In the wake of the unnecessary firesale of state assets, the Bligh government has continued down its merry path of trashing Labor policy. Last week we had the refusal to take any action over the charges laid against a 19 year old Cairns woman for “procuring an abortion” by using RU486. Now, it seems, we’re going to see Bligh “muscle up” and take on the public sector unions by reneging on a promise made for pay increases of 4.5%, 4% and 4% over the next three years of enterprise bargaining agreements. The government has already been slashing casual and short term employment across departments and state agencies. Tomorrow’s budget is rumoured to contain cuts to public sector superannuation entitlements and we know that it will place a cap of 2.5% on pay increases.
The state election campaign was a shambolic affair, and it was almost lost. Despite an inept performance, Labor was re-elected primarily because the “jobs” theme and the promise to continue to invest in public infrastructure despite the economic crisis touched a chord with voters. Anna Bligh made much of standing up to credit rating agencies.
So why the turnaround? A couple of factors are at work. The first is Bligh’s inability to set her own direction, adopting rather the path of least resistance recommended by right wing apparatchiks in her office. Let one grumpy voter in a focus group whine about debt, and, well, forget the election promises. Secondly, there’s the misplaced obsession with “strength”, driven by the same advisers. This apparently means tossing Labor policy out the window and pursuing supposedly popular brawls with unions.
This mob have an inability to understand that Labor governments always need to pursue a direction contrary to that favoured by the big end of town to be a success. Talk of ‘reforms’ in the context of short-sighted privatisations is quite risible in this context.
Nor is Bligh apparently capable of learning from the past. Wayne Goss’ government was defeated not by the ‘Koala road’, but in large part because years of managerialist lunacy alienated the public sector vote. Similarly, the slashing of services in outer suburban and regional areas and decisions such as the one to close down the QR workshops in Ipswich in the midst of a recession and deep structural economic change had a lot more to do with the rise of One Nation than some innate Queensland redneckism.
Peter Beattie knew all this.
The irony – or rather, one of the many ironies – is that the government and top bureaucrats have recently been pontificating about the need for public sector spending to create demand in a sluggish economy. That seems – insofar as it means anything – only to apply to bricks and mortar and roads and bridges and to completely eschew people’s livelihoods. All ‘Bligh the Builder’ is paving the way for at the moment is her own defeat.
Word!
Sorry, I’ve been watching “The Wire” all evening so I’m all down with the Baltimore gang speak.
Anna Bligh is heading into bizzaro-land. Maybe she needs reminding of the mess that the NSW state government has got itself into by privatising, or trying to privatise everything that isn’t nailed down.
As for the RU486 thing I don’t know what the hell she is thinking.
Yeah, I was trying to work out at what point Queensland re-elected the Nationals too.
For public servants, what is more unhelpful is the impression that we all sit in our offices/cubicles doing no work and get pay and benefits in excess of the market norm to do so, which is hardly the case at all. I’m a IT specialist in the service, and everyone who works in a similar field to mine knows that governments underpay techs. The only real advantages are the QSuper top ups and flexible hours. that’s our trade-off for lower wages, lifestyle. But ask anyone who comments in the MSN and you would get the impression that I was stealing from treasury.
As for Bligh, well … This is how we will remember our first elected female premier, at best a victim of bad advice by her advisers and party. This doesn’t bode well for future female political leaders who will have to fight here legacy at every election for decades to come.
PinkyOz
Aren’t the rising debt and the credit ratings downgrade factors that force Anna Bligh’s hand, even if she had Jim Cairns and Hugo Chavez as her advisors?
Looking around Australian this week, there will be a few state governments drastically reconfiguring their budgets as the days of easy money from property taxes and mining royalties are coming to an end.
Terry, but “fight the power” in this case goes with her campaign promises – ignore the ratings agencies and presumably use the obvious weapon – “the people who rated collections of dodgy mortgages as AAA say we’re not AAA rated any more… woe, that we’re not on the same level as an unemployed former banker with a million dollar mortgage and no income”.
