The Lollipop Ladies

While union corruption quietly siphons off billions from taxpayers behind the scenes, these highly paid, low-effort jobs sit right there in plain sight - a daily reminder that the same organisation inflating project costs to obscene levels is also propping up a workforce that looks more like a social-media side hustle than serious infrastructure delivery. No wonder people are furious: the lollipop ladies aren't the problem, but they're the face we see while the real rip-off happens behind the scenes.

Sometimes very glamorous faces, indeed. Look at these two, as featured on Australian social media. Here are their Tiktok videos…here and here. Of course, there are plenty of sensible women doing these jobs. But they too cop flak from an irritated public when drivers are late for work, stuck behind orange cones and forced to watch lollipop ladies chat on their phones, knowing they are earning so much more in a week than most qualified tradies.

"They are the women we love to hate," was one of the headlines of one of the many media stories ranting about their huge wages. "Lollipop lady sparks outrage after revealing how much she earns in a typical week - and the eye-watering amount she's paid for a 15-minute shift," fumed the Daily Mail, discussing revelations from one traffic controller that she'd raked in $148 for just 15 minutes of work.

It's not just the money. There are just too many of them. There are constant reports of overstaffing to meet union mandated minimums e.g., 2–4 controllers per site for shift rotations, even during quiet periods. Safety regulations require at least 2 controllers per high-risk site for safety (e.g., shift overlaps, breaks, or multi-lane coverage), even if traffic is light. This is the result of over-prescriptive rules from road authorities and work, health and safety regulators, falling over each other to pile on demands.

Australia proudly leads the world in over-regulating road traffic control, mandated by the government entities, such as VicRoads, Work Safe and councils. We boast roughly 40–60 traffic controllers per 100,000 people, roughly 2–3 times the rate in the United States, United Kingdom or New Zealand. Strict Austroads rules mandate human controllers on almost every moderate-to-high-risk site, often requiring 6 people or more per location.

The result? A very visible army of high-vis workers, many earning six-figure salaries with plenty of downtime. Yet there is no robust international evidence that this heavy-handed approach delivers fewer work-zone crashes or fatalities than countries that rely far more on signs, cones, portable lights, automated systems and common sense.

Well done, Australia-world champion in red tape and orange vests, and cost over-runs, with safety outcomes that look… pretty average.

There's been a bunch of recent inquiries and reviews which have reached the same conclusion. The 2025 Traffic Controller Safety Survey by the Traffic Management Association of Australia, explicitly calls for accelerated rollout of digital speed displays, truck-mounted attenuators, and physical barriers, with a long-term goal to "remove all traffic controllers from live lanes" through automation.

But at the heart of this story is the great gender-diversity circus - DEI initiatives and shiny government quotas strutting their stuff, especially on taxpayer-funded projects. Sure, the real engine is still the fat pay packets, the infrastructure boom times, and a steady stream of backpackers willing to wave a lollipop sign for six figures… but let's be honest: one reason you suddenly see so many young women holding stop/slow bats is so the big contractors can tick the "we hit our female quota" box and keep winning the next juicy government tender.

When it comes to ticking those boxes, it's not the lollipop ladies who are actually making the difference. Women in traffic control make up roughly 1.5–3% of the total female construction workforce. It's the female office workers and women in management who are really on the move – growing from 15% in 2023-4, to 50–55% in recent years. And to demonstrate how ideological this is, the majority of men in construction management have actual construction trade experience and qualifications, while almost none of the women appointed to these jobs do.

Fixing the lollipop lady problem-overstaffed, high-paid traffic controllers who are the most visible sign of waste in construction-means firstly going after the CFMEU by taking measures like deregistering or heavily restricting the corrupt construction divisions, stripping unions of their influence over traffic control accreditation and training. But also tackling the overemphasis on human controllers in government work, health and safety regulations, which are then imposed by builders, local councils, state road authorities and the like.