HERALD EDITORIAL:
Colin Barnett has conned us all. In March he was re-elected to office in a landslide, on claims of a prudent first-term and a steady hand on the tiller.
Yet just 16 weeks later his government has brought down a horror budget that includes spiralling debt.
With massive job cuts already flagged, schools and juvenile detention centres to close, public servants fighting desperately for their jobs, compulsory redundancies on the way and a raft of other savage cuts, WA will soon eclipse Liberal-led Queensland as a place of job losses and economic misery.
Is this the Liberal promise of hope and prosperity that so many in March voted for in good faith?
Is WA’s economy so dire that savage cuts must be flagged in the middle of a hotly contested federal election, being fought to the political death on the very same issues?
The WA Liberal government’s incompetence virtually guarantees no federal Labor losses in WA—and possibly even gains—just weeks after experts were predicting a Labor wipe-out. Voters wising up to the trickery in March are unlikely to be fooled again.
Single-handedly, Colin Barnett may well end up handing federal election victory to Kevin Rudd.
This week the premier wailed he had failed to deliver on his pet resource projects. You bet he has. But his budget shows he has not just failed voters, he misled them.
And we all know why. In 2008 the Liberals, having failed to win in their own right, took government by ‘bribing’ the National party with the outrageous Royalties for Regions scheme.
Billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted on superfluous regional projects while essential services in Perth—used by country folk, let’s not forget—have been hollowed out. Hospitals, schools, roads and rail have all suffered.
The Liberals ‘bribed’ the Nationals into government so the Nationals could ‘bribe’ country voters to keep them there. It’s a national scandal and the chickens are coming home to roost: A country voter needing treatment might prefer a hospital bed at RPH but instead their home town got a pretty median strip.
The WA Greens must share the blame for this corrupt parliamentary system because they inexplicably, stupidly rejected the 2005 one-vote, one-value reforms for WA’s upper house which would have ended the 100-year-old gerrymander that gives country voters twice the power of city voters.
by ANDREW SMITH
What is scandalous, Andrew Smith, is the fact that rural people have no where near the same access to facilities of ANY sort as urban dwellers do, and you are a disgrace for saying that metropolitan regions have in any way suffered because of the scheme. Unless you are suggesting that the reason for the constant and frequent grammatical, spelling and editorial mishaps in the Herald are a result of you and your journalists having been the victims of lower quality education because all the funding had gone to Royalty for Regions?