Thursday, August 21, 2025

A belated late arvo Groaning joins the productivity jihad ...

 

It's likely the reptiles thought they'd tricked the pond by introducing Dame Groan into this day's productivity jihad a tad late, long after the pond's early morning deadline.

As if reptiles, as if ... as if the pond, being exceptionally productive, couldn't arrange a late arvo addition to the productivity jihad ...



The header: Economic roundtable: A wasted day spent listening to all the usual rent seekers, Australia's economic reform roundtable has become a closed-door affair for rent seekers while common sense prevails at a rival meeting discussing the nation's investment challenges.

The caption: Treasurer Jim Chalmers at the economic reform roundtable in Canberra on Wednesday. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

It was only a three minute read, and catnip for the cultists who worship at the feet of the Groaner.

Besides, that reference to "rent seekers" is exceptionally rich, coming from rent seekers of the first water, with much rent seeking celebrated over the years ...

The Groaner was in top form, on the outside looking in ...

I could have been faced with a diabolical choice: watch the Treasurer’s official economic reform roundtable or switch to Matt Canavan’s competing roundtable occurring in another part of Parliament House.
As it turned out, I didn’t have to make that decision because the Jimbo shindig is “in camera” – only the anointed attendees get to hear what is being discussed. Of course, bits and pieces leak out – and on the face of it, Day 2 looks like speed dating for rent seekers.
Take the plea from the superannuation funds to be let off the hook from performance testing because there are long-term and often illiquid investments in worthy things such as energy, infrastructure and affordable housing that are going begging. The fact that some – many? – of these investments may never pay off is conveniently overlooked.
If this looks a wee bit self-serving by the people who run industry super, it’s because it is blatantly so. Having spent many years getting to the point where the performances of super funds are regularly assessed by an independent agency, these grifters in the superannuation industry want to use members’ money to fund their pet projects.
But because superannuation in this country is operated through individual members’ accounts – thank goodness – there is an obvious solution to this dilemma without seeking favourable regulatory change from Jimbo.
Ask members to tick the box for green energy, infrastructure, affordable housing or any other poor-return investment option and Bob’s your uncle. Just don’t allow these funds to hide these investments in the so-called balanced option.

The reptiles interrupted with a snap of a villain designed to inspire fear and loathing, Treasurer Jim Chalmers delivers his opening address for the second day of the Economic Reform Roundtable.




Eventually Dame Groan went AI curious ...

No doubt there was a lot of backslapping about the need to reduce red tape in all its colours. Once upon a time, we had ministers for deregulation – gosh, Penny Wong even held that portfolio – but those days are in the past.
But meaningfully reducing regulatory burden is much easier said than done. It can be gamed by the bureaucrats who have a direct interest in maintaining regulations with their high compliance costs. For instance, getting rid of a third of a statute that has been obsolete for decades is a favourite tactic, particularly if there is a rule about one in, one out (or some other ratio). The fact that many regulations affecting businesses are state-based also complicates the calls for red tape to be removed. What’s a thicket of impenetrable requirements to business is risk-averse required regulation to state politicians and public servants.
Of course, speeding up approvals looks like a no-brainer from a policy point of view. But the likely outcome from these secret proceedings is that approvals for new wind and solar installations as well as transmission lines will be made more quickly – objectors can simply forget about it – but approval for a new goldmine, say, will continue to go through the current costly, labyrinthine and lengthy process.
We only need to look at the delays, including the recent ones, to confirm the extension of the Woodside gas development in North West Shelf to realise what lies in store for any project not deemed to be in the worthy basket of green energy or affordable housing.
As for AI, it’s not clear where this will lead. But Australia will be a follower, not a leader here. There is very little likelihood of any major data centres being established because they need affordable 24/7 energy, something we simply cannot offer these days.

At this point, the pond felt the need to interrupt. 

It's perfectly clear where AI will lead.

It will lead to useless, feeble parody, with the pond commissioning Chatgpt to do a parody of a Dame Groan outing ...

The Productivity Trap: Or How I Increased My Output by Never Sleeping Again
By Judith Sloan (not really)

Let’s talk productivity. Not the quaint, old-school type where people went to work, did their jobs, then came home to enjoy a sandwich and some form of human affection. No, I mean the new kind—grindcore capitalism with a side of cold brew. The sort of productivity that has CEOs timing their bathroom breaks with AI-powered watches and interns optimizing their morning showers by shampooing while doing squats.
You see, economists like to bang on about productivity growth as if it's a holy grail. “Productivity is down!” they wail. “Australia’s GDP per hour worked has stagnated!” Cue the Reserve Bank governor nervously adjusting his tie while muttering about lagging multi-factor inputs. Meanwhile, Cheryl from accounts has been answering emails at 3am using a wrist-mounted Slack device to "stay competitive".
Productivity, in theory, means doing more with less. In practice, it means working yourself to the bone while pretending you love it. At some point, someone decided that the best way to improve national output was to outsource lunch, abolish breaks, and make 'burnout' a KPI.
I recently read a report from a consultancy firm—let’s call them Ego & Partners—that found the average worker is 17% more productive when monitored by software that pings them every time they hesitate over a spreadsheet cell. The same report recommended replacing middle management with “motivational holograms.” A bold vision. Personally, I prefer a real manager who can at least pretend to care when I cry into my fourth coffee of the day.
Of course, none of this affects the C-suite, who remain immune to the laws of time and basic biology. When questioned about his company’s 72-hour workweek policy, one tech founder responded:
"I don’t believe in hours. I believe in outcomes. My team delivers 150% every day."
Sir, respectfully, your team is dead.
It’s not that we don’t want to be productive. We do. We love graphs, metrics, dashboards. We live to be pinged. But somewhere along the way, productivity became less about “doing work well” and more about “optimizing yourself into a husk.” You're not tired, you're under-leveraging your circadian rhythms. You're not burnt out, you're in deep flow.
And let’s not forget the role of government. Every budget season they solemnly intone, “We must lift productivity to ensure long-term economic growth.” Translation: we’ve run out of ideas, so please work harder.
Look, maybe the real productivity gains aren’t in pushing humans to the brink. Maybe it's in investing in decent infrastructure, better public services, and the radical idea that people perform better when they’re not one Slack message away from a breakdown.
But what do I know? I'm just a columnist pretending not to write this during my scheduled rejuvenation nap window. According to my smartwatch, I'm now 43% behind on my sarcasm output.

Some might be alarmed. 

After all there was this howl in the wilderness by Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic (that's an archive link)...



And so on, and the pond began wondering whether it was hallucinating the entire Groaning, a delusional inability to cope with her presence ...

