It’s no wonder the cost of living is rocketing when the politicians who run our country have little or no experience of the way most of us have to live off what we earn. It’s no wonder they lash out huge sums of taxpayers’ money on swollen bureaucracies and energy fantasies and other sinks for cash when so many of them have never had to earn their wages in a proper job.

Politics, because of the huge fiscal and other responsibilities involved, affects the life of every citizen. Yet unlike every other profession or trade, there is no course of training or apprenticeship to teach the aspiring politician how to do the job responsibly. No one would think of letting doctors or engineers or builders or plumbers loose on the public without a rigorous period of instruction. Why politicians?

Presumably it goes back to the time when local communities sent one of their number to represent them in parliament. These representatives became practitioners of politics but were not politicians in the sense that we use the term. They were farmers or lawyers or whatever they had been before they became legislators, and generally they went back to being that after they left parliament.

Their previous occupation made them familiar with the problems and necessities of daily life. They had themselves earned a living and ran businesses and raised families and they knew first-hand the needs and aspirations of their constituents. As politicians they might have become incompetent or dodgy but they were not ignorant of how their constituents lived.

Can we say the same of the politicians who sit in our parliaments today? It is doubtful. Too many of them have no notion of the issues that ordinary people face and the jobs they do because they have had no experience of life outside politics.

This particularly regards politicians on the left, numbers of whom have gone straight from student or trade unions via some MP’s staff to a safe seat. Their typical CV might be that of – let’s call him Mick O’Flannery, who’s elbowed his way up through state politics to become a federal MP. Mick, or it could be, mutatis mutandis, Michelle, hopes to become prime minister if he can grease enough factions.

As a child Mick’s habit of gagging his younger brother and sister and locking them in a wardrobe to ‘keep them safe’ from colds indicated a suitability for a political career in an age of pandemics. He liked to open the windows of his room on the coldest days, because the house, he said, was ‘boiling’ and might even catch fire from the heat, though no one else could feel it.

Each morning on his way to school – where he learned to say ‘haitch’ but not much more – he passed an orphanage. He would climb the fence and invite as many children as felt inclined to come and stay at his parents’ place, though for some reason he never wanted them in his own room. He would yell and scream at his mum and dad when they demurred at seeing the house crammed with unwanted youthful visitors, and declare that the orphanage boys and girls had just as much right to be there as they had. Some of the visitors were not very well-behaved. Two were caught by Mick’s father in the garage letting off bombs they’d made of firecrackers and tins. One tried to cut the cat’s throat with the kitchen scissors and some staged a scene beside the family’s swimming pool, refusing to allow Mick or his parents and sisters into the water.

On other occasions, he took to upbraiding his parents for – he said – paying too little when they bought their family house. He told his father he should go and offer extra money to the former owners. He said to his parents that the people who had been living in the house before should be invited to take back some of the rooms and live in them and, indeed, charge his parents ‘rent’ for the part of the house the family occupied. Moreover, they should have ‘their own voice in the household’,  giving them the final say in any decisions made by Mick’s family.

At university he joined the Walter Ulbricht Society but failed politics, even after spuriously identifying as a ‘proud Tomandjeri man’ to take advantage of the lower pass level. He soon sniffed opportunity with the Greens. He wrote to Bob Brown offering his services as a ‘campus organiser’ on the model of the young Barack Obama. Then he saw an ad from a Labor MP’s office for a  ‘branch stacker’ so he abandoned the Greens and was soon standing for Labor preselection. For much of this time he was living with his parents, until he moved in with a rich private school-educated feminist scheming to become a Teal.

Mick has never done a day’s non-political work in his life. He has no skill apart from a capacity for tireless political intrigue. And in Australia today he is not atypical. You think I exaggerate? Look up the career history of some of our most prominent MPs.

A society that wanted to be properly governed, not treated with lofty disdain by a political class ignorant of the challenges of daily life, would make it obligatory that before being eligible for parliament, candidates must have worked in a proper job for five years. They must have done something worthwhile and known what it is to make ends meet.

This should be a constitutional requirement.

And if that means altering the constitution, well, some of our most eminent citizens and institutions recently showed themselves to be perfectly willing to do that.