In which the Canavan caravan rolls into town, taking the pond's mind off the war and sundry reptile culture warriors of the petulant Peta, Zoe kind ...

 

Now there's a prize joke. 

The "black coal matters", gay marriage hating, climate science denying, vaccine conspiratorial, Magafied Canavan caravan to lead the coalition into the future? 

And his first policy statement is a vacuous plea for more Australian babies, more Australian everything? (You can wiki his wild old ways here).

There's a new show pony in town, or at least a show pony with real style and the same cojones...

Naturally the reptiles were wildly excited, but the pond took it as a clever ploy to make Tamworth's unendurable shame seem not so bad ...

The reptiles couldn't resist opening their "Inside Story" coverage with a joke ...

Matt Canavan was lying on a hotel bed after an exhausting day on the 2010 election campaign trail, his then boss and mentor Barnaby Joyce beside him, barely a metre away, when he sent a message saying: “Hi, babe. Love you. Miss you lots.”
The message was meant for wife Andrea but Canavan had been messaging Joyce so frequently, the sweet nothings accidentally went straight to the then Nationals senator lying on the bed right next to him.
It made for a funny anecdote in Canavan’s maiden speech to parliament, but 13 years on the apprentice has become the master. And Joyce has defected to One Nation, a party that threatens the very existence of Canavan’s Nationals.
“I probably won’t find myself in a bedroom with Barnaby again,” Canavan quipped to The Australian on Wednesday after winning a three-way contest to become the 16th Nationals leader.

What a laugh, and how desperate and pathetic, and if anything certified that the coalition was in mortal fear of Pauline, this was it.

For those wondering where the show pony portrait came from, it came of course from the immortal Rowe ...

Sadly, with the intermittent archive now down and out, the pond could only find the room for one reptile piece celebrating the doofus from the deep north, but it's worth noting that Rosie's profile was full of excruciating banalities of this closing kind ...

...Canavan is credited with convincing the Nationals to reject a net-zero emissions target and played a decisive role in prosecuting former Greens leader Bob Brown’s anti-Adani convoy ahead of Scott Morrison’s 2019 “miracle” election victory.
Unlike many of his peers, Canavan – a self-described introvert – prefers to stay in at night when he’s working in Canberra and spends his time reading “arcane” economic policy reports. He also exercises every day.
On Wednesday morning, Canavan knew he should have been making calls ahead of the leadership vote but played soccer to clear his head.
He missed five or six goals before finally landing one.
“Persistence pays off,” he says.
It is that persistence that the Nationals will be relying on to turn the party’s political fortunes around.

Slap the pond with a warm lettuce leaf of inanity ...so instead of Rosie going full tedious suck, it was Brownie's EXCLUSIVE that got the nod.

Void your mind, and no harm will be done ...

The pond resorted to screen capping because the capping of the intermittent archive meant there was no easy form of paywall-free access to hand, so the unendurable simply had to be endured ...

There was another reason for the pond featuring Brownie, and for capping his work, because the reptiles diligently featured "key quotes", showing the Canavan caravan's capacity for distortion, misinformation and downright lies remained strong ...

Ye ancient cats and wild-eyed dogs, still lying about climate science, and now we're back to building coal-fired power stations. 

Not even nuking the country will be good enough for this ratbag ...

We can't wield cut throat razors in good old larrikin gang style? Gangsters and hooligans are all the go?

This is likely the last time the pond will be tempted by Canavan trolling, so the pond stayed at it ...

By doing the hard yards, the pond managed to land on yet more doofus delights, including the tariff thingie, and the identity politics thingie, followed - oh marvel of hypocrisy and irony - a deploring of the divisive thingie...

He completely rejects division? 

Could there be any greater comedy than those "thought"grabs? Is this a way to make Barners, Tamworth's eternal shame, sound like a rocket scientist?

Meanwhile, the war continued apace in inimitable King Donald style, with the reptiles clearly losing interest as quickly as the King. It was still LIVE, but only barely ...

From war to super in just two headlines ...

Gotta think about the hive mind demographics ...

Even the exquisite logic of Herbert seemed a day late ...

So too Wilcox ...

Sadly, with the intermittent archive no longer to hand, the pond felt the need to at least note some of the culture wars going down ...

As usual, the dreadful petulant Peta led the way, reviving an ancient feud ...

Usually this sort of revisionist whitewashing muck is reserved for January/Australia Day, and the pond stopped at the point when petulant Peta attempted to provide an uplifting note on the attempted extermination of Aboriginal people in Tasmania ...

In Tasmania, says the document, “the Palawa people fought a determined campaign during the 1820s to resist British settlement”. This is true, as the declaration of martial law there attests.
Yet the fact that one of the main Aboriginal leaders, Kickerterpoller (or Black Tom), was captured several times, without being executed for murder, due to the patronage of a doctor’s widow, before being exiled to Flinders Island, shows that this was not exactly a war of extermination.

