Editorial: Palaszczuk is putting one job first - her own

As a scheme that targets desperate Queensland jobseekers continues to operate despite criticisms, it appears our Premier is more interested in protecting her own job than helping others find work, writes The Editor.

Queensland Labor’s modern creation myth is one of proud corruption busting, cleaning up after the Fitzgerald Inquiry and shining cleansing light into what had become dank, dark and dangerous corners of our state.

What a terrible shame it is then that the Palaszczuk government has seemed more intent on cloaking itself from scrutiny than ­taking responsibility for cynical twisting of a system that is hurting some of our most desperate.

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Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s shambolic attempts last week to ram through laws that would have gagged the media from reporting corruption allegations to watchdog the Crime and Corruption Commission during election periods were bizarre, inept and heavy handed.

Not just were the laws an outrageous attack on free speech and counter-productive, they were also in direct contradiction to what she herself previously said about protecting whistleblowers.

Does it really need repeating that the pre-Fitzgerald corruption gripping Queensland was only cleaned up after brave and relentless investigative journalism by The Sunday Mail and The Courier-Mail? That whistleblowers need to be heard and that the media should not be muzzled when reporting inconvenient truth?

Apparently it does.

While Ms Palaszczuk was trying to force through the legislation – thankfully aborted – there were real abuses occurring on her watch.

Our award-winning reporter Kelmeny Fraser has exposed a scheme where false hope is being held out to jobseekers, funnelled into unnecessary training in exchange for fat government payments to job agencies and middlemen.

Some operators involved in herding the jobless toward training courses have become so brazen that they are now hijacking jobseeker applications by cutting and pasting adverts for real jobs and claiming them as their own.

The state government must order an independent inquiry, like it did after we revealed tow truck industry abuses. Instead, it appears Ms Palaszczuk and her Labor cohort last week were more focused on building a self-serving blanket under which they could hide in the run-up to election. With COVID crushing the economy, vulnerable jobseekers need to be protected.

Ms Palaszczuk appears to be more interested in protecting her own job than helping desperate Queenslanders find work.

BRAVE SOPHIE PUTS HER LIFE ON THE LINE

COURAGEOUS Queenslander Sophie Rose plans to stand at the very frontline of the battle against COVID-19.

The researcher, now based in Oxford, has launched a campaign for human challenge trials in a bid to speed up a vaccine.

Australian woman Sophie Rose wants to join human challenge trial for COVID-19 vaccine

Under the proposed trials, volunteers would receive a vaccine before being dosed with live coronavirus while they are monitored under strict laboratory conditions.

But more than just pushing for the trials, Ms Rose has volunteered to be a vaccine guinea pig herself.

The challenge trials concept is bold and has critics. Even key figures in the promising Oxford vaccine study are split over whether to use them. Given it is a potentially life-threatening experiment, it’s not surprising it is controversial.

But there’s also no doubting the selflessness of Ms Rose for putting her own hand up for the tests that, she argues, could help end or at least mitigate the greatest disaster the world has faced in generations.