Simply channelling Thatcher is not new or useful.
I doubt there is a single employer in the country paying 4.5 or 4 for three years, in the current environment. 2.5 is the going rate pretty much everywhere.
Bligh explains her thinking, such as it is, on the RU486 thing in that link. But I have to say that Labor policy about such things specifically and Labor culture in general (despite the specifics here) is still something that many of us wishfully believe to be far less patriarchal, sexist and even frankly misogynist than it actually is. There’s a sense shared, I think, by many here that a genuinely enlightened attitude to women is part and parcel of Labor Leftitude, but neither history nor statistics bear that out, despite the facts that (a) one or two official policies here and there are starting to catch up, and (b) every now and then a new female Premier gets handed a poisoned chalice or a messed-up bed to make and lie in.
Oh please, when will you people finally admit your mistakes and stop trying to blame the ‘right wing’ and Thatcherites.
Basically Bligh and Labor said what they needed to get elected. They knew all the unionists and public servants wanted to hear their jobs were essential and that the gravy train would remain unchanged (in spite of the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression!!). You all swallowed it hook, line and sinker.
Anna Bligh was Deputy Premier of Queensland from 2005 to 2007, and has been Premier from 2007. I don’t think she can be said to be the passive victim of others. I’m also pretty sure she would reject such a characterisation.
More generally, what do LP/Labor Left types say when the fiscal indicators turn south? If it is not privatising public assets, moderating public sector wage demands or cutting spending, then presumably it is either (1) raising taxes (which is happening anyway), and/or (2) flipping the bird to the credit markets and saying we don’t care about debt levels.
Having moved to Qld from NSW, I know the dangers of the latter course of action.
Bligh’s problem is that she has to keep the credit rating agencies happy by reducing the debt/deficit. But I don’t believe selling monopolized assets and increasing fuel is the right way to go about it. I support the concept of cutting waste in the public sector. And I note everyone is engaging in it including Obama in the US. But the interesting thing will be to see how the LNP reacts. If they cry foul over the Asset sales and the fuel tax then the onus will be on them to demonstrate how they would fix the budget without increasing the debt.
On the RU486 case, surely you (Mark) can’t expect the government to interfere in a criminal prosecution. That would be a return to Bjelke Petersen and Hinze. It is an entirely a matter for the DPP.
Just to be clear, I think the woman shouldn’t have been charged; now that she has been charged, the charges should be dropped; and that abortion should be decriminalised in Queensland forthwith, unconditionally. But keep the politicians away from the criminal justice process, please.
Good luck with that; the LNP never bothered to explain how they’d pay for things during the election, bar that poorly-scanned flight of fantasy they passed off as a costing document. Labour are stuffing things up pretty fabulously, but they’re unfortunately the best of a dreadful lot.
I would argue that it was both.
My statistical analysis of the 1995 State election showed s strong positive correlation between the size of the anti-Labor swing and the percentages within each electorate of those demographics in which one would expect public sector workers to be concentrated, so it’s very likely that public service grief was a factor pushing Labor close to a tipping point. Then the additional impact of the Koala Road issue pushed Labor past the tipping point.
Sam, the charges in this case are ridiculous. I suspect it will get thrown out anyway. I take the general point, but the Attorney-General always has a power to enter a nulle prosequi bill and quash a prosecution, if it’s contrary to public policy or to the interests of justice.
Having said that, the DPP needs a shakeup, and that’s not a new thing either.
On Terry’s comments – Ken Smith, the Premier’s DG, was running around last week spruiking the benefits of public expenditure as stimulatory, as I noted. If ratings agencies, etc, want belt tightening and privatisation, the government could at least drop the misleading rhetoric and be honest about its backflip – as Beattie would have. If he and Bligh are right, then their own policy is counter-productive and harmful. But the key here, as I’ve said before, is that it’s possible for the states to borrow with fewer constraints through access to the feds’ sovereign debt. Short term falls in state income are neither the end of the world nor an excuse to trash election promises and social justice by doing a quick turn to the right.
