World's best practice
We live in strange times. It now can be revealed that there has been in existence for the past year a body known as the Commission of Inquiry into the Inordinate Increase of Bludgers.
Some months ago this body sent out investigative teams to ascertain the level of bludgery throughout the length and breath of this great nation in which we dwell. Examination of raw data and in vitro observation has been in progress since, and preliminary reports that have reached me from field researchers indicate that discoveries are being made which may mean the end of this great nation as we know it, and the end of all our conventional assumptions of what constitutes orthodox economic intercourse.
If these reports are to be believed, it is no wonder we are in such bad financial shape.
I have no intention of entering into the contents of the perturbing preliminary reports in great detail. A complete summary of all the relevant figures and annotations will be available in due course. Here I can only hope to give you, at best, a general picture, the main thrust, as it were, of the inquiry's findings.
The news, unfortunately, is not good. As far as it can be ascertained, besides the 800,000 unemployed who are officially registered as bona fide bludgers, and Australia's indigenous people, who are born into a life of bludgery, the commission estimates that as much as 71.4% of our total population bludge in some form or another.
Indeed, the only major exceptions to this general rule that the inquiry could locate were: (a) members of parliament, (b) captains of industry, (c) members of the National Farmers Federation and (d) radio talkback announcers.
Take a moment to consider what this figure means. Seven in 10 Australians are getting a free ride. That's what it means. In the main, we're a nation of spongers. In a sick sort of way, maybe we have attained a "world's best practice" — but it's not going to do us any good. Henceforth, Australia is sure to be known worldwide as the land of the real long smoko.
We cannot go on like this. Some form of healing, of coming together, of reconciliation, is needed if we are to make it into the next century with head held high and our national accounts in the black. We need to step back, turn around and pull the finger out.
In that context, I call upon the nation's stevedores to lead the way.
We Aussies love our wharfies. Why, they're as much a national icon as a meat pie and a jar of Vegemite. We ask our dear dockers to do right by the rest of us and be the first to step forward and admit before God and country: "Yes, maybe we do bludge. Yes, maybe we are overpaid."
And then the miners and the teachers, the nurses and the clerks, the bus drivers and the lowly process workers can follow your lead so that the whole population (at least 71.4% of it) can confess to being bludgers too — overpaid and under-worked so-and-so's, just like those greedy wharfies.
By Dave Riley