Our Parliament Run by Incompetents?

ED: From my inbox … worth reading

by Vikki Campion, The Saturday Telegraph, December 27, 2024

If you think our parliament is run by incompetents, that’s because it is! Very few have any lived experience in any of the areas they make rules for, and worse still, don’t have much idea who to ask to help them. You probably have heard the term “unconscious incompetent”… that’s a perfect description for by far the majority of our parliamentarians.

The Problem with Our Parliamentary Team

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 coordinated to win the game. Players are chosen based 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 them.

In our parliamentary team, we have not a single plumber or electrician, 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.

Examples of Inexperienced MPs

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 be anyone they need to be.

• Example 1: Chris Bowen, whose occupational history is staffer, union official, staffer, staffer, city councillor and now cabinet minister, 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, can dress up as a senior economist in permanent disagreement with the RBA.
• Example 3: Pat Conroy, whose former jobs were working in Albo’s office, union staffer, Senate staffer, and back to a ministerial staffer, now dresses up as crucial to the defence of our nation.
• Example 4: The PM himself, who went from bank officer to staffer, ALP party official to staffer, 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.

Disconnected from Real Australians

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. They 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 the same way – as political staffers or, in the ALP’s case, union staffers. 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.

Lack of Experience in Key Sectors

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 members in the current parliament have listed experience in that arena, such as former builder turned barrister, Fisher MP Andrew Wallace.

Parties profess 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.

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.

The Decline of Practical Experience

With the departure of Keith Pitt and Karen Andrews, we lose two of the three engineers who were in the former Coalition government. They will be replaced – certainly in Andrews’ case, 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.

A Parliament That Doesn’t Represent Us

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 Australians do, and it’s Labor’s major policy.

There’s not one politician who lists their former occupation as in:

• Gas, water, and waste services (167,000 workers)
• Accommodation and food services (934,000 workers)
• Transport, postal, and warehousing (706,900 workers)

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.

The Solution: A New Team with Broader Skills

You don’t have to go too far back in time to find 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 skill sets to give the country a better shot in the game.