In which the cavilling Caterist and the swishing Switzer hog the hive mind stage ...

 

Once upon a time the lizard Oz used to be known as the Australian Daily Catholic News ... but then came Zionism, to be followed by the new leonine Pope blathering on in ways most unsympathetic to the reptile stand ...

This year, I would first like to consider the importance of making room for the word through listening. The willingness to listen is the first way we demonstrate our desire to enter into relationship with someone.

Listen? WTF?

...I would like to invite you to a very practical and frequently unappreciated form of abstinence: that of refraining from words that offend and hurt our neighbor. Let us begin by disarming our language, avoiding harsh words and rash judgement, refraining from slander and speaking ill of those who are not present and cannot defend themselves. Instead, let us strive to measure our words and cultivate kindness and respect in our families, among our friends, at work, on social media, in political debates, in the media and in Christian communities. In this way, words of hatred will give way to words of hope and peace.

Refrain? Abandon words of hatred? Double WTF ... (here at the Vatican)

Sad to say, the alleged heirs of the Judaeo-Xian tradition were at it again today, as a way of starting off the week with a fresh round of hate speech ... with the reptiles marching to the drumbeat of the Major ...

Protest fools beat the drum for repression
Why do Western protesters who think they are speaking truth to power focus on Israel but stay silent about billionaire oil sheikhs and Iranian mullahs who run repressive regimes and fund terror?
By Chris Mitchell
Columnist

The reptiles had an alternative header featuring "ignorant fools", an irony of the first water because there's none so iggerant as a man always hunting for Order of Lenin medals.

Never no mind, so long as the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank goes on, the pond refuses to indulge the Australian Daily Zionist News, and anyone interested in this spin must report to the intermittent archive.

Ditto that's where they can find this sort of quaint echo of a 1950s slur ... as if that was sufficient to distract from what's being implemented by the current government of Israel ...

‘Anti-Zionist’ protests just same old Soviet-style hate
The Soviet Union perfected antisemitism without antisemites. It also ended up in the dustbin of history. Let’s hope the recent visit of Herzog marks a turning point we’re out of the shadow of Bondi.
By Paul Rubenstein

A look at the tag was more than enough for the pond ...

Paul Rubenstein is the NSW chairman of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council.

So the fix was in from the get go ...

The pond also flung cackling Claire into the same basket...

We made Grace Tame a hero. Then we moved on
Grace Tame and what happens when celebrity fades
Grace Tame’s chanting extremist slogans was offensive. But it also can be understood as an attempt to regain relevance after the media moved on.
By Claire Lehmann
Contributor

It's a fine example of the bitterness that happens when someone never had any celebrity outside of occasional appearances in the lizard Oz, and surely it's past time for this small portion of the hive mind to move on ... at least from quaint, Victorian, Thomas Carlyle notions of the "hero", and from the notion that someone might object to the ethnic cleansing being conducted by the Israeli government because they yearn, like Vlad the sociopath, for Soviet days, or because it's a way to stay in the cackling Claire spotlight ...

Meanwhile, the reptiles have flung themselves wholeheartedly into campaign mode - apparently we're going back to nuking the country again ...

EXCLUSIVE
Stop Bowen tariff, end mega spend: Taylor’s opening salvo
Angus Taylor to fight any carbon tariff as he seeks deal with Anthony Albanese on spending
Angus Taylor has sounded a warning on carbon tariffs, as he urges Anthony Albanese to establish a bipartisan taskforce to deliver a new deal between the major parties on spending cuts.
By Greg Brown

How weird did it get?

Asked if it would undermine Australia’s free-trade credentials and be viewed by the Trump ­administration as a tariff aimed at the US, Mr Taylor said: “Almost certainly. If you are pro-free-trade I don’t know how you can support these things."

King Donald is a free trader now, and we must seek to maintain free-trade credentials with him? 

Pull the other 100% tariff leg, Faux Noise down under ...

But it's not just Brownie EXCLUSIVELY going the brown nose in the alleged "news" section.

As always, that third rate sociology student and expert in the movement of flood waters in quarries was on hand to help with the campaigning ...

The header: Taylor is a political outsider. He’s ran his own race against the political machine; Angus Taylor has a deep disdain for the sniping and factionalism that are entrenched in the culture of the political class.

The caption for the wild-eyed cackler, doing a Marlon Brando imitation as an outsider, sayeth the Caterist: Angus Taylor holds a press conference at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

That still featuring the besuited, speckle-tied stern statesman reminded the pond of a competition it never got around to staging.

Which snap of the besuited beefy boofhead best conjures up the gang of Mafia style conspirators?

The pond has always been in two minds .... each have their charms, and if your focus is on the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way, how can you separate out and prefer one image of the sneaky ferret gawking at the camera with a look of furtive suspicion and paranoia over the other?

Never mind, moving on ...

The smart kids in Labor HQ fired their first pot shot at Angus Taylor within minutes of his election as Opposition Leader.
Even with the advent of TikTok, the narrative that brings down your political opponent should still contain an iota of truth. Taylor is not “just another Liberal”, which was the thrust of Labor’s pop-up attack ad last Friday, a clownish pastiche of the imagined sins of his predecessors, displaying their pictures with Taylor photoshopped into the corner.
More than 12 years after he entered parliament, Taylor, like Pauline Hanson, is still a political outsider. Hanson arrived in parliament at the age of 41, her outlook shaped by experience in the productive economy. Taylor, who was elected to parliament two weeks before his 47th birthday, grew up with the farmer’s instinct to fix the fence rather than sitting on the veranda bellyaching about who broke it.
In the era of professional politicians, where many parliamentarians have been in or around politics for their entire careers, Taylor and Hanson are oddities. They have succeeded within the system without becoming part of it.
Taylor is the opposite of Anthony Albanese, a creature of the machine, who was honing his factional skills while Taylor was making something of himself in a corporate culture where reward is inseparable from performance.
It goes without saying Taylor has the hardest job in politics. His KPI is to lead the Coalition into government but first he must stop Hanson from doing to the Liberal Party what it tried to do to her 30 years ago when it dropped her from the party ticket, assuming it would end her career.
He must stop the surge that has increased One Nation’s support base by 80,000 voters a week since the last election.

At this point the reptiles introduced a snap of the scarlet terror, One Nation leader Senator Pauline Hanson at a press conference in Brisbane. Picture: NewsWire / John Gass

The Caterist moved past the orange to celebrate the beefy Angus boofhead and his astonishing career ...

Those who view politics through a left-right prism are inclined to place One Nation to the right of the Liberals. It is the basis for the claim that Andrew Hastie, a conservative prepared to speak his mind, would have been better placed to win back the conservative dissidents. Yet Hanson is not a creature of the right or left on this outdated map of the political landscape, which fails to recognise the tectonic plates have shifted across the past three decades. Taylor and Hanson sit on the same side of the principal fault line that separates an assertive new progressive elite from the rest of Australia.
Taylor’s political instincts were shaped in his late teens at the frontline of the dispute between shearers, represented by the Australian Workers Union, then one of the most powerful unions, and graziers. Taylor, who had grown up in the company of shearers, recognised they were ill served by their shop stewards, intent on forcing a costly and sometimes violent dispute against a productivity-improving innovation: wide combs.
More than a decade before the advent of John Howard’s battlers, Taylor realised the Liberal Party, with its focus on aspiration, was a more natural home for the working class than an ideologically driven Labor movement.
It explains why, even at the Coalition’s historic point of weakness, Albanese is threatened by Taylor and why he will try to destroy him if he can. Labor knows Taylor’s track record as the member for Hume, a seat that included the once solid Labor town of Goulburn until it became part of Eden Monaro in 2024.
When Taylor won Hume in 2013, the Goulburn booths were among the most hostile to the Liberals in the electorate. In 2022, even under the pressure of a national swing against Scott Morrison, Taylor won the six Goulburn booths comfortably with 6440 primary votes compared with 3036 for Greg Baines, Labor’s hapless candidate. One Nation, for the record, polled 794.
At the last election, the western boundary of Taylor’s electorate moved more than 100km up the Hume towards Sydney, pushing it off the edge of the southern highlands. The eastern boundary brushes Liverpool and Campbelltown, encompassing the new mortgage belt of vast subdivisions that cluster around Western Sydney airport. It includes suburbs less than a decade old, such as Oran Park, where in 2021, before the rise in interest rates, more than half of households were making mortgage repayments averaging $2626, 30 per cent higher than the national average.
In 2025, Taylor survived the national swing against Peter Dutton in a radically redrawn electorate, becoming the only NSW Liberal to increase his majority.

The reptiles then decided to remind the beefy boofhead of his dismal failure ... The 2025 treasurers debate between Jim Chalmers (left) for Labor and Angus Taylor for the Coalitiion. (sic, the pond merely transcribes for the full reptile experience) Picture: NewsWire/David Crosling

Talk about ancient echoes ...

And then it was on to the last gobbet in the opening Caterist campaign ...

