Thursday 14 October 2010

Council debt lecture is such hypocrisy from Labor

The Queensland Labor government is showing gross hypocrisy in lecturing local Councils how to manage their debt.

Cairns MP and Local Government Minister, Desley Boyle has produced a Guide to Asset Accounting in Local Government. This is not much more than an insult when you consider the financial mismanagement of Boyle's Labor government with its record state debt, now amounting $85 billion and the sale of publicly-owned assets, including Queensland Rail.

For Desley Boyle and her government to lecturing local councils on financial management and asset accounting is rude in the extreme.

The LNP local government spokesman Howard Hobbs says Boyle's Labor government is hardly a shining example of financial prudence.

“Everywhere you look and at every project Labor has touched there’s been financial disaster, whether it be the forced council amalgamations that have cost ratepayers more than $200 million, the water grid, electricity retail deregulation, the Traveston Dam fiasco,” Howard Hobbs says.

Hobbs says the facts showed the long-term Labor government had wasted billions upon billions of dollars.

“Labor is to blame for the poor financial position of councils through its forced amalgamations and takeover of council water assets," Hobbs says. “Forced amalgamations alone have cost ratepayers at least $200 million and Labor’s forced equalisation of rates across council areas is causing frightening rate hikes such as in the Central Highlands where rates will soar by 3000 per cent."

“Labor went against all the advice of local government experts and rushed ahead with its forced amalgamations without doing any cost-benefit analysis on the impact to ratepayers," Howard Hobbs says. “And when you look at the Bligh government’s management of a range of services such as health, it’s ridiculous and rude for the Minister to be lecturing councils on financial management."

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