Opinion: Leadership the worst of Qld, Australia’s many crises

The nation and its states are battling a leadership crisis, poorly served by a mediocre bunch of also-rans, writes Mike O’Connor.

Housing crisis, cost-of-living crisis, climate crisis, infrastructure crisis, youth crime crisis, hospital crisis, aged care crisis … pick a crisis, any crisis, we’ve got plenty.

Sadly, what we really have is a leadership crisis, with the nation and its states poorly served by a mediocre bunch of also-rans who would be hard pressed to organise a beer in a brewery.

The Oxford Dictionary defines crisis as a time of great disagreement, confusion or suffering, which pretty well covers the present situation.

Politicians love to declare a crisis because it suggests that rather than being the inevitable result of their fumbling, bumbling ineptitude it was an unforeseeable misfortune which suddenly descended upon their unsuspecting heads like a plague of locusts.

Housing crisis? It’s not hard to work out that if you bring in 500,000 migrants a year then they are going to put significant upward pressure on rents, housing prices and supply while increasing demand for health services, schooling and public transport.

The Queensland government’s solution is its Housing Investment Fund launched in 2021 which promised the construction of 3600 homes. So how’s that going? According to the Opposition by this time next year, 34 homes will have been built.

Densification is the new buzzword. This means destroying the lifestyle and amenity of existing residents and cramming as many people as possible into a suburb until there is standing room only in the name of solving the housing crisis.

People who exercise their democratic right to complain about this are accused by developers, salivating at the prospect of the money to be made by trashing existing planning regulations, of NIMBY-ism.

The latest stage government proposal – to subdivide 600sq m blocks into 200sq m blocks in Redland City and squeeze an extra 250,000 people into the area when the regional plan calls for an increase of only 50,300 residents by 2046 – is a perfect example of shortsighted government decisions driven by panic and an absolute lack of intelligent initiative.

Redlands Mayor Karen Williams has warned that this will turn the Redlands Coast into a sardine city.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk

“It’ll be the death of the back yard in the Redlands and, in turn, the death of the back yard for our entire region,” she said.

The same government moans about the ever increasing cost of its promised infrastructure projects, every utterance referencing ”blowout.”

One of the driving forces behind this blowout is the cosy deal it did with its union mates in the CFMEU called the Best Practice Industry Conditions policy, which according to the construction industry will see wages for tradies on major projects in the state increase by 30 per cent over the next five years, accompanied by a slump in productivity.

Climate crisis? Spend billions of dollars paying subsidies to overseas companies to install solar farms and wind farms while closing coal fired power stations and demonising gas in a Greens-driven pursuit of an unattainable net-zero emissions target while the lights flicker and die as they will this summer and industries are forced to shut down. We’ve gone from having some of the cheapest power in the developed world to some of the most expensive. That’s progress for you.

Hospital crisis? Patients are dying in ramped ambulances while we plan to spend billions of dollars staging the Olympic Games. Am I the only one who finds this to be an obscenity?

The youth crime crisis has, like all other crises, been building for years. If you know you can break into people’s homes and steal their cars and anything else at hand and face no penalty, then what you get is rampant lawlessness in the suburbs. Every car stolen and driven so recklessly as to endanger the lives of innocent people erodes people’s faith in government just that little bit more.

Incredibly, the state government is spending $400,000 on polling to find out the issues which most concern voters. Another way would be to stand in the middle of a suburban shopping mall on a Saturday morning and ask them. I would suggest they wouldn’t like the answers they would get.

Only one in three people voted for the Albanese government, hardly a ringing endorsement, and the Palaszczuk government is staggering towards defeat.

The rumblings of discontent around the nation can be easily heard, but if there is a man or woman out there with the integrity and intelligence to lead us out of the wilderness, I have yet to see them.