In which Our Henry dodges and weaves away from Thucydides to join the reptile budget jihad, and the bromancer also refuses to see what Xi said ...

 

It being Our Henry day the pond thought it might open with a little troll.

Over the past few weeks the pond has been spending time with John Lurie and the three seasons of short shows he made for HBO during the plague years, Painting with John.

Lurie's something of a polymath in that he's a musician, an eclectic jazz-inclined composer, an 'outsider' painter and an actor that delivers personal anecdotes in an enjoyably hammy way.

The series isn't epic in any way. Lurie paints, and as well as the anecdotes, does attempt some slapstick interruptions, of a vaguely surreal kind (e.g., an animated cowboy romp positioned in his artwork), some of which work and some which struggle. 

All are over quickly, as are the episodes, and throughout he's an amiable and likeable companion revealing something of his world (especially in the penultimate episode which showed him in the studio making the music for the series).

It turned out that the pond had other things in common with him, to quote from his wiki: 

In December 2023, Lurie condemned Israel's actions in Gaza as a "genocide" and Israel's apartheid system, stating on Twitter, "Apparently it is bad for your career to say you are opposed to genocide. But fuck it. I am opposed to genocide. I am opposed to apartheid. I am opposed to children having limbs amputated without anesthesia. (sic) You absolute fucks."

The pond realises that this might sound as if the pond and Lurie are in the same turf as Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Rand Paul's son, but commenting on the situation in Gaza (or the West Bank or Lebandon, as the slaughter and land grab continues there) is not to be anti-Semitic. 

In his show, Lurie comes across as an amiable old hipster, something the pond aspires to be, though without a shred of artistic talent.

Alternatively the pond could have begun by trolling Our Henry with a Chairman Xi reference.

As he sat directly across from Trump in the centre of a long oval table, Xi noted: "The world has reached a new crossroads."
"Whether China and the United States can transcend the so-called Thucydides Trap and forge a new paradigm for engagement between major powers, whether we can work together to address global challenges and bring greater stability to the world, whether we can jointly create a brighter future for bilateral relations — these are questions of history, questions of the world, and questions of the people," he said. (ABC here)

The utter, shameless cheek. Referencing Western Civilisation (and not just the brass bands).

And which is the ascending and which the descending power? The one that had to beg for help in opening the strait and ending the war of choice it started? Or the other one, sending massive numbers of EVs into the world?

And did mad King Donald have the first clue as to what Xi was on about? 

Crucially, was Our Henry ready to offer guidance on any of these matters this day?

The header: Anthony Albanese’s broken promises the death knell for public trust; Prime Minister’s abandonment of tax commitments risks devastating consequences for already fragile democratic fabric.

The caption for the gesticulating villain in chief: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s reversal on tax policy risks undermining public trust in government. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Dammit, the cunning sly old fox dodged and weaved, and stuck with the current reptile budget jihad, and so references to the ancient Greeks were out, with little else to hand for the five minute rant.

The reptiles seemed bored, and so offered Our Henry not a single visual distraction after that opening snap. (Perhaps the AI was feeling tired).

That didn't stop the old portentous pedant opening with a typical retreat to the eighteen century, with concomitant link to that bloody swinish Commie Labor party:
“Promises and pie-crust,” Jonathan Swift wrote in 1738, “are made to be broken.” Vladimir Lenin, who liked the line, treated it as a slogan. Anthony Albanese treats it as a principle.
The Prime Minister’s defence for repudiating assurances he had insistently reiterated – indeed, “for the 50th time” – is that Australia faces a crisis of intergenerational equity. But as Jonathan Pincus and I demonstrated on these pages, the claim is analytically incoherent and empirically threadbare. Nor, even if there were such inequities, would that justify the abrupt abandonment of repeatedly affirmed undertakings.
Serious governments seek democratic consent for contentious measures they had previously assured voters they would not introduce. John Howard did so with the GST: having ruled it out, he reversed openly, took it to the 1998 election, and proceeded only on the mandate he won there.
The reason the Albanese government has not followed suit is neither urgency nor necessity. It is fear: fear that despite the opposition’s parlous state, voters would punish a government that has spent freely, governed carelessly and is now poised to extract the greatest tax take in commonwealth history.
The budget’s own numbers make the reality plain. Even accepting Treasury’s assumptions, the budget measures will increase housing supply over the next decade by less than one-third of 1 per cent, while housing demand is likely to rise more than 15 times as quickly. This is not serious economic reform. It is a revenue grab wrapped in the language of moral urgency.
The inevitable result of that gap between political rhetoric and political practice is to corrode public trust. Trust, after all, is not a natural disposition; it is a social achievement, slowly accumulated and quickly squandered.

By this point in a very standard reptile jihad rant, some devotees of the hole in bucket man might be despairing. 

Fear not, Our Henry lives in the past and still labours to produce the odd sublime medieval insight:

The word itself reveals the point. The Old English “treow” lies behind both “truth” and “trust”; since at least the 15th century, “to trust” someone has meant to believe that when he says what he will do, he speaks truthfully. Governments can sustain trust only by being truthful and trustworthy – and the institutional form through which those virtues manifest themselves is the promise.

A promise is what binds words to conduct, declarations to action, and electoral consent to subsequent government. Governments owe fidelity to their promises not merely for their own political advantage; they owe it because a healthy democratic life depends upon citizens being able to assume and assess fidelity to public commitments.
The credibility of promises is also more broadly crucial to the viability of a free society, whose very essence is that people must order their lives amid continual uncertainty. Promises, including the promise that laws will not be changed capriciously, are what give individuals, families and businesses stable ground on which to plan. 

There came one more excellent reference, though sadly only twentieth century:

As Hannah Arendt wisely observed, they build “islands of predictability” in “the ocean of uncertainty” – islands that matter most to those with the fewest resources to absorb sudden policy shocks.
A young couple relying on an investment property to finance homeownership, a retiree dependent on hard-earned savings, a small business weighing expansion: all rely on governments meaning what they say.
But promises can only fulfil that stabilising role because they belong to the grammar of commitment: to the forms of obligation whose value lies in their relative insulation from changing convenience. A promise abandoned the moment it becomes burdensome is worth no more than the loyalty that melts away at the first sign of difficulty.
The preservation of credible public commitments is especially vital in Australia, where suspicion of the political process long predates contemporary disenchantment. Distrust of politicians was, as John Hirst emphasised, constitutive of the colonial polity itself. The men who entered politics were not thought fit to be trusted – and despite outstanding exceptions, many weren’t.

And let us not forget Burke!

The endless Australian debate over the accountability of parliamentarians reflected that suspicion. Both the Burkean trustee – who is guided only by the light of his own judgment – and the instructed delegate had their advocates. But it was the latter conception, entrenched by the emerging Labor Party, that ultimately prevailed. Labor parliamentarians were to be mere instruments: controlled by the ALP’s extra-parliamentary wing, bound by a pledge to uphold the platform and required to submit to caucus discipline on pain of political excommunication.
The Australian mass party thus emerged, from the beginning, as an institutional response to distrust: a mechanism designed less to cultivate confidence in politicians than to contain the risks they posed once elected. And Australian voters learned to scrutinise the distance between promise and performance with an intensity rare in comparable democracies. When that gap widened too far, confidence collapsed.
It is against this background that the events of the past three years must be seen. The Albanese government’s record on the central tax promises of two successive elections – stage three, superannuation, and now negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount – does not just constitute a litany of broken commitments; it constitutes the accelerated dismantling of an already tarnished public asset.
The predictable effect is an even more accelerated crisis of political representation. The four-decade arc from 1975’s 4 per cent third-party vote to 2025’s 34 per cent highlights its seemingly inexorable progression.
Those voters who have spurned the major parties are not ideological partisans of any third force; they are observant citizens who, having grasped what the parties no longer deliver, exercise the only sanction the system leaves them. Unable to meaningfully demand or expect faithfulness to a program from parties whose programs have ceased to bind, they withdraw their own faithfulness from those parties altogether.
The alternatives may not be especially attractive nor particularly unifying – but negative coalitions, aimed at punishing a detested foe, form more easily than positive ones precisely because they require only shared aversion rather than common aspiration. In these conditions, anti-system parties flourish, their capacity to aggregate voters a symptom not of democratic renewal but of democratic exhaustion.
To make things worse, governments confronted by a perpetually seething electorate are naturally tempted to govern through stealth and administrative manoeuvre, further impairing the trust whose disappearance produced the crisis of representation in the first place. And when a real, rather than confected, emergency arrives, they discover they can no longer summon the loyalties and willingness to sacrifice on which the survival of free societies ultimately depends.
No society can govern itself for long on the assumption that public language is merely tactical. Governments that repeatedly break faith with the electorate may secure temporary advantages. But they do so by undermining the confidence that policies announced today will survive long enough to shape behaviour tomorrow. As that confidence erodes, both the effectiveness of public policy and force of democratic authority unravel.
That is the deeper significance of the Albanese government’s conduct. It is not merely bad policy. It is the depletion of a civic inheritance that free societies squander far more easily than they rebuild. Yes, promises can be cracked like pie crusts. But in the end, public trust cracks with them. Lenin, sheltered by brutal authoritarianism, never had to learn that lesson. With the fabric of our democracy rapidly fraying, it is high time Anthony Albanese did.

