In which the pond offers a serve of Akker Dakker as place marker pablum...

 

Back in the day, the pond vividly remembers its first stay in Sydney, free of parents or the need to pander to the rellies out Kogarah way (as much losers as the current St George thugby league team).

In order to do some research at the Mitchell library, the pond decided to stay, as rustic folk were wont to do, at the Gresham, an elaborate Miss Havingsham kind of Victorian wedding cake concoction ...

It's since been rebadged and repurposed.

It was dirt cheap, suitable to a student budget, but that meant the rooms were rustic basic, and when checking under the bed to see nothing had escaped when packing to leave, the pond discovered a used condom.

This was big smoke sophistication at its finest, and the pond felt quite Parisian, in a brothel sort of way.

The pond relived that rustic spirit the last time it was in Sydney, preferring the downmarket vibe of the Great Southern Hotel to expensive inns with a harbour view.

The pond knows this is the sort of place that cockies, squatters and Tamworth types like to stay ... and it pretty much still looks like it did back in the 1940s ...

 

It has a twenty bucks all-in bacon and eggs breakfast, and a shower and toilet cubicle of a size to give anyone claustrophobia.

And it has a sub-Shining vibe - the lobby/foyer area is littered with snaps of the hotel in its grand 1940 era, and there are still some hints of the past.

The night the pond stayed, there was a giant exhaust fan blasting away, perhaps for the restaurant downstairs, but it shut down early enough in the night to allow a little sleep (unless you had a fear of being trapped in the rabbit warren if a fire broke out). (After all, country folk must eat no later than seven, and be in bed by eight, in order to get up with the sun).

The noise reminded the pond of the air conditioner racket that ran all night when the pond stayed at the Tamworth Hotel (just across the way from the railway station).

That too was a bit of nostalgia, because the pond's father had paid for that hotel back in the day when it was known as the Town Talk (aka the Railway), brick by brick, fermenting ale glass by glass, until he was completely awash in amber fluid ...

And the pond is staying at the Great Southern again, it being the cheapest, price friendly, home away from home available to rustics and tourists, and that's why the pond isn't able to offer an update this day for herpetologists devoted to the lizard Oz.

Enough of exploring ancient remnants of near forgotten Sydney, at least the pond can offer a token distraction before hopefully returning to the real business at hand tomorrow.

How about another serve of Akker Dakker?

Though the pond has shamefully ignored him in recent years, back in ancient times the pond always had a taste for the Gresham hotel-like festoonings that littered the Akker Dakker brain.

He was big on fear and loathing of the NBN ...

Akker Dakker tried every scare and bit of fear-mongering imaginable - the cables ruining the fine aesthetics of inner west Sydney, death stalking the land ...

Since the pond has moved to the mighty 'Gong, it's experienced the joys of fibre to the home, what with an earlier Labor government pandering to its base by making the 'Gong a trial run, and what a mighty fine thing it is ...

The pond now looks with pity on those who were deprived of the real thing by the shameless Malware doing it down on orders from the onion muncher and News Corp (desperate to see its box model for streaming survive in the new age. Silly reptiles).

The pond hesitates to provide a link to this Akker Dakker outing, what with it hooking up with news.com.au, but some might want more ...

And so on. 2009, and a visionary even then!

Others have been devoted to Akker Dakker. 

Here he is in a piece by Graham Readfearn back on Wednesday 30th March 2022, under the header A cut-and-paste attack on electric vehicle batteries and renewables is spanning the globe. But is it right?

If you followed the link, you might have come up against a Daily Terror paywall, so here it is ...

Those younglings are just the sort to give Akker Dakker nightmares - but then Akker Dakker's always been a 'green nightmares, we must nuke the country to save the planet' sort of reptile ...

We've been there before, and still go there each day ...

There wasn't anything Akker Dakker wouldn't tackle in order to keep the country back in the Mesozoic era ...

The Finkel report will burn us just like a Canadian wildfire? Or perhaps like the forthcoming Australian summer bushfire season?

Such a visionary.

Wait, the pond should probably finish off that other Akker Dakker outing ... especially as it evoked memories of that ancient dinosaur, Shane Stone ...

The fat owl of the remove was possibly shattered when the NRRA was merged with the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), with Stone ankling his baby, and with Murray Watt eventually coming to hold ministerial responsibility for it ...

Sic transit Akker Dakker, knock 'em down Humpty Dumpty glory ...

Is it any wonder that the pond once was devoted to Akker Dakker?

Why, the vibe's just the same, and the pond has always loved ancient vibes ...

Sorry, that's possibly a little too modern for Akker Dakker ...

And still he burbles on, at it again last Sunday in the Terror ... and so at last to the real place marker pablum ...

The header: Piers Akerman: Bowen’s silly electric truck plan running out of road while EV users don’t pay for the damage; Australia would need 14,000 extra trucks on its roads if Chris Bowen’s electric prime mover policy succeeds – and Piers Akerman says that is only part of the problem.

The thing about the fat owl of the remove is that he only manages a couple of minutes for a read, though perhaps even that's stretching the attention span of the rag's thugby league demographic, notoriously known for thinking that a full minute is quality time for a woman.

The reptiles have been down on EVs for some considerable time, so it was inevitable the fat owl of the remove would have a go at trucks ...

Veteran radio host Ray Hadley reacts to the Labor government’s push for electric trucks. “The arrant nonsense about B-doubles … and road trains being run on electricity,” Mr Hadley told Sky News host Sharri Markson. “Anyone who thinks that is going to happen in the next 100 years is stark raving mad. “They need fossil fuels to run.”
A scientific poll conducted under strict guidelines has found Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen is the stupidest member of the Albanese Labor government’s cabinet – except for Anthony Albanese.
OK, the poll was probably not that scientific. It involved asking groups at bus stops, in coffee shops, waiting at check-outs and sporting stadiums one question: Who do you rate as the biggest idiot in the government? The answer was Bowen every time, with some saying the Prime Minister was almost as dumb for keeping him in the cabinet.
When further explanation was sought, those who followed up pointed to Bowen’s denial of obvious facts, including the reality the price of electricity has soared since he insisted that rolling out so-called renewables, including wind and solar factories, would reduce energy prices to homeowners and businesses.
As one member of an impromptu focus group said, anyone who thinks the global climate can be altered by increasing taxes, subsidising electric vehicle purchases, importing solar panels and carbon fibre windmill blades from China or eating less red meat, hasn’t a clue.

