Satire

The updated Monopoly promises to be great fun for all the family – once they have worked through the thousands of pages of game instructions. Happy 75th birthday, Monopoly!

Once upon a time, a European traveller’s wallet used to be as colourful as the Eurovision Song Contest. Europe can only hope for the return of that splendid monetary diversity. And who would want to listen to the same daggy tune 27 times in a row anyway?

This week’s news held an unpleasant surprise for the world’s conservatives and religious. Luckily for them, they were probably too dumb to understand it.

While driving back to Sydney on the Hume Highway after a short visit to Melbourne, I started questioning Visit Victoria’s legendary slogan ‘You’ll never want to leave.’ Judging by the road signs along the way, they should have instead said, ‘You’ll never manage to leave.’

Regulation is supposed to encourage good behaviour and control it to maximise the public good. But regulation has become an entity unto itself.

There is only one place on earth where a man’s world is still as it should be, and that’s Russia. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has just released pictures showing him shirtless on a horseback, making fire by a lake and relaxing in a tree. As his steely blue eyes were gazing into the Siberian sky, nobody would have dared to tell the muscular ex-KGB man that men couldn’t be left to run things on their own.

The Catholic Church has long put the obstacle of the advocatus diaboli in the path of sainthood – someone who argues the devil’s case against the canonisation of a prospective saint. What the Catholic Church had not yet introduced, though, was an advocatus Australiae, an Australian gate opener to heaven.

A billion here, a billion there, and soon we’re talking about real money. But how could we make the money figures our politicians are throwing around more comprehensible?