I've just been spending some time tallying up the "qualifications" of our elected officials in the Federal House of Representatives (all 150 of them).
I'm a Mechanical Engineer and have a Masters and PhD in Biomedical Engineering. One thing about studying and practicing engineering is that you learn how to SOLVE problems not CREATE them. I recall an ad campaign from the 1990s by the then Institute of Engineers Australia. The catch cry was "Engineers make it happen". Think about it for a moment. Without Engineering there'd be no internet, no buildings, roads, cars, in fact there wouldn't be much of anything.
If people ever ask themselves "why the government doesn't "fix" things?" then here's the answer:
according to my quick analysis of federal lower house policticians 41% are either lawyers (30%) or accountants (11%). There are only 2 engineers! Riddle Solved.
According to this link being a politician is one of the most untrusted professions - coincidentally so too are lawyers (untrusted). In fact, they are only 7 spots away from each other on the table in the link. So politicians will never be trusted as long as we continue to have 30% of them with a law background.
What I find particularly ironic about this that the professions we distrust (lawyers) are the ones we need to trust. Why do we keep putting these professionals with verbal diarrhoea in parliament?
We NEED more engineers in Parliament.