Classic, sublimely stupid Akker Dakker, a form of self-projection of a kind that can be found throughout his scribbles, because he's a vox pop ssort of dude of the first water, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Energy Minister Chris Bowen. In a street poll, Bowen was rated the biggest idiot in the government, with Albanese almost as dumb for keeping him in the cabinet. Picture: NewsWire/Nathan Smith

The pond notes that battery-powered heavy duty trucks still need work.

But the pond can remember the days when reptiles at the lizard Oz tried to introduce range anxiety to the hive mind.

And yet these days  Chinese manufacturers are promising EV cars which can do Sydney to Melbourne on a charge.

Too rich for the pond, but dare to dream. Who knows, the next scratchie might be the answer. And if battery technology continues at its current pace, there'll be plenty to drop the cash on.

The pond remembers the days when EV vans were dismissed as out of the question. 

And yet when the pond rocks up to IKEA for a charge, there's always a flock of vans on view ...

Ditto buses, at least if the wretchedly inept Minns government ever gets its act together ...

The pond understands that not everyone is ready for an EV, or can afford one, or wants the singular pleasure of hooking up their EV to a trickle charger, and watch the car load up during the day for free courtesy of solar charging ...

But dare to dream, the pond says, in a way that luddites never can ...

These things are so apparent that no further examples of his stupidity should be necessary but, in the course of the research, the question of the government’s subsidy for electric prime movers – the big trucks that thunder across the nation’s highways – was raised.
Both federal and state governments underwrite the cost of heavy-truck electrification. LinFox received a $19.63m package, $755,000 a vehicle, to cover the gap in truck costs and the upgrade needed for charging stations, for example. Subsidised green financing is spewing money, but trucking firms aren’t convinced EVs are the answer. One trucking company executive bluntly says Bowen’s EV truck policy won’t work west (or east) of the Great Divide.

Akker Dakker was inevitably agitated at the sight of an EV van rocking across the bridge... Subsidised green financing is spewing money, but trucking firms aren’t convinced EVs are the answer.

Worried by the state of the strait of Hormuz? Worried that oil might hereafter be more a political football than a means of getting about?

In Akker Dakker's world, you just suck it up ... (in much the same way that mug punters must do without a FTTH connection) ...

“There just aren’t the charging stations and EV prime movers need charging every three to four hours, for hours at a time,” he says.
A regular prime mover carries enough fuel for 24 hours of operation. EVs’ hefty batteries put a 9-tonne weight on the front axle; regular diesel-powered prime movers are restricted by regulation to a 6-tonne weight limit.
This is a free pass for EVs, an additional penalty for the majority of trucks that crisscross the country. An articulated vehicle, a semi-trailer or a B-double truck with an electric powertrain weighs five tonnes more than a diesel truck. Logically, a wheat carter driving a single trailer EV could only cart 20 tonnes, a diesel would carry 25 tonnes legally.
There are 105,000 articulated vehicles on the road every day, and if the big trucks all went electric, there would need to be an extra 12-15 per cent more vehicles on the road just to carry the same payload as the current fleet.

Regarding the impossibility of it all, why not repeat that line so that the thugby league readership will fall in line, and stay with their gas guzzlerd ... There are 105,000 articulated vehicles on the road every day, and if the big trucks all went electric, there would need to be an extra 12-15 per cent more vehicles on the road to carry the same payload.

Should the pond revert to calling the fat owl full Bunter?

He's always had the same preening, supercilious air about him.

And so to the closing gobbet ...

That’s roughly an extra 14,000 trucks to carry the same loads. Australia can’t get enough truckies now; perhaps Bowen or the hopeless Immigration Minister Tony Burke will retrain returning ISIS fighters as heavy-vehicle operators.
The huge batteries would need to be changed by forklift vehicles because recharging the monsters would take too long.
Freight costs would soar and the effect on our climate would be zero. The extra cost would ensure greater inflation in almost every productive sector of the economy, and it would be more difficult to compete on the export market because all our agriculture, wheat, rice and cotton rely on road transport.
Our truckies pay for the damage they cause to roads through a 52c-a-litre excise, of which they can reclaim 20c a litre.
EV road users don’t pay for the damage their heavier vehicles cause.
With new Euro-standards being introduced, diesel trucks will use more fuel, pay more tax, and produce fewer emissions.
It’s a big country outside Canberra. Bowen and Albanese need to be reminded.

Hopefully this sort of carry-on will get slotted into the Daily Terror's campaign in favour of tungsten light bulbs.

Hopefully Akker Dakker will meet his match when invited to play a challenging game of chess ...

It's no longer Monday, but it seems like it's always Monday in America ...

Despite a flurry of lizard Oz teaser trailers, the good oil from the bromancer and Dame Groan is there to be found ...

 

First a housekeeping note: the pond must head off to the big smoke again, and so perforce will have to leave a place holder in place tomorrow, in lieu of proper lizard Oz herpetology studies. Hopefully the pond will escape a Sydney mugging and return to normal duties the following day.

Now carry on with wild abandon.

Lately the lizard Oz seems to have turned into the Geoff Chambers show.

There he was again early in the morning, top of the digital page ma, with an EXCLUSIVE and a Commentary...

Luckily the intermittent archive was to hand ...

EXCLUSIVE
Newspoll: Left-leaning voters not so spooked on China threat
Partisan divides are emerging in the electorate despite Beijing’s increasing aggression towards Australia.
By Geoff Chambers

Geoff was bitterly disappointed by this, so he chambered yet another round, what with the war with China by Xmas a long standing, highly prized and favoured reptile jihad:

COMMENTARY by Geoff Chambers
Apathy, ‘Beijing blindness’ are not options
The threat to Australia posed by Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party and People’s Liberation Army has never been greater.

