Nor has she dodged Indian “students” on inner-city footpaths making express deliveries for Uber Eats, or got a disinterested blank look from an Indian store worker who doesn’t speak English.

Such experiences, vibrant though they are, are below Wong’s pay grade.

DIASPORA

On the frequent occasions she does interact with Indians, the conversation is in bold, clear English, and the topics are ambitious and consequential: clean energy, advanced manufacturing, tourism, education, resources and, the jewel in the pagri, the “diaspora”.

Wong and various other foreign affairs and trade bureaucrats have compiled their interactions with their Indian counterparts into a 133-page document, A New Roadmap For Australia’s Economic Engagement With India, released four days ago.

The nauseating earnestness of it all begins before the report even starts. The routine Acknowledgement of Country on the inside cover includes: “We recognise the unique and important contribution that First Nations businesses have made, and continue to make, to strengthening our economic ties with India.”

Not quite as big as our coal exporters, whose $15b worth of sales represent about half of Australia’s total exports to India.

But Wong knows not to make too fine a point of that, and mentions coal only in passing amid more fashionable and sometimes just plain bonkers areas of trade and cultural interaction that fit more comfortably into her green-woke agenda.

More than any of her Cabinet colleagues, Wong gives the impression that end goals don’t matter as much to her as the hors-d’oeuvres, hobnobbing and hubris of the globalist cabal.

The process is the replenishment, you might say, which for her goes on forever while the consequences on the ground for we ordinary punters are never the ones we were promised.

Ironically for a report that spruiks technology, A New Roadmap reads, in the age of Google Maps, like a Gregory’s Street Directory from 1984.

It’s a book full of destinations with no clear instructions about how to get there.

Politically, of course, that’s the point. It employs legions of bureaucrats who are fluent enough in jargon to make Wong’s constant jet-setting look serious and substantial while also lending legitimacy to whichever policies her government needs to boost back at home.

LOCKED UP

Wong’s least popular colleague, Climate Change & Energy Minister Chris Bowen, has been locked up in the Witless Protection Program for the duration of the (still unannounced) election campaign.

But if you thought that that meant we get a respite from his catchphrase, “renewable energy superpower”, think again.

Wong gives it a spin when describing her government’s plan to “attract and enable both global and domestic investment to help make Australia a renewable energy superpower and strengthen our economic security.”

You don’t need to be a wheelchair-bound pensioner who has been abused by an Indian taxi driver to see that Wong is being taken for a ride here.

Indians know an opportunity when they see one.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi told the COP26 summit in Glasgow five years ago that the major polluting countries should make a massive $1.6 trillion available to developing countries – including his own, which is supposedly baring the cost of climate change.

“Today it’s important to track climate finance just like we track the progress of climate mitigation,” he said with his trademark amiability.

Against that claim, flicking India $30m to help them build solar panels and pumped hydro, as A New Roadmap does, seems like a bargain, especially as it also adds desperately needed cred to the ailing renewable industry back home.

PRISTINE

Never mind that Indians are hardly famous for their love of a pristine environment, or that they are planning to triple their nuclear capability by 2032.

Those details are to A New Roadmap what booster shots are to people who “died suddenly”.

In return, we allow in a virtually unlimited number of Indian migrant “students” to drive Ubers, ride delivery bikes and work behind the counter at 7-11s.

The “diaspora” is a key part of India’s interaction with the world, and for good reason. The diaspora has relieved India, which is already overcrowded, of 35m people, and counting.

Better still, those people between them send about $200b back to their families at home every year.

The Australian portion of that is about $5.5b. It’s a net benefit to India that people like Wong barely even realise.

Wong glosses over the “cultural exchange” bit with some tropes about sport and artistic collaboration, both of which, if they exist at all, are heavily overshadowed for most of us by typically unedifying encounters with the aforementioned drivers, riders and shopkeepers.