IT AIN’T FAIR - I GOT NO JOB TO PAY FOR STUFF I WANT TO BUY FROM CHINA

In Linton, as the rest of the country we pay as much as 50% more for on-line products than the average world customer. It’s called ‘geo-blocking’ where, like film and TV classifications countries are assigned a financial formula to ensure that the price they pay in India is relative in terms of GDP as Australia. There overall prices are far lower so that global corporations can compete against the local product and if you buy on-line in Linton the overall prices are higher because our wages are higher and global corporations can charge more and still compete against the local product.
Put another way, if a pair of shoes can be made in China by Nike for about $15.00 they can afford to sell them in India for about $20.00 lower than Indian retail and delivered direct from China (a billion potential customers is also a good incentive). In the United States where wages are higher they can sell them for $180.00 or more, while other stores have to pay rent and staff and the like to sell shoes Nike can just sell direct door to door and even discount against there own shops and retailers.
In Australia, despite the fact we think we have the highest wages but don’t, our minimum wage is far higher than the U.S.A so in G.D.P terms we can afford to pay even more, so the shoes will retail here for $220.00, again, delivered straight from the factory with no middle man no locally employed sales staff and as a result extraordinary profit margins.
The major retailers will tell you that ‘price, price, price’ is all that drives their customers. Locally made comes second and quality is sacrificed to price every time. Consumer organisations will tell you that ‘parallel imports’ where shops like Sam’s and Reject will ‘wholesale’ direct from India at  far less cost and thus sell the product far cheaper does nothing for our local economy. Great they say ‘it drives down prices’ but at the same time we are deliberately under-pricing ourselves and driving holes through our employment figures.
What is better - an additional 10% and full employment or 10% less and longer dole queue’s. Already to keep down unemployment statistics a ‘job’ is defined as about 8 hours work and not the 20 hours it used to be.
Here is some sage advice, admittedly information we got through subscribing to ‘Choice’.
When buying on-line (and we only do it when it cannot be obtained within 50Km) we can go through a whole process to purchase something ‘we could not find in Australian shops’ (in our case a Koran in English) only to find at the checkout that it could not be shipped to Australia. Fortunately we already have a spurious overseas address so we arranged for the book to be sent from the U.S address to the school in Bangladesh which was our target destination.
According to Choice these third-party delivery services such as MyUS.com, Lil’ Shoppa, HopShoGo and Bongo give you an American address for parcel forwarding and they can send it on to Australia. Some companies such as Price USA even buy the product on your behalf and use their local agents to ship it to Australia. But be warned - they are not free - they all have a fee of some sort hidden in the pricing structure commonly called ‘package and deliver’. So one needs to watch out for the additional costs.
If the product is not available in Australia then you have no other alternative than to either pay the extra or look for a locally made equivalent product which gives Australians work and probably works out about the same in overall costs. I believe that there are many out there that buy a bargain on-line only to find after the final bill comes in they could have bought it cheaper in Linton.
Regardless of what we are shopping for purchasing overseas can have major problems - no warranty for a start - faked parts is another - and medicines? No - unless you want to kill yourself (seriously).
Being obsessive-compulsive the Astonisher lives by an astonishing number of self-imposed rules and protocols designed to keep idle hands busy. Our policy in general is:-
1: Buy in Linton
2: Buy in Ballarat
3: Buy on-line in Australia
4. Buy where available.
We always believe the Australian economy must come first (a pity our elected representatives don’t care about that) and will lobby for a GST to be applied to all on-line purchases not just those purchased in Australia. If we want a level playing field then we have to apply the same taxes across the board regardless of price or origin. We don’t have GST on goods under a certain value as the bean-counters say it costs more to collect than what they will collect - what they don’t tell us is that GST on pricier items will more than cover the cost of collection on the lower end of the scale - let Peter subsidise Paul. They’re just too lazy and complacent and worried about getting home for the X-Factor to bother putting it in place. Why increase our workload?
The State Liberal Government was turfed out because it allowed 60% of green waste to go into land-fill (only Labor is that wasteful?) but they did rule that ‘geo-blocking’ was in such a grey area in regard to World Trade Regulations that they shouldn’t make it illegal to flout the rules governing such practices. ‘If one could one should’ was the outcome. Pity they don’t like that concept when it comes to personal taxes. Apparently it’s the downloading and not the smuggling of USB sticks up our arse that makes the difference.
Just as a demonstration of differences between countries. Taxes for on-line purchasing in America are for any purchase above $15.00 and in the U.K it’s $25.00 (so much for the too expensive to collect argument) but in Australia the maximum that does not attract taxes is $1,000. Basically Australians can buy almost anything they want and our politicians couldn’t give a toss.
There is another way to get around your Internet Shopping problems. You can save yourself some time and money by getting yourself a legitimate U.S downloading address using a VPN (a virtual whatever) through Free and Paid VPN servers. Readers should Google TorVPN, Logmein Hamachi ( a sort of Beam-me-up Scotty type site) Hotspot Shield, HMA. IPVanish (sounds more like a slash in the dark) and Overplay. You connect to your VPN server (which pretends to be your computer - good if you’re also Julian Assange) and allows you to set up an account and use a legitimate U.S postal address. One is not quite sure if the Sheriff has realised yet that there are 17 million people living in a two-bedroom flat in Little Rock.
Yet another alternative to VPN, if you spend quite a bit on imports (GMH for example) is to adopt a US based domain name such as un-block-us.com for about $5 a month. The Astonisher gets many Linton stories through our domain in Croatia to protect our local sources.

