Boring. Deeply, deeply boring.
Is there anyone with enough ticker to give the lettuce hope, as it begins to wilt?
Even the reptiles couldn't get excited about the little to be proud of affair, with this second cab off the rank ...
Taylor opens arms to Hastie and his supporters in leadership bid
Ahead of a looming leadership spill, Angus Taylor has offered an olive branch to Andrew Hastie’s key backers amid a push for Mr Hastie to become Treasury spokesman in a Taylor-led Liberal Party.
By Greg Brown, Sarah Ison and Noah Yim
The only notable thing in the update on the archive version was the way the pasty Hastie dressed in double blue, like a refugee from the 1970s or a Marlboro ad ...
C'mon, we all remember the look ...
Nothing about Clive, Epstein and Steve?
Nah, all Brownie could do was sob and sigh into the digital ether.
PM getting free ride amid the Coalition chaos
With the heat off Anthony Albanese’s agenda, Sussan Ley could face a challenge from Angus Taylor next week.
Could? Coulda. Woulda. Shouda.
Next week?
Always next week, King Donald style, while the lettuce fades and the pond sinks into an even deeper torpor.
How tedious and tiresome it all is, though the infallible Pope is always on hand to provide relief ...
There was nothing for it but to seek refuge on the extreme far right ... but alas ...
Andrew Hastie’s retreat was less a reflection of his suitability for the top job than it was an indictment on the amateurish and frankly embarrassing nature of the internal manoeuvres that have been going on within the party.
By Simon Benson
The pond will leave simplistic Simon's "analysis" (the pond uses the word loosely when in reptile company), while it finds nothing to excite in the latest droppings of pearls of wisdom...
Credibility is the most important tool central bankers have at their disposal. It means that we believe their promises on inflation. Bullock has broken hers.
By David Pearl
The pond makes only one note - why no credit for the collage, which makes a Leak cartoon look subtle?
Go on, pick the lurking, glowering, truly terrifying baddies if you can if it's too hard, try training on a 1950s western).
The pond also only notes this effort ...
If policymakers and commentators want a more honest migration debate, they should stop pretending net migration can be ‘controlled’ like a thermostat.
By Alan Gamlen and Peter McDonald
... to get briefly to the conclusion ...
On that score, there is room for improvement, but not for panic.
Australia’s post-pandemic migration experience is near identical to that of other high-income countries. The surge and fall were not uniquely Australian, nor uniquely political. They were the predictable aftershocks of a global shutdown.
The lesson is a simple one. Volatility after a shock is not evidence of failure. It is evidence of adjustment. If policymakers and commentators want a more honest migration debate, they should stop pretending net migration can be “controlled” like a thermostat and start paying attention to how the system actually works.
You want politics over facts?
Easy peasy ... because this day the Caterist went there and flung the pond into a panic about the way that the immigration system had let a dangerously radicalised, third rate sociology student into the country ...
The header: Migrants promised a dream, but sold into system of hostility; The immigration crisis, the one the political class is desperate not to discuss, is not going away. It is time we realised that promising the dream of Australia to millions denies the gift of becoming Australian to a qualified few.
The caption: International students at the University of Sydney.
A system of hostility? Isn't that the lizard Oz, and the spewings of the likes of Dame Groan?
The pond really didn't want to go there, an imported Pom whining yet again for four minutes, in a way designed to get Dame Groan agitated, but what other choice was there?
“My education agent is recommending that I study to become a painter,” she wrote. “Is physical labour really the only realistic option? I imagine it must be quite tough work.” A fellow participant replies: “You could look up chef pathway alternatively.”
Were this applicant to persist in moving to Australia, she would likely end up in the limbo of “permanent temporariness”, the ungainly official expression that describes the status of millions of migrants who live and work here with little hope of becoming an Australian. They are drawn here by loose visa rules, high wages, low unemployment and the expectation that getting a foot in the door is a step towards permanent residency and citizenship.
All the while, they are egged on by overseas migration agents and the Australian higher education sector with alluring promises that are unlikely to be met.
The number of temporary residents in Australia grew from 700,000 at the turn of the century to more than 2.2 million at the end of 2023. For most of its post-war history, settlement was permanent. They were encouraged to integrate and become Australian citizens, granting them an equal stake in the country’s future.
