An open letter to the Honourable David Crisafulli MP

Kenelm Tonkin I 9 October 2024 I Spectator Australia

Dear Premier,

First off, congrats! Here you are, keys to the kingdom in hand – and what a kingdom it is. Queensland – land of sun, sand, and the occasional catastrophic budget blowout.

Your mission?

Embody the libertarian reforming zeal of Sir Samuel Griffith, Campbell Newman, dare I say, even Wayne Goss but without the unimaginative, dunder-blunder managerialism of Annastacia Palaszczuk and Steven Miles. You know, all the lack of transparency, 50 cent train rides, and Covid detention centres which made Queensland a world laughing stock.

You’ve got a shot at greatness, mate. Don’t blow it.

Now, let’s get serious. Six. That’s how many of your LNP mates have governed before. Which means most of your team has no idea how sneaky the public service can be. They’re like bureaucratic ninjas – one minute, you’re a libertarian, promising fiscal responsibility, and the next, you’re signing off on a $100 million ‘cultural enhancement precinct’. It’s government weight gain, and it happens faster than the beer belly after footy season. Blink twice, and suddenly your budget is $90 billion, your total borrowings are $132 billion, and your taxpayers are sweating like cane toads on a Townsville tarmac.

Speaking of spending – mate, I hear you made assurances to public servants in your victory speech that they have nothing to fear and that their jobs are safe. Really? Sir Humphrey Appleby would call that courageous, but to help you with public-sectorese, Margaret Thatcher would have called this weak or feeble. You got the slow hand-clap from those of us who’ve waited an eternity for an economically literate Liberal government, like Kamala Harris got the slow hand-clap for running her Beyoncé concert bait ‘n’ switch this week. Promising no cuts to public service jobs in Queensland is like buying a Great Dane and promising it’ll stay the size of a chihuahua. It won’t. It never does. You’ve got 308,000 public sector employees and not a single one of them will volunteer for redundancy. By year two, they’ll all want pay rises, ergonomic desks, mental health days, and possibly a state-sponsored massage service NDIS style. (Nudge, nudge. Wink, wink…)

Your job is not to make bureaucrats comfortable. The state wasn’t designed to be a nanny. Nannies are for Green-voting rich kids in inner Brisbane who live off daddy’s sweat. Your job is to govern like you’ve just been told there’s a shortage of beer and you’ve only got one weekend to fix it. You’re not going to be in the seat long. Cut spending. Drop taxes. Show the rest of Australia that Queensland’s government can be lighter than a XXXX stubby on a summer day.

Let me lay it out for you:

• Cut the budget.
• Lower the debt.
• Do it now, before someone convinces you to spend $5 billion on a feasibility study for a railway that no one will ride, even at 50 cents a ticket!

If you don’t do it, the debt will grow, the budget will bloat, and you’ll leave office with nothing but a ceremonial shovel from some ribbon-cutting ceremony and an economy like a banana republic, by crikey even worse, Victoria! You want that to be your legacy? Be the Premier who tells Canberra to stuff it, who frees Queenslanders to make and keep their own money without Big Government getting in the way.

I don’t know, do something different. Try a little competitive federalism. Do to payroll tax what Joh did to death taxes. Cut payroll tax to $0, watch companies relocate to Queensland faster than cockroaches to a pizza crust at a Gold Coast beach party. Imagine it – head offices ditching their Sydney Harbour views for Brisbane riverside apartments. Melbourne execs swapping lane-way lattes for year-round sunshine. You’ll have more HQs north of the Tweed than kangaroos at the Irwins’ Australia Zoo.

And it won’t just be the corporates moving – it’ll be the can-doers too. Smart, entrepreneurial people, the ones tired of paying through the nose just to run a business. All you’ve gotta do is tell them, ‘Come to Queensland – where the payroll tax is zero, the beers are cold, and we don’t measure freedom in red tape.’ You’ll be the patron saint of small businesses and the guy who made Queensland the Switzerland of the Southern Hemisphere – but with beaches, not snow.

Forget tweaking policy around the edges – go big, or go home. If you want Queensland to lead, make it impossible for any other state to compete. When every accountant in New South Wales starts Googling ‘how to relocate to Brisbane’, you’ll know you’ve done something right.

Now, I get it – doing less is hard. Everyone loves small government until their pet project is on the chopping block. But here’s the thing: Queenslanders want freedom, not freebies. They want to know their hard-earned dollars aren’t funding another task force to study ‘arboreal sentience of lemon-scented gums’ or whatever nonsense is trending at the next policy summit.

So be bold, mate. Be a fiscal hawk. Fly high, claw deep, and dare to say ‘no’. Do it for the next generation, so they’re not stuck paying for today’s bureaucratic binge. Hell, do it just to see the look on the public service union reps’ faces.

And when the naysayers whinge? Just retort, ‘Howdy Lefties! I’m channelling the grit of old Sam Griffith and the drive of Can-Do Cambell!’ with little of the frump and buffoonery of the last Labor lot. Queensland needs you to be the guy with the guts to govern lightly. So put down the ceremonial shovel, grab a red pen, and slash some damn spending. Afuera!

Govern wisely, govern sparingly Mr Crisafulli, and govern like someone with a Libertarian membership application half-filled out in his desk drawer. Queensland public servants will always call you Mr Cris-a-Fooly. Your legacy should be to avoid being called the same by the economically literate.

Cheers,

A Friendly Fiscal Watchdog

P.S. When the bureaucrats come knocking for more dough, hit them with this: ‘The only thing that balloons faster than a government budget is the cane toad population – both are unwanted, and the only solution is to keep them in check!’

Author: Kenelm Tonkin