Again - rerouting your internet connection through a DNS server (we know that one to be Domain Name Server - Duh!!!!) by changing the setting on your computer (in our case permanently on another computer but not something we can tell you how to do - a Geek did ours for us) can also trick the site you’re attempting to hack (line through) access into believing your computer is in that country.

A word of warning at this point. Be warned about the possibility of bill-shock from excess data usage charges on the faster 4G network if it ever gets to Linton which has been found to increase data usage by up to 50% in some cases. Much of this caused by the multiple routing and other data sapping uses you might put your computer through for some of these exercises.

After whining on about buying Australian I’ve just realised I’ve told you all about not employing local talent with the exception of local geeks setting up nefarious ways to beat the system.

IT’S NOT OUR MONEY

The Linton Astonisher once had a thought that we should get rid of all political parties. That turned out to be a bit pie in the sky as political parties are the only ones that can form a government after an election. One can imagine the problem with 156 individuals all wanting to be the Prime Minister. I still believe it would, and should, apply to the Senate so that politicians would begin to represent their state and not their party very few Ministers and no Prime Ministers have ever come from this Upper Chamber anyway.

Individual members could coalesce around the laws and poilicies and vote in favour for only those policies they believe are best for their electorate, their state and not hjave to worry about the threats from Whips and other party leeches that ‘you’ll never get power if you don’t toe the party’s line’. They don’t seem to realise there is more power in the hands of a few crazies like Palmer and One Nation than ever being in government itself. You can be a pretty small tail and still wag the dog pretty vigourously as so ably demonstrated by the tree-hugging Greens.

Now you might be astonished to read that I believe we could also save a lot of taxpayers money by not allowing government employees to throw our cash to the wind in frivolous spending sprees. It is common knowledge, and I experienced it year after year when I was unproductively employed, that an attitude of use it or lose it becomes a common practice at the end of year civil servants sale.

This entails getting rid of any money you haven’t spent by the end of the financial year in the fanciful fear that you won’t get as much money next year. This is a furphy of course but is bandied around all government departments at all levels. Stupidity would reign if budgets were cut and then had to be increased again six months later, but then again stupidity is almost the exclusive domain of civil servants and pollies and in all three tiers of goverment, or as Golden Pains calls it  ‘community leadership’.

As a genetically programmed tight-wad I always treated my budget as almost my money and did not just spend it in a cavalier fashion. By the end of each financial year I might have had about $500 left over and I had mandatory instructions to spend it. As a result my office had enough stationary to last the next decade and every year I had to buy more productive items, it stretched my imagination to the limit.

What I did need was a new computer but there was never enough in the kitty to buy one. My pleas to put the money aside for the next year fell on deaf ears of course, funding from Community Services to N.G.O’s had to be spent without arguement and apparently on their part without conscience. It ended up by my applying for a special grant to buy a computer which could well have been funded from existing money and not yet another drain on the taxpayers purse.