Over at the alternative roundtable, there was so much common sense being uttered that it felt like my birthday. We heard it is not just investment but the quality of investment that counts. Where government is directing investment dollars, the scope for misallocation is great and denies the opportunity of achieving the lowest-cost options to satisfy consumer preferences though market signals.
Alarmingly, we learnt from several business executives that Australia is becoming an increasingly unattractive destination for overseas investors, including from Japan and Korea in the energy space. The dreaded label of “sovereign risk” is being increasingly attached to our name. Several big energy-using plants are likely to close in the next few years, never to return.
In combination with rigid industrial relations laws, the scene is essentially set for low productivity growth. Pushing on with even more investment in renewable energy, which is now 100 per cent government subsidised, is essentially a highway to higher energy costs.
My advice is to forget about mottos surrounding green energy being good for households, good for the economy and good for the planet. It entails a higher cost that has damaging effects on real incomes. US manufacturers now face costs between three and four times lower than here. It’s not hard to see where the next project will be located.
So, it was another waste of a day in the cabinet room. We read the rubbish coming out of the recent PC reports, but it’s OK because the chair thinks we need a “growth mindset” – whatever that means. Red tape must be reduced because we’ve never heard that before. And there’s the unproven allure of AI as the road to higher productivity. All in day’s work, I guess.

Splendid stuff, and so the pond took the liberty of asking the AI bot to conjure up Dame Groan having a groan about cardigan wearers ...

Bureaucracy as Performance Art: The Government Productivity Illusion
By Judith Sloan (if she had finally snapped and gone full satire)

Productivity in the public sector is like Schrödinger’s cat: it exists, and it doesn’t, and if you try to observe it too closely, someone will send you a 93-page PDF titled “Productivity Framework—Phase 1 (Discussion Draft, not for circulation)”.
We’ve now entered the golden age of government productivity initiatives—also known as “doing more with less while measuring everything with metrics no one understands.” Ministers line up to solemnly announce “efficiency drives” like monks announcing a fast. Secretaries nod gravely. Everyone agrees to “streamline service delivery,” which in practice means replacing humans with online forms that crash after Question 3.
Let’s be clear: nobody enters the APS to get rich. But they do expect at least a working printer and perhaps a chair that doesn’t date from the Howard era. Unfortunately, those were cut in the last round of “digital transformation.”
The government, you see, loves to talk about productivity. They form taskforces. They hold roundtables. They commission KPMG to review the roundtables. Then they publish glossy reports with cover photos of diverse Australians pointing thoughtfully at whiteboards. Inside, the conclusions are clear:
Productivity is low. It should be higher. More working groups are needed.
To boost public sector output, departments are now adopting “agile” methods—a term borrowed from Silicon Valley, where it usually means holding 37 meetings a week while achieving nothing until someone quits. In Canberra, it means putting your policy paper in a Trello board and watching it age like a bottle of South Australian shiraz.
I once sat through a presentation titled “Driving Outcomes Through Outcome-Driven Output Drivers.” At one point, a slide read: “Our deliverable is a framework for the roadmap to deliver the framework.” I asked what that meant. The presenter blinked, adjusted their lanyard, and replied: “It’s about impact.” Fair enough.
Meanwhile, frontline staff are expected to improve their “efficiency metrics” by 12% annually, despite receiving zero funding increases, one photocopier between 46 people, and a mental health seminar that was just a YouTube video of a cat meditating.
Of course, the real masterstroke is when governments announce they’re investing in productivity. That’s the win. No need to actually do it. Just hold a press conference, mention “digital capability uplift,” and maybe pilot a chatbot that redirects queries into a black hole.
And let’s not forget the annual Public Service Commission survey—the sacred ritual in which staff rank their “engagement” on a scale from “mildly disillusioned” to “actively Googling exit strategies.” The results are published, skimmed, and immediately forgotten.
Here's the truth: government productivity isn’t measured in widgets or KPIs. It’s measured in patience. In tolerance. In the quiet heroism of a policy adviser trying to explain superannuation reform to a new minister who thinks compound interest is a media scandal.
So next time a politician says, “We’re making government more productive,” ask for specifics. If they use the phrase “low-hanging fruit,” tell them the orchard was bulldozed for a procurement portal. And if they mention “efficiency dividends,” run.

And if they use "rent seekers" just give them a job at News Corp ...






In which the current reptile productivity jihad continues, with surprise guest appearances by Moorice, Javier and Uncle Leon ...

 

The pond has noticed that the reptiles like to slip a hint, a fragrance, an essence of climate science denialism, and renewables fear and loathing, into almost any column under the sun.

So the pond would like to begin a slow Thursday by opening with Peter Brannen's piece in The Graudian,  ‘A climate of unparalleled malevolence’: are we on our way to the sixth major mass extinction? Churning quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at the rate we are going could lead the planet to another Great Dying.

Spoiler alert, the final two pars...

...Unfortunately, the rate at which humans are now injecting CO2 into the oceans and atmosphere today far surpasses the planet’s ability to keep pace. We are now at the initial stages of a system failure. If we keep at it for much longer, we might see what actual failure really means.
If you want to overwhelm the system in a shorter time frame and shove the carbon cycle dangerously out of equilibrium, you need a much more intense infusion of CO2 into the oceans and atmosphere – faster than biology or weathering can save you. The modern global industrial effort to find, retrieve and burn as much ancient carbon buried in the Earth’s crust as possible in a matter of mere centuries might be up to the task.

And as the pond likes to exceed by excess, how about Adam Morton's Voices arguing that climate action is a waste of time are getting louder. Here’s why they are wrong, Optimism may be hard to come by but the evidence shows some progress on emissions is not just possible – it’s happening before our eyes

The pond feels it, as both Sydney and Pakistan cop a drenching.

Given the lizard Oz's recent EV jihad, the pond particularly savoured this ...

According to Our World in Data, global sales of internal combustion engine cars – which run solely on petrol or diesel – peaked in 2016 at 80.47m. Electric and plug-in hybrid car sales in that year were just 780,000.
Last year, sales of dirty cars were 62.05m, a 23% fall. Electric and plug-in hybrid car sales had increased to 17.5m.
Put another way, nearly a decade ago only one in every 100 cars sold across the globe was electric. Now it is more than one in five. Elon Musk’s extraordinary self-own in damaging Tesla’s reputation may dent the pace of growth but it won’t stop it. China has little time or need for Teslas and is home to more than 60% of global EV sales.

The times they are a changing, not that you'd know from plunging into the hive mind.

Speaking of a plunge, time to take a Thursday dip and see what the hive mind is leaving out in the snow...



The pond woke to news of a new illegal West Bank settlement, designed to kill forever the two state solution, together with further progress in ethnic cleansing in Gaza by a rogue state now seeking to become a new variation on the old apartheid South African regime.

You could read the story in the Graudian, but in the hive mind? 

Off to the cornfield with that angle, to be replaced by these EXCLUSIVES ...




Pitiful, the old anti-Semitic routine deployed yet again, and the pond could barely muster the energy for a cartoon response ...



Ukraine, Russia, King Donald, and the war had also disappeared, and in their stead came former chairman Rudd, keen to help ...



Such a helpful man, so subservient, so willing to bend the knee and tug the forelock....but that meant the pond had no excuse to run this cartoon by Dutch artist Siegfried Woldhek ...

What the heck, toujours gai Archy ...




Instead of King Donald, Gaza and the wars, the reptiles offered this from croweating Penbo, and without even the use of scare quotes in relation to "woke" ...

