Labor must persist with asset sales and Anna Bligh

THE white-anting of Anna Bligh's leadership in Queensland is another act of grand folly by Labor.

The party has not only lost its nerve, but its decency too.

Bligh is being run down for doing the right thing by the government, and by her state, by privatising assets.

It is something Jeff Kennett did two decades ago in Victoria, something NSW Labor squibbed under two premiers to its cost, and something Bligh must do despite the political cost.

Make no mistake: privatisation is being used by Bligh's internal critics as a stalking horse to destroy her leadership. The post-federal election jitters surfacing in the state Labor caucus are a function of this, and the inability of self-absorbed MPs to see beyond their personal interest.

If the Queensland Premier had another option she would have taken it. You can bet Brisbane to a brick that her predecessor, Peter Beattie, who left her to clean up his mess when he gave the game away three years ago, would have backflipped on the asset sales long before now.

Bligh won't because she knows that without selling most of Queensland Rail, along with the Port of Brisbane, with tollways and plantation forests also on the chopping block, there is no getting the state budget out of deficit and restoring Queensland's AAA credit rating.

A generation of Queenslanders would pay for that failure.

Labor's drubbing north of the Tweed at the federal election and subsequent recriminations have put Bligh's leadership under possibly irretrievable pressure.

Certainly, there is plenty wrong with her government: ask the nurses and doctors whose pay is botched, fortnight after fortnight, by a dud computer system brought in by Queensland Health. Or the people who will think twice this summer about switching on the air-conditioner when the electricity bill arrives. Or the Brisbane drivers gridlocked on roads that should have been upgraded long ago under Wayne Goss and Beattie, and not left to Bligh to fix. Bligh's insistence that Queensland would not be "infected by the NSW corrosion" that spread to federal Labor, is born of the frustration with which she confronts the noisy campaign against the assets sales.

True, she is culpable for failing to be upfront about the plans before last year's state election that made her Australia's first elected female premier. But the hypocrisy of the opposition is breathtaking. Are we to believe that the Liberal National Party, the party of free enterprise, wants government in the business of hauling coal or collecting the toll on Brisbane's Gateway Bridge?

Serious people know that the assets Bligh has earmarked to go should have been sold years ago.

The duplicity of the unions that have led the charge against privatisation is even more galling. As in NSW, where they killed off electricity privatisation under Morris Iemma, and his leadership with it, elements of the Queensland labour movement have run a line against privatisation that is long on dogma and self-interest. But it is woefully short of financially responsible in a state that was monstered more than most by the GFC, through the collapse of tourism and property, and that faces big challenges to fund the services and infrastructure to keep pace with population growth.

Queensland Labor must persevere with the asset sales, and with Bligh. There is no viable alternative. The most likely candidates to step in were she knifed are deeply compromised: Deputy Premier and Health Minister Paul Lucas by the hospital pay debacle; Treasurer Andrew Fraser because he is the architect of the privatisation program and budget strategy; and Attorney-General Cameron Dick has been in parliament for less than 18 months.

John Mickel, the dark-horse contender, is tucked away as Speaker of the parliament.

Labor knows all too well the heavy price it paid in Kevin Rudd's home state for bringing him down.

After so long in power in Queensland, and so many missteps under Bligh and Beattie, the ALP would struggle in ordinary circumstances to win another term at the state election due by early 2012.

To perpetuate the folly of Rudd's dispatch and the revolving door of premiers in NSW would destroy what limited prospects Labor has at that poll.

Turning on Anna would show it has learned nothing.