Being stuck in a windowless room with nerds discussing ways to stimulate an economy is, to normal people, about as exciting as attending a university lecture on heteronormativity with transgender lesbians, or kneeling behind a bloke at Friday prayers whose last meal consisted of curry and cabbage.
But not Andrew Leigh. To him, a windowless room and the company of earnest boffins is nothing short of nirvana.
One advantage of holding a nerd-fest like this in the bowels of Parliament House, Canberra, is that one is not distracted by the War Memorial, which the building’s architects made visible from many key offices as a constant reminder to the narcissists therein of their solemn responsibility to those who gave their lives for the country. Who needs that sentimental bullshit anyway? People like Leigh have more important things to discuss.
But it’s not just the War Memorial that Leigh’s “windowless room” blissfully obscures — it’s the entire outside world. Without the distraction of sunlight and nature, not to mention the irksome plebs who inhabit this annoyingly chaotic world, Leigh and his ilk, basking under fluorescent light and breathing conditioned air, can finally see the issues as they really are: technocratic problems for which there are only technocratic solutions. Or circular perceptions that could only come from a “roundtable” discussion.
They probably had no idea how stupid they looked emerging from a three-day government talkfest and offering, as their best idea, to “pause” construction regulations in order to solve the housing crisis.
Housing Minister Clare O’Neil told Sky News today: “We’ve got a national construction code which has become unworkable for our builders.” Putting aside the fact that O’Neil seems to be the last person in the nation to realise this — she’s only the Housing Minister after all — the process for her learning this was unnecessarily complex and expensive. Rather than attend a fully catered talkfest at Parliament House with some of the most overpaid bureaucrats in the nation, she could have been told the same thing for the price of a schooner in any front bar in the country at any time during the past 20 years.
What the government will do at the end of the “pause”, nobody is saying. But the smart money is on a return to overregulation because in the end that’s the only solution that people who lock themselves in windowless rooms can come up with.
It goes without saying that the one overwhelming problem Australia is facing — mass immigration — did not get a single mention at the roundtable conference.
Even Prime Minister Anthony Albanese knows the electorate wouldn’t fall for him feigning concern and demanding to know who let all these Third World peasants into the country. More depressingly, the problem is almost beyond solution anyway. Those who keep an eye on such things usually console themselves that, for all the alienating ghettos, hostile taxi drivers and scammers proliferating in Australia, at least we’re not as bad as Britain, where entire towns have been taken over by unassimilated migrants and the inevitability of race riots increases by the day.
Sadly, this consolation is wearing thin. It turns out we have already surpassed Britain in many ways. Take these figures for example:
31.5 per cent of Australians were born overseas. In Britain the equivalent number is 14 to 17 per cent.
Roughly 2.5 per cent of Australia’s population arrived in the last year. In Britain, the equivalent figure is a relatively modest 1.4 per cent.
3.4 per cent of Australians have trouble speaking English or can’t speak it at all. In Britain, it’s only 1.8 per cent.
And most alarming of all: Migrants living in Australia sent about $38 billion of the wages they earned riding Deliveroo bikes or being rude to Uber passengers back to their home country last year. In Britain, they sent only $18 billion.
By every measure, Australia is a rapidly failing state, and the main reason for it is immigration, which the unenlightened boffins in Leigh’s windowless room studiously and blissfully ignored.
The only real takeaway ordinary punters got from the overhyped three-day meeting was that the government has become a protection racket for itself. It creates problems with consummate ease, then offers excruciatingly apposite and expensive solutions that achieve nothing but curry favour with key demographics in order to win the next election, always at the expense of the wider community and traditional Australians.
Throw in the forthcoming censorship laws, the World Health Authority’s renewed powers to lock us up on a whim, and the government’s secret plans to control our bank accounts, and you have a ruling class that is more gangster than government.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese might have failed to inherit the desirable Italian characteristics of style, elan and sophistication from his wayward Italian father, but he has at least, in southern Italian style, transformed the Australian government into the Mafia.
