Working families ease the squeeze to climb the ladder of opportunity and bask in the glory of aspirational nationalism with the other true believers.

It was a good week for glaring contradictions on the news this week, assonant surnames or otherwise. Ten Late News ran another inflation story - the CPI's up four percent, vox popped mortgagees were complaining about repayments (including someone who bought a house in January of this year - are you familiar with the concept of fixed rate loans, you deadshit? Did you think interest rates were going down anytime soon? This is why banks need a stupidity clause for foreclosure in their mortgage contracts), and Wayne Swan managed to fit in a soundbite without the phrase "Working Families" for the first time ever.

It was another puff piece, to be sure. First of all, as economic doyen and straight-edge bad boy Pete explained to me, the Consumer Price index is a really rubbish way of measuring inflation. It maps the rise and fall of a group of prices without taking into account consumer purchasing habits; for example, when bananas went up to sixteen dollars a kilo after last year's Innisfail cyclone, it skewed the CPI upwards, despite the fact that poor people like me did without our Vitamin B for a year. It doesn't take into account the increased use value of products with major technological advances over time; for example, when computers become exponentially more powerful and progressively cheaper, there's no way of reflecting this in the CPI. Finally, the consumer goods mapped onto the CPI are often aribtrary; mobile phones were readily available for a decade before they were added to the CPI, by which time they were ubiquitous.

Malcolm Turnbull had a hissy fit at the end of the segment, complaining that additional taxation on pre-mixed alcoholic drinks and luxury vehicles were fuelling inflation. If I may put on the Edward de Bono brown conical hat of internet outrage for a moment: FFS. If there's anyone stupid enough out there to own a Ferrari and still have trouble servicing their mortgage repayments, they've waived the right to complain (then again, Turnbull does represent Double Bay and Vaucluse, so it's probably a sizable portion of his Vile Bodies constituency). Congratulations on continuing your party's fine legacy of economic sense and responsibility.

Because certainly the Coalition halving the capital gains tax in 1999 had nothing to do with making property prices escalate to the point where anyone on an income of less than six figures has to either live around an artificial lake on the suburban fringes, or pop out a kid just to get some extra sympathy from rental agencies. Certainly a housing market appreciating at double digits in some of the biggest cities in the country wouldn't be raising the cost of living - no, no, no. But that's alright, throw $14 000 at whoever wants to enter the housing market, that'll do. Oh whoops, now the market's jumped to completely absorb the government's offset. Oh, that kooky inflation, when will it learn?

Fuckarses.

Turnbull's little grab at column space wouldn't have been so grating, if it wasn't for the fact that Ten News ran a twenty second spot on Zimbabwe immediately afterward. The Zimbabwean Treasury has just printed a $100 billion dollar note to cope with rising inflation in the country, something that makes Weimar Germany look like a worker's utopia. The new currency can buy the equivalent of a cup of coffee or a loaf of bread, and translates to about an average day's wages. No word on what effect this has had on luxury car imports, as yet.