Jim Chalmers’ claim that Taylor is rich and entitled assumes voters won’t draw their own conclusions from his rural upbringing and the trajectory of his political career. Taylor’s pre-political career advising some of the world’s top businesses may have made him independently wealthy but he is no Malcolm Turnbull. Taylor has the confidence and good manners to rise above Turnbull’s undignified assertion that Taylor is an “idiot”. This intemperate remark dimin­ishes the standing of Turnbull rather than Taylor.
Taylor has a deep disdain for the sniping and factionalism that are entrenched in the culture of the political class. He has never taken up the habit of briefing against his colleagues, passing the buck or playing the victim card, although many have not given him the same courtesy. There may be merit to the criticism that he has yet to prove himself as a retail politician. Yet his first speech as Opposition Leader showed he has absorbed the lessons from Tony Abbott’s 2013 landslide on a platform of intelligent policy responses to pressing problems distilled into three-word slogans.
Taylor also has absorbed the wisdom of Howard, who weathered the first wave of Hansonism by governing according to his own convictions rather than opinion polls. After Hanson’s maiden speech in September 1996, Howard ignored the press gallery’s incessant demands that he join the conga line of condemnation. His judgment was vindicated in 2001 with the crisis over illegal boat arrivals and in the aftermath of 9/11, when his robust stance on border protection brought many conservatives who had flirted with One Nation back into the fold.
Taylor will succeed if he can recover the Liberal Party’s home turf, restoring the reputation it gained under Howard as the best party to protect borders, manage the economy and offer hope to Australians, young and old, that the next 30 years will be even better than the last.

That's the best they've got for the new piano player? Perhaps the honky tonk needs a tuning ...

The pond looked around for a bonus and thought simpleton Simon deserved at least an honourable intermittent archive mention ...

The RBA’s grim warning has delivered Taylor his opening script
After more than three years with his hands on the levers, can the Treasurer honestly look Australians in the eye and say they’re better off than they were before Labor was elected?
By Simon Benson
Political analyst

All hands on the reptile deck, all part of the new jihad which will fill the pages for weeks, as the reptiles nuke the news ...

Luckily the pond had an alternative - the enduring ghastliness of the swishing Switzer...

The header: The enduring ghastliness of Malcolm Turnbull; From The Guardian to the ABC, Turnbull delivers poisonous and deeply personal broadsides against Liberal leaders and the party he once led. The former prime minister has become the miserable ghost of Australian politics.

The caption for Malware, destroyer of worlds, or at least the NBN ...Malcolm Turnbull delivering the 2023 Australian Institute of Architects Griffin Lecture at the National Press Club of Australia in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman

The pond doesn't have much time for Malware, but it has even less time for the swishing Switzer.

The pond might even have been better off with the Zionists, but whenever the swishing Switzer bobs up, the pond is reminded of this yarn ... (*archive link)

Loons in glass houses, the dangers of stone chucking, and all that ...

Although it is cliche to say revenge is a dish best served cold, no Australian politician has embraced the maxim more assiduously than Malcolm Turnbull. Ever since losing the Liberal leadership in 2018, he has repeatedly lashed out at his former party, reserving particular fire for the internal opponents he faced while prime minister after succeeding Tony Abbott.
Turnbull remains the only federal party leader to have lost the leadership twice in partyroom ballots, and he is widely known to attribute both downfalls to conservatives who resisted his positions on the emissions trading scheme in 2009 and the National Energy Guarantee in 2018.
Turnbull’s interventions are too often cheap and unbecoming of a former leader of a great political party. Instead of reasoned argument, he defaults to abuse and denigration. The judgment may sound severe, but no former prime minister has descended so readily to this level. Hardly a week passes without him airing his grievances in public. From The Guardian to the ABC, he delivers poisonous and deeply personal broadsides against Liberal leaders and the party he once led.
At times, his bile borders on the comical. Consider his March 2019 interview with the BBC’s Andrew Neil, when Turnbull claimed his party defenestrated him in August 2018 because colleagues knew he would win the next election. An incredulous Neil replied: “You’re telling me your own party didn’t want you to win the next election? That’s not credible.” He then reminded Turnbull he had lost 40 consecutive polls in the lead-up to the coup.
Only someone as self-regarding as Turnbull could sustain the belief that victory was within reach; in his telling, after all, no one was quite as capable a leader as he. That, he insists, is why the party removed him – and why it instead gave Scott Morrison the chance to salvage the government, which he proceeded to do in May 2019.

The reptiles dragged in another snap ...The official prime ministerial portrait of former PM Malcolm Turnbull is unveiled at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman

Meanwhile ...  Think tank accused of ‘retaliatory action’ after staffer complaint about high-profile director (that's an intermittent archive link)

The pond realises that the swishing Switzer is desperate to be taken seriously, to come in from the cold ...but there's something bizarre about him rabbiting on about Malware doing damage to his reputation, as if doing damage to the NBN under orders of the onion muncher hadn't set him on the path of becoming a new kind of Ancient Mariner, a Malcolm Fraser in drag if you will,  in a never-ending quest for redemption ...

Since then, Turnbull has alternated between berating his successors and revising his own policy stances, often in ways that seem calculated to curry favour with urban progressives unlikely ever to vote Liberal. Consider the Indigenous voice to parliament. As prime minister, he rejected the Uluru Statement’s proposal as akin to “a third chamber” of parliament – indeed, he was the first to characterise it that way. Yet in 2023, he executed a conspicuous volte-face, only for the voice to be defeated in a landslide referendum.
After losing the leadership in 2018, Turnbull branded Morrison “deceitful”, “duplicitous” and a “liar”. In the lead-up to the last federal election, he labelled Peter Dutton a “thug”. And shortly after Friday’s Liberal Party ballot, true to form, he dismissed the new leader, Angus Taylor, as “the best-qualified idiot” to lead the party.
The only Liberal leader he has refrained from denouncing is, it seems, Sussan Ley – perhaps because they share a similar small-l liberal worldview, one that, according to the polls, has struggled to resonate either with the party or the broader electorate.
All this is surprising because many people once regarded Turnbull with genuine fondness and knew him, in private, to be capable of kindness and decency. As someone who previously praised his China policy – it was his government that enacted foreign interference laws and banned Huawei from the 5G network – I take no pleasure in saying that he is now doing real damage to his own reputation.
I have little doubt that Turnbull’s attacks on his former party form part of a deliberate strategy.
His apparent aim is to marginalise the Liberal Party’s traditional conservative wing and refashion it into a politically sanitised, quasi-teal vehicle. If that risks alienating large numbers of longstanding Liberal supporters, then so be it; the impression he conveys is that such losses would be a price worth paying. In this cast of mind, there seems scant room for dissenters from his positions on net zero, identity politics or mass immigration.
I confess to a measure of sympathy for Turnbull. He achieved more as prime minister than his critics ever conceded. He did, after all, win the 2016 election – notwithstanding his inspired decision to call a double dissolution that vaporised Abbott’s 19-seat majority and sent roughly a million conservatives drifting toward minor parties.
Turnbull also delivered a memorable election night address, memorable chiefly for reviving the republican activist at his most graceless. In his late-night rant that was hilarious in unintended ways, he had taken the unusual step of calling in the AFP over an opposition scare campaign – the sort of rough-and-tumble tactic long familiar to Australian elections. As Tanya Plibersek observed on an ABC election night panel: “Malcolm might lose the election, so he calls the police.”

Perhaps the pond should feel a measure of sympathy for the swishing Switzer, as the reptiles dragged in another feather duster, Former opposition leader Sussan Ley inside Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman

But no ... not when he produced disingenuous blather about having a card up his sleeve ...

And so to the final gobbet ...

Most notable of all, perhaps, was his contribution to the political lexicon: the phrase “miserable ghost”, denoting those former leaders afflicted – as Gareth Evans once put it – with “relevance deprivation syndrome”, and inclined to broadcast their reflections to the world at large. The term has worn well.
I have long held great respect for John Howard, one of our nation’s most consequential prime ministers. Yet his gravest misjudgment in retirement was to dissuade Turnbull from leaving parliament in 2010, as he had planned after first losing the Liberal leadership. That decision allowed Turnbull to continue destabilising colleagues inside the partyroom on his path back to the leadership – and later to direct his sharpest barbs at those who succeeded him.
The unhappy reality is that Turnbull won’t be remembered as a great statesman or political leader. His tenure was marked by a tenuous grasp of his party’s philosophical foundations, a detachment from the instincts of a clear majority of voters, and a conspicuous confidence in his own judgment.
Who could forget the former merchant banker’s advice in 2016 to young Australians struggling to buy their first home – that their parents should simply “shell out” for them? Or his 2009 demand that the treasurer and prime minister resign over what proved to be a fabricated email supplied by an eccentric bureaucrat?
Before the 2024 US election, Foreign Affairs magazine ran Malcolm Turnbull’s character sketch of a presidential contender: “Like most people, he is often wrong. Unlike most people, however, he is never in doubt. A powerful narcissistic self-belief has given him the strength to defy not just his many enemies but even reality itself.” He was describing Donald Trump. But the description lands with the force of irony, for it doubles as a precise study of Turnbull himself.

Uh huh ...Think tank apologises for ‘significant distress’ after sexual harassment complaint

And where is he now, apart from turning up in the glass reptile hive mind to carelessly throw stones?

Tom Switzer is presenter of Switzerland, a podcast about politics, modern history and international relations.

A desperate name for desperate times, with more desperate times sure to follow ...

 

As always, it's in the details, and what a fine bed it is ...