And speaking of NSW, let’s not forget that Anna’s chief of staff was Morris Iemma’s chief of staff.
As to the bigger issue, Bligh still doesn’t have legitimacy among many of the right wing ‘boys’ in the party.
Oh, and for the ‘what did you expect’ folk, I’d note again that Beattie’s practice was quite different. Historically, the Queensland ALP has eschewed privatisation and among other things, this decision shows the weakening of the power of the industrial wing of the AWU, which again makes it rather curious, given who has instigated it. The Queensland ALP also used to know something about politics.
Paul @ 13 – that should perhaps have read “not just”, but I thought it was worth emphasising that the Koala Road was not the sole, or even the main cause of the precipitate decline in Labor’s support between 92 and 95. Nor contra Wayne Goss, was it the ‘baseball bats’ waiting for Keating.
C’mon, Mark. We’re used to taking blame down here in the Premier State,* but you can’t expect us to carry the can for Kaiser. He’s a native-born Quincelander, and his politics are from north of the Tweed.
[*As Warhol might have said: in the future, everyone will be Premier for fifteen minutes.]
PinkyOz @ 3 said:
Isn’t there also job security which is worth a lot in times like this. Or does the public service in Queensland force through involuntary redundancies?
Is Bligh stupid or smart?
The jury’s still out, and there’s sense in breaking all your promises as quickly as possible.
This way you are clearing the decks for the next election’s round of promises where any murmurs about what happened two years ago can be put down to ‘exceptional circumstances’.
The election’s over. They can admit the state’s broke now.
The performance of most state governments provides a strong case for at least partly following the US practice of allowing the president to select cabinet members from outside of congress. For example, the hospital system is a clear example of a dept that needs a top class administrator with a track record of sorting out messes. We should ask ourselves which of the current set of ministers would be put in charge of a dept if Anna was not blocked from using the best and brightest?
Anna needs to stop rushing from crisis to crisis and do what she really needs to do. Some hard thinking about where the state needs to go and the creation of a framework on which decisions need to be based.
My experience on 80 hr plus a week commissioning jobs is that these sort of hours seriously affect problem solving skills and create a macho feeling that every one else should be working the same crazy hours. The federal and state goverments are behaving as though long hours are having a serious effect on their quality of thinking. Anna and her ministers need to stop putting all their time into crisis and photo ops and give themselves time to think properly.
“The performance of most state governments provides a strong case for at least partly following the US practice of allowing the president to select cabinet members from outside of congress.”
I’d say the performance of most state governments warrants the removal of state governments. What a waste of money, space and people. As it is local government is starved of funds, but in my area at least has a lot of good ideas. Doing away with state governments entirely, and expanding local governments makes a lot of sense.
Everywhere you look in NSW the state government is giving in to the developer lobby, removing heritage restrictions which are barely adequate anyway, and busily turning Sydney into a developer’s wet dream. You want 15 story apartment blocks in one of the most congested parts of Sydney, putting 600+ extra people onto the roads etc? No problem. Just plant a couple of trees and put a cafe on the ground floor, that’ll keep them happy.
Meanwhile simple and cost affective public transport solution are simply ignored.
State Governments. If they are the answer, I’d hate to see the question.
Go the Borg…
There’s a dilemma here for lefties. ALP politicians assume that our vote is safely in their pocket, which leaves them free to choose policies to target the middlies. Examples include Bligh, Rudd and Obama. (The mirror image is Howard with his middle class welfare.)
So what should we do? Send a message by voting against our natural representatives or vote ALP to keep out the parties of privilege, nutjob-ism, climate destruction and xenophobia.
Or vote green?