EXCLUSIVE
Health official’s trans stillbirth remark fuels woke row
Women’s groups have condemned a senior South Australian health official’s focus on gender inclusivity during stillbirth inquiry testimony.
By David Penberthy

Shouldn't that have been Health official’s trans stillbirth remark fuels allegedly "woke" row, whatever that word means ...?

All that did was immediately trigger the pond's contractual requirement whenever the reptiles trot out the word ...



As for what was happening over on the extreme far right, the pond had to stifle an impatient yawn ...




Of all the reptile jihads in recent times, the productivity jihad is the most boring and witless, and yet they were all at it.

Jack the alleged insider tried the old circus routine ...

Roundtable circus will produce some headlines but no real reform
Much was said on day one of the gabfest with precisely zero policy determined and this pleased Jim Chalmers, who could talk under wet cement about nothing.
By Jack the Insider
Columnist

The only notable feature in this outing came at the get go with a literal reptile attempt to conjure up the circus metaphor ...



That's beyond the valley of the wretched, with no human credit, and yet only a hint of the pathetic AI the reptiles now seem to rely on.

Anyone wanting to read Jack can head off to the archive...the pond had decided it could only cope with two productivity outings arising from the latest jihad, beginning with pearls of wisdom ...




The header: Why ideology is at core of our productivity slump, Is Australia’s poor recent productivity performance unique in the rich world? No, it isn’t, but while slow-growth European economies find themselves in a deep malaise like us, only a few decades ago we were streets ahead of them.

The caption: Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers opens the second day of The Economic Reform Roundtable at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

The pond can assure correspondents that this is five minutes of undiluted tedium (so the reptiles timed the read), and the only reason for running it is that it came straight from the Canavan caravan ...

In the spirit of joining that circus, hey ho, off the pond went ...

Last week the Reserve Bank downgraded its medium-term labour productivity growth assumption by 30 per cent, from 1 per cent to 0.7 per cent. If realised, this will cap the economy’s sustainable speed limit to a paltry 2 per cent each year.
Yet even this writedown remains optimistic, given that labour productivity has flatlined in Australia since 2016.
Is Australia’s poor recent productivity performance unique in the rich world? No, it isn’t, but while slow-growth European economies find themselves in a deep malaise like us, only a few decades ago we were streets ahead of them.
In the 1990s, labour productivity grew by an average of 2.3 per cent each year in this country. We were a truly exceptional, pro-growth, pro-aspiration economy where markets, not bureaucrats, allocated resources, governments lived within their means and believed in cutting taxes, and the vulnerable were looked after with targeted safety nets. It was a time when both major parties channelled Milton Friedman but with a social conscience.
We have had a spectacular fall from economic grace so far this century. If we continue along this trajectory, Paul Keating’s banana republic prophecy will be realised – and sooner than we think.

The pond didn't have to get to the end to realise this was pure Canavan caravan, because the reptiles slipped in the man himself, chatting to the Bolter, Nationals Senator Matt Canavan says he has decided to organise his own productivity roundtable on Wednesday, which “won’t have any elephants”. Mr Canavan says Labor has managed to “squeeze a lot of elephants” into their economic roundtable, where there are certain topics they are “refusing to discuss”. “We’ll be willing to call out issues like energy prices … the lack of serious and frank advice that’s given by economic agencies to the government,” Mr Canavan told Sky News host Andrew Bolt. “Our economic performance has not been good enough, and the only way we’ll fix that is if we speak plainly to each other.”




Back to the pearls of wisdom ...

The first step in arresting this slide is to correctly identify the nature of the problem, however confronting or inconvenient it may be. Let’s dispense with the myths and misconceptions peddled by some of those at the government’s roundtable.
Our productivity crisis cannot be blamed on measurement errors in the care economy, the slow uptake of technological advances or progressive economists’ favourite bogeyman – malign oligopolies that undermine competition and dynamism.
Neither can it be attributed simplistically to low business investment. For productivity, it is the quality, not the quantity, of investment that matters – the return it yields in free markets. Too many have forgotten this.

The reptiles then helped out with a graph, blessed with an astonishing simplicity ...



That really got the pearls of wisdom dropping, and yes, there was a harking back to the days of Gough, because ... the reptiles have a readership demographic that regards someone who can remember Gough as a spring chook?

Isn't Gough as the boogeyman wearing just a tad thin. Egad sir, forsook, enough of those heresies, we must keep living in the past and evoking nightmares ...

The truth is that we have deliberately chosen the low-productivity economy we inhabit. In the early part of this century we dispensed with the world-leading economic model Bob Hawke, Keating, John Howard and Peter Costello put in place, and set out to replace it with something entirely different. While this new dispensation was billed as a progressive one, it was in fact deeply and obviously regressive.
It was no more than a revival of the failed policies and fraudulent economic beliefs of our pre-reform era but with shiny new labels attached. Back then the rallying cry was “protection for all” – justifying an economy-wide network of tariffs, quotas, subsidies and price rigging. Today we impose these same policies under the inane banner of net zero.
In the area of workplace relations, we are reliving the bad old 1970s where unions dictate terms and multi-enterprise bargaining is back in vogue.
And, channelling Gough Whitlam, we have removed all fiscal constraints on government, embracing unaffordable welfare programs and sneering at the notion of balanced budgets. Both major parties are equally to blame for this economic retreat.
How do we begin to turn the corner?
It starts by posing a simple question. What kind of economy and society do we want to be? Do we want to be a high-taxation, cradle-to-grave welfare economy where resources are allocated by bureaucrats, not markets, and growth is deliberately constrained under the rallying cry of net zero?

Ah, there you go. The pond had promised a mention of bog standard reptile climate science denialism, and the reptiles delivered as promised, as they slipped in a snap in a bid to sort the net zero wood from the trees, Productivity Commissioner Danielle Wood has called on the political class to adopt a ‘growth mindset’. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman




Then came a key pearl of wisdom ... it was either his way or hit the highway ...

Or do we want to be a pro-growth, aspirational economy where markets, guided by consumers, occupy centrestage with government playing a secondary, supportive role?
As I have argued before, this is not a narrow technocratic choice but a political, social and even moral one. This is not an appeal to nostalgia. All societies of today and the future will be confronted with it – there is no third way.
Let me say a few words about the role of our economic institutions, including the Treasury, where I worked for two decades, and the Productivity Commission. The reform task the Hawke and Howard governments faced would have been far more difficult, if not impossible, without the sound advice, credible analysis and professional integrity of these agencies.
While the Treasury is not independent of government, it never hesitated back then to tell ministers what they needed to know rather than what they wanted to hear. We prided ourselves on our whole-of-economy focus and – behind closed doors with ministers – consistently made the case for lower and flatter income taxes, balanced budgets, targeted safety nets, free trade and undistorted markets.
We were informed not by ideology but by the laws of economics and plain common sense.
Across recent decades, both institutions have been colonised – and in my view seriously compromised – by progressive economic ideology, just as so many others have.
The rot started at the top, not at the working level.
The discussion papers they issued for the reform roundtable were shoddy, lacked economic rigour and spruiked highly questionable government policies and accomplishments.

