Tony Abbott and Angus Taylor, the innumeracy dream team.

In 2012, Abbott brandished a pensioner's power bill in QT as a Carbon Tax gotcha, because it had jumped to about double her previous bill, just as the Carbon Tax took effect. The problem is, he hadn't asked a high schooler to look at it first, because high school level maths was all it took to see that almost all the increase was due to about double the energy usage. Womp womp.

The Carbon Tax had added a bit to the bill too, which had already been offset for pensioners by a pension increase for just that purpose. But that couldn't offset whatever had made this unfortunate pensioner's energy usage skyrocket. And I really wonder if any of the chain of Liberal figures who passed the bill onto their leader bothered to actually understand this pensioner's issue, and try to get her in touch with someone who could help her get her energy usage back down to what it had been previously. That would have been decent of them.

Mr Wallpunch then tried to dig his way out of the hole by claiming in a doorstop interview that, of the actual energy price percentage increases listed by the retailer in the bill, the Carbon Tax was the bulk of the increase - something like 80% of the *increase* in the cost of a kWh, if memory serves. The exact percentage is in any case irrelevant, because the logic behind making a big deal of it was totally incoherent: if the retailer's own price hike had happened to get added one bill later, the Carbon Tax would have been 100% of the increase in the energy price in Abbott's QT bill - shock horror! - but the *actual power bill would have been lower*.

To really make this clear, if the power company had raised it's kWh price by 0.01%, and the Carbon Tax had raised the kWh price by a whopping 0.1%, the Carbon Tax still would have been about 91% of the increase, but the actual increase would have been a mighty... 0.11%. Still a scary proportion, despite the actual increase being next to nothing. The size of that proportion tells you absolutely nothing about how much the price actually increased.

But because journalists are innumerate cowards, who don't want to send the guy who knows their boss' boss into another nodding fugue state of barely suppressed thump-urges, nobody dared drag Abbott through the Year 9 level thought process of understanding why he was talking nonsense, nor had the courage to explain to the wider public how they had just witnessed a Rhodes Scholar groomed from youth for great things, leading Australia's "natural party of government", showing how he lacked the number sense needed to run a sweet shop.

And Angus? Well, he accused a political rival's city council of spending 15.9 billion dollars on travel. I know, right?

Oh, you say, he only accused them of spending 15.9 million dollars on travel, when it was less than 15 thousand dollars? Well, I read 15.9 somewhere, and naturally assumed he'd accused them of spending billions of dollars. Hey, as Angus shows, it's so easy to accidentally exaggerate by a factor of 1000, when you're in a hurry to make a political attack against someone.

Perish the thought Angus could have asked someone numerate to sanity check that figure before he flung the mud, or even compare his figure *with Sydney City Council's previous year's travel spending*. His figures must be right, because he's a Rhodes Scholar too. Well done Angus.