I did not watch the royal wedding. That does not mean I am a republican, or anti-monarchist, it simply means I am not interested.

If they want to get married, let them get on with it, they do not need the approval of the masses. After all, they are both adults, both famous for being famous, and one has already been there and done that!

I am also not interested in going to church. That does not mean I have no moral compass, or personal code that has as a base what could loosely be termed the 10 commandments. They make sense irrespective of your brand of faith.

What I am interested in is the replacement of important questions and issues, such as how we live together, how we treat others, and who pays the piper, by this wild and to my mind absurd, emotional response to two thirty somethings getting married.

It seems to me that the things that got us were we are, no longer hold any sway.

We have a tax system that is broken, at a time when we voters appear to be demanding more and more. Those with the power, which really means those few individuals running multinational corporations, hold the power to, and are personally paid to ensure the institutions they run pay as little tax as possible, and they have the resources to find the cracks in the system through which they can wriggle.

Amazon is a prime example, along with their digital multinational friends. They are disrupting retail, and a host of other domains, while investing heavily in new services in the cloud. Great you say, they deserve to be successful, and they do, but Amazon is doing it by more than just being the smartest in the room, they are being subsidised by their competitors.

Amazon trades at what  is effectively break even, yet it will probably  become the most valuable company in the world very soon. It has grown by reinvesting their profits into becoming bigger and more powerful across their areas of operation, and as investment is a tax deduction, they pay no tax.

Their competitors do pay tax, they are largely those who were around before Amazon emerged, but will not be around much longer to pay for the schools and hospitals we all want.

Who will pay for them then?

Not Amazon or Apple, or Google, or Netflix, they are reinvesting in growth at the expense of their competitors, and in the process denying our kids a place to go to school.

Amazon has flipped the system.

Listed companies are usually judged by their profitability, usually on an absurdly short term basis.  Companies sweat the books and beat up their staff to deliver on optimistic forecasts of quarterly profitability. By contrast, Jeff Bezos makes no or negligible profits and has made vision and the long term the source of share value.

Amazing!

Any business that pays more tax than it is legally required to do is not acting in the best interests of shareholders, or so the mantra goes, as was so dramatically stated by the late Kerry Packer in 1991. Therefore  in this day of internationalised supply chains, and low tax regimes in fly blown little islands scattered around the place, they register as businesses, and engage in legal but morally bankrupt practises.

In Australia we have in addition the sight of personal greed, cronyism, and utter lack of personal and corporate integrity being brought into the light by Royal Commissioner Hayne and colleagues. I am sure that this level of malfeasance exists elsewhere, most probably in greater volumes, but that does not make the sight any more palatable. Most probably nobody will go to gaol, a few will be banned from being directors for a while, and there will be mutterings of regret forgotten almost before the words are out. Then we have the competing pollies promising handouts of money we do not have, a bill our kids will have to pay in one way or another.

Who will pick up the real bill for tomorrows hospitals?