How our politicians are taking us nowhere slowly

Bill Hoffman asks why the federal election campaign is not talking about what really matters

Traffic congestion on the Bruce Highway is unlikely to ease if the Gold Coast's M1 experience is any guide. Picture: John McCutcheon

OPINION: BILL HOFFMAN

THE drama and pathos that is politics reached new peaks this past week with One Nation self-destructing, a seemingly surging Coalition self-destructing and the weird likelihood of Clive Palmer buying Australia's most expensive Senate seat.

In the midst of all the drama, Labor leader Bill Shorten has finally begun to look like a winner after a first campaign week of fluffed lines and shrinking poll margins.

Social media has meanwhile been alive with everything from the shrill desperation of rusted-on conservative voters who have suddenly realised the lollies may be about to be taken away, and the resurrection of old posts come back to haunt and taunt political wannabes who should have known better but didn't.

One Nation is not gone. Pauline Hanson will continue to be a voice in national politics.

She is personally not in this one, with three uncontested years remaining on her Senate place.

But we've seen the last of Malcolm Roberts, her odd little Queensland sidekick. One Nation was never a chance of getting him back into the Senate, making the number-two spot Steve Dickson once occupied on the party's ticket a meaningless exercise in self-indulgence from the start.

The former Maroochy Shire councillor and LNP state cabinet minister is also gone.

His dalliance with the US gun lobby and drunken strip club antics either were finally revealing of his true character, as some callers this week insisted, or some sort of time-warp return to his early 20s when he was getting up to who-knows-what or perhaps we now do.

The once-ebullient Member for Buderim no longer answers the phone. He doesn't return calls and the wet and bedraggled bevy of journalists who gathered at his front fence earlier this week got nowhere.

I wasn't in their number. That was always going to be an exercise in wasted time.

A three-week break which afforded me the opportunity to catch up with what can be achieved with genuine political commitment, good planning and smart engineering meant I missed the election campaign's first week.

I'm talking here about the multi-laning and future proofing of the Pacific Highway which will soon stretch from the mountainous country immediately north of Coffs Harbour over the Northern Rivers flood plains to Tweed Heads.

There, it encounters Queensland and what I found to be a pre-Easter week Thursday traffic jam that stretched in my experience from Currumbin to the Deagon deviation. What happened from there I remain uncertain of, having by that point given up on the exercise and retreating instead to family at Margate.

The many coastal towns and villages north of Coffs Harbour retain the old Pacific Highway as a link road for their domestic use, keeping them off the national highway.

It's an example of sensible planning and completely unlike Queensland where the once much-vaunted M1 is now little more than a six-lane suburban link road for opportunistic subdivisions allowed by indifferent state governments and foolish councils.

"The Bruce” and doing something about it have provided politicians talking points for much of my lifetime.

With subdivision and industrial estates creeping north into the inter-urban break from Caboolture and the bolting on of the hideous Caloundra South, expect decades more of gridlock, regardless of how many extra lanes are promised.

Have a look at the following https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=1oMZv0n37Tw of the new Harwood Bridge over the Clarence River and this time lapse of the Woolgoolga to Ballina upgrade https://vimeo.com/253355573 to get some comparison with our dawdling Bruce Highway dalliance.

What's been achieved in the past 15 months alone is simply staggering and really asks hard questions of Queensland planners and politicians.

In the name of cheap profits, southeast Queensland has been gridlocked, with an intent now to jam millions more into the mix with no coherent infrastructure plan to untangle the mess.

Why this issue is not fundamental to the federal election story here escapes my comprehension.

Instead, we have the embattled Peter Dutton in Dickson spruiking some railway station carparks as a career achievement and more locally Ted and Andrew heralding comparatively small-change infrastructure investments as game-breakers.

Why aren't what should be powerful business lobby groups across the southeast demanding more of both sides of politics instead of when it really counts, simply reverting to tribal fan clubs?

Why has there been more focus on neutering the earning power of workers than addressing the significant productivity loss from congestion?

And why, in 2019, do we still not accept that environmental loss is a cost that must be accounted for? All are questions this election should address but won't and never will until voters start demanding they be.

Originally published as How our politicians are taking us nowhere slowly