It's a great pity that this is the last time the pond will spend in Our Henry's company for some time. 

That invocation of Lenin lacked subtlety and wit, and shows the old propagandist descending to the lowest level of Murdochian hackery, more Daily Terror or Currish Snail or HUN than Burkean trustee.

As for whether Burke betrayed his principles by defending both the American revolution and France's L'Ancien Régime, that'll have to be left to another day.

The pond will settle for the notion that anyone who thinks a politician won't break a promise if they feel the time is right is merely delusional. (And Our Henry has been showing signs of that for many a column).

And now having done the hard yards, the pond should show what the reptiles have been up to early this morning. Get ready to scroll:

Wall to interminable, endless wall ...

And oh dear, top of the reptile world ma, not another hideous uncredited (AI?) collage as the parrots got to work with the regurgitating lead (only the early version currently in the archive):

Sorry, that's as much as the pond could stand from the beefy boofhead in the reptile séance session, but kudos to yet another Jimbo discovering this terrifying fear and shock and horror moment:

EXCLUSIVE
‘This is a death duty by any other name’: Shock tax buried in Budget small print
On the back of the clampdown on family trusts, popular ‘testamentary discretionary trusts’ are a surprise inclusion in Jim Chalmers’ budget.
By James Kirby 

How the jihadists love their hysteria. What was it someone said about death and taxes?

And the pond will always give a mention to Geoff chambering his inexhaustible supply of rounds, for those who can waive their sense of existential boredom and give him a read:

COMMENTARY by Geoff Chambers
Coalition’s fork-in-the-road moment
Angus Taylor puts up biggest income tax reform proposal in a generation
The Opposition Leader will need to be well-briefed and prepared for the avalanche of misinformation coming his way.

Ditto the bouffant one, a devout and devoted cheerleader, andalways up for the jihad (though like many Australian men, he seems to have problems getting past the two minute mark. Only two minutes for the best two days ever?):

Libs’ best two days in their year of chaos
Angus Taylor has delivered his strongest parliamentary performance since the election after Anthony Albanese’s credibility crumbled over broken negative gearing promises.
By Dennis Shanahan
National Editor

And the canny Cranston was standing by to make up a triptych of jihadist reptile cheerleaders (though he too expired after two minutes. Only two minutes to celebrate the bluff of the year?):

Taylor calls Chalmers’ bluff on tax brackets
Angus Taylor calls Jim Chalmers’ bluff with bold income tax indexation that helps young people
Angus Taylor is committing to fully removing bracket creep for the first time in 44 years and ending a regressive and massive tax burden on younger Australians.
By Matthew Cranston
Economics Correspondent

The hapless reptiles had a hard time flogging this horse, and in another place James Massola was asking questions: If Angus Taylor can’t thread this political needle, his fate might be all sewn up (*intermittent archive link)

For Angus Taylor, the gamble at the heart of his budget reply is that his thoroughly orthodox economic and political response in such unorthodox times may fall well short of what is needed to turn around Coalition fortunes. The challenge for Taylor is unprecedented: never before has a Coalition leader had to win back so much support from both Labor and One Nation. In trying to thread the needle to win back both sets of voters, he must risk satisfying no one. And he may only get one shot at it.

It's all got to be worth a Wilcox:

The pond is by this point well over the reptile budget jihad, especially as there is no indication of how long this baying of the hounds will last. 

It feels interminable already, and so it was a relief to turn to the bromancer, doing what he's ostensibly paid to do, scribble a few notes on current affairs, though this day he could only last three minutes:

The header: Inside the Trump-Xi summit: How public praise masked a private power struggle; Trump came into this meeting wanting more, and needing more, and needing it more badly, than Xi did.

The caption for the snap showing Xi entertaining the visiting grandpa: Children hold Chinese and US flags, as US President Donald Trump, right, participates in a welcome ceremony with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Picture: AP

Sadly the bromancer wasn't up to the challenge of doing an Our Henry and referencing Xi referencing Thucydides, so the pond must stay in the dark on that score.

Instead the bromancer resorted to an opening animal metaphor, though if the pond was going to go bear, it would have joined the infallible Pope and gone Pooh:

Now on with the bears:

Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, the world’s two big beasts, the growling giant bears of international relations, had a love-in in Beijing.
The Chinese stage-managed the love-in brilliantly. They know how to treat Trump. There was, of course, red carpet. But there were also ranks of little children waving flags and singing their welcomes to Trump. (Oddly, the Chinese state often deploys little children in large numbers in international diplomatic extravaganzas – hard to imagine a Western government getting away with it.)
There were ceremonial presidential inspections of troops, a stylised military march past. The anthems played. The two presidents stood side by side as the world looked on.
Trump loved it, and fully reciprocated every gesture. “Many people,” he said, “are viewing this as the greatest summit ever.”
Trump likes people who flatter him: “It’s an honour to be here and it’s an honour to be your (Xi’s) friend.”
More than that, Trump said to Xi: “I have such respect for China, for the job you’ve done. You’re a great leader. I say to everybody, you’re a great leader. Some people don’t like me to say it.”

The reptiles interrupted the meanderings of the sundowning sociopathic narcissist in chief with an AV distraction, featuring an impeccably framed image in the way that only the reptile AI can do: Yoni Bashan wraps up a busy day in Beijing where Trump is making his first state visit since 2017.

For reasons known only to himself - the Thucydides angle was surely a glittering prize for a devotee of Western Civilisation wanting a war with China by Xmas - the bromancer stuck with the wretched grizzly bear metaphor, when he could have turned to an Eric-inspired big game hunter metaphor:

For some reason, the bromancer seemed to think that the sundowning demented mad King Donald might get oversaturated by ego-stroking. If only ...

Trump badly wants this summit to be a diplomatic and public relations success; so does Xi. So the oleaginous, mutual ego-stroking will reach and surpass saturation point.
There’s a fundamental difference between the two men, of course. Trump is a democratically elected leader, Xi is a dictator. But the two grizzly bears, underneath the fur, are strangely alike. They flatter, and they threaten. They coo, and they condemn. They kiss you, then they smack you.
When the Trump-Xi meeting went private, and got serious, the first issue Xi raised was Taiwan.
We know this because the Chinese news agency, Xinhua, put it out while the meeting was still going. If the issue is managed well, Xi told Trump, the relationship between the US and China can be calm and wonderful, a sign to all the world of how great nations should relate to each other. If it’s handled badly, this could lead to disagreement and even conflict.

In the end, the bromancer didn't know what to say, and didn't say it particularly well:

Velvet glove, iron fist.
Xi wants the US to water down its support for Taiwan. He also wants better access to hi-tech US semiconductors and long-lasting stability in the level of US tariffs on China.
Trump wants quite a lot more from Xi. Though he claims the US doesn’t need the help of any other nation in dealing with Iran, he dearly wants Beijing to use its influence in Tehran to push the mullahs towards a deal, any deal, some kind of deal with at least enough face-saving concessions that Trump can live with it.
He wants China to buy more US beef, soybeans and Boeing aircraft. Trump in fact wants a managed trade approach from both Beijing and Washington.
Trump desperately needs Chinese rare earths and critical minerals to replenish the weapons stocks the US has expended in such prodigious quantities in Iran. Since Beijing imposed a temporary ban on the export of rare earths and critical minerals to the US, Trump has gone easy on trade threats and bluster aimed at Beijing.
Trump is also, rather bizarrely, seeking $US1 trillion ($1.38 trillion) of investments by China in US manufacturing. He’s also said he wants China to be more open to US investment. Forget about decoupling. What does this mean for on-shoring, or friend-shoring, for national security-related production?

Doesn't the bromancer realise that by the end of the year aliens and their alien ships will have been revealed, and thanks to mad King Donald, a world government will be given unto the world before the year is out? (Sssh, they have those Men in Black zappers at the ready)

And so to a final gasp, where once again the bromancer must play a doubting Thomas:

According to the Chinese readout of the meeting, Beijing agreed to open its economy more to the US in agriculture, tourism, health and law enforcement. It’s notable previous trade agreements Beijing made with Trump’s administration have not been honoured.
Trump came into this meeting wanting more, needing more, and needing it more badly, than Xi did.
It’s hard to know, therefore, whether anything substantial comes out of the summit. Certainly there’s less tension, for the moment at least, between the two presidents, even if the underlying interests of their respective nations remain deeply at odds.

But are they deeply at odds? What about that ballroom mad King Donald has invited Xi over to see (or is that sea?) 

The way that rube Rudio was pointing and marvelling at the hall in which he found himself showed once again that ever since the Forbidden City Chinese emperors have known to keep the plebs in their place ... just like King Donald wants to do.

