What will Sunshine State do now it's all grown up?

DECEMBER 2, 1989, is an important punctuation mark in the history of Queensland and the nation. Twenty years ago next Wednesday, the boy from Inala, Wayne Goss, steamrolled the last of Joh Bjelke-Petersen's Nationals in the Sunshine State and led the Queensland ALP back into office.

It was a big day for Jaimie Collins, too. As Goss prepared to claim victory at his breakthrough state election and declare an end to the Bjelke-Petersen era, she emerged into the world at 8.39pm, a bouncing baby girl to be taken home by her delighted parents, Neville and Tracey.

Today, Collins cheerfully admits she doesn't have a clue about Joh or the Fitzgerald corruption inquiry, which fashioned the political coffin Goss hammered shut all those years ago, giving rise to what he calls the "new Queensland".

Truth be told, she wouldn't have recognised the former premier until we introduced them. "A bit before my time," she demurred.

Still, it seemed fitting to put the two together. Approaching her 20th birthday, Collins has spent all but two years of her life under the state Labor hegemony that began with Goss, was resuscitated by Peter Beattie and that Anna Bligh inherited before she broke a glass ceiling for women in Australian politics and was elected premier in her own right in March.

In that time, Queensland has grown and matured, and so has Collins, progressing through school and on to Brisbane North TAFE, from which she is about to graduate with a certificate in veterinary nursing.

Her Queensland is a far cry from the state that was the brunt of jokes about cane toads and clocks being wound back.

It has become development central, growing faster than just about anywhere in Australia.

A state population that hit three million during Goss's first term of office, and four million under Beattie, will approach five million within a decade, fuelling a growth engine that is pulling the economic and demographic centre of the country northward.

About 2000 people move to Queensland each week and that flow has accelerated since Goss's day. This is a doubled-edged sword: while an increasing population drives economic activity, it also increases the strain on already stretched resources and public services that were overlooked for too long.

Water supply is a problem that won't go away for the emerging "Moreton Metropolis" of Brisbane, its hinterland, and the Gold and Sunshine coasts, especially when the federal government canned the proposed Traveston Dam in Mary Valley, a key part of the $9 billion water grid developed by Beattie to address the problem.

Hospitals, schools and roads are under pressure: like many Brisbanites, Collins despairs of the capital's traffic. "It drives me mad," she says of the congestion, which may ease when a multibillion-dollar network of tunnelled roads comes on line from next year.

When the summer sun shimmers off the towers in Brisbane's CBD it is even possible to forget they still haven't taken up daylight saving north of the Tweed. A referendum to introduce it failed under Goss and none of his successors was willing to try again.

Collins plumped for Labor when she voted for the first time in March this year, doing her bit to give Bligh her historic victory, and Queensland Labor its eighth since 1989. "Anna's doing her best and it is hard to please everyone," she explains. "But, really, I don't think that much about politics. I've got a lot of other stuff going on."

GOSS has an interesting take on that famous election win two decades ago. Politics should be about change, he says. And December 2, 1989, didn't only change the government of Queensland, it changed the state as a whole.

He's addressing these remarks to Collins, who inherited the future he wanted to create.

"Until the day of her birth, Queensland had never had a woman who had been a judge, a woman as head of a public service department, as an industrial commissioner, governor [or] as premier," Goss says.

"Jaimie may not have much of a recollection of the Bjelke-Petersen era or the reforms -- and you can't blame her -- but that was done for people like her, too."

So let's take stock. During the past 20 years, Queensland has come on in some surprising ways.

In 1989, average weekly earnings were $463, against $487 nationally. For 2008-09, the ordinary weekly pay packet jumped to $1119 in Queensland and $1173 nationally.

Collins will be pleased to know that the life expectancy of Queensland women increased from 79.4 years for those born along with her in 1989 to 83.6 years in 2007. (Males born 20 years ago could expect to live to 73, against 78 today.)

Her generation is better educated: the retention rate to year 12 of high school students is 78 per cent as of last year, compared with 69.7 per cent in 1989, broadly in line with the national trend.

But here's the kicker. While nearly three times as many Queenslanders undertook tertiary study last year than in 1989, TAFE enrolments as a proportion of the working-age population virtually halved, from 6.7 per cent of people aged 15 to 64, to 3.7 per cent. As of last year, Collins had 106,439 TAFE classmates in Queensland. In 1989, the number was 126,123.

In a state where mining has gone from the seventh biggest employer in 1989 to second, that goes to another unwanted growth factor: the shortage of skilled workers.

