In which the pond observes the lizard Oz productivity jihad, with just a waft of Lynch mob triumphalism and a Homeric snappy Tom ...

 

It's been a long time since the pond has indulged in ego surfing, and since then AI has ruined everything ...

Dammit, post-ironic? Must everything be meta? 

What's wrong with good, old-fashioned irony?

Speaking of simple irony, there was something peculiarly ironic about simpleton Simon's headline over on the far right of the digital Oz..

Cut spending? ALP ready with the mother of all scare campaigns
The next election will be a test for Australians. Do they think Millennial socialism is the answer or will it have dawned on them that this model may not be working?
By Simon Benson
Political analyst

"Mother of all scare campaigns"? 

The pond supposes on one level it's just game meets game, because this day the reptiles embarked on the mother of all scare campaigns, with productivity the name of the game.

One of the post-ironic things that inspires awe and wonder is the way they have a seemingly inexhaustible series of snaps of Jimbo looking gloomy or acting out head prefect ...

Enough of that, there's more at the intermittent archive, even if the archive is currently being more intermittent than usual ...

With the single-mindedness of jihadi warriors or crusaders, it was a productivity crisis from go to woe, with Geoff and the cranky Cranston tag teaming  ...

The pond loves the way that the reptiles label a bog standard lizard Oz jihad as EXCLUSIVE ...

EXCLUSIVE
Productivity crisis: nation set for worst decade on record
‘Worst decade ever’: Business’s grim projections for productivity under Jim Chalmers’ policies
Australia’s biggest employers have gone to war with Labor over policies strangling the economy, with Jim Chalmers set to deliver the worst decade of productivity since records began in 1960.
By Geoff Chambers and Matthew Cranston

Geoff chambered another round ...

COMMENTARY by GEOFF CHAMBERS
PM, Chalmers blame everyone but themselves for productivity crisis
It is probable Labor will not achieve its politically manufactured renewables and housing targets. But its failure on productivity looms as the Albanese government’s defining legacy.

The reptiles conformed to their Jimbo rule ... see how gloomy and defeated he looks ...

Over on the extreme far right Major Mitchell took up the chant ...

Albo and Jim’s economic blunders squander Hawke-Keating legacy
How Albanese and Chalmers are unwinding the economic legacy of Hawke and Keating
Treasurer Jim Chalmers wrote his PhD on his Labor hero, Paul Keating, but has absorbed every lesson except the right ones. History will not be kind to this government.
By Chris Mitchell
Columnist

History won't be kind? Why bother with history when the reptiles are doing the job here and now?

These days the pond will do almost anything to avoid the Major's scribbling, but must note the way that the Jimbo rule was followed, with bonus comical Albo ...

The pond is exceptionally bored by the trick performed over and over by reptiles in search of an angle - the use of Hawke and the French clock devotee to bludgeon the current government, when back in the day the reptiles eagerly conspired to produce the end of that regime.

Just to add to the litany, there was another blackening of the government on productivity over on the extreme far right ...

Why our productivity crisis has millions locked in cost-of-living pain
Australia is now staring down the barrel of its worst decade of productivity growth since comparable records began in the 1960s.
By Bran Black

That was a new name for the pond - the reptiles seem to have an inexhaustible supply - but in the end it turned out to be beyond the predictable ...

Bran Black is chief executive of the Business Council of Australia.

No need to go there in full, but please admire the way that the opening snap conforms to the Jimbo rule ...

Truth to tell, this jihad held little appeal for the pond, what with the pond having woken up to news of mad king Donald denying his own deeds in the middle east, and lumping blame on Ukraine ...

Trump calls on Ukraine to halt strikes on Russian diesel, saying attacks are causing a shortage
Civilians were killed and injured as Russia and Ukraine continued to attack each other with waves of drones overnight into Sunday

Brownie of the lizard Oz matched this feat with an EXCLUSIVE that didn't mention Iran or Trump.

EXCLUSIVE
Labor mulls new fuel excise cut as Mid-East war flares
Petrol prices could surge toward their previous $2.60 peak, forcing the Albanese government to weigh another costly fuel excise cut despite economists warning it fuels inflation.
By Greg Brown

Any reference to the deeds of Faux Noise's hero came in the first line ...

Anthony Albanese will consider restoring cuts to the fuel excise in the coming weeks amid expectations petrol prices will further increase as the Middle East war escalates.

Thereafter it was Albo did this and Albo might do that all the way ... and even worse, the opening snap broke the Jimbo rule ...

All that sets the tone for yet another bout of triumphalism by the Lynch mob, serial defamer of the reputation of the University of Wollongong ...