Pot, meet shoddy, rhetorical, argumentative kettle, with many bees in bonnet, as the dog botherer arrived on the scene to provide a distraction, Sky News host Chris Kenny says Australia needs “reform” due to Labor’s “unprecedented” government spending leading to budget deficits. “Here, the economy is stagnating, our productivity is sinking ever backwards and we are poorer as individuals than we were when Labor first won office three years ago,” Mr Kenny said. “The budget had five minutes of sunshine in surplus, but now with Labor’s unprecedented increase in government spending, the deficits stretch endlessly to the horizon, so we need reform.”




Then there was a final flurry ...

In her press club speech, Productivity Commission chairwoman Danielle Wood called on the political class to adopt a “growth mindset” and be aware of inescapable trade-offs, yet ignored the massive net-zero energy price shock we have imposed on ourselves – even describing it as an “economic prize”.
High on the to-do list for our next reforming government, whether Labor or Coalition, must be a complete overhaul of these institutions. Don’t listen to their media apologists.
Let me end on a more optimistic note. While the task of overturning a failing economic model is a daunting one, we succeeded in doing it before. Policy revolutions must start somewhere, as we discovered when Hawke floated the dollar in 1983.
What are the achievable, initial steps that can be taken that, while not silver bullets in themselves, may build momentum for wider changes? First, the pernicious practice of bracket creep must be outlawed, which not only is a hidden regressive tax but guarantees lazy governments additional revenue every year, feeding the Canberra beast.
Second, to fund needed substantial income tax cuts – both personal and corporate – federal spending must be reduced by the four percentage points of GDP Keating achieved in the late 1980s; if necessary, across several years. A much more narrowly focused National Disability Insurance Scheme should be first cab off the rank.
Third, just as Keating deregulated our financial system as an early priority, we must do the same to our centrally planned energy market, freeing ourselves from the pointless economic straitjacket of net zero.
If we know one thing about the government’s roundtable, it is that it will seek to take us in the opposite direction, serving only to deepen our productivity malaise.
This is not a grand experiment, as some claim, but a movie we have seen before – and as many of us know it has an awful ending.

It must be hard, and it must be even harder to be a pearl of wisdom, dropping endless pearls about how everyone back in the day got it entirely wrong, what with him having allegedly been at the heart of the rot for some considerable time, dressed out in all sorts of fine cardigans while strutting around Canberra...

David Pearl is a former Treasury assistant secretary. This is the text of his comments at the Real Productivity Roundtable, an alternative to the government’s economic reform roundtable, at Parliament House on Wednesday.

You'd think this pearl of wisdom would hide his cardigan-wearing shame instead of boasting about it and putting it in his CV ...

And so to the bonus, and the pond apologises in advance for it being more of the same productivity jihad ...



The header: Chainsaw reform or cordial experts? Roundtable outcomes in spotlight, Are Jim Chalmers’ hand-picked experts enough to push the Albanese government into the sort of reform needed to fix Australia’s dire productivity? Maybe Australia needs Argentinian President Javier Milei.

The caption: Treasury Secretary Jenny Wilkinson and former treasury secretary Martin Parkinson arrive at the Lodge in Canberra on Wednesday. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

The reptiles clocked it at a humble two minute read ... but at least it featured another from the Canavan caravan, Moorice himself.

Moorice was once much favoured by the pond, and how pleasing it is to see the canny Cranston give him a platform ...

Fly, Moorice, fly, fly like an eagle ...

As the high-profile participants of Jim Chalmers’ economic reform roundtable visited the Prime Minister’s Lodge for wine and cheese on Wednesday night, few could answer whether or not this group of hand-picked experts would be enough to push the government into the sort of reform needed to fix Australia’s dire productivity.
Former prime ministerial adviser Maurice Newman, who attended a competing economic reform roundtable hosted by senator Matt Canavan on Wednesday, said Australia was facing such a bleak future on productivity that he was in discussions to bring out chainsaw-wielding Argentinian reformer, President Javier Milei to fire up stakeholders.

The reptiles obligingly included a snap of Moorice's new hero, Argentina's President-elect Javier Milei with his chainsaw



Unfortunately that immediately triggered unhappy memories for the pond ...




How is Uncle Leon doing- apart from driving Tesler and his parody of a tank into the ground?

Well there was this in Forbes... with a snap featuring him looking like a stunned mullet ...




And so on, and the reptiles themselves helped out by happily reprinting a WSJ yarn on the drug-addled Tron truck car clown ...





What could possibly go wrong?

Uncle Leon hitched up with that couch lover JD, why it's sure to be an even bigger hit than Uncle Leon's last outing with King Donald ...

Carry on golfing and annoying the Poms ...




Why wasn't this featured by the reptiles? This sort of loonacy puts Moorice in the shade ...




And now the pond's gone this deep into the WSJ yarn, it should really finish the saga off ...




Sorry, sorry, yet another turkey from the Tron truck man, and so the pond will return to the tiresome business of productivity, praying for another Moorice sighting ...

Former Treasury secretary Ken Henry, who described the last two days as “remarkably constructive” was circumspect when asked on Wednesday if the roundtable was enough to produce the kind of outcomes needed to lift 60-year lows in productivity.
“We’ll just have to wait and see,” Henry said. “We do have the session on tax reform tomorrow.”
Henry has criticised the Albanese’s government’s plans for a new tax on unrealised capital gains, and has been pressuring the government to reform the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.
Commonwealth Bank chief executive Matt Comyn, who has said corporate tax reform was not a priority, said he didn’t think participants were holding back because of the privilege of being under the Albanese tent on reform.
“It has been said multiple times that people can say what they think. I haven’t had any issue with that,” Comyn told The Australian.
Billionaire Atlassian founder Scott Farquhar said, “I’m not sure I have a good answer for you on that,” when asked about whether people were holding back because of the having the privilege of sitting in one of the 23 golden ticket seats in the cabinet room.
Another participant told The Australian, on background, that “the way some of us are feeling is that ‘this is my seat’ and ‘I have got buy-in now” and they didn’t want to jeopardise that by being too forceful.

Oh brave participant, did you feature in the entirely pointless and visually dead snap? Are you in there, in the dark? Economic roundtable attendees arrive at the Lodge in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman



At least Moorice came back for the final gobbet, and whaddya kno, so did Gough, because the reptiles love to live in the 1970s...

Even the likes of opposition Treasury spokesman Ted O’Brien, who Chalmers implied was at risk of being a deliberate agitator, has been, for the most part, constructive and cordial.
But back to Newman, who famously paid for neoclassical economist Milton Friedman’s first trip to Australia in the early 1970s to inject some economic realism into an economy that had been subject to Gough Whitlam’s big-spending interventionism.
“I did that because I had become extremely concerned with the direction Whitlam had taken the economy,” he said.
Whitlam’s government’s spending as a share of GDP rose to 24.8 per cent in 1975, from 18.9 per cent in 1972.
Treasury expects that current government spending as a percentage of GDP, outside of the Covid stimulus, will hit the highest level since 1986 at 27 per cent of GDP in 2025-26.
“We need a catalyst for reform,” Newman said.
“Someone like Javier Milei is the sort of person you need. We are working on bringing him out to Australia.
“Milei got all the criticism in the world but he is getting results. Inflation has come down under him, and his government is spending less and getting economic growth.”
Newman said on Wednesday that he thought Friedman didn’t find a lot of friends in Australian government circles but he apparently found some favour in then treasurer Bill Hayden.