Teaser trailers should entice correspondents into those reptile chambers, at least those with nothing better to do...

Splendid reptile stuff, and with the war on China taken care of, another favourite theme was given the Pike treatment ...

EXCLUSIVE
Bowen splurges $4.2m on five-star Fiji resorts for COP talks
Chris Bowen’s department sets aside $4.2m to reserve luxury Fiji resorts for COP delegates
Foreign bureaucrats attending the climate change meeting will be treated to beachfront resorts and golf courses – all on the Australian taxpayer’s tab.
By Elizabeth Pike

Liz piked him good and hard ...

So Pauline had dropped off the reptile jihad charts? The fixation might be failing?

What a pity...

All well and good, but the pond takes its foreign affairs and climate science advice from the bromancer. 

Sadly, in his welcome return he showed the same apathy as left-leaning and university educated voters by ignoring China and focusing on the couch molester who is inclined to be aroused by suggestive, provocative ice cream eating.

The header: Critics have misread JD Vance. Don’t rule him out in 2028;What an astonishing figure Vance is, surely the most unlikely and distinctive personality to be Veep since Theodore Roosevelt.
The caption for the snap: JD Vance speaks at the 128th Air Refueling Wing Hangar in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Picture: Scott Olson / Getty Images

Where some see an ambitious, deeply weird loon, the bromancer was entranced, bedazzled by the couch molester and his magnificent theology.

After all, if one can resort to Satan's site:

Let the bromancer help JD put that recalcitrant papal tyke in his place:

As the US-Iran war races up the escalation ladder, one thing that has failed is the peace deal Vice-President JD Vance negotiated. The memorandum of understanding was simple. Vance explains it much better than Donald Trump does. Iran was to open the Strait of Hormuz to all shipping in exchange for sanctions relief. Then Washington and Tehran would subsequently try to negotiate an agreement on nuclear issues.
The deal failed not because of Vance, but because Iran, instead of opening the Strait of Hormuz, fired on commercial shipping. Which makes it bizarre that in a three-hour podcast with Joe Rogan, Vance went out of his way to criticise America’s ally, Israel, for allegedly spending money on a public diplomacy/social media campaign to criticise the deal as too soft on Tehran. Incidentally, the lobbyist involved swears he never campaigned against the MOU, only against Iran.
In any event, any money Israel spends trying to influence US opinion is a drop in the ocean compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars Arab countries spend similarly.
Vance’s remarks are even more surprising given that in his new book, Communion, Vance records that his murdered Christian friend, Charlie Kirk, was gravely concerned that young American men were becoming anti-Israel and anti-Jewish.

There came a certification that established the couch molester as being one of the UFC people, always ready for a rumble in the heathen jungle...US vice president JD Vance has appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast. Picture: YouTube

Why he's a veritable young Ted, a sort of outdoor type for the ages, compelling if you happen to be a bromancing bro ...

But let’s leave Iran and remark what an astonishing, and oddly compelling, figure Vance is, surely the most unlikely, diverse and distinctive personality to be Veep since Theodore Roosevelt occupied that office more than a century ago. I’ve just finished reading Communion, which recounts how Vance lost the evangelical Christian faith of his childhood, was for some years atheist, and came back to Christianity through Catholicism. Oddly enough, Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence, charted an exactly parallel but opposite journey. Pence was brought up Catholic, lapsed into atheism and came back to belief as an evangelical Christian.

As a dedicated tyke, the bromancer is right behind JD, and might even be inclined to be a little Peter Thiel curious ...

I interviewed and profiled Pence at length in my book, How Christians Can Succeed Today, and have no doubt of the depth and sincerity of his Christianity. Having read Communion, I feel the same about Vance.
I can’t believe how vituperative many reviews of Communion have been. For this is a brilliant, absorbing and challenging book, with only one big flaw. It has very little politics (that’s not the flaw). Mostly, it’s the story of Vance’s struggle to get to belief, to possess an attitude of life’s biggest questions that is meaningful and sustainable, and to lead a decent life. Vance’s previous book, Hillbilly Elegy, was one of the great memoirs, as good as Barack Obama’s Dreams from my Father, but with deeper sociological insights.
Vance squarely faces the many times he hasn’t done the right thing. There’s nothing false or humble/brag in his self-accusations: “In my life, too, getting drunk and acting like a jerk had filled the void left by God.” Vance’s personal search for God is a quest for decency, and for understanding.
As he later observes: “Human nature is one of contradictions: of the animal merging with the divine … The secular view was that consciousness and civilisation were a sort of accident of evolution … The creation story (in Genesis) tells us that we are both animal and divine on purpose – a purpose, to be fair, we can’t fully understand.”
This is a rich book. Vance has read deeply in Christian scriptures, and especially in Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and the dazzling scholar Rene Girard, who unpacked the secrets of human desire and the need for a scapegoat in the context of the story of Jesus. And of course Vance is also influenced by CS Lewis and GK Chesterton. None of this is fake. Vance has clearly internalised so much of it.

Indeed, and if only the Catholic church wasn't so stupid, and had appointed a stupid pope, why JD himself might stand as a profound guide to Catholic theology, and Catholic school students be made to read the new JD bible, JD Vance has written a new book, Communion, about his path back to faith

JD has had his troubles ...not least the way he helped kill off one pope ...

Vance's new book published June 16, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, chronicles his conversion to Catholicism and his Easter 2025 meeting with Pope Francis is featured prominently. The Catholic vice president uses the story to open up his reflections on the perceived tensions between his views on migration and the Vatican's moral teaching. The pope died the following day of a stroke and cardiovascular collapse.
But while details of that meeting are sparse, the vice president is sharply critical of his meeting the previous day with Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican secretary of state, and other Vatican diplomats, describing their discussion of migration as "too abstract to be helpful."
After what he described as a "substantive" conversation on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Vance said the subsequent discussion on migration was "unsettling" because Vatican officials did not make any specific requests.
"Here I was, the most senior Catholic in the United States government, and the Vatican seemed unwilling to move its moral guidance past the point of trite platitudes," he wrote. (NCR here)

Speaking of trite platitudes, the bromancer had plenty of his own ...

