“We’re investing $315 kabillion dollars over 15 years … Oh, no you’re not – you’re slashing $895.7 verzillion and forcing the nation to live in a ditch and eat gravel.” “Oh, yes we are, and furthermore we’re spending $99.2 quadrillion on better rubbish bins …”

It has been noted that the Egyptian hieroglyph for 10,000 is a man with his arms stretched as widely as possible, inferring that anything larger was unimaginable. The ancient Greeks had no number for anything higher than 10,000. The Romans bumped this up to 100,000.

Who knows, what our governments and our oppositions are saying might be true. Might not. It’s a natural consequence of our system of adversarial politics. 

The one thing they don’t say is that all those millions, billions are, or once were, ours.

You can bet there’ll be a few changes to tax laws, fee structures and we’ll find out about them by income tax return time.

I was talking about these returns to my adult daughters not long ago and they were gob-smacked at the tax laws which existed when I was a young bloke.

Even an 18-year-old could do the return in under an hour. It was one page.

The kids were stunned to find we used to be able to claim our mortgage payments as tax deductions. There was no Capital Gains Tax, so whatever you made from the sale of property or shares was all yours, and you weren’t losing up to half your gains paying for the Treasury Queensland Surf Club. No Fringe Benefits Tax, thus, lovely long lunches and work perks.

The tax rates per dollar earned were higher than now, but as a young bloke earning about $750 a year, that wasn’t really an issue.

There were far fewer taxes. There didn’t seem to be all sorts of hidden fees, charges, levies, co-payments or any of the other PC words for “sneaky tax”.

It was all so simple, and yet the nation seemed to trundle along okay. Heck, for one brief and glorious time, we even had free university education. No carbon tax, no climate change tax, no rubbish removal tax, no fuel levies, health insurance fees if you don’t have health insurance, on and on.

Back then we could not even spell “one billion”. I have an old dictionary which doesn’t include the word. But it’s like a runaway train now. Ten years ago, the federal government brought in a law saying Australia could never build up a debt more than $75 billion. Two years later, it was changed to $200 billion. Three years later it was upped to $300 billion. And the next it was $500 billion. What is it now? We don’t know because the government scrapped debt ceiling.

One estimate this week was about $715 billion … on its merry journey to $1 trillion. Some say on other measures, we’ve already zoomed past that milestone. I was almost going to say “millstone”.

But. There’s no use lamenting simpler times lost. As we say these days: it is what it is. And there’s some consolation in knowing that complaining about tax is a long-established human activity.

Even Albert Einstein moaned that the hardest thing in the world to understand was income tax. And Winston Churchill had some nice advice to our treasurers: “We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself to prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.”

WAYNE GREGSON