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You really have to wonder what sort of mandate Labor believes it has in Queensland when the travel of its recently re-elected premier is conducted in such a clandestine manner.

Post-poll, Anna Bligh made much of the wake-up call she received and how she realised she was there to govern for all Queenslanders whether they voted for her or not.

There was scant evidence of that in a visit to the Coast last Friday, her first since before the election apart from a quick Kin Kin floods fly-in.

Sections of the media were told the previous day that she was coming, but sworn to secrecy. The purpose of her visit and its location, however, were revealed less than an hour before she arrived at the Peregian Springs State School construction site.

It is a wonder the government bothered. Ms Bligh had only defiance to offer the people of Wide Bay and the Sunshine Coast, who have overwhelmingly rejected the Traveston Crossing Dam proposal, and the majority of Brisbane residents, who now also consider the dam on the nose.

And later she was equally dismissive of Mike and Jenny Tsilfidis, after promising in front of the cameras to finally look personally at the correspondence they had sent her calling for a re-think of the high-voltage powerline roll-out through a string of Land for Wildlife properties at Eerwah Vale.

Such was their frustration at being ignored that the couple, who had somehow heard it was on, posed as P&C members to infiltrate the event.

Powerline Action Group Eumundi, of which they are members, wants a switch from fossil-fuel delivered energy or for the new powerline to go down the existing highway easement.

Ms Bligh’s grip on the rapidly changing world around her and her contempt for its inhabitants were exposed when away from the cameras she queried where the Tsilfidis expected to find a haven free of powerlines.

Clearly not in a state clinging defiantly to the fossil-fuel powered source of the wealth it has repeatedly squandered in funding a bloated bureaucracy and ill-conceived, poorly cost-managed infrastructure roll-outs.

Her trip last week through Queensland featured a series of stage-managed appearances designed to dodge her party’s natural constituency in the trade union movement, which is furious at the planned sell-off of state assets.

It is hard to justify the cost of the whole exercise, which is backed by a $1 million advertising campaign, as anything more than Anna’s version of opposition leader John-Paul Langbroek’s billboard self-promotion.

Despite a Crime and Misconduct Commission investigation into its SEQ Regional Plan, the state government continues to define the public interest as that which allows developers the right to create short-term jobs.

It is a mantra that channels former “mates’ rates” planning minister Russ Hinze and his premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen and informs such documents as the government’s draft sustainable planning bill, and its coastal-management and climate-change adaptation policies.

Despite assurances from the premier that all environmental checks need to be passed first, ultimately even the tourism minister can now force through approval for new development in as little as 20 days on the basis of jobs, jobs, jobs.

Jobs are of course important, but those that last only as long as it takes to destroy valuable habitat, while placing new assets on coastal floodplains vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, really come at a price we should not be prepared to pay.

Perhaps it is time for a Royal Commission to fully and publicly examine just how lines made it on to the maps that form the SEQ Regional Plan and why this government remains hell-bent on driving increased density on coastal plains increasingly vulnerable to climate-change impacts.

Source:  Bill Hoffman – http://www.thedaily.com.au/blogs/bill-hoffman/2009/sep/02/anna-bligh/