Leaders make their pitch

ANNA Bligh's relationship with voters is on the rocks, and Lawrence Springborg wants to woo them away.

This Labor Government is old and tired, he croons. It doesn't care about you. I'll treat you better. Bligh wants another chance. I can change, she pleads. This is no time to be leaving. You can't trust him.

As Queensland's uneventful election campaign plodded into the home straight, both leaders made impassioned pleas to voters during an hour-long leaders' debate in Brisbane yesterday.

Springborg, the farm boy who left school at 14 to become Queensland's youngest MP at 21, launched a no-nonsense attack. "I come from a background of common sense," he boasted .

"My father said to me, 'There are some things in life you can't control but you can always be prepared'. This Government has never been prepared."

Bligh, the university graduate, community worker and public servant who was appointed premier two years ago, ridiculed her rival's simplicity.

Springborg's pledge to dig Queensland's budget out of deficit within four years betrayed the LNP leader's "complete misunderstanding of the global financial crisis". "How is he going to do it?" she said. "He told us he would be hoping. Hoping and wishing and praying. Well, running Queensland is more complicated than a 1960s pop song."

Bligh baited The Borg, invoking the ghost of Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the develop-at-all-costs National Party premier of 19 years. "Joh Bjelke-Petersen borrowed to build our power stations, borrowed to open up the Bowen Basin to coal exports, and borrowed to build the Gateway Bridge that you pay for every time you drive over it.

"If Mr Springborg had been premier then, we simply would not have a coal industry and we would not have the bridge that we need in this city," she said.

But Springborg just got more het up and criticised her performance during her eight years in cabinet. The Premier, who had appeared stilted early, finally found the fire in her belly.

"You have spent half your life in the Queensland parliament," she retorted. "This is your third time at having an attempt to be leader of this state and the only thing you bring forward to this election campaign is a promise to cut $1 billion of frontline services and to shed 12,000 jobs from the public service. That's not a record."

The Borg hit back at "an 11-year-old tired and stale government with no plan for the future, that is relying on Kevin Rudd's money and welfare from Canberra to bail them out of this".