Des Houghton: What’s next from our humbug Premier... free Big Macs, tents for homeless?
State-owned servos, free lunches, another government-owned energy company to magically create cheap power... will someone tell Premier Steven Miles he’s dreaming, writes Des Houghton.
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With voters already casting their votes, the Labor Party today announced a free Big Mac with fries for every Queenslander in a last-minute cost-of-living initiative.
Premier Steven Miles said the free burgers will be a boost for regional beef producers and potato farmers. He said he made no apology for offending the carrot munchers.
They will likely vote for the Greens anyway.
The Premier stood alongside Housing Minister Meaghan Scanlon who announced free tents for homeless people dislodged from public housing lists by refugees sent to Queensland on humanitarian visas. You can see where this is heading. What next?
In the dying days of the 2024 election campaign will Shannon Fentiman in her role as Minister for Women offer free pepper sprays for use by women targeted by young criminals?
In a desperate effort to save some furniture on October 26, Steven Miles has been feeding us not Big Macs but whoppers. And he has made a fool of himself. He is also making a fool of the Labor Party, with two-thirds of Queenslanders no longer giving the ALP their first-preference vote.
FOLLOW OUR COMPLETE ELECTION COVERAGE HERE
Miles has become the minister for humbug, drivel and assorted fabrications. Free school lunches? Impossible. Principals in regional and remote schools are short of teachers and can’t even get cleaners. The teachers are now cleaning the toilets themselves. Who then will make the lunchtime meals and who will provide the ingredients? Will they be flown in on the government jet, perhaps? And why not.
Remember The Courier-Mail reported earlier this year that Miles took the jet on an 11-minute, 74km journey from Hervey Bay to Bundaberg to deliver a birthday cake to Tom Smith, the ALP member.
Miles also proposes a string of government-owned service stations to dispense cheap petrol. Snigger, snigger. Taxpayers would have to dig deep for that one.
Another Miles fantasy was his uncosted pledge for a government-owned energy company to magically create cheap power. Will someone tell him he’s dreaming?
Voters have seen through these fake pledges and the Premier’s credibility is in tatters. The credibility of failed Treasurer Cameron Dick is also shot. Miles is losing the election because he embraced the ideology of ineptitude. He adopted the same brand of socialism that was the ruination of his predecessor.
Nationals Senator Matt Canavan got it right when he said the Premier’s last-minute cash splashes made Steven Miles look like a “shonky salesman”.
“They’ve run out of ideas – the only idea they’ve got left is spending your money,” Canavan said on Sky News.
With voting in the state election already underway, exit polls by The Courier-Mail point to a wipe-out for the ALP. The biggest surprise was that no one was surprised at all. Labor has not been treading water for two years; it has been slowly sinking.
The unsustainable “welfare” binge is one of the reasons why Dick’s Budget blew out by $9.07 billion last financial year – enough for two Olympic stadiums.
And what is there to show for the reckless expenditure apart from a bloated public service?
As well as failing to keep the community safe from lawless thugs, recruiting enough police and failing to provide enough hospital beds, Dick and Miles have put the Queensland economy in a precarious position.
Dick has already been rebuked by ratings agency S&P Global that warned of Queensland’s “waning fiscal discipline”. A $1.4 billion school lunch cash splash would push Queensland to the brink.
The more Labor handed out uncosted election sweeteners, the more Miles or Dick became laughing stocks in the boardrooms around Australia.
Credibility, or Steven Miles’ lack of it, has become the unspoken election issue. Some might say the weight of the Annastacia Palaszczuk failures on his back was too much of a burden for Miles to carry.
However, Miles was Palaszczuk’s deputy and the architect of many of the failures.
Instead of handing out free lunches to schoolchildren, Miles should have worked to repair Queensland’s appalling numeracy and literacy rates. In any case feeding children is a parental responsibility, not one for teachers or taxpayers.
And there are implications for federal Labor.
Reckless spending by Queensland is fuelling inflation and damaging the Albanese government’s cost-of-living repair job.
Steven Miles may very well drag Anthony Albanese down with him.
Originally published as Des Houghton: What’s next from our humbug Premier... free Big Macs, tents for homeless?
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