A 25-million-dollar flagpole, a steel pole to put up a flag on top of the Harbour Bridge, goes to show you how money is spent when it is spent in Sydney. That is an amount of money that virtually all who are reading this article, could never comprehend having in their life. It is a round piece of steel bolted to another piece of steel, how on earth does it cost $25 million?

The answer would be consultant approvals. Heritage consultants, architecture consultants, legal consultants, engineering consultants and cultural consultants. Basically, a whole heap of people on high wages living in the Eastern Suburbs and the North Shore of Sydney. It is following the same rule book of the so-called cost blowout on Dungowan Dam, studies, and consultants. Reviews upon reviews, that are reviewed, so the process of reviewing was appropriate. This is an example of how expensive government gets when you allow them into more and more facets of your life.

The big cost on everyday items right now is the 2050 zero-emission target. Australia’s effect will cause no change in the climate, but you are paying it anyhow. They say that younger voters vote green because they want more climate action. Well, you have got climate action now and it comes with a lot of wallet action but not so much action on Saturday nights because you have not got the money to spend on it. That action went towards paying your power bill, your food bill and putting fuel in your car. What climate action will lead to is mincemeat, pasta, shorter trips in the car, and wearing jumpers and coats indoors during the colder months of the year.

As for the flagpole on a bridge in Sydney, how can they say that amount with a straight face? What it says to all of us is how many other flagpole-like expenses do we have in government? I wonder if we spent that flagpole money helping people get back into flood-devastated houses in the Northern Rivers, we would have a more righteous spend of taxpayer funds.

Further on the flag issue, Adam Bant and the Greens have a problem with the Australian Flag being on the Harbour Bridge and anywhere else around them. They say that the Australian Flag is a flag of colonisation; wrong. The Australian Flag did not come about until the 3rd of September 1901. Far from being the flag of colonisation, it was not even the flag at federation. The first European flags used on Australian soil were the British Flag, the Union Jack, and two iterations of Union Jacks at that.

The Australian Flag we have now came after a competition that had almost 33,000 entrants. The Greens cannot park grievances they want absolute concurrence with every view they have. Driving the economy into the ground and pitting one Australian against another. But the indoctrination comes young, and bodies such as the Australian Teachers Federation understand that if you indoctrinate people when they are young, they are indoctrinated possibly for life but the epiphany of being poor has been known to change views.