Yesterday I received an email that referenced my very first blog, and I immediately felt guilty for having deprived my followers of my wise thoughts for too long.  By way of amends I offer the following…

A few years ago Mrs SG and I were on holiday in Cuba, where we met a British man and his daughter.  The daughter was introduced as a… was it ‘barrister’ or ’barista’?  Mrs SG and I were equally unsure, but thought she looked too young to be a barrister. We turned out to be wrong.

But today I Googled “How many baristas in Australia?”  I was offered a Bureau of Statistics figure for 2019: 48,000 of whom 16,700 were fulltime. This compares with 6,000 barristers.

I raised this question for two reasons.  First, one effect of the cost-of-living crisis is a rash of closures of restaurants and cafés, tossing baristas and other staff into the labour market.  Second, with a dire shortage of people to work in the police, armed forces, aged care and construction, it seems absurdly wasteful to employ people to make coffee for other people who could very well make their own cuppas at home or get them from a machine (this is not a sponsored link).

Now, I get as tired as anybody else with problems being identified and shouted about with no solutions being offered – other than setting up new government bodies or otherwise chucking tax dollars into a bottomless pit.  So I have a practical proposal: Offer generous tax concessions for the installation of coffee vending machines, conditional on the humane culling of baristas.

Whoa!  Not so fast with the criticism!  By ‘humane culling’ I don’t mean shooting them from helicopters.  I mean transferring them into re-training programmes so that they can become truly productive members of society.