In which Dame Groan saves the penultimate post day by arriving to gas the country, and gas the planet ...

 

This is the penultimate post by the pond before going dark for an indeterminate amount of time.

It's not so much the physical move, which will happen in a day, but getting computers back up, reconnecting to the intertubes and sorting through an enormous amount of junk.

It would be nice if, in these last few days, the reptiles managed to publish something compelling, something that sustained interest in the pond in the dark times, but that's just a measure of the pond's delusional devotion to herpetology studies.

Instead say, any commentary on Ukraine being sold down the river, there's just a bog standard continuation of the endless war on Jimbo, with these yarns briefly at the top of the digital rag...

STATE PUSHBACK
NSW to waive stamp duty as Chalmers charges ahead on trust changes
NSW has become the first state to rule out individuals and businesses being hit with stamp duty should they restructure their trust arrangements following federal Labor’s reforms.
By Sarah Ison, Lachlan Leeming and Julie-anne Sprague

They needed three reptiles to put together that sorry tale? More talk of the suffering of the trusty rich?

This is the way that endlessly rippling waves and water wear down coastlines and rocks.

Only two reptiles were needed to help in the next phase of the agitated jihad ...

ALP AGITATION
Sting in PM’s tale as Albanese walks away from boast
Anthony Albanese has walked back his claim of personally reversing the ATO credit card ban as Labor MPs say internal morale has hit a new low.
By Greg Brown and Rosie Lewis

Geoff chambered a bog standard round ...

Dr Jim’s record falling flat in treasurer match-ups
The fact that the Prime Minister has been forced to step in and clean up Chalmers’ mess on several occasions is a bad look for the Treasurer.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

Over on the extreme far right, Jack the Insider joined the chanting children in this version of Lord of the Flies ...

Past is past, Dr Jim … it’s your future I’d be worried about
Chalmers should forget about nostalgia, otherwise we might wistfully recall a time when giants of Australian political history really strolled the corridors of power.
By Jack the Insider
Columnist 

It's the repetition of visual images as part of the jihad that introduces a certain visual numbness ... with Jack recycling a lizard Oz favourite.

Talk about an inexhaustible ability to recycle old hits ...

And Geoff's piece was also a reminder of past visual glories...

It's the sheer inane repetition, the mindless ongoing sloganeering that means the rag is a propaganda sheet of the lowest and basest kind, that some days gets to the pond.

But why worry about images?

Well think of the alternatives.

it's Thursday, and that's petulant Peta day, and she was on a crusade worthy of a medieval Xian king ...

Taxpayers deserve answers over ALP grants to Islamic groups
The notion that taxpayers are left funding any individual or organisation connected with radical Islam should see urgent and immediate action.
By Peta Credlin
Columnist

The pond absolutely refuses to indulge this sort of crusade - there's always the archive for Peta cultists - but as a counterpoint might note an alternative in another place ...

Brethren a controlling sect, not a religion, former and current members say
Lindy Jacomb was a naive 20-year-old member of the Exclusive Brethren, living at home with her family, when spiritual curiosity got the better of her. So she wrote to her church’s global leader and other elders. (*intermittent archive link)
Michael Bachelard and Sherryn Groch

Here's the nub of that piece ...

...On Friday, the electoral matters committee will ask hard questions of Hales – unprecedented for a man who for decades has answered only the inquiries of his own acolytes. He tried to get out of the grilling but failed.
At stake is not just his church’s reputation, but millions of dollars in tax exemptions.
Charities in Australia are prohibited from campaigning for political parties, and Hales’ church runs a dozen charities with hundreds of millions in assets. Research in the UK reveals the Brethren use these riches almost entirely for their own benefit. A finding that the church was involved in electioneering could seriously imperil these generous concessions.
A number of right-wing groups have leapt to Hales’ defence. Holding him to account is a threat to religious freedom, they say.
Turning Point USA, the controversial US right-wing organisation, called on the Trump government to lobby Australia over Hales’ questioning, with pastor Lucas Miles worried that, “If this approach succeeds against one church, it becomes a precedent of intimidation for all”.
The Coalition members of the committee have labelled Hales’ grilling a “witch-hunt”. The Anglican Bishop of South Sydney, Michael Stead, and his organisation, Freedom for Faith, say the Brethren is a simple “mainstream Christian denomination,” whose members “have as much right as any other Australian to participate in the electoral process”.
“Religious leaders (are not) automatically responsible for the political choices, associations or conduct” of their members, Freedom for Faith told members of the committee in an email. (Neither they nor the Coalition responded to recent questions about Hales’ long history of antisemitic comments.)
Experts who know the Brethren better say these defences are wrong-headed. Reverend Tim Costello, a senior fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity and former president of the Baptist Union of Australia, said Hales’ church “regard the rest of us Christians as so unfaithful that they will not worship, fellowship or even eat or drink with us.
“And the Exclusive Plymouth Brethren break up families … this is not freedom of conscience or freedom of religion.”

