Solve the Uber Eats Crisis by Moving All of India to Australia! (Satire)

Australia is on the brink of a national emergency of almost biblical proportions: a catastrophic shortage of Uber Eats delivery drivers! Experts warn that without immediate action, millions of Australians may soon face the unthinkable horror of having to leave their couches, walk to the fridge, or, worst of all, cook something. The situation is particularly acute because this vital sector has long been sustained by international students, a large share of them from India, who have heroically pedalled through traffic, rain, and 40-degree heat to deliver lukewarm pad Thai and cold chips to a grateful nation. Or is that an ungrateful nation?

The conventional solutions, higher pay, better conditions, or recruiting local workers, have been dismissed as unserious. What Australia needs is bold, scalable thinking. The answer is obvious: move all of India to Australia!

With roughly 1.4 billion additional residents, the driver shortage vanishes overnight. In fact, the entire concept of "delivery drivers" becomes obsolete. There will be so many people that food no longer needs to travel by scooter or bicycle. It can travel by human relay.

Picture the scene. A restaurant in Parramatta finishes an order of butter chicken. The first person in the chain takes the bag and walks three metres to the next person. That person walks three metres to the next. And so on, across suburbs, through traffic lights, under freeways, until the bag reaches its destination in Melbourne or Brisbane via an unbroken chain of temporary residents. The food will of course be stone cold by the time it arrives, but that is already the baseline expectation for most deliveries, so standards will not fall. Efficiency will actually improve: no more app glitches, no more cancelled orders, no more drivers sitting on the kerb refreshing their phones. Just a continuous, organic conveyor belt of people.

Housing, infrastructure, water, and energy will adapt. After all, we have already demonstrated that we can add hundreds of thousands of people a year without noticing any strain on hospitals, schools, roads, or rental markets. Scaling that success by a factor of several hundred is merely a matter of will. Universities will experience an unprecedented boom in enrolments. Every lecture theatre will be standing-room only, and every lecture will end with a practical demonstration of the relay system as students pass the lecturer's coffee around the room.

Critics will object that Australia lacks the physical space. This is small-minded. We can simply redefine "space." With enough people, the distinction between indoor and outdoor blurs. Entire suburbs can be repurposed as relay corridors. Existing parks can become staging areas. The Great Dividing Range can be levelled slightly to reduce the number of handovers required on the Sydney–Melbourne route.

Environmentalists may worry about emissions. They need not. Human-powered relays produce zero tailpipe emissions. The only carbon cost is the embodied energy in the millions of new apartments that will have to be built, but those apartments can be constructed by the same relay method: one person carries a brick three metres, the next person carries it three metres, and so on, until the tower is complete. Progress will be slow, but it will be sustainable.

Some have suggested that Australians themselves could fill the delivery roles. This misunderstands the problem. The shortage is not of people who could deliver food. It is of people who will deliver food under current conditions while also studying full-time and remitting money home. Importing the entire source population solves the labour market, the education export industry, and the national cuisine simultaneously. Once everyone is already here, the cold food simply circulates among us forever, a perpetual motion machine of lukewarm curry and shared inconvenience.

The only remaining question is timing. Every day we delay, another Australian risks having to eat something that is still warm. That is a risk this country can no longer afford to take. Move India. Form the chains. Pass the food. The future is already on its way, slowly, and getting colder by the metre.

https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2026/10/australia-to-face-catastrophic-uber-eats-delivery-driver-shortage/