In which the pond goes briefly cultural with Gemmell before taking in Glasser, gawking at a lizard Oz editorialist grunting for Angus, and grinding away with Gemma ...

 

The pond apologises for this interruption to the usual Sunday meditation service, but the pond had no choice ... 

You see, Polonius went there with his prattle... 

Another show of ABC arrogance in Four Corners’ Bondi Beach terror program 

Four Corners accused the intelligence agency of failures over the Bondi Beach terrorist attack, relying on witnesses with axes to grind. 

By Gerard Henderson 

There was Polonius, bizarrely presenting himself as an eyewitness to the ABC's show - with no axe to grind! - when in reality he grinds his ABC axe almost every week, and has been grinding away for decades ...

It's also bizarre that Polonius should take time out to defend ASIO when every time they're given a chance to shine, the spooks routinely shoot themselves in the foot. 

In typical reptile fashion there was no link to the show, so here's a link for those who missed it...

   

And there's 49 minutes of the Sunday gone ... 

The pond never links to ABC shows, but Polonius gave the pond no choice.

That done, and with the pond handing out bans all over the hive mind shop, there's not much else of note in this weekend's lizard Oz offerings. 

The pond could have spent time with Linda, offering a role model for Susssan if she's looking for a spot in the hive mind ... 

 Give Taylor time, he’s not the Messiah 

The newly appointed Liberal leader will soon find, just as Sussan Ley did, he will be only as strong and successful as the team he leads. 

By Linda Reynolds 

On the other hand, Linda is a fourth rate drop kick, a token bit of window dressing who failed in a crisis, and who now keeps doing a Karen.

As the pond featured the third rate onion muncher drop kick yesterday, that's more than enough. 

Just to prove the pond's point, this is how Linda wrapped up her essay ... consider it a teaser trailer for that intermittent archive link ... 

...This latest coup will have been no different. It does present yet again an opportunity for the party to reform, but the party must stop looking for a quick fix based on a leader alone. Instead the party must to look to enduring principles of leadership and team cohesion to underpin party transformation. 

When I was a young officer, the army taught me valuable leadership lessons that have served me well in my army and political careers. Lessons readily apparent across our armed forces and just as relevant in politics, but not always so readily apparent in the parliamentary Liberal Party. 

The most important leadership lesson for the federal Liberal Party today is that all leaders, no matter their potential, require both the time and the unqualified support of their team to succeed. 

In Taylor’s case, he must now be afforded what Ley was not: time to develop as a national political leader with the unwavering support of both the parliamentary and organisational wings of the party. 

But time is not the party’s friend. Today, with a primary vote under 20 per cent, the hunt for a Messiah must end. The ideological battle also must end. The Liberal Party – at all levels – must find the will to transform itself into one that addresses evolving societal and electoral realities. 

The Australian electorate is very different from that 80 years ago. Organisational transformation is never easy, particularly in a largely volunteer organisation. 

However, the party does have a blueprint for change. A blueprint to be found in successive election reports has clearly and consistently explained why the Liberal Party continues to move further and further away from the government benches. 

Change will be even tougher to start after the next election, where the temptation will be yet again to find another Messiah for an ever-diminishing party. But there is still time for the new leadership team to foster genuine unity in both the parliamentary and organisational wings of the party and initiate genuine reform. While winning the next federal election is a herculean task, it is after all the Liberal Party’s sole reason for existing. 

Linda Reynolds was a senator for Western Australia from 2014 to 2025. 

The sole reason for existing? 

So if they lose the next federal election, they should cease to exist? 

And if he's not the Messiah, is he just a naughty boy?

Completely clueless, in a rhetorical way ... 

 On the other hand, a reader kindly pointed the pond to the venerable Meade's Weekly Beast last Friday ... ‘Inhaled with my groin’: The Australian’s Wuthering Heights review makes a splash

The venerable Meade carried on ..

Not everyone agrees. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw gave the movie two stars, writing: “It’s quasi-erotic, pseudo-romantic and then ersatz-sad, a club night of mock emotion”. 

Perhaps Gemmell wanted to make a splash after landing the role of chief film critic for the rebranded Culture section at the Oz. Both Gemmell and the former ABC broadcaster Phillip Adams have been dropped as weekly columnists, as has the former literary editor and chief film critic Stephen Romei. 

The cuts at the Oz are starting to show. When David Stratton and Romei were writing for the old Review section, the paper would publish between five and seven film reviews. Now they are down to a couple. But the real cuts have been to the once fine literary section, where the book reviews have shrunk from seven pages to between two and four under the literary editor, Caroline Overington. 

A spokesperson for The Australian said the masthead was “modernising and expanding its culture, arts, and entertainment coverage through a new multi-platform Culture vertical led by Milanda Rout, investing in video, newsletters, and fresh voices”. 

“New columnists include Charlotte Ree, who has joined The Australian Weekend Magazine as a columnist under editor Elizabeth Colman. Results have been very strong, with audience growth and subscriber engagement accelerating.”

The venerable Meade provided a little titillation by showing the Oz splash ... 

But why stop at a tease when you can go all the way, plunge in deep so to speak?

The header: ‘Inhaled with my groin’: A five-star Wuthering Heights; In Emerald Fennell’s hands we get the essence of women-directed sex. Sex through the female gaze. What women actually want. It’s dark. It’s filthy. Brace yourselves. 

There was no caption for the accompanying montage of short clips from the film, which seemed to suggest you could take it orally as well as inhaling in the groin (why the groin?)

the fold or depression marking the juncture of the lower abdomen and the inner part of the thigh

also : the region of this line

Is it too bold in reptile la la land to speak of v*ginas? (*google bot enhanced)

Then it was on for young and demented old: 

Strap yourself in. You will either love this or hate it. Bronte purists beware, but BookTok will go crazy for it. Me? Be still, my churning 14-year-old heart. After the clit-tease of a muscular marketing campaign we now get the actual product, ripe for Valentine’s Day. A film of such gleeful power it may well liquify your innards just watching it. 

I inhaled this latest iteration of Emily Bronte’s 1847 novel not with my heart (as with the 1939 Laurence Olivier/Merle Oberon version,) nor with my head (the dour, overly earnest 2011 one), but with my groin. Writer/director Emerald Fennell’s fresh interpretation has electrified the franchise. I suspect it’s going to be huge, drawing in the knowing young women who made Barbie, Six the Musical, Titanic and Taylor Swift such massive fangirling successes. 

There were plenty of visual distractions designed to enhance the feeling that you were keeping light-headed company with a bubble-headed booby, Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw in “Wuthering Heights,” a Warner Bros. Pictures Release. 

The multiple orgasms exploded line by line ...

Yes, this film is garish, outrageous, clashing and clanging, but it also taps into an authentic representation of female longing, female desire. Oh, it’s a dark, filthy, cackly little world in there, and Fennell portrays it, precociously. Yet it’s the suggestion of sex, the possibility of sex, rather than actual sex; because for many women it’s all in the mind, and she knows it. There’s no nudity. It is the eroticism, for a woman, of male hands running through the viscosity of cracked eggs under bedsheets. Of a lover’s digit in the cave of a mouth. Of secret fingers entwined at a funeral. Of a man pressed into a woman’s back, hands covering her eyes and mouth, as she listens to her first sexual experience through the floorboards beneath. And yes, it’s in a stable, and yes, whips and bridles are deployed. 

And what of the casting, madam, what of the descriptions of Heathcliff in the novel, what are we to make of those?

"A dark-skinned gypsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman: that is, as much a gentleman as many a country squire.

"It’s a cuckoo’s, sir—it’s as dark almost as if it came from the devil."

"Dirty, ragged, black-haired child." 

"That—the gypsy—the ploughboy?"

Ah, never mind, in King Donald's America that would be a step too far, and is best left to other versions.

Fennell has imagined the dark recesses of the mind of a reclusive, Victorian clergyman’s daughter, and brought female sexual longing into astonishing life. Every generation gets its cinematic version of Bronte’s book and this is the most visceral, most sensual yet. It sucks the marrow from the love story while nodding to the daring tone of the novel (Emily’s sister, Charlotte, noted the vulgarity of the language in her sibling’s confounding shock of a work.) This was writing to get the world talking; Fennell knows all about that. 

Pause for another distraction, as the pond contemplated the unerring ability of the reptiles' AI to chose precisely the wrong framing for the thumb illustration, Our chief film critic has been blown away by the latest blockbuster romance sweeping the world. 

Gemmell was all in on the kink, suggesting she might have been up for the execrable writing in Fifty Shades of Grey ...

For those hoping for some kind of fealty to the book, be prepared. There are no Wuthering tropes of branches knocking against windows, restless ghosts or desecrated graves. No memorable songs that touch the skirts of Kate Bush (sorry, Charli xcx). Nor is there an abusive brother, or indeed the entire back half of the novel. We don’t see intergenerational trauma dripping down the line, nor the curdling domestic violence of a Heathcliff turned sour. 

We see something far kinkier, yet true to the essence of the book. It’s all licking, fingering and flayed emotion, everything imagined and implied. And there we have the essence of women-directed sex, the new sexuality for the screen. Sex through the female gaze. What women actually want. Playful and tender. Foreplay and suggestion, rather than thrust. 