In recent decades, with almost no public discussion, our extraordinarily successful settlement program has been downgraded into a version of Germany’s Gastarbeiter system regulating the importation of labour units on time-limited permits.
Germany is hardly a good role model. What was conceived as a temporary labour solution for a booming post-war manufacturing sector quietly hardened into a structural fault line. A recent study found that around three-quarters of Germans worry that society is falling apart.
Whatever our concerns about the impact of temporary migrants on the housing market or the changing character of our cities, it is the fraying of the social fabric that should alarm us most after Bondi. Anthony Albanese’s quest to strengthen social cohesion is being undermined by weaknesses in an immigration system his government has only lightly addressed.
Naturally the reptiles dragged in the Bondi massacre, Thousands of flowers are laid at Bondi Pavilion to honour the 15 victims of last Sunday's attack. Picture: Tom Parrish
Last Sunday's attack?
Such lazy, shoddy journalism, what with the terror attack taking place back on the 14th December, more than a few Sundays ago.
Never mind, back to the grind ...
It is hardly gratuitous to draw a link to the Bondi atrocity. The elder of the two alleged gunmen arrived from India on a student visa a quarter of a century ago and never went home. He fathered a son who appears to have followed the familiar path for second-generation radicalisation, growing up among people he had learned to resent.
Like other bad policy decisions, no one designed this system of institutionalised impermanence. It just happened when educating overseas students expanded from a highly successful aid program devised by Robert Menzies into an export industry under Labor’s Bob Hawke. Successive governments have fallen for the argument that reform would jeopardise a $50bn export industry. But framing higher learning as an export commodity like iron ore or wool is highly misleading.
Unlike shipments of minerals or agricultural products, gross spending on education does not equal value added. Servicing overseas student demand consumes scarce resources that could be used for other purposes, such as housing, transport, infrastructure, and university desks. Heavy reliance on international fees alters universities’ incentives toward volume, downgrading the higher education experience for domestic students.
Policy failure is inevitable when there has been little attention to clearer distinctions between temporary labour, genuine study and permanent settlement. No government has been willing to resolve the central contradiction of linking a demand-driven market in higher education and a supply-constrained market for permanent residency.
The subclass 189 skilled independent visa is one part of the system that remains intact. It provides a pure, federal, points-tested pathway to permanent residency in which a fixed number of places are auctioned to the most highly skilled applicants.
So, while you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to apply for a 189, a degree in an astronautical engineering would boost your chances of getting one, while a grade 3 certificate in painting and decorating wouldn’t.
Hence the growth of permanently temporary migrants, drawn by false expectations, who live and work in Australia for years, often cycling through student, graduate, bridging and provisional visas, yet never securing permanent residency or citizenship. We allow them to live among us without inviting them to be one of us.
And then here we go again ... Anthony Albanese arriving to the national Day of Reflection on Sunday to honour the victims of the December 14th Bondi Beach terror attack and to stand in solidarity with the Jewish community. Picture NewsWire / Monique Harmer
The Day of Reflection vigil was back in December, the National Day of Mourning was on 22nd January ...
On the upside, the pond was completely distracted, and so missed the Caterist doing his best to politicise immigration matters...
They find themselves in a queue without an exit. They are encouraged to invest time, money and identity in Australia without any clear line of sight to permanence. They become economically embedded and socially present, yet civically excluded. Permanent temporary residents pay tax and follow the law, but lack political voice and long-term security. Uncertainty about belonging discourages commitment. People delay family formation, avoid deep civic engagement, and cluster socially with others in similar positions.
It is not necessarily hostility, but rational detachment. Why plant roots in soil you may be asked to leave? Why make the effort to assimilate to a society from which you have been excluded? A system that normalises exclusion creates blind spots as ambiguity hardens into resentment over time. It is the inversion of a settlement arrangement that has offered redemption to millions since 1788. A land of freedom and opportunity has become a Kafkaesque nightmare that forces migrants into a bureaucratic purgatory, wrestling with nonsensical rules.