‘Jesus! It’s only taxpayers money …. not yours’ was one response from my funding body.
So there we have it. The taxpayer around the end of June every year helps to pay for bonding exercises (see also wankers games), staff picnics and movie nights to develop relationships between the wage-earners (a.k.a dinner, movies and a free booze-up) or even paying for sessions called ‘personal development’ (including palm reading and star-sign interpretation) and in extreme cases large amounts can be exhausted on entire week-ends at a spa or other health resort (in my case it was a long-weekend at a Mount Victoria Boutique Hotel) and given such names as Peak Organisation Conferences (in my case the Office of the Catholic Archdiocese of Parramatta) where we learnt more about celibacy and family counselling, or Advanced Community Development where we learnt how to sway the system towards giving us more money to spend on frivoulous personal pursuits disguised as work.

The ultimate answer is to freeze the budget at a certain level for four years (a much favoured number for governments) and enable departments and individuals in the community sector to earmark the money that is left for use the next year. It would have the effect of making civil servants more accountable and economical when spending our money.

Over the next four years the Auditor-General could check the frugality of departments, their ability to use our money wisely and ensure that tenders for building works or provision of expendable supplies are within the same playing field as the private sector. When a normal house can be built for $150,000 why should the government pay $350,000 for the same project. When a good set of bookshelves cost around $3,000 why should Senator Brandis spend $14,000 on the same thing let alone a previous Prime Minister spending $5,000 on a desk which was priced at $2299.00 on the showroom floor. You would have heard about Gillard’s $100,000 School Tuck Shop about the size of a standard single garage.

Now its up to us, after all its our money, to start asking those ‘born to rule’ what they might do about this blatant waste of money. Little wander we are going further into debt at government level, they just don’t know when to stop spending.

HYPER-TRAVEL

Even though the developers of hyper-travel systems are having teething problems in 2018 doesn't mean that by 2028 those problems would have been solved. Twenty years ago nobody ever though about the Internet as we know it, and the potential for paperless communications, fifteen years ago the fully electric car was all but science fiction and even ten years ago the self-driving car the stuff of comic books. 

Given that our government cannot get any large infrastructure built within twenty years of conception, waste billions in the processes of consultation, development and legal challenges picking up and dropping ideas around the electoral cycle and refusing to admit intelligent people into the public service, nothing gets done without a lot of argument and angst.

As a result a fetish for developing uniquely Australian products rather than just buying fully tested and operational off-the-shelf projects preferably of Australian origin and manufacture has become the norm. The end product is that political interference in major projects have proved disastrous and we begin to look like a third-world banana republic.

Given the tyranny of distance of our nation cross-country transport is an essential part of our economy and is need to drive growth. What we face is the fact that after 150 years no government service has ever been able to keep wheels on trains let alone get them to run on time.  What have the fat cats of the railways services been doing for the last century and a half?

Well, now our government has got the idea that, like Battleships, they want to build a fast train system that is bound to be both out of date and inferior to the possible transport alternative twenty or thirty years in the future. We will have a Fast Train between Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane by 2045. That's the promise they believe they want to make. By the year 2045 even aeroplanes may be a thing of the past so why begin building what exists now instead of looking to a future that holds cheaper and faster transport alternatives.

The readers of H.G Wells, Alex Asimov, Peter Singer, Timothy Leary or even Ray Bradbury would see that after science fiction there sometimes becomes science fact.
The troubled Hyper-loop may be the future, with our topography and distances, but that and other futuristic transport systems need to be explored and considered.

What we need our government to do is to firstly stop the brain-drain to America and China by actually putting the money where their mouth is about developing a innovative and inventive economy, allow the intelligence of our community free reign,  waste not money on unwinnable wars but invest it instead in the CSIRO and other research organisations so that they can attract the best brains for the best projects.

Australia needs desperately to look far into the future, not just tomorrow or the next election. We need Statesmen to build a nation, not a superannuation nest-egg. We need government workers with the freedom and flexibility to innovate and improve their roles, we need imagination not migration, we need faith in ourselves and not continue to be the lick-spittle of international bullies, we have the ability to go it alone without the help of any other nation, we need fire in our bellies and under our arses. We need a hyper-government for a hype- future and not the Flat Earth Society residing in Canberra..