And so on, and the chance of reading anything like that in the lizard Oz? 

Between zilch, zero and zip ... (and yet any sensible atheist might wonder why all these churches get endless tax breaks and government indulgences)

What you get in the lizard Oz is endless hate, fear, division and loathing ... and the need for shadows to get on board the fake ranga agenda ...

Here's another piece the pond wouldn't touch with a barge pole ...

Labor’s ‘digital duty of care’ amounts to radical state censorship
Labor’s legislation is the most radical mass-censorship legislation any Western government has proposed in the internet era.
By Michael Shellenberger

That's the same loon that the pond recently noted was a charlatan, and yet he has the cheek, in the time of mad king Donald and tech bro billionaires, to blather about "western civilisation"...

...beneath these political and strategic motivations is a deeper intolerance towards different points of view. The left since 2010 went from demanding the cancellation of controversial speakers, to government censorship, to the celebration of the killing of Charlie Kirk for the things he said. This intolerance stems from the left’s dogmatic certainty that it is right and moral and its opponents wrong and immoral.
Western civilisation rests upon the idea that the truth emerges from dialogue and thus that free speech is the enabling foundation for democracy. The West’s first great martyr was Socrates, whom the government ordered to death for the things he said.
The Albanese government’s demand for censorship and the ability to wage informational warfare through the use of fake accounts is an attack on this Western tradition of free speech and democracy. I encourage the people of Australia to use their voices forcefully to oppose it.
Michael Shellenberger is the CBR chair of Politics, Censorship and Free Speech at the University of Austin, the founder of Public.News, and the president of Civilization Works. He was a guest of the Institute of Public Affairs in Australia.

Yet another reminder, per his wiki ...

...Shellenberger has faced accusations of "bad science" for his comments on climate change in Apocalpyse Never; he has also been criticized for arguing with prominent climate scientists on social media and "apologising" to the world on the behalf of environmentalists.
A panel of scientists organized by Climate Feedback analyzed the claims he made in his "apology" article, concluding that they were "inaccurate or mislead readers by contradicting available evidence or using scientific data out of context." A Snopes article, which consulted multiple scientists that Shellenberger had cited, was similarly critical; Michael Mann called one of Shellenberger's central arguments "completely wrong," and found it was also contradicted by the very IEA source Shellenberger used to support it.  

He's also in the grip of a demented form of transphobia and can be relied upon for endless blather about "woke" ...

The pond doesn't want to get in the way of its final post tomorrow featuring Little Marco, and "western civilisation" and Socrates, but what the heck ...

Rubio’s Greece speech is MAGA’s latest classical cover story
Curtis Dozier

...The secretary’s examples of Western heroism were the Spartans at Thermopylae and the philosopher Socrates, both of whom, he said, illustrate the “Western” willingness to “pay any cost for a cause worthy of his loyalty.” But the Spartan militarism that Rubio so admires came to define the city state’s culture only because they had no choice but to devote all state resources to maintaining an army sufficient to suppress the revolts of the massive number of enslaved fellow Greeks upon whom the Spartan economy depended. And the most plausible explanation for why Socrates was executed is that he had been an intellectual mentor to several of the men who ruled Athens as a violent, dictatorial junta in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian war; it was Socrates’ student Plato, who devoted his talent to sanitizing the political reputation of his teacher by painting him as a courageous free-thinker. 

And with that preview done and dusted, what else was there to contemplate this day?

The pond feared that, by eliminating all the basest of the reptile loons, it had arrived at a blank canvas, but huzzah, old faithful war horse and rogue biddy Dame Groan hovered into view to warn that we'll all be rooned ...

The header: Judith Sloan
A workable gas reservation policy? I think not

Hear the clarion call of the bot: Listen to this article
4 min

The caption for the frankly terrible opening illustration: Australia's oil and gas infrastructure as the lifeblood of the nation's economy. Sources: iStock. Artwork: Frank Ling

The plea for the mighty tech bro G: Make us preferred on Google

There will be a few wimps who will say that they've read all this before, but remember, it's not just the art of endless visual representations, there must also be endless text recylings.

Dame Groan groaning about gas and renewables is an eternal, never ending classic ...

There are legitimate grounds for a government imposing a gas reservation policy as long as it’s declared before investments are made. Those risking their money can assess whether to proceed based on the requirement that a certain percentage of output must be reserved for domestic use.
But that is not what the Albanese government has in mind. It wants to impose conditions on the big gas exporters to reserve 20 per cent of their output to be available for domestic use. In this way, the domestic market can be somewhat oversupplied – a figure of 110 per cent is mentioned – thereby creating downward pressure on domestic gas prices.
Bear in mind here there is not one domestic gas market in Australia and there are major constraints because of the lack of pipeline connection. And why would Western Australia want to participate because it has its own scheme? It also doesn’t bear thinking how the scheme would work in the Northern Territory because there are no substantial case users there.
The whole idea reminds me of that famous quote from Friedrich Hayek: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”
Throw in women and I’m fully on board.

