In which Polonius's prattle and Gemma's grating are the two reptiles left standing ...

 

Talk about a curve ball, talk about unnerving...

After years of the reptiles introducing a column with a snap at the start, suddenly in this weekend's Polonial outing the snap is down the page a little...

The pond supposes that if this is the worst of the existential crises it faces, then things are looking good.

But why the format change now? And why Polonius?

Was Polonius's sudden addiction to a minor state premier, ruling roost over a minor state, before sallying forth to beard eastern staters, deemed a little unsavoury?

Is it a way of putting the upstart croweater back in the sand box, so he can play with his almost deep west toys?

Whatever, the pond decided to restore world order by treatingPolonius as it always does...

The header: Premier’s warning to the left: lay down your weapons: The SA Labor leader Peter Malinauskas has warned against progressive sanctimony, which he says has fuelled the rise of far-right politics, and urged focus on the issues that mattered.

And then it was straight into the four minute read, and here the pond should note a hint of incest.

For those who've come in late, the pond has highlighted the magnificent CV and snap of Polonius and his partner at the Sydney Institute site.

Intense. Deeply informative.

Now guess where the crow eater made his speech.

I have tended to avoid the term culture wars, partly because it is a misnomer and partly on account of the fact it has become a cliche.
In modern-day parlance, the reference to a culture war is invariably used by the left – or “progressives”, as leftists like to be called – who accuse conservatives of fomenting culture war. This despite the fact that conservatives are intent on supporting tradition. That is essentially a defensive position, not a warlike one.

Invariably? On every occasion: always. (So says the dictionary)

No, not invariably ...

It's an idle game, but if you're going to out-pedant a pedant ...

Here's the bromancer way back in October 2007 bemoaning the way the lying rodent lost the culture wars ... (Trove)

...It (the Howard government) has governed against the relentless opposition of the big institutions in our society: the media, particularly the ABC, the public service and the universities. It has at times out-manoeuvred these institutions; it has not reformed them. The Howard Government has comprehensively lost the culture wars. It has on occasion been clever at arousing a popular backlash against elite opinion on this or that subject. But it has not changed elite opinion. And in the end it appears that it is impossible to govern permanently against elite opinion. Elite opinion shapes popular opinion. Far from ferociously waging the culture wars, the Howard Government has been mostly missing in action.

If the bromancer is a lefty, a progressive as they like to be called, the pond will eat Polonius's culture wars hat.

The pond could play this game all day because the reptiles love the culture wars, in much the same way as they love abusing the 'leets and the woke.

And so to Polonius celebrating the croweater, wandering the eastern states, perhaps unaware of the company he's keeping, or more likely feeling proud and strong that he too can do a Fetterman ...

In a major speech to the Sydney Institute last Wednesday, South Australian Labor Premier Peter Malinauskas delivered a novel twist to the use of the term culture war. A leading member of the Labor Party’s right-wing faction, he had some advice for those whom he called the “far left”. Namely, that the left should lay down its culture war weapons.

A major speech? Only if you value croweaters the way they value themselves.

Dammit, must the pond now insert the caption for the snap? ‘If politics becomes the principal determinant of migration policy and a numerical race to the bottom ensues, it is going to hurt every Australian economically,’ Mr Malinauskas said. Picture: John Feder

What's worse is that this was the only visual distraction in the Polonius outing ...

Back to the small beer man from a small-minded state. Oh Adelaide, Adelaide:

The Premier, whose focus was on immigration, said “people on the far left who are understandably horrified about the extraordinary rise of far-right politics in Australia would do well to engage in a moment of self-reflection”.
He added: “Maybe, just maybe, the intense self-righteousness, sanctimony and piety that underpinned the ‘great awokening’ may have tilled the soil for the inevitable countercultural movement on the far right. Now, of course, these countercultural anti-woke warriors have become no less belligerent or self-defeating as those on the far left.”
Earlier in his speech, Malinauskas argued that immigration had not become such a flashpoint this year because Australia was a racist country. He said: “There are bigots in any society, in any century. But that doesn’t explain what’s changed in politics and polls so dramatically over the last nine months.”
Many on the left these days who have experienced a comfortable life like to depict Australia as a racist nation. 

Sorry, a personal moment ...

The wisteria on the back verandah is still blooming
And all the great aunts are either insane or dead...
...All the king's horses all the king's men
Wouldn't drag me back again
To Adelaide, Adelaide, Adelaide, Adelaide...

