Man, it's a lucky thing the Age of Entitlement is over. That was a damned close run thing wasn't it? Damn those greedy pensioners and school teachers, and selfish nurses and arrogant fire fighters, damn them all to hell. Always putting their hands out for another dollar, possibly even $1.50, the cheeky bastards. Don't they realise every precious dollar they suck off the welfare tit is an almost infinitesimally small amount that can't go to some deserving multinational mining company and the wealthy shareholders who invest in it?

Of course they don't, because anybody who'd object to taking money from an indigenous literacy program or a women's shelter and giving it to somebody useful like a giant bloody mining company is just a stupid lefty and probably doesn't even want the wealthy super elites to be wealthy or even really super anymore. That's your politics of envy, right there mate. And that's why people are angry about the Australia Institute's so-called revelation tax-payer funded subsidies to mining companies cost $18 billion over the last six years, more than half of that money being pissed up against the polished marble wall in Queensland. You remember Queensland. The place with the yawning budget hole which needed filling in with the bodies of fifteen thousand executed public servants.

Of course people are going to be angry when a bunch of know-nothing know-it-alls use their fancy maths and big school thinking to argue the largest and most profitable companies in the land didn't need all the billions of dollars they took out of the back pockets of ordinary taxpayers. Especially since they sent most of the tens of billions of dollars they made to a post office box in the Cayman Islands. Where they don't have to pay any tax.

That will make a lot of of people very very angry, because those people, many of them managing directors and board members of mining companies, care a lot about mining companies and the small number of people they employ, and the even smaller number of people who own shares in them.

But it's not just hard working owners of mining companies. Lots of other people care so much about mining companies which don't employ them and which pay minimal tax, that the previous government's attempt to grab a little bit of that lolly back saw them destroyed by a propaganda campaign, funded by those wealthy mining companies. You see? You see now, how having wealthy mining companies benefits everyone who owns shares in wealthy mining companies? Or in large advertising agencies? Or the media companies where they place their most effective propaganda?

I for one am glad the miners in Queensland have trousered $9.5 billion dollars in taxpayer funded subsidies that might otherwise have been spent on all the services the Queensland government has cut back or abolished. Because if we hadn't sacked all those lazy, greedy public servants, and got rid of all of that waste and inefficiency, why, the Age of Entitlement might still be with us. It's possible, and I don't want to alarm you, but it is totally possible some wealthy mining company owner somewhere might have had to make do with a slightly smaller yacht or Manhattan town house.

And that, I'm sure you'd agree, would be an absolute tragedy. For the owners of mining companies.