Australian printer owners have welcomed the announcement of a royal commission into the high cost of printer toner.

“I had to get a bank loan to cover the cost of printing off five copies of a picture I made of my cat after she went missing last year,” said Adelaide cat owner Felicity Stringdangler. “I had to be very choosy about which telegraph pole to stick the posters on because each one was worth more than a Picasso.”

“People just don’t understand how complicated the process is to make printer toner,” said billionaire printer toner manufacturer Mervin Xerograph. “Cyan is made from ground up sapphires, yellow is hand picked from the stripes of Sumatran tigers and magenta is processed from baboon arses that have to be smuggled out of war torn regions of the Republic of the Congo.”

The royal commission will look into why printer toner is pound for pound the most expensive substance on earth, why lines of print start to go grey even though the indicator on your printer says there is still a third of the cartridge left and why blue and red have fancy names like cyan and magenta but yellow is just called yellow?

“For years the printer toner industry has worked with the same business model as heroin dealers,” said consumer advocate Bethany Ripoff. “They suck you in by selling you the printer for next to nothing but then hit you with nut tearing toner costs when you get around to running off those flyers to advertise your school’s trivia night.”

Categories: Politics

Tags: auspol, Bill Shorten, Malcolm Turnbull, Peter Green, royal commission, The unAustralian, Xerox