This is Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” (note the inverted commas in the Mills and Boon-esque movie poster), not Bronte’s. The film begins with the rhythmic panting of possibly climaxing sex – we’re not sure – which turns out to be a hanged man, with erection, in death’s throes. Ah, Emerald-land, here we go again. Back in the shocky, schlocky stew of Saltburn’s sweat. 

Forget the alliteration, couldn't the reptiles have shown the poster and shown what a schlocky rip of Gone With the Wind that it was?

 

Très pathétique, because it seems that even back in the 1930s they could get more busty than slick pics aiming at 14 year olds, wanting to try out for a Mar-a-Lago Miss Teen pageant.

Instead the reptiles trotted out another still from the show ...A scene from "Wuthering Heights" a Warner Bros. Pictures Release. 

Gemmell carried on panting...

But Fennell’s work is more interesting than mere spectacle. This is Wuthering mashup; she picks out the book’s slithery innards and fleshes out her very own beast. Extracts a clear, clean narrative from the knotty text, a galloping storyline for our new, shortened attention spans. And also some circuit-breaking humour from a novel cruelty-soaked. 

Yet can two Banana Benders, with sunshine in their bones, deliver as Britain’s most romantically doomed couple? Well, this era now has its Scarlett and Rhett, its Jack and Rose, because Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi’s chemistry blows this film off the screen; possibly aided by a cultural shorthand of familiarity from the state that brewed them both. 

Yes, teeth are too white and physiques too glowing for the howling, 1840s Yorkshire moors (especially the bloom of Robbie’s post-baby body), but who cares, this works. Novelistic concerns around Heathcliff’s ethnicity and Cathy’s hair colour and age are swept away in the cheek of the pairing. This feels right. Explosive. Canny. Although Robbie’s received-pronunciation accent is a little jarring at first, she’s a fine heroine who does Cathy proud. 

Yet Elordi is revelatory as every woman’s first, bad-boy love, the one your mother hates. He delivers another breathtaking performance after a hypnotic Frankenstein’s monster, with depths of sensitivity to that beautiful face. He’s rapidly becoming one of the most exciting young actors on the planet, and gives a glimpse of wet white shirt here that annihilates the memory of Darcy’s Colin Firth. 

The wet dreaming continued with the snap, Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff in “Wuthering Heights,” a Warner Bros. Pictures Release. 

There was just a final panting to go:

Over-stylised costumes by Jacqueline Durran and sets by Suzie Davies speak to the story, to its vastly differing worlds. We’ve got the Earnshaw farm’s earthy gloom, all eviscerated animals and blackened interiors, then the dewy artifice of Thrushcross Grange with walls replicating Cathy’s skin, blood-red floors and clothes of the cheapest satin, latex and lurex. Fennell often demonstrates distaste for the wannabes and pretenders crashing into her rarefied toff world (see, also, Saltburn), and Thrushcross Grange has never been interpreted quite like this, with all the nouveaux riche signifiers of non-U wealth. But once again, it works. 

It’s cinema as visceral experience. A fever dream of lust and letdown and the loneliest sex in the world, within marriage; then the most connecting, ever, full stop. The movie is soaked in a yearning that females of all persuasions will recognise. Here’s to our inner, liquid howl of want. 

There’s no cautiousness to this, just as there wasn’t to the original novel. How can women filmmakers smash through the tight little bro club that bestows platforming and pay cheques upon certain clubby projects? With daring audacity, with bolshie irreverence. And here we have it. The aim: to be fearless. Bronte was. Fennell is. Right now she’s one of the most commercially interesting directors in the world, alongside Greta Gerwig. They’re making art of provocation, wit and deep thought. This is my first five-star review, and I can’t wait to see what this filmmaker tackles next. 

 ★★★★★ 

That said a whole lot more about Gemmell than it does about the film, but it did remind the pond why it never bothers with any of the lifestyle nonsense used as window dressing for the hard right ratbags that occupy the top of the digital edition.

Perhaps it's best left to 14 year olds and Gemmell. The pond has had its ups and downs, wotthehell, wotthehell Archy, but there's a dance in the old dame yet, toujours gai, just not this one ... (pdf at the archive)

Still going fillum buff does give the pond a chance to note that it's been looking at some old, much treasured shows, including The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (not the terrible remake).

What a great Noo Yoik outing it is, with Robert Shaw and Walter Matthau and Martin Balsam in great form. Gesundheit! 

The pond even allows the hokey special effects to pass, just so the mayor can be harassed by Tony Roberts, the money can hit the street, and the caper can hit the third rail (lordy, lordy he can actually act).

And last night the pond watched Wag the Dog for the nth time.

The pond can recall that at the time it was deemed a little too far-fetched and cynical, a satirical outing with too many movie references, thanks to the presence of Dustin Hoffman doing any number of great routines (that was nothing).

But now, with a reality TV star in the White House ruining the planet, it feels neo-realist and prescient, and if anything, way too understated.

Speaking of King Donald, the howls of pain are now so loud the pond is almost impervious, the effect the demented King wants...

Look at poor old Susan B. Glasser in The New Yorker, embarking on yet another listicle in "If We Don't Have Free Speech, Then We Just Don't Have a Free Country" (*archive link).

Inter alia ...

Or maybe it's as simple as this ...

But the pond supposes it should stick to its Tootle tracks, and return to the lizard Oz to see the lizard Oz editorialist welcoming the beefy boofhead ...apparently he's as robust as a character in Wuthering Heights...

Yes, and he'll put a stop to those infernal whale-killing windmills!

Poor old Susssan, already a feather duster, was now just a bit of rubber on the road, roadkill dragged to the side with a pious sigh ...

They wish him well?

Within a week they'll be in full campaign mode ...and the lettuce will be waiting to spring into action.

And so to the bonus, and if the pond can do Gemmell, then the pond can certainly do garrulous Gemma ...

The header: ‘Degrees mean nothing now’: I’ve given up on graduates - give me grey hair and war wounds instead As cheating becomes the norm and the ‘magic of learning’ is lost, we have birthed a generation of entitled graduates ill-equipped for the workforce. A radical course correction is vital, but there’s a silver lining

The caption for a truly dire stock photo: Candidates waiting for a job interview. In the real world, actions come with risk, responsibility and consequences. There’s no fake it till you make it here. Picture: Supplied 

That stock photo should have warned the pond it had made a near fatal mistake, that and the warning that Gemma, in her grating way, was going to grind a good five minute read out of her uni and youngling bashing ...

First there had to come a boast about how brainy she was ...

It has been 38 years since I started university. Not being content with going to one university at a time, I attended two: Curtin University and the University of Western Australia. My substantive degree (English, politics and history) was done at Curtin while I studied Italian language at UWA. 

The latter decision mostly was about maintaining fluency in the language of my heritage, but it was also influenced by lazy afternoons on UWA’s Oak Lawn, Friday night parties in the law courtyard and, for me at least, the peace and solitude of the Reid Library. Oh, Curtin was OK, but that meant going south of the river. For those unfamiliar with the quirks of my hometown, Perth’s north-south rivalry goes beyond tribalism. I am forever north to the core. 

Back then, the Curtin campus was still quite underdeveloped. It was sandy and a bit dusty, but those were great years. Formative and fun times. Apart from developing a love for kebabs, I accidentally got myself elected to Guild Council on a Labor-Unity ticket during the dying days of compulsory student unionism. Once, going to university was just as much about the campus experience as anything else. A far different world from the one described so chillingly by Ros Thomas’s expose on cheating in higher education in The Australian Weekend Magazine last Saturday. 

Reading it, I recoiled. You hear stories about this kind of thing but I never imagined it being so grim. What a terrible indictment on so many. What a pitiful window into the generation we’ve raised and, by extension, those who’ve raised them. Imagine going to university and regarding cheating as the pinnacle. How sad to be a person who actually seeks not to learn. I can’t help but feel disdain for the parents, caregivers and teachers who, somewhere along the line, haven’t done their jobs. Do you think values just form themselves? Something has gone fundamentally wrong here. 

What made this so risible to the pond?

It was the incredibly sh*tty images that the reptiles had dug up to accompany the screed. (*google bot enhanced).

Mediocrity doesn't even begin to conjure up the ways that this visual crap assaults the eyes ... Imagine going to university and regarding cheating as the pinnacle. How sad to be a person who actually seeks not to learn. Picture: News Corp 

News Corp wanted to take credit for that drek, that junk, that slop? How sad to be an alleged news organisation seeking not to upgrade its graphics department to barely human.

Perhaps it was designed to match the thinking ...

As for the university administrators who have had ample time to prepare for this onslaught, let me offer a few suggestions. Stop offering everything online. Get students back into a classroom. Enact a minimum in-person attendance requirement. Make the degree come with a cost other than dollars. Stop making universities the educational equivalent of a safe injecting room. 

Outside of things such as medicine, engineering and the like, can someone please tell me what the point is of a university degree? 

Um, so you can sound like Our Henry and sound like you swallowed a dictionary of ancient times? Not even the Lynch mob is worth a listen? (Someone please tell the hive mind).

