Five BHAGs you never knew you needed

Our gub’ment, of the feral variety, has put up some BHAG grants for SMEs to tackle five major issues, selected after late-beer interrogation of senators of the National Party and One Nation flavours.

Why five? Well it’s the current magic number in Cnbra. I think the pollsters have decided that ten is too hard for your average Australian to get its head around. I suspect the right hand is used to count the fingers on the left and is thus unavailable for adding to the total.

To the glorious challenges themselves;

On-the-spot technology for measuring pyrethroid surface residue. This means they want to measure pesticide residues on crops without lab assistants, i.e. put more scientist out of work. The obvious solution is to train all those recently unemployed greyhounds to do a lick test. The challenge is to have the fuckers out and about without their muzzles.

Tracking the effect and value of information products. Quite obscure this one. I suspect it’s a plea for someone to solve the Census problem. That is, how to collect all the information they ever wanted on the subject of the discrete us’s without us knowing or minding. And the answer, of course, is to buy it off Google and Facebook.

Digitally enabled community engagement in policy and programme design. A reality TV show set in the Australian Parliament where the viewers get to vote the morons out of the house, one by one. When there’s a single productive winner, we get to fill the house up again with an election. And do it all over again, ad nauseum.

Improve transparency and reliability of water market information. Farmers know how to surreptitiously use pumps so there’s a big gap between how much water there’s supposed to be in our rivers and dams and what’s actually in them. There isn’t actually a solution to this problem but, hey, they never said the information had to be accurate, just transparent and reliable, so they may as well just publish the reliably shit info that they already have in an app.

Sharing information nationally to ensure child safety. The easiest of the lot; we just put prisoner tracking devices on all priests and private school teachers, and publish the data on a website and in an app, in real time. Sort of the like the rain radar site, only the contour maps are the real-time and local risks of your kids getting molested.