In which Our Henry saves the Western Civilisation test, the onion muncher goes full jihad, and Killer is in an exuberant mood ...

 

The pond showed incredible restraint this week.

The reptiles' droppings have been littered with the usual blather about the Judaeo-Xian tradition, and suddenly a dire threat emerged from left Commie dictatorship field.

But the pond wanted to save the threat for Our Henry to handle in his Friday missive. 

How China Learned to Love the Classics
The Chinese Communist Party has embraced the study of Greek and Latin—as, in some ways, an antidote to the modern West. (*sorry, paywall; the pond still can't get the archive to work, but for those who can, who knows, it might work, or might not)

By Chang Che

Mother of mercy, how could this be?

...Even as foreign textbooks are banned and news broadcasts portray Western societies as gun-toting hellscapes, Chinese universities are hiring Greco-Roman classicists. One Beijing university recently completed a new translation of Plato. Another university established a research center, led by an Oxford professor, that puts ancient Chinese texts in conversation with other classical textual traditions, including Greek and Latin. The reason for the classics fervor varies depending on whom you ask, but most scholars agree that Chinese officials tend to see the Western classics as a complement to their politics. In recent years, Xi has made “cultural confidence” a cornerstone of national policy, referring to pride in Chinese traditions and values. Across China, archeological museums and exhibitions are multiplying, and neglected villages are being refurbished into stage-set “ancient” towns. At universities, the study of ancient Chinese texts has historically been scattered across disciplines; now, under government direction, universities are trying to gather that scholarship in new classics departments where, one theory goes, ancient truths can be nurtured and passed down. In 2024, Renmin University, in Beijing, became the first university in China to offer an undergraduate major in Chinese classical studies. Last March, Sichuan University opened a classics department, aiming to educate students to be “conversant in both Chinese and Western learning.” “When China looks at the world, they want to be like Greece,” Martin Kern, a Princeton Sinologist and keynote speaker at the World Conference of Classics, told me. “Greece is for Europe what China is for East Asia. You guys have Socrates. We have Confucius.”
By now, it is almost a cliché to say that the Western classics are in crisis. During the past half dozen years, around ten universities and colleges have closed their classics departments or programs, with some folded into larger humanities units. Western classicists look to the classics revival in China with a mix of awe, envy, and hesitation: a geopolitical rival could very well value their discipline more than their home institutions. In 2023, Shadi Bartsch, a classicist at the University of Chicago, covered the cresting interest among Chinese intellectuals, in ancient Greek and Roman texts, in “Plato Goes to China.” From late Qing reformers inspired by Athenian citizenship to nationalists who draw on Plato to bolster China’s political ideology, Bartsch shows how supple ancient texts are in the hands of interpreters. Yet she also acknowledged the upsides of a foreign government’s support for her field. “There is real interest in the question of whether China is going to become the main protector of the western classics,” she told me over e-mail.

Dear sweet long absent lord, it's a den of woke correctness and wild connections...

...In the enlarged vision of the classics slowly taking shape in the American academy, Yanxiao has found an intellectual foothold. He studies interactions between the eastern half of the Roman Empire and East Asia, and sheds light on how popular art forms were often misunderstood by their ancient critics. In the fall of 2024, he flew to Princeton, where he delivered a lecture on Roman pantomime, a dance form that once dominated theatres across the Mediterranean. Comparing élite Roman accounts that dismissed pantomime as a vulgar import from the East with the way K-pop had been received by some Anglophone critics, Yanxiao reframed pantomime as a transformative hybrid of “East” and “West”—between the Empire’s eastern provinces and Rome—rather than a corrupt derivative. Padilla Peralta, who attended the lecture, called the paper “spectacular.” Yanxiao had proved, Padilla Peralta told me, that people of diverse backgrounds, and the “interventions” they brought to the field, led to a “richening of the historical fabric, not to its impoverishment.”

The pond was so titillated the temptation was to go on quoting, but the main point - that the Chinese are now taking over the classics - is clear enough.

The pond didn't expect Our Henry to be up to speed on this, but what a challenge for one of the lizard Oz's most pompous, portentous pedants.

Only this prating coxcomb could show the perfidious Chinese that the whole gigantic edifice of Western Civilisation wasn't up for grabs - but only if he mentioned Thucydides or some other Greek and Roman luminaries in his column this week. 

Or else they might end up being quoted in 人民日报 (Rénmín Rìbào or People's Daily if you will).

Was he up to the challenge? Could he save the Judaeo-Xian tradition? Stop the long march of Chinese Marxists through the institutions?

In its anxiety, the pond abandoned any pretence at paying attention to the news of the day or to others. Instead, with shaking hands, and baited breath, the pond rushed to Our Henry ...

The header: No concession from regime​ that glories in the apocalypse; Gripped by paranoid delusions and steeped in antisemitic fantasies, Iran’s clerical-military regime prefers destruction to compromise.

The caption:  Iranian pro-government supporters mourn as they hold the picture of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Picture: Getty Images

Oh dear, not a good sign, it seems Our Henry has been triggered and has erupted into full jihadist/crusader mode...

