As I Please: How To Win In Queensland
At the Labor Conference in crowded rooms over lots of coffee I put about with waning hope my plan for Labor to win in Queensland. It attracted everywhere firm assurances that 'Bligh will never buy it' and pleas that I cease talking now, please. I therefore put it down for the record, as evidence of Labor's implacable desire to lose, and lose big, whatever glad prize dangles before them.
The idea is this. That the Queensland Goverment buys 18 percent of Qantas and with its thereby boosted influence on the company's operation seeks to impose on its customers very, very cheap air fares to Cairns, Mount Isa, Port Douglas, the Gold Coast and other Queensland holiday destinations; and it also demands no further Qantas jobs go overseas. And Alan Joyce be sacked if it is the mood.
This idea would have no significant enemy I would think and would leave Campbell Newman foxed and bloodied and whimpering for oxygen. The Queensland And Northern Territory Air Service -- QANTAS -- would come home to its roots and the tourism industry get up off the canvas with some small chance, or a better chance, of surviving 2012.
It would also remove some part of the curse from Bligh's and Fraser's widely abominated privatisations. No privatisation of anything ever has won a single swinging vote in world history, yet Labor governments everywhere keep losing office by trying it on. They disgust the party faithful and the undecided voters by pretending it's good policy when it's only a fuckwitted venal scramble to balance the books.
This mild-mannered Chifleyesque chess move could turn around all that and keep Labor in power in Queensland for forty further years.
But of course it won't happen. It sounds and feels too much like common sense.
As I said nine years ago in one of my books of the same bright, balding, self-desructive dipstick: Shame, Fraser, Shame.
The idea is this. That the Queensland Goverment buys 18 percent of Qantas and with its thereby boosted influence on the company's operation seeks to impose on its customers very, very cheap air fares to Cairns, Mount Isa, Port Douglas, the Gold Coast and other Queensland holiday destinations; and it also demands no further Qantas jobs go overseas. And Alan Joyce be sacked if it is the mood.
This idea would have no significant enemy I would think and would leave Campbell Newman foxed and bloodied and whimpering for oxygen. The Queensland And Northern Territory Air Service -- QANTAS -- would come home to its roots and the tourism industry get up off the canvas with some small chance, or a better chance, of surviving 2012.
It would also remove some part of the curse from Bligh's and Fraser's widely abominated privatisations. No privatisation of anything ever has won a single swinging vote in world history, yet Labor governments everywhere keep losing office by trying it on. They disgust the party faithful and the undecided voters by pretending it's good policy when it's only a fuckwitted venal scramble to balance the books.
This mild-mannered Chifleyesque chess move could turn around all that and keep Labor in power in Queensland for forty further years.
But of course it won't happen. It sounds and feels too much like common sense.
As I said nine years ago in one of my books of the same bright, balding, self-desructive dipstick: Shame, Fraser, Shame.
posted by Bob Ellis @ 10:33
2 Comments
2 Comments:
At the rate Joyce is going, Qantas should be an ever better bargain later on. As Kerry Packer said, "You only get one Alan Bond in your lifetime"; or perhaps it should be as Bing Crosby bewailed of Frank Sinatra, "Why did he have to come along in my lifetime?"
Grrr.
Joyce doesn't seem to know what Qantas means to Australians. Pushing its operations offshore is like Britain opting to manufacture Spitfires in Stuttgart in August 1940. It's a company whose heroic ivonic status is owed to Australians alone, and to see an accountant sacking them, sacking our national heroes, FOR ANY REASON is unthinkable.
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