Luckily my job entails a lot of international travel and I get to see the good, bad, and ugly in all sorts of places. I can reflect at 35,000 feet with some ‘Smooth FM music’ … listen to the good life in Australia circa 1966 when the dual speaker transistor radios were blasting out uplifting songs like the Beach Boys Wouldn’t it be nice.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could wake up
In the morning when the day is new?
And after having spent the day together
Hold each other close the whole night through
58 years later, waking up in the morning in Australia you will be avalanched with depressing news bulletins on radio, TV, or print. Every 27 minutes they will spew out tanked news from a dubious source, 83 per cent of it negative. Check for yourself. Positive news doesn’t sell, according to my friends, many of whom have sunk lower than secondhand car salesmen and become journalists.
Each day when you wake up, you can choose to be an influencer or be influenced, so I choose the former. I decided to abandon negative news outlets and go in search of positive outlets.
Armed with some music USBs I have light classical or jazz in the background whether at home, work, in the car, or on a plane.
My closest friends, like me, are contagiously enthusiastic about Queensland despite an ever-increasing mob of government fools nailing down the prosperity of individuals, businesses, and the country.
Wouldn’t it be nice to revert to having three jobs and getting more net take-home pay in a world where increased effort increases reward?
In 1975 I was working for Australia’s government shipping company ANL in Melbourne and being increasingly surrounded by petulant unions and the newer threat of EPA bureaucracies, I could smell the company’s demise.
I started plotting my escape to create my own company and there only seemed to be two alternatives at the time: Western Australia or Queensland. The logic I used was if you’re alive and breathing 168 hours a week, and work only 40-50 hours a week, why stay in a place just because of your job? Melbourne’s weather was miserable, the unions and environmental bureaucrats were even more miserable, more contentious, and more exasperating. I had to escape.
Queensland was the place I selected and at the time it was known as sleepy hollow, when people would say, ‘I have two sons living and another in Queensland…’
But it had a leader, a true leader, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, a relatively uneducated person that actually understood leadership. I loved this guy!
So in September 1976, I headed north and set up my one man camp on the Gold Coast. At the same time this Queensland Premier declared an end to the death tax on the sensible basis that why pay tax all your working life, then pay more after you die?
This one bold decision propelled the development of Queensland. At the time the population of Queensland and South Australia were languishing just over 1 million each. 48 years later, South Australia is 1.5 million but Queensland is 6 million. Hello? As an investor in South Australia, and their preponderance to vote ALP, and enthusiastically embrace union and EPA policies and regulations, I am not surprised.
Three years into building my empire in 1979, now with a staff of five, I surprisingly received an invite from the Queensland Premier for a Saturday morning breakfast at the Pacific Hotel in Southport. A free breakfast? despite being apolitical, and still not a registered voter, my Scottish DNA kicked in and I accepted.
Even more surprising there were only 20 people at this breakfast plus the Premier and a minder. The Premier was no taller than me. From TV images, I thought he was a giant, which he was, but not physically.
‘I asked you all here,’ he said, ‘because you are the future of Queensland, and I want to give you some advice.’ (I was asking myself, how does he know anything about me?)
‘I am not an educated man, but I know right from wrong. Death duties were and still are wrong and I righted it. When I am faced with decisions, I always ask, is it good for Queensland? And is it good for your industry? If yes to both, I will support it, if no to both, I will oppose it.’
His courageous enthusiasm for Queensland shone out.
I immediately enrolled as a National Party member and started attending local meetings.
Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s courageous enthusiasm for Queensland had him remain as Premier for a record 19 years, but the union and environmental bureaucrat activists were all creeping north like a plague of locusts devouring the good of the land, and in the end his own party bowled him out trying to appease the plague.
So why am I telling you this?
Well, Queensland still has the majority of the last remaining sensible Australians while the Leprosy of the Left is entrenched in the southern capital cities of Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney, and Adelaide. Just take a moment and look how those lily-livered bedtwetters in southern states vote, and how they happily support the activist ever-unhappy, angry anti-Australian groups.
So come and visit Queensland soon!
We have had nine years of Labor bringing our state down with the usual ALP crap ‘We’ll give ya free or cheap stuff if ya vote for us!’ then demolishing farmers, fishermen, and small business with UN and Union appeasing policies of closing down live sheep exports, sustainable ports act, gill net fishing, etc.etc. Don’t get me started on the Voice to Parliament and Welcome to Country!
We are so sick of it and we will throw them out next month. Guaranteed!
I will be hosting an MTG coffee the following Wednesday after the election at 10 am and this Scotsman will buy! Somewhere near Runaway Bay Marina.
All welcome! We will show you how to be enthusiastic about our country.
Activists, please stay south of Tweed Heads, and compliments of facial recognition, you will not be allowed into Queensland!
Wouldn’t that be nice?