And yet the reptiles showed this day how easy it is to jump from a war zone to a contemplation of your wealth ...

What an inspiration, but the hole in bucket man couldn't take the hint and refused to advise the hive mind of his wealth ...

Two weeks of bombardment have done more damage to Iran’s military infrastructure than 46 years of sanctions and diplomacy combined. But those decades of pressure teach a lesson it would be dangerous to ignore.
This is not a regime that moderates under pressure. It hardens. Forged in searing conflict, its institutional architecture encodes a single response to every challenge: entrench, double down, escalate.
Understanding why requires looking at the war that made it what it is. When Saddam Hussein invaded in September 1980, expecting a revolution in chaos to be readily dismembered, he miscalculated fatally. The war he started did not destroy the Islamic Republic; it consolidated it.
Eight years of attrition empowered the regime’s most radical elements. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps emerged as a vast empire inside the state. The Guardian Council, the Assembly of Experts and the clerical foundations were embedded by acclamation in the constitutional order under wartime pressures that made any alternative seem like treachery.
The Iraq war also gave the regime its theology of action. Volunteering for the front, supreme leader Ruhollah Khomeini proclaimed, was a religious obligation. Thousands of boys aged 12 or younger were inducted into the militia, taught the virtues of martyrdom, and sent across Iraqi minefields to clear them with their bodies.

The reptiles compounded Our Henry's paranoia ... A sea of hands reach out to greet Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini following his arrival at Tehran airport in 1979.

The pond was becoming more alarmed by the minute. The devious Chinese were on a classics winner and by this point, the pond would have settled for almost any historical reference ...

A regime that spends its children this way does not learn restraint. Nor does it view even disastrous losses as evidence that ambitions must shrink.
Underlying that indifference to pain is an eschatology that turns defeat into confirmation. Its central paradigm is Husayn’s refusal to yield at Karbala, where the Prophet’s grandson was martyred in 680 – the model of righteous action for Shia Islam. The Shia formula, “every day is Ashura, every land is Karbala”, makes the founding trauma a permanent present: every defeat becomes a new Karbala, renewing the obligation to resist and the promise of vindication.
The Islamic Republic has applied that grammar since its blood-soaked birth: each martyrdom is a deposit in an eschatological account whose balance is guaranteed by God; each setback confirms righteousness, the magnitude of sacrifice measuring the infinite bounty to come.
Exactly the same mindset characterises Iran’s proxies. When the 2006 war left South Lebanon in ruins, Hezbollah’s Na’im Qassem called the destruction a “divine victory” that heralded the appearance of the Mahdi, the long-awaited redeemer. “The fire did not burn the mujahidin,” Qassem declared, “it burned their enemies”; angels had given Hezbollah’s combatants wings to reach their everlasting reward.
This self-sealing logic – that defeat purifies rather than disconfirms the struggle – has deep historical precedents. After the Second Crusade ended in catastrophe in 1148, Bernard of Clairvaux concluded that God had ordained the crusade’s failure to chastise the participants’ sins. The divinely mandated response, he said, was not withdrawal but renewed effort. The Crusades continued for centuries more, their costs vastly outweighing any conceivable gains, each disaster redefined as sanctification.

The Crusades? 

That's the best Our Henry has got, and even worse, he's calling the Crusades a disaster? 

Was that echoed by the snap of another disaster in the making, the CIA (and the Pom) backing of Saddam? Iraqi President Saddam Hussein waves to the crowd in Baghdad in October 1995.

The pond read on with a mounting sense of despair ...

The parallel is not merely instructive: it is structural. For movements organised around sacred history, devastating losses rarely end the struggle. And in the Iranian theocracy’s case, virulent antisemitism and crude demonology make backing down harder still.
From the earliest stages of his career, Khomeini classified Jews alongside dogs, pigs and urine as sources of ritual defilement. Even worse, they sought global dominance, plotting its conquest at secret conclaves. The Prophet had fought the Jews of Medina; the battle against Zionism was merely that conflict’s latest phase – a conflict destined to end in extermination, not negotiation.
Compounding the paranoia, Khomeini fused those delusions with the apocalyptic mythology of Sayyid Qutb’s “Our Struggle with the Jews”, which depicted Judaism as a demonic curse on mankind. The Jews’ survival and success, he concluded, was not due to resilience, ability and determination; it reflected a diabolical capacity to “muster satanic forces through witchcraft”.
Those demonic powers are, in the theology of Iran’s leaders, real, active and pervasive. And while America is – literally – the Great Satan, its regional agent, poisoning Muslim territory, is Israel.
That is why Iran’s war on Jews is non-negotiable. Recognition of the Jewish state would be theologically impermissible – the closure of a conflict the eschatological narrative requires remain open. At most, a hudna may be offered, modelled on the Prophet’s Treaty of Hudaibiyya: a tactical pause in preparation for the next round, just as that treaty was merely the prelude to Mecca’s conquest.
Seen from within this mindset, concessions are a confession of weakness – and weakness invites eventual annihilation. Clausewitz captured the logic: “So long as I have not overthrown my opponent, I am bound to fear he may overthrow me.”

