In this Friday Fink Tank Col takes aim at people who whinge about tax.

More specifically, he invites us to think of tax not as something being taken away, but instead the opportunity to live in a society of abundance and prosperity.

We enjoy and expect generosity at the micro level. It seems to get murkier at the macro.

A five minute high-level chat can't cover the nuance and politics and complexity of the topic, or the struggles people are facing. So please, be civil in the comments!

See? This doesn't make any sense! Yet...

Conventions exist for a reason, and you should break them only very rarely, and only very deliberately. Putting the punchline first is uncommon, and as you can see, it's jarring when it happens.

Conventions make processes easier.

Greeting people, playing team sport, going to dinner parties.

We know what to expect, and we know what’s expected of us.

In this Friday Fink Tank, Col and I swap chairs to chat about the usefulness of convention.

Driving someone else’s car is easy, because the accelerator and brake are always in the same place. But it’s annoying when the indicator is on the wrong side.

Convention can reduce friction and focus attention where it’s wanted.

Your quirky font will not make your book ”stand out” it will make it unreadable.

If people using your website have to wait or squint, you risk losing them.

AND

Convention can bore people, entrench privilege, and alienate people. If you’re going to break convention, do it in service of your audience. For example, Callum McKirdy’s website breaks convention in service of accessibility for neuro divergence. Nice one.

I held hands at a concert with a blind man named Andrew. What happened next was hilarious.

Should I feel bad about that clickbait headline? Probably, but I stand by it.

I’d gone to the Ocean Alley concert on my own, at the wonderful Forum Theatre in Melbourne. I love going to gigs with friends or my brothers, but the solo outing does leave room for serendipitous encounters.

And so it was.

I’m so glad I got to experience the show with Andrew, a warm and friendly man with the courage to ask for what he wants. In this Fink Tank Col and I laugh about the cultural norms that were comedically broken that night.

Unspoken in this conversation are the gendered safety issues around this topic. Patriarchy and misogyny have a lot to answer for here.

I asked Andrew for consent for the photos, and to share the story.

And I won’t forget that night anytime soon!