Vikki Campion: We are now ruled by desk jockeys and apparatchiks

If you were picking our parliament like a football team, most would not have their job, as we’d be picking players who have never played the football of life before, writes Vikki Campion.

If you were picking our parliament like a football team, most would not have their job.

A winger has to be fast, a prop has to be big and scary, and a halfback has to be cheeky and co-ordinated to win the game. Players are chosen on their skill sets, and there has to be a broad range to make a winning team.

The problem is we are picking a parliamentary team from players who have never played the football of life before. They have merely watched on the sidelines, got coffee for the players, and wished they were the players but merely mimicked.

In our parliamentary team, we have not a single plumber, sparky, and only a couple of carpenters, yet they all have the grand elixir to fix the housing crisis.

There are just a couple of accountants, but if you listen to them, they are all experts on budgets and economics. There is not one genuine atmospheric scientist but they are all beaming with expertise on climate science.

Parliament is dominated by the team mascots, the person who dresses up, prances around the sideline cheering but has never kicked a goal – the staffer, who can dress up to anyone they need to be.

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen likes to dress up as an electrical engineer, nuclear physicist, infrastructure tsar and all-round clever guy. Picture: NewsWire/Martin Ollman

Example 1. Chris Bowen whose occupational history is staffer, union official, staffer, staffer, city councillor and, now, cabinet minister who can dress up as an electrical engineer, nuclear physicist, infrastructure tsar and all-round clever guy.

Example 2. Jim Chalmers, who went from cabinet staffer to ALP party staffer, to political staffer to consultant, PhD scholar and now Treasurer, who can dress up as a senior economist in permanent disagreement with the RBA.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Picture: NewsWire/David Beach

Defence Industry Minister Pat Conro. Picture: NewsWire/Martin Ollman

Example 3. Pat Conroy, whose former jobs were working in Albo’s office, union staffer, senate staffer, a union staffer and then back to a ministerial staffer, who now dresses up as crucial to the defence of our nation.

Or the PM himself, who went from bank officer to staffer, ALP party official to staffer, and now dresses up as Julius Caesar, the great leader.

If every parliamentarian is a preselector-schmoozing, university-educated, city-dwelling party apparatchik turned staffer, you don’t have diversity; you have a cloning machine pumping out politicians who all think alike no matter which party they belong to.

Cultivated in the same clique, this is why they are so easily led by the bureaucracy who want to shut down our primary industries, like fishing, forestry, farming, coal and gas, and so easily swallow this net zero rubbish, because they don’t know any different and wouldn’t know who to ask if they did.

More than half of the federal ALP and a third of the Liberal Nationals landed on the red or green leather as a political, party or union staffer. Picture: NewsWire/Martin Ollman

More than half of the federal ALP and a third of the Liberal Nationals landed on the red or green leather the same way, as political, party or, in the ALP’s case, union staffer.

It would be a perfect representative parliament if half of the population of Australia were political staffers.

But we’re not.

This is the result of a system that demands gender diversity but abhors experience diversity.

Nearly 10 per cent of working Australians are in construction. You will struggle to find 10 per cent of parliamentarians whose construction experience advanced past Lego, but they are full of advice on the housing crisis.

Only 1.7 per cent of the 227 in the current parliament have listed experience in that arena, such as former builder turned barrister, Fisher MP Andrew Wallace.

Parties profess about how they will get more trades into the economy but they can’t get them into the parliament with not a single plumber or sparky.

More than 42 per cent of the private sector, five million people, work in small businesses, yet just a handful of parliamentarians genuinely have built their own businesses from scratch.

It’s a short list and about to get clipped as a host of MPs retire, leaving few, such as pest control boss Luke Howarth and franchisee Terry Young, among the last of the elected mercantile class.

Luke Howarth. Picture: Matthew Poon

Terry Young.

Yet those former staffers will profess their expert knowledge on small business, wading through the morass of regulations, having never been self-employed in their entire working life.