It was exactly and precisely a war of extermination, no matter that George Angustus Robinson managed to kill the war's few survivors with tone deaf stupidity, disguised as kindness ...

...By August 1834 the Aboriginal problem, as the colonists saw it, had been settled, since all but about a dozen natives had been removed from the mainland to the Flinders settlement. This had its beginnings on Swan Island in November 1830. Although under Robinson's general superintendence, it was largely managed by commandants who had little interest in their charges and behaved like gaolers. Mortality had been severe, and by 1835 the Aboriginal population, estimated at about 4000 before European settlement began, had shrunk to fewer than 150 natives, of whom about half were the survivors of those sent by Robinson to Flinders Island. Introduced disease was now rapidly reducing the number of survivors.
When Robinson himself took control at the Flinders settlement in October 1835 he first set out to provide adequate food supplies and to improve housing; but his greatest change was to root out Aboriginal culture and to attempt its replacement with a nineteenth century peasant culture. Schools were established in which the natives were taught to read and write. Catechetical religion took a prominent place in all the instruction. The teachers were drawn from the Europeans in the settlement and from those native children who had learned to read and write at the Hobart Orphan School. Attempts were made to 'civilize' the natives in other ways: markets were held where they were taught to buy and sell in hope that they would come to realize the value of property; they were given new names and taught to elect their own native police. The experiment failed, partly because the natives were dying off rapidly, but chiefly because no culture can be uprooted without being replaced by an adequate and acceptable substitute.

Note to self, must avoid reading petulant Peta's whitewashing apologetics. Must also avoid disseminating them to AI. There's already too much stupidity to hand on the full to overflowing intertubes.

What else? Well Zoe was also to hand conducting another kind of culture war. 

Sssh, don't mention the ethnic cleansing going down in Gaza, and the West Bank, with ye olde Tasmania providing a goodly example of strategies to be followed to make sure you control from the Derwent river to the Bass strait sea..

The pond didn't have the ability to complete the mission, but did note the source of the disease ...

Zoe Booth is content director and host of the Quillette Cetera podcast.

What else? Well Jack was around ...

All well and good, but berating mug punters for being mugs is an easy sport. What a pity Jack didn't get on to the billionaire doomsday cultists, the preppers and survivalists who can really afford a bunker mentality, as noted in the Graudian a few years ago: The super-rich 'preppers' planning to save themselves from the apocalypse. Inter alia ...

Hmm, must make sure there's enough toilet paper in stock ... but how lucky is the pond that it ignored reptile advice, and decided to go EV rather than ICE.

The pond should note that at the top of the digital edition early in the morning there was one big shock horror splash ...

The pond confesses it didn't have the slightest awareness that this Richo was actually involved ...and a short dip reminded the pond it didn't much care ...

And so at last to the real bonus ... Dame Groan doing her groaning in the usual way ...

The header: A cosy group of economists won’t fix Jim’s list of woes; Jim Chalmers had a brainwave. Why not invite handfuls of blokey professional economists to hand over their pearls of wisdom?

The caption for the completely bewildered Jimbo: Treasurer Jim Chalmers addresses the House of Representatives at Parliament House. Picture: Hilary Wardhaugh / Getty Images

Some might wonder if Dame Groan attempted to pin the tail on the donkey King Donald for upsetting the world with a series of economic shocks, from tariff wars to assorted actual bombings, but Dame Groan only has one fixation.

She has Jimbo on the brain ...

There’s no official collective term for economists, but I’ve always thought that murder would be a good choice. A murder of economists nicely conveys the depth of disagreement that characterises this profession.
As they say, if you laid all the economists in the world end to end, they wouldn’t reach a conclusion. But Jim Chalmers had a brainwave. Why not invite handfuls of blokey professional economists to hand over their pearls of wisdom about the best policy options given our current economic challenges.
I’m not quite sure where this leaves the hundreds of economists in Treasury and the Productivity Commission whose jobs exist to make policy recommendations to the government. I guess they can conclude they tried hard, but their efforts haven’t been good enough.
I’m also not sure what the Treasurer’s initiative means for the value – or lack thereof – of last year’s roundtable on economic reform. Sure, many of us thought it was useless at the time, although Chalmers has done his best to promote the theme of intergenerational inequity to justify tax grabs on the wealthy and those on high incomes. Plenty of the hand-picked participants have gone along with this misleading theme; so maybe that was its value.
The Treasurer would have been wiser to ditch his list of productivity initiatives reeled out at the time. Getting rid of nuisance tariffs; pausing the next stage of the National Construction Code; improving interstate recognition of qualifications; faster approvals under the environmental legislation – it’s hard to see any of this list moving the dial on productivity, particularly in the short term.

