It’s time for all the freeloaders on the Reef 2050 gravy train to get off at the next station and let taxpayer dollars help taxpayers. As yet another $12.6 million was thrown at the reef last week, it is time State and Federal Governments and their hangers-on are held to account. We’ve had $2.7 billion of taxpayers money thrown at the reef and in return we get policies demonising farmers and regulations designed to drive them out of business. We’re seeing millions and millions of dollars being poured into research that produces recommendations to send the Gravy Train back for more taxpayer money. It’s time the perpetual Reef 2050 Gravy Train was ground to a halt and the focus shifted to sustaining industry and jobs.
The amount of money being spent as part of Reef 2050 is absolutely disgraceful when ordinary Queenslanders are suffering so much stress and hardship.  I don’t think Government and their ‘hangers-on’ have any idea just how much bitterness is felt out here in the community at the unequal manner in which the COVID-19 lockdown has adversely impacted only certain sections of the community. It has been the elderly and the young, the ordinary workers in private industry, the sole traders, small business owners, regional and rural workers, who have borne the brunt of this. It’s not the Government, not the public institutions and not the public service sector that has copped the rough end of this pineapple.
The one thing the government could have done to actually help people in a practical way would have been to properly fund the QRIDA concessional loan facility. The Queensland Labor government promised to support small business and they spectacularly failed to do so with the facility suspended only weeks it started because it ran out of money.  The amount they made available for small business was just $500 million in a crisis of a scale we haven’t seen since the Great Depression. Meanwhile, the State and Federal governments are throwing $2.7 billion at the Great Barrier Reef with no result and no accountability.