Take it away immortal Rowe ...

Special Faux Noise ballroom update (whatever happened to Fetterman? A Bill Leak moment?)

 

 Another in an endless supply of odd spots ...

In which the pond tries to cope with ongoing reptile budget hysteria and is reduced to a sobbing fit about the fate of billionaires ...

 

You could have knocked the pond over with a feather.

There was the pond deep inside the hive mind, only to stray and see this Ross Gittins' headline: It pains me to say nice things about politicians, but this is a good budget  (*intermittent archive link)

The pond hadn't experienced that level of heresy since the days the pond's mother, in her Tamworth Martin Luther days, dragged the pond off to dull, joyless proddie services (say what you will, and the pond says plenty, the tykes knew how to bung on a do for impressionable young minds).

It was like experiencing a black mass:

...To tell the truth, the courage Albanese has shown in proposing a budget as reforming as this one has surprised me. Until just a week or two ago, I was convinced he lacked the resolve to make anything more than the most urgent and unavoidable changes.
As for Jim Chalmers’ opposite number, Tim Wilson, he deserves great praise for the honesty of his position. As the Liberals’ Treasury spokesman, he is implacably opposed to any weakening of the negative gearing and the capital gains discount going mainly to well-off older men.
And then the Libs wonder why so few young people vote Liberal.

Even worse the pond stumbled across a couple of Grattan Institute lackeys at The Conversation:

Will this budget really make housing fairer for more Australians? It’s a good start

They would say that.

Surely any talk of sunshine was entirely wrong?

Yes, the tax scare gloom will likely infest the reptiles at least until the next election or the next budget, whichever comes first.

Giddy with alarm, the pond rushed back to the citadel of well-off older men (and the odd woman, the more decidedly odd the better).

Sure enough the reptiles were still in a frenzy,

Teams of reptiles flocked together to sound the alarums ...

Contrary to that Gittins, who needed to get git, this triptych of reptiles knew wot's wot about the suffering of younglings...

VICTIMS
Backfiring budget tax measures will hit Gen Z
Jim Chalmers has rejected indexing income tax rates while defending property tax changes that break election promises and could delay young homebuyers by up to a year.
By Greg Brown, Matthew Cranston and Julie-Anne Sprague

Victims! Blood on the floor, the knife in the water ...

Just look at the villain in the uncredited (AI?) collage showing the villain persecuting the younglings ...

The bouffant one was just below, dragooned into whine about broken promises...

COMMENTARY by Dennis Shanahan
PM’s plan to beat ‘liar’ accusations after broken promise budget
After months of Labor dominance and Coalition incompetence, there is a buzz in the House of Representatives as both sides can see a fight underway.

As if comrade Albo could trick the reptiles. It's fight time, and there's going to be plenty of biff in the schoolyard ...

There were a few victims the reptiles managed to step over on their way to the biff ...

Then there was more whining from carefully selected younglings, and what a team of reptiles gathered to help with the affray...

EXCLUSIVE
Young Australians say tax crackdown pushes home ownership further away
How Chalmers just made it harder for young Australians to get ahead
Labor’s tax grab in the name of fixing intergenerational inequity will punish the very generation they claim to be helping.
By Paige Fryer, Julie-anne Sprague, Cliona O'Dowd and Pamela Rontziokos

If you don't come away with heart shattered by those tales of woe, you must be like that selfish giant in Oscar Wilde's fairy story.

Ancient Troy, who spends a lot of time wandering in the past, went there again ...

40 YEARS ON
Keating’s warning echoes from the 80s
Paul Keating’s ‘banana republic’ warning echoes as budget spending hits record levels
Former Treasurer Paul Keating’s explosive ‘banana republic’ warning burst from him ‘like a truth fountain’ 40 years ago during a kitchen radio interview, as Australia faces similar spending and economic challenges today.
By Troy Bramston

The pond confesses to being completely bewildered and only a few sideways references helped shed some light ...

Inter alia: 

...The anniversary of the remarks that caused shockwaves across Australia comes in the week Jim Chalmers delivered his fifth budget with both spending and taxation projected to ­remain at their highest levels outside the pandemic since the “banana republic” warning.

...While Mr Keating was not commenting on the 2026-27 budget delivered by the Treasurer on Tuesday, his comments are timely and relevant given the spending and taxation challenges facing Australia.
At the National Press Club on Wednesday, Dr Chalmers bristled at comparisons with Mr Keating, his political hero, suggesting the economic challenge 40 years ago is not comparable with today.

... Dr Chalmers’ budget will see spending continue to grow next financial year and the one after, and reach 26.8 per cent of GDP.
Although Mr Keating introduced capital gains tax and fringe benefits tax in 1985, he also reduced the top marginal income tax rate from 60 per cent to 47 per cent and the company tax rate from 49 to 39 per cent while Treasurer. (It would later fall further.)

And then over on the extreme far right came the grumpy old codger himself, top of the reptile world ma, with a walk down memory lane that began with Lawsie ...(is there a youngling who has the first clue who that is/was?)

How Paul Keating’s ‘banana republic’ moment flicked the switch to savings
The treasurer was in a noisy kitchen at a wedding venue when the John Laws radio show called. The rest is economic history.
By Paul Keating

Amazingly there wasn't a single word about the current budget or Jimbo, just a lot of immodest glorification of the Keating treasurer years.

The pond couldn't see the point, except perhaps a hint of an implication that this Jimbo was no match for the banana republic man in his prime.

And that wasn't the end of it. 

There were more headlines ...

Sheesh, how could the pond cover all that? 

Punters would simply have to learn how to use the intermittent archive, though the pond could at least highlight one story that plucked at the pond's heart strings ...

Capital Gains Tax
Billionaires attack ‘crazy’ CGT plan that punishes success
From tech billionaires to storage kings, Australia’s elite entrepreneurs say scrapping CGT discounts amounts to economic self-sabotage.
By John Stensholt

Oh the suffering of billionaires ...

And so on and on... victims forced to go on the run ...

The reptiles were taking care of the most put upon, long suffering, and wretched of the earth ... and what joy it was to see the billionaires giving their due,

But it wasn't just the billionaires and the younglings. 

Over on the far right, there were sturdy men armed with cricket bats, ready to take a whack at things...

Labor courts the kids as the boomers reach for their cricket bats
Will Anthony Albanese’s U-turn on negative gearing and CGT discounts hurt the government? Probably not, but it will be a constant conversation starter in media interviews.
By Jack the Insider
Columnist

Jack at first seemed to want an each way bet ...

(A little verbiage later)...

Even worse as Jack reached the end, he entirely ignored Dame Groan's formula that suggested world events had nothing whatsoever to do with the Australian economy, and that the unfolding disaster was entirely Jimbo's fault ...

...One great food bowl of the world, the Mekong Delta, expects a 40 per cent reduction in rice crop yields this season with chemical fertilisers at a premium price in Vietnam, if farmers can get them.
Grain yields, especially wheat, are down almost 30 per cent in another of the world’s breadbaskets, Ukraine. The war-torn nation’s production of urea and ammonia has virtually ceased, leaving Ukraine to import chemical fertilisers for the first time in a century.
From the micro to the macro and back again, the shortage of chemical fertilisers means some people will starve while others will pay more to keep fed, and that rule extends to Australia where the agricultural sector routinely creates twice the food we consume.
A farmer friend in rural NSW said the price of nitrogen-based fertilisers has almost doubled while phosphorus is up 45 per cent.
Urea, he said, was available but at a price.
The double whammy of increased costs and reduced yields will flow through the global economy fuelling inflation, and that’s without considering the myriad other sector-by-sector economic impacts from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
Overall, more than three million tonnes of chemical fertilisers have been stalled in the Persian Gulf in the past two months. Supply of nitrogen is most critically affected as producers such as Qatar have shut plants because of gas disruptions and the threat of drone and missile strikes. A third of Australia’s urea comes through the Persian Gulf.

After some equivocation, Jack came down on the side of the boomers, and all was well in the hive mind ...

...Boomers do have the advantage of having seen this film before. For those who came in late – Gen X, Gen Y, Gen Z and so forth – one of the distinctly possible outcomes is global stagflation where high unemployment and desultory, if not negative, economic growth meets spiralling cost-of-living pressures, which turns to an economic cataclysm almost impossible to repair without economic growth, which becomes nigh on impossible in a major global downturn.
Stagnation killed governments around the world stone dead at the ballot box, from Jimmy Carter’s Democrats down. Stagflation would go on to bring down Malcolm Fraser’s Coalition government in 1983, re-elected only six years earlier, having sent Gough Whitlam and Labor to near-oblivion. No amount of government-promoted cross-generational ruckuses will help once the hard, enduring pain of a high-inflationary environment pervades the economy. Like the Fraser government, Albanese and Labor may survive one cost-of-living crisis but two would be a stretch.
Australian political history tells us that is when voters reach for their – we use cricket bats in this country. A well-aged Gunn and Moore Diamond sits in my garage and it is due a day out.