Carl? Herr Hitler's favourite military theorist, though perhaps as much misunderstood as frequently quoted by Adolf and the Nazis?

This isn't Thucydides, nor even Caesar's Gallic Wars ...

For the sprawling clerical-security complex, the threat is as much material as it is theological. The ulama have grown from 25,000 seminary students in 1979 to between 350,000 and 500,000; their foundations – Setad alone estimated at $US95bn ($133bn) – control assets rivalling national budgets, and the IRGC supports hundreds of thousands of direct dependents. Counting families, the regime’s stakeholders number in the millions.
Compromises that leave Israel and the West intact and the regime’s enemies emboldened are therefore not merely anathema. They are a fatal risk to the ruling caste’s prosperity.

There came a final snap... Hezbollah supporters gather to mourn the death of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Beirut. Picture: AP

Our Henry refused the last chance to redeem himself, turning instead to a strange view of the 'Nam war, with the Vietnamese apparently broken ...

That same logic explains the endless bouts of savage repression. When demonstrations first broke out, supreme leader Ali Khamenei decreed that “sedition is worse than killing” and imposed punishments, from flogging to hanging, to match. Reflecting that decree, the reformist pressures of the 1990s were met by the systematic assassination of secular intellectuals. The Green Movement of 2009 produced mass arrests; the Mahsa Amini protests of 2022, executions and Basij deployments against crowds. Now, the regime has butchered 20,000 or more of its own citizens to quell dissent.
Yet breaking points do exist, even in regimes that seem unbreakable. The 1972 Christmas bombing brought Hanoi to terms after years of fruitless negotiations. 

Oh yes, they were broken, so, so broken ...

And so to the wrap ...

Two months of relentless NATO air power over Serbia persuaded Slobodan Miloševic that the Dayton dispensation could be enforced.
Moreover, the regime’s foundations are weaker than ever. Recent surveys show religious observance plummeting, with a majority of Iranians considering religion unimportant – a sharp reversal of the 1979 fundamentalist wave, and a measure of the regime’s loss of popular allegiance. With support ebbing, each outbreak of protest has mobilised greater numbers, requiring an increasingly murderous response that fuels seething hatred.
Force works against adversaries of this kind – but the iron carapace of eschatological certainty does not yield to graduated pressure. Only shattering it will do. Half-measures are worse than useless: they are taken as evidence the adversary’s resolve has limits.
The priority should therefore be a sustained, if necessary escalating, offensive – degrading capabilities, starving the regime of revenues and eliminating its proxies. But even if the war simply breaks the regime’s defences, reduces its assets to rubble and decimates its leadership, the threat Iran poses will be dramatically reduced.
The lesson those 46 years of sanctions and diplomacy failed to teach, two weeks of force have made inescapable: any hedging on support for effective military pressure will not be viewed in Tehran as prudence. It will be read as a licence for murder, aggression and terror. And once again, we will be in its sights.

So Chairman Xi has won. 

The classics now belong to the Chinese. Our Henry has abandoned the field and all that's left is a new kind of jihadist mortification.

Speaking of jihadists, after years of most excellent military service, the onion muncher was also out and about in the field, and in warrior war footing mode ...

The header: Once a trusted US ally, Canberra is now all talk, no action; How can Australians learn how to operate nuclear-powered submarines if they go missing when the pressure is on?

The caption: Australia under Anthony Albanese has become a strategic shirker. Picture: Getty Images

The sublime, ineffable stupidity of the onion muncher was embedded in that question in the header: How can Australians learn how to operate nuclear-powered submarines if they go missing when the pressure is on?

What a prize maroon, and the pond knew there'd be no salvation of Western Civilisation in this encounter. More likely the notion would disappear down the WC...

Australian forces have long been fastidious about “rules of engagement”, but sending personnel to their bunks while their US submarine torpedoed an Iranian frigate takes this combat caution to new levels.
What kind of an ally puts its sailors on warships as tourists, should action beckon? And how can Australians learn how to operate nuclear-powered submarines if they go missing when the pressure is on?
The whole point of an alliance, as opposed to a protectorate, is that allies are prepared to take risks on each other’s behalf. Allies put their armed forces into combat to support each other, as opposed to simply subcontracting their national security to someone else.
It’s precisely because America’s European allies have treated NATO as a protectorate, requiring almost no responsibility from them, that the durability of the world’s greatest alliance in now in doubt.
And by opting out of the Iran war, even Britain and Australia, formerly America’s most reliable brothers-in-arms, have become strategic shirkers, leaving the US to do all the heavy lifting without us.

Amazing really, that this strutting bantam should attempt to outdo Tony Bleagh, yet here we are ... Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has confirmed three Australian personnel were on the US submarine which sank an Iranian ship.

There's never been a war that the onion muncher hasn't wanted to send others off to ...

