If you look at the second of two photos of her in a story in today’s Courier Mail, you can see her clearly leading a protest to save the endangered lungfish, the Mary River Turtle,the Mary River Cod and the rural community in the Mary Vary from a heartless uncaring Queensland Government in the pockets of developers and corporations.

Nevertheless, the strong opposition to population growth in the Sunshine Coast is a matter of public record. What sort of Premier and what sort government knowingly and repeatedly disregards the expressed wishes of people?

The Nambour hospital cannot cope with the current residents of the Sunshine coast. All the infrastructure in the region is straining. There are no plans to upgrade the infrasruture and yet Bligh wants to bypass the opposition from the Sunshine Coast Council, elected with 70% of the popular vote, and dictate to it that it take 75,000 more residents.

These include her anti-democratic trampling on the rights of communities and their local councils to oppose over-development and overpopulation (as discussed in the forum Will “the great immigration debate” take place? abruptly ended on the seemingly flimsiest of pretexts) and her policy of continuing to flog off the family silver (currently the Cairns and Mackay airports, and, before long I expect, water, Queensland Rail also) to pay for other government services.

Her determination to accelerate the insane destructive enormously costly frenzy of road, bridge, tunnel and high-rise construction across Brisbane is beyond belief, and her continued encouragement of population growth, when existing Brisbane residents cannot afford to rent accommodation let alone buy dwellings seems to indicate a reckless indifference to their welfare.

She is truly a servant of the property lobby and other powerful vested interests.

Beattie would be the first to agree with the necessity of same. FGS the Beattie brand has been done and dusted.

“keeping business sweet by going with the PPPs Beattie had always nixed.”

Beattie did so for very good reasons. I am yet to see any proposal that is in the public interest - long term.

“In fact, her appointment of Beattie to a Trade Commissioner position in the US is looking a bit smarter than it did at the time - enabling her to insist that as a public servant, he no longer hold forth on the news of the day”

Mark, it’s now clear that Beattie didn’t leave without creating a ’soft landing’ for himself and so many of his loyal staff. No names and no pack drill.

The interesting twist is how Bligh added her ’supporters’ to the favoured list and at the same time silenced the Opposition by giving Quinn a sinecure, knowing full well that the Borg would never dump on Quinn.

Nevertheless, it is obvious that Bligh didn’t engineer the ‘deal’, Beattie did. Bligh simply added the icing.

(1) I don’t know! Beattie was very well liked for a while, but I think the “media tart” thing accentuated his decline in popularity because it contributed to the perception that he was all talk and no action. Obviously Bligh has taken a conscious decision which she signalled at the time of her elevation - we’ll have to wait and see.

(2) But it’s not really “one fell swoop” because the two polls are months apart - that decreases the reliability of any inferences we can make because a regular series would make it easier to weed out any polls that might be prone to sampling error, and to observe a trend better. But it doesn’t necessarily surprise me that there’s been a drift of support to the Borg and the opposition - even if I suspect the numbers are wrong. My answer to (3) as well would be that the failures in service delivery are a continuing problem which can be masked by a weak opposition - if Springborg has indeed gained some cred recently, then one would expect votes which were only reluctantly attached to Labor to drift to the Pineapple side of things.

Reasonable analysis but a couple of obvious points jump out.

1. Do Queenslanders prefer a high profile in your face Premier?
2. Dropping 9% in one fell swoop would indicate some gnawing issue upsetting the voters. e.g. petrol prices
3. Why would all the failings in service delivery suddenly manifest themselves in this poll?