Thanks, Helen.

There aren’t too many Liberals for whom I have affection. But Helen Coonan is one of them. She has just announced her resignation from the Shadow Ministry. Barnaby is her likely replacement. Shame. Senator Coonan was a moderate, a Republican, and a woman of conviction. As the only woman to have occupied a treasury portfolio, she was an unheralded trailblazer; her success despite her sex under misogynistic Mr Howard a testament to her talent.

Her major fault: her bottle blonde hair.

Good luck in your future endeavours, Senator Coonan.

As for her likely successor in the finance portfolio… I watched Barnaby Joyce on Insiders on Sunday. I have been firm in my conviction for some time now that the man is a crackpot. Now, I think he is a stupid crackpot. What Barnaby says, if you listen closely enough, makes no sense.

I don’t just mean from a policy perspective: after listening to a good ten minutes of ranting and raving, I realised that I could only discern meaning in about 10% of what he said. His sentences often make no sense. Some appear to make sense but then, in a heartbeat, the entire focus of the sentence (let alone the tense, subject and object) changes. He never finishes thoughts, and speaks in clichés.

And if being a minister means that he will be “concentrating on the file in front of him” as he claims he will now do, one wonders what he’s been doing until now...