The pond tries to shoot fish in a barrel, but finds the cost of cartridges prohibitive ...

(Above: a few samples of Rinehartiana doing the cartoon rounds. More Nicholson here, and John Kudelka's site is here).

It's like shooting fish in a barrel, but the rich do serve a purpose by providing great comedy material.

The super-rich, and particularly Gina Rinehart, are even better fun.

It was Ben Butler at Fairfax who picked up on Rinehart's latest comedy stylings, wherein she recommended - in a piece for Australian Resources and Investment (you have to register to access the purest comedy gold) - that average punters live within their budgets and stop taking overseas holidays, while warning against excessive household and government debt.

This at a time, as Butler noted in Don't overspend, Rinehart recommends, when she's on the Ten network board, and the wretched company is busy arranging really low rent debt - oh okay 20 cent shares in a "capital raising" - to try to halt its current slide into oblivion.

It's like shooting fish in a barrel, but what fun, and Ben - the pond's current favourite bearded business reporter - fired away with both barrels:

According to the nation's richest person, back in the day almost every Australian home "understood that you had to earn revenue before you could spend it". 
"Then you had to make choices: it might be nice to have overseas holidays, but maybe we should renovate the bathroom and/or kitchen, save for a granny flat, et cetera," Rinehart said in her regular column, published today. 
"Proper planning and allocation within the budget constraints had to occur. This may not be popular, but we need to get back to these basic understandings, and, very importantly for Australia, so do our overspending governments."

There's more by Ben - something about media types at Ten being flung on the scrap heap before Xmas - but thanks to Gina, the pond understands the solution to its current problems - a 20 cent share capital raising issue.

And it made for a splendid Fairfax splash, which you can find here in Colin Kruger's coverage of the highly dilutive offering, Fresh raising piles pressure on Ten board:

The pond should be shedding tears - it once tuned in regularly to Ten to watch The Simpsons, but that was long ago, before the show nuked the fridge - and now that it's the home to Andrew the Bolter Bolt,  it's hard to restrain a dance of glee on its corporate dance of doom.

Chasing a young, wired, hip demographic with an angry white male? Good luck with that ...

And then as a bonus, the pond stumbled on another site which sagely and cogently summarised some Rinehart advice on how to get wealthy.

Distilled down, there were five key points: inherit wealth; use every court in the land to keep your children's filthy paws off it; run a mega-million dollar campaign to protect your wealth; where possible, import cheap labour; and make sure to write a poem and inscribe it on a rock. As sure as the blarney stone gives you the gift of the gab, the poetic rock will see you filthy rich in short order.

Oh sure, it's shooting fish in a barrel, but a hat tip to Gina Rinehart's five easy steps to making more money for showing how to blaze away.

The underlying point of course is that being rich is a different country, and the filthy rich simply don't have a clue. They grow up surrounded by forelock tuggers, toadies, servants, pilot fish, and sycophants used to saying 'yes' while scoring some crumbs from the table.

It gives the rich an other-worldly, easy arrogance, and a born to rule mentality, and a conviction that they're always right.

Some with inherited wealth - like Rinehart in her mining business - make a go of it - and some make a right royal mess of it, as with Lachlan Murdoch and Rinehart in the media business.

Any which way, it's guaranteed comedy gold, especially when Gina gets to hang around with her mate Barnaby Joyce, thereby imagining that she's in touch with the people, when of course it's the business of the average larrikin punter to mock the rich because there's bugger all joy in a salaryman life.

What would we do without the rich?

There's Nathan Tinkler raising headlines every which way he goes, as in Tinkler a right wally when it comes to lying low, and Stadium debt action against Tinkler, and Receivers move to clip Tinkler's wings, and so on and so forth and many debt-laden etceteras.

Of course if you're an out of pocket sub-contractor with no easy way to get your money back, you might not be so keen on Tinkler's comedy stylings, but no doubt he can hand out a pamphlet of Gina's deep thoughts about debt to grieving punters.

And knock the pond over with a silver spoon, today in Taped call has mogul in sticky spot, the filthy rich Travers Duncan confessed he was a liar:

When it was put to Mr Duncan that he had either lied to the commission or he had lied to his friend Mr Kinghorn about having a mate in the department checking files for him, Mr Duncan chose the latter. When asked why he would lie to his friend and business partner in a private conversation, Mr Duncan replied, ''I have no explanation for it except folly.'' 
''I'm going to suggest you're lying to me and in fact what happened was you spoke to Ian Macdonald about this - do you accept that?'' Mr Watson asked. 
''No, I don't,'' Mr Duncan replied. 
Then came the bombshell that this conversation had been recorded on March 17 last year, about 10 days before the most recent state election.

Yep, good old Travers had been doing the dance with members of the then NSW Labor government - ah the mates and comrades again - in relation to mining licenses.

Talk about comedy stylings, though it does seem to put a new perspective, a different slant on Gina's pious blather about balancing household budgets and staying out of debt, or blaming Sydney's infrastructure for arriving late to an AGM.

Would slipping a fin to a government minister (five dollars in the old days, perhaps $500,000 would be better these days) be a better way to balance the budget and keep on getting filthy rich?