So what should we do? Send a message by voting against our natural representatives or vote ALP to keep out the parties of privilege, nutjob-ism, climate destruction and xenophobia…
Why not do neither? The last time I wanted to give the ALP a right thump in the chops, I was forced to preference either ALP or the Liberals. Now I don’t have to. Thank you ECQ for optional preferential voting.
Or vote green?
Unless the Freemarijuana brethren decide to have another run of it, yes. Although I’d be annoyed if they field Drew Hutton – the Perpetual Green Candidate of Brisbane – for South Brisbane. Please – get someone electable.
Mark, I agree with everything you say, except the implicit praise for Beattie. The disastrous state of the State’s treasury has everything to do with Beattie’s (and Mackenroth’s) ineptitude as financial managers. The state-owned enterprises were saddled with debt in the late nineties and early naughties in order to provide ‘dividends’ to government, which was spent on recurrent expenditure. Revenue-raising opportunities passed on by regardless of the policy impact, and profitable enterprises (e.g. retail electricity, TAB, Cairns airport) were exchanged for ongoing loss-makers such as regional hospitals. Noisy or politically dangerous constituencies (e.g. doctors, firefighters) were bought off, while those who could be ignored with political safety (teachers, public servants) were indeed ignored. Infrastructure and services were allowed to deteriorate until suddenly they became crises, at which point Beattie would don his grave face, express contrition at not having noticed all the warning signs, and make the crisis de jour the No. 1 priority. When the realisation dawned that even the Queensland electorate had realised the shark had been jumped, he quit. The Rudd regime’s tactic of letting everyone know how tough the decisions will be, and then announcing a weasely set of feel-good decisions that offend no-one is straight out of the Beattie playbook.
Queensland’s debt-laden low-service low-infrastructure poorly planned status quo is Beattie’s legacy of boom times squandered. And for what? Will Labor supporters do you suppose fondly remember the Beattie government’s obsessive secrecy, outsourcing civil liberties and police powers to the Queensland Police Union, elevation of cronies and placemen to the senior ranks of the public service and statutory authorities, cuddling up to the developer lobby (strangely no longer referred to as the ‘white shoe brigade’) and elevation of spin over substance (e.g. ‘Smart State’ numberplates while education indicators stayed at the bottom of the Australian states’ comparison tables)? He gets ticks for some of the environmental decisions, but these were after all direct payoffs for green votes.
Premiers are already allowed to appoint non-elected persons to their cabinets.
I’m glad that someone mentioned the former Premier of Queensland, as I was otherwise starting to think the problem was that poor Anna had been led into the dark woods by (1) a nameless patriarchal hierarchy at the top of the Qld ALP, or (2) demonic NSWelshmen who could fool a poor, innocent Queenslander. I was thinking that maybe she should have taken a loaf of bread on her journey, so that she could leave a trail of breadcrumbs in order to find her way back to the feminist friendly heartland of good-natured Qld ALP folk.
I think that Anna and her team may be “doing a Gordon”, based on the ongoing slow political death of the British PM. Having found that the Government failed to plan for an economic downturn when he was in charge of the finances, the next steps are:
1. To proclaim that only Labour can be trusted to “invest” in the public sector, and the evil Tories will make cuts and sack public servants;
2. Proceed to make cuts and sack public servants anyway;
3. Insist that you are doping it in a “Labour” way, and that the evil Tories …
Continue for as long as the electorate lets you, which may be a matter of weeks for Gordon, but longer for Anna & Co.
Costello is gone.
http://www.petercostello.com.au/press/costello-announces-he-will-not-renominate
Is Anna Bligh ever wrong well lets go on a spending spree which is great for the state until it comes time to pay it back but i get the impression Anna doesn’t take any blame for whats happening so lets blame the world economy but not Anna lets go build another useless dam & disrupt a lot of peoples lives & waste that money again but Anna’s not at fault she’s the boss so blame everyone else for the big mess she’s got us into so she says now all Queenslanders have to make sacrifices but i bet she wont be sacrificing a darn thing
Golly. did someone link this post at the courier mail? I’m slightly out of breath.