As I say, I can’t understand the determined, vicious hostility with which the book has been so much received. I’d recommend the first 200 pages without hesitation. Vance links his beliefs to the culture around him, and the breakdown of key institutions, but his religious belief is not essentially a matter of the culture wars.
Vance honours all the Christian denominations. But he’s found his home in the Catholic Church: “The Christian tradition was so rich, the Bible so big and difficult to master, that I began to see the structure of Catholicism as a benefit, not a burden. That the Church spoke with literally thousands of years of tradition behind it, that it had long-established processes for evolving doctrine and responding to new realities …”
He explores the role of doubt in faith: “No matter what we see, we are all tempted by doubt. The Peter whom Jesus pulled out of the sea is the same Peter who denied Christ three times shortly before His crucifixion.”
Most of the last third of the book is about politics but only in a very general way. Vance is inspired by Catholic social teaching, especially the balanced view of the social reality of humanity described in Rerum Novarum (Of New Things), the historic encyclical written by Pope Leo XIII in 1891.
Vance relates this all to his own life. The therapeutic idea that he could blame his own shortcomings on childhood abuse and dislocation was profoundly unappealing. It robbed him of agency and denied his own moral responsibility. His gratitude to his grandmother, his love of his wife, radiate from the page. He embraces the Catholic practice of confession – it offers him reflection on his own shortcomings, genuine personal responsibility for them, and forgiveness. This is certainly not for everyone, but it’s not nothing.

Inspired by social teachings? The ones about shooting all furriners on sight?

Not nothing? Comes a fly in the bromancer ointment, Donald Trump and JD Vance salute during a ceremony at Memorial Amphitheater at Arlington National Cemetery. Picture: Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images

There's simply no avoiding him ...

Finally the bromancer had to bite the mad King Donald bullet with a mild remonstrance, a gentle billy goat butt, only to provide a masterly retort, a JD supporting epic billy goat butt ...

The one glaring omission in Vance’s book is how he reconciles this genuine Christianity with serving in the Trump administration. There is a reasonable defence of this, I think. Democrats, at least as much as Republicans, have made a mess of America. There was a solid case for thinking Trump a less bad alternative than Kamala Harris at the last election. Therefore, trying to make the best of Trump is an ethically reasonable response.
Nonetheless, Vance certainly sometimes goes too far down the Trump road. Yet his versatility is astonishing. In his podcast with Rogan half an hour is spent on the niceties of caged fighting, half an hour on Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theories, half an hour on whether aliens are demons, and so on. Lots of four-letter words. Yet mostly Vance is moderating Rogan, jovially pointing him to reality. Vance is quite different in his appearance on The View, responding politely, patiently, reasonably and convincingly to five vocal, hostile women.
But to see the best of Vance, watch his hour-long conversation with Bishop Robert Barron of Word on Fire. A brilliant, subtle, hopeful dialogue on faith, purpose and society.
Is it a strength or a weakness that Vance is so at home in such contradictory environments? He’s presently unpopular. But he may yet resemble his boss in being protean, persistent, limitlessly energetic, easily underestimated, always formidable. Don’t rule Vance of out for 2028 just yet.

Strangely the bromancer ignored not just the war with China by Xmas, but the coming of Andy ...

That was left to the malignant Magnay, sounding very Iron Lady Margie about idle munificence...

Time to put up, now Mancunian is in Downing Street
Scaring away businesses won’t help prop up the extraordinary welfare situation, where large families on benefits have more disposable income than schoolteachers.
By Jacquelin Magnay
Europe Correspondent

Day 1 and the rats were in the street ...

Sadly the pond had to pass by, but the intermittent archive abided and that's surely enough.

The intermittent archive also took care of ancient Troy ...

Breaking with history: why this ALP conference will be different
Labor’s national conference will be a highly stage-managed event with little debate, even less dissent, and an emphasis on unity.
By Troy Bramston
Senior Writer

Keeping to teaser trailers left just enough room for Dame Groan, present to remind Australians that they were deeply stupid...

 ...and would certainly be rooned by Xmas ...

The header: End of an era: How we fell from exceptional nation to outpost of mediocrity; All those years of hard-fought reforms, of accepting the important trade-offs, were simply forgotten.

The caption for the uncredited collage showing a gaggle of Tory heroes: Former Liberal leaders Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison and John Howard.

Sheesh, the pond couldn't believe it.

There the pond was thinking that all the promotional work for nattering "Ned's" tome had been done and dusted, and straight up front the old biddy put in a plug for it ...

I have been reading the excerpts of Paul Kelly’s new book, The Twilight of Exceptionalism, with great interest. But it did occur to me that instead of using the noun “twilight”, I might have been inclined to use “end”.
Kelly’s book covers the period of the federal Coalition government between 2013 and 2022. In that time, we had three prime ministers, each very different from the other. It was a time of monumental lost opportunity, of parties that couldn’t quite figure out their common mission.
It’s worth outlining what Australia’s exceptionalism involved. Both the Hawke-Keating and Howard-Costello governments take the credit for this outcome. By and large, it was a long period of outstanding policy, of careful economic management and unparalleled outcomes. Annual economic growth rates in the high 3s and into the 4s were common. Productivity growth averaged above 2 per cent per year. The change to per capita incomes moved Australia up the world league ladder, with Australia’s GDP per person exceeding all the G7 countries apart from the US by the middle of the 2000s.
When it came to budgetary policy, the results were truly remarkable. As Peter Costello points out: “By 2004, after seven cash surplus budgets, the commonwealth government was debt-free in net terms. No other comparable Western country got anywhere near that, not the US, the UK, the Europeans, the Japanese.”

To match Dame Groan's carry on, the reptiles slipped in another reminder to buy the book before it hits the remainder shelves, Paul Kelly speak at the book launch for The Twilight of Exceptionalism in Sydney. Picture: John Feder / The Australian

Now on with the important business of revising history and explaining why we're all rooned ...