Queensland remains the most decentralised state. One in five Australians live in Queensland, 66.3 per cent of them in the state's southeast, compared with 62 per cent in 1989. Back then, the population of the Brisbane statistical division was 1.3 million; today, it nudges two million.

Goss is careful when discussing the legacy of his government, which lasted until a 1996 by-election in Townsville completed the demolition job the Nationals' Rob Borbidge started at the polls seven months earlier. Goss had carried his hefty majority from 1989 into the 1995 state election, his third as Labor leader, and the perception that he blew it has taken years to live down.

In the event, Borbidge's coalition outfit never had time to consolidate. Beattie won the narrowest of victories in 1998, thanks in part to the havoc that Pauline Hanson and One Nation wrought on the conservatives.

Borbidge did some useful things -- building the M1 motorway between Brisbane and the Gold Coast was a notable achievement -- but there is no doubt the past 20 years belong to Labor in Queensland.

Kevin Rudd, Goss's one-time chief of staff, went to Canberra and made his home state a bulwark of his federal Labor government. Wayne Swan, another architect of the 1989 state election victory, has steadily risen in stature as federal Treasurer.

Goss and Beattie have competing views of their respective periods in office and how that applies to their ultimate successor, Bligh, who entered parliament in 1995 and took over as Premier when Beattie retired in 2007 after nine years in the top job.

Beattie's assertion that the tone of the Goss government was set by Tony Fitzgerald's expose of corruption under Bjelke-Petersen, and the reforms that spun out of it, would hardly endear him to Goss, who maintains his policy agenda was much wider than that.

"The Labor Party should make Tony Fitzgerald a life member," Beattie says, provocatively. "Goss achieved a lot, but the Fitzgerald inquiry made it all possible."

Goss replies that times were very different for him and the man who succeeded him as state Labor leader in 1996 and was premier for nine years from 1998.

"We were in the middle of the recession we had to have, which made doing all that you wanted to do so bloody difficult," Goss says, recalling the dark days of the early 1990s when unemployment hit double digits.

"Peter came in in the good times . . . it was raining gold bars. I think [he] spent a lot more time building things and that is good. But the level of recurrent expenditure was built up to a pretty high level, and that happened in a number of states, and the problem is when the wheel turns that can put pressure on the budget, and that is what Anna Bligh is facing now."

With 51 of the 89 seats in the state parliament still in ALP hands, Queensland Labor should be laughing its way into next week's anniversary celebrations.

Yet Bligh, for all her early promise, is struggling. The Traveston dam debacle is only the latest in a succession of setbacks that have people wondering whether she's the last of the line.

Goss would be familiar with the problems she faces; he exploited some of them when he went after the Nationals.

Fitzgerald returned to the public stage in July to voice concerns about the jailing for corruption of former Beattie minister Gordon Nuttall and the cosy deals between so-called Labor mates, business and the state government. While the former corruption commissioner reserved his sternest criticism for Beattie, who replied in kind, Bligh had to handle the fallout.

As if she didn't have enough on her plate. Almost unthinkably, the Queensland government lost its cherished triple-A credit rating ahead of the March state election, after which Bligh, without mentioning it during the campaign, ditched a petrol subsidy and proposed asset sales worth $15bn. She has shaken up the public service, crunching together departments in a reorganisation that has parallels with those carried out by contemporary Labor governments in Victoria (successfully), South Australia (less so) and by Goss (politically costly because it alienated the government workforce and sections of the labour movement). A Galaxy poll found last month that Bligh's approval with voters had plunged to levels not seen for a Queensland premier since Russell Cooper, the man who picked up the pieces after Bjelke-Petersen.

To date, one of Bligh's saving graces has been the absence of an alternative to her leadership for Queensland Labor. That is good news for her, but it exposes how far the gene pool in the state ALP has receded.

For now, young Collins is sticking with Bligh, and so is her party. "Anna tries," Collins says, and she respects that. So does Goss.

"If you look at the last couple of months, there has hardly been a day when she has not been king hit by some issues," he says.

"And she just keeps getting up, she keeps going . . . and I think that shows a lot of resolve, a lot of character. She is going to need some clear air before she can start to rebuild and I have got confidence she can, if she can get that clear air. But it's not going to be easy."

Two decades on from Goss's election, compelling questions loom for Queensland Labor and a federal party dominated by some of those who came to political prominence through his government. These questions concern the future, not the past.

Where is the next Rudd or the next Swan? Beattie's sure instincts are sorely missed, along with the discipline Goss brought to the ALP and instilled in government.

They should enjoy the celebration of Labor in power next week: it may be the last in Queensland for some time.