Paul Sheehan in absentia, and a flock of flyweights fuss and feud over great big new blather ...

(Above: the first modest proposal, available here).

It's only just occurred to me that the lights have gone out over Sydney, and not for some useless earth day or earth hour.

Paul Sheehan, usually the salvation of a Monday for keen connoisseurs of commentariat commentators, seems to have disappeared (no cheap jokes about fundaments, please).

There I was clicking on the Herald - well to date it's reading for nothing and the clicks are free - expecting a valiant defence of a beleaguered, besieged, hapless, helpless mining industry - only to be confronted by emptiness, a void.

This created a crisis du jour, since there doesn't seem to be anyone else around on the pond ready to deal with the crisis du jour in a sufficiently grumpy and surly way.

Sure there's always the impenetrable and opaque David Burchell, but he's busy celebrating the instant elevation to sainthood and wisdom of Gillian Duffy, labelled a bigot by that hapless git Gordon Brown.

Burchell's rant, The catastrophic cleverness of the political class, is a classic in its own right of course, as he berates the ruling political elite and celebrates Brown's humiliation at the hands of the Rochdale council worker.

Only a few short years ago, Burchell might have been writing the same guff about Sam Wurzelbacher, aka Joe the Plumber, who these days is keen to explain how John McCain screwed his life.

Naturally Joe is now a keen tea partier, doing small town gigs like a run down rock star working the hicks in the stix. Latest news is that he did a gig in downtown Toledo at an event organised by the Children of Liberty, explaining how the federal government killed the auto industry, without the help of the far-sighted executives running General Motors. (here).

Who knows what Ms Duffy might do with her new found fame.

Yep it's a tough gig when the likes of Burchell get to celebrate the wisdom of a person plucked from the crowd, and given the Susan Boyle once over, only to see the media circus move on. Is it too cruel to label Burchell as just another wannabe Matt Preston?

How about this blather for conclusive proof?

... as we learned in this country in the 1980s and 90s, ordinary folk are not economic illiterates, merely by virtue of being ordinary. They simply demand to have the unromantic reality of their country's economic situation explained to them in an unvarnished manner. The bulk of the Australian electorate is instinctively unhappy about the demise of local manufacturing; but it is even more unwilling to return to the days of tariff walls and economic provincialism. This is as it ought to be.

You see, Burchell is better than the Delphic oracle, and can divine the collective economic unconsciousness by simply plugging himself into the zeitgeist and explaining the instincts of the bulk of the Australian electorate, whether it's demanding this in an unvarnished way, or unwilling to do that in a provincial way.

This is beyond what it ought to be, what any ordinary soul might expect from anyone, even if they're a dab hand with a divining rod. This brings the art of extrasensory perception and necromancy to a new level of understanding.

It seems the state of Britain can be attributed to the electoral system, which if it were sensible and worthy of its electors would see the Labor party shattered and in ruins, supported only by the low-skilled and the poor, benefits takers, and so Labour's feudal dependents.

Damn those wretched poor people, having tremendous fun on welfare and ruining it for everyone else. Why on a daily basis you can see bankers in the city sobbing into their warm beer at the way the low skilled and the poor simply ruin society.

Time for a modest proposal from some latter day Dean Swift, Mr. Burchell?

Sadly, it seems that Britain will end up with a coalition government, cobbled together, when what is really needed is a Margaret Thatcher, slashing and gouging and grinding, or perhaps even a latter day Oswald Mosley, at last given a chance to turn Britain into a truly noble society, as it was when it built an empire.

It's stirring stuff - the vision of common people restoring the polity, whatever the alternate reality that exists outside the necromancer's vision - but still I felt an emptiness, a void.

Sure, even as I type, there's jolly Joe Hockey blathering away on radio in support of the mining industry, but that's only to be expected. Golden goose, he blathers, golden goose.

Who could truly fill the empty void of idle golden goose blather? Who could stand up this day, and explain how the mining industry is the goose which will stop laying golden eggs in a way which would appeal to the commoners celebrated by Burchell for their instinctive economic wisdom? On a par with the wise Wilkins Micawber ...

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.

