push for reform, it is now. People rightly feel poorer. Yet the Prime Minister has been boasting that super could become a “national asset that can be used more appropriately”, while the Treasurer said in 2023 that he hoped to maximise its potential through “greater investment in our national priorities”.
And what exactly does that mean? Five per cent of your retirement savings tipped into Snowy 2.0 or Melbourne’s Suburban Rail Loop? Of course, allowing workers to withdraw their super balances in full would be unwise. The resulting wall of cash, eagerly leveraged by the banks, would wash into the housing market and drive prices even higher.
But workers should at least be allowed to opt to receive three percentage points of their gross income as wages instead of having it funnelled into super. That would be entirely their choice. It would harm no one else. It is their money, their employer would not care, and it would not cost the budget a cent. If anything, the reverse is true. Australia is the only developed country with a means-tested pension sitting alongside a massive compulsory, privately managed, defined-contribution savings scheme. Rather than congratulating ourselves on how clever that makes us, we might pause to ask why.
Hanson and Bragg deserve credit for reigniting a debate that should have been raging for years. It’s is more than can be said for the dozens of seatwarmers in the upper house. Senators, with their long terms and broad state constituencies, are meant to speak plainly and challenge orthodoxies, not merely parrot party lines. That is what we pay them for. And there is no bigger issue on which to do it than super.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

What else did you expect from Killer of the IPA? Full Pauline, full Bragg, full on destroy super, and all will be well in IPA land, and the sooner we can reduce the country to the sort of impoverished poverty rife in the United States, which keeps grey nomads chained to work into their eighties, all the better for the IPA's sponsors.

And now to a moment the pond regrets:

Alas, that means even fewer reasons to resort to the other rags.

With that farewell done, the pond turned to Our Henry's outing with a deepening sense of regret. 

There surely must be better ways to waste time early on a Friday morning, with the stench of real disaster infesting the nostrils...

The header: The ‘implied freedom’ is a recipe for violence; Parliaments are obviously imperfect but that is no excuse for courts to take over their role – and make a mess of it.

The caption for the snap designed to terrify the hive mind: Weekly demonstrations adjacent to St Mary’s Cathedral and the Great Synagogue have raised concerns over worshipper intimidation. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Damian Shaw

The pond had wanted to cut straight to the chase with Our Henry, never mind any of the other reptiles competing for attention, but then discovered that the hole in bucket man had wasted a five minute read on legalisms worthy of Dame Slap, and all for the purpose of repressing dissent and protests about the current genocide going down in Gaza and the West Bank.

Has the old codger lost his ancient Thucydides-inspired mojo?

There's the odd flicker here and there, but his contributions to the Australian Daily Zionist News suggest an increasing persecution complex, with layers of paranoia ...

For almost three years, Sydney’s Catholic Archbishop Anthony Fisher has watched the same scene unfold, week after week, outside St Mary’s Cathedral. Anti-Israel protesters gather in Hyde Park blasting incendiary slogans, some blatantly antisemitic, “through highly amplified megaphones, often pointed directly at the cathedral doors during Sunday liturgies”.
Worshippers, the Archbishop told the Samuel Griffith Society last Saturday, have felt sufficiently intimidated to take other routes or attend services elsewhere.
Fisher’s point is not that political protest should disappear from our streets. It is that a protest that may seem tolerable viewed on a single Sunday assumes a very different character when demonising slogans are incessantly repeated in the park adjacent to the Great Synagogue. And what may be acceptable in times of civic peace can destroy civic peace itself in the wake of a murderous antisemitic attack.
The NSW government has twice tried to meet that danger. In March last year it restored to police the power to move protesters on near places of worship; in October, Lees v State of New South Wales struck that legislation down. After Bondi it acted again, and acted decisively; in April, in Jarrett v State of New South Wales, the Court of Appeal struck down that legislation too.
In doing so, the court exposed a fundamental defect in the “implied freedom of political communication”. Lange v Australian Broadcasting Corporation (1997), the doctrine’s authoritative restatement, confined the freedom to political communication “necessary for the effective operation” of representative government.
But the formula contains an ambiguity. If the emphasis is placed on “necessary”, it establishes a constitutional minimum: the political communication without which representative government cannot function. If it is instead put on “effective operation”, as the courts have tended to do, the inquiry changes. The question is no longer whether representative government survives, but whether it works as well as it could.
Once courts ask that question, they require some ideal of representative government against which legislative provisions can be assessed. Thirty years of litigation have not resolved the conundrums that poses. Indeed, things have gotten to the point that Steward J has called the doctrine “very wrong” and “just not sustainable”. Yet amid the doctrinal rubble, the implied freedom’s purported reach has continued to grow.