In August 2006, the Financial Times editorial concluded: “Australia continues to live up to its much overused sobriquet, the lucky country. But as the OECD observes, a big reason for its good fortune is that it has been adept at making its own luck.” The fact Australia was feted at international economic forums was no surprise.
The election of the Abbott government came after the chaotic years of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government. Plenty of poison pills were left by Labor, representing a real challenge for any incoming government. Some of these pills were dealt with – abolishing the absurd mining tax and bringing illegal migration under control by turning back the boats. But when it came to economic policy, the outcomes were extremely disappointing.
Promises not to cut spending in key program areas stymied the Abbott government from the start. It was a time that spending on the misconceived Gonski school funding model and the NDIS could have been reined in, with future expenditures locked into sustainable trajectories. We are now paying a very high price.
The fact Joe Hockey as treasurer pushed for the abolition of the debt ceiling – and succeeded – was more than passing strange. Having promised fiscal restraint, this action made no sense. It has relieved future treasurers from the worry of having to argue the case for expanding the debt ceiling.

The reptiles spared no expense and wheeled out some lavish artwork by Emilia, which the pond had mistaken as a tonal AI rendering, John Howard and Peter Costello. Artwork by Emilia Tortorella.

What an excellent evocation of a lying rodent and a man without the ticker.

End times devotees then got exactly what they wanted, so they could embark on their day knowing that it was all futile ...with all that nonsense about climate science central to the ruination ...

Twenty years on from zero net debt, we are now on the hook for $600bn of net government debt, with gross debt fast approaching the trillion-dollar mark. It is surely ironic that the commonwealth’s biggest asset is the Future Fund.
After the disaster of the 2014 budget – the only “achievement” was a temporary income tax surcharge on the highest earners – the Coalition simply dropped the ball on fiscal management.
Some key ministers began to argue debt and deficits didn’t matter, and the voting public quickly absorbed the new messaging. With inflation seemingly under control – this had a great deal to do with the goods deflation associated with expanding exports from China – the old trade-offs seemed to have vanished.
Measures to deal with climate change took a central role, with Abbott being the prime minister when Australia signed on to the Paris climate agreement. Under Malcolm Turnbull, climate change assumed an even higher priority, with a series of interventions put in place. They included the commissioning of the disastrous Snowy 2.0, which was seen as a giant battery that could underpin the shift to renewable energy. Note also that it was the Coalition government that first introduced the Safeguard Mechanism, which is effectively a carbon tax on our largest industrial emitters.
To be sure, there was some pushback to the attention being given to climate change – who can forget Scott Morrison bringing a lump of coal into parliament?

Who could forget it? Was there ever a better example of a profound insight into climate science?

Strangely the reptiles decided to ignore that as a visual illustration, and decided to go full boring...Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull at the conclusion of Question Time in the House of Representatives. Picture: Sam Mooy / AAP Image

Dame Groan seemed to be showing weird signs of a yearning for the clap happy SloMo ...

But come 2021, Morrison had become convinced the Coalition would lose the election unless his government adopted the position of net zero by 2050. Coupled with some debatable arguments that Australia would face high tariffs imposed by climate-compliant countries and be starved of international capital, the cabinet went along with the change. The Nationals, whose instincts were to oppose the motion, were rewarded with the promise of billions of dollars of compensation.
At the same time, Covid played havoc with the budget as government spending went from $478bn in 2018-19 (24.5 per cent of GDP) to $654bn (31.3 per cent of GDP) in 2020-21. Of course, a great deal of this spending was unavoidable given the uncertainties surrounding the severity and course of the pandemic. The decisions by some of the states to impose prolonged lockdowns also forced the hand of the federal government.
But having grown accustomed to very low rates of inflation, the Coalition massively underestimated the danger of igniting inflationary pressures, particularly in the context of frozen supply chains. Many of the programs that were initiated at that time were both badly designed and badly implemented.
The HomeBuilder program, for instance, led to a surge in building costs that continued well after the pandemic had ceased to be a problem. The JobKeeper program was far too generous and allowed firms that didn’t meet the criteria to keep the assistance.

Oh dear, so it was actually the clap happy one that set the country on the road to ruin? That surely deserves a snap ...Scott Morrison speaks during a press conference.

Tears streaked down Dame Groan's weathered visage - bonjour tristesse - as she pounded out her last gobbet of doom ...

There was never any indication given by the government that the temporary financial assistance given to households and businesses would need to be repaid. Research undertaken by world-renowned economist Greg Kaplan has established that this failure to foreshadow repayment in the US contributed to the price level rising by some 16 per cent. There is every reason to think a similar conclusion applies here.
Exceptionalism was replaced by sloppy thinking and mediocrity. Handing out favours, spending more on programs, putting everything on the tab – this was the modus operandi of the Coalition government when it was voted out in 2022. All those years of hard-fought reforms, of accepting the important trade-offs in managing the budget and the ever-looming threat of inflation, which is the ultimate tax – they were simply forgotten.
The Labor government is arguably much worse as it focuses almost entirely on redistributing our shrinking wealth. But the rot had set in when it won the 2022 election. Productivity growth is barely above zero and real wages are where they were in 2012. From top of the pops to clear laggard in less than 20 years – it is a very sad story.

So sad, such tristesse ...

If only Dame Groan could look on the bright side, and the opportunities all around us, as Wilcox showed her how to do it ...

It turns out that everything is currently an odyssey ...

So why haven't the reptiles gone all in on the fully woke show that's ruining the planet?

In which the flood water whisperer shows signs of fearing bottle red heads, while Killer Creighton cheerfully goes on nuking the country...

 

Doom and gloom.

It's the daily diet the reptiles offer the hive mind.

Geoff was top of the digital doom machine this early morning, as he chambered yet another round ...

Thank the long absent lord the intermittent archive was working ...

EXCLUSIVE
Mining royalties, tax payments crash by $25bn
$25bn mining plunge leaves Labor and state governments in jeopardy
The figures revealed in new modelling come as Labor mulls a push to increase taxes on the resources sector at this week’s national conference.