This is what the doofus Malinauskas gave permission to Polonius to do. Downplay any notion of racism, even as One Nation makes bigotry a fundamental value ...

This does not make sense viewed with respect to empirical data.
Australia has a relatively high level of interracial marriage. Some prefer the term “partnership”. And a relatively low level of ethnically motivated crime. A nation with such attributes does not warrant the label “racist”.
There is one qualification to this piece of judgment. The recent rise in antisemitism in Australia that started before Hamas’s terrorist war on Israel on October 7, 2023, and found appalling expression in the Bondi Beach massacre on December 14 last year requires some re-examination.
Antisemitism exists on the extreme right. But the most damaging current expression of antisemitism in recent years has involved radical Islamists and the radical left.
Nevertheless, despite the appalling recent outbreaks of antisemitism, which are among the worst in the Western world, Australia is not a racist country. Malinauskas is correct in stating that opposition to immigration has grown in response to the falling standard of living illustrated by increasing cost of housing, energy, food and the like.
Australians have been most welcoming of immigration during times of relative prosperity and rising standards of living. Opposition to immigration has risen in situations such as Malinauskas describes as the moment – when “our people are rightly worried about their economic future”.

So many bald-faced lies, so much distortion, so much pandering to the right.

The point is that many people try to get along, live amiable lives in a multicultural society. From the pond's personal observation, we wouldn't have a healthcare system without migrants.

But that's not to say that there isn't an inclination to be racist...

Then came a familiar routine, but on the upside, for once Polonius wasn't blaming the ABC ...

This was not the case in the post-war mid-1960s. In his recently released book Three Shocks: Who We Are Becoming in the 21st Century (Penguin), George Megalogenis writes that in 1973 Gough Whitlam’s Labor government removed “the last vestiges of the White Australia policy”.
This is misleading. The White Australia policy was effectively dismantled on March 9, 1966, in a ministerial statement in the House of Representatives by immigration minister Herbert Opperman. That was at the time of the Harold Holt-led Coalition government. The 1966 announcement followed earlier restrictions of the White Australia policy in 1956, 1957 and 1964. The Whitlam Labor government merely removed some extant legislation.
As I recall, former Coalition prime minister John Howard used to say that Australians were most relaxed about immigration when economic times were good.
That was not the case during the Whitlam government between December 1972 and November 1975 where there was economic decline accompanied by low migration intake.
Australia was never and never can be a monocultural society. It was always multicultural even though the term was first used officially by the Whitlam government in 1973. The original large diversity after 1788 was between a primarily British (and Protestant) majority and primarily Irish (and Catholic) minority. But no one spoke of multiculturalism.
When I interviewed Howard in 1995 for a book, he said if multicultural meant there should be respect for everybody’s own individual cultural diversity then he was “totally” supportive. But if “you’re promoting diversity ahead of unity” then the concept was questionable. This position was unfashionable then in many circles. But it makes sense today.
In 2011, British prime minister David Cameron, who was no right-wing extremist, distanced himself from multiculturalism. He did so in a speech on radicalisation and Islamic extremism at the Munich Security Conference.
Here Cameron followed a view expressed by Christian Democrat German chancellor Angela Merkel who had expressed a similar position the previous October. She was reported to have said that “multikulti”, the German word for multiculturalism, had not worked. Before the statements of Cameron and Merkel, British Labor prime minister Tony Blair had warned of the rise of extremism.
In his speech last Wednesday, Malinauskas did not mention multiculturalism. His approach was strictly empirical. He is committed to immigration and maintained that other leaders should speak out in support of its economic benefits.
But Malinauskas was pragmatic. He did not state what the net migration intake should be. Rather, he asked questions such as: “Want more affordable and available housing? How about some more sparkies, tilers, roofers, concreters and brickies? Want your Mum and Dad to be able to get an aged care bed? How about more ready-to-go, fully trained care workers?”
Malinauskas’s message was essentially to the “progressive” left. They were advised to stop attacking Australians concerned about their declining living standards by calling them racists and to focus on the issues that mattered.
Without question, developing immigration policy is a very complex task. Unrelated to what some call culture wars.

Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

He couldn't resist a final lie, that migration was just a complex policy issue, and that players weren't motivated by racism, and focus on anything else rather than the racism that litters the lizard Oz and One Nation.

And so the likes of Malinauskas facilitates and enables the canker at the core ... the routine scapegoating of furriners in the lizard Oz on a daily basis, not to mention the regular bouts of black bashing the rag indulges in...

