CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
In a weird turn of events, the right-wing coalition of the Queensland Opposition and the Murdoch newspapers are apparently outraged by the Premier’s wasteful use of light aircrafts.
Steven Miles is being blasted by the media this week for his decision to fly between two Queensland cities – instead of driving along a notorious and deadly Queensland highway that would have taken him over three hours and seen him arrive well after dark.
The state Labor leader flew from Hervey Bay – three-and-a-half-hours north of Brisbane – to Bundaberg on Monday afternoon.
While the detached shiraz conservatives of Murdoch’s NSW-based media companies pretend to clutch their pearls at this decision to travel by air, it appears to be lost on both the Courier Mail and Sky News that the vast majority of voters in 2024 will never once in their lives drive longer than 3 hours in one sitting.
However, with the Labor Premier’s recent bump in poll numbers, the right-wing machine is holding a microscope over his every move. Desperately hoping to find some sort of slip up that could be magnified into an election-losing scandal.
The aircraft left Hervey Bay Airport at 4:22pm and landed at 4:33pm, a 74 kilometre journey that lasted just 11 minutes and cost less than dragging an entire government convoy of vehicles up the coast.
From there he presented a Woolies mud cakes to Bundaberg MP Tom Smith for his 34th birthday, before sleeping the night in a roadside motel and then waking up at the crack of dawn to face media interviews and tour the construction site of Bundaberg’s hospital – which he is responsible for building.
The fact that the Queensland Premier has to travel these kinds of distances every single day is not really a talking point for his LNP Opponents, who have been in opposition so long that none of them can actually remember what it’s like to govern a landmass that is seven times bigger than the United Kingdom.
Unfortunately for the Premier, this 11 minute flight has put him in the same camp as that well known polluter Taylor Swift – who the Murdoch media are convinced is unpopular with the general public for her shameful private jet carbon emissions.
Queensland voters are this week in awe of the mental gymnastics required to turn a right-wing propaganda campaign – aimed at getting the LNP elected so they can scrap Labor’s royalties tax on foreign mining bosses who pollute our atmosphere with fossil fuels – into a furious condemnation of the needless carbon emissions that come with travelling on a plane between different towns in a state that is two and half times bigger than Texas.
