Finally, someone is thinking of the children
Wake up Australia. The country is drifting down Shit Creek and Gina Rinehart is the only one prepared to get an oar in the water. She’s doing some hard paddling and steering us back upstream.
She first spotted problems two years ago. We’ve to “spend less time drinking, or smoking and socialising” and take a moment to thank the real wealth creators, she counselled in a 2012 Australian Resources and Investment article.
“The millionaires and billionaires … are actually those who most help the poor and our young. This secret needs to be spread widely”. It’s a secret all right. Probably only the top 1 percent of the population knows about it. It’s time to end the ignorance. We’ve got to get back to basics and follow the lead of people like her late friend Michael Kailis – Australia’s “king of crayfish and prawns”.
Royalty isn’t afraid of rolling up the sleeves and getting its hands dirty to build up a respectable business. No, the king gets stuck right in: “He talked the local prison officer into letting him take the prisoners off his hands during the day, and return them at night, too tired for trouble. This would most likely be against regulations today.”
Get real Australia, it’s a nanny state now. And it progressively has encroached on our rights and stifled entrepreneurship since the end of assigned convict labour. Why won’t anyone act?
Minimum wage provisions are the most nefarious expression of this government interference. You won’t hear poor diddums sook sessions on the good ship Rinehart, though.
An address posted at the Sydney Mining Club about the high cost of Australian labour pointed to real solutions: “Africans want to work, and its workers are willing to work for less than $2 per day.” Too right – let’s get those good times shared globally.
Her latest intervention in the public debate on how the workers’ movement has doomed us is titled “The Age of Entitlement – has Consequences”. It’s straight talk the country needs to hear: “We are living beyond our means. But dare say that and you are condemned … Australians have to work hard or actually harder.”
It takes courage to lay down a few home truths. There’s no room for pork chop slackers high on life. Club Med Australia has already gone on too long. It is “creating problems for all of us, our children and our grandchildren”.
Finally, someone is thinking of the children. There’s no one better to evoke on that front than British former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, to whom Rinehart’s article is a deserved paean.
Thatcher knew how to get things done. In 1971, as education secretary in Edward Heath’s government, she ended a 200ml milk allowance for schoolchildren over the age of seven. Milk sounds like latte, that’s why. And it’s a gateway beverage: free cow juice for pre-teens leads to emboldened claims for God knows what. Working class youth instead want for a nice warm mug of harden-the-fuck-up.
That’s what we need here. HTFU Australia. And get moving. We “have to put out the ‘welcome mat’” for multinational companies. Hard but fair. It won’t be easy. “I can already hear the left boiling with rage that I dare challenge their ‘bottomless [welfare] pit’ and belief that money doesn’t have to be earned before it is spent mentality.”
Don’t get upset, Australia. Trip down to Huon Valley, hug a tree and get a grip. Then get to work: “We all have a role to play in mitigating the thinking that’s not helping our country’s future.”
We need to mitigate the crap out of it all right. Dream, believe, achieve. Former Iron Man Trevor Hendy said that. And where’s he now? Getting us back on track running “Bootcamp for the Soul” and teaching nippers how to swim. That’s the service economy stepping up to the challenge and giving something back to the children. Ask yourself Australia: “What am I doing to step up?”
Well, the secret is out now. The best way to do it, the way that will allow the greatest insight into the problems afflicting the nation, the way that will ultimately allow for the formulation of clear solutions, the way to move beyond dreaming, is to inherit mountains of coal.
Not just a bit of the stuff. Shitloads Australia. You’ve got to want it. Just get out there and flog it like Lang Hancock. Not for yourself. For your country.
Follow Ben on twitter @Benji_Hillier