For 23 years this coming July, I’ve been an employer of some incredibly bright, articulate, hardworking, university-educated young people. They came to their interviews with curiosity, prepared, and it was often a difficult task to discern who would be the best fit for us. That’s the context, and it’s important. As any employer knows, you go through cycles of a business in which the structure and dynamic change. People move on to new opportunities and you respond to that change within your own team. Four years ago, that was me and we decided to hire a fresh out-of-the-box graduate. Everyone has to start somewhere and I felt a conviction that providing that start for someone was part of showing leadership. For my good intentions, I was introduced to a cohort underwhelming and underprepared as compared with what I had previously experienced. Great CVs, fantastic even, with strong academic performance. But come to the point of interview and it was like opening your Christmas stocking and finding it full of coal. 

At this point the pond gave a deep sigh of relief.

The pond has endured some tough times as an employee and delivered some tough times as an employer, but thankfully never had to endure the likes of this sort of self-satisfied preening, made even worse by the dire quality of the visual distractions, We need to stop making universities the educational equivalent of a safe injecting room. Picture: iStock

Couldn't the reptiles have dug up a snap of Curtin, so we could see where Gemma got injected with her self-satisfied stupidity? Or perhaps some other red brick uni (as the newer concrete monstrosities were once called), instead of snatching at a snap of Sydney Uni?

Then it was on to more relief that the pond had never been a youngling forced to endure Gemma's interrogations:

“Tell me what attracted you to this role, and to this industry?” I asked one applicant. 

There was a long pause. She leaned back in her chair as if to stretch after a long nap. “Yeah, I dunno.” “What will YOU do, to guarantee I succeed in this role?” one candidate asked me. 

“I can guarantee you will have every opportunity to succeed, whether you do or not is on you,” I responded. 

They did not get the job. 

There were variations on this theme, times a dozen or more. Now, I’m not saying the people I interviewed were cheating but neither do I know they weren’t. I do know that experience sealed the deal for me as an employer. Degrees mean nothing in my game. 

What an incredibly stupid non sequitur.

Now, I’m not saying the people I interviewed were cheating but neither do I know they weren’t.

Now the pond isn't saying that Gemma is being deliberately obtuse, but the pond doesn't know if she wasn't. (Make sense of that if you will, if you can).

But the pond did wonder why she still carried the aura of a cult item with some pond correspondents ... especially as the illustrations continued woeful and dire: Young people don’t know or don’t care that they’re missing out on the magic, the wonder of learning. Picture: iStock

Ye ancient cats and caricatured AI slop. That represents the magic, the wonder of learning?

The pond has groaned on occasion about the strange ways of vulgar youff, but has seen this sort of whining go on down the generations, and has come to understand that most of it is envy, because youff always has youff on its side, and that's one thing you can never get when you turn into a hardened, "it's all chaff to me", sergeant major caricature ... 

...are you experienced?

Or have you ever been experienced?

Well, I have

I know, I know you probably scream and cry

That your little world won't let you go

But who in your measly little world

Are you trying to prove that

You're made out of gold and, uh, can't be sold?

So uh, are you experienced?

Have you ever been experienced?

You can end up sounding like Dustin Hoffman's producer in Wag the Dog ...or like Gemma ...

Thomas’s piece is equal parts horror story and tragedy. I found myself raging as I read. Not only at the shallowness of it all but also the fact these young people don’t know or don’t care that they’re missing out on the magic, the wonder of learning. The sense of fulfilment and pride that comes from wrestling with hard things and prevailing. The feeling that comes from having your brain and your world enlarged. The brain muscle you build as you do hard things and keep doing them. 

As a now extremely rusty classical pianist, I can confirm that AI can’t do the practice for you. It can’t make you proficient in every exercise contained in the wondrously torturous Hanon: The Virtuoso Pianist. There is a strange feeling of accomplishment that comes with mastering those scales, error free. Trust me, I know. Education is a gift. It is a ticket out of poverty for so many around the world, yet here in Australia we appear to have devalued it so much that cheating is treated as a fait accompli and universities are behaving as if they are without options. 

You can sense the resentment, the bitterness, the raging at the dying of the light. So she mastered some tinkling of the ivories, and now she has rusty fingers. Who cares?

The reptiles compounded it by slipping in another snap ... In Kabul, girls return to class following the Taliban’s previous order to shut secondary schools. Access to education is a precious gift, a ticket out of poverty for so many around the world, yet here in Australia we appear to have devalued it so much. Picture: AFP 

 Say what?

And it's vulgar youff that's devalued education and isn't aware what's happening in the world?

Here's the thing. You can't cite - incorrectly - what is happening in Afghanistan as a way of bashing local heads. Or you can pay attention.

The pond was reminded of that old game parents played - how you had to eat your vegetables because others were starving in the world.

The pond remembers being told by one victim of that torment how she put her food in a parcel and took it down to the post office to ship it off to Asia...

Perhaps someone could ship off the reptiles?

But the pond digresses, it's time to wrap up Gemma's jihad ...

Is it any wonder? I mean, personally, I doubt that the same university “educators” who presided over the cancerous spread of Jew hatred on campuses around Australia have the wherewithal to face this problem and deal with it. 

Put that another way.

I mean, personally, I doubt that university students in Gaza have the wherewithal to face this problem of ethnic cleansing and deal with it. 

Fixed, and time for a wrap ...

It’s perhaps the ultimate show of privilege that middle-class Australian kids should be so indifferent about their access to education when it is denied to so many in other places. In Afghanistan, girls and women are strictly forbidden from secondary and higher education by the governing Taliban.

Um, that's not what the caption said... back to the wrap:

Meanwhile, in Australia, young women boast about how they can get away without doing the work. God, the shame of it all. 

Now we're appealing to mythical deities? As if She could help? For the sake of the long absent lord, wrap it up ...or head off to a fast food joint, and act as a role model (minimum wage of course, and age limited):

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: Australia, we need a radical course correction. To the students who spoke to Thomas for her piece, on the one hand I applaud you because nothing disinfects like sunlight. Good on you for fessing up. 

But I have another message for you, too. Good luck getting a job, kiddos. You’re living in a fantasy land, one without consequences. Good luck when you come face-to-face with the reality of being paid to do a job, then not being able to do that job. In the real world, actions come with risk, responsibility and consequences. There’s no fake it till you make it here. 

There is a silver lining, though. In an AI world, where shortcuts are king and knowledge scant among the upcoming professional classes, I’m seeing a resurgence in demand for the “old guard”. 

As an employer, I’m looking for experience. Give me a hint of grey hair and healthy dose of life’s war wounds. Give me instinct formed through years of being in the trenches. Give me wisdom that can’t be acquired any other way. That’s where the value is.

With those appalling images as part of her content, she has the gall to rag AI shortcuts and scant knowledge?

Nah, the pond can do without a dose of Gemma. Especially as her piece is littered with AI slop of the most wretched kind ... down there with her thinking, and that blather about the need for war wounds.

And so to a couple of distractions. This one features Kermode on that film ...

 

In which the pond kicks Zionist "Ned" and doggie boy to the archive curb, but compensates with the bouffant one, some onion munching, and the Ughmann, possibly scribbling in a seminary ...

 

Be fair. 

The lettuce was very humble in victory, and described Susssan as a tough, tenacious opponent, who fought to the bitter end, and did the right thing by falling on her sword. 

She also thrashed Lord Downer by a remarkable 24 days, thereby confirming that he remains the top all-time loser and therefore eminently qualified to scribble for the lizard Oz. She also operated under a considerable handicap which has always proven difficult for female stayers ...

Perhaps Susssan will now set up shop somewhere in the hive mind.

Of course the reptiles were obsessed with the result ...

This was just as well, because elsewhere the pond noted a return to the very worst days of the Australian Daily Jewish News ...

The pond will note the braying and the baying, but in all good conscience, can't support a devotion to genocide or ethnic cleansing, and so must refer this aspect of the hive mind to the intermittent archive ...

EXCLUSIVE
March madness: The ugly truth of Sydney’s protest movement
While Hamas terrorists were still slaughtering Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, the Palestine Action Group jeered and began mobilising for a rally in Sydney. They haven’t let up since.
By Stephen Rice and Lachlan Leeming

The pond will simply note Emilia's splendid work in demonising assorted folk ...

Sadly - though also somewhat of a relief - the pond declined to embark on this weekend's Everest with nattering "Ned" ...

Commentary by Paul Kelly
A big question now hangs over Australia: will this division actually get worse?
Isaac Herzog’s visit raises profound doubts about the nation’s ability to recover from the Bondi crisis and whether our shared values are eroding.

Strangely the pond doesn't share the lizard Oz's taste for ethnic cleansing, especially enduring "Ned" obscuring it for a bigly nine minute read.

Ned's thoughts on Gaza, the West Bank and the great extermination?

The Herzog visit shows the depth of the political and moral campaign to brand Israel a pariah state – now a priority stance for many progressives and activists – fanned by the mass Palestinian victims in Gaza. Yet such tensions are as revealing about Australia with the politics of the Middle East assuming a far higher profile in this country, albeit driven by minorities, with most people divorced from the passions and activism.
For Australia, the problem is not one-dimensional.
Australia is becoming a more fragmented nation. It is losing its sense of shared values as its so-called multicultural principles are openly trashed. Its public square is tarnished by tribalism, identity politics, religious fanaticism, right-wing extremism and divisive left-wing progressivism – all contributing to the erosion of confidence in the Australian identity. The frequent line from people in the street that “this is not the Australia I know” has become a valid lament.

Yes, if you think ethnic cleansing might be an issue, you're clearly part of a decline in shared values ...