Really Moorice, just Javier to arrive and fling around his chainsaw? 

Why not Uncle Leon? He's standing by, and could help out in style ...



... and if he can't stuff the country in hive mind style, who can?

And so to wrap up the day's proceedings with the infallible Pope ...





Wednesday, August 20, 2025

In which the pond draws short bromancer and Dame Groan straws, but "Ned" delivers full blather ...

 

The pond never thought it would embrace colonialism, but what a relief to have the Graudian down under, offering pieces such as Graham Readfearn's rebuttal of the reptiles of Oz in Chevron boss's gripe about Australia: be more like the US or the Middle East.

The pond only noted the Chevron con in the lizard Oz in passing, and doesn't regret the omission, but does appreciate Readfearn indulging in a little herpetology study. Inter alia...

What is there to say about Chevron’s climate record that didn’t make it into The Australian’s reporting?
In Australia, Chevron’s LNG plant at Gorgon in Western Australia is the biggest-emitting project in the country and has received the equivalent of millions of dollars in tradable carbon credits under the government’s safeguard mechanism.
Chevron is known as a “carbon major” because of the greenhouse gas emissions that come from its current and historical operations.
According to a database of historical emissions, Chevron has been responsible for the release of more greenhouse gases than any other independently owned entity (there are three entities that have emitted more than Chevron since the 1850s – Saudi Aramco, China and the former Soviet Union).

And so on and so it goes, and meanwhile, another record bites the dust, as reported in the ABC, Sydney records most rain since weather station opened in 1858.

Melburnians can quietly guffaw at their leisure, but you won't find that kind of story featured in the lizard Oz, with all climate records diligently sent to the cornfield.

Meanwhile, you could have knocked the pond down with a feather when it spotted this story in The Hill - The Hill of all places! - Italy’s Ventina glacier has melted so much geologists now can only monitor it remotely.

Italy’s Ventina glacier, one of the biggest in northern Lombardy, has melted so much due to climate change that geologists can no longer measure it the way they have for the past 130 years.
After this year’s hot summer, geologists discovered that the simple stakes used as benchmarks to measure the glacier’s retraction each year are now buried under rockslides and debris that have made the terrain too unsteady for future in-person visits.
The Lombardy Glaciological Service said Monday that it will now use drone imagery and remote sensing to keep track of the ongoing shrinkage on the glacier, which is located near Sondrio, in the same general area of northeast Lombardy that is hosting some 2026 Winter Olympics events.
Geologists say that the Ventina glacier has already lost 1.7 kilometers (1 mile) in length since the first measuring benchmarks were positioned at the front of the glacier in 1895.
The melting has accelerated in recent years, with the glacier losing 431 meters (471 yards) in the last 10 years, nearly half of that since 2021, the service said. It’s another example of how accelerating global warming is melting and shrinking Europe’s glaciers, causing a host of environmental and other impacts.

And as the closer:

According to the Lombardy service, the Alps represent a climate hotspot, recording double the global average of temperature increases since pre-industrial times, resulting in the loss of over 64% of the volume of Alpine glaciers.
In February, the journal Nature reported on a study showing the world’s glaciers lost ice at the rate of about 255 billion tons (231 billion metric tons) annually from 2000 to 2011, but that quickened to about 346 billion tons (314 billion metric tons) annually over about the next decade.

Why you'd almost think there was something kinda funny going on with the climate.

But enough of the planet going to hell in a handbasket, helped along by the hive mind's climate science denialism, what are the scourges and deniers of truth up to today?



Of course, of course, Albo finally took a mild stand, and so the reptiles reacted with shock and awe ...

LOW POINT
Netanyahu accuses ‘weak’ Albanese of pouring ‘fuel on anti-Semitic fire’
Benjamin Netanyahu has branded Anthony Albanese a ‘weak politician’ who has betrayed Israel, and ‘poured fuel on this anti-Semitic fire’, in an extraordinary letter to the PM.
By Cameron Stewart and Richard Ferguson

Just below, Kelly crafted her thoughts on the matter.

Commentary by Kelly Craft
PM’s Palestine call comes at worst time for allies

Anthony Albanese’s blunder on Palestine comes at the worst time for the Australian-US relationship, says Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations.

A blunder? Observing a genocide in action is a blunder?

That set the pond off on another tangent, to a story by Eyal Press in The New Yorker, The Troubling Lines That Columbia Is Drawing, By adopting an overly broad and controversial definition of antisemitism, the university is putting both academic freedom and its Jewish students at risk. (*archive link)

Inter alia...

...The curtailment of academic freedom, the deportation of foreign students, the banning of protests: all of this is being done under the pretext of protecting Jews, who alone are entitled to protections that other groups apparently don’t merit. It is hard to imagine a more effective way to breed anti-Jewish animus. And there is another danger, one the historian Tony Judt identified in an essay published nearly two decades ago, around the time when the I.H.R.A. definition first appeared. “The habit of tarring any foreign criticism with the brush of anti-Semitism,” Judt observed, reinforced the idea that if you didn’t like something the Israeli government was doing—violating international law, building illegal settlements—it was not because of your values or your politics but because “you don’t like Jews.” Constantly affirming this conception risked turning it into “a self-fulfilling assertion,” transforming the “Israeli occupation” into a “Jewish occupation” and thus encouraging others “to look upon Jews everywhere as de facto collaborators in Israel’s misbehavior.” There are, in fact, plenty of Jews who have come to view the Zionism of Israel’s current right-wing government as a racist endeavor, and who criticize Israel in ways that might run afoul of the I.H.R.A. definition, as evidenced by the large number of Jewish students who have participated in the protests against the Gaza war at schools such as Columbia. To equate the expression of such views with antisemitism is not only wrong; as Judt warned, it also risks putting Jewish students in greater danger.

