Why, when you're raking in a maximum of $257.80 per week for a single person, you're going to be living like a king on a quarter of what the ABS has determined is an average Australian wage! Oh, and you get almost $25 a week more if you have kids to feed, clothe, house and educate, which is basically just gravy! Kids pretty much pay for themselves, right? Sending in ground troops to the class war Of course, there are those who argue that paying people anything at all is just throwing public money away - which again makes perfect sense. At least, it makes sense as long as you assume that taxpayers wouldn't also be paying for the things that society would need more of when you have an underclass given no way to survive for six months. You know, things like emergency rooms, ambulances, police officers, legal services, courts and prisons.

But going back to the wording of the G20 action plan, it's also an excitingly counterintuitive idea that ensuring that a great deal of people have literally no money will somehow stimulate economic growth. Maybe the government is banking on an economy buoyed by an explosion in private security firms and insurance premiums? Typically economies work more fluidly if people are spending money to buy stuff rather than not buying anything at all. If not-spending-money acted as an economic spur, the music industry would be enjoying a peerless golden age right now. Labor's assistant treasury spokesman Andrew Leigh made a similar point, explaining that "If you produce a budget that reduces the income of the poor, it has an impact on consumer demand because they spend everything they've got," he said. "That will detract from economic growth." Pfft, Leigh. Like money ever had anything to do with economics!

The state of environmental debate Labor is on an uncharacteristic tear at the moment in terms of actually opposing things they should be opposing, what with being in opposition and all. The latest thing they're bravely declaring is that they will ban the dumping of dredging spoil in the Great Barrier Reef world heritage area if they come into power. Now, if you want to reflect on how far the goalposts have changed regarding Australia's environmental policy, just take a moment and process the fact that one of our major political parties has just said that they oppose the dumping of sludge on the Great Barrier Reef. As recently as two years ago you might have just assumed that the dumping sludge on the Great Barrier Reef is universally recognised as a terrible idea. But you would be wrong: until very recently, your "Environment" Minister Greg Hunt thought it both nifty and uncontroversial.

Which will be the first party to officially announce that they are opposed to strip mining Uluru, or burning Kangaroo Island down? Apparently we can no longer take these things for granted in 2014. How about burning kittens for fuel? That's still OK, right? It's a point worth making because a new report by the Climate Institute has concluded that Australia's going to have to reduce its carbon emissions by 40 per cent by 2025, 60 per cent by 2035, and finally be at zero emissions by 2050. Which under the current government strategy seems… look, let's just say "ambitious". The authors recognise that this would require people to start accepting facts rather than just adopting a political stance and yelling. "Australia's track record of highly politicised approaches to climate policy has produced politics that have often been inefficient and continually readjusted," the report says.

Of course, they would say that - bunch of seditious fact-lovers. Go back to your Science Republic of Factopia, you goddamn factniks! The ISIL Crisil: this headline would have worked better if we still called them "ISIS" There's a bit of what technically passes for good news in the fight against ISIL: their hitherto unstoppable advance across Iraq has slowed. And it'd be lovely to argue that it's because of the resolute response by the massed western forces, but there's a rather less sexy reason for it: religious demographics. Short version of long story is that ISIL's appeal has been that they are a Sunni resistance movement in countries with Shia governments - which is the case in both Syria and Iraq. There's a deep, easy to exploit division between the two Muslim sects in both countries and ISIL has therefore had a decent amount of underdog cachet in regions who've been unhappy with their government, either for mobilising state force against Sunni resistance (Syria's Bashar al-Assad) or just straight-up neglecting the poorer regions of the nation in favour of the more cosmopolitan metropolises (the strategy of former Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki).