Let’s stay on the subject of trains for a bit.

I have a friend who had just left Chullora railway workshops when I met him. He left school to become an apprentice fitter in, what was then, a world-class workshop with an impressive range of skills.

He made no bones about telling me, that quite a few of his fellow workers, including himself, were absolutely hopeless. ‘Fitters and Effers’ is a family newspaper way of describing what he called some of the people he worked alongside.

Fortunately, because it was a big workshop, everyone knew who was less than competent. They were shielded from being a menace to public safety by the vigilance of their co-workers. The managers, the foremen and the workers all accepted that not everybody in this world is able to produce equally useful work.

But they were never made to feel less than equal. All workers were paid according to their award category. They all received the same sick pay, holidays and superannuation entitlements. The exceptional workers made products as good as you could find anywhere, most worked competently and a few were quietly kept out of harm’s way.

Everyone had a job and there was a job for everyone.

Nowadays, the weasels with clipboards and stopwatches have got our industrial workforce trimmed to the bone. Cost-efficient productivity is the main requirement of economic rationalism. ‘Meet that target or get out of my way!’

To be allowed self-respect, to be part of the community, to be less than the best unit of economic production; all this has gone by the wayside.

So many of our public policy makers now pander to this worst kind of miserable timekeeping. Everything is measured in terms of crude economics. The larger and much more important picture of what’s actually happening to our society is ignored.

Ironically of course, if you add up all the ‘ties’ with their flow charts, powerpoint presentations and long lunches, we’re carrying way more drones than ever before.

Privatisation of vital community infrastructure is a prime example of the paucity of political expertise we’re facing. The bottom-line bozoes in Sydney are hell bent on privatising what is arguably the most vital of all our utilities, electricity production and supply.

Look at what’s just happened to grain freight by rail, not just here but in Victoria too. The privateers move in, all glossy and smooth, use the infrastructure that generations of taxpayers have provided, squib on paying for adequate maintenance and then take off when they’ve run it all into the ground.

At least in Victoria, the government has had the nous to buy the rail freight service back, albeit at a sizeable cost to the taxpayer.

Don’t hold your breath for the same sensible solution here.

Getting back to those workers in the railway workshops; the ones who could never be trusted to get it quite right. These days they’re probably destined to a life alternating between the dole and destitution.

In fact, the best chance for a plodder to get a cosseted job these days, would be to get elected to the NSW Parliament.