The way commodity supply and demand generally get back into balance after supply overshoots is that production falls. It's what's happening now as marginal coal and iron ore mines close around the world. And it's happening with dairy, too. It is a terrible, sometimes even tragic, thing to be the marginal producer at such times. In the meantime, lower prices can soften the blow for some commodities by boosting or at least maintaining demand. So what's the reaction of dairy farming group Farmer Power and Joyce? Barnaby says he'll try to jawbone retailers into putting up the price of milk while the farmers want a straight 50¢-a-litre levy on fresh milk. Gee, I wonder what that would do to domestic milk demand. Then there's Slater & Gordon, a law firm sailing close to its own bankruptcy and in need of all the work it can get, filing a class action against Murray Goulburn on behalf of Murray Goulburn investors who claim they were misled by the company into investing in the company. I've long had a problem with this sort of class action, which is rather different from banding together the little guys to take on Big Tobacco or asbestos or misbehaving insurers and banks. If they were going after the management and board – if the management and directors have been negligent or worse – it would make sense to claw back undeserved pay packets. But investors suing the company they own are in effect suing themselves and paying lawyers for the privilege.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission, the pathetic creature that it has become, has outsourced much of its corporate disclosure enforcement to such corporate ambulance chasing. But ambulance chasers only chase where there are pockets deep enough to be worth pursuing and ASIC rarely bothers with the rest. It will be interesting to see if a possible class action against Slater & Gordon is judged worth getting off the ground. The Murray Goulburn mess has already had plenty of attention and will receive more. Highly paid management proved to come at a vastly higher cost for all involved, never mind the hubris and/or desperation that tends to be near the heart of such disasters. There was a very sound idea of trying to move the co-op up the value chain, an idea that might yet pay off. But if ever an alarm bell should have rung, it should have been ding-a-linging early over the corporate headquarters story, as reported by Michael Bachelard: Before (now ex-CEO) Gary Helou was hired, Murray Goulburn management had decided to move out of the derelict headquarters in Brunswick to a purpose-built office at Essendon Fields, at Essendon airport. Andrew Fox, Essendon Fields manager and chief executive of Linfox, says the former Murray Goulburn management drove a hard bargain and, at $19.7 million, got a good price for a 10-year lease. Then the board hired Helou.

"He elected not to move into that building," Fox told Fairfax Media. "He liked staying in the premises of [Freshwater Place], Southbank." Murray Goulburn sublet the building to the Good Guys but had to pay them $6.27 million of farmers' money to take up the lease. A Murray Goulburn spokeswoman said Essendon Fields was "deemed an inappropriate location because it is poorly serviced by public transport". But according to Fox, "I feel sorry for the people he [Helou] represents. "Nobody in a private company would take a hit of $6.27 million. Good Guys should be sending the Murray Goulburn people a bottle of champagne every year to thank them. I hope it's Dom Perignon."

Allowing that to happen puts the Murray Goulburn board up there with Barnaby and investors suing themselves. But when the money's rolling in and big stories are being told about ever-higher prices, people from directors to farmers have a tendency to hear what they want to hear. Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Australian Dairy Farmers wanted a 50 cent levy. ADF says it does not support a levy on milk. Its view is that a levy would deliver a perverse outcome for the industry as a whole, where farmers in non-exporting markets (such as Northern NSW, Queensland and WA) would be subsidising their south-eastern counterparts.