Why America’s war on terror worked
After a weekend commemorating 9/11, we should reflect how little damage its plotters did to US prospects – and how much they did to their own.
By Timothy Lynch

The pond will skip past the Lynch mob's personal reminiscences - most people will remember what they were doing that day, and the pond still has vivid memories of the drama unfolding as it talked with a traumatised New York Jewish man ...

It was the notion of the alleged way the war on terror had worked that intrigued the pond ...just as Iran maintains its threat to the strait and the Houthis have taken over access to the Red Sea coast ...

‘A f***-up of epic proportions’: Blame game begins after Iran-backed Houthis’ lightning advance down Red Sea coast

Here no f*** up, no f*** up here, as the Lynch mob went full triumphalist ...

...Federal power has never really recovered from the failure to interdict this crudely simple plot. While the day itself still throws up amazing tales of bravery, loss and long-term consequences – nearly three times the number killed on 9/11, for example, have since died of diseases caused by the poisonous dust of the fallen towers – the response of the US government to 9/11 is widely condemned.
This has made the task of defending the Bush administration’s response to the attack hard to impossible. For sure, the charge sheet is a long one.
It begins with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, moves to a global recession, Russian revanchism, Chinese emboldenment, Covid, domestic polarisation, Iranian scheming, October 7, and then into an immigration crisis and the discord woven into attempts to solve it. Even the decline of sex and reproduction in the West gets blamed on the ennui of national failure that al-Qa’ida exposed. Why bring children into such a world?
Each, singularly or in combination, gets tied to the dereliction of duty on 9/11 itself: “If we can’t trust the government to protect us from such a simple threat, why should we believe it capable of confronting more serious foes?”

To help with the yarn, the reptiles flung in a triumphalist snap ... US Marine covers the face of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s statue with the US flag in Baghdad’s al-Fardous square. Picture: Ramzi Haidar / AFP

Any notion that the Lynch mob might be sensible collapsed with the next reference to "climate catastrophism".

Such a stupid phrase, by a man who purports to be an academic, but always resorts to the language of the stupid ideologue ...

...The wonder is that climate catastrophism has risen in parallel with a distrust of the national and international action held necessary to appease it. The bizarrely porous southern US border, which Donald Trump won two presidential elections promising to close, was an uncomfortable reminder that it was legal aliens who hijacked the four planes.
My problem with this powerful consensus – 9/11 as an omnicause of everything bad that came after – is that it blinds us to what America (and by implication Australia too) got right in the past quarter century. And not just right by accident but got right by design.
First of these is the absence not of a second 9/11 but of something worse. We now mock George W. Bush’s war on an abstract noun. But his global war on terror was not an open-ended campaign to rid the world of evil. It was narrow and specific in its objectives. It meant to limit the terrorists’ arsenal to what they could purchase at Bunnings or Home Depot.
The focus of the 9/11 response soon moved from Afghanistan to Iraq. Again, this is widely criticised as the original sin of the war on terror. Not so. Iraq mattered because of the fear made real on that morning: that terrorists with hearts so full of hatred only lacked the capacity to inflict carnage consistent with it. Go after the states that might lend them that capacity. This moved the regime of Saddam Hussein inexorably into US sights.
Being sure the Iraqi dictator did not have weapons of mass destruction that he could leak to terrorists meant removing him. And that is what the US, Britain, Australia and Poland did in March 2003. Nearly 40 nations took part in the eight years of occupation that followed.
The war on terror was driven by a national security logic that commanded a consensus in the US (which Barack Obama joined) and was deeper abroad (especially in, but not limited to, Canberra and London) than we have remembered it.

The reptiles attempted to bolster the case by flinging in a face now largely forgotten by vulgar youff ...Osama bin Laden. Picture: AP.  

Then came a final bout of triumphalism ...

America did not squander the goodwill that came its way after the 9/11 attacks; it deployed it. When terrorism has taken place in the past 25 years it has been unnerving but, compared with a nuclear or chemical weapons attack, small fry. The global war on terror did that. It meant to deny to the bad guys the heat, light, shelter and food necessary for their plotting, and it succeeded in keeping those plots limited to bombs, bullets, cars and knives.
Second, while the retreat from Afghanistan in 2021 supposedly validated Chinese geostrategic thinking – oh, those wise Sun Tzu-reading communists know how to avoid a quagmire – it also reveals a certain American resilience. The regimes in Moscow and Beijing could not countenance losing a war. Capitulation in Ukraine would be existential for Vladimir Putin. Xi Jinping, likewise, avoids the inherent risk of foreign military adventure because of his domestic weakness rather than his entrenched strength. The South China Sea remains an American lake. China’s only “blood ally” is North Korea.
The US, in contrast, has lost nearly every war it has fought since victory over Japan in 1945: Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq (Iran?). The consequence is not Chinese, Russian, let alone Islamist, supremacy. It is a world that still represents an economic, military, cultural and even sporting (ask those 100,000 fans at the MCG on Friday) market for American power.
After a weekend commemorating the outrage that was 9/11, we should reflect how little damage its plotters did to US prospects – and how much they did to their own.
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.