Is that why this ancient movie held some appeal?

Oh yes, freedumb boy and the beefy boofhead will knock up a century or two, or at least prove they could earn a spot in the English cricket team ...

The pond has only one further reptile to note ...

Jim’s budget has some tripwires for the nation’s start-up sector
The Treasurer’s capital gains tax changes could scar Australia’s growth potential for decades by discouraging start-ups.
By Petr Sedlacek

It's not just the younglings and the billionaires, it's the tech bros!

The prof was full of saucy doubts and fears, but all the pond could think about was the opening snap.

Was this snap of youngling athletics in any way related to, or a meaningful metaphor for the start-up sector? Judge for yourself:

Was there any upside in this wall to wall hysteria?

Yes, indeedy do. For some reason, petulant Peta had gone MIA ... just when she was most needed, what with the onion muncher needing her support, and the budget crying out for a rabid denunciation by her.

And for some reason no reptile spotted by the pond mentioned the gas spectre ...

With that elephant tucked away, after all that, roll on Friday, where hopefully Our Henry can link the current budget follies to the budgets and economies celebrated in Thucydides ...

How soon before we can forget all this budget blather and venture back into a sane world? 

It could be some time ...

In which the pond covers a few key reptiles - "Ned", Lloydie of the Amazon, and Dame Groan - covering the budget... (boring)

 

Despite the best efforts of the ABC, the scurrilous Seven network (see Media Watch), the Nine rags, and the climate science denying, anti-renewables reptiles of Oz, the pond is getting an EV to help with the transition to living down south.

This might sound like a knee-jerk response - after all, Trump’s Iran mess festers, and the world economy slouches toward crisis

But the pond has been to this rodeo before, what with this the third EV in the pond household. 

Once you've tasted this reptile-forbidden fruit, it's hard to get back on the ICE, gas-guzzling addiction.

If the pond hadn't been making the move south, likely it would have settled for public transit.

As it is, being deeply conservative, the moment the pond saw a YouTube video asking "is this car too sensible?", the pond was hooked.

Actually the EV in question isn't in any way a leader. Slowish to charge, and with the "extended range" version risibly modest, the Geely EX5 is only a middling middle-class vehicle (unless you count the luxury of seats with a massage function).

With the Geely of Chinese origin, the pond is aware that Chairman Xi will use the pond's shopping data to invade and conquer Australia, but helping Uncle Leon and mad King Donald make Australia the 53rd state would have been more expensive (and they happen to be doing more to ruin the planet than Xi at the moment). 

And so to this day's tour of duty, and as anticipated the reptiles were in a state of high budgetary excitement and high dungeon ...

The pond had to cut the reptiles off at that point, and to be honest, the pond's eyes glazed over at the sight of that modest sampling, because the budget had very little of personal significance in it.

It was Brownie who was given given top billing, accompanied by an appalling uncredited (AI?) collage and an even more appalling lesser Leak cartoon making a play on "The Joy of Tax".

Luckily the intermittent archive was working, and even more joyfully the saved copy was stripped of the lesser Leak:

2026 federal budget: Full breakdown of every major announcement
Jim Chalmers has unveiled billions in net tax increases, with a hit on housing investments and trusts easily outweighing the cost of a new $5-a-week tax cut.

The pond also made only dishonourable mentions of two of the most boring reptiles in the lizard Oz hive mind:

Analysis
Jim Chalmers just became the highest taxing treasurer of all time
New tax changes on capital gains, negative gearing and trusts will raise more than $100bn over the next 10 years.
By Matthew Cranston

That canny Cranston outing began with the heavily recycled lesser Leak, so the pond wasn't being a tease by cutting it off. 

Anyone who wants to assault their eyeballs can do it in the privacy of the archive.

The completely tedious Geoff chambered one of his seemingly endless rounds.

Let off the leash, battler Jim finally shows his true colours
Chalmers has grasped the big tax stick and fulfilled his dream of becoming a Labor treasurer who wages class warfare in the 21st century.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

The old "class warfare" angle eh Geoff? 

"True colours"? 

Karl Marx meets Cyndi Lauper?

What an inspired reptile you are, and no doubt an inspiration to the hive mind. The pond guesses someone has do it, and when it doubt, break glass and pluck out some reptile with a limited imagination.

When the pond wants to be bored by the reptiles, it will always turn to a master of the art, "Ned" in full blown natter mode ...

The header: Survival of the fittest: how the 2026 budget rewires Australia’s housing market; The Albanese government risks everything on property tax reforms that could trigger a generational political war over Australia’s housing market.

The caption for the boring snap showing houses with black roofs, undoubtedly the best way to prepare for global warming: Labor’s surgery on negative gearing seeks a generational bonus for the government with younger voters.

Surprisingly "Ned" could only manage four minutes boring socks off feet, perhaps because there wasn't enough time available for him to borrow the thoughts of others and recycle them.

What he managed on his own was direly predictable:

This budget is a political and economic reset for the Albanese government.
Its forecasts are optimistic, it imposes tax increases on assets, it enshrines a reformed NDIS as the linchpin of its fiscal future and, above all, it seeks to keep Labor on the offensive as the status quo falls apart.
It is a budget of rival worlds.
Jim Chalmers calls it Labor’s most important, ambitious and responsible budget – but for the nation these economic reforms don’t reach deep enough to recharge productivity, puncture a decade of deficits, and deliver serious personal income tax reform.
But it virtually guarantees a political war over tax.
Labor’s surgery on negative gearing for property and replacement of the 50 per cent capital gains tax discount to “restore the taxation of real gains” is an audacious strike at a weakened Coalition, and seeks a generational bonus for the government with younger voters.
At the same time, Labor’s working tax offset – an annual $250 income boost from 2027-28 onwards for 13 million workers – creates a political test for the Coalition.
Do the Liberals support or oppose it, given their pre-election tax rejection blunder last year? In truth, they should exceed it.
Taylor’s challenge

Oh hang on, that sub-heading reminded the pond that it has the perfect 'toon for any talk of prime Angus beef's challenge ...

Nothing like a Hitchcock joke for those who can dimly remember the 1950s, as "Ned" tried to help the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way (watch out for the cornfield):

That means enabling Angus Taylor to outsmart Labor by pledging in his Thursday budget reply to index the personal income tax scale, a superior reform that would upstage Labor, reinvent Labor’s move, and market the Coalition with the type of bold tax reform it desperately needs.
Frankly, it is hard to see Taylor dodging this chance.

The pond was disappointed "Ned" didn't give "class warfare" a run, and instead settled for "political war", The stage is set for a political war on tax reform. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman.

"Ned" got into the weed and the numbers ...

A defining feature of the budget is the herculean transformation in the purpose of the NDIS. It is projected to reduce scheme payments by $184.9bn in the years to 2036-37.
Once an icon of Labor social conscience, the NDIS now becomes the mainstay of Labor’s budget savings over the coming decade and its capacity to get the budget to surplus in 2035-36. 
The NDIS growth is estimated to average only 2 per cent over the forward estimates – a task verging on the improbable – before returning to 5 per cent from 2030-31. If the savings aren’t delivered, then fiscal policy doesn’t work.
The Treasurer is proud that in this budget, savings from spending restraint is almost three times savings from higher tax; again, that’s the NDIS story. 
Anthony Albanese and Chalmers have wilfully embarked on their negative gearing-CGT changes calculating they can overcome the broken promises legacy, judging that the public is more ready for reform than in 2019 when Bill Shorten ran these initiatives, and branding them as generational equity. 
That’s deceptive, of course, giving that gross debt in this budget breaks through the $1 trillion barrier – the ultimate generational inequity. The negative gearing-CGT reforms deliver only modest extra revenue across the forward estimates running at $3.630bn, which doesn’t compensate for the $250 working tax offset that costs the budget $6.380bn over the same period. But these assets tax increases generate a windfall over the decade. Indeed, the total tax changes improve the budget bottom line by $77bn out to 2036-37. At the heart of the fiscal policy lies a deception.

Inevitably there had to be a snap of the main villains,  Treasurer Jim Chalmers is congratulated by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese following the delivery of the 2026-27 budget. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman.

