"Before Malcolm Turnbull prohibited his ministers from having sexual relations with their staff, there's a few dozen things he should have banned first.
For example he could have banned ministers wasting taxpayers' money. That way we wouldn't be spending $50 billion on submarines that won't be operational for thirty years.
Or he could have banned ministers breaking their election promises by introducing retrospective laws. That way we wouldn't have had the superannuation tax debacle.
Or he could have banned ministers from introducing any new regulation unless they also abolished two old regulations. That way we'd be on the path to shrinking the country's largest industry - red tape.
If it's a question of who would provide a greater benefit to the Australian public - a philandering minister who slashes government spending and cuts the size of her department in half, compared to a minister who's been happily married to the same person for thirty years and who faithfully follows the advice of her left-leaning bureaucrats - the choice is not even close. T
he prime minister's desire to have the government control the personal relationships of employers and employees is another manifestation of the overweening desire of politicians of both the left and the right to regulate what we can say, who we can ask out for a date, and what and when and where we can eat and drink.
It's no surprise that the federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins welcomed the ban. The commissars at the Human Rights Commission never miss an opportunity to tell people what to do and how to behave.
The application of common sense, as ill-defined as that term might be, is a better way of managing workplace relations, than through the imposition of a prime ministerial decree.
Certainly common sense is fuzzy, but so are personal relationships. Sometimes hard and fast rules are necessary, but sometimes they're not.
