The Australian Bureau of Statistics website shows that in June 2022 Queensland public sector employees comprised 52,700 Commonwealth, 406,800 State, and 44,600 Local Government. That is a total of 504,100 employees.

In July 2023 there were 2,850,000 persons employed in Queensland. Nearly 18 per cent of Queenslanders with a job are on a government payroll. Among government employees, there is a sharp divide between generally overpaid bureaucrats and chronically underpaid frontline nurses, teachers, and coppers who provide needed services to the public. The frontline workers are vulnerable to bullying and exploitation. It will be very difficult to forgive widespread career destruction as punishment for declining to accept experimental mRNA injections.

Red Union members joined us because they knew we would not use their membership money for party political purposes. While that hasn’t changed, to achieve professional remuneration for nurses and teachers to run our hospitals and schools, we need legislation to stop these institutions being poorly run by a systemically inefficient unmanageable and unaccountable public service. The operational rules designed to provide equity diversity and inclusion for all instead provide a career path haven for incompetents and bullies who wouldn’t last five minutes in the non-government sector. In my opinion, nearly 50 per cent of the health and education senior management would fit those profiles.

To claim anybody can better manage government bureaucracy is an oxymoron. The best solution is to get someone other than the bureaucracy to do the work. That means we need politicians who will pass legislation to move the centralised administration of health and education and policing to locally run institutions under different rules. That means communities electing politicians who understand the maxim: perform or be replaced.

The perform or be replaced principle is applied brutally in the centralist bureaucracy-loving ALP but not in the Opposition who have become essentially unaccountable to their unsurprisingly dwindling membership. They need Internal Party Democracy (IPD).

IPD has an impact in Ireland, where all major parties empower party members to vote for candidates at district-level selection conventions. The situation is complicated by multi-member constituencies and by rules denying public funding to parties that fail to implement gender quotas. These factors strengthen the influence of party elites in candidate selection.

The National Party of New Zealand by Rule 114 of its Constitution allows local electorates to choose a ‘universal suffrage’ system of selecting a candidate, yet curiously constrains local decision-making with a centralised party elites Preselection Committee which prunes the number of candidates for nomination to five. In both cases ‘beware the devil in the detail’.

Local empowerment through IPD, now becoming daily more appealing to Australians, finds eloquent expression in Canada. The Canadians set a valuable precedent with their Conservatives recruiting 700,000 members enthused by not only choosing their own candidates and hence, their parliamentarians but, wait for it, also their parliamentary party leader. That translates pro rata to 500,000 Australians signing up to break the power of the lobbyists and the party elite factions if we do the same. Let’s do it.

We need a transformation in Australian politics, with local participation replacing distant decision-making. Our first step is to develop a purposeful ‘go local’ grass-roots organisation, but not a political party, whose Constitution bestows upon local community groups an accessible structure empowering them to operate, raise money, and coordinate local actions for their causes. These causes will deny politicians the wherewithal to expand their power and influence at the expense of Australians and reverse the harm that they have already inflicted.

With a combined population of 60 million, England and Wales have 43 police forces, so we might expect at least four police forces in Queensland (population 5.46m) and eighteen in Australia. Our vastly greater distances suggest that a much larger number of cooperating autonomous police forces would be good for Queensland and elsewhere. The USA has 17,985 police agencies with all bar the handful we read about in Democrat cities doing a good job. Local law enforcement chiefs are customarily elected by the communities they serve.

Why not have local communities guiding local policing? Each community could then deal in its own way with an issue such as a youth crime spree or an illegal drugs epidemic. The downside for the bureaucracy would be the loss of some of the 5,000 civilian jobs at Queensland Police and no repetition of $1 billion wasted in supporting Brisbane-based not-for-profits ineffectually purporting to address regional youth crime.

Why not have autonomous hospitals run by health professionals under locally elected boards? Let’s aim at zero interference by Canberra in local hospitals and minimal involvement by health bureaucrats in State capitals. Health care is at the forefront of the principle that decisions should be made as close as possible to the individuals affected. In practice, there are no central bureaucratic system of health education or policing experts.

This is a good time to assert that there is no excuse for the Federal Government interfering in State and Territory education systems. Instead of vote-buying gifts of taxpayers’ money to schools, the Federal Government will achieve far more by cutting the bureaucrats out of the system through provision of education vouchers to parents who then make all the decisions about the education of their children.

Why not have parents voting for the school board and having the power to move their children? The Queensland Education Department has 85,000 employees including 49,000 teachers and teacher aides, suggesting 20,000 unnecessary bureaucrats. Autonomous local schools run by teachers rather than by bureaucrats will compete for students and bid up the market value of well-motivated teachers by at least 20 per cent. This is good for good teachers. And it is hard to imagine anything more detrimental to education than a national curriculum.

Health, education, welfare, policing, aged care, guardianship, this is a partial list of areas of governmental activity where Australians will no longer tolerate distant decision-making. An especially egregious example of distant decision-making was the Federal Government, fully supported by State Governments and their opposition parties, stripping individual Australians of their common law right to sue for damages a supplier of defective goods in the event that those defective goods were to cause harm. The case in point is the outrageous blanket indemnity granted to foreign manufactures, but not local ones, of purported vaccines.

To guarantee that no such crime is ever again visited upon the Australian people, we need a transformation to localism, a transformation to practical commonsense solutions.

This transformation will replace the current centre lead descent into authoritarianism. The Red Union has the expertise and experience to do it. The frontline health, education and law enforcement workers are waiting to lead the way.

Graeme Haycroft, Founder and Chairman, Red Unions