Left to his own devices, "Ned" quickly ran out of steam:

While the cash balance is the government’s preferred budget measure, the gulf with the headline balance is now respectively $150bn versus $264bn across the forward estimates. The latter includes a large number of off-budget items that distort and exaggerate the government’s fiscal credentials.
The budget prioritises maintaining living standards in the teeth of the Iran war and energy crisis, with extra commitments on Medicare, hospitals, aged care and housing. It radiates confidence in the outlook forecasting inflation peaking around 5 per cent, the labour market staying buoyant with unemployment not exceeding 4.5 per cent, and the crisis shaving growth next year to 1.75 per cent before kicking back to 2.5 per cent, still below the long-run trend.
Treasury’s more severe scenario of the Middle East conflict assumes the oil price peaking at $US200 a barrel and delivering a quarter of negative growth, persistent economic weakness, inflation rising above 7 per cent, and unemployment scaling pre-pandemic levels of 5 per cent. But Chalmers is adamant: “We would still avoid a recession.”
While Chalmers projects real spending growth is limited to an annual average of only 1.5 per cent out to 2030, the overall bigger government under Labor remains the status quo. Government spending as a proportion of GDP is 26.8 per cent in 2026-27, far ahead of the long-run trend, and stays above 26 per cent across the forward estimates.
The budget cash balance sits at a 1 per cent of GDP deficit across the current four years but since mid-year the deficit across the forward estimates has been cut from $195bn to $150bn, a huge improvement dominated by a revenue surge, with economist Chris Richardson saying “war and inflation” delivered this boost to the government “on a platter”.
In short, it came via an economic gift, not by Labor decision-making. 
This is not a transformational budget for bottom-line fiscal policy. The budget will remain in deficit for the coming decade.
It concedes that productivity gains will emerge over a longer period. Living standards for most people will remain under pressure.
But the budget constitutes a significant repositioning for Labor.
It puts the government on to a new pathway. Albanese and Chalmers have shifted policy to retain the political initiative, reset tax priorities, pitched to a younger generation of voters, fused economic resilience and national security, and created conflict to better define their convictions. 
This is a second-term preparation for the next election.

It's an election platform? 

Oh well they've lost, because you'd have to scour the lizard Oz from top to bottom for a positive response, or even a kind word, and then you'd come up short.

Speaking of platforms, the pond was delighted to see that the infallible Pope had at last returned. The pond had been worried about him, but no doubt he needed the break, as we all do ...

The pond was startled and shocked to see Lloydie of the Amazon emerge from the jungle to ring the climate science denialist alarum bell, again with a wretched, uncredited (AI?) graphic at the top of the offering:

The header: Budget 2026: Capacity Investment Scheme the hidden green debt bomb; For taxpayers and energy users, this massive renewables scheme threatens a repeat of the NDIS.

The pond has almost forgotten Lloydie of the Amazon was a reptile thing, and this time the hapless lad could only manage a two minute outing to shout fear, rage and beermb ...

There is a potentially multi-billion-dollar green debt bomb hidden in the federal budget that for taxpayers and energy users could one day be a repeat performance of the NDIS.
While attention in the budget was focused on tinkering with current programs and limiting any reference to net zero, the sting in the tail is what might happen to the Capacity Investment Scheme that is designed to underwrite future large-scale renewable energy developments.
The CIS is listed in the budget papers as a contingent liability, alongside the Snowy 2.0 hydro electric scheme, which has already blown out in costs by billions.
According to the budget papers, “The Australian government’s maximum liability and estimated payments under these (CIS) agreements are not for publication due to commercial sensitivities”.

At this point the reptiles interrupted with an AV distraction, which began by offering an exquisite framing of a beard. 

Does Lloydie boast a toilet bowl beard? Who knows? Who cares? Graham Lloyd on the key energy changes the government plans to bring in with their 2026 Budget.

Lloydie carried on, giving "potentially" and "potential" a massive hard ride, though to be fair "could" and "likely" were also given an outing ...

If what is happening overseas is any guide, the scheme could represent a massive potential liability for the commonwealth – the British equivalent has grown to £90bn on the national budget, with a cash cost of between £1bn and £2bn a year.
The eventual costs will likely dash the hopes of Finance Minister Katy Gallagher, who this week said it would be unsustainable for the government to indefinitely continue “supercharged spending” on the net-zero transition.
Labor commits $12.3bn in new net zero spending
Her sentiments were not mirrored in the budget papers, which disclosed $12.3bn in new net zero spending commitments over the forward estimates and $18.2bn over the medium term.
The action is taking place off-balance sheet, however, where billions are being spent assisting climate-focused investments.
In his budget speech, Jim Chalmers said the Albanese government was “progressing the most significant reforms to the National Electricity Market since the 1990s as the world moves to net zero – including to attract more investment in renewable energy and increase competition”.
The CIS is designed to help deliver the government’s 82 per cent renewable electricity by 2030 target with an additional 40GW of capacity by 2030.
The Powering Australia plan
It complements other programs under the Powering Australia plan.
This includes rewiring the nation to build the network of high voltage transmission lines. The CIS is supposed to support about $73bn in investment in the electricity sector but things already are not going to plan.
Winning bidders in tenders so far are lobbying to renegotiate contracts that set a floor and ceiling price.
Under the terms of the underwriting agreements, once the projects are built and operational, if the actual revenue earned by a project is below the agreed revenue floor, the Australian government will pay the project operator 90 per cent of the revenue shortfall up to the agreed annual cap for 15 years.
If the annual revenue earned by a project exceeds the agreed ceiling, the project operator pays the Australian government 50 per cent of revenue above the ceiling up to the agreed cap.
Because CIS payments depend on uncertain future electricity prices and project revenues, the exposure is disclosed through fiscal risk statements rather than through a large, explicit budget provision.

And that, luckily was that. 

Let's hope Lloydie of the Amazon returns to the jungle like a Japanese soldier unaware the war has ended, so that we might hear from him potentially in a decade or so with his potently potential insights.

Another reptile deciding to end with a whimper rather than an intergenerational bang ...

And where would the pond be without the triumphant return of Dame Groan as the capper, boldly proclaiming "we'll all be rooned", as if referencing The Castle yet again was some sort of new insight she was peddling. (Can't someone show the old biddy Muriel's Wedding so she can go around saying "oh you are terrible Jimbo"?)

Again Dame Groan was launched into the world with that hideous recycled and uncredited (AI?) graphic suggesting that the lizard Oz's budget was in as much trouble as the country. 

Poor Dame Groan, forced to make out with Brownie's graphic, like Dolly made to wear rags and patches:

The header: Fifth time lucky for Jim? Tell him he’s dreaming; It’s almost comedic the lengths to which Jim Chalmers is prepared to go to ensure no blame is attributed to his actions.

Amazingly the old chook could only lather up a three minute groaning about dire Jimbo:

The second week of May is ­traditionally a time of great excitement for a federal treasurer. It’s the culmination of many meetings, decisions made and marketing plans mapped out.
Most of the budget details are strategically leaked, although some are held back so some interest lingers when the treasurer does rise in the house to deliver the budget speech.
Notwithstanding all this hard work, including for the Treasury bureaucrats putting in long hours, most budgets are quickly forgotten.
All that flowery rhetoric about the outstanding job the government is doing to manage the budget and oversee an improving economy simply falls on many, many deaf ears.
There have been exceptions. When Wayne Swan got up to announce four budget surpluses in 2012, we all got a good laugh.
Mind you, most of us can’t remember anything else about that budget.
The 2014 budget was a bit of clanger when Joe Hockey proposed a series of cost-cutting measures that hadn’t been previously mentioned and ultimately never passed parliament except for the income tax surcharge. (There is an important message here: the changes announced in budgets almost always require legislation, which does not always eventuate.)

Inevitably there was a snap of Dame Groan's foe: Treasurer Jim Chalmers takes questions from the media on arrival to Australian Parliament House ahead of handing down the 2026 budget on Tuesday night. Picture: Getty Images

The pond means no disrespect, but the old biddy could do with something a little less terrifying than that ominous ogre, who always sets her off ...

As she has done many times before, Dame Groan was determined to downplay the dire straits the world has been plunged into by mad King Donald.

(And who knows where the tariff wars will be after the mad King's visit to China?)

Dame Groan was determined not to let Jimbo wriggle off her hook, or escape her baleful ancient mariner eye:

This is the fifth budget Jim Chalmers has handed down. It carries on the theme that ­whatever has gone wrong with the economy or the hardship that ordinary folk have been feeling has nothing to do with his government.
Indeed, there is a whole box in the budget papers on the drivers of the recent increase in inflation but no mention of the role of excessive government spending.
It’s all about the war
It’s almost comedic the lengths to which Chalmers is prepared to go to ensure no blame is attributed to his actions.
Now it’s all about the Iran war, but it was the war in Ukraine before that.
The reality is these wars have made a net revenue contribution to the budget through the impact of higher commodity prices.
Talking of comedy, some of the tables in the budget papers look particularly weird. This fin­ancial year, the CPI is expected to increase by 5 per cent, but next fin­ancial year (and across the forward estimates), annual inflation miraculously returns to 2½ per cent. How good is that?
Obviously, Jim knows something about what is going to happen in the Strait of Hormuz that no one else does.

The caption for the next meaningless snap was a little Sir Echo of Dame Slap's line ... Does Jim Chalmers know something we don’t about the Strait of Hormuz? Picture: AFP/US Navy

None of this sort of nonsense please ...