Yes the rich are a different country, as can be seen in Ken Auletta's story in The New Yorker, The Heiress (link offered by a kindly and thoughtful reader).

Yep, now that Lachlan and James have proven to be absolute duds, Elisabeth's star is on the rise, perhaps because when it came to shovelling shit on to television, Elisabeth has had absolutely no care, scruples or compunction (nor any concern about cashing out to dad).

Take a look at the current list of Shine Australia's productions, here, but only if you're feeling mentally tough and up to the job.

Shine was prepared to put together the most mealy mouthed low rent productions, like that tic tock Letters and Numbers show for pathetic, tragic, bottom-feeding SBS, until SBS turned so low rent, it axed the show, put it and the viewers out of their misery, and purchased the UK equivalent, Countdown, presumably on the basis that English migrants needed to feel at home in their new multi-cultural world.

Roll on NITV, which should never have been allowed to go off free to air (yes Stephen Conroy another barb coming your way).

Sadly, all this brooding about the rich doesn't leave much room for the lip-smacking comedy stylings of the idle pandering lickspittle lackeys at The Australian, but it has to be noted that Darren Davidson was in fine form in Gina's network exposure: shares down, and then some (behind the paywall so you won't be cruel to your dog).

First up he offered sympathy and applause:

Infrastructure bottlenecks and notorious inefficiencies. If Gina Rinehart wants to get Australia moving again, she can start in Sydney. 
 She arrived 45 minutes late to the Ten Network's annual general meeting yesterday thanks to congestion on Sydney's roads. There's a popular cause she could champion for the good burghers of Sydney: the traffic. 
 The Ten director and shareholder won a round of applause from some shareholders when she did eventually arrive at the Wesley Theatre in Sydney's CBD. 

If you're an average Sydney punter, try telling your boss you ran 45 minutes late because of the traffic. Good luck with that, and here's hoping a terrorist scare shut down the Harbour bridge.

And then it was a warm embrace with Lachlan, completely unlike the tone at Fairfax and Roger Corbett and his wretched performance, replete with blather about being a fair-minded observer from Davidson, and then this fair-minded observation about Lachy:

In the face of a series of critical comments, Mr Murdoch was confident, and often left the lectern and walked to the front of the stage to address shareholders, remaining cool and even swapping wry banter with shareholders on a day that was both personally and professionally challenging. 

There is no hiding from Ten's performance, but action was being taken, Mr Murdoch appeared to be telling shareholders with his frequent walkabouts.

Yep, Davidson's piece was right up there with an unctuous Uriah Heep, with a resolute Murdoch strutting the stage and never a mention once of that gadfly Stephen Mayne.

Of course you wouldn't be James Warburton for a shipload of green tea (CEO in firing line as Ten admits mistakes) and Gina is so on board with the new strategies that she's waiting until today to see if she'll join in the new fund raising, but it almost got poignant right at the end of Davidson's puff piece:

As for Mrs Rinehart, she followed up the recent launch of her new book, Northern Australia, and Then Some, with a comment yesterday about Ten's programming schedule. 
 When a shareholder appealed to the board to bring back Andrew Bolt's The Bolt Report, her eyes lit up and she said, in a soft voice: "Here, Here." 
 Ten will be hoping that she is similarly enthusiastic when she decides whether to take part in the capital raising today. 

Oh the pond's eyes went dewy with a soft "here", "here", because so long as the Bolter blights Sunday - instead of a rousing bout of Video Hits - so long will Ten be blighted by Lachlan Murdoch, Gina Rinehart and really stupid programming decisions that make hiring Paul Henry for breakfast seem like a stroke of telly genius.

But are things as glowing as Davidson portrayed? (He could always make a living doing paintings for chocolate boxes).

In Rinehart keeps Ten guessing over capital raising (behind the paywall so you won't kick the cat), this slipped out:

A shareholder attempted to ask Mrs Rinehart whether she had decided about participating in the capital raising. However, Mr Murdoch ruled the question out of order given her attendance at the meeting was as a director of Ten, not as a shareholder. 
Mrs Rinehart was observed asking Mr Murdoch for a private conversation after proceedings wrapped up, and they soon went to a private area to discuss the matter.

Then it was back to natter about Murdoch sharing the pain and the sympathy with small shareholders, and Ten and its Board doing its very best - keep the Bolter on the air! - and talk of a surer footing and yet again a mention of the deviant perversions of Nine and Seven, and once again not one mention of that persistent torment and gadfly Stephen Mayne.

But you will find him on PM where it's recorded that the AGM wasn't webcast and that the ABC wasn't allowed to record the meeting. (Shareholders slam Ten for $230 million share sale plan).

Oh yes, there's open democratic media for the rich, and then there's openly closed media for the rich ...

But at least in the pond's romp through the indulgent pages of the Oz business and media section this proposal caught the eye:

Yes and if you don't like a television network, don't watch it, and sucks boo to you, and nah nah, we don't really like you or want your business, and you can all get fucked, piss off if you've got a problem, we'll go our own way and do our own thing, because we're all right Jack... and remember, if you keep on about it, the African poor will always work for the smell of an oily rag ...

Amen, says the pond.

Consider it done and dusted Mr. Day, the pond has made it so ... because that's the sort of business plan and attitude the pond cherishes ...