Re Chris @18, it is a bit of a bonus, but you can still be shunted off to woop-woop or experience an unexpected role shift at fairly short notice, with your alternate option being to quit. That said, the main culprit in public sector job loss is the way people are kept on temporary status for as long as possible (often >5 years). Policy was changed recently to allow long-term temps to ‘graduate’ to permanency, but there’s no guarantee the policy will remain.
The only problem I have with PS job cuts, mind you, is the way they’re applied across the board. A lot of departments (and more importantly subgroups within departments) are actually understaffed, but still have to meet the same targets as the puffed-up areas. Don’t really care about super cuts; as a young worker I don’t expect to ever see that money again anyway :/
A short while back Mark was celebrating the Anna Heterogeneity.
Now he laments the ALP hegemony.
Talk about running hot and cold with a vengeance.
I find his phraseology to be eerily reminiscent of another amateur psephologist:
Compare this to Jack Strocchi Jun 3rd, 2009 at 10:11 am earlier commentary on the same ALP tendency:
I dont think Mark is intentionally quoting without attribution. Just channeling thought streams from the Strocchiverse. It happens to the best of us.
@26 – Hal9000, yep, Peter Beattie looks good largely in retrospect, and though my assessment of him is somewhat more positive than yours, you make some good points. He had to leave largely because his bag of political tricks had well and truly passed its use by date, but at least – while on top of his game – he was a very useful politician. I don’t think Anna is a natural at politics per se, and some of her advisers? Well, let’s just ponder the whole “Mark Latham would have won if only he’d kept to the micro-managed script for the election” claim…
@28 – Terry:
I’m not sure there’s even much pretence at 3, except for a bit of window dressing. The difference is surely that while Brown may have made a few Keynesian noises, Bligh went to – and won – the election on a platform people had no problem recognising as Labor. And now?
Oh no, that’s not the Qld ALP! As I’m sure you’re aware! However, it is worth pointing out:
(a) there are distinctly different traditions in the Qld and NSW ALP – the Split or lack thereof respectively is part of that – but Bligh invoked one of them herself when she started going on about state butchers’ shops…
(b) Where Bligh really disappoints me is that she seems to have fallen for the whole “Queenslanders like tough leadership” blah she’s being fed.
I would also observe that the economic issues are far from insurmountable. I do think there’s both a failure of nerve and an over-reliance on short term “beat the opposition in each news cycle” stuff. It doesn’t necessarily bode well for the future.
Then, there’s also the fact that “Ministerial renewal” also implies the elevation of a number of Ministers without much of an independent powerbase as well as without much experience.
I notice Palmer has declared that he’ll drop the defamation charges (but omitted the cheap and nasty asset sale that will be the bargaining chip). Maybe Clive is getting a cheap forestry to demolish and his very own coal train for his new project? Call me crazy but I think Clive has bought the first elected woman Premier and Treasurer with the eternal comb-over…and in record time.
Chris @ 18
It’s true that there is a relative advantage in job security for public servants, but I have seen my fair share of “Temporary” staff, unusual contracting arrangements and outsourcing projects to know better then to think that the public service is a bullet-proof recession job choice. Watch this space, as to say.
PinkyOz
And, again as I noted, PinkyOz, they’re the ones being pushed out the door at the moment and little hints are being given to permanent staff through some agencies and functions being identified as “protected”. Note that this was PRECISELY the LNP policy except without the “efficiency dividend” moniker which Anna et al thought was an election winning gimme to Labor.
Somehow, I doubt that the QPSU, QTU, QNU, etc. will be running an active campaign for Bligh’s re-election next time around. That “lesser of two evils” thing only works for so long.
Nice post Mark. If voters wanted a government that would privatise profitable assets and focus on the short-term credit rating, they could have voted conservative. The Bligh Government has been very dishonest with the Queensland public.
