Dick Bolles helped more people find a job than a thousand Centrelinks.

The former Harvard physics major and Episcopalian minister wrote the immensely successful book What Color Is Your Parachute, accurately sub-titled A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers.

Richard Nelson Bolles (pronounced bowls), who died in 2017 at the age of 90, originally self-published his manual in 1970 as a photocopied how-to booklet for unemployed Protestant ministers, but it went on to sell 10 million copies and has never been out of print, according to his obituary in the New York Times.

I still have my 1996 edition of his book and rate it as a brilliant how-to tome not just for finding a career, but for its folksy exploration of the psychology of being happy down the coal mine.

His central advice is simple – find out what you like doing, then set about finding a job that will let you do it.

“You may never understand why things sometimes work, and sometimes don’t,” he wrote.

Spot on. I’ve only formally applied for a few jobs in my life. One of them was the role of director of communications for the Adelaide Catholic Archdiocese.

Some time after I got the position, a member of the selection panel, former Centacare director Dale West, a gifted administrator, confided that my written application was so bad they thought I didn’t really want the job.

So, I’m probably not the best person to hand out career advice. But why let that stop me?

Here’s my advice for finding a highly-paid job in South Australia, a gig that requires no formal education, no 99.9 per cent ATAR after Year 12, no skills at all really apart from one – shameless self-promotion.

You will be richly rewarded by governments, who will happily hand over buckets of cash raised by tirelessly shaking the pockets of Tammy and Tim Taxpayer. Not just cash, but airfares, luxury accommodation, concert tickets, meals and booze.

Kids, forget STEM subjects and coding, this job is the bomb.

And what is this dream job? Influencer.

Yep, influencer, the one-word career that’s the bee’s knees in 2023.

You won’t find it in What Color Is Your Parachute, but being an “influencer” has replaced “futurist” as a magnet for state governments, none more so than South Australia’s thoroughly modern Malinauskas Labor Government.

Of course, being an influencer isn’t really a career in the true sense of the word, it’s more a state of being.

Or as Dennis Denuto, the suburban lawyer in The Castle told the High Court: “It’s the vibe and ah, no that’s it. It’s the vibe”.

They exist in a strange social stratosphere, from lowly-ranked Royals to unknowns who have become known on social media, famous for being, well, it’s hard to know really.

Take someone called Olivia Molly Rogers, whose life, her dog and marriage travails occupy an inexplicable quantity of ink in our newspapers.

Described as a “model and influencer”, she recently revealed she had her wedding video re-edited to remove vision of her “estranged husband” Justin McKeone.

She then shared the Justin-free video on TikTok, explaining that it was now “just me, my friends and family … I am so grateful that I can remember the day in my own way”.

Being an influencer, this no doubt sparked a boom in marriage break-up video re-edits, with husbands or wives ending up on the cutting room floor, instead of in the bedroom.

But does it occur to anyone this is just a little, err, odd?

Wouldn’t you maybe, just possibly, while watching the edited version, remember why you and your friends and family were all having such a good time in the video?

Or is it a case of out of sight, out of mind? It matters not. Influencers are defined by what cannot be defined.

Over the past week, the government has been left squirming as details have emerged of taxpayer cash being splurged on selling the wonders of our great state to hundreds of influencers, of all shapes and sizes.

Like Premier Peter Malinauskas, I hadn’t heard of singer Sam Smith, but as a taxpayer now know that we all helped kick in around $500,000 for them to wow a crowd of invited guests – influencers – to a free knees-up at The Cube at the d’Arenberg vineyards in McLaren Vale.

That sounds a bit light on to me but it’s still a boot-load of cash.

Taxpayers also shelled out for minor Royals Zara and Mike Tindall to travel to South Australia and generally swan around the joint, especially at the Adelaide 500 car race.

A government spokesperson described Zara as a “prominent member of the Royal family”. Really? She is the daughter of Princess Anne. I had to Google it.

Her net worth is reportedly $20 million. That’s almost as much as the initial $21 million budgeted for the Adelaide 500 race, until it blew out to $35 million.

The Malinauskas Government is not revealing how much we all paid to bring the Royal couple to SA, hiding behind the “commercial in confidence” defence. That hoary old chestnut.

Tourism Minister Zoe Bettison says the Smith concert generated $14 million in free publicity for our state.

“We consider that a great return on investment … so what that is, is a measure of the free media got that we did not pay for,” she said.

But Minister, it’s not “free” publicity if you pay for it, or have we missed a step in the process? Without knowing what we pay for all this “free” media, how can taxpayers work out if it’s a “great return on investment”?

It might be a case, as Dick Bolles said, that you may never understand why things sometimes work, and sometimes don’t. That’s not good enough when you’re spending the hard-earned cash of taxpayers.

When so many people are struggling to make ends meet, the whole thing is shabby and insulting to those regarded as having no “influence” beyond paying for these oh-so-clever marketing campaigns.

The Premier argues that we all need to get up to speed on the modern way of marketing our state – giving freebies to influencers – but it should be open and accountable about just how much bang we’re getting for our buck from the tiktokerati.

The government reckons that apart from being married to a “prominent Royal” and being a former England rugby captain, Mike Tindall is good value as he has a “social media reach of 586,000”.

Big deal. Pope Francis has 53.5 million followers on Twitter. Let’s get him out here for next year’s race. He’d at least pay his own way.

Matthew Abraham’s weekly analysis of local politics is published on Fridays.

Matthew can be found on Twitter as @kevcorduroy. It’s a long story.