Dame Groan is probably also agitated at being reduced to an irrelevant Groan for the hive mind... Economists walk out of Treasury after a meeting with Treasurer Jim Chalmers in Canberra, Friday, March 6, 2026. Picture: Mick Tsikas / AAP

Let's be clear, those wretched, unnamed scallywags can't offer a scintilla of the insights available in an endless Groaning ...

Let’s get back to Jim’s brief, chinwag sessions involving some well-known economists. Let’s be clear, macroeconomists are not well-trained to be offering up specific policy advice beyond broad trends. They deal with the fluctuating economy, the emerging patterns. They care about GDP growing by 0.7 per cent rather than 0.6 per cent. They make short-term predictions.
The bank economists, for instance, have a very good feel about the key components of economic growth but they tend to stick to their knitting. They are also not expected to pick fights with the government of the day – that’s company policy. To be sure, there are some economists around who continue to point out the false statements made by Chalmers about the role of public spending in driving the economy and contributing to inflation.
Just last week, Chalmers was trying to make the claim that the strength in the economy is now coming from the private sector. But Stephen Smith of Deloitte Access Economics noted that “public demand rose by 0.9 per cent over the quarter, outpacing private demand growth of just 0.4 per cent”.
The blowout in the medium-term budget outlook revealed in the MYEFO statement released in December was also wrongly attributed by Chalmers to a revenue downgrade rather than greater spending. Again, this mistake was picked up by some economists.
The overall impression now is of a Treasurer struggling to link the requirement for responsible economic management with his political ambitions, particularly in terms of higher government spending. His unexpected call-up of private sector economists reflects an element of panic.
With the inflation genie truly out of the bottle and the unknown consequences of events in the Middle East, the game has suddenly become a lot harder. A higher oil price adds to inflation while slowing economic growth – an ­unpalatable combination. Higher interest rates are on the cards.
There is clearly concern about the current and future state of the budget. The rate of increase in the size of government has clearly pushed the economy to its capa­city limits while causing a significant drag on productivity.
But a great deal of the spending is locked in, either through legislation or intergovernmental agree­ments. The costs of demand-driven programs – and there are many – are difficult to estimate at the best of times. The dollars being allocated to childcare, aged care and the NDIS are all escalating rapidly.

Bad luck for those wondering if the Dame would make mention of Adam Smith's 250th anniversary. The best she could manage was Justin ...

Columnist Justin Smith questions the true source of ballooning costs, warning politicians won’t personally feel the pain of spending cuts. “Where are those costs coming from?” Mr Smith told Sky News host Chris Kenny. “There will be no politician that will be worse off when they cut spending.”

And so to the closing bleat ...

Simultaneously, the Treasurer is under pressure to demonstrate his reform credentials to make up for the lack of progress in the first years of his tenure. Whether this is really a good time to be implementing a major package of changes, particularly to the tax system, is of course moot. Dealing with the fallout from overseas events is challenging enough.
But Chalmers needs to decide whether to adopt a pro-growth strategy or focus on redistributing income from wealthy and higher-income individuals. The latter ­approach will win plaudits for “fairness”, and may make some contribution to budget repair.
But realistically, tweaking property taxes at this time, for example, will do little to alter housing affordability and may raise only small amounts of additional revenue. As economists are always keen to point out, beware the unintended consequences.
Over the past several weeks, there has been a slew of dodgy advice offered up to the Senate Committee on Capital Gains. Some of the flawed recommendations include imposing the capital gains tax on nominal rather than real gains and rejecting grandfathering of tax changes.
Both ideas are preposterous. After all, the aim is to encourage investment in capital assets, which is the ultimate basis of productivity gains. To tax an asset held for 30 years, say, based on the nominal gain would be to actively discourage long-term investments. Grandfathering is required to underpin certainty in the rules under which investments are made and are not arbitrarily altered midstream.
We can only hope that the Treasurer will be appropriately advised by the Treasury on these topics. The bigger picture is that only larger scale tax reform is likely to generate sustainable gains in real per capita income. The changes should include a lower top marginal income tax rate – many of our current problems stems from our high rate – and a lower company tax rate. But it’s hard to imagine Chalmers going there even if most of the murder of economists recommends it.

If we only had Dame Groan as King Donald's wrangler, how smoothly the world would run ... but it's passing strange than when indulging in a groan, the Dame didn't bother to mention one of the key drivers of inflation.

So suppose a Dame ain't bright
Or completely free from flaws
Or as mad as a Canavan hound dog
Or as cruel as a coal-lumping Santa Claus
It's a waste of time to worry over
The oil that they have not
Be thankful for the things they've got

Groan after groan after groan, always the same
So there is nothin' you can name
That is anything like an always groaning Dame