On Monday beloved Australian entrepreneur Dick Smith unexpectedly declared his support for One Nation and his willingness to advise (although not fund) Pauline Hanson on matters of policy.
In doing so he made clear that he agrees with the party's stance on curbing immigration, while attempting to distance himself from Pauline Hanson's position on banning Muslims from Australia. And on the face of it that makes about as much sense as Smith saying that he's a Coldplay fan because he concurs with their choice of shoes even though he hates their terrible, terrible music.
There's a second point which seems to have escaped notice.
But let's talk about Smith's position on immigration first.
It was the central issue covered in his appearance on The Project on Tuesday night, when he called for Australia to more than halve its rate of immigration to 70,000 a year. Which, incidentally, wouldn't make up for the 90,000+ people that emigrate from Australia every year, so the Smith/One Nation plan would appear to be have fewer Australians cluttering up the place.
The problem with this is that unless you're simultaneously proposing a different national economic system to the current "people work jobs and pay taxes during their adult years and are supported in youth and old age by taxes paid by others in turn", the argument that Australia needs to slash immigration right now seems a bit nutty.
For a start, we're in an era when Australia's birthrate is dropping, and the average age of our population is rising. Australia last had a "replacement" birthrate (ie: when births equalled deaths, calculated at 2.1 births per fertile woman) back in 1976 and, aside from a little blip around the mining boom, it's been in a gentle decline ever since.
At the same time, Australia's largest ever population cohort – the baby boomers – is ageing out of the workforce and their care needs working taxpayers to fund it. This isn't unique to Australia, by the way: every industrialised nation has a declining birthrate, and Australia's doing a better job than many nations. This issue is currently transforming a huge problem in immigration-averse Japan, for example, where it's already moving from problem to crisis.
Waleed Aly made a similar point to Smith on The Project, to which Smith argued that population replacement was a Ponzi scheme for some reason and told Aly "you don't understand basic economics" before seemingly predicting that current rates of immigration would create "a billion people in 200 years" in Australia, which seems to assume Australia's about to experience an excitingly optimistic-sounding level of immortality.
But let's leave the silliness about Australia's immigration policies aside and focus on Smith's other goal here, which is this: lobbying for the aviation industry.
Getting a better deal for the personal aviation biz has been Smith's goal for a long time - it was explicitly part of his threat to challenge Bronwyn Bishop in the seat of Mackellar earlier this year when he declared "I'm concerned that the aviation industry is being completely destroyed under the Coalition" - and in March 2015 he announced that the reason he'd just registered the Dick Smith Party was largely to demand less bureaucracy within the the Civil Aviation and Safety Authority.
Now, it's worth adding that Smith might well have a point regarding the aviation industry being over-regulated, although it's hard to be sure since it's not exactly a sexy subject that gets mainstream attention.
General aviation is a niche area, particularly in Australia, and anyone with enough knowledge of the issues is almost certainly going to be a player in the industry, and therefore open to accusations of having a personal stake in the outcome.
(That being said, it's worth having a read of Smith's argument, and the discussion that follows, at the Professional Pilots Rumour Network messageboard from earlier this year, although it's hard to necessarily parse out what are specific economic pressures on the personal aviation industry and larger economic pressures suffered by regional Australia generally.)
It's a matter worthy of discussion, and clearly the Nationals and Liberals have disappointed Smith with their response so far – so he's taking an alternative approach.
This is understandable, but there's something unseemly and desperate in seeing an optimistic futurist like Smith align himself with aggressively future-averse conservatives like One Nation. Especially since they're a party with a deliberately selective grasp of matters of science and technology, as Senator Malcolm Roberts' statements on climate change regularly demonstrate.
Unfortunately this means that what might well be reasonable questions about regulation of the aviation industry will be tied up in emotive, divisive arguments about immigration, because Smith has made this pragmatic decision to get the outcome he wants.
Like so many of Australia's rent-seeking millionaires, he's turned into another lobbyist.
Be like George Brandis and grab copies of Andrew P Street's The Short and Excruciatingly Embarrassing Reign of Captain Abbott and The Curious Story of Malcolm Turnbull: the Incredible Shrinking Man in the Top Hat, just in time for Xmas - and listen to new Double Disillusionists podcast with special guests Ruby Hamad (Daily Life) and Mark di Stefano (BuzzFeed)
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