Cranky Queenslander

Once again the Queensland taxpayer is being robbed blind by a high tax state government.

Anna Bligh’s plan to sell Queensland Motorways is just the latest con job our long standing labor leaders will force on us.

Surely a toll road should be publicly owned, with a view to removing the tolls once the cost of the road has been recouped?

Once these important transport links are sold off, we can expect even higher tolls, and to be paying them forever.

It’s high time things changed in Queensland. If we keep running the show this way, selling off all our assets, then we will end up broke. How will they fix the hospitals then?

News out this week that our esteemed leaders in Canberra never really intended to scrap the Goodna Bypass should come as no surprise; Prime Minister Rudd has always been a man ready to say what needs to be said to get the votes, and worry about the doing later; But I think the important points have been missed completely or reported backwards by Channel 9;

First of all, there was NOT massive opposition to the bypass, and it was NOT the reason Shayne Neumann was elected; Polls conducted prior to the election in the area showed a majority supported the bypass, and anyone who has driven that corridor in the last 2 years will know why that is the case.

Even that’s not the big question in my mind; To me, the real question is, if you believe the bypass is going to be necessary, why on earth are you spending so much money massively upgrading a road that will later be bypassed?  It makes no sense at all, and you have to wonder what would motivate anyone to spend $2 BILLION upgrading a road you are going to replace.

Okay, $700 million of that is for the Wacol to Darra stretch, but still, it’s a lot of money for a road nobody will travel on when the bypass is put through.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out at the next federal election; Surely the folks who don’t want the bypass are going to be cranky, and the ones that did, equally so?

Listening to the continuing CPRS debate in federal parliament today, I am still baffled that so many people seem to be accepting the Labor party’s line on the subject. To me, it seems pretty obvious we need to do things that will reduce our carbon emissions.

So why is the Labor party hell bent on imposing a new tax, instead of reducing emissions? Take labor man John Quiggin for a great example of what I am talking about;

“More generally, since the opposition plan amounts to picking some winners, and throwing public money at them, it’s obvious from first principles that it must be more expensive than the government’s ETS.”

Not to me John; The governments proposed scheme levies a huge new tax, and also guarantees to give all the tax money back in compensation. It’s obvious to me that means a nett zero effect on the economy, and will mean a zero impact on emissions;

As I understand it, the opposition are suggesting we actually spend some money on projects and technologies that will actually reduce emissions. That seems like the way to go to me, lets see some government initiatives in Solar, Wind, Tidal, Nuclear and other low/non carbon emitting technologies. How about we do something about increasing the range of electric vehicles?

Seems simple enough to me, so get yourselves into the comments and tell me why I’m wrong. (or that I’m right, either way is good!)

I think it’s fair to say the federal Labor government have over the 12-18 months, lost all credibility they had as a progressive socialist government. They have consistently professed a desire to redistribute the countries riches more equitably to those lower down the societal ladder, but the evidence is now pouring to disprove that.

Labor’s Building the Education Revolution program is providing ample evidence that Labor is pouring money in the union dominated construction sector by approving construction at massively inflated prices.

The Herald Sun reports on one such example, brought to light by the school’s principal, who must have had the silly idea he could save a whopping $140,000 by getting the work done by contractors other than those appointed by the government.

Interestingly, this is the same school where the principal earlier this year refused to allow the feds to fund a $3 million gym, because the school already had one!

I wish more school principals had the guts to check what was going on at their schools and call the government out for the complete waste of money it is perpetrating. The real irony here is the kids it claims will get a better education because of it will certainly need one, because they’ll be paying back the debt for years to come.

Carole Park residents on Sinclair Drive have been suffering with increasing noise levels since bushfires in 2003 burnt down the noise barrier that was erected to mitigate the growing noise levels from the Centenary Freeway.

As the traffic level of the freeway has increased, so has the noise, and finally residents get upset enough to start writing to their local representatives. You’d think they’d rush to organise a team to go out and repair the barrier upon having this pointed out.

No. Instead of actually fixing the problem, State Member Anna Palaszczuk and Councillor Milton Dick have come together to hold an information night. I’m not making this up. Seriously. An information night? What kind of information do these people need? They know the barrier is gone, they know the noise is hard to live with, how about you just repair the barrier?

This Cranky Queenslander wonders how much of this crap has to go on before people will stop voting for these fools.

Place your bets folks. VivaJet is set to launch in November, targeting the business traveller with a "non budget" offering that is sure to please. At least, the backers hope it will please more than OzJet’s offering in 2005 did.