With the notion that Australia had anything to do with the rest of the world and its fortunes banished from the old biddy's mind, she could sail on in her denunciation of Jimbo, and the pond could do a Donald and nod off (eyes closed means the pond is just blinking):

We’re also told not to worry about the decline in real wages this financial year because there will be (assumed) real wage growth in the out years.
Marginal reductions in underlying cash deficits forecast in the budget compared with the 2025 MYEFO are hard to take seriously. A difference of $3bn when the government is spending $830bn carries no bragging rights.
Chalmers is also deliberately misleading when he talks about savings and the budget being in better nick. He was very keen on the figure of $114bn as the savings and reprioritisations going into this year’s budget. The problem with this figure is that it’s a gross figure, not net.
Only the bottom-line matters, not the creative accounting he applies to arrive at a politically appealing figure. By 2029-30, gross government debt is expected to be $1.193 trillion or 35.6 per cent of GDP. This is up from $982bn next financial year, or 33.1 per cent of GDP.
Net interest payments go from $19.9bn to $31.7bn – a massive increase of 60 per cent.
This year’s budget adds another $64bn to these gross savings and reprioritisations.

Imagine the pond's disappointment that Dame Groan didn't reach for low hanging fruit, one of her stock in trade items ...

Instead she just resorted to a billy goat butt of uncertainty and assumptions ...

But here’s the thing: these savings are dominated by assumptions that apply to the immense scaling back in the NDIS. It’s worth quoting from the budget papers here. “Nominal growth in the NDIS is projected to decline from over 10 per cent in 2024–25 to an average of around 2 per cent between 2025–26 and 2029–30.
“As a share of GDP, NDIS ­expenditure is expected to decline from 1.7 per cent in 2025–26 to 1.6 per cent in 2028–29 and 1.5 per cent in 2029–30. Without the government’s recent changes, NDIS expenditure as a share of GDP would have been projected to exceed 2 per cent by 2029–30.”
Let’s be clear: there has never been a program that had been growing at more than 10 per cent being scaled back so drastically, so quickly. It beggars belief that the government will not face fierce blowback from affected groups, particularly as the useful reform of attaching co-payment to the scheme has been ruled out.
At least, the budget papers clarify the overall net saving figure. “Over the five years to 2029–30, net policy decisions improve the budget by $26.1bn, when accounting for previously made provisions.” That’s $5bn a year, close to a rounding error.

That's it? Wouldn't it have been simpler and quicker to just scribble "we'll all be rooned", and not finish with a whimper rather than a bang with talk of a "rounding error"?

The pond is certain that the budget will echo through the hive mind for days to come, but speaking of "butts", there is possibly a bigger game afoot than the reptiles v. Jimbo ...

And on the upside, it could be a whole lot worse, as Little England sinks into a mire and a deep funk:

In which the pond tries to cram all the reptiles into a hearty stew, with Dame Groan, ancient Troy and the bromancer as the succulent bits ...

 

The pond would like to begin the day by boasting how it's boycotting Eurovision, but as the pond has never watched the show, that's a tad hard. 

To the consternation of the pond's gay friends, the pond has always said it would be rather be struck deaf and blind than take in that cacophony of trash, and so it will continue.

And now before beginning this day's reptile tour of duty, the pond was startled to see this story, and in the WSJ  of all places ...

Talk about complete cheek and a colonial, or rather expansionist imperialist mindset..

More of the yarn here...

Israel Built and Defended a Secret Iran War Base in Iraq (*intermittent archive).

And now to the tour of duty, and the pond will confess that in its enforced absence, it will miss the old biddy's groaning into the digital ether.

That's why the pond gave Dame Groan pride of place, especially as she's still blathering on about the "vibe":

The header: The Treasurer is talking up tax reform, but the facts don’t add up; Tuesday night’s tax measures look set to fail the tests of efficiency, equity and simplicity but Jim Chalmers will still claim to be a reforming treasurer.

The caption for the outrageously laughing Jimbo, as he (allegedly) deals death, destruction and woe to the country: Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Picture: Martin Ollman/NewsWire

It wouldn't matter a brass razoo what's in the actual budget, or what Jimbo did, or attempted to do.

In Dame Groan land, we'll all be rooned by Jimbo. He began by rooning us, he continued rooning us and this will just be the latest example of roonation ...

So the old biddy squawked, so the old biddy still groans ...

There was a time when Paul Keating declared that all the pet shop galahs were talking about microeconomic reform. If you believe many members of the press gallery and progressive commentators, those pet shop galahs are now squawking about tax reform.
You know the sort of thing. What do you want? Tax reform. When do you want it? Now.
It’s important in this context to question the objectives of some of those who participate in this debate. It’s generally about the vibe rather than the facts. Loose terms such as intergenerational equity, social cohesion and young people getting a fair crack are used to justify radical changes that had been explicitly ruled out by Labor in the election campaign.
Take the case of the tax on gas exports, a proposal that was loudly launched by various left-leaning individuals and groups over the past several months. The idea was that a 25 per cent export levy could potentially raise billions of dollars annually and wouldn’t cause any harm to domestic gas users.

The reptiles interrupted this groaning with a shot of the perfidious document in preparation: Production of the 2026-27 federal budget papers enters its final secure phase in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman/NewsWire

As always, Dame Groan was gobsmacked. The thought of questioning Japan's ability to mark up our gas to extraordinary levels as it onsells the gas was nothing short of delusional, if not downright treacherous:

The naivety in this idea was breathtaking. The levy would not be paid by the gas producers, but by the customers. The delicate state of trade-related international diplomacy would be significantly unsettled, including our need for imported fuel.
But here’s the real rub: the proponents of this idea were not unhappy with the notion that this tax impost would deter further investment in the gas industry in this country. Indeed, this is seen as an upside of the policy. When it is pointed out that the investments on the east cost LNG industry would never have occurred had such a levy been in place, they regard this as missed opportunity.

Just to rub it in, Jimbo was shown clutching a copy of his wicked text, like some Satanic worshipper of evil: Jim Chalmers receiving his copy of the budget. Picture: Instagram

That snap of the man rooning the country (allegedly) sent Dame Groan off on a wild, extended groaning ...

When thinking about tax reform, there are three key criteria: efficiency, equity and simplicity. The aim should be to raise a certain amount of revenue at the least economic cost and as simply as possible while meeting equity objectives. Changes to the tax code should also be judged as a whole, rather than as individual measures.
There is also an important dictum – an old tax is a good tax. What this means is that the compliance costs are essentially sunk and the decisions made by individuals and organisations are based on long-established parameters in the tax code.
This is particularly important for investments in assets held over long periods of time. It’s also why grandfathering any changes is essential – to stay true to the basis on which legitimate decisions were made.
Having explicitly ruled out changes to the capital gains tax and negative gearing, it now seems likely Tuesday’s budget will contain some significant changes on both fronts. The trouble for the Treasurer is that the consequences, both intended and unintended, of these changes are difficult to predict. There will be both short-term and medium-term effects.
One potentially serious consequence of altering the capital gains tax is the impact on start-ups, and entrepreneurship more broadly. The owners of start-up businesses often forgo current income for years in anticipation of reaping the benefit of a significant capital gain. They may also partly pay the staff in equity to conserve scarce cash.
It is interesting to note here, in Canada’s recent botched attempt to increase its rate of capital gains tax, there was a specific carve-out for start-ups. Commercially savvy Prime Minister Mark Carney at least understood the importance of this aspect of the change.
There is also likely to be a wrinkle to the change to the capital gains tax arrangement: the special deal that applies to superannuation funds is likely to be preserved. (Had this not been the case, we would have heard a great deal of wailing leading up to the budget.) What this means is that a further arbitrage will be created for investments by superannuation funds, entities highly favoured by Labor.
When it comes to negative gearing changes, the exit of individual investors in real estate – many mums and dads – may be replaced by large corporations managing large numbers of properties in a hands-off way. This is common in the US, for instance.
Companies can deduct all the costs of investment from their taxable income and will thus be favoured if the benefits of negative gearing are denied to individual investors. Ironically, some of the current investors with multiple properties – they attract particular scorn from the progressive crowd – may be able to establish companies that own the properties. Save for the transaction costs of the transfer, these investors may end up being no worse off.
The seeming aim of these changes is to tilt the playing field in favour of first-home buyers by discouraging investors. One problem is that many properties attractive to investors are not attractive to homeowners, particularly those with families.
There is also the potential problem of rising rents caused by the loss of the benefit of negative gearing and any increase in the capital gains tax. Investors will naturally focus more on cash flow rather than the ultimate capital increment.
This will make it harder for renters to save up for a home deposit, even the 5 per cent variety. For forever renters – and there is a substantial cohort of them – this will be unambiguously bad news.
There is also talk about changes to the tax arrangements that apply to trusts, including a minimum 25 per cent tax on trust income. Many years ago, the Coalition government toyed with the idea of altering the tax of trusts but concluded there were so many complications that it would simply end in tears.
Just think about it: there are discretionary trusts and unit trusts. There are testamentary trusts and disability trusts. There are trusts associated with superannuation and funds management. There are trusts attached to companies. There are trusts that hold farms over the generations. Many small businesses are set up as trusts.
It simply cannot be a one-size-fits-all. There is also some serious misunderstanding of how trusts work and how they are taxed.
In the case of a vanilla family trust, all income must be distributed each year, and tax is levied at the marginal rate of each beneficiary. Children under the age of 18 are taxed at a punitive rate. Losses cannot be distributed. In many cases, trusts are established to protect assets, not for the purpose of tax minimisation.
For wealthy families, establishing a minimum rate of tax will make no difference. This is not so for struggling small-business owners or other trust beneficiaries.
Excluding farm assets from the change is also fraught. An incentive will be created to include some farm-related assets within existing trusts to qualify. This is surely not an intended outcome.
I come back to those three criteria: efficiency, equity and simplicity. When judging the changes that will be announced on Tuesday night, bear them in mind. On the face of it, it seems highly unlikely that efficiency will be improved, particularly as any significant cuts to income tax won’t be part of the package. Simplicity will be sacrificed, without a doubt. The equity effects will be very unclear apart from damaging existing asset holders.
But Jim Chalmers will claim to be a reforming treasurer, which is what this is really all about.

