Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk refuses to take a risk on daylight saving

QUEENSLAND’S Premier may have revealed she personally supports calls for daylight saving but she’s likely to do nothing towards making it happen. And that sums up the nature of our current political class.

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk is personally in favour of daylight saving. Pic: Liam Kidston.

PREMIER Annastacia Palaszczuk deserves kudos for revealing she personally supports daylight savings, a perennial issue back in discussion courtesy of Brisbane Deputy Mayor Adrian Schrinner.

Ms Palaszczuk’s backing comes after her deputy Jackie Trad last week professed her love for the practise of winding clocks forward an hour during the warmer months.

Yet as arguably Queensland’s two most powerful politicians what is this pair prepared to do about it?

Well, principally nothing.

Cr Shrinner’s decision to rip the Band-Aid off this enduring issue – courtesy of his own survey and now a petition on the Queensland Parliament website – may inevitably prove to be more illuminating about his political ambitions and the future of Lord Mayor Graham Quirk than anything else.

However, Ms Palaszczuk’s eagerness to keep the daylight savings genie in a bottle rather than countenance any sort of debate or discussion is demonstrative of the risk-averse nature of our current political class.

Ms Palaszczuk’s view that daylight savings dislocates and disadvantages northern and western areas of Queensland has been the same view espoused by every Queensland premier over the past 25 years, since the 1992 referendum was narrowly defeated.

Yet that doesn’t mean a line should permanently be drawn through the issue, that more innovative solutions can’t be fleshed out – and that Queenslanders shouldn’t have another say.

Governments, particularly ones that claim to have consultation as their founding bedrock, should appreciate this. And governing simply through a placatory, business-as-usual approach isn’t really governing at all.

Administrations with enviable records, like the Howard, Hawke and Keating governments federally and the Goss and Beattie governments at a state level, inherently knew that with great risk came great reward. They were prepared to argue their case for reform.

Today’s political rubric, however, dictates that the safest place for the major parties to stand is the middle ground even though it’s crumbling beneath them.

Whether it’s the current minor party du jour, One Nation, Clive Palmer’s short-lived outfit before that, Katter’s Australian Party or the Greens – all are signs of how policy timidity is carving apart the traditional tectonic plates of politics.

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk is personally in favour of daylight saving. Pic: Liam Kidston.

Federal Labor Leader Bill Shorten, for instance, is currently arguing the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement isn’t worth fighting for after US president-elect Donald Trump indicated his opposition. Mr Shorten has branded Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s bid to ratify the agreement in parliament a “waste of time”, yet is coy about whether Labor would support the TPP.

The Labor Leader’s pivot towards protectionism, in contravention of the Hawke/Keating legacy around free trade, is a clear populist play for those voters who are weary of globalisation and drifting towards One Nation.

Yet at the same time at the state level, Labor leader Ms Palaszczuk is loudly warning about the peril Pauline Hanson’s nationalistic rhetoric poses to Queensland’s heavily export-reliant economy and the danger of an LNP/One Nation alliance after the next state election.

So this is middle ground politicking at its finest from Shorten – attack an opponent’s position even if it’s contrary to your own legacy or counterintuitive to other positions of your own party.

Deputy Jackie Trad last week professed her love for the practise of winding clocks forward an hour during the warmer months.

With her focus honed on to the next Queensland election, widely anticipated to be later this year, Ms Hanson is clearly troubling the major parties. Neither seems willing or able to address the issues the One Nation matriarch is raising after entrenching themselves into one vacuous position after another.

Ms Hanson is not an apparition but a product of their own failings. Be it daylight saving or trade deals, our current political class now seem readily poised to bury their collective heads in the sand or flip flop whenever necessary rather than debate and decide. And in so doing they have left behind great swathes of voters who have grown disillusioned and distrustful.

Until our elected representatives start demonstrating some courage and conviction, Australia’s political paralysis will only get worse.