There was just one other snap for the outing, and the caption suggested an AI summary had been employed to expose the paranoia in Our Henry's thinking... Commentary argues the High Court’s implied freedom doctrine undermines parliament’s ability to maintain public order during emergencies. Picture: AAP

 Say what? parliament’s ability to maintain public order during emergencies. 

Pure Trumpism, that call for public order and the cleansing of the streets ...

Jarrett crystallises that growth’s consequences. The legislation under appeal was enacted barely a week after 15 people were murdered at Bondi. It allowed the police commissioner, with ministerial concurrence, temporarily to prevent public assemblies: 14 days at a time, 90 days at most, and only after the terrorism legislation had first been enlivened.
The court invalidated the scheme. Representative government, it held, “entails acceptance of the potential for disharmony, incivility and disruption that is part and parcel of democratic intercourse”. The state’s contrary argument – that in the aftermath of terrorism, when divisions have escalated into violence, a community may require a measure of civic calm – was dismissed as involving “a particular conception of civic life” at odds with the Constitution.
But what makes the court’s conception any less “particular”? Nothing in historical experience, democratic theory or the Australian Constitution says that representative government requires tolerating the virulent conflict the court embraced.

The pond did pause to note Our Henry's attempts to invoke his grand days, when a heavily thumbed book of quotes was always beside his parchment, as he laboriously copied out sage insights by hand with quill and ink ...

That the court’s approach is arbitrary is unsurprising – and so is the chaos into which the doctrine has descended. The quest for a Platonic ideal of “representative government” against which to measure legislation is intellectually absurd. No such ideal exists.

And Plato wasn't the end of it, but it took a couple of pars to get to the next one ...

Rather, representative government is exactly what philosophers describe as an “essentially contested concept”, whose proper form is a matter of legitimate political disagreement. Yet in Jarrett, parliament’s conception was treated as a political preference while the court’s was elevated into a constitutional truth.
Having thus conjured up its preferred version of what representative government entails, the court then turned to the emergency context. It accepted that the legislature “perceived that community tensions were running high”, and that assemblies might place the community at risk – but held that a terrorist attack “does not make it any more constitutionally permissible” to impose those restrictions.

The next reference was feeble. Might not Our Henry have noted that it's mainly later historians who reference "statis" as a condition, or so the word's wiki suggests ...

However, since antiquity, political thought has recognised the danger the Greeks termed stasis: political antagonism gradually hardening into hatred and hatred then escalating into violence. Democracies cannot be required to await the crisis; they need powers to meet emergencies by law, bounded in advance and strictly limited in time. This scheme easily met those criteria, yet it was knocked back. The court went even further. Quelling political communication “in the interests of protecting another part of the community from a sense of unease or threat (not associated with any proximate physical threat)” is not, it held, a legitimate purpose.

The old rogue really does want the cops out in the streets for a laura norder campaign of the first water:

But murderous violence, such as that at Bondi, does not erupt out of the ether. It breeds wherever a small community is repeatedly demonised and cast outside the moral restraints that prevent disagreement descending into barbarism. That is why, as Fisher insists, the “cumulative effect” matters: repeated protests can impose an “unreasonable burden on the lives and freedoms of others”.
By its nature, that harm is neither proximate nor necessarily physical. Yet on Jarrett it cannot itself justify restricting political communication until the blood, or its immediate threat, runs on the sand and the streets. And because the court held that the vice “lies in the purpose for which the power has been conferred”, rather than in the means by which that purpose was pursued, no amount of redrafting can allow the state to fulfil its utmost duty: to allow all citizens, including Jews, to live, work and pray in peace.
All that is worse than an error; it prevents democratic institutions from performing functions the Constitution entrusts to them.