The pond knows where this leads, it knows what Gina aspires to, and has fellow travelled with, and as we're doing topsy-turvy formatting these days, here comes the 'toon usually saved to last ...

As for the bonus, the pond has already discounted many reptile contributors and will discount a few more.

The pond couldn't arouse a flicker of interest, not even with 240 volts to the eyelids, in these yarns ...

‘Off the scale’: Regulator system harming good doctors
System to catch bad doctors is causing harm to the good ones
The regulator meant to protect patients has no bar on accepting complaints – and its own data shows 16 doctors took their lives while under its scrutiny.
By Dr Michael Gannon

And the only thing appealing about this one was the formatting ...

COMMENTARY COMMENTARY: TEACHERS STRUGGLE WITH UNRULY CLASSES
Teachers struggle with unruly classes
Australian teachers rate their schools as calm and orderly, yet new research reveals nearly one-third of every lesson is lost to student misbehaviour.
By Blaise Joseph
Contributor

Perhaps the name too ... always shaken and stirred:

And that's how the pond ended up with garrulous, grating Gemma ...

The header: Hey kids, skip the gap year – your country needs you; Eighty countries demand their young people serve. Australia asks nothing – and we are paying the price.

The caption for the genuinely hideous, wisely uncredited artwork: Volunteer programs boost productivity, increase employee engagement and improve hiring and retention.

Perhaps the pond should first introduce Gemma ...

That handily conveys the air of smug self-satisfaction which emanates from the piece ...

It was a warm summer day in Tel Aviv at the start of June in 2023. I was at a laundromat, fumbling my way through the mechanics of trying to work the washing machine with my non-existent Hebrew.
A couple of kindly local lads came to my rescue; I handed over my coins and they drove the thing for me. Relieved and slightly flustered, I settled into a plastic chair in the open window to wait. A warm breeze wafted in as we sat there, my fellow travellers and I.
A bit of a non-event, isn’t it? Who would suspect a visit to the laundromat might be the beginnings of an idea that has been germinating for three years?
Well, it did, and I have a conversation with a stranger to thank for it. Not a lot to do while waiting for the spin cycle to do its thing, other than chat. If you know me, you know I love a chat. Call it a hardwired curiosity about the world around me and the people in it.
There was a woman waiting with me, a local. Her washing machine had broken, if I remember correctly. She was curious about Australia, as was I about her life. She had three boys, I think. We got to talking about life, as is my habit. She told me her kids were all adults and one was doing his national service. Oh, in the military? I asked. No, she said, he’s a pacifist so he’s doing his service as a teacher’s aide in a school for children with learning disabilities.
At the time I didn’t realise non-military service was an option in Israel and said as much. My new friend told me you could opt out of military service and instead perform another kind of civil service. Serving your country, your community was non-negotiable.
I have thought about that conversation a lot in the past three years – in recent months even more so – and I’ve come to a view that no doubt will be unpopular with many.

True dat, all the more because calling conscription "mandated service" is the sort of word salad up with which this blog will not put...

Service, mandated service of our country, is one way in which we can start rebuilding some of what has been lost in our country over recent decades. It’s a powerful way to address the creeping malaise that seems to be at the heart of so many of our societal ills and generational challenges. Hey kids, guess what – it’s not just about you. What a concept.

The pond will ignore that preening condescension.

The way conscription worked is that if you had the right connections you could get out of it (so many bonespurs), and the ones sent off to die in Vietnam were mug punters, working class men (boys? Certainly teens, some were only 19), and rustics from the bush.

The pond lost a couple of friends to that war, and a couple more went to the clink rather than head off to a useless war. They had different reasons, but this will serve...

"Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?"
"Man, I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me n*gg*r."
"I'm not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over."

The pond always liked Ali, which is more than can be said for grating Gemma ...

The catastrophically ruinous Whitlam government abolished national military service in 1973, the year of my birth. (As an aside, my parents met when my dad was doing his nashos in Brisbane so, in a way, no national service, no Gemma.) And before anyone tries to put words in my mouth, I’m not talking about conscription or only military service, though that certainly should be an option.
I’m talking about civil service. Community service. Before you go offshore to volunteer with a non-government org­anisation, why not invest your time and energy in this country? There may be nowhere near the same level of virtue or street cred, but doesn’t charity start at home?

So is it conscription, or is it voluntary? There are already plenty of ways of volunteering, but if it's mandated, it's conscription, and no word salad offering woke causes deserving of help can disguise it...