FREE HISTORY LESSONS

Australia has much to thank Captain James Cook for. Even though he was an illegal boat person landing upon the shores of Terra Australis, denying the aboriginal population the right to say who comes to their country and under what circumstances they come, he did introduce the concept that if the land was Terra Nullius, in that there was nothing here, a whole lot of people in chains could arrive bringing with them their family pets, dogs, cats, foxes and rabbits.

His foresight in positioning Australia to take advantage of this Asian Century, he believed that the West, Sydney with its pure Anglo bloodlines, would eventually move towards the East, Kathmandu as the economic center of the world and take it over as well. Historians of the day told us that the Chinese were too backward and that the Japanese had poor eyesight and thus no foresight, our future would lay somewhere between here and London via Seth Efrica. Of course it was proven some time later that what lay between us and the Mother country via Seth Efrica would see us pouring all our treasure into those fractious, tribal states to keep them from committing Genocide on each other and Australia prostituting itself to pay for it.

Of course Captain Cook believed that America at that time, a rambunctious adolescent nation, desperate to rid themselves of the English language and King …….. , would never amount to anything if they didn’t have a Monarchy to lord it over them. This was well before the Trump reign.

His mistake was corrected geographically when the Japanese who couldn’t see straight decided to re-arrange the Eastern World. They failed but drew our attention to the fact that the fertile crescent would be a nightmare and the Far East - China (so called because of the hegemony of the West) would eventually dictate to us what we had tried for decades to dictate to them.

Another huge error was to not harness the environmental power of our original inhabitants, or even the physical power for that matter, as Terra Nullius denied their very existence. The idea that a nation, a culture, a civilisation could exist without landholders, streets, shops and civic centerers was pure fantasy. A parcel of land, regardless of its size, could not call itself a country unless it had a flagpole to show the world that it was civilized.

Of course without vegetarian environmentalists, later to be called the Greens, Cook envisaged Botany Bay to be the place to put Oil Refineries and Chemical Works while further North in Sydney Harbour subsequent wandering seafarers would put a city, with its bridges and tunnels and houses built right down to the waters edge occupied by the twin evils Prime Ministers, Catholic Archbishops and Drug Lords.. The whole idea of reserving the harbour for the rich and powerful, was to keep anything dirty and smelly as far away as possible while the stench of industry was good for the healthy development of the working classes to the West of the city it offended the sensitivities of the political class.

Nothing was thought wrong with the concept of placing several of the countries tanning works, rubbish dumps and heavy industry at Mascot, which, years later would prove to be a nose destroying entry to Sydney if you arrived by flying machine. The rich those days traveled by ’Liner’ via Aden for cheap shit on the way.

It would be half a century or more later when John Batman (Great-uncle of Bruce Wayne) saw the potential of digging holes all around Ballarat but living in the unpolluted atmosphere of Melbourne. His attraction to Gold was only to be superseded by that of Brown Coal an equivalent distance to the East of Melbourne as Ballarat, again to keep as much soot as possible from the clothes lines of the aristocracy. This brown coal, cheap, nasty and highly polluted could be used to power the boilers of the era of steam, heralding the use of railways to get more people into Myers Department store and the products of industry out to the country. This tradition of bringing the countries wealth to Melbourne and shipping its rubbish back out to the country would go on for a long time, but now the rubbish comes from China via Port Melbourne.

The City Planners of Melbourne and Sydney saw no need to design anything further than there eyes could see, a tradition dating back to the time of the Pharoahs, this land would always just be a suburb for Mother England, a place to strip away its wealth, and like shit to the countryside, a place to dump its boat people, crooks and vagabonds housed in rotting hulks on the Thames River.

Who would guess two centuries later that Australia would treat its new boat people the same way shifting them from rotting hulks from Indonesia onto the shores of New Guinea, Port Moresby being seen by the rulers of Australia as Sydney had been to the rulers of Great Britain. A good place to send your rubbish and bring back much plunder.

Anyway, the planners only laid out a city for a few hundred thousand people, not that many Britain's would want to come to this God-forsaken land unless it was to vandalise it. Here it was thought that, like the aboriginals, the crooks would eventually breed themselves out by being absorbed in the advanced civilisation of the West. The explosive growth of Australia after 1945 put paid to the fact that we would remain a British backwater nation, great for cattle, sheep and minerals. Since we had cut the apron strings of Britain they could not hold us back any longer, and, following the war would begin to tie ourselves closer to those rebellious Americans and leave Britain to sink under the weight of it’s faux-supremacy and Margaret Thatcher.

