Paul J Penton – Songwriter

You’re all invited to the wedding. Roll up. Roll up. Bring your confetti of dockets and receipts and prepare to shower the happy couple, you and the taxman. Every year you get married. The accountant is your wedding planner. You  make all the arrangements. Collating the guest list of  receipts – allowable deductions who send in their notice of attendance, their RSVP. Work boots, softwares, printer cartridges, petrol receipts. They all come together from far and wide for the  celebration and meeting with your accountant.

In a noiseless office with a  bay window view of a vacant carpark and some stretched high tension power lines he runs through the standard order of service with rote questions. The pre-calculated package he has on offer as the wedding planner is flashed before you. He ticks boxes and taps away at his Alice in Wonderland calculator- it really does seem too big for him. Maybe it’s so he doesn’t mess up those important numbers.

For an hour it’s a series of taps and twizzles until you realise he’s now wearing a bakers hat and his office has morphed into a kitchen. He’s just about to place a fold of pastry over a bunch of numbers and figures that will bake for 25 minutes at two hundred and twenty degrees celsius in the ATO approved oven.  When it’s done it’ll come out with all the fresh baked goodness of apple pie. He’ll deposit straight into your bank account where you can add your own cream or whip off a slice of credit crunch to go. Something to help pay down some debt mountain you’ve accumulated in the third world. A stinking pile of debt, people live around it’s outsides in shanty towns in squalor. Daily walking through the raw sewage and grime and stench of your consumption.