With the Australian election underway, we are being bombarded by all the usual political ads, but one particularly puzzles me… The government keep going on about how 70% of the opposition front bench have come from a union background and that this is somehow supposed to be a bad thing.
Well, thanks to wikipedia and a little research, I found that 60% of the government front bench are solicitors and barristers. Is that supposed to make us feel any better?
Certainly not if you have a look around the web for ‘trusted profession’ surveys, where lawyers, insurance brokers, real estate agents and journalists seem to rate in the same 40-50% ‘trust’ strata as unionists. If you add in that Mark Vaile was a real estate agent and Tony Abbot was a journalist, then you’d find that more than 70% of them have belonged to professions with an image problem.
Of course, they’ve all taken a massive downward step since their earlier careers, because politicians are almost always judged the least trusted profession in surveys, only beaten into last place by used car salesmen. Would you buy a used government from this man?