What’s not to support in the American-Israeli strike on Iran? The mullahs’ regime has routinely threatened to obliterate both America and Israel (the two “Satans”); has waged direct or proxy war against nearly all its neighbours; has sponsored terrorism around the globe (including the firebombing of Jewish premises in Australia and attacks on anti-regime campaigners in Britain), and; has killed untold numbers of its own citizens, tens of thousands just two months ago.
Even if the current air assault does no more than utterly destroy the Iranian war machine and further set back its nuclear ambitions, Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu have done the whole world a massive favour.
Australia says it supports the US action but has not lifted a finger to help. Indeed, by requiring our personnel on the USS Charlotte Los Angeles-class submarine to stand down, we may actually have hindered US operations (even if only in a minor way). Imagine the captain being told that three of his crew were now passengers; imagine the Australian personnel facing the humiliation of standing aside from their crewmates’ mission?
Everything the Albanese government does exposes the fact that its senior members see themselves as social justice activists rather than the national security warriors these times demand.
Even though Labor ministers, from the PM down, admit that these are the most dangerous strategic circumstances since the late 1930s, not only does the Albanese government stubbornly refuse to lift defence spending, it’s cannibalising every other element of our armed forces in order to pay for AUKUS submarines sometime next decade.

Naturally the onion muncher was fully on board with Benji and King Donald ... Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump have done the whole world a massive favour. Picture: AFP

Nauseating in all the ways that the onion muncher has managed in an extensive career as war monger ...

This is despite the acknowledged immediate and multiplying threats to a “rules-based global order” that has only existed while America and its allies have been able to intimidate predators from challenging it.
But it’s not just a failure to take seriously our current military preparedness. As exemplified by the red-carding of our personnel on the USS Charlotte, there seems to be a near pathological aversion to using lethal force, even though that’s the whole point of having armed forces.
The Albanese government’s initial response to the attack on Iran was Penny Wong’s call for “de-escalation”; in others words, stop fighting. Although the Prime Minister eventually overruled his Foreign Minister with a statement in support of US efforts, he stressed that he’d had no prior warning of the attack, had not been asked for military help, and had no expectation of any such request in the future. Even though it had been obvious for weeks that the US was gathering forces for an assault; and previous prime ministers, including Bob Hawke, would have picked up the phone to ask the president of the day how Australia might usefully contribute.
When the Albanese government refused to send a frigate to secure freedom of navigation in the Red Sea in December 2023, it was the first time since the ANZUS alliance in 1951 that Australia had declined an American request for military help. Rather than our ships being fully engaged elsewhere, as claimed, the real reason (I thought at the time) was fear that our ships weren’t up to the job, or political cowardice at being seen to assist Israel’s campaign against Iran’s proxies.
But now it’s worse than that: the Albanese government seems to suffer from a kind of practical pacifism, where the only circumstances our armed forces might conceivably be permitted to fire a shot in anger is at an enemy actually bombing Darwin.

There came a final snap ... Mr Trump needs Australia to start lifting a finger to help. Picture: AP

The pond was overwhelmed by a desire to slip in a matching 'toon ...

Then there was a final gobbet ...

What’s all but certain is that the current government’s reply to any US request for help, even in our own region, such as in the Taiwan Strait, would be that “we’d like to but we can’t”.
It’s telling that when the Emirati government did, this week, ask us to assist in its self-defence, our response was to send an unarmed aircraft for the command and control of fighter jets other than our own; plus the despatch of missiles for someone else to fire.
While Donald Trump has eventually praised our PM for offering asylum to Iranian women footballers, it seems the government only moved after he had demanded it on social media. At some point, the US President, who’s supposed to give Australia up to five Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines, is going to ask about its impact on US firepower. Could a country that benches personnel already embarked on a US sub ever be trusted to be at America’s side when it really counts?

What a relief that this wretched sock puppet can now only fulminate on the sidelines, a devotee of authoritarians of the Orbán kind relegated to the bench like a Tottenham goalie (sorry, Mr Crace, the pond only pays attention because of a devotion to your work).

As for that talk of asylum ...

And as for King Donald's jihad, it's all going tremendously well ...

At this point the pond should note a few regrets. 

Having been unable to get the intermittent archive working, the pond can only record yesterday's appearance of the craven Craven with a teaser trailer ...

What an insufferable wretch. That's more than enough of that brand of drivel.

And the pond regrets it can't do a deep dive into the bouffant one blaming the latest crisis on Albo - apparently that immortal Rowe 'toon referencing Gericault flew right over his head ...

Dammit, they should have personally escorted the oil through that bloody strait, and never mind a few drones ...

And with that, on with the bonus, because how can the pond ignore Killer Creighton in exuberant, triumphant mood?

The header: At last, Coalition fields its best economic team in decades; Taylor channels the economics of Thatcher and Reagan; Canavan embodies more of the nationalist policies associated with Donald Trump. Will the partnership work?

