Look I know that Essendon are the Bombers, but the Saints made a better headline and like the mainstream media I’m more concerned with sounding good than actually conveying accuracy in my headlines.

By the way, I loved the front page that I saw today: CHALMERS OFFENSIVE. I’m presuming that it was meant to be a play on the phrase “charm offensive” even though there’s no suggestion that the Treasurer is launching one. The paper managed to get easy with calling Dr Jim offensive without any link to what they’d written. Where’s “Mad As Hell” to use that one and say just a bit of fun, eh? The actual piece was about how abolishing the Stage 3 tax cuts was going to hit teachers, nurses and tradies. I could write a whole piece about how the Stage 3 tax cuts could be manipulated a bit so that, not only were they fairer, but they could be made less costly without abolishing them entirely. It’s interesting though, because the media is wildly speculating that Labor are “softening us up” for a change and then complaining bitterly about their broken promise… which mightn’t actually happen. Labor may actually mean it when they say that they intend to go ahead with them.

Whatever Labor end up doing, I’d like to suggest that while it’s good to keep promises, reassessing a situation closer to the time is always important. I’m sure that nobody would argue that Barry should keep his promise to drive his mum to church this Sunday even though it means dragging her out of the hospital where she’s on a respirator.

But before I got distracted by the whole tax cut thing, I was going to comment on that poor guy who lost his job because of his religious views, Now, if you read the original version of the Bible you may end up a wee bit confused…

No, not just because it was written in a foreign language…

Was it originally written in Hebrew, Latin or some other language?

Whatever, it certainly wasn’t written in English so there’s a whole range of things that may have been lost in translation.

Anyway, in case you haven’t followed the news, Andrew Thorburn was asked to resign from the job that he’d been given after an extensive search by Andrew himself, after which he concluded that the best person for the job was him. (Yes, yes, shades of Morrison, but stop interrupting and making me lose my train of thought!)

Andrew Thorburn has an impressive track record in the corporate world where he told the Banking Royal Commission that he had no idea what was going on and that dead people were being charged for financial advice that they weren’t receiving. In some cases, this was because they were dead, but as Mr Thorburn believes in life after death, he may not have seen it as a problem… unlike all the problems he acknowledged as problems even though he had no idea they were going on because he was just the CEO, so how could he be expected to know what was happening?

Let’s just pause a minute here and look at the way things are meant to work in a secular, inclusive society according to those outraged by Mr Thorburn’s sacking/resignation:

• Nobody should exclude anyone from a job on the basis of their religion, unless the body doing the employing is religious itself, in which case they shouldn’t be forced to employ someone who doesn’t adhere to their values.
• Nobody who’s religious should be excluded from a job based on the position of their religion on certain topics, even if that position is in direct conflict with some of the views of the organisation employing him, her or them.
• Schools don’t open on Christmas Day, indicating a refusal to celebrate Christmas and all schools should be celebrating Christmas even if the teachers employed there have a religious objection.
• Australia has the right to insist on certain values and people who don’t adhere to Australian values should go back to where they came from, even if their objection to the value is religious in nature.
• If the people not adhering to Australian values happen to be non-migrants who are just doing things like calling January 26th Invasion day, then they should be sacked from any job they hold because they don’t appreciate how lucky they are, because if the British hadn’t invaded then it would have been the French and that would have been a bigger problem because most of us don’t speak French.

Peter Dutton thinks that Andrew Thorburn should be re-instated, and not just because Dan Andrews thought that removing him was a good idea. No, it’s like I said: religious institutions have the right to consider religious views when hiring and firing, but nobody else does.