A peculiar thing about the Puddin' was that, though they had all had a great many slices off him, there was no sign of the place whence the slices had been cut.
'That's where the Magic comes in,' explained Bill. 'The more you eats the more you gets.
Cut-an'-come-again is his name, an' cut an' come again is his nature. Me an' Sam has been eatin' away at this Puddin' for years, and there's not a mark on him.'
Although written as children's literature in the middle of the First World War, Norman Lindsay's "The Magic Pudding" has become something of a political commentary on many Australian attitudes and institutions.
Both Labor and Liberal have been giving away huge slices whenever there was an election looming. And the Liberals have done so again during this coronavirus crisis.
Slice One was $750 to all who were already on some sort of welfare.
Slice Two was another $750 to those who had already got Slice One.
Slice Three was a doubling of the so-called JobSeeker payment, commonly known as the dole, to $1,115 a fortnight.
The Fourth Slice was a hugely generous JobKeeper pay-out of $1,500 a fortnight until the end of September to anyone who has had a job before this corona stuff started, regardless of how little they had earned previously.
All this runs into billions and billions of dollars which will put this nation's taxpayers in debt for several generations to come, but some small relief was in sight: the Federal Treasurer got a call on Thursday night from the Treasury Secretary saying that, due to some unexpected miscalculations, he's found $60 billion down the back of the couch.
The Society of Puddin'-Owners should have been jubilant but instead of welcoming this improvement to the country's financial fortunes, these Puddin'-Owners turned Puddin'-thieves are pressing the Treasurer to keep on paying this "extra" money out to other "deserving cases".
Spend, spend, spend! "The more you eats the more you gets."