Of the many absurdities in that litany, the one the pond liked both the least and the most ...Capitulation in Ukraine would be existential for Vladimir Putin.

Tell that to the mango Mussolini, and if aviation fuel is in short supply, top up the old truck with with six buck diesel and head off to Washington to celebrate American prospects, as the defamation of the University of Melbourne continues apace ...

On the other hand, it's true that the mad king has taught those terroristic Canucks and their bloody infidel maple syrup and unclean mooses a lesson ...(moose if you must, but the pond was brought up to speak fluent Bullwinkle)...

The pond supposes it should have featured the quarry whispering Caterist ...

Cultural safety has led to ‘two-tier’ child protection policy
The era of so-called paternalism has given way to an era of bureaucratic inertia in which a child’s fortunes are determined by race.
By Nick Cater

But it's just another unsavoury example of reptile black bashing, something the pond has always avoided, along with the transphobia that infests the rag ...

The pond personally saved it to the intermittent archive (more intermittent than usual with a host of bad gateways) and instead decided to feature snappy Tom's weekend outing...

The reptiles pulled their usual fast one, and trotted out the Ughmann and snappy Tom late on the weekend, thereby avoiding the pond's deadline.

Perhaps next week the pond will feature an Ughmann double bill in a special time slot, but for the moment, the pond wanted to applaud snappy Tom for an attempt to do an Our Henry and drag the Odyssey into his tall tale ...

The header: Financial quake looms in age of frenzy and fury; Productivity stuck at 2019 levels, living costs up 30 per cent – Australia’s economic managers are navigating the worst of both worlds with no easy escape.

The caption for the borrowed snap, without a mention of Nolan or the movie: Governments and the RBA monetary policy board are also caught in a Homeric vortex, where debt is piling up, voters are demanding more services and cost relief, inflation is stubborn and investors are demanding more for their at-risk money.

Homeric vortex!

Sure, it was just a precursor to this day's productivity jihad, but snappy Tom was on song, a veritable Siren ...

Like Odysseus in Homer’s epic, the people managing our political and economic affairs are trapped in a narrow, hazardous passage. Sail too close to the sea monster Scylla, and you’ll lose your head; dally with the whirlpool Charybdis and the entire ship is sunk.
Market gods are uneasy, there’s a quake in the financial terrain. Voters are in a nasty mood. We’re living in the age of frenzy and fury.
The ever-helpful Greeks, ancient and modern, have several distinct words for anger to make sense of these times. From the top, there’s menis, a cosmic rage, which the poet calls forth in the opening line of The Iliad to convey the wrath of the humiliated Achilles.
Then there’s thumos, an explosive burst of temper. Think of Jacqui Lambie’s verbal blast about Pauline Hanson after One Nation’s slur on SAS veteran Andrew Hastie. The blood is up among the political warrior class.
Civilians must settle for orge, which describes the deep-seated resentment at large in the post-pandemic settlement, conventionally referred to as the cost-of-living crisis. It’s the top issue Australians want governments and monetary officials to address.

Here no hubris, no hubris here, though after that singular outburst snappy Tom settled back down into a banal set of numbers ...

The Big Inflation may have passed but the beast’s tail lingers in our midst. It’s likely we won’t be going back to the long lull in consumer prices growth we enjoyed for decades, while the price level has been ratcheted up forever on most items. A basket of goods and services in the consumer price index valued at $100 five years ago now costs $124.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics also measures price changes across population subgroups, which helps to assess whether the disposable incomes of households have kept pace with price changes (the living cost index includes mortgage costs, the CPI does not).
Since mid-2021, living costs have increased by 30 per cent for working families and 23 per cent for self-funded retirees. People on pensions and benefits have payments adjusted every six months by the greater of CPI or LCI.

The reptiles provided an AV distraction ... Reserve Bank of Australia Deputy Governor Andrew Hauser says inflation remains too high, after the central bank raised interest rates three times earlier in the year. “We have one big problem, and that’s inflation,” Mr Hauser said. “Inflation is too high, and that’s why we raised interest rates three times at the beginning of this year.”

