“The way to ensure that continues is to keep spending under control and keep taxes low; that’s the way forward. I’m not going to try to sell the Australian public a unicorn, Alan, and say that there’s really easy solutions here. You’ve just got to keep going at it, day in, day out, and that’s what we’re doing.”

Scott Morrison

 

“But is the unicorn a falsehood? It’s the sweetest of animals and a noble symbol. It stands for Christ and for chastity; it can be captured only by setting a virgin in the forest, so that the animal, catching her most chaste odor, will go and lay its head in her lap, offering itself as prey to the hunters’ snares.”

“So it is said, Adso. But many tend to believe that it’s a fable, an invention of the pagans.”

“What a disappointment,” I said. “I would have liked to encounter one, crossing a wood. Otherwise what’s the pleasure of crossing a wood?”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

Ok, I suppose it makes me sound like a bit of a romantic, but I prefer the Umberto Eco quote.

Anyway, after Joe Hockey telling us that poor people don’t drive, now Scott Morrison is telling us that none of us are allowed to ride unicorns. Or at least, he won’t be selling them.

He’s just telling us that the Liberal Party are going at it, day in, day out.

That’s right, they don’t stop. They been hard at work, developing their tax policy. They haven’t stopped. They’ve managed to rule out the GST and then they’ve told us that they’re sort of ruling out changes to negative gearing and not just because Labor suggested it. It’s because some of those people who use negative gearing are “mum and dad” investors. And by that he doesn’t mean mothers like Gina Rinehart. He doesn’t even mean mothers like Rupert Murdoch. He means that sort of “mum and dad” investors who struggle to send four kids to independent schools while negative gearing just so those poor renters have somewhere to live. And all this on an income of less than ten thousand a year.

It’s been a long week for the government, because they’ve been trying really hard to develop a tax policy that addresses bracket creep. And as Scott Morrison tells us they’ve been working to keep taxes low, only to discover that inflation is low so, as Mathias “Don’t be an economic girlie man” Cormann told us, bracket creep isn’t really that much of a problem, so we really only need to give tax cuts to companies and the people whose votes we may need in the looming election.

So, it looks like they have to keep at it. They have to keep “going at it, day in, day out”, until they develop a policy, coherent or otherwise, because I doubt that even this government couldn’t really go to the election with a tax policy of:

STOP THE UNICORNS!

Mm, Barnaby as Deputy PM, Brandis’ letter praising Tim Wilson, Phil Ruddock as Human Rights Envoy… Thinking about it, they may think they’re on a winner.

Still, unicorns aside, I liked the ABC news item that told us that even though the Turnbull government was “only five months old” it was already having a ministerial reshuffle. It’s almost as though, we’re all meant to have hit the reset button and treat the ascension of Turnbull as a whole new government. Surely, it would be more correct to say that since the Liberals were elected in 2013, we’ve had several more reshuffles than a deck of cards at Crown Casino.

I liked that even more than the government ads inviting us to join the ideas boom. I guess they’re waiting for the CSIRO scientists being sacked to offer to join it on a volunteer basis. Sort of like work for the dole. Except that’s not really volunteering.

Yep, they’re telling us that they’ll develop their policy and then release it closer to the election. I mean, it’s not like they’re the government or anything.