And what a busy possum he is. 

After Gina's pet's problematic overseas junket, palling around with felons and far right loons (not to mention exquisite fashions), Geoff did his best to restore faith in Pauline...

EXCLUSIVE
Newspoll: Hanson, Taylor climb as Labor’s support sinks
Newspoll: Pauline Hanson regains ground and Liberals rise, as Labor falls to equal lowest point since 2022
Core support for Labor fell to 30 per cent, which reflects the ALP’s lowest point since the Gillard government.

More EXCLUSIVES than a possum could shake a stick at.

It felt like Geoff was the primo reptile peddler of doom and gloom ...

COMMENTARY by Geoff Chambers
Reports of One Nation’s demise are greatly exaggerated
One Nation is not dead yet: Labor and the Coalition cannot write off Pauline Hanson
Senior Labor and Coalition sources say the idea One Nation’s support will drop off or fade quickly are wrong.

Hang on, hang on, hold Geoff's beer, because the Caterist is also in town and the header suggested he was smitten by the bottle red head ... what with Gina's puppet filling a gap in the political landscape, in much the same way as you might celebrate a mad King Donald or even a Mussolini...

The header: How Pauline Hanson fills the gap in our political landscape; A Hanson-led conservative government in which the Liberal and National parties are the junior partners is an absurd proposition.
The caption for the snap which suggests some reptiles spend too much time on social media with a screen capper: One Nation leader Senator Pauline Hanson speaks at the 2026 CPAC Conference in London. Picture: YouTube

Relax, the pond was just teasing, a little trolling, as a way of beguiling correspondents into suffering along with the Caterist.

The Caterist was alert, but also somewhat alarmed, as he began by reluctantly admitting it wasn't Gough wot done it ...

Some Australians will agree with Pauline Hanson that Australia’s immigration policy turned bad in 1973 when Gough Whitlam scrapped the White Australia policy and opened the doors to all comers. More informed readers know the policy was abolished six years earlier by the Liberal Party, but let’s not quibble on detail.

For a "let's not quibble" outing, the flood whispering Caterist had a lot of quivering quibbles, as he did his best to stand by the beefy boofhead:

Whether “some” voters constitute a majority of 50 per cent plus one is doubtful. Many may agree with Hanson that immigration is out of control but will reject her ugly allusions to skin colour and religion. They will be repelled by her clumsy attempts to scapegoat Muslims as the chief rorters of the National Disability Insurance Scheme and her refusal to distinguish the many patriotic Muslim Australians who like the country how it is and the radicalised few who want to change it.

Sheesh, it's like the reptile hive mind has turned full bizarro, compleat topsy turvy? 

Has the pond wasted an entire clumsy lizard Oz lifetime learning how Islamics were ruining the country and lazy, uppity, difficult blacks didn't deserve a Voice?

Seems so, sounds like the quarry whisperer has gone a little bit woke ...

Which is why Angus Taylor was expressing the views of two-thirds of the country and possibly more when he told The Australian recently that One Nation is unfit to govern.
One Nation may one day eclipse the Liberal-National Coalition as the principal force on the centre right but it will never form government while Hanson remains its leader. Not while its internal structure remains nebulous and immature and the mechanism for the leader’s removal is entirely in her own hands. Not when the party’s future as a parliamentary force lies in the hands of inexperienced MPs and senators.

The reptiles didn't help by pumping up the visual volume, Pauline Hanson meets up with Nigel Farage. Picture: Facebook/ Pauline Hanson

Even Nige found her meeting up with felon Tommy a tad too far, though no doubt he otherwise agreed with Gina's pet, refused to apologise for being white, and thought Australians were stupid, and fell into line with the lizards of Oz and Pauline that the country was way too woke ...

The Caterist did his best to cope and suggest solutions ... (though the unfortunate reptile habit of blathering on about the woke wasn't one needing reform)...

Those home truths aside, however, it is a fantasy to suggest Hanson’s ill-considered decision to hang out with Tommy Robinson in London is the beginning of the end for One Nation. The groundswell of support for Hanson cannot be explained by reductionist this-leads-to-that explanations.
The populist wave overturning business-as-usual politics around the world is driven by demand, not supply. A gaping hole has opened up in the centre of the political landscape which, this being a democracy, would sooner or later be occupied.
Hanson’s One Nation didn’t create this space, nor did it appear to be the natural candidate to fill it after the last election, when it emerged with a primary vote of 6 per cent.
Yet One Nation has scooped up the none-of-the-above votes scattered like confetti in 2025 and pushed the boundaries still further by becoming the home for a substantial subsection of the disgruntled Liberal base as well as the working-class voters Anthony Albanese has shaken off as Labor reinvents itself as the party of the technocratic elite.
For Hanson’s accidental army, One Nation is as much an emotional home as a serious political choice. A survey of the comments on any article in The Australian remotely critical of One Nation (including most probably this one) reveals how passionately supportive they are. Former Liberal voters who switch allegiance to One Nation are not simply changing their votes. They are changing tribes. Their internal narrative changes from “I support the Liberal Party” to “I’m one of the people who finally woke up”.
If Hanson reveals her weaknesses as a prospective national leader, they can resolve any internal contradictions by (a) admitting they were wrong or (b) persuading themselves that Taylor is worse.

Sheesh, is the Caterist suggesting it's a cult? Is he also suggesting that the lizard Oz hive mind is a cult, but Gina's pet has attracted some of its cult membership to its very own cult tribe?

Whatever, it seems times are tough for the reptiles who've devoted so much time encouraging their cult, and the beefy boofhead they'd like their cult to love, if only he was remotely loveable, what with some not infatuated with one of the duller knives in the drawer, Opposition Leader Angus Taylor speaking at the LNP conference in Brisbane. Picture: John Gass

How the reptiles love the beefy boofhead, mouth open and in full gesticulation mode.

At last it was time to take down Gina's pet so that the beefy boofhead might shine like a 20 watt bulb ...

