While much of the nation confronts an incessant meth problem, our major political parties struggle with a different kind of addiction – splashing public cash, then demanding more.

With even an ostensibly ‘right-wing’ Liberal government proposing hikes to the Medicare levy and a major banking tax which most of us will end up paying for, the new mantra seems to be ‘tax it because we can’ rather than ‘tax it because we should’.