You know the hordes complaining about credit card interest rates of 22 or 23 per cent? They don't know what high interest rates are.

The "payday loan" industry and its more dubious siblings at the usurious end of the "consumer lease" business play in the realm of effective rates of about 70 per cent interest up to several hundred per cent. Yes, several hundred per cent.

To quote an example from a government inquiry into the extreme rip-offs, there's nothing like landing a desperate soul with a one-year contract to rent a $345 clothes dryer for $117 a fortnight to make Ned Kelly look saintly. It works out to an equivalent interest rate of 884.34 per cent. By comparison the $498 fridge rented for $65 a week was only 324.35 per cent.

The inquiry reported in March with a series of recommendations that, at their most revolutionary, merely peg the consumer lease highway robbers back to the level of the 70 per cent payday loan gangs.