First job I had paid four bucks a day. I was 14, pedalled a couple of miles to a 7.30am start and worked through to 4pm.

Place was a battery hen poultry farm, stunk to high heavens. I had two tasks – collecting eggs and shovelling the excreta that gathered in metre-high piles under the cages into wheelbarrows to be dumped in pits elsewhere.

Kept it up for a couple of years. It had its upside. Boss was a funny bugger who kept you in stitches between nearly passing out to methane poisoning and headless chook antics he executed before dinner, and I do mean executing.

A paper round might have been nicer but, hey, no complaints from me – I could have been up to my neck in the stuff working at the nearby sewerage farm.

But this privileged boomer can still sympathise with the kids working stop-start shifts in fast food and coffee sweatshops these days while trying to juggle uni lectures at ridiculous times of day.

I sympathise too with overseas students getting worked over. Cash jobs, shonky contracts, $10 an hour and threats their visas will be cancelled if they complain.

Likewise, OS farm workers traditionally abused at will by growers. Bad as $100 for a 73-hour week’s work before new laws came in.

I am curious why business supposedly needs so many OS workers when there’s no shortage of kids who’ll work for reasonably regular or predictable hours.

Nor can I fathom why universities so desperately want OS students on site. Aussie students rarely go anyway near lectures. Everything’s online.

Don’t OS students have net access? Or are they really just highly-sought rent-boys and girls for the landlords of apartments emptied by Covid?

Rentals will only rise more sharply with the arrival of 1.5 million migrants over the next five years. Perhaps the dumbest thing government could do for the economy. Massively inflationary.

Competing for housing is about to become a coliseum sport. Prices for house and apartments, new and established, are only going north.

The Reserve Bank’s efforts are doing nothing but raising prices, wage claims and mortgage-belt anguish. Fueling the inflation it’s supposed to be stopping.

But government has plenty of distractions to disguise its failings; Higgins, The Voice, Thorpe, Ukraine, PwC, CO2, Australia Day …

All of which means it’s back to the future for us. Back to the stagflation 1970s. All we need is an oil shock or two to really GFC things up. Recession will look good by comparison.

Meanwhile, the people who should be trying to mend things are simply thrashing about, hissing and spitting blood and bile like one of the old boss’s headless chooks.

I know who should be getting paid $4 a day.

This article appeared in the Geelong Advertiser 27 June 2023