Peta Credlin: Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s panic to cost us all

Australians shouldn’t have to pay the bill for Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s trigger-happy border closures, Peta Credlin writes.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not happy to pay the bill for Annastacia Palaszczuk’s trigger-happy border closures; or any other Premier’s either. As my mum would say, you make your bed, you lie in it.

After all, it wasn’t as if Palaszczuk wasn’t warned time and time again by small business and tourism operators in her own state that Queensland’s fortress mentality was sending them broke.

Now she’s demanding Scott Morrison bail her out which means every taxpayer in the country paying more to fix up her fiscal incompetence.

As NSW Treasurer Dominic Perrottet put it: “Queensland, closed one day, asking someone else to pick up the tab the next.”

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk. Picture: Attila Csaszar

It’s Premiers panicking at the first sign of a cluster that has made it virtually impossible for people to plan a holiday, wedding, even a family get-together — and that’s made it very difficult for the tourism and hospitality sectors, which employ over a million people, to keep going.

The businesses and workers who’ve been smashed through no fault of their own need help, but not the Premiers who claim political wins for posing tough but refuse to accept the political pain of a stop-start economy.

I wish Scott Morrison had not agreed to give Premiers a blank cheque for closing down their states’ economies. Yes, the federal government did have to support workers and businesses when government shut them down.

But he should have demanded states at least contribute because it might have forced some common sense when weighing up the cost of border closures, in economic not just health terms.

Watch Peta Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm