Eventually, the Gov comes for your chip packet too.
I learned more about economics in a fish and chip shop than I ever did from a government-approved school syllabus or textbook.
As a kid, my parents would hand me three dollars and a mission: buy two dollars’ worth of hot chips with chicken salt, and spend the remaining dollar wisely—on Street Fighter II.
While the chips were being double-wrapped in a gallant slab of butcher’s paper, I’d be hammering buttons, convinced that victory was only one well-timed Hadouken away. When the bag arrived, it took two hands to carry back to the car. On the drive home, Dad showed me a trick: tear a tiny hole in the top so you could sneak a few chips without letting the heat escape.
It rewarded whoever was closest to the packet—an arrangement modern fiscal policy has perfected.
Fast forward to a recent hot chip escapade in Hervey Bay. I ordered a large serve of hot chips and was handed a cardboard container roughly half the size of my childhood memories and twice as disappointing. The price? Twelve dollars. Apparently, the inclusion of aioli elevated the experience into something “artisanal.”
When I realised I also needed tomato sauce, I went back to the counter. The girl stared at the POS system like it was asking her to solve quantum physics and informed me it would be one dollar more for a squeeze sachet. A dollar. For sauce…. Something that used to be free, or at worst, a small copper-nickel token found under the car seat.
Coins or Tokens
Australian “coins” are nowadays better described as tokens, due to the removal of precious metals such as silver and gold found in pre-decimal currency. The use of the word “coin” is proof that our language is being watered down at the same rate as our currency.
That, dear Chitchat readers, is an example of inflation at work—with a side of garlic mayo. I don’t blame the shop owner anywhere near as much as the irresponsible system that enables banks and governments to water down our purchasing power through money creation.
Over the past few years, especially during COVID, governments around the world perfected an old magical trick. Whenever things got hard, they simply printed more money. Australia joined the party enthusiastically. Central banks flooded the system with cash, interest rates were driven artificially low, and politicians handed out stimulus payments like Street Fighter Guile spamming Sonic Booms.
The initiative was sold as a disciplined strategy, but it became impossible for ordinary players to defend against.
Financial education is conspicuously absent from the education system, and the average Joe hasn’t seen wages keep up with inflation.
Predictably, everything got more expensive. Houses rocketed beyond reach. Stock markets boomed, and gold and silver climbed higher. Crypto went from internet meme to dinner-table discussion. This wasn’t random. When you water down the currency, prices don’t rise—money simply buys you less. But try explaining that to the talking heads in the mainstream media, who seem to believe inflation is caused by shop owners waking up one day and collectively deciding to be greedy.
Either the mainstream media don’t understand cause and effect, or they do—and hope you don’t. Both options should worry you.
None of this is new. G. Edward Griffin laid it out decades ago in his book The Creature from Jekyll Island, explaining how central banking and fractional reserve lending turn money into a magic trick. Banks lend money they don’t actually have, central banks promise to save them when it goes wrong, and politicians get to spend now while sending the bill to the future pleb taxpayers who feed on the leftovers. It’s the economic version of eating the chips on the way home and hoping no one notices.
If you want to see where this road leads, look at Zimbabwe, the “Breadbasket of Africa”. Over a few short years, the government managed to bankrupt a productive nation, confiscate private property, and inflate its currency until people needed bucketloads of cash to buy bread. Farms were seized. Bank accounts were drained. Inflation didn’t just erode wealth—it vaporised it.
Walk In The Wilderness
This isn’t ancient history. Local Bundaberg Author, Shaneen Bruss survived it. She fled Zimbabwe as the government confiscated her farm and stripped citizens of their savings. She later wrote about the experience in her book Walk In The Wilderness, and how her Christian faith helped her endure the collapse of everything she owned. Her story isn’t a warning from the distant past—it’s a postcard from a possible future.
And yet here we are, watching the same playbook being dusted off. In the United States, interest rates are being cut again. Donald Trump wants them lower still. Cheap money is back on the menu. When America sneezes, Australia usually catches a cold—or prints another batch of dollars.
Lower rates mean more borrowing, more inflation, and more pressure on savers who foolishly believed money in the bank was “safe.”
So what’s the average Aussie to do while the people in charge play like dodgy bankers in a game of Monopoly with real currency?
First, recognise inflation for what it is: a tax that doesn’t require legislation. Second, don’t keep all your wealth in cash, which can be quietly diluted by continued money creation. Scarce assets—property, precious metals, even a careful allocation to digital assets—exist for a reason. Third, invest in things governments can’t confiscate easily: skills, relationships, faith, and community.
And finally, be sceptical of anyone who claims the solution to money problems is more control, more printing, and more taking from “those people who have more than you”
History shows that envy and covetousness, when given political power, rarely stop at the rich. It eventually comes for your chip packet too.
Go check out the inspirational book:
Walk In The Wilderness
by Shaneen Bruss.
It is available online on Amazon or locally at:
The Hub Christian Bookstore
5 / 39 Bourbong St, Bundaberg Central.
or
Dymocks Bundaberg
95 Bourbong St, Bundaberg Central
Written by John E Middleclass
Chitchat Newspaper. January 2026.