Peter Beattie’s gone, off presumably on a long extended holiday with his wife and kids.

Good luck to him. Enjoy.

He laid it out Monday for the rest of us. “I’m over it” he said of his life in politics.

Half his luck - there were many in the community who were over him too, but have been now denied the opportunity to say so at the ballot box.
Now we just get to live with his legacy and she has made it increasingly clear that she will keep singing from the same song sheet.

Anna Bligh last week shoved the the Urban Land Development Authority Bill 2007 through state parliament and followed up with the warning that she would out local authorities who attempted to slow down development approvals.

Presented as a means of delivering affordable housing the bill takes any planning authority out of the hands of local government and establishes its own set of rules on everything from building heights to required infrastructure provision.

Both the bill and Bligh’s strong-arm stance perpetuate the myth that local government is responsible for the shortage of land for housing and consequently its high price.

Nothing could be further from truth. The Productivity Commission (2004) studied the factors affecting first home ownership in Australia and found that claims like those Bligh seems bent on prosecuting had no basis in fact.
In south-east Queensland the development industry’s production of new housing blocks lags 25% behind local government approval of new estates.

Perhaps Ms Bligh would be better off altering the conditions that make it so attractive for a handful of big developers to land bank approvals and drip-feed new developments onto the market to maximise their profit.

Does Bligh intend to simply be Beattie-in-a-dress or, even more frighteningly, an amplified advocate for the strategy of growth is good, the more people the better?

Who represents the rest of the community and cares for their aspirations and lifestyles?

Peter Beattie may well be “over it” as he puts it, but there are many more who are over the cosy club Labor has created where senior bureaucrats and politicians drift effortlessly from government into the echelons of the big five developers and where only one voice is determining policy.

A study called Assessment of the Factors Impacting Housing Afforability in Queensland commissioned of the AECgroup by the Local Government Association of Queensland and delivered last year found that despite having approvals in place, the production of lots by developers had been less than the rate of consumption during the previous five years.

That is one glaring contributor to the high price of housing that does not seem worthy of mention by the premier designate.

Why? The Productivity Commission report of 2004 found that “variations in prices and affordability around long-term trends are an inherent feature of the housing market in Australia” and that much of the increase in prices during the early 2000s was explainable in terms of “structural and normal cyclical demand pressures”.

The new housing affordability bill will allow this government to identify areas of land under its control and on-sell them to developers free of any of the normal local government planning constraints.

It has identified areas for this purpose including four in Brisbane and one in Mackay and also signalled it would bring forward from 2018 the 3700 hectare Stockland Caloundra South development.

It should be remembered that the northshore of the Maroochy River (Twin Waters) was once national park converted by the Bjelke-Petersen government for the benefit of its developer mates. What an asset that would have been to a community whose population this state government intends to double.

At times of departure it is good form for kind words to be spoken, but I for the life of me can not see how the Beattie government’s planning policies have differed in any significant way from the Bjelke Petersen era.

The same privileged group has been afforded the same special access to government afforded it under the Bjelke regime and the rest of us have been left to please ourselves.

Ultimately Beattie’s greatest strength was the weakness of his opposition and a real suspicion in the electorate that he was the best of a bad lot.
Whether Bligh will be extended the same benefit of the doubt remains to be seen.