IN the New Australia, thou shalt not get fat. Thou shalt not wash thy car with a hose.

Thou shalt not drink more than four standard alcoholic beverages, thou shalt not march down King William St, thou shalt not use plastic bags, thou shalt not do thy block with waiters, thou shalt not have seven children and, perish the thought, thou shalt not earn more than $100,000 and expect a tax benefit from the state. Are we having fun yet?

Remember when Prime Minister Bob Hawke, during a Whyalla shopping centre  walk-through in 1989, called pensioner Bob Bell a ``silly old bugger''? These days, Hawkie would be sent off for counselling.

The laugh of the kookaburra has been replaced by the tut-tutting of the new elites, whoever they are, hard at work inventing a whole raft of new social crimes.

As a former colleague once observed, the Taliban are everywhere.

Being fat and wanting a government tax benefit are two examples of these New Sins.

On Monday last week, the ``news'' broke that Australia was facing a ticking Fat Bomb, with nine million Australians, almost one in every two of us, obese or overweight, making us the world's fattest nation. Really? Where are all these fatties hiding?

The study, from the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute, was proof that Australia was facing an obesity epidemic, the cliche of the moment.

The study is little more than a collection of interesting research, published complete with cute little hearts and cartoons.

The opening paragraphs even point out the lack of reliable data on projected obesity in middle-aged Australians.

The next day, the official Commonwealth snapshot of our national health, the Australian Health Report 2008, found Australia's life expectancy is now one of the highest in the world, an amazing 81.4  years, second only to Japan.

Is obesity rising? No, it is falling. The report showed a small improvement in Australia's ranking for adult obesity rates since 1987, although Australia remains in the ``worst'' third of all developed countries on this measure.

However, it cautioned against comparing nations on this count, as ``Australia is among a small number of countries that provide bodyweight estimates based on actual measures of people's height and weight rather than self-report''.

Bad luck to the Fat Police  while we could lose a few kilos, we are in pretty good shape.

Now to the case of the Brisbane couple, Simon and Sonya Dorries, who on June 18  made the mistake of revealing in The Australian that: a) they have seven children and one on the way; b) Mr Dorrie earns a bit above $100,000; and, c) changes to the treatment of salary sacrifices into super means they will lose the Family Tax Benefit.

They were not complaining nor were they arguing they were hard up, just pointing out the changes meant they would put less cash into their own super.

Their story drew an appalling four-letter spray from Bernard Keane, Canberra correspondent for online news service Crikey.
He bagged them for daring to see themselves as a quintessential Aussie working family.

``Eight kids and a six figure income? The only thing that's quintessential of is a gated community of Catholics,'' Keane wrote. Some Catholics might see that as bigotry.

``If the Dorries were so quintessential, they'd do what most families do  find a job for the non-employed partner,'' he wrote.

Keane mocks the family's desire to have eight children  ``there's already 7 billion people on the planet  a few more won't hurt, surely''  and while he stops short of calling on Mrs Dorrie to be sterilised, says the family is ``unusual in its tendency to procreate''.

But the Dorries' real crime is to have only one spouse working, earning over $100,000, and wanting to make tax-effective contributions to their own retirement. Apparently this is now a mortal sin in Australia.

Thank heavens they are not obese. They would be tarred and feathered.
  
Matthew Abraham can be heard on 891 ABC Adelaide from 8.30am each weekday