“Supply-side – This concerns the bits of the economy which produce goods and services. Policies which target the supply-side make it easier to make things and make money, and this very often involves lowering taxes. For this reason, ‘supply-side’ is code for ‘rich people’, thus ‘supply-side economics’ in practice means ‘rich-people economics’, because the policies involved –lowering taxes and cutting regulation –are always popular with the rich. One of the ideas behind supply-side economics is the ‘trickle-down effect’, in which the rich get tax breaks and spend money on services provided by people with less money, who then spend money on services provided by people with even less money, and so on, as the money ‘trickles down’ through the economy and everyone benefits. If that was going to work, you’d have thought that it would have kicked in by now.”

From How To Speak Money by John Lanchester

Now, don’t get the wrong idea here. My interest in human rights is – like many politicians – completely flexible. For example, I can be ultra-concerned about Andrew Bolt being denied the opportunity for to write untrue, racist columns, while telling everyone that it’s all right to hold children on Nauru indefinitely because their parents tried to come to Australia on a leaky boat and the rights of the child are superceded by the need to discourage others from making the journey.

And when it comes to over-payments by Centrelink, I have no interest in that old chestnut, “Innocent until proven guilty”‘ As far as I’m concerned, anybody taking money from the government is committing fraud until they can prove that they’re only receiving back the franking credits that they’d receive if they were actually taxed on the superannuation income they were receiving. To do otherwise would be like denying companies access to the tax cuts, just because they’re not paying any. I’m sure that our government has a plan to include them when they eventually get the comapny tax cuts through which will be something like the franking credit refund. However, when it comes to the whole robo-debt thing, I don’t care if they were entitled to the money under the rules, the point is that the more money the government claws back, the less they have to tax me. Taxing me, is a denial of my human rights.

Of course, when it comes to unions, I can assert that union officials have no right to enter work-sites to make safety inspections but it’s quite ok for the AFP to make raids on union offices to seize ten year old documents that the union was under no obligation to have held for that long.

But when it comes to Royal Commissions, I’m quite consistent. Royal Commissions should only be used for political reasons, because all Royal Commissions have certain powers that – under normal circumstances – we’d regard as a breach of our rights. So we need to be very careful to ensure that any Royal Commission doesn’t go too far. I mean, remember the one into the Painters and Dockers union? It ended up finding out about the “bottom of the harbour” tax avoidance schemes, which wasn’t its intention at all. And the Fitzgerald Inquiry was never meant to lead to the jailing of Queensland miinsters and the end of Joh, it was meant to simply tell us that while there was some police misbehaviour, what could one expect when they were dealing with criminals all the time, so we’ll tell them not to do it again and everyone can go back to developing the sunny state!

Now the time has come to say that enough is enough when a Royal Commission starts ignoring religous freedoms and not just human rights, because – as I’m sure Phil Ruddock’s report into the protection of religous freedoms will tell us – religions should have a special type of status. You know, one where their rights are free to trample over the rights of godless heathens who’ll spend the rest of eternity in Hell anyway, so why not start now?

Not all religious rights, of course! Some people have cultural practices which are inconsistent with the approved religions. As a society, we should be free to strip such people of any rights on the grounds that they are either a cult or against Australian values.

But when it comes to the approved religions, there is no way that a Royal Commission should be asking people to choose between the normal behaviour of secular society and their particular faith.

So these bankers and financial planners who have spent their lives worshipping Money, shouldn’t be asked to pretend that they think such behaviour is wrong. Why, one poor man collapsed while being questioned. That’s how much cognitive dissonance we’re causing them.

No, they should be allowed to worship their God, and it’s wrong of us to expect them to do otherwise. We don’t appreciate Money like they do. That’s why it’s wrong of us to keep it when they want it in ways that we pagans can’t understand.

If we don’t shut down this Royal Commission right away, before we know it, there’ll be all sorts of unintended consequences. You know, things like expecting financial planners to put their client’s needs before their own religion.

And we can’t have that!