The funny thing, Al, is I strongly suspect the Nats wouldn’t have gone down the privatisation route (though it would have depended a lot on the relative balance of power within an LNP cabinet and party room). I think they’re well aware of the sort of arguments I was making in the earlier linked post about the necessity of cross-subsidy in Queensland for rail given the geographical extent of the state and the relatively broad dispersion of population.
I’d suspect Mark is correct there. Their permanent fear of constant irrelevance (well founded as it is) would preclude them. They’d be terrified to do so.
Check out the cartoon.
You are right Adrian@22. We would be a lot better off if the state governments disappeared and the state duties split between the federal government and Brisbane city council size regional councils. We are talking about areas with budgets a bit larger than the Tassie budget so perhaps Tassie could be rebadged as a regional council.
JohnD at the risk of going against the popular get rid of state governments meme, I actually see that as far too clunky a path for reform. I would suggest the idea (as others have done here recently) an upper house in QLD comprised of regional reps (such as mayors etc) would would be elected to the house of review thus ‘getting rid’ of a whole non-constitutional tier of government and creating a house of review without having to elect more politicians. Or possibly ‘super committee systems’ made up of what would have once been local government. With their own chair etc analysing the legislation through the state parliament. Removing state governments is an idea paralysed by the constitution itself and for a reason. Our forefathers were quite visionary.
Mark,
I’m not trying to go over old points, I’m just trying to give an on the ground picture. What we are experiencing is difficulty keeping anyone on for projects and short term work, and a huge spike in permanent applications. We are seeing increased use of contractors to fill temporary positions that are just unfulfillable and a lot of temporary positions that should have gone permanent by now are being knocked back, most of which is counterproductive and probably expensive.
Working for the public service just isn’t what it was 30 years ago. I’m not saying that this budget will include the big ‘O’ word but watch the next two, there may be a couple of branches that may be facing privatisation at some point, especially in departments perceived to be more bureaucratic then service delivery.
PinkyOz
PinkyOz @ 43 – presumably one of the reasons there’s the growth in contractors and outsourcing is because its so hard to make people redundant in the public service – and voluntary redundancy is one of the worst ways to reduce your workforce (except where people working there are really just generic cogs in the machine which I’d imagine is fairly rare). With contractors and outsourcing its quite simple with no bad newspaper headlines.
Pedro @ 42: The states are an anachronism that was forced on us at federation. Brisbane is closer to Launceston than it is to significant parts of Qld. My northern NSW rellies come to Qld for serious medical treatment becuase everything north of coffs harbour is closer to brisbane than it is to sydney. On the same theme, NSW is still stuffed even though people from large tracts of the state go to Adelaide, Melbourne or Brisbane if they need capital city type services.
An upper house might protect us from the worst excesses of single house parliaments provided it uses a Senate style proportional preference system but you’ve got be joking if you think a house of Mayors would provide protection.
re anna and abortion
the young woman obtained misoprostol, a drug used in conjunction with ru486 for medical abortion. misoprostol can also be safely used alone for medical abortion however is less effective than ru486 and has a few extra side effects. It is regularly used in south america and other countries where abortion is not legal…
as has been pointed out the charges are not about illegal importation but unlawful abortion – according to the qld criminal code abortion is only lawful if it is to save the mother’s life.
the prosecution of this young woman is outrageous and makes a lie of the claims of many pollies over the years that criminal code sections on abortion are effectively redundant so why rock the boat by pushing decrimalisation. as caroline de costa has pointed this case demonstrates that current abortion laws can and will be used to prosecute women and their doctors.
