mxx1's avatar

Occupational Vanity

Having more people in your country used to be a good thing. More people, more production.

Now they’re just mouths to feed and voters to pander to.

Pauline Hanson, uniquely amongst Australian politicians, understands this.

It’s not that she dislikes foreigners. She just doesn’t want to share the pie.

That makes her the only honest politician in the country – she knows there’s at most only 0.5 million people in critical jobs that create all the real wealth from mining, tourism and agriculture.

The rest of us are in domestic services sucking off the tit, and we really don’t care to share.

Well if you’re struggling you don’t want to share. But if you’re earning $500k a year for HR’ing then, yes, bring them in. More people, more for me and my measured insouciance.

However, they can’t plan properly because we need to tell the lie that we’re all critically productive. I think some sort of weird pride is behind all the lying.

We need a Royal Commission into the Australian Collective Narcissism. The Commission could begin with one question: if your entire profession disappeared tomorrow or was replaced with machines, how long would it take before anyone outside your profession noticed?

We value odd things like high tech, IP, HR, lifestyle management, manufacturing, massage therapy, financial management, travel blogs, and we tell ourselves these are important, completely independently of whether we do them or not, and if they have an impact on the economy or not.

So my message to Pauline: instead of targeting immigration, she should target all those useless jobs. Not to get rid of them, just to point out how useless they are.

Then the immigration argument would have a rational conclusion that everyone agrees with.

Once occupations are separated into those that create the pie and those that consume it, population becomes a capacity question rather than an ethnic one.

But don’t worry, according to the SMH, “China’s ambition is global domination, including control of the Pacific and Antarctica and, incidentally, all of Australia’s environs.”

The bakery gets a new Chinese owner; that’ll sort it all out. Gotta love Chinese pies.