There are a lot of moving pieces on the political chess board this week.
It looks like the celebrity DJ and private jet aficionado known as Anthony Albanese has landed from his extended honeymoon.
That was obvious when the son of a single mother, who has an Italian father, finally turned his back on public housing.
In Tasmania this week, just prior to going to professional provocateur Kyle Sandilands' wedding, the PM was announcing hundreds of millions for an unnecessary stadium in Hobart.
The announcement wasn’t welcomed from some public housing enthusiasts who clearly felt deserted by the kid from Camperdown.
Albo is now an enthusiastic landlord with an impressive portfolio of properties - even for a socialist - but seemed somewhat less eager to talk about the rental crisis in Tasmania.
Who can really blame him wanting to talk about a million dollar celebrity wedding rather than public housing problems.
Once the electoral appeal of your own rise from public housing to the number one publicly funded house in Canberra has been used up, there’s no real point in raising the subject again.
The government was trying to talk up their economic credentials this week though.
We were told via press reports of a possible budget surplus thanks to booming commodity prices and soaring taxes.
We even had a monthly surplus of $1.6 billion in March.
But don’t get too excited. At that rate we’d manage to pay off our existing debt in only 50 years or so. A bit like paying the monthly minimum on your credit card.
Still, if there is actually a surplus this year or the next, it would be a remarkable achievement given the inability of any government to deliver one for 15 years.
If, and I stress if, it does happen, let me tell you it’s more through the good fortune of circumstance than good financial management.
With spending way too high to be sustainable, a surplus merely suggests that our taxes are also way too high to build a prosperous and productive nation.
Maybe that’s why the government is so keen to focus on ‘reform’ of our immigration system instead of reforming our tax system.
Making it even easier for people to migrate here keeps the headline economic numbers up while our quality of life goes down. .