anna has said for many years that she is pro-choice. how can you be a pro-choice but as premier take no action to ensure no more women and their doctors will be at risk of criminal charges. the majority of qlders and australians support the legalisation of abortion so it would not be a vote loser…
anna is now using the
Forgive the failing memory of an ex-ALP member, but didn’t the Goss government re-form after the Koala debacle with support from the Independent Peter Wellington up at Nambour? Only then did it show how pathetically weak and inept it really was by caving in to the green bobby in Redlands, a seat that had lost anyway, and abandoning the “Koala Track” in favour of the disasterous widening of the existing Pacific Highway link between the Gold Coast and Brisbane. One stupid decision then followed on another. The PSMC “reforms” under the genius of Rudd, Coldrake and Forster (more recently of the QH Inquiry)will go down in the annals of politics as the greatest stuff up of the century. Now we have a PS that can be 100% politicised by any new government immediately it comes to power. No need to wait around for senior PS people to resign from some gullarg at Petrie Terrace. Halleluah comrades, brothers and sisters! Labor can stay in government FOREVER in Queensland and the voters wouldn’t even notice the difference.
No, Harry. Wellington wasn’t elected until 1998. Goss survived for six months with a bare majority until the courts ordered a re-election in Mundingburra, on account of some votes from soldiers serving in Somalia weren’t counted. Frank Tanti won the re-election for the Liberal Party. Liz Cunningham then had the balance of power and decided for Borbidge. The Borbidge government decided on the widening of the Pacific Highway.
Selling the state out, setting up mega-tribunals to rubber stamp and fast-track developments. Anna Bjelke-Petersen has made the transition to the LNP without anyone noticing.
[•$9.3 million for a new geothermal power station at Birdsville and for mapping potential geothermal sites closer to the coast]
Undoubtedly the highlight of what I thought was a pretty fair budget overall.
http://www.budget.qld.gov.au/budget-papers/budget-highlights.shtml
How corrupt is Queensland?
The Premier and Chief Judge take bribes.
Premier Bligh now has over 100,000 people locked up in her mental hospital jails without trial or even a fair hearing.
Property Developers and other businesses only have to pay and Premier Bligh, through the Mental Health Act, sends the Police out to arrest people and lock them in her mental jails. Then through the appointment of an administrator their property is sold to the greedy property developer at bargain basement prices.
Political activists and people aggrieved by injustices are being removed from society and disappeared this way too. Where someone is High Profile the alternative option of the Courts are used. The property is seized using the corrupt legal system and the victim is made to look like a criminal in the media. Court costs and legal fees does this job well for the Premier and her corrupt bunch of cronies.
Well if you want to take it up with her personally, and you’re quick, and have $35 you’re prepared to stump up for the privelage ( cash for contact?), there’ll be a
Community Business Breakfast, Wednesday 2nd December, 7.00am for a 7.30am start to 9.00am, @ Era Bistro, 102 Melbourne Street, South Brisbane
“Be part of this special opportunity for an up close and personal breakfast featuring:
The Hon Premier Anna Bligh & Local State Member for South Brisbane
The Premier will present a broad brush picture of all the big community issues from the State perspective: affordable housing, public transport, health, disability care, child care etc.”
You might even get fed, a bit.
RSVP Details
Credit $35 to:
mecu Breakfast Account
BSB: 803 140 Acc No: 23152533
Referencing your name and sending a confirmation email to
michelle.ennis@mecu.com.au
Or drop payment in to mecu Limited at 4/12 Browning Street, West End.
Please phone Michelle Ennis on 3327 5814 with any queries.
Bligh has to go. She has sold out unions big time and has become arrogant and power obsessed. I am a unionist and have never ever voted conservative. I am in the teachers’ union and Bligh does not understand the high level of contempt teachers have for her government. Teachers generally vote ALP but I detect a massive swing away from them. Public service anger cost Goss. It will also cost Bligh. I will vote any way I need to to get rid of the Bligh government, LNP if need be. She is selling assets, banning teachers from striking and abusing unions. She has alienated so many and people will not forget.
However, abortion law should be tightened and doctors performing abortions should be charged. Abortion is not a just act.