Press provided a link to the Judt piece, which included this note:

...The habit of tarring any foreign criticism with the brush of anti-Semitism is deeply engrained in Israeli political instincts: Ariel Sharon used it with characteristic excess but he was only the latest in a long line of Israeli leaders to exploit the claim. David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir did no different. But Jews outside of Israel pay a high price for this tactic. Not only does it inhibit their own criticisms of Israel for fear of appearing to associate with bad company, but it encourages others to look upon Jews everywhere as de facto collaborators in Israel's misbehavior. When Israel breaks international law in the occupied territories, when Israel publicly humiliates the subject populations whose land it has seized - but then responds to its critics with loud cries of "anti-Semitism" - it is in effect saying that these acts are not Israeli acts, they are Jewish acts: The occupation is not an Israeli occupation, it is a Jewish occupation, and if you don't like these things it is because you don't like Jews.
In many parts of the world this is in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling assertion: Israel's reckless behavior and insistent identification of all criticism with anti-Semitism is now the leading source of anti-Jewish sentiment in Western Europe and much of Asia. But the traditional corollary - if anti-Jewish feeling is linked to dislike of Israel then right-thinking people should rush to Israel's defense - no longer applies. Instead, the ironies of the Zionist dream have come full circle: For tens of millions of people in the world today, Israel is indeed the state of all the Jews. And thus, reasonably enough, many observers believe that one way to take the sting out of rising anti-Semitism in the suburbs of Paris or the streets of Jakarta would be for Israel to give the Palestinians back their land.
If Israel's leaders have been able to ignore such developments it is in large measure because they have hitherto counted upon the unquestioning support of the United States - the one country in the world where the claim that anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism is still echoed not only in the opinions of many Jews but also in the public pronouncements of mainstream politicians and the mass media. But this lazy, ingrained confidence in unconditional American approval - and the moral, military and financial support that accompanies it - may prove to be Israel's undoing....

Cue the lazy lizard Oz, regurgitating deeply engrained political instincts, used with characteristic excess, but if Albo has made a blunder, what of far right barking mad fundamentalists intent on a genocide, both in terms of reputation and of goodwill?

And now, what of the reptiles on the extreme far right?



Why there's "Ned" nattering away, and Dame Groan with her groaning, and the bromancer finally realising that he's the alleged foreign editor.

For those who want the lesser member of Kelly gang's take, Joe can be found in the archive ...From Alaska to the White House: Trump’s peace push leaves Ukraine’s future unclear, Donald Trump’s personal diplomacy with Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky aims to end the Ukraine war, but Europe’s role and the deal’s specifics hang in the balance.

Spoiler alert ... this was his closing...



Joe was just a warm up to the bromancer ... and what a dismal effort the bro made, all of two minutes, so the reptiles said...

Two minutes, and no warning ...



Okay, the pond was too lazy to give it the proper treatment, but the bromancer continued on beneath the gabfest, here only noted as a screen cap...

Putin also avoided Trump’s threatened “very severe consequences” if he didn’t agree to a ceasefire.
Now Trump didn’t want a ceasefire himself, but a permanent peace agreement, seemingly on Putin’s terms.
Then Zelensky and his European allies heard a completely different story at their White House summit.
There would be only minor land swaps. Trump for the first time said he’d back a security guarantee and allied forces stationed in Ukraine.
Trump hinted not only that the US would back this force, but might participate in it. That changed over the course of a day to a European force that the US would “co-ordinate”.
Trump announced that Putin would meet Zelensky one on one, then have a follow-up meeting of those two plus Trump, presumably to finalise a deal.

The reptiles interrupted, as they always do, with a bit from Sky Noise down under, Shadow finance minister James Paterson discusses the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict and the potential for a ceasefire. “If President Trump can broker peace between Russia and Ukraine, that will be a historic achievement and a very welcome one,” Senator Paterson told Sky News Australia. “If all it is a pause in fighting which allows Vladimir Putin to rebuild the strength and then reinvade Ukraine at some point in the future, then we will have gained nothing at all. “We want this to end on terms that are acceptable to Ukraine.”




The bro wound down quickly after that ...

Once again we face the perpetual Trump conundrum. Is the President playing some version of four-dimensional chess that the rest of us don’t understand? Or does the appearance of chaos simply obscure the reality of … chaos?
One disturbing element is that Putin spoke to Trump of business opportunities. Flattery, the more gross and fantastic the better, plus the smell of money, are proven paths to Trump’s heart.
Putin has a bizarre ability to bewitch American presidents. He did it with a notable hard head in George W. Bush, then with someone on the opposite end of the scale in Barack Obama.
Trump has levied massive tariffs on India for buying Russian oil – greater tariffs than he’s imposed on China – and thereby gravely damaged the critical US-India relationship.
Now he’s decided that he’s not going to apply strict secondary tariffs against nations that trade with Russia after all. So what was the strategic rationale for punishing India?
If Ukraine gives up the rest of Donbas in exchange for security guarantees, it will be a severe defeat for Ukraine and the West. It will reprise the deal of 1994. Ukraine gave up the substantial arsenal of nuclear weapons it inherited from the Soviet Union, in exchange for security guarantees from the US, UK and Russia.
These were worthless. It’s also clear that had Ukraine been able to keep its nuclear weapons Russia would not have invaded.
No one emerges very well. Putin’s Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and took Crimea. Obama told Ukraine not to escalate and wouldn’t supply effective weaponry to Kyiv.
The Europeans, in the intervening 11 years, have not built up their defence forces nor created the industrial capacity to supply even Ukraine.
China, Iran and North Korea have been better allies for Moscow than the Europeans have been for Kyiv. So while much of the criticism of Trump’s fecklessness is valid, this is civilisational failure. Though vastly bigger in economic and population resources than Russia, the Europeans must still beg the Americans to bail them out.
On the basis of his past behaviour Putin is likely to keep stringing this out while he continues his military operations. If he gets Donbas, he’s in a good position to strike again in a couple of years.
Two sets of smiles are deceiving. For KGB men don’t really smile.

That's it, that's all he wrote? 

Joe, lesser member of the Kelly gang, managing to produce something more sensible in his allocated two minutes than the bromancer? 

Perhaps the bromancer should get back to evoking the spirit of comrade Dan, he seems more comfortable blathering on about renewables and energy and all that jazz than he does dealing with King Donald.

Time to celebrate the state of the nation ...



And so to more dreary talk of productivity, which inevitably leads to the day's groaning...but what a relief, perhaps there is a god after all, because She decided that the old biddy could only manage a couple of distracting minutes of sobbing and sighing, keening and wailing...



The header: No competition here: Day 1 of talkfest was less than productive, While American productivity soars ahead by 10 per cent, Australia's economic roundtable ignores the elephant in the room – our dramatic decline in business investment.
The clock: 2 min read
The caption: Anthony Albanese, left, Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Finance Minister Katy Gallagher at the economic roundtable on Tuesday. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

The pond resisted the temptation to have AI do a mock Groan piece, because the old biddy manages the task of producing a caricature all by herself ...

I guess we are either not smart enough or important enough to watch the proceedings of Jimbo’s economic reform roundtable. Or perhaps the sight of all those carefully selected attendees running interference for the government would have given the game away; it was best to keep the door firmly closed.

Ah, the bitterness of the excluded, the old biddy with her nose out of joint. See how she sharpens her beak in response ...

