Opinion: I’m ashamed to be a Queenslander

We are Australians first and Queenslanders second. Premier, you are embarrassing yourself, writes Des Houghton.

I feel ashamed to be a Queenslander and I’m seriously thinking of bailing out.

I’ve come to the unhappy conclusion that I’d rather live in NSW than put up with the deceptions any longer. Sydney appeals. So does Armadale. So does Victoria’s Yarra Valley. I’ve rejected Melbourne as a relocation option for fear of being cut down in gangland crossfire.

I just don’t want to live in a double donut anymore.

I don’t want to live inside a socialist, fairytale fiefdom run by public servants, judges and magistrates who appear to me to be politically partisan nincompoops. Some of them anyway.

I don’t want to live in a hollow, hillbilly kingdom cut off from the world. I don’t want to live in a state whose leaders openly ridicule their neighbours.

I don’t want to live in a state that keeps many of its nurses, teachers, ambos and coppers on slave wages while it pays $180,000 to lollipop workers to wave around a Stop-Go sign.

I don’t want to live in a state where people who have committed no crime can be placed under virtual house arrest.

I don’t want to live in a state where grandmothers can be dragged away in handcuffs for attempting to meet relatives on the other side.

I don’t want to live in a state where cops call the shots at media conferences and not their minister.

I don’t want to live in any land where a bungling, crypto-fascist crime watchdog with coercive star chamber powers can hurt civic leaders who do no wrong.

I do not want to live in a state that blocks its citizens from returning home even when they are double-vaxxed.

I don’t want to live in a state with a dinky toy university that shames us all by persecuting an honourable man with a different opinion.

I don’t want to live in a state where too many in the media are timid to pick a fight.

I simply do not want to live in Palaszczuk’s Queensland where rights are routinely trampled, and public information smothered.

Queensland, I want a divorce.

Barcaldine Regional Council mayor Sean Dillon

Our secretive government’s misguided and nasty little digs at NSW and Canberra over Olympic planning, hospital funding and border closures is embarrassing.

I deplore the Premier’s grandstanding over the Olympics.

I especially regret the attempts by our incompetent leaders to blame Canberra for hospital failures knowing full-well the Morrison government has increased health funding by 99 per cent since it was sworn in.

Pull your head in Premier. You are not Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

We are Australians first and Queenslanders second. You are embarrassing yourself.

This week we had a stark example of how Palaszczuk failed to defend free speech.

An outback mayor was accused of misconduct for raising concerns about the rollout of Covid vaccinations in his community at Barcaldine.

Mayor Sean Dillon raised concerns about the rollout plans, saying he was “very worried” the state Central West Hospital and Health Service would not be able to vaccinate all in his community in the allocated timeframe.

He added: “I’m sorry but I’ve got no confidence in them”, and “to think they’re going to do it in one pass, someone who’s got no idea in regional Queensland. Like it’s just not going to work”.

Dillon is under investigation by the Office of the Independent Assessor, a body set up by the Labor government to outsource complaints of corrupt and inappropriate conduct by councillors.

This is another of those secretive, unelected organs that enables gutless politicians to wash their hands of complaints and say they are matters for an independent assessor.

Has not the OIA got anything better to chase a bush mayor for trying to protect his community?

Palaszczuk showed her true colours when she said: “I think it’s a bit of a storm in a teacup”.

She failed to condemn the OIA’s overbearing intrusion.

Free speech is the cornerstone of any democracy, Premier.

LNP senator James McGrath called the OIA the “Gestapo of local government in Queensland”. Agreed.