The caption for the beaming lads: Andrew Hastie, Matt Canavan and Angus Taylor form a formidable trio. Picture: Martin Ollman

Strangely Killer could only manage three minutes celebrating the arrival of the Canavan caravan, and his teaming with the prime Angus boofhead from down Goulburn way:

If academic achievements in economics counted politically, the Coalition would win in a landslide at the next election.
Senator Matt Canavan’s elevation to Nationals leader this week has cemented – with Angus Taylor at the helm of the Liberals – the strongest Coalition leadership duo ever in terms of economic qualifications.
The left’s caricature of Canavan as a coal-obsessed, parochial Queenslander ignores his first-class honours degree in economics from the University of Queensland, earned back when that was still difficult. His trademark opposition to net zero is informed: he spent six years at the Productivity Commission analysing the ballooning array of highly inefficient climate change policies that began strangling Australian industry in the late 2000s. The Productivity Commission’s then chair, Gary Banks, made him a director before he was 30.

A coal-obsessed deep northerner? Never!

(Found in the Junkee archive)

The IPA was wild-eyed with excitement and all in, Institute of Public Affairs Director of Research Morgan Begg praises National Leader Matt Canavan for his focus on family issues within Australia. “I think this is a great outcome for the National Party,” Mr Begg told Sky News Digital Presenter Gabriella Power. “How refreshing it is to hear a political leader speak plainly and honestly about the problems in our country at the moment.”

Killer was as excited as he's ever been, no doubt because the Canavan caravan shared Killer's distrust of vaccines... (he was fully down with it)

Taylor’s CV is even more impressive: university medal in economics at Sydney, before coming second at Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar, in the MPhil in Economics, a famously brutal course.
When appointed partner at McKinsey he was the youngest in the world and the quickest to get there. If Taylor is lazy, as some anonymous colleagues snipe, he’s either Einstein or they are hypocrites. Both their theses were prescient: Canavan’s on private money before the rise of Bitcoin, and Taylor scrutinised oligopoly in the beer and petrol sectors.
If the Australian media followed The Economist’s style guide and condemned anyone with a PhD to being a mere Mr or Ms (unless they hold a university title or practise medicine), the public might be more aware of the Coalition’s new intellectual warriors, and less wowed by Dr Jim Chalmers’ PhD on Paul Keating, which some might consider a less analytically difficult credential.
Perhaps it’s a good thing their everyday vernacular has obscured their qualifications. Political history is littered with pompous failures. As John Hewson famously illustrated in the 1990s, policy ambition and academic smarts are no guarantee for political success. Indeed, Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers keep Labor’s brightest economic mind, Andrew Charlton, relatively obscured.
Still, it’s not clear their smarts, however impressive, will be a political plus. Canavan is unlikely to defer to the Liberal leader so readily as his predecessors might have.

How he loved the beefy boofhead ....Angus Taylor has an impressive CV including the university medal in economics at Sydney University. Picture: Martin Ollman

Indeed, indeed ...

Killer kept fawning in a way that was most un-Killer like ...

Canavan’s elevation has touched a nerve with Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, which on some polls has become the most popular and potentially powerful political force in the nation.
“Canavan joins the likes of the ABC, The Guardian and left-wing fact checkers who have started a war against One Nation to try and tear us down,” Senator Hanson fumed this week, telling voters her party was “the only one truly dedicated to leading the agenda on ending net zero, cutting immigration”.
Her concern is understandable as the Nationals under Canavan pose a major threat – albeit a small one at this stage – to One Nation’s spectacular rise. His views are far closer to hers, and indeed to those of his former boss and ex-National, Barnaby Joyce, than to outgoing leader David Littleproud. The Coalition’s new-found potential makes its lack of policy even more embarrassing. No one expects Hewson levels of detail but, almost a year since its electoral thrashing, the Liberal Party website lists only obsolete 2025 election policies.
Months after formally dumping net zero, the Liberals seems too scared to critique it. Moreover, they refuse to seriously condone the electorate’s increasingly overwhelming desire to slash the quantum of immigration, not only tweak the origin criteria here and there.

The reptiles rounded out the yarn with a double banger of snaps, Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Andrew Charlton.

 

Killer came to his final gobbet, with the three minute coming still exultant, still in mirabile dictu mood ... though some might doubt if a formerly ranting, raving deep north ratbag of the first water had the ability to transform, shape shift himself into something approaching a rational-sounding politician ...

Hanson might not have fancy degrees, but her party has the most comprehensive range of policies across numerous areas, from tax and free speech to energy and medical cannabis (pro). Sure, they might be light on details, but the direction is clear, and for a small party without having ever had the resources of government, that’s all that can be expected. On the two biggest policy issues of our time – immigration and energy – even uninformed voters know where One Nation stands.
Canavan’s desire to defend his party’s turf against One Nation might make it more difficult for him and Taylor to agree. Deep down he probably believes the “uniparty” criticism often levelled at the Labor-Liberal establishment. Taylor channels the economics of Thatcher and Reagan; Canavan embodies more of the nationalist policies associated with Donald Trump, a toxic figure to many Liberals but one embraced by Hanson. Canavan is unafraid to embrace less orthodox economic policies and a more isolationist foreign policy, still anathema to the Liberal Party that still venerates the economic policies of the Howard government.
Far more than with Sussan Ley and Littleproud, Taylor and Canavan reflect the two intellectual wings of the modern right in the Western world, which are at loggerheads in the US and risk tearing the Republican Party apart.
Neither of the Coalition leaders are shrinking violets. They will almost certainly make for more entertaining and intellectual politics but it remains to be seen whether it translates into electoral success.
Adam Creighton is Institute of Public Affairs chief economist.