The immigration crisis, the one the political class is desperate not to discuss, is not going away. Indeed, it has intensified after Bondi, prompting a fresh exodus from the legacy parties to One Nation, which is at least prepared to name the problem, even if it lacks a well-developed policy solution to fix a devilishly complicated system riddled with unintended consequences. Reform should begin from first principles: a student visa grants permission to study, not full entry to the workforce before or after completing a degree.
It is time we realised that promising the dream of Australia to millions denies the gift of becoming Australian to a qualified few.
The qualified few? How on earth did he qualify?
Phew, the pond is pleased that's over. Sometimes the careening Caterist pushes the pond to the outer limits of tolerance for migrants, which is deeply unfair to the many newcomers who make positive contributions to the country.
As for the rest of the reptile rabble, the pond discovered that the Major was back on his favourite climate science denialist hobby horse, this time with a new angle, blaming the bloody Canadians ...
The header: Insurance premiums rising again? Carney ignited climate risk industry; Australians unhappy with high home insurance premiums can blame a Canadian for his move in 2015 to make global businesses account for climate change risks.
The caption: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney started the push for greater corporate accountability when he was Bank of England governor. Picture: The Canadian Press via AP
Astonishing really that one Canuck has been responsible for trends in the global insurance industry, suggesting that perhaps the Major has been talking to a few too many treasonous Albertans.
Elbows up Canucks, it's going to be a rough ride ...
Carney has flipped his rhetoric on climate change since 2015 when, as governor of the Bank of England, he began a push to make global businesses account for climate change risks.
That speech kicked off a whole new consulting industry that has allowed bankers and large accountancy firms to make even more money from green politics: As if just investing in government-guaranteed renewables schemes underwritten by taxpayers with annual rates of return fixed by law was not enough already.
After the 2008-10 global financial crisis triggered by the collapse in September 2008 of US-based investment bank Lehman Brothers, G20 leaders turned their attention to other potential threats to the global financial system.
The international media was already focused on the potential for disasters triggered by global warming in the wake of former US vice-president Al Gore’s climate change hysteria film, An Inconvenient Truth.
The reptiles slipped in a couple of dull snaps for those who missed the current feud ... Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney; US President Donald Trump.
The sight of King Donald could have inspired a cartoon about his latest folly, but instead the pond turned to the Graudian ...
‘Tight correlation’ between premium rises and counties deemed most at risk from climate crisis, experts say
Oliver Milman with graphics by Andrew Witherspoon
A mounting toll of severe hurricanes, floods, fires and other extreme events has caused average premiums to leap since 2020, with parts of the US most prone to disasters bearing the brunt. A climate crisis is starting to stir an insurance crisis.
Across all US counties, those in the top fifth for climate-driven disaster risk saw home premiums leap by 22% in just three years to 2023, compared to an overall average of a 13% rise in real terms, research of mortgage payment data has found. The Guardian has analyzed the study’s data to illustrate the places in the US at highest risk from disasters and insurance hikes.
Sure 'nuff, there was a graph for those who like that sort of thing ...
There were more graphs, but the pond had to get back to the Major blaming the Canuck for the whole damn thing ...
He has paused electric vehicle mandates and reduced carbon taxes. Canada already has huge reserves of non-emitting hydro-electric power generation that provide half its electricity.
While our government commits all-out to renewables, Carney has signed off on a new private sector oil pipeline from Alberta to the British Columbia coast and a uranium deal with India. He wants Canada to be an energy superpower to defend itself against new US tariffs.
While Carney’s pragmatism should be a signal to governments here and in Europe, perhaps more interesting for Australian consumers is new analysis showing how the climate risk financial services sector has allowed global insurance businesses to keep ramping up premiums while receiving sympathetic coverage from activist environment journalists who have fed into a false narrative about natural disasters.
This column on December 11 recommended readers who want to understand how predictions of global warming had become overheated since the original Paris accord of 2015 check Roger Pielke Jr’s The Honest Broker site on Substack.
Pielke, often criticised by activists as a climate sceptic, is also a respected political scientist, a professor at the University of Colorado, a former staff scientist at the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research and a believer in climate science.
He published a three-part series in December looking at how the insurance industry has used false claims about individual climate events to ramp up premiums and profitability.
Part one, on December 9, is titled “The Climate Risk Industrial Complex and the Manufactured Insurance Crisis”.