I think it’s rather interesting that the expert editors of Wikipedia suggest that OzJet’s failure was in part due to launching a business class service right before Christmas (when business travel typically is at a low ebb), and VivaJet is set to launch….right before Christmas.

We’ll just have to wait and see what happens, but personally, I’d rather someone tried to find a better way to get me to the airport. It costs me more to take a tax to the airport than it does to fly to Sydney a lot of the time!

Cool headline, but I am beginning to suspect this is nothing new. I was talking to a source the other day who told me that plans were approved and the deal was done for construction of a the southern hemisphere’s longest transport tunnel linking the airport with the western suburbs.

The story goes that everything is done, except the public announcement. So I headed home to do a little research before posting this awesome news;

Seems that our good friend Campbell Newman has been planning for a tunnel link between the airport and the North/South Bypass Tunnel for some time, and as early as April last year bidding was underway for the project.

So, perhaps my source was just ill informed, or in fact the deal has been done, and we are in the dark. The Brisbane City Council website has nothing up to date on the project, so the latter could well be true.

In any event, I support Campbell’s efforts to improve Brisbane infrastructure, and think the more traffic we can shove underground, the nicer the city of Brisbane will become. 

Further to yesterdays article about the Ipswich Motorway fiasco, a footnote to this story is that Paul Tully, often quoted but rarely relevant local councillor, was quoted as saying his office has received no complaints from locals regarding the Rudd governments plans for the motorway.

Firstly, that’s because you have virtually nothing to do with it Paul. The road is a federal road, and under current agreements, is built, upgraded or maintained by the state government using federal money. The local council has little to do with it.

But more importantly, I think it’s time locals DID write to Paul and tell him what a crock this upgrade really is. He obviously doesn’t read the paper or watch the news too often, or else he would know that most people were in favour of the bypass.

Just for the record, I’ll tell you why that’s the case. Building the bypass would have resulted in almost no disruption to the existing road while it was constructed. Once built, it would have taken most of the traffic off the existing stretch it bypassed, allowing upgrade works to be done on it much more easily if still required.

Okay Paul, your turn. Give it to me in the comments

I came across this article in the courier mail, and after reading it through twice, and recalling the labor party rhetoric of the last election, I thought it was a bit of a beat up. The labor party never promised to upgrade the whole Ipswich motorway did they?

So I went looking, and found the new member for Blair Shayne Neumann’s maiden speech to parliament. I did a quick scan for any mention of the motorway, and I found this;

Nevertheless, for many years now, the missing link for Ipswich and its surrounds has been federal funding. The most obvious example of the financial neglect by the previous coalition government has been the Ipswich Motorway, linking Ipswich with Brisbane. This four-lane national highway is at its capacity…….

….my Liberal predecessor opposed the full upgrade of the motorway from Ipswich to Brisbane, instead wasting years by running interference on this vital issue. We will fix the Ipswich Motorway. We will fully upgrade the Ipswich Motorway to six lanes and build a network of service roads to take intersuburban traffic off the motorway.

So the courier mail appears to have it right on; One of the very first things Shayne did as the member for Blair was promise this very thing, a FULL upgrade of the motorway, not just the Dinmore to Goodna stretch.

Was Shayne lying when he said that in parliament, or does he just not know where the Ipswich Motorway goes? I have heard stories locally of other clueless incidents, so perhaps its the latter. Either way, he needs to come out and apologise and make this right.

I also can’t seem to find a website with all his speeches and what not… anyone know where I should be looking?

I was flipping through my "Road Ahead" the other day, and game across a smaller article on page 58 by Jon Dee, the founder and chairman of Planet Ark. In it he talks about the prospects for moving to hydrogen to power our cars and other transport options.

He restates what everyone knows; That to get there we need someone to push out hydrogen refuelling infrastructure, and we need a clean source of hydrogen. He goes on to point out that the University of NSW has developed a solar powered system for generating hydrogen from sea water.

In fact, the University has been saying this for a while, I found a press release from 2004 about it.

We also have the team over at Hydrexia, who are working to improve on our storage techniques for hydrogen.

It could be a technology that not only free’s us from the shackles of the oil industry, but if we get there first, could be a big winner for Australia’s economy. It could be, if we would fund it properly.

Sadly, nobody at the top is listening, which is why today I am writing to the Federal Environment minister to get his excuses for why there has been no announcement on developing hydrogen as a fuel since he got the job. You never know, we might get lucky.