Great times ahead for Western Civilisation it seems...with King Donald in a Gulliver moment ...

And now, for those who cherished petulant Peta's talk yesterday of the need for patriots to talk patriotic history, here's a reminder of how much she and Vlad the Sociopath have in common with such blather ...Russian schools introduce obligatory history exams, education based on "Love for the Motherland"

Last but not least, the infallible Pope was also out and about this day, but he was looking at a matter entirely ignored by the lizard Oz.

Do a search of the front page of the digital edition of the hive mind for "NACC" and you score 0/0 mentions. Ditto the liar from the Shire.

So that's how the infallible Pope ends up last, like a shag on a rock, simply because there's no way for the pond to segue to this matter from the reptiles, determined to send it to the cornfield ...

In which the Canavan caravan rolls into town, taking the pond's mind off the war and sundry reptile culture warriors of the petulant Peta, Zoe kind ...

 

Now there's a prize joke. 

The "black coal matters", gay marriage hating, climate science denying, vaccine conspiratorial, Magafied Canavan caravan to lead the coalition into the future? 

And his first policy statement is a vacuous plea for more Australian babies, more Australian everything? (You can wiki his wild old ways here).

There's a new show pony in town, or at least a show pony with real style and the same cojones...

Naturally the reptiles were wildly excited, but the pond took it as a clever ploy to make Tamworth's unendurable shame seem not so bad ...

The reptiles couldn't resist opening their "Inside Story" coverage with a joke ...

Matt Canavan was lying on a hotel bed after an exhausting day on the 2010 election campaign trail, his then boss and mentor Barnaby Joyce beside him, barely a metre away, when he sent a message saying: “Hi, babe. Love you. Miss you lots.”
The message was meant for wife Andrea but Canavan had been messaging Joyce so frequently, the sweet nothings accidentally went straight to the then Nationals senator lying on the bed right next to him.
It made for a funny anecdote in Canavan’s maiden speech to parliament, but 13 years on the apprentice has become the master. And Joyce has defected to One Nation, a party that threatens the very existence of Canavan’s Nationals.
“I probably won’t find myself in a bedroom with Barnaby again,” Canavan quipped to The Australian on Wednesday after winning a three-way contest to become the 16th Nationals leader.

What a laugh, and how desperate and pathetic, and if anything certified that the coalition was in mortal fear of Pauline, this was it.

For those wondering where the show pony portrait came from, it came of course from the immortal Rowe ...

Sadly, with the intermittent archive now down and out, the pond could only find the room for one reptile piece celebrating the doofus from the deep north, but it's worth noting that Rosie's profile was full of excruciating banalities of this closing kind ...

...Canavan is credited with convincing the Nationals to reject a net-zero emissions target and played a decisive role in prosecuting former Greens leader Bob Brown’s anti-Adani convoy ahead of Scott Morrison’s 2019 “miracle” election victory.
Unlike many of his peers, Canavan – a self-described introvert – prefers to stay in at night when he’s working in Canberra and spends his time reading “arcane” economic policy reports. He also exercises every day.
On Wednesday morning, Canavan knew he should have been making calls ahead of the leadership vote but played soccer to clear his head.
He missed five or six goals before finally landing one.
“Persistence pays off,” he says.
It is that persistence that the Nationals will be relying on to turn the party’s political fortunes around.

Slap the pond with a warm lettuce leaf of inanity ...so instead of Rosie going full tedious suck, it was Brownie's EXCLUSIVE that got the nod.

Void your mind, and no harm will be done ...

The pond resorted to screen capping because the capping of the intermittent archive meant there was no easy form of paywall-free access to hand, so the unendurable simply had to be endured ...

There was another reason for the pond featuring Brownie, and for capping his work, because the reptiles diligently featured "key quotes", showing the Canavan caravan's capacity for distortion, misinformation and downright lies remained strong ...

Ye ancient cats and wild-eyed dogs, still lying about climate science, and now we're back to building coal-fired power stations. 

Not even nuking the country will be good enough for this ratbag ...

We can't wield cut throat razors in good old larrikin gang style? Gangsters and hooligans are all the go?

This is likely the last time the pond will be tempted by Canavan trolling, so the pond stayed at it ...

By doing the hard yards, the pond managed to land on yet more doofus delights, including the tariff thingie, and the identity politics thingie, followed - oh marvel of hypocrisy and irony - a deploring of the divisive thingie...

He completely rejects division? 

Could there be any greater comedy than those "thought"grabs? Is this a way to make Barners, Tamworth's eternal shame, sound like a rocket scientist?

Meanwhile, the war continued apace in inimitable King Donald style, with the reptiles clearly losing interest as quickly as the King. It was still LIVE, but only barely ...

From war to super in just two headlines ...

Gotta think about the hive mind demographics ...

Even the exquisite logic of Herbert seemed a day late ...

So too Wilcox ...

