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 ...