Cranky Queenslander

The recent news that the Bligh government has decided we should limit the storage at Wivenhoe dam to 75% of its intended capacity should be all the proof you need that the current government has no idea how to manage anything. Lets take a moment to spell it out so Anna can understand;

Floods happen. It doesn’t matter what you do with Wivenhoe, every so often we are going to have a flood. By all means do things to help lessen the impact, but dumping our water supply shouldn’t be one of them.

Improve infrastructure so when released from Wivenhoe are necessary, they can be carried out immediately and quickly. The reason why we don’t flush the excess water out of Wivenhoe in a big hurry when it does overfill is because we wash out vital road links across the Brisbane river. If we simply put a bridge across where the Moggill ferry now is, and raised colleges crossing a few metres, we could let the excess capacity (that is, over 100%) go more quickly, because there would be less consequences down stream.

Educate the public. Too many people didn’t realise they were going to be completely inundated. Leaders kept saying it was another 1974 flood, but plenty of new home owners and business owners are only in their thirties, so have no idea what that means.  You have flood maps, you have computers, why not just send a letter to every home and business once every five years and tell them what the flood risk is at their property? You waste enough money on other things, this would at least be helpful.

Build some sensible infrastructure. Why did we have ferry terminals that ended up destroyed in the flood? Why did we build river walk and then watch it tear free and float out to sea?  We have plenty of great engineers in this state, lets have them draw up plans for riverside developments that are build to accomodate the occasional flood, so we don’t have to spend millions of dollars replacing them.

Okay, I’ve digressed a little, but the point of this post is to draw attention to the knee jerk reaction to flush our drinking water down the river, because the Premier believes there are enough voters who will think this is a good idea to win votes in the early election she is almost certain to call. It’s all very cynical, and one can only hope when the next election does roll around, we end up with a better government that this one.

Does anyone else find it strange that the Queensland ALP website seems to feature Julia Gillard almost exclusively? Is our state premier that much on the nose she can’t even get a look in?

http://www.qld.alp.org.au/

You really have to wonder how the Queensland labor party expects to win any seats, let alone government at the next state election. One look at the litany of wasteful descisions the Bligh government has taken on water policy should be enough to have you put them last on the ballot paper.

Back when it looked like we would run out of water during one of our worst ever droughts, we were promised a new dam would be built to increase our storage, so when it did eventually rain, we’d capture more of it. Great idea, but a completely bungled process eventually led to the Queensland government wasting by their own estimate $265 million tax payer dollars.

From there, the decision was made to Build a desalination plant on the gold cost. With taxpayer dollars burning a hole in their pockets, the state government blows almost 900 million on a plant that will continue to cost big bucks to run year in year out. Despite being told that the energy input cost of desalination made it a poor choice for our region, they pushed ahead.

Then we have recycled water. This one should have been a slam dunk, but again the government bungles it. They knew they could supply power stations with the recycled water without raising concerns, which means they could get the plant built. Surely the obvious way to demonstrate the viability of pumping the recycled water into the drinking supply would simply be to have the plan operating, and then test it’s output?

At this point, any community concerns could be tested for, and the water shown not to contain whatever contaminant that people worried it might.

Instead, the Bligh government pushed ahead building a pipeline to wivenhoe dam, which they now won’t turn on because they have failed to sell the idea to the public. They arranged for water from the plant to be bottled for handing out to people to prove the water was safe, before parliament had even passed laws making it legal to do so, and eventually they quietly destroyed the bottled product.

All in all, the state government has presided over a ton of waste, and it’s time they were held to account for it.

Anyone who thinks Julia will be able to ensure kids go to school by harassing the local soccer club is living on a planet far far away. This has to be the low point in policy announcements, surely?

For a start, you will have to make some effort to find out what kind of family situation is in effect for each truanting child. Are the parents doing their best to put the kids into school, and are they working with the school? There’s a big difference between a kid left to their own at 7am as the parents shoot through, and the kid who is dropped at the front gate by their parents at 8:20.