It's part of the reptile lexicon to throw in dire examples of renewables, with dastardly solar the thumb image for this AV distraction ...

Next video thumbnail
Australia would be ‘entirely reliant’ on renewables if Albanese government got its way
The Samuel Griffith Society Executive Director Mia Schlicht says Australia’s energy system would be “entirely reliant” on wind and solar if the Albanese government got its way.

Any mention of renewables always sends Dame Groan deep into the deep end of the "we're all rooned" pool ...

Let’s be clear here: the Albanese government’s previous attempt to regulate domestic gas prices when they soared after the outbreak of the Ukraine war was a complete disaster. Some misguided Treasury officials thought it was possible to control both price and quantity, suggesting that they should never have passed their economics degrees.
The end result was exemption after exemption, with domestic gas prices remaining high. Good one Jim, good one Chris.
Let’s be clear on another matter: the coal-seam gas fields in Queensland would never have been developed were it not for meeting export demand. It’s all very well to try to turn this around and expect those LNG exporters to meet domestic needs, but if that had been the case in the first place, the investments, certainly the extent of them, would probably never have occurred.
Recall also that the Rudd/Gillard government contemplated introducing a reservation scheme at that time and rejected it.

Is there anything that will appease here? Sure, an image celebrating sweet, dinkum, virginal, completely clean and innocent Oz coal A coal seam gas well head in the Surat Basin, Queensland.

At this point some cynic might attempt a Graham Readfearn billy goat butt ...

Heretics!

Dame Groan wasn't having any of that sort of carry on ... she was all in on gassing the planet, as you'd expect from a Santos devotee ...

It’s worth noting here the complete hypocrisy of some of the states, particularly Victoria and NSW, in this policy space. Their governments complain about high gas prices but have done everything in their power to block new gas developments.
The Victorian government even went to the trouble of inserting a “no fracking’ provision in its constitution – I ask you? This was done in the full knowledge that the once ample gas supplies in Bass Strait were running out. NSW produces no domestic gas at all and yet it has impeded the development of the gas project at Narrabri at every step of the way – both Coalition and Labor governments.
In fact, various plans to import gas into Victoria and NSW are reasonably developed. The costs would be horrendous, but supply might be able to be guaranteed.
So, what should we make of Resources Minister Madeleine King’s presentation to the National Press Club? It was easy to gain the impression she didn’t much want to talk about the gas reservation policy, preferring to drone on about the importance of resources, particularly critical minerals.

Cue the villainess herself ... Madeleine King addresses the National Press Club in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman/NewsWire

Her presence made Dame Groan very mad ...there was no way that renewables should be allowed in country, not when it and the planet could be gassed.

She quickly skated over the details of the now tabled reservation legislation, pointing to the watered-down ministerial discretion. She also mentioned eliminating loopholes and the potential for gaming – read my lips, the bureaucrats would have no idea about this stuff.
The key danger is that the intervention will drive domestic prices below the long-run marginal cost of new gas projects. Add in the large element of uncertainty and it’s entirely possible that investment in local gas projects will simply dry up. Of course, there are plenty of activists on the Left who would be happy with this outcome.
Any short-run relief in terms of gas prices would very quickly be followed by much higher prices. While King regards gas as vital to Australia’s energy future, including for the processing of critical minerals and firming the electricity grid, her words could easily turn out to be hollow.
The scheme doesn’t come into play until 2028, but the disincentive to invest has already started. The truth is that Australia has oodles of gas; it’s just that it’s in the ground. It may stay there for many years, if not decades. Talk about shooting ourselves in the foot.

Shooting ourselves in the foot? Maybe ...

Never mind, the hive mind was right behind Dame Groan ... except for one heretic ...

And as this is the penultimate post for a time, the pond thought it would drop in on the lizard Oz editorialist for a last whiff of what's behind the hive mind ...

Achieve a two state solution while Benji is all in on a greater Israel from the river to the sea? Good luck with that, as the ethnic cleansing continues apace.

And there was this effort, a rousing reminder of the Dame Groan reptile way ...

And with that the pond will be up tomorrow for a final post, hopefully then returning in goodly time for ongoing reptile disasters, including the pending US election mid-terms, because what could possibly go wrong?

That's cruel ...

Finally a reminder of one of the cankers at the core ... Alex Gibney says Universal ‘wavered’ over releasing Elon Musk documentary
The revelation comes after the four-hour film’s Venice premiere drew a string of criticisms and insults from the founder of SpaceXAI