Article: Anna Bligh's seven deadly sins

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Anna Bligh's seven deadly sins

Anna Bligh's seven deadly sins
Article from: The Courier-Mail

Craig Johnstone

June 18, 2008 12:00am

JUST how is Anna Bligh going with this plan of hers to put her personal stamp on the Government, to let Queenslanders know what she stands for?
Well, this week the Premier travelled all the way to New York to discover that a good way of clearing traffic jams is to get a big bulldozer and push all the broken down cars off to the side of the road.

A press release said: "Ms Bligh said tackling urban congestion was a top priority for her Government and she was keen to see if any of the projects or systems in New York could be applied in the Smart State".

She also may have noticed that New York has this thing called a subway, which allows millions of people to get around each day without having to get into a car and contribute to congestion in the first place.

But if there is one thing Bligh has made clear since she took over running the state, it is that she is not about to break any of the bad habits that Queenslanders are known for, like driving their cars too often or living on big blocks of land which encourage urban sprawl.

With the notable and welcome exception of freedom of information reform, the Premier has talked a lot about following her own agenda but her actions suggest an approach not far removed from business as usual.

She wanted us to think the State Budget was all part of this effort to refocus government on things she says matter. In truth it was all about perpetuating the policies of her predecessor, Peter Beattie. How can she be leading the way on climate change when she is tapping coal companies for $3 billion and entrenching a subsidy encouraging petrol use?

Ten months after Bligh took over there is little to distinguish her Government from Beattie's.

Bligh's seven deadly sins are these:

Keeping the dead wood. Her attempt some weeks ago to convince ministers past their prime to announce their exit fell flat. Maybe it was because those about whose futures the premier allowed speculation to flourish were mostly members of the Old Guard faction rather than the AWU. All this did was convince MPs like Judy Spence to dig in their heels. The minister wants at least another term, and is being parachuted into preselection for the new seat of Sunnybank to achieve it. Frustrated, Bligh instead has put a broom through the bureaucracy and told them to pull their finger out.

Not jumping on the blunderers. John Mickel's handling of the Go Card introduction is a train wreck. His ill-disciplined staff got him mired in the so-called "gravy train" affair. And his graceless, bad-tempered efforts to distance himself from it endeared him to no one. Yet he got off lightly.

Not following through. With great fanfare last year, Bligh announced a transit authority to fix public transport in southeast Queensland but has done nothing but talk about roads and car transport ever since. Combine this with Mickel's less-than-stellar performance in the portfolio and suddenly she's battling perceptions the Government does not know what it is doing on transport.

Cuddling up to the developers. The results of March's council elections showed that people are beginning to feel uncomfortable about the breakneck pace of the region's development. Yet Bligh has swallowed the development lobby's schtick about how releasing more land improves housing affordability. The problem is that the market tends to roll right over any artificial mechanism to influence it. Releasing greenfield sites for housing trashes the South East Queensland Regional Plan and hands back influence over the region's growth to property speculators.

Not chancing her arm. She wants to be the go-to woman on federal-state relations but is timid in the face of a strong challenge from Victoria. If anyone has reason to rein back the power of the teacher unions and back some uniform standards in the classroom, it is the premier of a state with consistently low literacy and numeracy rates.

Not muscling up to Lawrence Springborg. Bligh is just as scornful of the Opposition Leader as the rest of her Cabinet, but surely it's time for her to expose the flakiness of his policy stances. Few people will vote for a man who thinks recycled water will change the sex of fish.

Not acting as if she has legitimate right to govern. Most of the above comes down to this single flaw. Sure, she has not yet won an election in her own right but, in 2006, most Queenslanders voted for the Government she now leads. The challenges confronting her are too urgent to wait for permission to confront them.

Craig Johnstone is a senior Courier-Mail writer and

education editor.