But if the plan is to force competitive diagnostic services currently monopolised by specialised medical organisations, why stop at GPs? Why do we still have all that unnecessary knowing-how-this-works red tape that's stopping our entrepreneurial small businesses from installing MRI suites in service stations and newsagents? This is the sort of competence-ensuring bureaucracy that's stifling innovation! Don't we need to be more agile and disruptive? Heck, 7-Eleven is presumably looking for new revenue streams to offset the inconvenient new costs of being forced to actually pay their staff, so why not give them the opportunity to do tests? Just think of the promotional opportunities! Remember to validate your Medicare Card at the corporate website, customers, because every fifth Serum/Plasma test qualifies you for your pick of the new tropical Summer Slurpee range! Franchise participation may vary! "See, rules work the opposite way in some circumstances - that's what makes them rules!"

If you read the above and thought "hold on, if cutting rebates to GPs would reduce the number of people seeing their GP - which was the entire point of the GP co-pay that former Health Minister Peter Dutton kept trying and failing to get passed through Parliament - then how is Ley arguing that doing the exact same thing with other medical services would somehow not have the same effect?" then congratulations: you are now Professor Brian Owler, president of the Australian Medical Association. "These measures are simply resurrecting a part of the government's original ill-fated co-payment proposal from the 2014 budget," you-as-Owler reportedly said in response. "It is yet another co-payment by stealth." And Labor is correctly seeing this as the sort of issue that's a) in their traditional wheelhouse, b) might actually be popular with the wider community, and c) might therefore remind people that they exist, which is an increasingly urgent problem that they should address. "Our initial instinct is to stand up in defence of Medicare," Opposition Leader Bill Shorten declared. "That's what Labor does. If you want to assault Medicare like the Liberals do, you'll have to come through me and the Labor Party first." And that's technically not true, but saying "well, you'll have to come through me and the Labor Party, and obviously the Greens, who will hopefully also refuse to pass this legislation through the upper house, and also at least three of the eight crossbench senators, since otherwise it's totally going to pass and there's not a damn thing I can do about it."

Still, it's nice to see Labor doing stuff. Sure, the election's probably still a while off, but some practice at speaking in public might be handy. Get up! Stay on the scene! Like a tax machine! Adding further embarrassment to the Treasurer is the public being made aware of the companies that rake in billions in revenue in Australia, yet mysteriously pay little-or-no tax in Australia. Well, some do pay tax - just not this year, because of previous losses (hi, Qantas!) and others pay suspiciously low amounts of tax ($4.2 million tax paid on $3.9 billion turnover, News Corp? Seems like you might have missed a couple of decimal points there!), and some are very, very interesting indeed. Take the Abbot Point Coal Terminal - the one that apparently needs to be expanded, with dredge to be dumped in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. The government has been very, very clear that this is a necessary and vital development in order to accommodate the huge volume of coal shipping through the port, so it seems very odd that it paid no tax at all - despite the vast global demand for coal that absolutely justifies digging up Queensland's Galilee Basin.

Another weird tax-not-paying outfit is everyone's favourite offshore detention providers, Transfield. We know they made $2.8 billion last year (heck, we paid for it!), so it seems weird that the apparently total tax take on that amount is zero. Oh, and fuel giant Chevron have just been ruled against over their unpaid tax in a despite with the ATO, which they are appealing against at the moment, but are also paying no tax at all on $3 billion in turnover. Now, it's important to realise that turnover doesn't mean profit, and V from the S doesn't in any way want to suggest that certain politically-approved companies get what amounts to a secret thumbs-up subsidy of freedom from paying any sort of contribution to the communities off which they're profiteering. There's probably some other explanation, one assumes. The cocktail hour: A Very Robotic Xmas