With the departure of Keith Pitt and Karen Andrews we lose two of the three engineers who were in the former coalition government, to be replaced either certainly in Andrew’s instance, or likely in Pitt’s, with yet another staffer.

With Pitt and Andrews out, the Coalition is left with one engineer, Garth Hamilton, joining Malcolm Roberts and Dan Repacholi as the sole representatives in each of their parties, One Nation and Labor, who have both engineering qualifications backed up with getting their hands dirty.

We are in an energy crisis, and the people who have lived experience managing it in the field are nowhere in parliament.

The clamour of the choir comes from those who have lived the quasi-bureaucratic life, the type who will pay more for energy if it gives them more kudos in Canberra, who have never had to see the cost of energy make their business unviable, because they have never had a business.

If you think the parliament is disconnected, it’s because it is.

There’s no one in parliament who lists their former occupation in manufacturing, even though more than 862,000 Australian’s do and it’s Labor’s major policy.

There’s not one politician who lists their former occupation as in gas, water, waste (167,000 workers), accommodation and food (934,000 workers), or transport, postal and warehousing (706,900).

There’s a handful of teachers, some doctors and nurses, one former seafarer (Matt Burnell), zero mechanics (the last being Joel Fitzgibbon), and the last parliamentarian who was paid to clean toilets at 14 and listed it as a former occupation, just left (Warren Entsch). Now, the parliament is more like an episode of Suits, overflowing with solicitors, staffers, and sometimes both.

You don’t have to go too far back in time to find the Australian parliaments that actually elected vets, carpenters, brickies, shearers, miners, taxi drivers, real farmers (not hobbyist lifestylers), electricians, plumbers and engineers.

This year, we pick a new football team in the coming election, let’s hope preselectors provide a better breadth of skillset, to give the country a better shot in the game.

THIS IS A REAL CRIME, PREMIER, SO HOW COME YOUR EARS ARE CLOSED?

Is the LNP’s latest premier in Queensland a political coward or so besotted with the government he never wants to chance his arm on anything but the mind-numbing banality of preaching law and order?

It poses the question, who believes in crime?

But if that’s the theme of his government, surely a law that allows a 40-week-old child to be aborted deserves some inquiry, some discussion, and some substantial debate on the criminality of this action.

If the Crisafulli Government, which has gagged parliament to debate any and all matters raised by MPs on behalf of their constituents on abortion, truly wanted to stop all crime, why isn’t he allowing discussion about the heinous practice of aborted babies born alive refused medical care.

If that’s not a crime, what is?

A poll of 1,000 Queenslanders, commissioned by the Australian Christian Lobby, found Crisafulli and his government require correction.

Queensland Premier David Crisafulli. Picture: Supplied

The snapshot found 70 per cent were unaware babies can be legally aborted in Queensland up to 40 weeks of pregnancy, 71 per cent were unaware babies survive abortions; 62 per cent believe abortion beyond 22 weeks should be restricted, and 75 per cent believe babies who survive abortion should receive the same level of care as any other newborn.

How can you be so tough on criminal kids but so terrified of the unborn?

If nothing else, if you want to show strength, have the capacity to have the debate, whether on abortion or nuclear.

Labor made it their calling card they don’t care about babies who survive abortion, but they lost. The side that won wants something done about it.

If it makes you feel awkward, Mr Crisafulli, there’s a reason for that.

You don’t feel uncomfortable about locking up a ratbag who has stolen a car.

But you do about a healthy child dying in a bucket alone in a hospital designed to save lives. You feel awkward because you know it’s wrong.

LIFTER

The brains behind the Parker Solar Probe which will get closer to the sun than ever before.

LEANER

Nationals “leader” David Littleproud’s less than gracious response to the retirement of Hinkler’s Keith Pitt which left even Labor warriors shocked.

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Originally published as Vikki Campion: We are now ruled by desk jockeys and apparatchiks