Our leaders are so unpopular it’s time to dump state governments

With the popularity of Queensland’s political leaders falling to an all time low isn't it time we ditched state parliaments altogether and saved the nation some money, asks Michael O’Connor. VOTE IN THE POLL NOW

Given that a recent poll showed Queenslanders have no faith in Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s government and find Opposition Leader Deb Frecklington to be equally unappealing, perhaps it is time to consider getting rid of the lot.

Abolish State Parliament. Not just ours but the rest of them as well. We are without doubt the most over-governed nation in the world so let’s dump state parliaments and all the freeloaders who occupy them.

Our state government is so hopeless it can’t even build a dam that does what dams are meant to do – hold water – witness the debacle of the Paradise Dam near Bundaberg.

The locals there can thank Peter Beattie for that one. The government has known there were issues with the dam for years and has now panicked, rushing through emergency legislation allowing it to lower the dam wall before it fails.

Paradise Dam – irony anyone? – stands as a symbol of the bumbling and fumbling that plagues state governments.

Then there are hugely expensive state government IT systems that simply don’t work, hospitals that cannot cope with demand and roads and bridges that are poorly maintained. Then there are consultants by the truckload who are feeding off taxpayers, some of them hired to find out why there are so many consultants, a bloated public service that continues to gorge on the public purse and plenty of jobs for the boys and girls who are mates of whatever regime is in power.

When things go awry, which is almost always, the states blame the federal government. Every state does it, as they stagger from disaster to misfortune and back again.

If only the federal government would give them more money to waste, then everything would be sweet, mate. Whenever there is a need for the state and federal governments to co-operate for the good of the population at large, as in matters of health and education, then the result is conflict, game playing, finger pointing and political posturing. It’s a farce.

At least in Queensland we are only burdened with one state house whereas New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia, South Australia and Tasmania are cursed with two. Yes, Tasmania has almost as many politicians as it has people.

Let’s just have the federal government looking after the entire country, leaving the local councils to fix the potholes, cut the grass in the parks and be investigated for corruption every second week.

We can keep the state boundaries so we can still be Queenslanders, the difference being that Parliament House would become a public space with restaurants and bars and lawns with a nice outlook over the river.

The state governors will have to go along with the pollies. That we persist with this nod to our colonial past, at significant public expense, defies belief. Government House could also be given back to the people who could then enjoy its gardens and views to the mountains.

The savings in fiscal terms would be enormous. We’d get rid of all those Yes, Minister public service mandarins with their inflated salaries who, as was revealed last week, can take a redundancy payment of several hundred thousand dollars and then shortly thereafter be rehired on the same huge salary they were getting before.

Let’s get rid of the lot. I don’t think that things could be more dysfunctional than they are now. They might even improve!