When I finished high school several eons ago, nobody really did a gap year. It feels like a recent (as in within the past 10 to 15 years or so) phenomenon. I’m not against gap years; to each their own. But consider what it might look like if, as a society, we asked young people to value the country they lived in and spend some time in service of their community.
Military? Sure, if you want to. Working in a remote community? Brilliant. A wildlife project, somewhere? Fantastic idea. And it doesn’t have to be 12 months. National and civil service occurs in varying shapes and durations in the 80 countries that still mandate it for their young people. Countries including Norway, Morocco, Sweden and, of course, Israel.

One moment it's compulsory ...

In Switzerland, men aged 18 to 30 do just 18 weeks of compulsory military service training. For women, serving is voluntary. Don’t get me started on that. Equal opportunity means equal responsibility. Italy abolished national military service in 2005, but most of my cousins completed theirs.

The next moment it's voluntary ...

The French have a voluntary national service program for teenagers aged 15 to 17 that gives the option of serving in the military or civic programs. Nobody would suggest France is the embodiment of social cohesion but at least they have a pathway. Here? We don’t value anything enough to ask young people to serve.

On and on she blathered in an unctuous way ...

The power isn’t in the project; it’s in the act of service itself. It’s in the understanding that Australia is a wonderful country that doesn’t owe us anything, and we all have a responsibility to contribute. You could argue (fairly) that we are being taxed into oblivion by this government and you’d be right. What I’m talking about is intervening with a policy reset of sorts that will help build resilience in generations to come.
In his 1961 inaugural address, US president John F. Kennedy encouraged Americans not to ask what their country could do for them but to ask what they could do for their country.
That sentiment has been romanticised but not emulated as societies have progressed. We know from myriad studies that service to community, focusing on things outside our own world, delivers incredible outcomes such as social connectivity, cohesion, a sense of shared purpose. Serving helps develop skills in a way that is unique and meaningful.

Haven't we been here before? That green army thingie from the mind of a dingbat ...

Then came a defensive attempt to prove that garrulous Gemma wasn't a true Quad-ranter:

For some young people it may bring clarity around a career path. Set a course for life that previously may not have been clear or accessible. I can think of at least one friend whose decision to enrol in cadets during high school had a profound impact on the direction of their life.
I understand some people will have very strong reactions to what I’m suggesting here but I don’t think it’s that controversial. Valuing your country isn’t wrong, it’s not “far right” and it’s not regressive. And none of us serves anything we don’t place value on. I’m also of the view that the most powerful and effective iteration of leadership is servant leadership.

Is there anything stopping Gemma from dropping everything and rushing to serve?

Meanwhile, slash all that talk about it being voluntary. It's back to being mandatory, and it's for younglings, because they need to be whipped into shape, under the stern eye of Nurse Ratched Gemma ...

Many will argue that plenty of people volunteer, so why make it mandatory and why for teen­agers? I suppose my thinking is about the deterioration of social norms and a shift towards a culture of self. Add to that the social disconnect that has been a by-product of the digital age. Relationships that exist only in chat rooms, online, and the like.
I think back to the woman in that Tel Aviv laundromat. She didn’t care that one of her children was a conscientious objector. She said something along the lines of: I don’t care how he serves but he needs to serve his country.
My observation is that this attitude demonstrates an understanding of the value, the price of their freedom. Do we in Australia understand that value or do we take our lifestyle and freedom for granted? I would love to see what kind of impact this idea could have, if the seed might be allowed to germinate. Imagine that.

Have we really moved much past the condescension embodied in that ancient Python Four Yorkshiremen sketch?

Python 2: Luxury! We used to have to get out of the lake at six o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, work twenty hour day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!

Python 3: Well, of course, we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox in the middle of the night, and lick road clean with tongues! We had to eat half a handful of freezing-cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at that mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home... our dad would slice us in two with a bread knife.

I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down the mill, and pay the mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home... our dad would kill us and dance about on our graves singing "Hallelujah."

Python 1: And you try to tell the young people of today that ... they won't believe you.

Python 1: No, They won't.

And now to wrap up proceedings, a serve of what's on the mind of the lizard Oz editorialist, heart of the beast, heart of darkness ...

Naturally there's One Nation, another step in endless reptile agonising ...

What a perfect excuse to interrupt with an old infallible Pope 'toon ...

Quickly, finish up Oz ed with a final wringing of hands...

And where would the pond be without a celebration of the mad King?

That's got to be worth a 'toon or two...

With Simon Marks MIA at time of printing, another source for cult news of cult ...