Opinion: Palaszczuk Government fails to show way forward as Queenslanders struggle
Queenslanders are suffering and there’s much more pain to come from the COVID-induced recession, yet the Palaszczuk Government continues to play political games, writes Steven Wardill.
Opinion
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A MATE became a victim of Queensland’s COVID-induced recession this week.
He was forced to close the doors of the inner-city store that he’d poured his heart and soul into over the last 14 years.
It was a sad end to a successful business that had been feted for being a cut above its competitors.
He’d already been dealt a blow by the construction occurring outside his premises of a State Government mega-project that was indifferent about the plight of tenants.
But after the coronavirus pandemic left busy Brisbane’s city streets looking like something out of a post-apocalyptic horror movie, he couldn’t afford to hang on any longer.
“Despite my best efforts, the reality is I am beat,” he wrote to dedicated customers.
Tragically, his story is not unique.
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Many once thriving Queensland businesses have folded already through no fault of their own and numerous others will follow as the first recession to hit Australia in a generation begins to bite.
Queensland is in an excellent position amid this pandemic thanks in part to the Palaszczuk Government’s rapid health response but also our state’s natural geographic advantages.
Yet there’s little evidence that the Labor administration is aware of the length and breadth of the economic challenges that Queensland faces, let alone has a proper plan to addresses them.
Perhaps that shouldn’t come as a surprise from a Cabinet that doesn’t have a single member who has owned and operated their own business for any length of times, although one of its lowest ranked ministers was a locksmith for a bit.
There are five former ministerial staffers, four former unionists, four lawyers, a couple of educators, a surgeon, a tradie and an ambulance officer.
They’ve all got skills of varying degrees, without doubt.
But despite being from the party that prides itself on diversity, not one of them has first-hand experience of the trials and tribulations of starting and operating their own business.
Meanwhile, they’re spending millions of dollars advertising to Queenslanders that they have an economic plan.
That plan talks up how good the Sunshine State was going before the coronavirus crisis, citing economic growth that was better than the national average.
But it skips over unemployment which was above the national average.
And as the Government’s own Queensland Productivity Commission pointed out this week, “a return to pre-crisis economic growth will leave the economy running below its potential, limiting growth in the living standards of Queenslanders”.
The Government is also regularly masquerading its plan to spend $51.8 billion on infrastructure over the next four years as a COVID response.
That’s akin to claiming they’d solved the crisis before there was one.
Despite all the bloviating over this big figure, the Government’s annual infrastructure commitment was actually 20 per cent below the average spend as a proportion of the Queensland economy over the past decade before the pandemic hit.
That’s roughly $1.5 billion, the same amount that the Government was spending each year servicing the interest bill on its massive borrowings.
With asset sales off the table and debt skyrocketing towards $100 billion, something has got to give and its likely to be the very thing that the Government insists it’s doing to keep the economy going: infrastructure spending.
To give the Bligh government it’s druthers, it tackled the global financial crisis head on by selling off assets which have evolved to become even greater contributors to the Queensland economy.
Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and her treasurer Cameron Dick were both in the Cabinet that made this decision.
Yet faced with an economic challenge far more extreme, the response so far has been lacklustre.
Sure, there’s the Government oversubscribed interest-free loan scheme.
But many businesses can’t just take on additional debt.
Payroll tax relief has been a boon but only for businesses that were big enough to pay it.
Investing in training is all very well and good but there’s got to be jobs for people to deploy these skills.
Beyond this immediate rescue relief and business-as-usual spending, the massive missing piece of the Government’s so-called recovery plan is how it proposes to enliven economic activity.
How is the Palaszczuk administration going to attract and facilitate the significant new investment that is needed in Queensland to generate jobs?
How is it going to address its dire budget predicament and avoid foisting even greater costs on to Queenslanders?
What people are being fed right now is a blight “she’ll be right” attitude to the greatest economic challenge this state has faced since the Great Depression and a falsehood that a plan is in place.
People are suffering, there’s much more pain to come yet the government is playing political games.