Have you ever had to sit through a Press Club address where the Prime Minister gets a rock star reception from his rent-a-crowd? While he’s flashing his Medicare card? While you know for a fact that when you go to your GP, you’ll need your credit card too?

Albo was at it again yesterday. Strutting around with his Medicare card out. In Peter Dutton’s old seat. Cheryl Kernot’s old seat, too. My old stomping ground when I was based at Enoggera. Where handing out how-to-vote cards was a contact sport.

Dickson is an electorate where old political parties go to die. Don Chipp’s Democrats died there. The Liberals, too. Hopefully Labor will go the way of these other parties that became the object of ‘keeping the bastards honest’.

Albo’s Medicare card is another example of political dishonesty.

Getting a bulk-billed appointment reminds me of the old CES (Commonwealth Employment Service) days. When you were about to leave high school, we working-class kids were told to go straight to the CES and register.

For most of us, however, the CES in Cairns was a Who’s Who of welfare professionals. The running gag was to fill out the form with your left hand and spell your name wrong. You’d be on the dole in no time.

For suckers like me, labouring was the only real option. Returning from weeks away up on the Cape near Weipa, working as a chainman – later known as a surveyor’s assistant – was a hoot. I’d come back as a bronzed Aussie with a pocket of personality until the purse was empty and off I’d go again.

My boss, the head surveyor, called me in one day and gave me a copy of the Weekend Australian.

‘Have a look at the employment section,’ he said. ‘Look at all the career opportunities. You’re too smart for this job, but if you stay much longer, you’ll end up like Old Mate there. I’m giving you two weeks’ notice. You can’t stay here any longer. Go and get a real job.’ No freebie handouts, just straight up tough love.

If it wasn’t for men like him, I probably would’ve remained unchanged, cocky, ignorant, and without any of the social capital that enables social mobility.

Social capital, in its real sense, refers to the examples we observe first-hand and the support networks we can access that enable us to achieve some level of self-actualisation. In practical terms, it means you aren’t dying as a child living in squalor in Alice Springs or waking in the midnight hour in your fifties wondering what the hell was the point of labouring until your body was broken. It’s not something you get from the CES, Medicare, or Albo’s ‘kindness’. It is personal. It has nothing to do with the government.

So off I went to the CES. The first job was at a vertical blinds shop. I wore a tie in the stinking heat of a Cairns summer. The flash bloke in the demountable ranted about whether I had the courage to join his team, to command the living room and use high-pressure sales techniques to sell vertical blinds. Commission only, no retainer.

After a suitable time (no doubt to make me sweat), he rang to say I got the job. I politely refused the role. Next was pizza delivery. After the old Toyota Crown broke down on my second delivery, my mate picked up the cold pizzas. My pizza delivery days were over, and I was out of pocket for fuel and repairs. With nothing for several hours’ work, I thought I’d rather be a chainman.

That’s what it was like for working-class kids growing up in regional Australia. If you wanted something more, you were denounced for ‘never being satisfied’. If you did the same old same old, you repeated history and became a vessel for passing on genetic material to the next generation. The CES was a cesspool of government trying to replace social capital.

No input, no influence. A bit like your Medicare card.

When Albo flashes that card, he is taking the mickey. Whenever anything goes wrong, he pulls it out as if to say, ‘Look what we do for you!’ I’d rather keep my Medicare Levy in my own pocket and get a real benefit from my health insurance. Instead, we pay and pay and get nothing in return. If only I could fill out a form with my left hand and spell my name wrong.

Mind you, there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence of that happening on the NDIS. You could see that enormous rort a mile away.

Labor has a way of trying to control everything, messing it up, and costing us a fortune. Tonight I revisited my first article for The Speccie in September 2022 where I wrote: ‘the cost of living is rising and Labor has nothing but the solutions to problems faced by the Hawke government in 1983’. Labor was touting higher taxes as the solution from day one in government.

Back then, like many my mortgage repayments were roughly half of what they’ll be in July. I’m tipping this year’s budget will see home ownership fall while Labor incentivises living off the government teat. Labor’s idea of the Australian dream is a nightmare.

So, when I see Albo waving around that Medicare card, effectively Bob Hawke’s Australia Card dressed in ‘kindness’, I know exactly what he can do with it. And it isn’t to jimmy open the Treasury’s locks to give away more of our national inheritance. I will leave the rest to what is known as Hemingway’s ‘iceberg’ technique.

Dr Michael de Percy @FlaneurPolitiq is the Spectator Australia’s Canberra Press Gallery Correspondent. If you would like to support his writing, or read more of Michael, please visit his website.