In which a grand plan for performance based pay for politicians and other prattlers is proposed ...

(Above: Nicholson back in 2007. More Nicholson here).

With the introduction of performance based pay for teachers, the pond has determined that the moment is now right for performance based pay for politicians.

Here's how it might work. We must first look to the kind of judiciary set up by sporting bodies to do with cheap shots, low blows, punching, fingers up bums, biting, eye gouging, cheating, off field activities such as having sex in untoward places, or urinating in public, and all the usual pleasantries of fair minded Australian sporting professionals ...

Many, if not all these crimes, have been aped, shamelessly imitated, by unimaginative politicians (please, don't ask about fingers up the bum and urinating in public, and we won't tell).

And that's before we get on to crimes against policy.

If a politician produces a silliness, a stupidity, a factual error, or makes a nonsensical statement, or perhaps indulges in a personal or professional foul, they can either be sidelined by the judiciary for a couple of weeks or fined or both. Penalties might include being sent to do honest decent work in their electorate, as opposed to blathering and babbling to the media - sin binned to their home town for a couple of weeks, or a month, and in very bad cases, for half the season.

And if it's a decent enough foul, why then I'm afraid a financial penalty is the only way to make them understand that they've broken the rules of the game.

That way it could well turn out that the likes of Sophie Mirabella have to pay to stay in parliament, but who could possibly contend this is an unjust result.

And when Tony Abbott says performance based pay for teachers should be implemented "NOW" without any consideration or explanation of what "NOW" might actually mean, I'm inclined to think a $10, 000 fine, applied "NOW" would be appropriate.

Which is not to let the players off, when they should be studying the coaches' manual and the play book to see if the moves they make will turn out to be remotely useful. In an education context, how about reading NAPLAN-style testing has 'failed' US schools?

''We have learnt about the potential negative effects of very narrow tests, particularly when they are put in a high-stakes context,'' Professor Darling-Hammond said.

Schools and individual teachers have been judged and rewarded financially for improving student test scores and punished for poor ones. This led to many of the best teachers abandoning schools in the disadvantaged areas, with some teachers accused of teaching to the test and others of helping children cheat to improve results.

"We have seen growing student exclusion to get the scores up. Schools either prevent students from taking the test or encourage them to leave school," she said.

"Schools that have choices about who to admit will not admit low-achieving students because they will bring their scores down.''

"It doesn't serve society to say we got our scores up but didn't educate lots of children. At the end of the day, it hurts the economy."

Never mind. The lumpenproletariat was always full of drop kicks and losers, and I guess once we get a full supply of gated communities, away from the crime zones, American style, all will be well.

Meanwhile, let's forget about the United States. We want to fuck things up in our own way, and we want to fuck them up NOW.

Mr Abbott says good teachers should not have to wait for a bonus but should be paid more now.

"If it's worth doing, it's worth doing now," he said. (here).

Yes, why wait, it's well worth fucking up right NOW.

Naturally the government is busy following his advice, as can be found in Teacher bonus pay won't help students, educators warn.

Professor Brian Caldwell, a former dean of education and now professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne, said the government's scheme - which aims to reward one in 10 teachers - was impossible to deliver by 2014.

2014, Prof? Hell that's not NOW. Fuck it, we'll do it fucking live, we'll do it NOW, the whole thing sucks anyway. (with apologies to Bill O'Reilly).

Back to the judiciary scheme.

Of course if the country did well, and everything was spiffing, the reverse would apply, and politicians would be entitled to a performance based boost, a bonus, based on the gate for the year, or a rise in collective intelligence, or happiness in the UK style, but as that's never likely to happen, we're quite content to offer a carrot and stick system. To hell with the carrots, bring on the stick.

Come to think of it, a performance based system could also be applied to commentariat scribblers. If more than ten readers advise the Herald that they've nodded off to sleep while reading a Gerard Henderson column, then surely Henderson should be penalised, his column sent to the sin bin, or any payment for the scribble refunded.

Monies so accumulated can be forwarded to nursing homes where delirious readers, sent slightly mad or demented by reading the commentariat, live out the last few years of their tortured, tragic lives ...

Yes, you can guess I've been reading Gerard Henderson again, and there he is in all his glory in Tanner's lack of self-awareness clear in tale of media pandering, displaying a salutary lack of self-awareness which would surely make even Tanner blush.

