Gina Rinehart, and you there, spit out that chewing gum at once, do up your shoelaces and tuck in your shirt, and stop that bloody smirking ...

(Above: the Fairfax lions do their favourite shareholder proud. No embedded links, it's a cap).

By golly, it's handy to be a shareholder.

There's Gina Rinehart scribbling away in the relatively obscure Australian Resources and Investment magazine about the glories and wonders of Singapore, and next thing you know it's a front page story, with poll in the Fairfax press, and in The Age with bonus left hand splash, as shown above.

Oh and inside there's a snap happy photograph of Ms Rinehart at the top of the story, What Australia can learn from Singapore, and it's all jolly spiffing hockey sticks.

Mention Singapore, and I tend to get a little grumpy.

Not so Rinehart:

Singapore welcomes investment, makes real effort to minimise red tape (even asking its people and businesses to point out time- or money-wasting red tape if they find it), has low taxes, low crime, enables guest labour, and has no debt. Singapore imports 80 per cent of its food, but still manages to invest hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide on behalf of its citizens.

Yes, and it also happens to be a repressive, oppressive quasi-fascist one party state. The presence of a parliament, the status of a republic, and a notional opposition shouldn't obscure the way PAP deploys censorship, gerrymandering and corruption to stay in power, often using libel and slander actions to bankrupt and silence any dissenting voices.

It also happens to be an irritatingly bland and empty set of compressed spaces, an ersatz version of the Asian dream of harmony, with the sheep well settled and shorn, but with a quiescent media and a dull repressed culture. The comical ban on chewing gum (wiki here) is only worth mentioning for being emblematic of the way the government pokes its nose into the doings of the citizenry to ensure everything flows according to the government line ...

In its own way, the result is that Singapore is the Stepford town of Asia ...

If you happen to be gay, or have dissident views, tough luck, as you can discover by listening to the ABC radio documentary What can I say in Singapore? It turns out that online at the moment you can say a lot more than you can in conventional media, but you do it at your peril, and at the risk of being tagged as a troublemaker.

No doubt this is why Rinehart clucks and coos about Singapore. It seems everything Singapore does, it does better than Australia. There's so much red tape here it makes development onerous and burdensome, but if red tape puts an outrageous boondoggle like the Sydney city development of Barangaroo through the hoops, where's the problem?

Then there's Rinehart bleating about taxation, and you wonder why - given she's the richest woman in Australia with some nine billion smackeroos - why she bleats so loudly about taxation. And don't give pabulum about her concern for those on low and medium incomes.

No, no, what she wants is a guest labour system, a kind of 'bring back the Kanakas' routine, and not just for handsomely paid gigs in Australian football codes:

Australia needs guest labour. Just think where Australia could be if we welcomed guest labour, even if limited to hot or remote areas or to unskilled and semi-skilled positions. This should be considered on humanitarian grounds alone. Please consider the terrible plight of very poor people in our neighbouring countries in Asia. We should, on humanitarian grounds, give more of these people the opportunity of guest labour work in Australia, so that they can feed and clothe their families and pay for medical and other pressing needs. Singapore, Dubai and even Europe have had guest workers for decades.

Yes, it would be ever so kind, to bring them in and screw them blind, purely to help them out in their poverty of course.

Never mind that it's been a profound source of disharmony, with the recent results and resentments in Libya there for all to see as the guest workers try to get the hell out of the country. As for guest workers in Germany ... I guess Rinehart is so busy making squillions she doesn't pay much attention to what goes on in Europe, let alone the deep unhappiness of the exploited in Dubai ...

Guest workers is of course one of those quaint words for quasi slavery, indentured servitude and profound exploitation, as exemplified by Dubai, where the mistreatment of 'guest workers' is legendary (and only 17% of the workforce is 'local'). The benefits of guest workers is three fold - the workers can never gain citizenship, have less residential and other rights, and a cunning employer can rip them off blind, usually by withholding passports, salaries, and such like tricks (cf the wiki on foreign worker or have a read of Thanks for Your Hard Work. Now Get Out! or Emirates making peace with migrant workers).

Thus far Australia has restricted its covert guest worker program to sundry brothels who've imported women to act as sex slaves, so I guess we can build on that.

Of course if an Australian employer actually wants genuine expertise from a foreign worker, currently it's a doddle to pick up a 457 work permit, and truth to tell, the IT industry would be dead without it. But it's a simple and fair system, that treats skilled people as valuable contributors offering short term solutions ...

