Waste; Bligh Government’s chickens come home to roost.
It is sometimes claimed that a government has a
responsibility to do those things that the private sector either can’t do, or
won’t do. In the case of the late
and unlamented Bligh Government in Queensland, responsibility was also taken
for doing those things that the private sector would never be crazy enough to
do.
Bligh took over the Premier’s role from Peter
Beattie at a time when the profligate spending of that administration had put
the state in the position where it was about to lose it’s AAA credit
rating. She called an early
election and secured another term before that happened, and then spent wilder
than ever before. Some of the more
idiotic items are still coming to light.
We have dealt here before on the $6 million Brisbane ski jumping centre of excellence. Queensland owing to its tropical climate puts locals who
want to compete at the top levels of this sport at a serious disadvantage by
not having snow. Rather than just
tell them to go somewhere where there is snow, it was decided to build them an
artificial jump complete with ski lift to get them up there.
The arts expenditure has to be seen to be believed,
with over a million spent on a bronze elephant standing on its head, which is
supposed to illustrate an Aboriginal legend despite no elephants ever existing
in Australia, but the New Zealand sculptor probably wasn’t aware of that. As a bonus, a ‘contemplation’ chair
comes with it. Perhaps that at
least will be useful.
Another $700,000 was spent on an egg shaped pile of
rocks down the back end of the Connondale National park in a relatively
inaccessible area. There are some
nice pictures of it though.
Some other items are:
… $10,000 spent on T-shirts bearing the logo, "Buy Local - Back Queensland", which were meant to assist with the 2011 flood recovery. Public servants were ordered to cut the clothing tags out to try to hide the fact they were "made in Bangladesh.
In another embarrassment, 58,000 Travelsmart backpacks found "gathering dust" in a Brendale warehouse.
… expenditure of $43,000 to install 24 electric carparks in Adelaide St despite having no plans to purchase electric cars.
And that’s before we get into the real waste like
the Health Payroll debacle, which has been described as the equivalent of
buying a Mars Bar for $400.
Yep; we can be pretty certain that private
enterprise would not do that; could not do that without a shareholders revolt,
and definitely would not be insane enough to attempt it.
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