National pride and belonging in decline

As the Scanlon survey highlights, national pride and belonging in Australia are in decline. In its 2025 Social Cohesion Report, the Scanlon Foundation finds only 34 per cent take “great pride in the Australian way of life and culture” and only 46 per cent have “a sense of belonging in Australia to a great extent”. Generational differences are widening. Among 18 to 24-year-olds and 25 to 34-year-olds fewer than one in three, at 29 per cent, report having a sense of belonging in Australia to a great extent.

"Ned" went on to beat the drum about migrants, especially Muslims, thereby putting him well into Pauline's camp.

How absurd did it get? "Ned" in his final par turned to the deeply corrupt beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way to offer  a "value-led" recovery ... (If you want an insight into the Watergate scandal, one of a number of scandals, start with IA here).

With the change of leadership in the Liberal Party there are expectations that Angus Taylor, an economic liberal and cultural conservative, might offer a strong set of values to guide the Liberals and the Australian community at this time. The nation badly needs it, as the Scanlon survey shows. But Taylor will need to break the cycle – in recent years whenever the Liberals have tried to tackle cultural issues, they have lacked the skill and language to make a persuasive case. 

What a contemptible, doddery old clown "Ned" is, and the pond also consigned the dog botherer to the intermittent archive with a sigh of relief.

Lost in translation: how lies are corrupting public debate
Grace Tame’s Instagram post betrays an activist pushed onto the protest podium while spouting no shortage of slogans, but showing little understanding in a misinformed debate.
By Chris Kenny

What to say about a notorious dissembling liar when he accuses others of lying?

The dog botherer went full Zionist, and ended with this absurdity ...

President Herzog has now returned to a multiethnic country constantly riven by boisterous and freewheeling politics, perpetually under siege from state and non-state actors, but populated by people united in their devotion to the shared values that underpin Israel’s existence. There was a time we could make similar observations about Australia.

Uh huh ...that's some mighty fine values to share ...

Luckily - after those short trailers for what lies in the intermittent archive - this weekend provided a host of alternatives.

The bouffant one managed a whole eight minutes of navel gazing and fluff-gathering ...

The header: Can Angus Taylor’s new deal revive a fractured Liberal Party? Angus Taylor has won the leadership, but a harder line on immigration and promises to ‘restore values’ may not be enough to heal divisions or win back drifting voters.

The caption for another of Emilia's exquisitely awful collages, which really should be blamed on AI: Angus Taylor, Pauline Hanson, Barnaby Joyce, Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers. Artwork: Emilia Tortorella. Pictures: Supplied and iStock

Why start with this fossilised dullard? Well in earlier times, the bouffant one used to content himself with short spurts, only 2 or 3 minutes long, so consider this an encouragement award:

The fate of the Liberal Party, the Coalition and centre-right politics in this country now rests squarely with Angus Taylor, after the conservative challenger emphatically defeated Sussan Ley to become Liberal leader on Friday morning.
In his first remarks as leader, the member for Hume vowed to restore the values and standing of his party and take a hardline stance on immigration, which he presented as the crucial spearhead for the Liberals’ fightback. “The numbers are too high and the standards are too low,” Taylor declared, flagging new measures to stop “people who hate our way of life” from entering the country.
Taylor denied there would be any attempt to move the Liberal Party to the right, saying he did not see the current political landscape in terms of “right, left or centre”. Having admitted he made mistakes on tax and economic policy during the last election – when he was opposition Treasury spokesman – Taylor promised to call “the rotten government” to account on economic management and to fight “their bad taxes”.
“The first priority of the Liberal Party now,” he said, “will be to restore our standard of living and protect our way of life.”
Though initially nervous and scripted, Taylor’s first foray as Liberal leader was devoted in part to admitting past mistakes on tax and economic policy – trying to head off Labor’s attacks on his credibility – and using strong language in promising to cut the amount and style of immigration, trying to pull back the flood of support to One Nation.
Yet restoring the Coalition’s economic credibility is going to take more than admissions of error, while trying to match Pauline Hanson on immigration rhetoric carries serious risk that can’t be covered by the old welcoming of migrants because of the benefits of a great cappuccino.
Taylor promised there would be more policy and soon.
This is just as well because his leadership is set to be tested immediately with a by-election in Ley’s rural NSW seat of Farrer (formerly held by Nationals leader Tim Fischer) in which One Nation, Climate 200 teal independents, the Liberals and, potentially, the Nationals, as well as a swath of other independents, will fight each other like starved vultures over a ripe carcass.
Labor could very well not contest the by-election and concentrate the anti-Liberal vote in a seat where the independent finished second at the last election and where One Nation got half the ALP vote and finished fourth.

The caption for the snap which offers incontrovertible proof that Jimbo isn't the sharpest sheep in the back paddock: Senator James Paterson said Angus Taylor was the “smartest policy brain in the shadow cabinet”. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Really Jimbo? 

Bunging on that Rodin pose as a deep thinker didn't help, but it did remind the pond of Charlie Lewis in Crikey, sorry, paywall ...

Gender quotas? 

Now we know where that all went, as the bouffant one spared a thought for the loser ... and sounded decidedly gloomy into the bargain ...

In a gracious concession, reflecting on her first election 25 years ago and her defeat on Friday, Ley said: “There is no doubt that it has been a challenging time to lead the party after we suffered the worst defeat in 81 years, it has been tough.
“At times, very tough, but every sleepless night, every intractable problem, indeed every personal challenge, has always been put in perspective by my understanding of the burdens that so many ordinary Australians face quietly and without fuss every day.

“I will be spending the next couple of weeks thanking the amazing people of Farrer and expressing my gratitude to them for the honour of representing them for 25 years. Shortly thereafter, I will be tendering my resignation.”
Ley’s departing Parthian shot at the new leader demonstrates the mistake of expecting major change through the dumping of a leader.
The real questions facing Taylor include far more complex, fundamental and difficult problems than a relatively simple, if messy, change of leader. This quandary cannot be addressed on any puerile concept of turning right or left.
Neither can the Liberal Party’s turn to Taylor be read as an Australian-grown version of the recent sweep to the right among governments and political movements in the US, Britain, Italy and Japan.
Taylor’s victory in the Liberal partyroom in Canberra followed weeks of speculation, negotiations with conservative colleagues, a “secret” meeting with the more well-known conservative contender, Andrew Hastie, taunts from Ley’s moderate supporters, and policy-free and platitudinous promises to “restore” the party.
On Wednesday night during his brief pitch – which was followed by a short video titled Why I’m Running for Liberal Leader – Taylor said: “Under Anthony Albanese, Australians are going backwards. Our standard of living is declining, and this government is failing to protect the way of life Australians have worked so hard to build.
“We must urgently restore Australians’ confidence in the Liberal Party by demonstrating strong leadership, clear direction, and the competence and conviction to courageously fight for our values with a clear vision for the future.”
Here Taylor was indicating that he intended to move quickly on developing policy, which has been largely missing for the first nine months of the opposition.
Interestingly, Ley regards her legacy as resetting the Coalition’s energy policy on net-zero emissions by 2050, as well as the establishment of the royal commission into antisemitism and the re-forming of the Coalition after Nationals leader David Littleproud declared he could not work with her.
Before the Liberal spill, Taylor’s public pitch to become leader did not involve any policy but centred on a video declaring he was going to restore the Liberal Party and Liberal values.
It is always a problem when a politician stands in front of a placard saying “what I stand for”. This is especially so for Taylor, since the more well known and better recognised Hastie released a highly successful video last year of himself in front of a Ford Falcon and spruiking changes to industry policy.
Hastie – who went to the backbench arguing he wanted more say in determining immigration policy – became the people’s choice as conservative challenger to Ley. But he lacked the support in the Liberal partyroom to overstep Taylor.

There was promise of migrant bashing to come, the sort of jihad the hive mind loves ... Angus Taylor vows to restore Liberal values and take a tougher line on immigration. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

The bouffant one noted that the pastie Hastie was still in the wings, and while correspondents have proposed a short time line, perhaps just 3 months, the pond thinks that the beefy boofhead will need a little time to hang himself, and so the Xmas silly season might be best for challenges to crank into gear ...

