The first thing they would do is ditch the assistant that stands next to the surgeon, passing the tools whenever the surgeon calls out for them. I mean, come on doc, have a go. Strap on a tool belt with all your scalpels and clamps so your assistant can go and do something useful. It’s the first rule a tradie learns: never turn a one-man job into a two-man job. I guess surgeons haven’t learnt that because they haven't been taught by tradies.

Tradies could teach surgeons a thing or two about productivity. Credit:Janie Barrett

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Our tradie game changers will need a bit of time to whip the education sector into shape before we let them loose in our hospitals.

Of course, if you’re going to hire tradies as teachers, you’ll want to recruit the absolute cream of the crop. The real A-listers. The tradies that all the other tradies look up to. The rock stars of the construction industry. That’s right: the brickies. Winston Churchill wanted to be one. Germaine Greer married one. We’re hard to resist. And let’s face it, you could improve just about any industry by adding brickies to its workforce. But as there are currently not enough brickies to actually lay bricks, you might have to settle for a carpenter, an electrician, or even (God forbid!) a concreter. Still, any tradie is better than no tradie at all. In boom times, you take who you can get.

Most tradies have either employed or directly supervised young apprentices. So teaching is an essential part of our job. Combine that with a tradie's natural flair for story telling and you’ve got someone who would be an asset in front of any class, whether directly related to their trade as the minister seems to suggest or across the curriculum. If you think Australia's Local Hero of the year Eddie Woo knows how to deliver an interesting maths lesson, you should hear my mates Robbo and Macca explain how they managed to charge a client for laying 27,000 bricks on a job that only had a total of 2400 bricks in it.