At last there came a reference to Aristotle...

Freedom, security, social cohesion and equal civic participation cannot be reconciled by formula. Balancing them requires what Aristotle called phronesis: practical judgment, the characteristic virtue of the statesman because it must accommodate competing goods and values as circumstances change. Making those ever-shifting judgments is, in a system of representative government, exactly the task of democratic legislatures.

The pond was inspired to rush off to the word's wiki, and sheesh, Socrates was the first cab off the rank ...

As for Our Henry's thesis?

Nah, not really, give the pond the High Court most days of the week, and the final gobbet did nothing to sway the pond from the notion that demonstrating about the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank is a useful enterprise ...

Their responsibility is not to enthrone one freedom above all others; it is, as Fisher argues, to order common life so that all citizens can enjoy the “goods and freedoms necessary to flourish together in community”.
Legislatures can get that balance wrong – but they are accountable to voters and can correct mistakes in the light of social change and practical experience.
By arrogating that role to themselves, courts undermine the institutional division of labour on which representative government rests. Even worse, they expose the community to dangers it should not be forced to bear.
It would, however, be a mistake to blame the NSW courts. The mess is the inexorable result of a doctrine that lacks any limiting principle. The Constitution empowers courts to protect its specification of representative government; it gives them no authority to engage in a quixotic search for democratic utopia, much less to turn the Constitution into a suicide pact. A High Court that ignores that distinction can only destroy the freedom it exists to defend.

The reptiles even went as far as providing a link to the old codger's paranoid cultivation of a sense of crisis ...but not, of course, any sense of crisis involving Gaza and the West Bank, or the ongoing bombing of countries bordering on Israel:

Henry Ergas’s “The implied freedom of political communication and the present crisis” is available at https://www.ruleoflaw.org.au/programs-lecture-2026-ergas-implied-freedom.

After all that, the pond felt the need for a little light relief, and it came via the lizard Oz's stablemate, the WSJ ...

Opinion Unruly Republic
JD Vance Is the GOP’s Obama
He and the former president have much in common. And both disdain Republicans.

And so on, and desperate, richly comic times, and there goes JD ...

...Mr. Vance likes to tout his youth (“don’t hate me”), but he was old enough to follow the news in the 2010s as Mr. Obama attempted to turn U.S. policy away from Israel and draw Iran into the community of peaceable nations. Mr. Obama, too, liked to contrast his practical and interest-based approach to that of his ideology-driven predecessors.

With few exceptions, though, Mr. Obama limited his scoldings to members and administrations of the other party. At the core of Mr. Vance’s message is the repudiation of views allegedly held by both parties, especially his own. In Brewer, Maine, this week, the vice president described that bipartisan “consensus” again, though the caricature has a conspicuously Republican shape to it. What places like Brewer “really needed, they told us”—no prizes for guessing who “they” were—“was just to juice the short-term profits of a few big corporations, that we needed to open that border and prioritize foreign workers over our own citizens. They would cheer on the corporate raiders as they slashed headcount and shifted all those businesses either to foreign countries or brought in illegal aliens to employ.”

Leave the policy argument, if you can call it that, to one side. The lines reveal a man so contemptuous of views different from his own that he can’t be bothered to understand them. Now ponder a future GOP headed by such a person. Mr. Obama at least respected the party he led.

Now there's a country rich in internal wars, splitters, schisms and schismaics.

Mad king Donald is also a reliable daily source of rich comedy.

There's the renaming of the lake, which suggests that the demented mango Mussolini has regressed to childhood, and the level of a primary school bully ...

And there was this ...

White House Roasted After Embarrassing Canada Fail

Luckily the CBC could help out with that one.

Elbows up Canada ...