Case closed. 

Nothing Jimbo could do could possibly have impressed Dame Groan, because she's got his number (allegedly). 

She's got the vibe.

We'll all be rooned, and likely before the year is out, and it has nothing at all to do with mad King Donald rooning the world's economies...

There was other reptile budget coverage, but the pond wasn't tempted ... not even by a canny Cranston EXCLUSIVE ...

EXCLUSIVE
Tax bracket creep will eat Jim Chalmers’ ‘WATO’ budget cash splash handout in financial year 2027
Jim Chalmers’ budget sweetener will only return half of what bracket creep costs average workers, while a 30 per cent capital gains tax looms.
By Matthew Cranston

... even though it began with an astonishing collage which shockingly was uncredited...

Goes without saying. Just as Dame Groan called the vibe, doomed before it even begins.We'll all be rooned, before the year is out...

Nor could the pond find room for indefatigable Geoff, chambering what seems an inexhaustible supply of rounds ...

COMMENTARY by Geoff Chambers
PM and Chalmers are in ‘sync’ and all smiles – but this is an ambitious Treasurer
Anthony Albanese and his Treasurer, whose ambition is undisputed, were all smiles as they met on Monday to discuss their trickiest budget to date.

Does this Jimbo seem ambitious?

Geoff says he is ambitious;
And, sure, as far as reptiles can go, he is no doubt an honourable man.
The pond speaks not to disprove what Geoff spoke. 

Let this teaser trailer cry to the heavens ...

A Betoota analysis. Now there's the vibe. No wonder we'll all be rooned before the year is out ...

And now speaking of slinky seductresses, the pond should note this story, yet another reptile EXCLUSIVE ...

EXCLUSIVE
Hanson’s challenge to Coalition: Let’s get together to beat Labor (*intermittent archive)
Pauline Hanson demands the Coalition guarantee support for a One Nation-led government if it wins more seats than them at the next election.
By Rosie Lewis

The pond only offers that teaser as a further example of the way the reptiles at the lizard Oz continue to do mischief, a form of mischief-making denounced by the keen Keane in Crikey...

Everywhere the Liberals look, the feral right and their News Corp friends are killing them
The collapse of the Liberal vote in Farrer is only the end stage of a process that’s been underway for a long time — the destruction of the Liberal Party as a centrist organisation (Sorry,  possible paywall)

The Murdochians as sleeper agents? So the pond has been doing a Smiley ...

From there it was a natural segue to ancient Troy in the slough of despond ...

The header: Liberal Party faces terminal decline after catastrophic Farrer by-election loss; Losing one of its longest-held seats is a result that threatens Liberals’ survival, yet Angus Taylor is clueless about how to respond.

The caption for the oopsy daisy snap: Opposition Leader Angus Taylor at Lavington Public school polling booth on Saturday. Picture: Simon Dallinger/ NewsWire

To say that the pond enjoyed ancient Troy's four minute tale of woe and misery and despair is possibly an understatement:

Angus Taylor failed his first major test as Liberal leader, losing one of the Coalition’s longest-held seats at the Farrer by-election. He now leads a party with fewer MPs than when he took over just three months ago. Moreover, he has no viable strategy to deal with the existential threat facing the Liberals from the rise of not only One Nation but also the teal independents.
We are witnessing the continued destruction of the Liberal Party, uncertain of its identity and purpose, unclear about who it represents, losing members, voters and donors, and plagued by organisational and leadership weakness. The extremist far-right One Nation, which claimed Farrer with almost 40 per cent of the primary vote, will pose a major threat to the Liberal Party’s viability.

The chief villains in ancient Troy's yarn: Taylor and Senator Matthew Canavan chat wih a voter. Picture: NewsWire / Simon Dallinger

Ancient Troy couldn't resist another recounting of an origin story beloved by reptiles:

Farrer includes the border town of Albury, where the second conference to form the Liberal Party was held in December 1944. It took place at Mate’s Lounge over three days, and delegates agreed on a platform and constitution, structure and operating principles, with the goal of encouraging “individual initiative and enterprise”.
Eight decades on, Liberal tradition is being erased across Australia. I’ve noted before that every seat held by Liberal leaders, apart from two – Malcolm Fraser’s Wannon and Scott Morrison’s Cook – have been lost to Labor or independents. We can add Sussan Ley’s Farrer. It charts how the party has lost its heartland and is disappearing from the electoral map.
The loss of Farrer is directly related to Taylor’s Liberal leadership challenge to Ley in February, the party’s first female leader. Ley’s resignation was always likely if toppled by Taylor. But an opposition losing a seat at a by-election is extremely rare. Farrer was comfortably held by the Liberal and National parties since Robert Menzies led the Coalition to victory in December 1949.

Oh dear: Taylor and Liberal candidate Raissa Butkowski pose for photos. Picture: AFP

And still the unravelling continued, as Susssan was as graceful as she was when she conceded to the lettuce. 

Not like that humbug beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way, the wind turbine wonder:

Ley, travelling overseas, departed the leadership and the parliament with dignity and grace. She said nothing that could harm the party’s chances and gave no interviews. Taylor was given a clear run to defend and hold the seat. “I urge the Liberal leadership to accept this result with humility because the voters never get it wrong,” Ley said in a statement.
Taylor’s speech in the wake of defeat was extraordinary. “This by-election was always going to be a mountain to climb for the Liberal Party,” he said.
Yet it has been a Liberal seat since November 2001. “We have been a party of convenience, not of conviction,” he added.
Like conviction on lower taxes, deficits and debt? As shadow treasurer, he supported higher taxes and larger deficits than Labor.
“The Coalition hasn’t done what it should do: be united, stable and strong,” Taylor also noted. The Coalition did split; Nationals leader David Littleproud did face a leadership spill and later quit. But Taylor, too, has been part of that disunity and instability with his takedown of Ley.
The cost of toppling a leader is rarely factored in; this time it was the loss of a relatively safe seat. The result is that the Liberal Party has lost more of its heartland. The May 2022 election brought a warning that it was in crisis, but MPs, officials, members and past leaders routinely ignored it. Yet that was abundantly clear when voters bundled Morrison’s government out of office with brutal efficiency.
In Farrer, the Liberal Party was relegated to third place with just 12.3 per cent of the vote, a swing of 31 per cent since the May 2025 election. The incumbent party was almost wiped out. In the March 2026 South Australian election, the Liberal Party also came third with a miserable 18.9 per cent of the primary vote. The Liberal Party is going out of business.
While the focus is rightly on One Nation’s triumph, winning its first House of Representatives seat at an election, independent Michelle Milthorpe came second in Farrer with 28 per cent of the vote. The independent and teal movement – Milthorpe denies being a teal – represents another major threat to the Liberals having snatched several seats and (mostly) holding them. Labor could also be vulnerable to One Nation in the outer suburbs.

Then came a snap of the betrayed: Michelle Millthorpe lashed the Coalition for preferencing One Nation ahead of her.

Ancient Troy was inconsolable as he shouted his despair to the high heavens:

The Liberal Party’s task, as ever, is to return to the mainstream centre-right. It should not mimic One Nation’s xenophobic and nativist policies and rhetoric, as Taylor has done on immigration. One Nation has not changed; it is the same grievance rather than solutions- based, far-right extremist party. Most of its voters have given up on the major parties and are lodging protest votes.
It was catastrophic for the Liberal Party to direct preferences to One Nation. Coalition preferences helped delivered a One Nation victory in Farrer. This will keep happening, across Australia, unless the Liberal Party takes One Nation on, critiquing its policies and leadership, and preferences it last. One Nation is toxic to mainstream Liberal voters who have turned to Labor, teals and independents.
Yet shadow treasurer Tim Wilson is open to forming a coalition with One Nation. On Sunday, he did not rule it out. Those words will be an albatross around his neck. Labor’s 2028 election campaign strategy is written: vote Liberal or National and you may get One Nation in a three-party Coalition government. This will only hasten the Liberal Party’s demise.
At the conclusion of the Albury conference that formed the Liberal Party, Menzies spoke in response to a motion thanking him for his efforts.
“We have brought into existence for the first time in the history of Australia the Liberal Party of Australia,” he said. “This is the first occasion on which those of, broadly speaking, our political way of thought have established themselves on an Australian footing.”
That party, organisation, leadership and “political way of thought” have lost their footing. The Liberal Party looks to be in terminal decline without a radical rethink of its purpose, policies, constituency, organisation and leadership.
We may look back on Albury as the place where the Liberal Party was born and where it died.

