Duncan Storrar on the Q&A panel. Credit:ABC

What happened next was fascinating and awful. His 'critics' did not refute Storrar's main point that a rise in the tax free threshold can change the daily life of a poor person. Probably because it's irrefutable. Nor did they take up O'Dwyer's bungled defence of a tax cut for the rich over the poor - which might even be defensible if you're arguing from deep inside the closed loop of neo-liberal economics. Nope. They just pulled on the jackboots and kicked forty-seven flavours of shit out of an impoverished, uneducated man who'd done nothing more than ask a simple but surprisingly difficult question.

The savagery of the media assault on Duncan Storrar, almost entirely the work of the Murdoch press, was sickening to behold. It was, to quote from Jennifer Wilson (@noplaceforsheep on Twitter), a "depraved abuse of power". It elicited feelings of deep disgust from many who observed the attack. It was not unlike watching a crippled man set upon by a gang, his attackers huge with steroids and laughing like psychopaths, drunk with the heady liquor of their own violence.

They turned his family against him. They blew up his criminal record. They called him a thug, an egregious hypocrisy coming from these people.

Interestingly, however, as terrible as it must have been for anyone in that family, the destruction of Duncan Storrar did not go exactly to plan. Even as he was defamed, normal people, which is to say not billionaire media barons or lickspittles in the employ of billionaire media barons, continued to offer support and donate to the Go Fund Me campaign set up on his behalf. It really does bear repeating that Storrar never once asked for the money or the attention. People just started throwing tens of thousands of dollars at him via the internet because they were sympathetic or outraged or both.