The still potent threat from Hastie – which is sharpened by his support among young men – is another complication for Taylor, who will come under pressure from conservatives if he fails to lift Liberal support in the polls and doesn’t deliver on clear policy initiatives.
The Farrer by-election will be a big early test on how Taylor performs and what the voting public thinks.
On Thursday, senior conservative James Paterson said Taylor was the “smartest policy brain in the shadow cabinet”, a “man of deep courage and values” who “understood this is a change or die moment for the Liberal Party”. Paterson also predicted Taylor would lift the Liberals’ standing but did not offer any policy changes under him.
This is the essential problem: conservative MPs, senators and public supporters may have got what they wanted with the removal of the moderate Ley, but without a real improvement in the polls, without a clear shift back to the Coalition from disenchanted One Nation supporters and, most important, a cut-through, clear suite of policies on immigration, cost of living, energy, economic management and housing, despair will rise again.
Leadership challenges, successful or not, haunt the leaders and pollute the parties.
There is also the issue of dealing with the Nationals in Coalition, who should be happy with the removal of Ley. But there is still the problem of the Liberal leader finding a way to straddle the electoral demands of trying to win back Liberal seats lost to the Climate 200 teal independents, defeat Labor MPs in suburban Australia and fend off the One Nation threat, especially in the regions.
Only last week, after a disruptive and damaging Coalition divorce between the Nationals and Liberals, was Ley able to do a deal with Littleproud and ensure a crucial partnership, essential for Coalition election, was re-formed. With the ink still wet on the leaders’ signatures, Taylor will have to ratify the Coalition agreement as a new leader.
But the real challenge for Taylor in solidifying his leadership and achieving the promised lift in Liberal fortunes is to produce policy that is agreeable to his own partyroom and satisfies voters that he has more to offer than Ley.
There’s no argument that Ley is responsible as leader for an even more cataclysmic collapse of Liberal support since the election defeat, with Coalition primary support at just 18 per cent in the latest Newspoll and her personal leadership ranking the lowest of any leader since 2003.
Even more calamitous for the Coalition is the rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party to 27 per cent primary support in the same Newspoll that threatens Nationals as well as Liberal seats and entrenches Labor through preferences.
But the failure is not all Ley’s fault and in no way will her removal resolve the fundamental problems besetting the Liberal Party, the Coalition and the Nationals.

At this point the reptiles decided to interrupt the bouffant one's copious weeping with yet another of those deeply mystifying intrusions.

Is it a way of proposing an existential madness at the heart of reality? 

Whatever, the bouffant one carried on ...

There are factional warriors on both the moderate and conservative sides who have all but destroyed the Liberal Party at state level, leaving behind scorched rumps of dysfunctional oppositions, and whose only contribution to federal Liberal election prospects has been to infect the national movement with ideological, demographic and geographic divisions.
These divisions have confused and immobilised the Liberals on the key policy issues of cost of living, energy, immigration, tax reform and housing, where One Nation’s single, clear and unchanging message on cutting immigration draws support from the Nationals and Liberals in regional areas and alienates Liberals in seats lost to Climate 200 teal independents.
The fractious divisions also have contributed to the differentiation and separation between and within the Nationals as Coalition partner.
Yet the simple replacement of a moderate Liberal leader with a conservative doesn’t address these internal and external threats.
Taylor used a commitment to restore Liberal values as the basis for his appeal to his colleagues as he defended himself as being loyal and hardworking in the Liberal Party’s interest.
“Despite these efforts, the Liberal Party’s position under Sussan Ley’s leadership has continued to deteriorate, leaving it weaker than at any time since its formation in 1944,” he said. “This is a confronting reality, but one we cannot ignore.
“As a party that holds itself up as an alternative government, our failures have allowed the Albanese government to avoid accountability for their mismanagement of our country. This is devastating for Australians who, under Labor, have become poorer, more divided and more disillusioned.”
Albanese, who still can’t believe his luck on turning the tables on antisemitism and pro-Palestinian protests this week as he embraced Israeli President Isaac Herzog, has found a sensible centre position from which he can dismiss the extremists on both sides.
Ley had actually made inroads into Albanese’s leadership and Labor support after the Bondi Beach massacre on December 14 last year. Yet by the time the special sitting of parliament had begun in January to consider antisemitism and gun laws the Coalition made itself the centre of attention.
The Coalition split, Littleproud’s demand for an end to Ley’s leadership – which he has now achieved – and the subsequent chaos drove support in the latest Newspoll down to a record low and provided the trigger for Taylor’s challenge.
Ley was mortally wounded and the government started to build a profile of Taylor in anticipation of his rise to the leadership.
But the real damage to Ley, Taylor, the Liberals and the Coalition is that more people will turn away and that there is no basis for them to be lured back. This is the bitter harvest of leadership challenges – even for the victor.

Hallelujah, he is risen ...

Hardly a happy set of thoughts from the bouffant one, but at least it's an easy way to offset the nausea which is instantly produced by the onion muncher... always to hand to provide a ten pound Pom kind of insight ...

The header: Get your armour on, Angus Taylor, Labor’s slugfest just got real; Half an hour after he became Liberal leader, Labor’s ambush on Angus Taylor began with the launch of an attack ad. The blitz will be ferocious. He’ll need a united party behind him.

The caption for the AV distraction which the reptiles put at the head of the piece so that even the hive mind had some relief: The Labor government have released (sic) a new advertisement attacking incoming Liberal Leader Angus Taylor ...

On the other hand, the onion muncher managed just three minutes of advice, all the more sublime coming from one of Australia's worst prime ministers, a dropkick loser who first lost his job, and then promptly lost his seat.

He deserves some kind of knighthood for the arrogance and sublime lack of self-awareness on parade ...

Angus Taylor’s accession to the leadership of the Liberal Party and alternative prime minister of Australia is good news for everyone who thinks our country is drifting backwards and needs change. His declaration that he will restore Australians’ standard of living and preserve our way of life is exactly what’s needed right now.
Under the Albanese government, GDP per person has declined sharply and Australia has endured the biggest drop in real living standards of any developed country. Government policy has made a bad situation much worse.
Labor’s emissions obsession has caused skyrocketing energy prices and is closing down all our heavy industry. Labor’s green fixation has made it almost impossible for new resource projects and is inevitably ending the coal and gas exports on which our prosperity absolutely depends. Labor’s union attachments are crushing productivity and making businesses much harder to manage.
As well, out-of-control mass migration has put downward pressure on wages, upward pressure on housing costs, big extra burdens on social and physical infrastructure and is undermining social cohesion. Australia is the world’s greatest migrant success story but that doesn’t mean taking anyone from anywhere all the time.
Migrants have to be committed to Australia and take their citizenship oath seriously. The Bondi massacre shows that it’s way past time to discriminate on the basis of values and insist that every Australian has a responsibility to respect the rights and liberties that keep Australia Australian.

The pond warned that the nausea level would be high as the reptiles tried to hitch the hapless prime Angus beefy boofhead to the onion muncher ...Newly elected Liberal Leader, Angus Taylor and Deputy Leader, Jane Hume. Picture: Getty Images

Ah but, thanks to the ABC ...the pond is in the mood for some records ...

Talk about charts and records ...

One of the worst PM's of all times and still he brays on, hoping to sound relevant ...

There is no hope of better government from a Labor Party that’s owned and operated by the union movement, contaminated by the politics of climate and identity, tends to see every issue through a quasi-Marxist lens of oppressor and oppressed, and is addicted to spending and regulating. Under Labor, spending has increased by 3 per cent of GDP – on everything except the armed forces – and the public sector payroll in Canberra has grown by 50,000 in just four years, but does anyone think the quality of government has improved?
The fact that the Prime Minister’s first-term priority was the divisive race-based voice that crashed to defeat and his ongoing moral confusion about the Jew hatred that has disfigured our streets for the past two years says everything about the lamentable state of our public life.
Still, a Labor Party that’s hopeless at government is clever and cunning at low politics, and a tsunami of abuse will now be directed at Taylor and the Liberals.
It started in the parliament last week with almost every minister competing to mock the Liberal Party and play the politics of envy against Taylor for being a successful businessman, multi-generational farmer, Rhodes scholar and – supposedly – a throwback to a gentrified Australia that’s passed.
Labor and the unions have a small army of keyboard warriors on social media trying to persuade voters and stampede commentators that Taylor is out-of-touch and unelectable.
He’s being blamed for all the mistakes of the Morrison government and the Dutton opposition even though, as a loyal colleague, he simply did his best to support the team while being a voice of reason to leaders who wouldn’t often listen.
Parliamentary question time is certain to degenerate even further into a mindless slugfest. In the end, the public is repelled by ministers better at abusing the opposition than governing the country, but it will be important for Taylor’s colleagues to have their armour on.

Why did the reptiles attempt to curse beefy Angus from the get go by dragging the moth-eaten onion muncher out of the closet? Labor wasted no time in starting the ambushes on Angus Taylor, releasing an attack ad just half an hour after he was elected as the new Liberal leader. Picture: Supplied

Never mind, it was time for a little coal and gas worship, King Donald style, and more of the usual ...

I’m confident the Taylor opposition will quickly pursue a new policy direction that’s a clear contrast to a failing and flailing government.
No more coal-fired power stations will close, new gas fields will open at express speed, subsidies for renewable energy will end, the nuclear ban will go and immigration numbers will come back to the average of the Howard years by stopping language schools and unis selling work and residency in the guise of education, and stopping businesses substituting cheap foreign workers for paying and training locals.
There will be no ambivalence about Australia Day or Anzac Day; there will be only one national flag, not three; and acknowledgments of country will be confined to the Indigenous occasions where it’s only courteous to do so. Australia’s Anglo-Celtic core culture will be respected and our fundamental Judaeo-Christian ethos will be honoured and preserved because – after all – that’s what made us attractive to migrants in the first place and we do no one any favours to dilute it in a bid to make Australia more like the places migrants left.
Every Coalition MP and all the Coalition’s erstwhile supporters in the community now need to get behind the leader and the Liberal-National parties that are by far the best hope of better government in this country.
It’s time to put aside personal ambition and to be ambitious for the party and the country. It’s time to stop seeking perfection and be content with substantial improvement.
Taylor knows that this is his one and only moment to take our party and our country in a better direction and that he must rise to this mighty challenge and opportunity.
Knowing him well, I’m sure he has the character, conviction, courage and relentless energy to reverse the decline and keep our country the very best on Earth.

