Bligh leadership blighted by fear of decisions
24.03.2008
COMMENT
THE latest political scandal confronting the Queensland Government -- the alleged rape of a nurse on Mabuiag Island in the Torres Strait -- has brought even more evidence to suggest that Premier Anna Bligh sees herself as being a one-term leader.
Bligh's unwillingness to demonstrate leadership in times of crisis is defining her political future.
Her reluctance to take the tough decisions that might put her at odds with some in her party is in direct contrast to her eagerness to dispense sinecures.
Bligh raised eyebrows early in her premiership when she parachuted her husband into a well-rewarded public service job. And then she showed no courage at all when having to decide the fate of former emergency services minister Pat Purcell, who admitted assaulting two public servants.
Instead of demanding, as any responsible leader would have done, that he leave or be expelled from the parliamentary team, she meekly suggested he had already paid a high enough price for his bullying conduct.
And there was last week's doozey -- handing out overseas ``trade commissioner'' postings to political apparatchiks including her former ministerial colleague and factional friend, Steve Bredhauer.
Health Minister Steve Robertson has declared that he is not responsible in any way for conditions that led to the attack on the nurse on Mabuiag on February 5 and instead said the three reports outlining the appalling and dangerous living conditions for the nurse on the island were never brought to his attention.
Therefore, he contends, it is public servants who should accept responsibility, and not him, because he ``heard no evil''.
And Bligh, who is from the compassionate Left, has predictably given her stumbling minister her public support, saying he is doing a ``good job''.
Perhaps Bligh's leadership might get its necessary injection of steel if she went into a room alone with the young woman victim of the vicious attack and sat at a table opposite her.
Bligh could hold the traumatised nurse's hand, look her in the eye, and tell her how nobody in her Government is responsible for what happened.
After all, that is what Bligh is expecting everybody else to believe.