Rinehart has grander visions:

Also, think about the lack of adequate services for our own war veterans, the elderly and the disabled, and how much better their lives and their carers' lives would be if we gave guest workers temporary visas to assist.

Yes, everyone with their own personal slave. Why there's a batch of Filipino guest workers standing by at the moment, and we can treat them with the same disdain as they cop in guest worker jobs around the world ...

But then Rinehart manages to sound just like Pauline Hanson:

Our crime record is unacceptable: we should all be able to live safely in our homes and suburbs. Taxation monies that should be spent on more, better paid, better resourced and better trained police are wasted – think of the recent federal government wastage on over-priced school kitchens (that don't even cater for pie warmers in winter), expensive insulation bungles, and dare I repeat, duplication of environmental departments.

And dare we mention that Singapore is a caning and a hanging country? (Capital punishment in Singapore).

Sure it keeps the sheep in line, but pardon me if I join with William Gibson in thinking the city state is Disneyland with the death penalty ... (naturally Wired was banned the moment that piece hit the world):

There is no slack in Singapore. Imagine an Asian version of Zurich operating as an offshore capsule at the foot of Malaysia; an affluent microcosm whose citizens inhabit something that feels like, well, Disneyland. Disneyland with the death penalty.

So by the time I got to this par by Rinehart I began to understand:

With good, responsible government, less tax, policies to welcome investment, and less red and green tape, Australia could be in Singapore's position over time. We could even hold hundreds of billions of investment funds for our citizens like Singapore's Temasek and GIC funds. Attitudes need to change before we can achieve Singapore's fortunate and compelling position.

Yes the unfortunate but compelling position of a quasi fascist state, with all the sheep nicely lined up, nicely shorn, happy and peaceful, content in their shopping at the local mall (naturally the government understood that some might like the anarchy of a street market, so they tried to build one, as you do in Disneyland, a devoted imitation of the real thing. It just goes to show the innate limits to government and Disneyland, and how plastic will always feel more like plastic than real).

It would be helpful if media reporting in Australia also considered the reasons for the stark contrasts between Australia and Singapore. Those media members who visited Singapore three or four decades ago and saw how poor the country was back then, should analyse why Singapore is now in such an envious position just decades later.

And then I began to think how Rinehart would experience Singapore. Jet in, go to the finest hotel in town, much boot licking and bowing ensues, do a deal or two, and fly out again, and everything's happy and the deals have been done, and the sheep can keep on working, and never mind any actual thinking about their situation, their condition, or foolish notions like democracy, contrariness or dissidence ... Just keep shopping in that mall.

It reminded me exactly why I dislike Singapore so intensely. I guess there's only one place I dislike even more, and for similar reasons, and where my stay has been even shorter, and that's Dubai.

And why suddenly Hong Kong seemed a much more vibrant, ragged, rat baggy place, even as the mainland looms over it.

Well it's perfectly okay for the Fairfax media to pluck their favourite shareholder's thoughts from obscure places and give them a run, and it's perfectly fine for Rinehart to hold her views in favour of quasi fascism and Lee Kuan Yew's vision of paradise, a bit like Moonee Ponds with caning still allowed.

Singapore's destiny will be to become nothing more than a smug, neo-Swiss enclave of order and prosperity, amid a sea of unthinkable...weirdness

Yep, I'll drink to the sea of unthinkable weirdness, though it's a tad hard to think of Australia as even thinkably weird ...

If Singapore is the vision that Rinehart has for Australia, count me out ... and never mind the irony of someone bleating about the doings of the Australian government while elevating the supreme oppressiveness of the Singaporean government into a role model we should emulate ...

Less government means more government? Intruding into every corner? What a goose, albeit a very rich, well fed goose ...

Call me a libertarian, but it's days like these that I feel really content not paying a bean for Fairfax products ... especially when they make such a song and dance over their favourite shareholder, when if you could have been bothered, you could have read Rinehart's musings at source here.

And what's more, for free, which is possibly over-rating its value, except as a warning to all of us that the absent lord won't help us if Rinehart ever gets a chance to determine the shape of government policy, in the way it seems she's shaping the editorial department at Fairfax so that they now marvel and jump up and down at her wondrous thoughts and insights ...

Happily Rinehart copped a decent pasting in the comments section, though the poll turned out in favour of her guest worker routine. I guess we all want our own personal slaves hey, and if the Filipinos won't do, we can always turn to the Mexicans the United States doesn't want ...

As an alternative read, you can still pick up the Gibson piece in the Wired archive here, and it continues to resonate in other places where people brood about the singularity of Singapore architecture and culture ...

(Below: welcome to Disneyland).