The election best lost

This flies in the face of reports by both the Productivity Commission and Ernst and Young which find that electricity prices have risen 120% since 1998 in Queensland while they have steadily fallen in Victoria or South Australia, where electricity is privatised.

Such is the gap that a new report by the Carbon and Energy Markets has found that Queensland is the most expensive place in Australia for electricity, paying up to four times more than in Victoria, the cheapest.

"One of our standout findings is that costs are extremely patchy across Australia with some people, particularly in parts of Queensland, paying extraordinarily high network costs," said Lin Hatfield Dodds, National Director of Uniting Care Australlia.

When faced with such a dismal fiscal outlook Labor has to ask itself, is the sentimentality of state ownership really worth a protracted deficit of $100 billion?

Despite being rejected by the voters on January 31^st , the Newman government's privatisation agenda achieved a rare feat of near consensus amongst economists and business leaders.

As Dr. Tony Makin, a Professor of Economics at Griffith University, said "I think that with the shortfalls in revenues and the blowout in public expenditure and growth in debt, assets had to be put into the picture in the absence of some white knight solutions like increasing the GST."

With the erosion of popular support for both Anna Bligh and Julia Gillard when proposing controversial agendas, we are now witnessing the death of the reform era where Oppositions win government by saying what the public want to hear and then get turfed out as soon as people realise they've been ribbed.

Labor is opting for short term electability rather than long-term survival and in doing so have missed a golden opportunity to have an open and honest discussion about the measures needed to repair budget prior to an election, something that Bligh, Gillard, Newman nor Abbott ever did.