Just a thought. What do the younglings make of this sort of mindless bigotry and vile stupidity?

The pond will repeat the mantra at the risk of having to rush to the toilet for an upchuck:

There will be no ambivalence about Australia Day or Anzac Day; there will be only one national flag, not three; and acknowledgments of country will be confined to the Indigenous occasions where it’s only courteous to do so. Australia’s Anglo-Celtic core culture will be respected and our fundamental Judaeo-Christian ethos will be honoured and preserved because – after all – that’s what made us attractive to migrants in the first place and we do no one any favours to dilute it in a bid to make Australia more like the places migrants left.

It's all the more insufferable as he tries to make Australia more like the little England that lurks in his war-mongering, though possibly bone-spur laden, imagination ...

That endurance test done and dusted, the pond turned to the Ughmann for a little palate cleansing closer...

The header: Push for law change could embed remote work expectations despite productivity, workplace culture concerns; Warped bureaucratic priorities and pandemic-era thinking have metastasised, spreading from the public to the private sector.

The caption: Anecdotal evidence from public service managers in Canberra suggests the ever-expanding expectation of working from home now stretches to most days of the week. Picture: NewsWire / Andrew Henshaw

Okay, okay, the pond was keeding, the Ughmann is no palate cleanser, he's just another palate clogger.

And the pond has just one question.

Did the Ughmann head into the office to type up this column, or did he file it from home? Just asking ... and not expecting an answer...

A couple of years ago I got a call from a friend who had just been employed by a state government.
He was wandering around his new office block, attempting to find the meeting he was scheduled to attend. This was proving a more difficult mission than he had expected because his superiors had unilaterally decided to rename all of the meeting rooms in words drawn from the local Indigenous language. Alas, the names were an obstacle course of consonants and each so similar that no one could work out which room they were supposed to be in.
Another acquaintance working in a federal department in Canberra complained of being dragooned into an unconscious bias course as part of his agency’s drive to decolonise the minds of its employees.
“Once they have found everything you actually are bigoted about, they go searching for things that you didn’t know you were bigoted about,” he said.
Without debating the merits of self-reflection and the determination to redress past wrongs, the point here is that too many senior bureaucrats seem to believe their purpose is to play lead roles in the theatre of performative virtue.

That reminded the pond of a line it liked ... turning virtue-signalling into vice-signalling ... naturally in a performative reptile way ... as the reptiles interrupted with one of those terrible thumb images for an AV, A recruiter has offered some blunt advice to parents looking to work from home full time.

Was that ECU designed to disguise a streaming from home? Who knows, and who knows if the Ughmann was at home to watch it, before scribbling away ...

That, and re-engineering the notion of work to suit the lifestyle choices of employees whose post-Covid expectations have multiplied faster than the virus. The disease has spawned a new industrial creed of indulgence and the workplace is being built around it.
In a recent parliamentary committee hearing it emerged that on any given weekday in Canberra, somewhere between a quarter and – “on a really, really good day” – a tad over one-third of the employees in the Department of Infrastructure and Transport bother to wander into work.
Given so few workers darken the doors of the workplace, the department is going to save taxpayers money by moving buildings and cutting its leases from four to two.
The road to these savings lies through $46m in fit-out costs, or about $2413 a square metre. This is significantly higher than the government’s target for such work of between $1500 to $2000.
The official departmental gloss is that the buildings must be premium grade to meet federal standards for size, acoustics and government-mandated environmental ratings.
The rarely there workforce will have the best office money can buy to visit at their leisure. Departmental leaders expressed the hope that staff might be enticed to return to an office with embroideries such as sensory rooms. These, as far as I can tell, are places where employees can lie down in a darkened space to recover from the exhausting ordeal of periodically attending the office.

The caption for this meaningless snap provoked another question ...The Australian Services Union has argued there should be a default working-from-home right for almost two million administrative staff. Picture: Getty Images

Dear sweet long absent lord, the hideous banality of stock images ...

How many reptile columnists look like that? How many head into the office to type up their "think" pieces? How many stay at home or head into a congenial location, such as a coffee shop, to do it?

The pond recalls in ancient times that it almost never headed into the office to type up copy. It was always easier to do it in a quiet space, and then drop it off before deadline time ...

Never mind, the Ughmann was on a roll, and at least it wasn't climate science denialism ...

If there is a grade above the commonwealth in torching taxpayer cash in ethical pantomime and retooling jobs to suit the private lives of public servants, it must be the ACT.
Here the permanent Labor-Greens government has built a progressive paradise. Here, when one employee was asked how he managed to work for the territory from his home on the distant NSW south coast, the reply was that his boss didn’t mind because she lived in Queensland.
Unfortunately, unlike the commonwealth, the ACT is responsible for delivering hands-on services such as education. And here, government employees not fronting up for work have consequences for students and parents.
Last year 25 schools in Canberra were closed because of potential asbestos exposure. Some stayed shut for a week.
Sounds bad until you realise the risk came from buckets of coloured play sand that contained traces of chrysotile, a type of naturally occurring asbestos. One might have thought an alternative to closing entire schools was to have someone come and collect the buckets.
That thought clearly occurred to those who run Canberra’s Catholic schools because they identified the same risk and stayed open, as did public schools in other states.
Post-Covid, the performative progressive administrative mindset treats risk not as something to be managed but as something to be eradicated. In the pursuit of eliminating a threat, any intervention can be justified because more government is presumed to be the answer to every question.
In the shadow of the pandemic, one of the conceits of politicians is to dress bad policy in the hazmat suit of public safety. Once this is invoked, anyone who objects can be branded a heretic.

The reptiles interrupted with a snap of a villain, ACT Education Minister Yvette Berry. Picture: AAP

The pond was stuck back a few lines before that, still wondering what might be an unnaturally occurring form of asbestos?

Sure asbestos could, as a fibre, be refined into different forms, but wasn't asbestos just a group of naturally occurring fibrous silicate minerals?

What was the point of labelling something naturally occurring when it was all naturally occurring, as if there was something about it that was unnaturally occurring?

Or was it wrong to expect actual science from an unreformed former seminarian?

On cue, ACT Education Minister Yvette Berry released a statement pledging: “The safety of school staff and students will always come first.”
Tellingly, the reflex of the most progressive government in Australia was to nominate staff before students and prefer the convenience of employees over education.
The insidious problem for the nation as a whole is that warped bureaucratic priorities and pandemic-era thinking have metastasised and are spreading from the public to the private sector.
Last year The Australian Financial Review reported that the Community and Public Sector Union was pushing to extend a government-backed bias in favour of working from home to businesses. Now the campaign has escalated, with the Australian Services Union arguing before the Fair Work Commission that there should be a default working-from-home right for almost two million administrative staff.
The argument for this rests largely on workforce expectations. The ASU released a statement from national secretary Emeline Gaske citing polling that claimed “a significant majority of Australians believe working from home is the new industrial standard”.
“Working from home has become a critical part of managing work, caring and other responsibilities for so many Australians,” Gaske said. “The fact that almost nine in 10 of us support a right to work from home shows that the community has moved on, even if some employer groups are still stuck in the past.”

Then came another reminder in the final caption of that unanswered question: Department of Health, Disability and Ageing secretary Blair Comley has lamented the 22 per cent attendance rate among his 7000 employees. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Still no guidance on whether the Ughmann did his column from home, nor any chance of a survey of reptiles to work out just how many trudged into the office to pound out 1500 words. Was, for example, the Major always keen to leave the golf links to head into the office to toss off a weekly serve of Zionism?

What about Polonius? Did he loyally trot into the lizard Oz office to deliver his prattle, or did he, heresy of heresies, stay in his own office, a form of treachery even worse than staying at home ...as if any office could compete with the hive mind central office...

Never mind, it's time for a bog standard rant about cardigan wearers...

The union goes on to say the polling “challenges the myth promulgated by big business groups that remote work hurts the bottom line”, with two in three workers agreeing that working from home has fewer distractions and makes employees more productive./Users/tj/Desktop/ozcharlie.jpg
Around the globe, workers routinely report higher productivity when working from home and many of their bosses disagree. Anecdotal evidence from public service managers in Canberra suggests the ever-expanding expectation of working from home now stretches to most days of the week. Many complain they have no idea how some staff spend their days, and most believe the workplace has suffered because of it.
All are grappling with how to get some of their staff to work at all, but few dare say so. Working from home has been rendered politically untouchable since the Albanese government forced the Liberal Party to abandon a modest plan to trim the public service and curb remote-work arrangements.
One of the few prepared to speak plainly is Department of Health, Disability and Ageing secretary Blair Comley, who has lamented the 22 per cent attendance rate among his 7000 employees, warning it carries consequences for productivity, workplace culture, and personal and professional development.
Not all change is progress. In what universe does Australia’s overpaid and underworked public service act as a model for the private sector? In a country where productivity has already flatlined, entrenching indulgence in industrial law is a road to ruin.

What a wanker he is, but at least it wasn't about climate science...

And so to end with the immortal Rowe, and this time the pond was completely befuddled by the splendid array of talent, such that there was no detail to excerpt, all was detail ...stuck on the bloody Hume again, with those infernal whale-killing windmills hovering in the distance ...