The ATO Diet

Federal Liberal MP, Teresa Gambaro, burst from deep backbench cover this morning with the funniest tax proposal since Pauline Hanson’s little – “take 2 away from 2 and add 2 ” – side-splitter convulsed the nation back in 2001.

Ms Gambaro – also from Queensland, oddly enough – thinks that it would be a top idea to give a tax break to people who lose weight. Sort of a neo-Marxist rethink : from each according to her enormous bum size, to each according to his slender waist measurement. Ms Gambaro – noting that skinnier people are healthier people and thus cost fewer health tax dollars – endorses the carrot (raw, without calorific dipping sauces) and stick approach. Shed those unsightly bulges and make $$$$! Reject the opportunity and you’ll be joining Amanda Vanstone in supporting the entire boomer generation on your over-ample rears. The choice is yours – fatso!

There are some obvious flaws of course. What do we do with people who have wasting diseases like HIV and are, kind of, the skinny unwell? Should they be getting a tax break when they still require costly meds and stuff? And what of people unfairly gifted with genetic predisposition to chronic, fat-blasting illness? What of the deceptively skinny elderly with their tedious budget-muching insistence on being “under the doctor’? Not to mention the potential for laxative abusing tax cheats. Or the amphetamine diet. Consider the implications of smoking your way to a size 8 tax break! And finally, is there not a potential for an embarrassment of riches synergy with the fact that millionaire trophy wives got to look that way via a rigorous diet of lettuce, botox and valium?

“We’re out of negative gearing. We get more back these days from Fiona’s hip measurement.”

And can’t you just hear the whining from self-indulgent lardasses who continually blame their “glands” as they rip open the 7th pack of Tim-Tams for the day? John Howard can. And unlike Ms Gambaro, he knows they vote.

“It’s a silly idea” he said on radio this morning. “It smacks of Big Brother.” Not to mention slim, svelte, “hit the deck and give me 20!”, body fascist Brother.

The coup-de-grace was delivered by Julia Gillard, who clearly couldn’t believe her luck. ” If this represents health policy development in the coalition, we’ve got a problem.

By mid-afternoon Ms Gambaro had fled back to well-deserved obscurity. Only a few discarded carrot tops showed she’d ever been here.