Forrest of every poster here now or ever in OLO I would rate you as intelligent as any.
Mate you know I am often more critical of my team than some conservatives.
This thread is headed lets hear it for Joe.
Not lets try to show labors faults, Shadow Minister,Hasbeen, and Individual, have refused my challenges time after time to highlight faults on their side.
But in every thread, remotely about politics, defend them,and try to turn it to an anti Labor one.
An inquiry is to be held in to this flood,it will talk of this dam, it may well be white washing.
IF it is I will be the first to openly charge my side with it.
POLITICS should be about being better taking it on the chin when wrong, looking for improvement.
Tell me what government, in living history, had so many convicted or charged, what leader was so blind he did not know.
But tell me this, please tell me, if we defend the indefensible, try to hide our sides failures why do we take an interest in politics, we if true have no interest in honesty in government.
It is just not good enough to chant anti Labor things but refuse the truth air.

Belly says:

"This thread is headed lets hear it for Joh.
Not lets try to show labors faults, ...."

I can't answer for other posters' views, Belly, but putting the focus upon how good a government decision it was to both build the Wivenhoe Dam, and also provide for the water supply requirements for the increase in SE Queensland population that was foreseeable even in the early eighties by the building of an additional dam, is exactly what I have been trying to do in this thread. Joh was at the helm when those decisions were taken, and they can now be seen to be very good ones.

Whilst the cancellation of the Wolfdene Dam, for which the land had already been acquired, by the incoming Goss government in 1990, as Hasbeen suggests may have had some intrinsic merit, the failure to construct either it or an alternative and thereby complete a well conceived project that served the public interest in SEQ must inevitably attract some criticism.

Some may see that failure as vindictiveness aimed at minimising Joh's standing in public memory. Others may see it as the seizing of a political opportunity to run down the infrastructure capital of Queensland and divert the earmarked funding to the attainment of other political objectives. I see it as the early outworking of an Australia-wide plan to strip the public of its infrastructure assets.

That is why I declined to take the opportunity given in TBC's post of Friday, 14 January 2011 at 5:50:18 PM, to identify the 'politico-gopher' he suggested may have had something to do with the cancellation decision. It would have been akin to shooting the messenger. That is also why I have not so far even mentioned Anna Bligh in this thread: she did not even enter the Queensland Parliament until 1995, well after the decision had been taken.

Understandably, Belly, you see this as one political 'team' in Australian politics versus another, each of which believes it is working in Australia's best interests. I suggest the real picture is different.

I think what I think Forrest is that both sides have faults.
That no one team gets it right.
And I think, if we trawl, we will find both good and bad in both sides.
Dams, we know just how emotional they are, have seen them canceled in NSW and QLD recently, after not in my back yard protests.
Now if we forgive Joe,forget for any reason, that true nature of his government.
Then I should forgive this NSW mob!
NEVER I want better from my side, believe we are the party of real reform real change, currently hiding under our own bed afraid to be our selves.
But if more challenge the wrongs done by Rudd/NSW we will be better.
I will not change my view if Joe did no wrong no one ever did.

P.S. thanks Blue for your kind remarks.

I'm thinking that you might have been young and not conservative? during the Reign of Terror that was the Joh Govt. The Queensland Police were running amuck in the latter years of Joh's tenure and this was sorely felt by the youth movements. I remember preposterous stories printed by the Courier mail like, "Uni students plot to blow bridge" a completely made up story about a group of students planning to blow up the Storey Bridge, in order that Brisbane and the Qld economy be disrupted.

These sorts of myths were perpetrated by the media in league with the Premiers office routinely, in order that Police be given greater powers to search and destroy, and I mean destroy!. I am sorry to express myself so vehemently about this, but you had to be there.

Joh was nothing more than fanatical head scoundrel, in a complete autocracy of scoundrels, rotten to the core, and without equal in terms of corruption in Australian political history.

A Gov't so out of control that it was reminiscent of a beast fed on steroids and hormones, who's legs were no longer able to support it's own weight.

And finally I think it's drawing a long Wivenhoe to suggest that Joh had the dam built for any visionary reason anyway Hasbeen.

Posted by Forrest Gumpp:>> The voting age was lowered from 21 to 18 in March 1973. The government that Joh had led did not get voted out until late 1989. The 'youth' of 1973 were by then aged from 34 to 36 years old. Between 1973 and 1986 successive elections in Queensland had resulted in increasing majorities in the two-party-preferred Liberal/National vote over the ALP. So how were the majority of the youth that had progressively become entitled to enroll and vote since 1973 and up until 1986 voting? Not against the Bjelke-Petersen governments, it would seem.<<

I stand corrected, thanks Forrest.

,

sonofgloin,

Thank you for your gracious admission, but you are not necessarily completely wrong in looking for a change in the electoral support base for an explanation for Joh's eventual political demise. Its just that the origin of a substantial part of that ultimately 'dethroning' electoral influence may not have resided in the 'youth vote' of those times so much as in something that was perhaps able to be made to look very much like it.

Perhaps a good name for it may be/have been 'involuntary youth proxy vote'.

The thing about proxy votes is that they are actually cast by a person or entity different from the person who acquires or holds the right to vote in the first case. In a corporate context, holders of an original voting entitlement may be legally free to assign their voting rights to another person or entity. In the Australian electoral context, State or Federal, any such transfer of voting entitlement is, and always has been, completely illegal.

An obscure submission to one of the now routinely held Parliamentary inquiries into the conduct of Federal elections, those of 2004, contains a hint as to the potential existence of such an 'involuntary youth proxy vote' being evidenced in the overall official electoral enrolment statistics for Australia near the end of 1973. That submission contended that there was of the order of half a million more electoral enrolments made between March 1973 and November 1973 than would have been expected. A share of those questionable enrolments, perhaps better described as 'proxy voting opportunities', would have related to Queensland, and, in the very finely balance electoral malapportionment that existed in Queensland until 1990, could have been decisive in sending overall State electoral results first one way, then the other.

Returning more directly to Hasbeen's topic, it now seems that the Wivenhoe Dam, operated correctly in the original role for which it was conceived, could have totally prevented the flood in Brisbane. See: http://bit.ly/gABxPF and: http://bit.ly/hGCX05 . It was simply kept too full, in the absence of other originally planned storage, in the face of warnings.