A Productive Cough

Now, of course, one is a happy little work unit, going about not asking difficult questions and NOT seeing quite a lot, while making the world safe for capitalism (Bragg 1990). And part of that is the, dare we say it, fetishisation, of something called productivity.
"AH HAH" I hear you Joanna and Johnny Socialist exclaim "THAT'S JUST ANOTHER NAME FOR EXPLOITATION!" I really think that there was no need for the exclamation mark there, but you young folks today with your fancy intertubes and smartphones.
 Anyway when we put your accusation through the "Milton Friedman Answer-matic to combat Socialists dogmas and such" we get "Maybe it is IVAN. Or maybe it's not, we'll have to have a faculty meeting in Davros to see."
Yes we in New Zild clung hopefully to the olive branch of productivity, hoping that the Dove of Rising Economics will alight and, presumably using super powers gained through eating a radioactive peanut, carry us back to a Noah-like figure who is actually a sort of boss person whose son has just had a traumatising experience in the NZ court and been sentenced to 3 hours cleaning the Prime Ministers golf cart.
 Immediately he offers us a job sweeping out the Ark and through olfactory deadening hard work and several mysterious deaths we rise to control the Ark and challenge God himself...If, like Mel Gibson is involved.
 But as is usual in these sceptred isles (Shakespeare, olden days) to maintain the proper respect and discipline that PRODUCTIVITY demands of us all, we have a commission of Productivity. That's right a group of people, might one hazard a guess and say predominately white, male people?, who ensure that the correct observances are made and the proper sacrifices sent to the ravenous maws of the True Gods. Extensive research finds that only 5/7ths of the commission are white males. Everyone is lily coloured, however.
But, there they were, sitting around, watching daytime TV, buying fartbombs via the internet, sending cat videos to each other and they thought "You know, we haven't buggered about with tertiary education for a good week or so, let's have another whack at them, eh". Being the government's japesters that they are the commissioners had to consider the fee-fees of the National Party BFF the ACT party, who are a bunch of cold eyed society stranglers have made a few appearances in the pages of Riddled.
So the usual Randian ideas were cut and pasted into a document which was duly released into the wilds. 
Have I mentioned that one of my contracts at the moment involves driving around taking swab samples from cow and sheep poo? I'm pretty good at this thing now and  get the swab into it's tube and back into the swab bag with no mess. In a strikingly similar exercise the Productivity Commission seems to done the job blindfolded and using swabs taped to their foreheads.
This "paper" advocates a "Shake-Up" of the tertiary system that seems to be modeled on the Shake-Up that the Fukushima nuclear plant underwent.
Government would no longer have to pay for debts that universities incur, there would be a loosening of regulations about what constitutes a university and post grad supervisors would no longer have to be involved in research! Brave days, my friends and a green light went on in the Riddled Institute tea-room.
These people's outdated and stupid ideas will blight us all if implemented. They have learned nothing from the last 30 years of NZ economic rationalism experiment and can't see the damage they do, even as they do it. Interesting to see that they all have degrees too, I wonder what their student loan levels were? Oh wait, we didn't have them in our day, did we? Fuck 'em (Stipe 1993)
But they have been productive.