Come on down Steve Fielding:

... it’s always popular to sting the big guy and not the little guy who owns the corner shop down the street. But going after the big guy can be a dangerous policy because the government is essentially taxing an industry which has propped up this country throughout the global financial crisis.

And what happens when we've dug everything remotely useless out of the ground and shipped it offshore? Perhaps it's time for a brand new political slogan? We will determine who comes to this country to dig up our ground and the circumstances in which they dig?

I keed, I keed, don't you worry about that, because today we're all just worried about the heavyweight big guy, one hand tied behind his back as he confronts an out of control flyweight corner shop owner egged on by Chairman Rudd. Was there ever a more uneven and unfair contest arranged by cunning politicians?

Fielding manages to fill up Henry: By going after the big guys, little guys will get hurt with all kinds of sage advice, but he doesn't seem to have caught up fully with Burchell's message of tough love for a wise electorate which knows that pain is pleasure, in an economic BDSM kind of way.

In the review Henry recommends providing low income families with a 90 percent subsidy for childcare. A good idea that most people would no doubt support. But as you can imagine, the Rudd Government makes no mention of helping out this bracket of people in making childcare more affordable. In fact, in Henry’s directions for supporting productivity, participation and growth he says there is a need for affordable childcare because it encourages workforce participation.

That'd be right, take money from the hapless big guys, and shove it down the throat of low income breeders (if I may be so bold as to state Burchell's thesis a little more baldly, since we know that all these poor people on welfare do is have sexual orgies fuelled by drugs on a daily basis, and then go in search of subsidised child care).

Well what's the bet that the electorate falls for the bribe cleverly devised by Chairman Rudd, proving truly that he's heir to John Howard in every significant way imaginable - Howard having regularly bribed the electorate from his own mining boom.

It's left to Peter Hartcher in It's not the economy, it's the election, stupid, to explain that it's not the tax so much as what's done with it that matters, and what Chairman Rudd and Swan propose to do with the windfall is likely to be another pissing into the wind, John Howard style.

Meanwhile, silly, hapless Tony Abbott disappears somewhere off over the horizon screeching his cockatoo mantra about a "great big new tax". Yes, he's deeply hostile to another great big new tax, except when it's on big business for a parental leave scheme - Abbott attacks great big tax on mining - but I'm afraid I've reached breaking point on rhetoric about great big taxes.

Couldn't he at least have called the strategy a great big new set of bribes? Guess not, since as a member of a government which mastered the art of the bribe, he knows what happens when an electorate is confronted with a tasty bribe, Burchell's noble portrait of a pain-loving electorate notwithstanding.

So there you have it. The crisis du jour isn't the great big new bribe being offered to swinging voters, but the absence of Paul Sheehan to explain this to the world.

Loon pond is confronted by a great big new void, and we're not sure what to do about it, since cultivating grumpiness, grouchiness, surliness and perversity in the commentariat takes years of careful nurturing, from spore on glass to fully formed mind snatcher.

What are we left with? David Burchell? Steve Fielding? Tory Maguire? (Yes I tiptoed past her Rudd's created a "super" enemy, Abbott's got a GBNT* for fear the troll beneath the bridge might come out and eat me).

Is it time to whip up a petition demanding the return of Paul Sheehan forthwith? Or is a placid well bribed pond free of squawks, except for a few blue sky miners, a quieter, better place? As we're fair and balanced, it's up to others to decide ...

But hey, in a first ever move, who could resist the chance to quote a Midnight Oil song. Could the new super tax be Peter Garrett's final cunning revenge? Well if you believe that, you'll believe anything ...

Who's gonna save me?

But if I work all day on the blue sky mine
(There'll be food on the table tonight)
And if I walk up and down on the blue sky mine
(There'll be pay in your pocket tonight)

And some have sailed from a distant shore
And the company takes what the company wants
And nothing's as precious
As a hole in the ground

Who's gonna save me?
I pray that sense and reason brings us in
Who's gonna save me?
We've got nothing to fear

In the end the rain comes down
Washes clean the streets of a blue sky mine

PS no correspondence will be entered into regarding blue sky mining referring to asbestos mining, rather than the current heroic endeavour to dig up Western Australia and ship it in its entirety to China, because asbestos is problematic but who can argue WA would be missed?

(Below: simpleton finds the golden goose).