"We may"?!

Oh come now ancient Troy, that's a fudge worthy of the beefy boofhead himself.

And now the pond will admit in this farewell tour to throwing everything at the wall, including the kitchen sink, knowing nothing will stick, but how could the pond leave out its most prized exhibit, another chapter in the deep thoughts of the bromancer?

Unlike wimpy, creepy ancient Troy, the bro was up for the fight. He was onion muncher mad, fighting fit and ready for a trip back to the future ...

The header: Hanson, Farage and Trump show centre-right must fight or die; To prove they are serious, Liberals must engage on net zero and elect Tony Abbott as party president, otherwise the party could be totally eclipsed.

The caption for the snap of the epic fails: Farrer candidate Raissa Butkowski with Angus Taylor, who did manage to mention net zero in his later speech to the handful of Liberals who stayed for their election wake. Picture: NewsWire / Simon Dallinger

The bro was keen for the beefy boofhead to maintain the rage, and pace the keen Keane, what better way that to go full King Donald, full mad far right climate science denialist?

Here’s a critically important take-out from the Farrer by-election. Almost 65 per cent of all voters chose parties that explicitly reject net-zero emissions targets. Yet for how long have we been told that it would be electoral death for any party to oppose net zero in principle?
The Liberals and Nationals were right to give preferences to One Nation, just as Labor preferences the Greens. On any measure, the Greens, whose policy outlook and rhetoric enable antisemitism and whose actual economic policies are nuts, are vastly more toxic than anything One Nation has ever been.
One Nation, in the way of many right-of-centre populist parties that sustain a parliamentary existence over decades, has moderated over the years. It is certainly no longer racist, if it ever was.
In Farrer, too much of the Liberals’ campaign was directed at badmouthing One Nation, rather than holding the Albanese government to account and offering a compelling economic and social vision for regional Australia. The failure to fight on net zero is key.

But there’s obviously a much deeper story to tell.

Uh huh, the deeper story is to join Pauline in her climate science denialism, thereby ensuring absolutely no product differentiation whatsoever. Bring on the seducer of reptiles: One Nation leader Pauline Hanson.

The bromancer was keen for the beefy boofhead to emulate such feats as the Brexit triumph...

Pauline Hanson, Britain’s Nigel Farage and US President Donald Trump are manifestations – and there are more on continental Europe – of the same underlying impulse. That is a conviction by sizeable numbers of voters that the political system no longer works. Not just that it no longer works for them, but that it’s gone wrong fundamentally.
Of course Trump, Farage and Hanson are wildly unalike. Yet all three evidence similar impulses and syndromes in similar societies. Trump is the most consequential disrupter. But Farage has already fundamentally changed British history. Without him, Brexit would never have taken place. A few days ago he won a staggering victory in local council elections held over most of Britain, and came second to the nationalist party in the Welsh assembly, pushing Labour into a humiliating third. Reform came equal second in Scotland, again humiliating Labour in a former heartland.

Speaking of manifestations, the pond regrets not having found a space for the immortal Rowe celebrating Nige and Sir David ...

Oh dear, speaking of more manifestations, not that scarf again: David Farley, the day after his election in Farrer.

Consider again the many virtues of climate science denialism, and not just an eternally stuffed planet to bequeath to the younglings. Everybody wants to stuff the planet, so why not join the cause?

If an election were held today, Farage’s Reform would go close to a majority. That doesn’t mean Farage will perform that well when an election finally arrives. Like Trump, Farage defies political niceties and orthodoxies, though he certainly is nowhere near as foul-mouthed or verbally undisciplined as Trump.
But consider, again, net zero. Farage is utterly contemptuous of net zero commitments and just won very big. Farage and the Conservatives combined score just under half the popular vote in Britain. They, and a couple of smaller parties, now thoroughly oppose net zero. Even Tony Blair says the Labour government should ease back on net zero, as so many other developed countries are doing, either pulling back their official targets or quietly going for more fossil fuel development and power generation.
Across Asia this is undisguised. In much of Europe, it’s happening a bit more shamefacedly. Almost the last true-believing net-zero governments are Keir Starmer’s Labour government in Britain and Anthony Albanese’s in Australia. Britain, in all its mess, is probably Australia’s future.
I mention all this because it goes to the heart of the Liberals’ contemporary dilemma. The Coalition has renounced net zero. But having done so, Angus Taylor and the Liberals almost never mention the fact. It seems they quietly try to reassure country electorates that they’re done with net zero, but do so in such a sotto voce way that they hope city electorates such as Wentworth and Kooyong won’t notice they’ve changed.

Could the reptiles resist slipping in a terrifying snap of an infernal windmill, the carcasses of dead whales just out of frame so as not to upset the hive mind? 

Of course they couldn't: The Coalition renounced net zero, but the failure to fight on it is key. Picture: Christophe Archambault / AFP

The bromancer pressed his point by conscripting his favourite Catholic scribbler, truly an indication of where his mind resides, an eternal Edwardian (born Victorian):

But here’s a simple law of political physics. Changing a policy then not campaigning on it doesn’t win you the support of those who hated the policy, nor does it win you the acquiescence of those who support the policy you’ve abandoned. As my hero, GK Chesterton, observed, it’s the willingness to die fighting that gives the brave soldier a chance of surviving a terrible battle, where the coward has no chance at all.
One Nation’s winning candidate in Farrer, David Farley, gave a stirring speech to his supporters after victory was declared. It was full of specific things he, and One Nation, wanted to do, among them tearing up net zero in order to once more produce cheaper power for Farrer communities. The Liberals should oppose net zero as economic policy.

Of course. What a vision. Stuff the planet and all will be well.

The reptiles decided to offer the prime Angus a little AV distraction: Opposition Leader Angus Taylor says the Coalition is now “strong” under his leadership. Mr Taylor said “we are back” and ready to work together with the National Party. “This will pay dividends over time, I will guarantee it.”

The bromancer pressed his point. The planet might be facing an existential crisis, but what a chance to get ahead by denying it was happening, or better still, making it even worse...

Angus Taylor did manage to mention net zero in his later speech to that tiny handful of Liberals who stayed for their election wake. Managerial politicians typically try to avoid conflict and hard choices. But especially in the era of populist disruption, politicians who don’t make and stick to hard choices die the coward’s death of a thousand cuts. The Coalition has had one big victory in recent years, defeating the voice. The Liberals were a quiver of indecision on the matter. Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s courage and conviction forced the Nationals to take a stand, and that forced the Liberals to follow. Then Nampijinpa Price and Warren Mundine’s brilliant, passionate campaigning won the day.
Initially, the polls were against Nampijinpa Price and Mundine. They did what’s meant to happen in a democracy – they won the public argument. Initially, the polls were against Farage on Brexit. He won the policy debate with the British people.
The Liberals face existential crisis. They must fight like hell to show they have convincing economic arguments and that must mean fighting on net zero. To have any chance of a centre-right government, they must exchange preferences with One Nation. One task is to beat One Nation on primary votes.
It’s similar in Britain. If the Conservatives enter an election campaign well behind Reform in opinion polls, voters who badly don’t want Labour in office will tend to vote Reform.
One way the Australian Liberals can show they’re serious is electing Tony Abbott as party president. He will galvanise the base, energise the party, project purpose, and he’s a gifted fundraiser who will work hand in glove with his friend, Taylor.
All mainstream centre-right parties face a choice: fight or die. As the old saying goes: if you must be a dog, make sure you’re an Alsatian.
Greg Sheridan is The Australian’s foreign editor.

Why didn't the pond think of that?

 Why does the bromancer always have the most perfect solutions? Bring back the onion muncher so that ludditism, far right fundamentalist, and climate science denialism might flourish one more time.

Yes, if you want to stuff the planet, make sure to stuff it in best far right Brexit fashion, and then we'll all enjoy the return to the days of the onion muncher of yore ...

And if you can't beat 'em, remember to join 'em ...

Further to the pond's opening, is the god of Israel inclined to genocide?

You betcha ... the things that you're liable to read in the bible start with a hearty genocide:

Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered. And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man: All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died. And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark. And the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days.

A mass extinction event, and more at the Skeptic's bible showing god willing to get down with it, and urging his people to do the same.

And then there's this ... perhaps a tad ponderous and pedantic, but convincing up against the genocide deniers:

 

So the current government of Israel, which has form, has some pretty impressive biblical verses to quote in aid of its ongoing ethic cleansing ...