If the parents are a big part of the problem, then the intervention should be directed at them. After all, they are their kids, their responsibility, and if they aren’t doing everything they can to ensure their kids get an education, shouldn’t they be on the end of the big stick, not the local footy club?

How exactly are you going to ensure that kids who miss school don’t play footy anyway? Are you going to setup a public register of truant kids and legislate for every footy and netball club to check it before letting kids play on Saturday? Really? You must be joking.

And finally; What about the kids who truant, and who do not play sport. They get a free pass do they?

Honestly, this is a half baked and stupid idea, and Julia will eventually have to wake up to it.

$2000 for people to trade in old cars seems like a poor policy choice to me; Firstly, wouldn’t it be better to simply look at reducing taxes on cars at the very low end of emissions scales?

The other key point is that people with pre 1995 cars generally have them because they can’t afford a new car, and $2000 isn’t going to radically change that financial picture.

This is clearly a throw away policy designed to gain a few votes, but in reality, going to do nothing for the country.

I was just watching ABC News 24, and they featured a report on Refugees.

They had the UN High Commissioner for Refugee’s on, who said;

Every year, about 70,000 refugees are resettled into all the countries that take refugees.

Then, it was said that Australia takes about 13,000 every year.

Then, they trot the UN High Commissioner again, who says our burden is much less than everyone elses.

It baffles me if we are taking 18% of the worlds refugee’s, why anyone thinks we aren’t doing enough.

Facts on refugee intake.

How does the media justify this ridiculous attack on the opposition over industrial relations laws? It seems to me that many in the media have been reading from the Labor party play book, and are recycling this issue on a daily basis because they know a large number of voters aren’t going to see through the scam.

Labor came out on day 1 and said the coalition would reintroduce Workchoices.No matter how many times Tony Abbot and Joe Hockey come out and promise not to do so, the media somehow manage to believe that there is a story to be told around this issue. It’s just crap, to put it plainly, and the media should be ashamed of themselves.

After hammering Tony Abbot to give guarantee after guarantee on the issue, the media then turns their argument on its head, and start saying that because no changes are going to be made, the opposition has no policy for IR! Seriously!

So the reality now, is that the opposition cannot win, because whatever they say, the media will argue the opposite case, even though in the end, the media is arguing against itself!

Kerry Obrien on the 7:30 report last night continued to drive the most stupid point, that changed rules about union secret ballot elections is somehow a change in Industrial Relations laws. Lets be honest about it Kerry, while the law in question may have been shoehorned into the IR package by the Labor party, nobody in their right mind believes that asking Unions to pay for expenses they incur from the taxpayers is in any way related to the working conditions of Australians.

Kerry proved he was just grinding an axe, when after wasting much of the interview waffling on about lawmaking technicalities, he said;

“But the point I’m making has nothing to do with amounts of money, or about making savings, it is, that you are using one act, to change the nature of an aspect of another act, that you are saying you are not going to touch” – Kerry Obrien.

Exactly Kerry; Why are you not talking about things that actually affect voters; Interest Rates, Federal Government debt, standard of living. Why?

If the people of Australia let this issue decide the next election, then we will certainly have got the government we deserve.

The Greens are already deciding how they can upset things after the election, when they are expected to hold the balance of power in the Senate. Andrew Bolt reports that the Greens have said they will insist the mining industry pay much higher taxes going forward, scuttling Julia Gillards compromise deal struck before the election was called.

Now we look to the Labor party to tell us what their plan B. is, in case the Greens manage to get the balance of power and refuse to support plan A.

People or Sardines?

News this morning that two more rickety old boats have turned up overloaded with asylum seekers, and still the Labor party twiddles it thumbs in response.

Just take a look at one of the boats, on which over 40 people were crammed for the ocean journey. Does anyone really believe this is a good thing?

The reality has always been that the people profiting from shipping people like sardines over to Christmas Island should be stopped, before more people are killed.

Seriously dodgy stuff reported by the ABC today. A labour candidate has suggested that Tony Abbott is causing suicides by his own thoughts.

Read more about this grub here: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/07/21/2960486.htm?section=justin