“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”
Wilkins Micawber, David Copperfield
Sorry to get all high school English on you and start quoting Charles Dickens, but it now seems the Reserve Bank have decided the above Micawber Principle goes rather nicely with our newly Dickensian industrial relations system, though frankly any bank that discourages people from using their credit cards is hardly deserving of the name.
As we know, happiness is a warm widescreen plasma TV, so logically, misery must be its absence. Now that people are going to have to start choosing between giving back either the TV or the house the TV’s in, there’s a certain elegant symmetry to the thought of the PM popping around the suburbs in a white van, doing a reverse Santa on the good people of Australia.
“Hang on!” you might squawk. “Didn’t all those ads we watched on 63 inches of plasma flatscreen goodness before the the last election assure us that Johnny was going to keep interest rates relaxingly and comfortingly low?”
Well my advice is don’t wait up to argue the point when your name appears on the wrong side of the ledger of who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, because a promise from the PM comes with enough small print to make your average credit card contract seem like the abridged version of “See Spot Run”.
You’ll not only end up apologising for misunderstanding the complex web of economic factors that make all the good times the direct result of sound fiscal management and all the bad times due to bananas, but you’ll also end up helping him load your ex-TV onto his van and slipping him a couple of thousand dollars to fill up his tank for the ride back to Kirribilli.
Credit where credit’s due, after all.
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