QLD Premier slammed shut QLD borders during Covid, hired 50,000 bureaucrats in 9 years

As Queensland Premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk legalised abortion and voluntary assisted dying, slammed shut borders during Covid, saw unemployment drop, and hired nearly 50,000 public servants.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk announcing her retirement from politics at government headquarters in Brisbane on Sunday. Picture: Liam Kidston

In nearly nine years in power as Queensland Premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk legalised abortion and voluntary assisted dying, slammed shut state borders for months during Covid, saw unemployment drop from 6.6 per cent to 4.2 per cent, and hired nearly 50,000 more public servants.

After Campbell Newman’s 2012 whitewash left new Labor leader Palaszczuk with an opposition of just seven MPs – including herself – she stunned everyone when she came from nowhere to win three years later.

She became the only woman premier in Australia to win three elections, and was fewer than six months away from eclipsing Peter Beattie’s record as the longest-serving Labor leader since World War II.

Labor campaigned hard in 2015 against Mr Newman’s slashing of 14,000 full-time equivalent (FTE) public service jobs; since Ms Palas­zczuk became Premier, her government has increased the size of the public service by nearly 50,000 FTEs to more than 250,000.

Annastacia Palaszczuk on election night in January 2015. Picture: John Pryke

In her final press conference on Sunday, Ms Palaszczuk said the unemployment rate in parts of ­regional Queensland had been 11 per cent when she became Premier and was now under 3 per cent.

She said Cyclone Jasper – to cross the Queensland coast on Wednesday – would be the 63rd natural disaster she had led the state through, not including the Covid pandemic.

“There are close to 300,000 more jobs in Queensland after the pandemic, than there were before it,” she said. “Thousands of Australians are moving here, for more opportunities and a better life, and you can’t blame them.”

At this year’s budget, Treasurer Cameron Dick said net debt was forecast to rise from an estimated actual 2022-23 level of $5.8bn to reach $46.93bn by mid-2027, driving a debt-revenue ration from 7 per cent to 55 per cent in four years.

Total debt, which includes borrowings by state-owned corporations, was $103bn and predicted to hit $147bn by 2027.

In the Newman government’s final budget for the 2014-15 financial year, the estimated actual total debt was $76bn and forecast to reach $82bn by 2017-18.

The government has also set a target of reaching 80 per cent renewable energy by 2035, for which it has introduced legislation into parliament but not yet passed.

Other major Palaszczuk government reforms included the legalisation of abortion in 2018 – removing the termination of pregnancy from the criminal code for the first time in 119 years – and voluntary assisted dying in 2021.

The Premier – along with a ­coalition of southeast Queensland mayors – secured the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games for Brisbane.

Ms Palaszczuk recalled that during the Covid pandemic, she stood side-by-side with a chief health officer and a police commissioner who were both women.

Now Queensland currently has women in the roles of police commissioner, governor, chief justice, and integrity commissioner and as 52 per cent of board members for government-owned businesses.

Ms Palaszczuk, 54, succeeded her father, former Beattie government minister Henry Palaszczuk, in the safe Labor seat of Inala in 2006.

In the Beattie and Bligh governments, she held the ministerial portfolios of disability services, multicultural affairs, and transport.