(03) 9020 2905Pizza. Oh, love of my life! Every experience can be enriched with pizza’s inclusion. Both life’s highs and lows should be celebrated with it.
Birth of a child. Grand final victory. Pay rise at work. Redundancy. First date (gourmet, perhaps). Funerals. Graduation. Boys’ nights out. Girls’ nights in. Saturday morning hangovers. Sunday arvo sessions. Divorce parties. And, of course, death row final meal.
Pizza is always an appropriate meal.
I’ve eaten pizza on five continents (I haven’t been to Africa or Antarctica), probably 30-odd countries. This includes camel pizzas in Abu Dhabi, pizza buffets in Brazil, and what would have been the most boring, least memorable, pizza of my life in Thailand … had it not downed my entire family with the “Phuket puke” just an hour later.
Pizzas can be subtle. They can be outrageous. They can be as simple or as complex as imaginations will allow.
The humble pizza, in my opinion, can also be used to help explain many other things. I view life through a “pizza prism”.
Geography: “Perth is here. Freo, just here. Bali is this bit of burnt ham up here”. Sport: “Now, son, Fyfe is the bacon here and he should have kicked it to the capsicum, Pavlich, shouldn’t he?”
Helpful assistance with awkward conversations: “Lovely pizza, wasn’t it, darl? But now it’s finished. And so are we.”
And finances: “Two pizzas. This pizza is your salary. The taxman eats this bit, the mortgage is this piece. You’re spending the rest, plus this piece from my pizza. Now you owe me a piece of pizza. And I won’t forget.”
Now, tomorrow night’s Federal Budget, in Canberra, with Treasurer Joe Hockey.
You’re going to be served pizza.
Pizza worth roughly $400 billion. Shared with your fellow Australians.
This isn’t going to be the nicest pizza you’ve ever had. Curtis Stone epicurian this will not be.
No gooey melted cheese, spicy pepperoni, caramelised onions, marinated mushrooms and roasted capsicum.
But it will be “quattro stagioni”. Four quarters topped with tax hikes, bitter pills, debt threats and, possibly, nothing at all on the last bit.
Hockey will accuse us of ordering the cheaper small pizza (not paying enough tax), but then eating a second pizza someone else ordered (racking up debt) every time in recent years.
(We tell the DebtKids pizza is a “sometimes food”. Thankfully, my kids are young, go to bed early, and are completely unaware of how many pizzas I actually order in.)
Extra pizza occasionally is okay, Hockey will say. But he’ll argue we’ve been running a tab at the pizzeria for too long. Time to start re-paying some of that pizza shop debt.
There are a few options. And it sounds like Hockey is going to do several of the following.
Pizza price rise. Tax hikes. It looks like a 2 per cent debt tax loading on those earning more than $150,000 a year to help pay down the store credit we’ve been racking up. The “wealthy” are going to have to chip in more for their pizza.
Go stingey on the toppings. Hockey could recommend calorie-controlled eating – less cheese, pepperoni and ham and more healthy vegies.
He will almost certainly cut the slices thinner. Same number of slices, but less filling. Less handouts from the government.
He could enforce a proper “Biggest Loser” diet. Or, worse, insist on lap-band surgery. Two pieces of pizza and you’re full, reach for a third and you’ll vomit. (Oh, the humanity!)
Who the hell made Hockey Masterchef?
You did.
You got sick of the other pizza parlour run by Kevin and Julia. Too much tension in the kitchen. Knives being sharpened for backs rather than slicing prosciutto. Made Gordon Ramsey’s potty mouth sound palatable.
So, chefs Tony and Joe, running the only other pizza joint in the area (except for the vegetarian place on the far outskirts of town, run by Bob and Christine) got the gig.
They’re the cooks. They can top it how they want.
I’m going to call now and pre-order my own pizza to arrive at 5.30pm tomorrow. I’m going to have the lot, with chilli, hold the pineapple. Fruit has no place on a pizza.
It could be my last for a while.
Bruce Brammall is the principal adviser with Castellan Financial Consulting (www.castellanfinancial.com.au). E: bruce@castellanfinancial.com.au.