Satire

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?

What a miserable place Australia must be if it finds itself behind a bankrupt economy and a country left ungovernable by the financial crisis. However, we may feel a bit better because Australia did not need to be bailed out by the IMF, nor did our capital cities see rallies of angry citizens which recently brought Dublin to a standstill.