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Melbourne’s Suburban Rail Loop Authority recently advertised a $200,000 job.

$200,000 a year.

And can you imagine what it was for?

Was it for a CEO?

Was it for a CFO?

A chief engineer, perhaps?

A supply manager?

Nope. No, and nah. It was for none of those.

The Rail Loop Authority want to pay an annual salary of $200,000 to an “Inclusion and Diversity Manager!”

I would have thought a loop, by definition, was inclusive. But I digress.

According to the advertisement, the successful applicant will be responsible for “delivering expert advice and services to the organisation to ensure SRLA is an inclusive and diverse workplace”.

Short of winning Powerball, I don’t know an easier way to make 200k.

The ‘job’ ad says that the successful applicant will have “a passion for Inclusion and Diversity”.

Woohoo!

All you have to do is not hire any straight white men, and get rid of the existing ones by making life difficult at every turn. Diversity achieved in week one!

In week two, you instruct staff to address each other as “Hey Team” rather than “Hey Guys” in order to ensure no-one feels excluded. Inclusion achieved.

And then, for the remaining 52 weeks of the year, you sit around drinking Bud Light.

That a state more than $100b in debt, the profligacy is truly stunning.

Even more incredible is that a lot of people now think inclusion and diversity managers are vital.

This single job advertisement highlights the biggest economic challenge we are facing right now in Australia … a lack of productivity.

Imagine being paid almost a quarter of a million dollars – not to provide a service, and not to produce a product, but to manage diversity and inclusion.

You can’t eat diversity.

We don’t have countries lining up to buy pallets of Australian inclusion.

Unproductive jobs, such as this $200,000 public service appointment, are destroying the country. This job, and ones like them, exist only to tick boxes created by government bureaucracies that are more enthusiastic about ideology than about productivity.

If you wonder why so much money is spent on people to manage diversity, here’s a clue…

Quotas like those outlined above have zero to do with productivity. In all likelihood, they will reduce productivity.

So we have state and federal governments, using borrowed money, to fund nothing jobs where the only purpose is to entrench unproductivity.

(I’m not sure unproductivity is a real word. I am absolutely sure Inclusion and Diversity Manager is not a real job.)

The best way to get this country moving forward is by removing the red and green tape that constrain business productivity.

We need to release entrepreneurs and business owners to flourish.

We need to encourage risk and investment.

We need to reward success with greater opportunity, not punish success with higher taxes and burdensome compliance regimes.

And while we are at it, we need fewer laws.

Governance and compliance are necessary, but they should not be a distraction or an intrusion from the main business of producing things.

We need to stop passing new laws. Or, at the very least, we should remove two existing laws from the statute books for every new law that we add.

Doing business in this country is currently too expensive and too cumbersome.

On top of that, for two years we had politicians telling everyone to work from home. Now many of those same politicians are telling everyone they should work a four-day week on five days’ pay.

Oh, and don’t forget personal leave, bereavement leave, sick leave, maternity leave, paternity leave and gender affirmation leave. We have banks giving staff six weeks leave so they can try on new pronouns for goodness sake!

No wonder RBA boss Phillip Lowe said at the weekend that a lack of productivity is the biggest problem facing our nation right now.

Frankly, it’s a miracle that our GDP grows at all. Actually, let me correct that. It’s not a miracle that our GDP grows. It’s thanks to the resources sector. Those miners who, unlike many in Canberra who love to demonise them – actually produce something that people want.

The Lucky Country has become the Lazy Country.

We need to aspire to be the Productive Country.

And it should be the government’s number one priority to make it so.

Expensive fake jobs – like the one being advertised by the Suburban Rail Loop Authority – are precisely what’s wrong with this country.

Little wonder Victoria is woke, er, broke.

Oh, and one more thing. Imagine if the Victorian Liberal leader John Pesutto made THIS an issue rather than attacking one of his women MPs for attending a women’s rights event.

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Originally published at The James Macpherson Report. Photo by Finn Whelen.