Why the first day went by the title Resilience is anyone’s guess. The more appropriate title would have been The Productivity Challenge and how Australia is failing.
No doubt, the Treasurer would have made the point that Australia is not the only country to be reporting poor productivity – think here Britain, most of Europe, Canada.
Yet the common factor here is that those countries have all pursued productivity-sapping policies such as enforced high-priced clean energy and masses of low-skilled immigration.
The US, by contrast, has been powering ahead, along with several Asian countries.
Our labour productivity has flatlined while in the US it has grown by 10 per cent.
We should be looking at the US for some lessons, but I doubt those packed around the cabinet table will have bothered to do so.
Unless we understand the reasons for our appalling productivity growth record – and all its attendant aspects such as falling living standards and stagnant real wages – it’s hard to see how there can be hope for improvement.
The figures tell an alarming story. Business investment as a percentage of GDP is currently around 12.5 per cent; it was over 18 per cent in 2012.
Investment in machinery and equipment, which is highly correlated with productivity growth, is currently about 4 per cent; it was 8 per cent in the late 1980s.
The fact is that we have experienced a protracted period of capital shallowing, with employees now working with proportionately less capital.
We have increasingly ignored the incentives for private businesses to consider and invest in long-term projects in this country.

The US as the exemplar, as the way forward? Perhaps the pond has been reading too much Krugman on stagflation.

At this point the reptiles interrupted with a sigh of despair, Inside the economic round table, where the seating plan, side glances and silences reveal as much as the speeches. From who sat closest to the prime minister to the quiet tussles between unions and big business, this is a rare glimpse into the dynamics of the nation’s most important economic conversation.




The groaning then quickly tailed away ...

The very rapid increase in the size of the public sector, post-Covid – both at the federal and state levels – increasingly crowds out the scope for the private sector to invest, in part by soaking up potential workers.
The current and anticipated tax burden is also an important consideration.
The most alarming aspect of this three-day event is the seeming cluelessness of both Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers.
Comparing the enforced shift to “clean energy” as equivalent to the Industrial Revolution is to demonstrate a complete lack of historical knowledge.
Do you think there was an Industrial Revolution commission directing government spending – Labor prefers the term “investment”? Were there parallel agencies to the Australian Energy Market Operator and the Australian Energy Regulator?
The fact is that electricity prices have more than doubled in Australia this decade; from being a country with affordable and reliable energy, we are now a high-cost energy producer. This has a major impact to investment, as well as causing the closure of some of our large energy-intensive plants.
But if you read Treasury’s briefing documents, this fact doesn’t even rate a mention, apart from an endorsement of the government’s funding of – sorry, investment in – the increasingly expensive transmission network.
The fact that some of these transmission lines will only be used a quarter of the time is the very antithesis of higher productivity.
The unions’ ambit claim that businesses should be forced to pay for worker training according to some government diktat – we’ve been there before because bad ideas never die – added a bit of spice to an otherwise pointless talkfest.
But how long have we been talking about recognition of internationally obtained qualifications? Eliminating nuisance tariffs was announced more than a year ago; the economic impact is trivial.
Perhaps the second day will be better.
At least there will be some competition, with senator Matt Canavan’s rival roundtable including some serious heavy hitters among the attendees.
We all know that competition is good for productivity.

The Canavan caravan? 

The pond wouldn't have had a clue what the old biddy was clucking about, save for a correspondent drawing attention to a story in the AFR, Canavan to focus on energy and IR at rival productivity roundtable

Imagine the pond's consternation on discovering that Dame Groan wasn't among the participants. Imagine the relief that climate science denialism would be given another outing ...

...Canavan said Australia’s productivity slump over the past 20 years was largely in mining, manufacturing, construction, electricity and gas.
“We’re not afraid to tackle the elephants in the room like our shocking energy price situation and industrial relations’ impact on construction,” he said.
Canavan said Treasury’s productivity papers barely mentioned the cost of electricity.
“Maybe going from some of the cheapest power prices in the world to some of the highest might explain some of the productivity story in this country,” he said
Australia’s largest steelmaker, BlueScope, warned on Monday that Australian manufacturing was under threat from gas prices that are three to four times higher than in the US and the Middle East, calling for an immediate domestic gas reservation policy.
“Manufacturing is at a tipping point,” BlueScope chief executive Mark Vassella said. “People are getting sick and tired of energy costs,”
Productivity Commission chairwoman Danielle Wood said on Monday Australia’s 2050 net zero carbon emissions goal needed to be achieved in the lowest-cost way, such as through a national carbon price and scrapping the costly fringe benefit tax exemption for electric vehicles.
The Albanese government’s signature measure to boost electric vehicle uptake has blown out significantly, with official modelling now showing it will cost more than $23 billion over the coming decade to exempt drivers from paying fringe benefits tax.
Several of the participants at Canavan’s meeting oppose net zero, including Canavan, Newman and Pearl.

Of course they do, how else could they score an invite to ride on the Canavan caravan?

Time to celebrate with Wilcox ...



And now, everything thus having been a detour, it was time for a full flourishing of "Ned's" Everest natter, a genuine five minutes of Chicken Little flapping of wings and gazing at sky ...



The header: Productivity experiment to improve living standards will make or break Labor, The laws of economics haven’t been abolished. Labor is launching a grand experiment that will make or break the Albanese government.
The clock: 5 min read
The caption: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese opens the economic reform roundtable at Parliament House in Canberra on Tuesday. Picture: Martin Ollman

The laws of economics? More on that anon, meanwhile ... get those wings flapping, the sky is falling ...

Labor’s economic reform roundtable will slot into the political and intellectual recasting of Australia’s productivity policy, a story shaping future living standards and fundamental in determining whether Albanese Labor will succeed or fail.
Australia now lives in a Labor ascendancy that will run at least until the early 2030s.
During this era economic policy will be redesigned and re-engineered. This complex process will be driven by three forces: Labor’s contemporary values; its judgment about what is politically tenable; and the changing intellectual climate about how to enhance productivity in the 21st century.
These are deeply contested issues. The idea that Labor will merely do whatever it wants at the roundtable entirely misses the point.
This is a creative exercise in stakeholder recruitment and evolutionary change.
Jim Chalmers, fully aware that Labor has the power, seeks to exploit the terms of engagement and bring stakeholders into the ascendant Labor project – indeed, even grant them influence and status.
The Treasurer aspires to fashion a new reform paradigm in a world being transformed.

And there's the rub, the thing that drives the reptiles into a frenzy ...

Australia now lives in a Labor ascendancy that will run at least until the early 2030s.

No wonder it all sounds like a theatrical ritual, with the reptiles suffering under the certainty that none of what they scribble matters more than a hill of beans.

And just how lazy are the reptiles these days as a result? 

Why they replicated the copy for repeat of this AV interruption, Inside the economic round table, where the seating plan, side glances and silences reveal as much as the speeches. From who sat closest to the prime minister to the quiet tussles between unions and big business, this is a rare glimpse into the dynamics of the nation’s most important economic conversation.




Talk about extracting maximum sour lemon juice for minimal effort, as "Ned" kept sobbing into his beer...

