27/10/2024
Now, it’s time for the LNP to deliver for all of Queensland. Clearly regional voters hit the Miles Labor government between the eyes.
Successive governments have pandered to the South-Eastern corner of the State for decades, bribing city voters with socialist carrots. For example, the whole idea of almost-free public transport for city-dwellers when the government has failed to provide decent roads for the rest of the State was obscene. The Labor faithful also loved the promise of free lunches from the State for school children, paid by taxpayers. Posed as a ‘cost-of-living’ relief measure, it was just another socialist gimmick to get more people dependent on the State instead of providing an economic environment in which people can provide for themselves.
In Nanango, one of the forgotten regional seats, there can be no more excuses. As, potentially, a senior minister in the incoming government, our local Member can no longer hide behind the curtain of ‘being in Opposition’.
There can now be no more excuses for a white-elephant hospital which cannot even do the most minor medical procedures, and in which doctors reportedly cannot even recognise a cattle tick. Third World stuff.
There can now be no more excuses for the narrow, broken-edged roads which we need to drive over every day competing with dog trailers, buses, and other heavy vehicles. It is time for the incoming government to assert itself and start putting city bureaucrats in their place. Country electorates must start receiving their fair share of the budget cake or voters will oust the LNP once again in four years’ time. Contrary to what a lot of our politicians seem to think, Queensland is not just Noosa to the NSW border.
Nor can there be any more excuses for burdening ratepayers with ‘dam upgrades’ for hypothetical flood events that some city bureaucrat has invented to transfer costs from the State to local ratepayers. Let’s take that cost and put it right back where it belongs – on the State government. It was just another way of penalising regional voters and favouring the seats Labor thought they needed to hold to stay in power. Imagine the backlash if the ratepayers in a city electorate were suddenly asked to pay mega-millions for some project that would do absolutely nothing to improve or upgrade their local water supply! Water for whatever purpose, be it for human consumption or for agriculture or industry, is a State responsibility, and should not be put on the shoulders of local Councils.
And there can now be no more excuses for all the other projects that being in Opposition supposedly prevented our sitting Member from achieving. I’d list them from her own words, but the Member has seemingly blocked me from her page, and demonstrated again a complete lack of transparency and accountability to those who live in her own electorate.
This election has shown that regional voters want a greater say in how we are governed and the local outcome suggests that most Nanango voters seemed to think the only answer was the LNP. Considering how ineffective our Member has been in the twelve-odd years she has been the Member for Nanango, it does not make much sense, but now the LNP has secured government, she and the LNP must deliver and start listening to regional Queenslanders.
Dozens of dams need to be upgraded across Queensland at a cost of more than $3 billion, prompting calls for the next state government to offer financial support.
