Barnaby’s Party Gets Wild And A Tale Of Indian Cobras!

For the past few weeks, people in the Coalition have been trying to persuade Barnaby Joyce that they don’t want to lose him and that he’s really, really appreciated and there’s no need to be persuaded to leave them for that other woman…

Now if there’s one thing you can say about Bananaby it’s that he’s a man of principle. He’s not one to abandon his principles for anything less than a better offer and, while a wagyu steak cooked on a sandwich press may have led him to say, “Well done, Pauline,” he’s not committed himself to One Nation at the time of writing.

Mind you, he was the leader of the Nationals when they “committed” to net zero, so one might suggest that a Joyce commitment is one that one should not regard as permanent… sort of like John Howard’s “never ever” to the GST or Tony Abbott’s “ironclad, rock-solid” promise not to change the Medicare safety net.

Strange though how his party was so determined to keep him in spite of the fact that he’d caused them so much trouble and strife (not rhyming slang; nothing to do with a wife). He’d talked them all into net zero, he’d alienated a significant number of centre-right voters, he’d constantly spoken out on things in defiance of the Coalition’s position and generally been a headache. And in spite of being told that they still wanted him, he said that they didn’t try hard enough and he was out the door.

Now we’re starting to see the party get wild and suggest that they’d supported Mr Joyce through his hard times. So far, they haven’t got specific and mentioned which these times were or how long they lasted. Did they mean the times he’d had to function without the help of a press secretary leaving him to manage his own press? Or did they mean the times when the plant box moved unexpectedly and the footpath was hard? Or were there even harder times like when he heard that Slim Dusty had died and the radio played “The Pub With No Beer”?

Whatever, I suspect that Mr Joyce has burnt his bridges and there’s no way back into the National Party unless they offer him the leadership, which sounds completely implausible until you remember that, at one point, he was acting Prime Minister, so there’s an inspiring tale for anyone who feels that life is just too hard and that they’ll never achieve their dreams, just remember that lack of competence has rarely held any back provided they’re ambitious enough.

Enough about Mr Joyce. It’s symptomatic that so many words are written about things that are possibly irrelevant and may have no significance in a few months time, like Sussan Ley’s leadership. I guess it’s too hard to write about important things because that would involve a lot of nuance and admitting that some things are just a wicked problem and it’s far better to speculate about the future, secure in the knowledge that nobody remembers that you were almost one hundred percent wrong with your past prognostications. For example, I have read a number of articles where people are telling us that the RBA reduced interest rates to quickly and the next move may well be up. It would be pedantic of me to point out that just a few months ago, when just about every economist was wrong about a rate cut, the same people were saying that the RBA was too slow to move and too cautious. (In terms of the next interest rate move, I’d like to put it on record that I have no idea when it will be and whether it will be up or down, because it depends on a lot of things that haven’t happened yet. Rather like trying to predict the AFL premiership winner without knowing how many injuries each club will have…)

Anyway, I was actually going to write about cobras, or more specifically, the Indian Cobra effect.

As the story goes, when India was under British rule, there was the problem of too many cobras, so they put a bounty on cobras. At first this seemed to be working well, but after a while there seemed to be an extraordinary number of cobras being brought in, and it was discovered that people had worked out that they could breed cobras to take in, and this was simpler and more efficient than catching them.

Now I can’t vouch for the veracity of the story but it makes a good morality tale. Sometimes the very thing that you incentivise doesn’t just fail to have the effect you want, but it sometimes encourages the opposite. If, for example, you incentivise police for lower crime rates with bonuses, you may find that some officers actively discourage people from reporting a crime. Or if you fine the company for late trains, then they simply cancel the tardy ones which solves their problem but makes public transport worse. Or if you suspend Pauline Hanson from the Senate for seven days, she may do it again just to get two weeks holiday…

So, I can’t help but wonder if Pauline’s steak dinner for Barnaby will encourage more Nationals to express an interest in defecting to Pauline’s party in the hope that she offers them a free dinner too. While this would be the sort of thing she wants, the “cobra effect” might mean that she ends up with too many snakes and not enough charmers!

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