Option (b) is the psychologically cheaper choice since admitting error imposes a high cost on self-esteem. It requires acknowledging not only Hanson’s flaws, but also personal poor judgment, and in an era when one’s political opinions are broadcast on social media that is an awkward pill to swallow.
Politically engaged voters are inclined towards what social psychologists call motivated reasoning, selectively assimilating evidence that reinforces prior beliefs and discounting discordant evidence. Perversely, as Hanson reveals her imperfections, hostility towards Taylor – and by extension the Liberal Party – hardens.
Hanson need not become more impressive to retain these voters. She simply has to remain less unacceptable than the Liberal alternative. Taylor must overcome this asymmetry if the Liberal Party is to recover its position as an effective political force.
Taylor must also overcome the uniparty narrative that One Nation employs to great effect. When the political and philosophical divide between the Coalition and Labor is at its widest point for at least half a century, Liberal and National supporters feel an understandable sense of indignation at this slur, which was imported from the US.
Yet the uniparty slander remains powerful as an encapsulation of the new political divide between the governing establishment and those who feel their values are not respected by the graduate elite.
In his 2022 book Values, Voice and Virtue, British political scientist Matthew Goodwin makes a strong case that the exposure of this fault line in Britain predates the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. The speed of Farage’s ascendancy, like the sudden rise of populist movements in other European democracies, owes less to his political attributes than the gap in the market for a movement that respects the view of the non-graduate majority.
Reform was the result rather than the cause of the populist mood, fuelled by resentment over the pursuit of pet projects such as multiculturalism and the mitigation of climate change that diverted government attention from the everyday problems of working families, small businesses and retirees.

And there in a nutshell is the Caterist and the reptile problem. 

All Gina's pet has done is take on board the policies espoused by them - the climate science denialism, the fear of furriners, and so on - and the notion that a messiah might come along to save them. 

Faux Noise and mad King Donald for example, though perhaps not the beefy boofhead or Kemi ...Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch delivers a speech on the economy at the Victory Services Club. Picture: Dan Kitwood / Getty Images

After all, the reptiles were dedicated to Brexit, and had a splendid time stripping the Voice of its capitalisation, and lathered themselves up into a fever pitch of outrage and indignation.

What could possibly have gone wrong with the rage machine?

In Britain, the populist revolt manifested itself most clearly in the Brexit vote. In Australia it was the voice referendum. 

There you go, that's what the pond's talking about. The reptiles might offer a capital V for Goodwin's Values, Voice and Virtue, but damned if they'll offer a V for that pesky, difficult, uppity black Voice.

Why they created the policies Gina's pampered pet is promoting, but where's the respect, where's the acknowledgement, where's the capital V for their long standing voice for bigotry and prejudice?

In both countries the established conservative parties seemed at first to be on the right side of the argument. Peter Dutton’s Liberal Party appeared to gain ground, just as the Conservatives did in Boris Johnson’s landslide election win in 2019. In both cases, the alignment with anti-establishment voters was short-lived. Neither Johnson nor Dutton could overcome the tensions in their own party.
For Taylor and British Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, the solution is not as simple as many commentators suggest. The seemingly contradictory solutions of moving to the right or recovering the vacant centre ground understate the challenge.
The task is to relearn the language and recover the trust of the disillusioned voters attracted to Hanson or Farage simply because they represent the least imperfect candidates among the none-of-the-above.
Whether Hanson’s European misadventures put a ceiling on One Nation’s vote at about 30 per cent or, as is equally probable, it begins testing the high 30s hardly matters.
A Hanson-led conservative government in which the Liberal and National parties are the junior partners is an absurd proposition. Eighteen months out from an election, with Albanese’s support in some polls in the high 20s, arguments about whether Taylor or Hanson would make a better prime minister are entirely theoretical. Unless something breaks this stalemate, and breaks it quickly, neither will be given a chance.

Sheesh, the pond had promised doom and gloom, but somehow ended up with the Caterist prophesying doom and gloom for Gina's pet, all in aid of the struggling beefy boofhead?

The infallible Pope had just the cartoon to celebrate on the weekend ...

And so to send the Major to the intermittent archive, because some days the pond baulks at the relentless serves of Zionism offered up by the Australian Daily Zionist News ...

Social media the tool of Hamas spreading hatred about Jews
How Hamas’s disinformation campaign is fuelling a global surge in antisemitism
Content posted online found a community here and around the world already conditioned by Hamas’s propaganda from the day its fighters invaded Israel.
By Chris Mitchell
Columnist

The pond just didn't feel up to yapping about Zionism yet again.

Correspondents have read it all before, and are free to read it again - relax, things are going tremendously well in Gaza if you follow the Major - and for Benji too ...

Okay, apparently it might have been for the wrong reason, it might have been to get more barking mad fundamentalists into the IDF, but what the heck, enjoy the moment all the same ...

And have a 'toon to celebrate ...

But what to do for a bonus?

The pond was over AI, so sent simpleton Simon off to the cornfield, even though only the pond cared enough to do the saving...

We need to sort AI’s moral risks before it’s too late

The speed of the race appears to be overtaking the foundational rules that must accompany such a technology.

By Simon Benson

Political analyst

A 'toon would suffice for that ...

Luckily Killer Creighton was to hand, doing what the IPA does best ... fuming and fulminating about renewables, and matching AI at devising ways to do over the planet ...

The header: Fudging language of energy transition won’t stop its political reckoning; ‘Involuntary load shedding’ is the new blackout: the deliberate disconnection of customers to keep the grid functional.

The caption for the terrifying snap: Miners taking part in wind turbine operation training listen to an instructor next to one of the wind turbines at the Gorzyca Wind Farm. Picture: Wojtek Radwanski / AFP

Killer only took three minutes, but surely that shocking snap of a windmill dominating the landscape and ruining mad King Donald's day - not to mention the beefy boofhead's fear of the infernal machines down Goulburn way - as a tremendous kick starter for the standard serve of rage ...

Just as grandfathering has been rebranded as grandparenting by Jim Chalmers so as not to offend, blackouts appear to have been excised from the official vocabulary.

