Des Houghton: This is the Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry we really need
Everything Labor touched in the past nine years turned to garbage and will likely leaving our children’s children footing the bill, writes Des Houghton.
Des Houghton
Don't miss out on the headlines from Des Houghton. Followed categories will be added to My News.
I’ve changed my mind. I am now in favour of a Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry.
But it is not the truth-telling inquiry you imagine. The one I propose would be a commission of inquiry to subpoena witnesses to chronicle the atrocious lies and misinformation pumped out by the ALP and the unions at the last election.
Revelations of costly union featherbedding, monumental budget blowouts, cronyism and a culture of cover-up will shame Queensland ALP for generations.
Is there a more shocking example of snouts-in-the-trough inequity than the paltry pay to nurses while CFMEU stop-go lollipop workers got three times as much on government projects?
Billion-dollar blowouts on the cost of pumped hydro, the (fanciful?) CopperString project, Olympic Games venues, Cross River Rail, the Coomera Connector, hospital upgrades, Gold Coast light rail and the Cairns marina will leave our children’s children paying for Labor’s blunders.
Everything Labor touched in the last nine years turned to shite.
The Palaszczuk-Miles government continued to spend and borrow, despite its supertax on coal companies that funnelled an extra $25.9bn into state coffers in two years.
It could have been worse, I suppose. Remember Labor wanted to introduce free school lunches, state-owned petrol stations, a state-owned energy retailer and medical clinics to compete against the private sector.
Cameron Dick’s staggering incompetence makes him in my opinion the worst Treasurer in the history of Queensland. Competent state treasurers like Thomas Hiley, Gordon Chalk, Bill Knox, Llew Edwards, Russell Cooper, David Hamill and Keith De Lacy would be aghast at Dick’s ineptitude that sent our debt spiralling out of control – even with the royalties bonanza.
Does Cameron Dick realise how comical he now looks when he bobs up like a jack-in-the box on the TV news to blame the LNP?
The Labor Party not only lost the October election; it has lost its credibility.
Another failed Labor minister who is contorting facts to fit her socialistic ideological prejudices is Grace Grace. She held the portfolios of education, industrial relations, state development and infrastructure in the last government and made a hash of them.
Now she has the temerity to criticise the make-up of the Crisafulli government’s Brisbane Olympic Games Infrastructure and Co-ordination Authority, which has the task to sort out the mess left by Steven Miles and Annastacia Palaszczuk.
Labor is doomed while Miles and Grace hang around to remind Queenslanders of the party’s failures. They should retire soon to give the party a chance to regenerate.
In a solid speech this week Treasurer David Janetzki, warned key projects “have been set back years” because of Labor mismanagement.
Janetzki said Treasury modelling showed the deal with the CFMEU would increase the costs of government infrastructure projects by up to 25 per cent, with up to $17.1bn in additional costs between 2024 and 2030.
“We must walk the tightrope,” he said. “We have inherited a weakened position, following the flagrant spending and debt settings of the previous government.”
New figures showing a blowout in the social housing waiting list were another blow to Labor’s credibility.
Sam O’Connor, newly minted Minister for Housing and Public Works, says 47,820 Queenslanders are now waiting for social housing due to Labor’s lack of inertia to build homes.
O’Connor said the waiting list grew by 11 per cent in just one year under Labor. “An additional 20 people per day were added to the social housing waitlist every single day in the September quarter,” he said.
“In the final months of the former government, 1,800 additional Queenslanders were added to the waitlist every day.”
O’Connor also wants to quickly build 10 new shelters for vulnerable women and children escaping family violence.
Time to probe the toll of Covid
There is a second Truth Telling and Healing inquiry needed. It should probe the economic and human toll of the Covid pandemic and Queensland’s response to it.
This will help us prepare for the next one, likely to be a bird flu virus accompanied by a grim reaper who will cut down a third of earth’s population.
The federal government Covid inquiry was a Clayton’s inquiry that failed to explore the overreach and human rights abuses when Queensland became a police state.
This week there was a Covid story out of America that I thought was highly significant. But it raised barely a flicker of interest.
A two-year study by the United States Congress found the deadly virus was not zoonotic in origin. That means it was not spread from animals to humans at a wet market in Wuhan as originally believed.
The US panel examined all the evidence and backed the theory that the coronavirus “likely emerged because of a laboratory or research related accident”.
It found the virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature.
In many states including ours, honesty and integrity went out the window when the virus was used as a political weapon. Labor refused to disclose the medical advice it received to justify the lockdowns. I will never forgive nor forget the sight of little children stopped from being reunited with their mothers, or the grieving loved ones blocked from attending family funerals.
The pain of Covid persists, as Brisbane’s Helen Morgan, 41, reminded me this week. She has had Covid three times and suffers long Covid.
The mother of three was admitted to Wesley Hospital suffering debilitating symptoms of fatigue, accelerated heart rate, brain fog and numbness in her hands and feet. Before the virus attacked, she was active and running 5km a day.
Morgan said she found relief at the Wesley Hyperbaric clinic and was one of the first patients treated at the facility she “never knew existed”.
“I’d known hyperbaric chambers had been used over the years to treat divers with oxygen for decompression illness, but I now consider myself to be extremely lucky to have found this pathway to getting back my quality of life.”
Morgan has had 10 of the 90-minute hyperbaric oxygen treatments or “dives”, where patients are put in a chamber where the pressure is increased up to two times higher than normal, allowing them to breathe pure, 100 per cent oxygen.
“In just two weeks, the results have been amazing. I honestly haven’t felt this good for years.
“I’m so grateful they found a spot for me,”
Wesley Hyperbaric medical director Susannah Sherlock said two patients a week with long Covid were now being referred to the clinic.
The results were promising, she said.
Irritant
Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen who refuses to admit that renewables will simply not deliver enough power to keep industry humming and our lights on.
Former public servant’s bombshell claim about ‘blocked’ Palaszczuk probe
A former senior government worker claims he was blocked from investigating Annastacia Palaszczuk and senior ministers, and that some of the people who protected them are still public servants.
Gender wars: New call for suspended psychiatrist to be reinstated
A fellow of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists has called on Queensland Health to reinstate a suspended psychiatrist, saying she was the target of a political campaign by gender activists.