Credit where credit is due, Roger A. Pielke Sr. also made an appearance in DeSmog, while Pielke Jr. has a long and sordid DeSmog CV ...
The reptiles wanted to put Jr in the frame, Roger Pielke Jr. Picture: Getty Images
Now don't get the pond wrong.
Climate change, climate science and insurance are big issues, as explained by the infallible Pope ...
Just don't expect any enlightenment from the Major ...
In the wake of last year’s Los Angeles fires, he quotes the US National Association of Insurance Commissions: “Despite heavy catastrophe losses, including the costliest wildfires on record, the US Property and Casualty industry recorded its best mid-year underwriting gain in nearly 20 years.” Here the picture is much the same: industry analysts say Australian insurance profitability is at or near record levels.
Releasing figures that show total US P&C insurance profits rising from just under $US40bn ($57.5bn) in 2017 to $US170bn in 2024, the NAIC said: “Strong premium growth, driven largely by rate increases, coupled with abating economic inflation … (has seen) net income nearly doubled from last year.”
Pielke links this rise in profitability directly to Carney’s Bank of England speech.
He says climate risk assessment companies that have grown since then depend almost entirely on the vagaries of economic modelling that effectively compounds the vagaries of the climate science modelling.
Of course when peddling a vast international conspiracy, there are a few other suspects ... Simon Holmes a Court. Picture: Martin Ollman
Meanwhile, the Major is intent on proving that a little reading can be a dangerous thing ...
This essay ends with a devastating quote from global climate risk assessment firm Verisk: “We estimate about 1 per cent year-on-year average annual losses are attributable to climate change. Such small shifts can easily get lost behind other sources of systemic loss … such as inflation … The random volatility from internal climate variability also dwarfs the small positive climate change signal.”
In part three, published December 22, “The Invention of Climate Risk – Politically Brilliant but Fatally Flawed”, Pielke shows how the climate risk business was targeted “at compelling the outcomes of the 2015 Paris Agreement”.
“Extreme weather became the focal point but the real world did not play along.
“Efforts to connect climate change and extreme weather really took off” after Al Gore’s movie, mentioned above. The problem with this as a strategy to bring the dangers of climate change home to ordinary people was that “Mother Nature was not co-operating with detectable trends” in extreme weather.
Time for another suspect, Mike Cannon-Brookes. Picture: Martin Ollman
The pond supposes that a bout of climate science denialism, dressed up as a form of paranoid Canuck bashing, is a variation on the Major's usual Zionism, but the pond regrets it, because the pond had saved up a cartoon for the Major, a way of celebrating the ongoing carnage in Gaza...
Never mind, almost done ...
As regular readers of this column will know, it has been clear in many IPCC reviews that most climate scientists assign a very low probability to links between man-made climate change and individual climate events. Trends in tropical storms here, in the US and Asia have been down.
Clear? Only in the Major's truly bizarre world ...
Amazingly, King Donald's minions left this NASA page up ...
... including these immortal words ...
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s Sixth Assessment Report released in 2021, the human-caused rise in greenhouse gases has increased the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. NASA’s satellite missions, including the upcoming Earth System Observatory, provide vital data for monitoring and responding to extreme weather events
Lest readers imagine Pielke is alone in this, Jessica Weinkle, on the EcoModernist site on Substack last February, traced the insurance industry’s reactions to major US disasters since Hurricane Andrew in Florida in August 1992, only months after the creation the previous June of the UN Convention on Climate Change.
Her central conclusion about disasters and insurance industry risk: it is the lifestyle decisions of millions of people moving to warmer sea-change areas or fire-prone tree-change areas that is driving the cost of individual natural disasters.
That and inflation in the building industry. Sound familiar?
Yes, the denialism is tedious and way beyond familiar, and despite the endless provocations, the pond is pleased at the discipline shown in not going the 'toon ...
Well if the reptiles can slip in visual irrelevancies ...
And now, as the Major mentioned the NY Times, the pond seized on the chance to note that David Brooks has left its hallowed two siderest halls...
He left a trace of his taint in Time to Say Goodbye ... (archive link)
Sadly it wasn't goodbye and good riddance, and the pond only notes this to draw attention to a farewell offered by Chris Lehmann in The Nation ...