Sadly, with the intermittent archive no longer to hand, the pond felt the need to at least note some of the culture wars going down ...

As usual, the dreadful petulant Peta led the way, reviving an ancient feud ...

Usually this sort of revisionist whitewashing muck is reserved for January/Australia Day, and the pond stopped at the point when petulant Peta attempted to provide an uplifting note on the attempted extermination of Aboriginal people in Tasmania ...

In Tasmania, says the document, “the Palawa people fought a determined campaign during the 1820s to resist British settlement”. This is true, as the declaration of martial law there attests.
Yet the fact that one of the main Aboriginal leaders, Kickerterpoller (or Black Tom), was captured several times, without being executed for murder, due to the patronage of a doctor’s widow, before being exiled to Flinders Island, shows that this was not exactly a war of extermination.

It was exactly and precisely a war of extermination, no matter that George Angustus Robinson managed to kill the war's few survivors with tone deaf stupidity, disguised as kindness ...

...By August 1834 the Aboriginal problem, as the colonists saw it, had been settled, since all but about a dozen natives had been removed from the mainland to the Flinders settlement. This had its beginnings on Swan Island in November 1830. Although under Robinson's general superintendence, it was largely managed by commandants who had little interest in their charges and behaved like gaolers. Mortality had been severe, and by 1835 the Aboriginal population, estimated at about 4000 before European settlement began, had shrunk to fewer than 150 natives, of whom about half were the survivors of those sent by Robinson to Flinders Island. Introduced disease was now rapidly reducing the number of survivors.
When Robinson himself took control at the Flinders settlement in October 1835 he first set out to provide adequate food supplies and to improve housing; but his greatest change was to root out Aboriginal culture and to attempt its replacement with a nineteenth century peasant culture. Schools were established in which the natives were taught to read and write. Catechetical religion took a prominent place in all the instruction. The teachers were drawn from the Europeans in the settlement and from those native children who had learned to read and write at the Hobart Orphan School. Attempts were made to 'civilize' the natives in other ways: markets were held where they were taught to buy and sell in hope that they would come to realize the value of property; they were given new names and taught to elect their own native police. The experiment failed, partly because the natives were dying off rapidly, but chiefly because no culture can be uprooted without being replaced by an adequate and acceptable substitute.

Note to self, must avoid reading petulant Peta's whitewashing apologetics. Must also avoid disseminating them to AI. There's already too much stupidity to hand on the full to overflowing intertubes.

What else? Well Zoe was also to hand conducting another kind of culture war. 

Sssh, don't mention the ethnic cleansing going down in Gaza, and the West Bank, with ye olde Tasmania providing a goodly example of strategies to be followed to make sure you control from the Derwent river to the Bass strait sea..

The pond didn't have the ability to complete the mission, but did note the source of the disease ...

Zoe Booth is content director and host of the Quillette Cetera podcast.

What else? Well Jack was around ...

All well and good, but berating mug punters for being mugs is an easy sport. What a pity Jack didn't get on to the billionaire doomsday cultists, the preppers and survivalists who can really afford a bunker mentality, as noted in the Graudian a few years ago: The super-rich 'preppers' planning to save themselves from the apocalypse. Inter alia ...

Hmm, must make sure there's enough toilet paper in stock ... but how lucky is the pond that it ignored reptile advice, and decided to go EV rather than ICE.

The pond should note that at the top of the digital edition early in the morning there was one big shock horror splash ...

The pond confesses it didn't have the slightest awareness that this Richo was actually involved ...and a short dip reminded the pond it didn't much care ...

And so at last to the real bonus ... Dame Groan doing her groaning in the usual way ...

The header: A cosy group of economists won’t fix Jim’s list of woes; Jim Chalmers had a brainwave. Why not invite handfuls of blokey professional economists to hand over their pearls of wisdom?

The caption for the completely bewildered Jimbo: Treasurer Jim Chalmers addresses the House of Representatives at Parliament House. Picture: Hilary Wardhaugh / Getty Images

Some might wonder if Dame Groan attempted to pin the tail on the donkey King Donald for upsetting the world with a series of economic shocks, from tariff wars to assorted actual bombings, but Dame Groan only has one fixation.

She has Jimbo on the brain ...

There’s no official collective term for economists, but I’ve always thought that murder would be a good choice. A murder of economists nicely conveys the depth of disagreement that characterises this profession.
As they say, if you laid all the economists in the world end to end, they wouldn’t reach a conclusion. But Jim Chalmers had a brainwave. Why not invite handfuls of blokey professional economists to hand over their pearls of wisdom about the best policy options given our current economic challenges.
I’m not quite sure where this leaves the hundreds of economists in Treasury and the Productivity Commission whose jobs exist to make policy recommendations to the government. I guess they can conclude they tried hard, but their efforts haven’t been good enough.
I’m also not sure what the Treasurer’s initiative means for the value – or lack thereof – of last year’s roundtable on economic reform. Sure, many of us thought it was useless at the time, although Chalmers has done his best to promote the theme of intergenerational inequity to justify tax grabs on the wealthy and those on high incomes. Plenty of the hand-picked participants have gone along with this misleading theme; so maybe that was its value.
The Treasurer would have been wiser to ditch his list of productivity initiatives reeled out at the time. Getting rid of nuisance tariffs; pausing the next stage of the National Construction Code; improving interstate recognition of qualifications; faster approvals under the environmental legislation – it’s hard to see any of this list moving the dial on productivity, particularly in the short term.

