Liam Flenady has been endorsed as the Socialist Alliance’s candidate in the April by-election for the South Brisbane seat of former ALP Queensland premier Anna Bligh. Flenady released the statement below on April 11.
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Within two weeks of taking office, Premier Campbell Newman and his Liberal National Party (LNP) government show signs of returning to the bad old days of the Joh Bjelke-Petersen regime.
They have begun to make serious cuts in funding to the arts, environmental programs and the public sector. In the name of “cutting red tape”, the new Queensland government is preparing to give open slather to their mates in the property development industry by abolishing key environmental regulations on new building projects.
They are giving Liberal Party heavies plum jobs in the state bureaucracy. Clive Palmer and his cronies in the mining industry are rubbing their hands together at the prospect of even more new coalmines, and possibly even uranium mining for the first time in Queensland.
The remaining state-owned sector in QR National will soon be flogged off to private investors. What other public assets will be sold off remains to be seen.
The disaster suffered by the Bligh government on March 24 shows it had totally lost the support of the Queensland people. The former ALP government’s sell-off of public assets was a major factor in this defeat.
As in the recent state election, I am running for Socialist Alliance in the South Brisbane by-election on a platform of genuine, radical change.
The Socialist Alliance stands for:
• Ending corporate control of politics,
• Taking back the people’s assets: for a state-owned insurance company and a Queensland State Bank,
• Green energy, not coal: stop coal seam gas,
• Free and frequent public transport,
• Putting people and planet before profits.
In the April 28 by-election for South Brisbane, we will campaign on these and other radical policies and will call for the launch of a fightback against the Newman LNP government.