It is little known that William Solander once wandered around the fields of Kingsford-Smith and would foresee thousands of great birds landing there, nor that Joseph of the Banks Family would establish a repository (aka suppository) for the whole nation called the Bank of New South Wales to lock away the riches for safekeeping until they could be eliminated through the London Stock Exchange by computers that just said ‘No”. Nor is it known that Queen Victoria, originally pleased to have a state named after her, was not amused when it turned out to be a gigantic mine site.

Long live Victoria the drug-ridden slut that she was and the state that sells itself to any sleeze in a fancy car.

IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS ‘SPONSORSHIP’

In the beginning He created heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep,the Spirit of God hovering over the Mount Franklin waters.

And God said,“Let there be Incandescent light,” and there was incandescent light. Saw that the Osram light was good,he separated the Osram light from the Phillips . Called the Osram light “ Woman’s Day,” and the Phillips he called “Sleep City Night.” there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

And God said,“Let there be a vault to the waters for to separate light water from heavy water.” So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. It was so. God called vault “sky.” there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.

And God said, “Let the Mount Franklin water under the Etihad sky be gathered to one place, let dry ground appear.” And it was so called the dry ground “Australia,” and the gathered Mount Franklin waters called “seas.” God saw that it was good.

Then God said, “Let the land produce gorse vegetation: -modified seed-bearing plants and pine tree plantations on the land that bear fruit without seed in it, according to Monsanto. ” And it was so. The land produced gorse vegetation: GM plants bearing seed according to their kinds pine trees bearing fruit with no seed in it according to Monsanto. And God saw that it was good. There was evening, and there was morning—the third day.

And God said, “Let there be downlights the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, let them be L.E.D lights in the vault of the sky to give soft light on the earth.” And it was so. God made two great lights—the greater light that govern day he called News Limited and the lesser light to govern night he called This Day Tonight. And he also made the TV stars. God set them in the vault of the sky to transmit light to the earth, govern the day and the night, to separate light Comedy programmes from Game Show darkness. And God saw that it was good. There was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.

And God said, “Let the Mount Franklin water teem with living creatures, let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.” God created the great creatures of the sea every living thing with which the Mount Franklin water teems and that moves about in it, to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that Virgin Airlines **, and Carnival Cruises and Manly Ferry’s were good and blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the Mount Franklin water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.” There was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day.

And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures to their kinds: livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.” He created Football Teams and it was so and made the wild animals according to their kinds, Tigers, Panthers, Lions and the livestock according to their kinds,  Football Fans, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds., NFL, and God’s own favourite Soccer. And God saw that it was good.

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, our likeness, that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” And so he created Advertising Agencies and Account Executives and Ticket Writers and he saw that it was good. 

So God created his own image, in the image of God created them; male and female created them, Nobility and Dictators he created them, cross dressers and people who were gay he created them, and people who fantasize of vacuum cleaners and watermelons he created them. But the Devil not God created he the species called Vegans for he saw that it was bad. That they would gobble seeds and not the animals that seeds were meant to feed. God saw the badness in Vegans and said that they should be treated as humans in need of special care.

God blessed them all who ate Meat and said to them,““Be fruitful and increase in number; most of thine at least, the earth subdue it. Rule over fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

Then God said, “I give you every GM seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with no seed in it. They will be for Woolworths. To all the beasts of the earth for Megameats and all the birds in the sky for Birdseye and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life it—I give every green plant for food to Supermarkets.” And it was so.

God saw all that he had made, it was very good. There was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the T.V hosts for them. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made and he said that Carpet King Touch Football and Commonwealth Bank cricket should they be blessed to play on the seventh day. And he blessed all those who play for Packer-stan.  All the generations of the footballers and of the cricketers they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens,

Footnotes:

** There is no commercial relationship between Virgin Airlines and the Virgin Birth.

HOW TO WIN WARS BY LOSING MONEY

Society is constantly in a state of confusion over what is best for its future. From the earliest begining the law has been based initially on the Ten Commandments, and not withstanding the 18 million different interpretations of those laws are still essentially the basis of a functional community.