Dame Groan is probably also agitated at being reduced to an irrelevant Groan for the hive mind... Economists walk out of Treasury after a meeting with Treasurer Jim Chalmers in Canberra, Friday, March 6, 2026. Picture: Mick Tsikas / AAP

Let's be clear, those wretched, unnamed scallywags can't offer a scintilla of the insights available in an endless Groaning ...

Let’s get back to Jim’s brief, chinwag sessions involving some well-known economists. Let’s be clear, macroeconomists are not well-trained to be offering up specific policy advice beyond broad trends. They deal with the fluctuating economy, the emerging patterns. They care about GDP growing by 0.7 per cent rather than 0.6 per cent. They make short-term predictions.
The bank economists, for instance, have a very good feel about the key components of economic growth but they tend to stick to their knitting. They are also not expected to pick fights with the government of the day – that’s company policy. To be sure, there are some economists around who continue to point out the false statements made by Chalmers about the role of public spending in driving the economy and contributing to inflation.
Just last week, Chalmers was trying to make the claim that the strength in the economy is now coming from the private sector. But Stephen Smith of Deloitte Access Economics noted that “public demand rose by 0.9 per cent over the quarter, outpacing private demand growth of just 0.4 per cent”.
The blowout in the medium-term budget outlook revealed in the MYEFO statement released in December was also wrongly attributed by Chalmers to a revenue downgrade rather than greater spending. Again, this mistake was picked up by some economists.
The overall impression now is of a Treasurer struggling to link the requirement for responsible economic management with his political ambitions, particularly in terms of higher government spending. His unexpected call-up of private sector economists reflects an element of panic.
With the inflation genie truly out of the bottle and the unknown consequences of events in the Middle East, the game has suddenly become a lot harder. A higher oil price adds to inflation while slowing economic growth – an ­unpalatable combination. Higher interest rates are on the cards.
There is clearly concern about the current and future state of the budget. The rate of increase in the size of government has clearly pushed the economy to its capa­city limits while causing a significant drag on productivity.
But a great deal of the spending is locked in, either through legislation or intergovernmental agree­ments. The costs of demand-driven programs – and there are many – are difficult to estimate at the best of times. The dollars being allocated to childcare, aged care and the NDIS are all escalating rapidly.

Bad luck for those wondering if the Dame would make mention of Adam Smith's 250th anniversary. The best she could manage was Justin ...

Columnist Justin Smith questions the true source of ballooning costs, warning politicians won’t personally feel the pain of spending cuts. “Where are those costs coming from?” Mr Smith told Sky News host Chris Kenny. “There will be no politician that will be worse off when they cut spending.”

And so to the closing bleat ...

Simultaneously, the Treasurer is under pressure to demonstrate his reform credentials to make up for the lack of progress in the first years of his tenure. Whether this is really a good time to be implementing a major package of changes, particularly to the tax system, is of course moot. Dealing with the fallout from overseas events is challenging enough.
But Chalmers needs to decide whether to adopt a pro-growth strategy or focus on redistributing income from wealthy and higher-income individuals. The latter ­approach will win plaudits for “fairness”, and may make some contribution to budget repair.
But realistically, tweaking property taxes at this time, for example, will do little to alter housing affordability and may raise only small amounts of additional revenue. As economists are always keen to point out, beware the unintended consequences.
Over the past several weeks, there has been a slew of dodgy advice offered up to the Senate Committee on Capital Gains. Some of the flawed recommendations include imposing the capital gains tax on nominal rather than real gains and rejecting grandfathering of tax changes.
Both ideas are preposterous. After all, the aim is to encourage investment in capital assets, which is the ultimate basis of productivity gains. To tax an asset held for 30 years, say, based on the nominal gain would be to actively discourage long-term investments. Grandfathering is required to underpin certainty in the rules under which investments are made and are not arbitrarily altered midstream.
We can only hope that the Treasurer will be appropriately advised by the Treasury on these topics. The bigger picture is that only larger scale tax reform is likely to generate sustainable gains in real per capita income. The changes should include a lower top marginal income tax rate – many of our current problems stems from our high rate – and a lower company tax rate. But it’s hard to imagine Chalmers going there even if most of the murder of economists recommends it.

If we only had Dame Groan as King Donald's wrangler, how smoothly the world would run ... but it's passing strange than when indulging in a groan, the Dame didn't bother to mention one of the key drivers of inflation.

So suppose a Dame ain't bright
Or completely free from flaws
Or as mad as a Canavan hound dog
Or as cruel as a coal-lumping Santa Claus
It's a waste of time to worry over
The oil that they have not
Be thankful for the things they've got

Groan after groan after groan, always the same
So there is nothin' you can name
That is anything like an always groaning Dame