Just a whiff, a taster, a teasing trailer ... go on Chris, tell us what you really think ...
Brooks, who has occupied the prestigious (if mythical) “reasonable conservative” perch at the opinion section of the Paper of Record for nearly a quarter century, is now decamping for The Atlantic, another inert organ of elite consensus politics, to serve as a staff writer and host of a video podcast. For Brooks to be forsaking his role as the nation’s Times-branded civic scold while US democracy swoons further into the abyss amid Donald Trump’s second authoritarian term drives home how ineffectual-to-untenable he has been as a trollish Never Trumper. Still, his failure bears a closer look, if only to size up the vacuity of a particular strain of culture-calibrating punditry from the US right that has bent over backward to avoid acknowledging a clear and present mobilization of blood-and-soil reaction.
For in the moral universe that David Brooks presides over, there is never a sustained ideological threat to democracy and civic culture from an insurgent right; instead, the great hazard before us is the failure of liberal and left elites to strike just the right Goldilocks posture of sympathy with the conservative grievance-industrial complex. Across successive revanchist right takeovers of the GOP, Brooks’s columnizing output hewed to this message with the unshakable conviction of a Soviet apparatchik, and he also reliably plied it from his role as a reasonable right solon on the PBS News Hour—which, alas, shares the same editorial instincts as Maureen Dowd.
During a post-2016 election colloquy of pundits debating the laughably irrelevant proposition, “Do liberals hold the moral high ground?,” Brooks, who was of course arguing the negative claim, disclosed the formula behind all his sober diagnoses of what ails our body politic. “A lot of people voted for Donald Trump because they thought a lot of tenured radicals along the coasts thought they were morally superior to them,” he proclaimed. “So if you want the kind of politics we have today, think you’re morally superior to the other side.”
That smug, counter-empirical refrain has fueled countless Brooks columns, to say nothing of a torrent of ponderous and unenlightening books, harking back to his reputation-making work of “comic sociology” Bobos in Paradise. In Brooks’s foreshortened social vision—which, for the record, is neither comic nor sociological—myopically privileged if provisionally well-meaning liberal elites have broken faith with the American civic tradition by putting themselves indelicately forward as role models for everyone else. The ensuing backlash is thus entirely their doing, in just the way that abusive spouses declare that their inattentive mates have left them no choice but to assault them.
This just-so fable of terminal social haughtiness from the left was, despite its rough plausibility for certain neighborhoods in Berkeley or Cambridge, always a lie. Back when Brooks, then a staff writer at The Weekly Standard, was burnishing his mainstream comic-sociological bona fides in the pages of—you guessed it—The Atlantic, he published a suburban safari dispatch from Montgomery County, Maryland, outside DC and the Franklin County exurbs of Philadelphia professing to document the insular lifestyle politics in strongholds of “blue state” liberalism and “red state” cultural revolt on the right. The resulting Mad Libs–style account was classic Brooks; riding mowers and NASCAR viewing were duly name-checked as badges of conservative belonging, while NPR listening and (irony of ironies, given his subsequent career arc) a subscription to The New York Times were telltale signs of opportunistic liberal secession from the broader polis.
The only problem, as then–Philadelphia magazine writer Sasha Issenberg documented, is that the whole thing was a fairy tale. Three of the country’s top five NASCAR TV markets were in blue states, Issenberg found, and the QVC home-shopping network—another sign of red-state habitation in Brooks’s account—also drew most of its revenue from blue states. Brooks’s claim that he was unable to spend more than $20 on a meal in Franklin County was likewise easily exposed bullshit. When Issenberg interviewed Brooks about this barrage of falsehoods, he retreated to his “comic sociology” shtick, and argued that he was trafficking in broad generalizations that “ring true” to the worrisome cultural divides overtaking the country.
There's more at the link, but already the pond was howling with delight ...and now the pond will do its best to ignore Brooks at The Atlantic in the way it ignores the NY Times - the pond is stuck on its hive mind lizard Oz track - despite the many pleasures and temptations that path would offer...
In much the same way the pond is likely to miss the movie of the year, despite the immortal Rowe's best ticket selling devices...