Here's how Henderson wraps up his piece about Tanner and the media:

Sideshow makes a lot of valid criticisms of the impact of the cult of celebrity on modern politics. But Tanner has not discovered a new iron law of politics. The O'Farrell experience demonstrates politics can still be essentially about good government.

Yes, Henderson's talking about good government in the context of an election held on 26th March, just over a month ago, with the O'Farrell experience to date demonstrating that in a month it's bloody hard to get a handle on good government (which didn't stop Paul Sheehan exploding like a cheap two bob watch in yesterday's Herald).

What Henderson means to say that the O'Farrell experience demonstrates politics can be essentially about good old-fashioned campaigning, as he says earlier in his piece. But because he's inclined to repetition, somehow he manages to get himself caught in a tautological inexactitude.

This is the sort of verbal error that would have the prim punctilious prattling Polonius in a rage if discovered in another scribbler.

Suspend the Henderson column for a week, and send the man to study the dictionary, says the judiciary, with a pound of the gavel.

There are of course other inconsistencies, natural when a nit-picker is out there determined to pick away at the nits and the gnats.

Henderson berates Tanner for attacking the media for the way politicians now willingly participate in entertainment formats that have little connection with any political issue.

According to our desiccated Polonius, This is a clever point, but a trivial one nevertheless.

So how trivial do you want to go?

Well Henderson gets right down there with Tanner. Tanner berates the media for picking up on a politician's clothes, appearance, language or demeanour, so Henderson berates Tanner for mentioning that Gillard dyes her hair red, in a way that sensibly makes her more noticeable.

It's not a clever point, and bugger me dead, it sure as hell is trivial.

Ditto Henderson rabbiting on about Tanner making a joke about how he started out in student politics and then ended up in the Rudd cabinet in a variant on Melbourne University SRC politics circa 1975.

The righteously pompous prat Henderson rabbits on about this endlessly, because the man simply has no sense of humour.

When, by way of comparison, this means Tanner, a relatively humourless man in public life, is way more humorous in his scribbles, you can see why you should never pitch a joke to the dull, sour, sanctimonious Henderson.

Why, it has to be said that Tony Abbott has a better sense of humour, and even Julia Gillard. You'd have to look to Peter Garrett to find an equivalent to Henderson's lack of humour in his public pronouncements.

Henderson naturally takes Tanner's thoughts as a sign that the Rudd government became dysfunctional, with nary a mention of how in the last six months of its life, the Howard government became dysfunctional (as did the Keating government in its last months).

Half way through the piece, you feel like dragging him from the field and making him sit on the substitutes bench, for preferring pedantic nit picking and ball fumbling and constant failure to attend to the bigger picture.

His bizarre attempt to exonerate the current media circus is surely a one pointer. And citing Barry O'Farrell as a wondrous example, when O'Farrell knew even a drover's dog could have won the election from where he sat, and being a small target was the way to go, is surely an own goal.

With ball disposal like that, Henderson needs some time on the bench ...

The one good thing about the Henderson piece? There's no mention of inner western suburbs city elites - automatic four column ban and thousand dollar fine, with an additional thousand for mentioning coffee, wine, caviar or latte - because it's time for jokes about Victoria.

Yes Tanner has only to look over the Murray river to realise how grandly democratic and media shy Barry O'Farrell was when he won his historic victory, while all the time indulging in good government. Sorry, we meant good honest Bazza campaigning.

Shades of parochial pedantry. And they now run Henderson in The Age. I wonder what they make of that, those Mexicans over the other side of the Rio Grande.

And so on and so forth. It's so tedious that Henderson can thank the dear absent lord that the commentariat judiciary hasn't got into full swing just yet, because I'd rub him out for the season, just for being trivial and dull.

It's worse than watching Collingwood play, worse than enduring Eddie Maguire, worse than wondering how on earth a creature like Sam Newman came to exist, and then be rewarded with a spot on network television ...

(The pond gratefully thanks its supplier for a rich trove of football metaphors).

(Below: now apply the logic of the cartoon below to politicians and the commentariat. As Toad might say about a car after it sends his canary yellow horse drawn caravan careering off into a ditch:

“Glorious, stirring sight!" murmured Toad, never offering to move. "The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here to-day--in next week to-morrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped--always somebody else's horizon! O bliss! O poop-poop! O my! O my!"

O bliss, o poop poop as the politicians get paid for performance).