For those of you who have had the fortunate experience of working at an accountancy practice, you will understand the joys of every day allocating 75 chargeable units of six minutes each. Ten units to Mr Smith, 12 units for Mrs Jones, went to smallest room in office with water view and read paper, research.
It's called productivity and if you aren't working on things that matter you lose your job. Later on as a manager you know all the tricks, you know what the clients will pay and Mr Smith and Mrs Jones know value for money.
The problem at the moment is our Government is following a green office culture of aimless wanderings and beautiful thoughts but working on nothing we can actually bill out to anybody. If the firm keeps going on like this, someone is going to have to be put off, when you are not working on your client someone else is.
The Governor of the Reserve Bank, Glenn Stevens, pointed this out this week, we are not focusing enough on things we can bill, things that will increase our productivity.
So what is the country focused on instead? A carbon tax. A tax which is a guaranteed productivity destroyer. A tax, the singular focus of which is to raise the costs of almost every business.
How do you think the discussion with Mr Jones and Mrs Smith will go when they query the bill sheet line item marked ''CTC 3000 units'' and you reply ''that was when I was Changing The Climate''?
The policies of the Greens are unproductive. They want a top marginal income tax rate of 50c in the dollar, reintroduction of death duties, a complete stop to the $1billion live-cattle trade, reduce water use by over 50 per cent in the Murray-Darling Basin, which produces 40 per cent of our food.
The Greens want to shut down the entire forest industry in Tasmania. Remember when the Greens wanted to stop the logging of ''old growth'' forests? Now it is all native forestry, including regrowth. Soon they'll demand the locking up of the plantations that are invading productive agricultural land.
Don't think these policies can't happen; Bob Brown has been successful in his advocacy of many of these policies in the new Green-Labor-Independent Government.
This Government shut down the north of the nation by suspending the live-export trade. They tried to shut down the middle with a draft Murray-Darling Basin plan last year that caused a virtual riot and this week they have announced a plan to effectively shut down the forestry industry in the south.
Next we will have a carbon tax to shut down whatever is left open.
Economists and bureaucrats talk about productivity in prosaic and abstract terms but all of these anti-productivity policies have real consequences for real people.
Water buybacks effectively closed the town of Collarenebri when the Federal Government rushed into a $303million water deal with the Twynam Agricultural Group.
The Government's panicked reaction to a TV documentary has put ringers, truck drivers and helicopter musterers out of work for months. The economic rug of Scottsdale has been pulled out from under it with the closure of its timber mills in response to green bullying.
Any government that wants to adopt green policies should go and visit these places first. The signs of economic dislocation hit you in the face; those who have happily transitioned to green jobs are harder to find. In fact, I am yet to meet one.
The reality is that the green agenda destroys real jobs; it destroys the real wealth that people have invested in their homes and small businesses, and it leaves people stranded with debts that don't get written down because of bad government policies but asset values which do.
For all of those fortunate enough to have relatively secure employment, we should take time to think of the people working in the timber mill in Smithton, working on the cattle property near Tenant Creek, teetering on the edge of a new Murray-Darling Basin plan in Deniliquin or working in a coalmine in the Hunter Valley as they shake their heads at the policies coming out of Canberra. As the cattle grazier in northern Australia said, ''We don't want social security, we just want to keep our job.'' Seems to me a perfectly reasonable request.