As Chalmers said in his opening remarks this transformation is driven by energy, demography, technology, industry and geopolitics. The world that saw the Hawke-Keating-Howard reforms is long gone. So is the world of 1998 when the Productivity Commission was created, its economic roots originating in the old Tariff Board, with Gary Banks appointed as the initial PC chairman.
In the first term Chalmers moved to update the PC, just as he updated the Reserve Bank. He said of the PC that “its structure and remit have not changed for 25 years”.
The full extent of Chalmers’ ambition to create a new productivity agenda was obvious before the 2022 election but barely recognised. Yet the conditions are now established; Australia moved to the left at the 2022 election and further to the left at the 2025 election.
That generates momentum for what is best described as a progressive productivity agenda – an entirely new experiment for this country – closely tied to the evolution of institutions and changing economic norms seen in evolving attitudes from the Treasury to the PC.
Labor’s productivity agenda constitutes a sharp break from the pro-market regulatory reforms of the Hawke-Keating-Howard era and the prescriptions of the Banks-led PC a generation ago. This transformation is both political and intellectual – Labor seeks to create an economic policy for the 2020s that resonates with its progressive values and that delivers in terms of rising living standards for households.

Cue another interruption, Treasurer Jim Chalmers is promoting a progressive productivity agenda for the Albanese government. Picture: Martin Ollman




How soon before "Ned" joins the Canavan caravan? Not long ...

Still a work in progress, the main elements of Labor’s agenda, in its positives and negatives, seem as follows: complete rejection of industrial relations deregulation; no commitment to a tax-mix switch – lower personal income tax and a higher GST; while putting budget repair on the table there is little interest in public sector spending restraint; the implied assumption is a higher tax take to address a decade of fiscal deficits; a government-directed industry policy and a renewed emphasis on workforce skills; state power interventions retain priority over market forces; the big change is enshrining the renewable energy transition as pivotal in reviving economic growth and productivity; and digital technology, long prioritised by Labor, is now buttressed by the arrival of artificial intelligence, an issue where the Labor constituency is divided but the balance will surely see a strong bias in favour of AI capabilities across the entire workforce.
This is a productivity vision in hefty reinvention. While much of the business community is highly dubious, Anthony Albanese and Chalmers should be able to extract a range of roundtable support based on a mix of initiatives.
Chalmers wants outcomes to inform the next three budgets and will look for consensus around reform directions, specific policies and ongoing priorities. Lots of scope there. He’s upfront: he wants “participants” in the Labor project.

Now here comes the promised Canavan caravan, looking as silly as memories of Senator Steve Fielding dressed as a bottleSenator Matt Canavan hosts his own "roundtable" at Parliament House. Picture: Martin Ollman




But why didn't Dame Groan join the ride?

Never mind, "Ned" was on board ...

In a symbolic move, Nationals senator and former PC economist Matt Canavan has combined with Page Research Centre chief executive Gerard Holland to conduct on Wednesday what they call a “real” as opposed to a “fake” productivity summit.
First speaker on their agenda is Banks, a sustained critic of Australia’s failing economic reform over the past decade and a sceptic about the “new look” productivity agenda.
Indeed, in one of his most lethal recent remarks on our productivity performance, Banks said: “On the one hand we have been busy eliminating our comparative advantage in energy while on the other hand we are reviving our traditional disadvantage with respect to labour.”
Canavan said Australia’s slide from having some of the cheapest energy prices in the world to the highest was basic in grasping our productivity decline. He lamented that people with economic degrees “have forgotten the importance of low energy prices”.
Chalmers told the roundtable that cabinet had decided “to put productivity at the very core of our second-term agenda”. That’s essential and belated, given the first term was dominated by the Reserve Bank’s interest rate hikes to beat inflation. Now the real challenge begins. Frankly, it’s a nightmare.
Both the PC and Reserve Bank have issued sharp warnings, giving the roundtable extra salience. The bank has scaled back its long-term productivity growth outlook from 1 per cent to 0.7 per cent annual growth with trend GDP growth a dismal 2 per cent.
Decoded: without a productivity revival, Australia faces economic decline and lower living standards.

It's a nightmare? Well yes, working out that Danielle Wood isn't part of the Canavan caravan was a tad tricky, as "Ned" switched tracks, Productivity Commissioner Danielle Wood wants a “growth mindset” to return. Picture: Martin Ollman




The pond had to remind itself of the players who joined the Canavan caravan, including the pond's favourite, that Athenian, neigh Roman, repairer of buckers, our Henry ...

Invitees to Canavan’s conference include former Business Council of Australia president Tony Shepherd, Empire Energy chief executive Alex Underwood, Bowen Coking Coal chairman Nick Jorss, former ASX chairman Maurice Newman, Housing Industry Association executive Simon Croft, and economists Henry Ergas and David Pearl.

Pearls of wisdom, buckets fixed, but no groaning ... and now back to the real roundtable ...

In her speech on Monday, PC chairwoman Danielle Wood said the absence of a “growth mindset” had been missing from Australian policy for too long. The productivity problem is now a decade old. Wood nailed the flaw in our governance: politicians seeking to “do something” every time a problem arose, the upshot being more regulation, “a system that dampens growth” and runs “into almost every area of our economy”.
In truth, for the past decade Australia has prioritised stability over entrepreneurship, redistribution over growth, government intervention over market dynamism. The upshot is a demoralising burden on most people.
In her speech Wood, drawing on the five PC reports for the roundtable, sketched an emerging agenda for the times – it is an independent PC agenda but it dovetails into much of Labor’s priorities. The spearheads are digital technology and the energy transition.
Wood says data and digital technology “is really going to shift the dial” for productivity. She brands AI as a potential “general purpose” technology, comparing it with electricity and the internal combustion engine, predicting it can add an extra $116bn in economic activity over the decade, equivalent to boosting incomes for each person by $4300 over the period.

The pond really must stop reading Krugman...What Happens If AI Hits An Energy Wall? The technology driving the economy has some big problems



Heck, have a Golding to celebrate ...



And so to a final word from "Ned" ...

Wood opposes any new, overarching regulatory framework for AI, favouring a light-touch regime – putting her into direct conflict with much of the ALP base.
On energy, the PC is grossly underdone on evidence-based analysis but absolutely committed. Wood says “net zero could be ground zero for productivity reform” and that net zero “will transform our economy from top to bottom”. This is Labor’s mantra and its singular gamble.
The PC wants a carbon price but, knowing this won’t happen, remains optimistic. It backs wind and solar farms, “big batteries”, thousands of kilometres of transmission, a faster rollout and radical new powers for bureaucrats to break through community and legal roadblocks.
Labor can be expected to amass significant political support for its productivity agenda, drawing on progressive values, interest groups and media.
Yet these won’t be worth a bumper if the pre-eminent condition isn’t met: this agenda needs to work; the reinvention of how to deliver superior productivity must deliver the goods and the higher living standards that Labor needs.
The laws of economics haven’t been abolished. Labor is launching a grand experiment that will make or break the Albanese government.

Hang on, hang on, the pond let it pass the first time, but economics still has laws?

The pond could barely believe it went off to Reddit - Reddit! - to read Does economics have "scientific" laws? What distinguishes a law from a theory?, only to stumble right at the get go ...

The use of the term "law" is mostly a leftover from a common scientific perspective in the 19th century about social sciences that has been long gone.

That's our "Ned", that's the lizard Oz hive mind, proudly 19th century... 

And so wrap up the proceedings this day with the infallible Pope...




The pond knew these old Goldings would come in handy some day ...