Part of that function has been to hurt those who are naughty and punish those who cannot afford to break the laws.

But where after 40,000 years has it got us. Even the most severe punishments, the taking of a life by the State, has never deterred miscreants from breaking the law.

Data will show in general that for every $20 Billion a year lost by society through the committal of various crimes it costs society $80 Billion a year in control, detection, justice and punishment. One might ask the question is it worth paying out $4 to save $1? Statistics says it doesn’t but our community has to be protected and there must be a better way.

Switzerland has four more times the guns per person than in the United States yet less than 1% of crime is committed with such a a weapon in that country. It does not compute, so there must be another explanation.

In the Northern European countries the prison system would appear to us to be a joke, group homes, minimal security and only those who are the most violent are locked up. Crimes where there are no victims are generally punished in what Australian would describe as an unpaid holiday. Yet the recidivism rate is only a quarter of what it is in this country.

Where are they going right or where are we going wrong?

Data in the United States would suggest that with their imprisonment rate increasing by around 15% every year that by the end of the next century every American man, woman and child will be locked up in prison. Maybe that’s good - crime will cease to exist except within the controlled environment of a penitentiary. And think of the court costs that will save.

The cave man tore peoples tongues out, the Pharaohs crushed criminals under heavy rocks but people were still naughty. The Romans threw them to the lions, Kings and Queens used hanging as a punishment and then added drawing and quartering to the mix finally sticking their head on a pike and propping it up on the nearest bridge as a final flourish but the prison hulks kept filling up. Vlad tuned people into kebabs, while boiling in oil was popular in the Otterrman Empire. After the reign of Henry VIII the axe became less popular and hanging people in a cage from a gibbet by the roadside until their bones fell through the bars was thought to be a more modern day deterrent. Dogs and pigs were well fed but crime went on un-abated.
The British in the 1770’s even despatched criminals across the seas, exhiled them to the hell of the antipodies hoping to never see or hear of them again so what happened to that experiment? It evolved into people smuggling.

Exiling people and sending them off to Gulags didn’t get Russia anywhere. Their criminals became the ruling class. Concentration camps either in Poland or in the Pacific has not deterred anyone from continuing anti-social activities, Asylum Seekers made out to be those most heinous of criminals can’t even be stopped from tramping all over the garden beds of Europe and we can’t even stop them from tramping all over Christmas Island.

Why are we not looking at what ideas are working and ignore the Queen of Hearts screaming “Off with their heads”. We must devise ways not to violently fuck up other peoples countries so they all want to rush over here in a peaceful invasion. We’ve got to spend those $1’s on young people through proper education and training, support and encouragement to save the $4 they’ll cost us when they get older.

We’ve got to stop subsidizing the rich and close the tax loopholes so that every citizen pays their fair share towards the combating of crime through the human improvement to our community. Make make everyone pay their fair share so that some bastard doesn’t decide to take it from us illegally.
Make the punishment fit the crime for rich, poor, elite and even ruling classes alike but make it a punishment that works.

BARNABY JOYCE HAS NEVER CONCEIVED ANYTHING

Fresh doubts have been cast over whether Barnaby Joyce has actually conceived anything at all during his 15 years in Parliament.

As speculation intensified in Canberra this morning, Mr Joyce said he had no choice but to confront the rumours, after weeks of conjecture. “The truth is, it’s possible I haven’t conceived of a single useful idea since 2013. If you look at the dates, you’ll see what I mean”.

Colleagues of the former Deputy PM said they were yet to see any evidence of a fresh idea. One went as far to speculate that Mr Joyce’s entire parliamentary career may not even be his. “It’s a grey area,” the colleague said.

Barnaby Joyce’s 13-year political career may actually belong to someone else, it has emerged.

As speculation intensified in Canberra, some sources suggested the true owner of Mr Joyce’s career his been an open secret for years.

“It’s pretty obvious that Barnaby has had nothing to do with this,” one source said. “The career belongs to Gina Rinehart. She conceived it; and she’s the one who’s supported it through it’s whole life”.

Mr Joyce said he would consider the career his, even if it turned out it wasn’t.