Of course, Greg Hunt has to be our Health Minister. After all, he’s the “best minister in the world” according to some group somewhere. And the idea that Arthur “What Was I Doing Again” Sinodinos could take on such an important portfolio is just ludicrous. Why he might easily lose track of where the all the money went.
Not that losing track of things is that big a problem for the current government. According to an audit report into our detention centres, “$1.1 billion was approved by DIBP officers who did not have the required authorisation and for the remaining $1.1 billion there was no departmental record of who authorised the payments.” It further found that there was no assessment of whether we were getting value for money. And what was Peter Dutton’s response? Well, of course, it was Labor’s fault because they changed Howard’s policies and that was the reason for all these boat arrivals.
But enough bad jokes. Let’s move on to some good ones. Like the one about the boy who shot both parents and pleaded for a lighter sentence on the grounds that he was an orphan.
I think the point of that joke is that some people never take responsibility for their own actions even when they’re not the Minister for Immigration.
Which sort of leads me in a roundabout way back to the distraction of Susssan Ley (I added an extra “s” because clearly her decision to add an extra one in order to have a more exciting life was a mistake and if I simply took it away, you’d think I didn’t know how to spell her namme) and to the whole Centrelink debacle. In a strange coincidence, I was read a book called “Messy” by Tim Harford and I came across a section where he wrote about Google’s 96% accuracy with the Street View. I quote him verbatim:
“Such a high error rate is actually a source of comfort, because it means the method won’t be relied on. Companies such as UPS or Fedex would never accept as many as one in twenty-five of their parcels going to the wrong address; it would be a reputational disaster.”
But, one in five errors, according to our Aussie government is the system going according to plan. And the most worrying thing about that is that I’m afraid that it’s the truth.
However, all’s well, because a confluence of things gave me the solution to the unemployment problem. Shortly after reading a suggestion that instead of targetting the poor, the government should be sending letters of demands to all those companies avoiding tax, I noticed a report in the media which told me that the eight richest men owned as much as the bottom half the world combined. And I thought, there’s the thing. They don’t want to upset people who are wealthy. They dont’ call them leaners. Even if you’ve got a million or so in investments, nobody complains if you spend you’re whole day just checking the stock prices and sipping boutique beers while wondering how to while away the hours.
And then it hit me. We need to start making our unemployed millionaires. Ok, we can’t do it overnight, but if instead of saying it’s all your own fault for the fact that sometime in the last twenty-five years some head of some company decided that he’d export your job to some third world country or that it be better off to be done by a machine and, in return, he got the sort of pay increase which means that he’s in the sort of tax bracket where he feels entitled to complain about all his taxes going to pay to keep those dole bludgers in food and clothing, we need to make them all men and women of means.
Of course, we could have done it simply by considering that the mineral wealth of Australia belonged to all of us and pretending that everyone was a shareholder, instead of receiving “welfare” we could have all received a dividend cheque once a fortnight, but it’s probably a bit late for that. So I guess the only solution is to find a few billionaires and fine them for something. I mean there must be some law that they’ve broken. Or maybe we could simply send them a letter asking them to prove that they didn’t owe the government half their wealth. Failure to do so would lead to a confiscation of several billion. And let’s be real, does it really make any difference whether you’ve got five billion or ten billion?
Now let’s say that we’ve collected five billion in the first year. If we gave a million to each of the longest term unemployed, there’s five thousand instant millionaires. What a boost to jobs and growth that would be, eh?
The only problem is how to pick which of the unemployed get the million. I guess we could encourage them all to look harder for jobs by having random job applications chosen as the lucky winners. Ok, the chances might be small but then so’s their chance of getting a job in today’s market.
All right, I know it’ll upset some of you who’ll think it unfair that the unemployed are rewarded and not working people, but don’t worry. The longer that this mob stays in government the more chance you’ll have of becoming one of them yourself.
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