The pond hungered for more ancient Greek references, but snappy Tom was pretty much done with his venture into Our Henry turf ...

Reserve Bank deputy governor Andrew Hauser spends some of his work time travelling around the country, listening to companies, local authorities and organisations dealing with debt problems and other matters. Everywhere he goes, he hears “cost, cost, cost, inflation, inflation, inflation”.
“People are furious about inflation,” he told ABC TV’s 7.30 this week. “I understand why. It’s unfair. It hits people on low incomes. It damages price signals. It makes the job of companies difficult. What they want us to do is our job and bring inflation down.”
That’s the cost picture. The income story is more dreadful.
Zoom out and consider what we buy and sell in the world. Australia has taken a hefty pay cut. Our terms of trade (the ratio of export to import prices) have fallen by 11 per cent over the past five years.
Across the nation, living standards have gone backwards over that period. One measure in last week’s national accounts (for the June quarter) tells the broad story. Real net national disposable income per capita is 3 per cent below its level in June 2021.
The main culprit is our wretched productivity performance. The national accounts showed the amount of goods and services we produce (or GDP) per hour of labour is at the same level it was at the end of 2019, before the Covid crisis. Productivity in the non-market sector (which is primarily healthcare and social services, education and public administration) is now below the level it was in early 2007.
Given workers are in a pincer of high costs (some homegrown, some not) and stagnant incomes, it’s clear why the consumer mood is glum and voter rage is white hot. The torrent of “bad” news – on tax, the budget, petrol prices, energy costs, interest rates, home prices and dodgy political acts – is also contributing to the despondency.

Wait, there was one final "Homeric vortex" to come...

Governments and the RBA monetary policy board are also caught in a Homeric vortex, where debt is piling up, voters are demanding more services and cost relief, inflation is stubborn and investors are demanding more for their at-risk money.

After that thrill it was back to the hard yards ...

In a note this week, Commonwealth Bank chief economist Luke Yeaman describes a “new economic reality” of hard-to-tame inflation, geopolitical turmoil, skittish global bond markets and the great big sucking sound of artificial intelligence investment as it scoops up vast amounts of capital, materials and skills.
He argues interest rates will need to be kept higher than in the past but estimates of so-called neutral interest rates (neither expansionary nor contractionary) are imprecise, increasing the reliance on real-time data and the risk of policy mistakes.
Yeaman says the inflation-fighting credibility of central banks is in the spotlight “with bond markets watching closely to see whether authorities will act quickly enough and decisively enough to keep inflation contained or instead drag their feet due to political and public pressure”.
“The task is now materially harder and the RBA knows it,” he writes. “As a result, we expect the RBA to remain very cautious and on ‘high alert’ for the foreseeable future. This means the slowing economy will not bring much in the way of immediate or major rate relief for Australian households.”

As is required in these reptile outings, there has to be a comical snap of Jimbo, and sure enough ...Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

The pond pondered in Rodin Le Penseur pose for a moment: where would the lizard Oz's enfeebled graphics department be without a comical Jimbo?

Snappy Tom wound down, but a final reference to the vortex produced a little shiver of delight and reminded the pond of his splendid start ...

As rates remain elevated, governments are feeling the strain. The cost of borrowing is rising, not only for Canberra but also for Washington, Tokyo and the Europeans. Donald Trump’s forlorn Treasury secretary Scott Bessent, trying to buy back bonds in an orderly way while his boss sprays dollars by the trillion, is being rumbled by the markets.
Jim Chalmers is running a budget deficit one-sixth the size of Bessent’s and with a much skinnier debt-interest bill. But the Treasurer has got a world of other problems to deal with, not least the hungry beast of universal social benefits. Over the past six years, spending on health, disability services, aged care, childcare and other benefits has almost doubled.
Yeaman, previously a Treasury deputy secretary, says with central banks forced to maintain the monetary squeeze, governments will come under more acute pressure to lift productivity and cut government spending to free up private sector capacity.
“As we move further into this new economic era, governments will increasingly need to balance pressure from communities for more structural spending and support, with pressure from global debt markets,” he writes.
As stewards, elected and unelected, are discovering, it’s a savage crossing between voter furies and the vortex of raging capital.

If only the other reptiles had shown an interest in the movie - naturally without mentioning the movie - the pond might have been able to pay more attention to the productivity jihad ...

Meanwhile the reptiles had gone eerily silent on the topic of the ranga and the pastie Hastie and all that ...

How many distractions can an Epstein file bear?