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 bottle, Senator 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 ...