Mismanagement. Waste. Squander. Ineptitude. Pouring money down the drain. Talking / writing about the financial blunders of the Queensland Government can, for some people, seem a little tedious.
I get it – not everybody gets as worked up by the blunders as I do. However, this past week the LNP has brought to light yet another example of your dollars being flushed down the toilet. $40,000,000 ($40 million) was spent to keep just 12 people in hotel quarantine (after hotel quarantine was apparently finished, and with a $200 million white elephant quarantine facility sitting pretty much empty near Toowoomba).
You couldn’t make this up. That’s $3.3 million per person for their quarantine stay.
None of the “geniuses” in the QLD Labor Government, it seems, thought they should check to ensure that contracts with hotels could be ended or reduced in cost if there was no / very little use for the hotels. No, they just signed us all up for a massive waste of dollars.
Why should we care? All governments waste money, I hear you say? Sure, government spending can be less efficient than private spending, and that’s why we in the Liberal National Party hold it as one of our basic principles that government should always aim to lower taxes and keep more money in the hands of families and businesses – who will always be more careful with their own money than the government.
But blunders and waste of this type are just such simple, basic mistakes. It comes on top of the reported $200 million wasted on a quarantine facility that has barely been used and which Queenslanders don’t even own. And the $3,000,000,000 – $3 billion – in blowouts on big transport projects in southeast Queensland. These are just the ones we know about.
I get angry about these things because I am regularly told, in letters from Ministers and bureaucrats, that there is no funding for public transport on Tamborine Mountain, no funding to improve state roads around Canungra, the Mountain, and Beaudesert, no funding for more hospital services at Beaudesert and no funding for anything at all to fix the debacle of traffic and parking near Cedar Creek Falls Road in the National Park estate. No funding for improvements to Long Road sporting fields (just a fraction of the $40 million wasted would go a long way). No funding to plug the near $6 billion backlog on road repairs and maintenance. You get the picture. With a long-term Government making blunders like this $40 million mistake on a regular basis, I suppose it’s not surprising.
My advocacy has seen advances on local infrastructure and services, but we as a State can – and must – do so much better. We must do better to bring the best future for everybody. We must end this era of waste and dereliction of duty by Labor in Queensland.
Scenic Rim Electorate Office
You can contact me by phone, toll-free, on 1800 813 960, or email scenicrim@parliament.qld.gov.au, so I can lobby on your behalf. In an electorate as large as the Scenic Rim, there are lots of issues and I appreciate your feedback that helps me do my job as well as possible.