Good point. Katter was the only one who didn't. Ofcourse nobody could have predicted what a royal mess Gillard would make of things. Why anyone would want a bar of Labor after their recent spate of stuff ups is beyond me. That was a federal election and Bob Brown probably had a role in that decision.

Anna Bligh is quite possibly more hated right now than Julia Gillard. Katter wants to buy back all the assets she has sold off. The Queensland Party wants a moratorium on Coal Seam Gas. This is Anna Bligh's big revenue raiser. How she hopes dig herself out of her financial hole. Why would she create a party dedicated to undoing her only hope of reverting the economic mess she has made?

The Conservatives in NSW are still set on selling off more assets. What looks like going is:

Ports
Ferries
Rail
Power

Water (in dispute but it won't be long)

These people cannot be trusted with protecting public assets. It doesn't matter who you vote for, both ALP and Liberal governments have never taken these issue to a referendum. Good to see new parties forming on this platform but the Australia Party has some worrying policies as well, will it be enough to get them over the line. Maybe in QLD but I doubt in other parts so much.

What is needed is a more Centrist Party with a commitment to keep essential services in public hands.

Labor has become so corrupt & incompetent that they will literally do anything to try save their hide. Bring out the branding iron I say.

by the way, anyone seen this ?

http://www.cobbers.org.au/index.html

very good site indeed

I am trying to decipher Pelican's post. Correct me if I'm wrong, but here's what I get.

Pelican seems to want to keep as many as possible of the essential services in "public" hands. I assume that means keep as many as possible of these services that can cause the most disruption by a strike, in union hands.

Perhaps it is not that at all. Perhaps it simply a desire to keep about 3 times as many [non]workers as needed to run a service, in nice comfy overpaid positions, at the public expense.

Perhaps it means both, or could it be to keep a bunch of no hopers in senior positions.

Have you noticed, every time we have some kind of emergency we find the top management of the relevant departments totally incompetent.

Fire service, damn management, hospitals, health service in general, emergency services, police commissioners, it doesn’t matter, they all fail, when there's an acid test.

Isn’t it dreadful that we have to call in some army general to sort out the public service mess? From my past experience army types were not the top of the tree. Perhaps that has changed, or perhaps they look good, when they only have bureaucrats to be compared to

Pelican,
Australians of today no longer have the logic to sort out the mess by way of referendum.
If they had we wouldn't have the mess we have.

Hasbeen,
I don't know what Pelicans reasons are for wanting to stop the selling off of our assetts, but she is right. Look at the electricity in NSW, CBA, Qantas and Telstra. Privatising or making the utilities bigger has simply resulted in price hikes for consumers and massive pay rises for top management.

I do not know of one assett that has been sold off where the public and consumers have benefitted.

I would like to see a party formed that really opposed the sale of assetts, they would get my vote.