Absent an obvious replacement colour, the Australian Energy Market Operator’s latest grand plan for achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 comes up with a variety of obscure phrases to describe how to deal with insufficient electricity in our largely sun and wind-dependent grid.

It all sounds almost fun. Consumers will be playing “an increasingly active role” in ensuring the power system remains stable, AEMO chief executive Daniel Westerman writes in the foreword to the latest Integrated System Plan released on June 25. “First Nations” communities will be “empowered”.

“Involuntary load shedding” is the new blackout: the deliberate disconnection of customers to keep the grid functional. This may arise in times of “unserved energy”, when the power system simply cannot meet the electricity demanded.

About 1 per cent of the national electricity market is expected to depend on “demand-side participation” by 2050, where households or businesses agree in advance to have their power turned down or switched off in exchange for financial compensation. The old electricity grid once served households; now households and businesses increasingly serve the grid.

Consumers are supposed to be “virtual power plants”, handing control of their home batteries and electric vehicles to third parties that can draw on them when required. Rather than generating more reliable power, the system increasingly seeks to “reduce the total energy drawn” from the grid.

The pond smugly set its EV to trickle charge - it being a sunny day and the solar standing by to kick in - while the reptiles served up a snap of that diabolical wretch Jimbo, looking just as smug in a quizzical way, Jim Chalmers during Question Time at Parliament House. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

No doubt haunted by Jimbo, Killer was in a foul IPA mood ... though perhaps it was tinged with a fear of impending hellfire, with shades of a Canadian wildfire...

Nah, a cartoon wasn't going to stop Killer.

He had a Killer IPA job to do, and the lizard Oz was a perfect IPA propaganda machine, and dammit, he was going to do it ...

The huge strides in living standards across the past century have been predicated on using more energy, not less. In any case, none of this is likely to happen.

AEMO’s latest ISP is solving a problem created by unrealistic political targets.

Increasingly – and laughably – it continues to assume Australia will achieve an 82 per cent renewable electricity grid by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2050. The plan is described as the “least cost” pathway, but only in the sense that the genuinely low-cost alternatives have been ruled out.

The 36 per cent of suitable Australian dwellings that have installed rooftop solar did so largely because governments showered households with billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded subsidies across the past two decades.

Those subsidies, largely taken up by higher-income households, are barely acknowledged in the ISP’s cost estimates. The same applies to the nation’s roughly 600,000 household batteries.

Importantly, such subsidies are also unlikely to continue indefinitely given the rapidly deteriorating fiscal position of state and federal governments.

Does anyone seriously think Victoria’s Yallourn coal-fired power station, which still supplies about 15 per cent of the state’s electricity and helps insulate South Australia against disaster on cloudy, still days, will close in less than two years as the ISP assumes?

Moreover, about 120 gigawatts of additional large-scale wind and solar capacity must be constructed by 2050, roughly five times today’s installed level in less than 25 years.

Construction has not begun on even one of the 83 offshore wind projects slated for completion across coming decades, according to online tracker TGS, and investment has collapsed globally.

Another 6000km of transmission lines also must be built to connect remote wind and solar developments to existing cities, which is certain to invite fierce community opposition.

It's doom and gloom all the way, and yet there's a solution to all this, a way to save the planet, though everyone knows that the planet doesn't need saving, what with Killer having demolished many times all that nonsense that's scribbled about climate change by alleged climate scientists entirely lacking Killer's scientific credentials.

Correspondents will already know the solution, can chant it by heart.

If only we'd nuke the country ...

Curiously, nuclear energy is not mentioned once in the ISP’s 141 pages, despite the fact the Liberal Party, the Nationals and One Nation all support the one proven technology capable of delivering reliable, dispatchable, low-emissions electricity at scale.

Amazingly in response to this klarion Killer kall,  the reptiles didn't deploy one of their much loved snaps of a nucklear plant nuking away, and instead settled for a man at a gabfest ...Daniel Westerman speaking at the Energy Nation 2025 forum in Sydney. Picture: Nikki Short

It was on to an impassioned Killer spiel for the urgent need to nuke the country, even if the planet didn't actually need saving ...

We’ll will happily dig up uranium, put it on a ship to India and congratulate itself when it produces reliable zero-emissions electricity there. The only place we apparently can’t use Australian uranium is, of course, Australia.

The Coalition should be making hay with the rank hypocrisy and absurdity of the targets but has barely said boo about dumping net zero since last year’s recantation through gritted teeth.

Countries such as South Korea and China have demonstrated that modern nuclear plants can be built relatively cheaply. A genuine planning exercise at least would model it alongside the alternatives rather than pretend it does not exist. More fundamentally, the whole exercise rests on an extraordinary assumption: that anyone can accurately map Australia’s electricity system a quarter of a century into the future.

A decade ago almost nobody foresaw the explosion of artificial intelligence and the demand for data centres, or the shale gas revolution. Who knows what technologies will emerge during the next 25 years? The ISP increasingly resembles less an engineering blueprint than a work of central planning, complete with heroic assumptions about consumer behaviour, technological progress, political consensus and construction timetables extending all the way to 2050.

At least the latest CSIRO GenCost report, released alongside the ISP, acknowledges what was once heresy, conceding that net zero costs 5 per cent to 39 per cent more than abandoning the target altogether.

Rebranding blackouts as “involuntary load shedding” and power shortages as “demand-side participation” may delay the political reckoning but it will not prevent it. Physics and economics have an inconvenient habit of ignoring government communications strategies.

Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

Haven't had enough? 

Perhaps you should visit the IPA and read Killer exposing the way that climate science is just a religion ...The moral imperative that doesn’t ring true ... and then you might want to nuke something ...

Just gotta love a little beneficial warming. Why there's nothing like a Canadian wildfire to gladden a Killer heart, not to mention splendid South American super charged El Niño inspired floods.

And so on and so forth and Killer fun and Killer times for all ...

Shouldn't that read "welcome to a white Australian climate science denying fear of furriners" reptile hive mind?

Never mind, what an inspiration little England is for bottle red heads and bin men ...