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5 July 2007
Mr Paul Syvret
Courier Mail
Achievements over the Past
Decade
Your favourable
observations about Queensland's premier's
accomplishments (Syvret P., 'Fine state we're in', Courier
Mail, 3/7/07) seem more realistic
than those in Crispin Walters' cynical letter to Courier
Mail's editor on the same date.
That letter claimed that building a football stadium was
the only real achievement.
However, while
the state Government has been active over the past decade and has spent public
money freely, it has not been very competent or effective. For example:
Government
administration generally has been dysfunctional and crisis prone (see
Evidence of a Problem,
and
Queensland's Challenge: A 2006
Report Card).
Many social
stresses within the community have often not gained effective responses (op
cit).
The
widely-touted Smart State strategy could not
actually achieve the economic transformation that was needed, for
very predictable reasons (see
Commentary on 'Smart State').
The state's
economy has boomed because of both mineral and energy investments that
reflect strong global growth (probably associated with an
unsustainable asset bubble) and rapid
interstate migration (which imposes increasingly costly demands on
Queensland's taxpayers).
Infrastructure
machinery has been complex and ineffective (see
Defects in Infrastructure
Planning and Delivery in Queensland).
Growth
management for SE Queensland reflects many noble aspirations, that are not
easy to achieve in practice (SE
Queensland Regional Plan and Infrastructure Plan).
Large increases
in public spending have been the preferred solution to many problems - and
the costs of this are finally starting to be considered (see
Queensland's Budgets).
Abuses of power
seem not significantly lesser than those before the Fitzgerald inquiry (Reform
of Queensland Institutions - or a Rising Tide of Public Hypocrisy?).
There remains a
lack of real political accountability, eg because of weaknesses in the
political opposition and other institutions (see
Superficial Accountability).
It would be
unfair to simply blame a premier (or the community's elected representatives
generally) for these problems. In part they reflect the state's history,
dependence on resource wealth and lack of real policy leadership by
independent civil institutions (see comments in
Structural Incompetence and SE
Queensland's Water Crisis).
However one
serious failure must be blamed on the governments that have held power over
the past decade or so, namely the lack of a effort to restore effectiveness to
government machinery after it was badly disabled (eg de-skilled by
politicisation and rendered unrealistic by policy
centralization) in the course of misguided 'reform' efforts in the early 1990s
(see
Queensland's Worst Government?).
Regards
John Craig
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