Letter to the editor:
The $1.3m sale of the former Mareeba Agricultural College premises fits in well with the Liberal Partys state and nation-wide plan to sell any government asset not nailed or bolted down.
There are just two publicly owned agricultural colleges remaining in the state, at Emerald and the almost dysfunctional Dalby campus. They have been given a two year Ministerial ultimatum, generate some income or you will be shut down.
This Brisbane-centric government has now realized our worst fears by attempting to privatise the education sector.
Driven by their user-pay policy, the LNP and the ALPs Competition Commission also has wreaked havoc in the far north where we have seen a 900 per cent hike in water charges and a 23 per cent jump in power costs.
Education Department school and land sales and the privatization of TAFE do not augur well for the training of several thousand unskilled, unemployment benefit recipients in the Cairns region.
If there remains a publicly owned industry training facility in the state, other than the Gladstone college, then bring your cheque book and learn Mandarin if you want a feed in five years time.
The mismanagement of such a great facility such as the Mareeba Ag College by this and the previous state government is not surprising as the LNP has left out to dry many hundreds of cattle producers in the north west suffering their worst drought since 1969.
There has been no help for bush people from this government of Malthusian Liberals. Just read any western region newspaper.
Visionary spins of creating the food bowl of the north have now fallen on deaf ears, because there wont be any primary producers left in the north to utilize the few thousand megalitres of river water so magnanimously handed out to the defeated farming industry struggling with a $66 billion debt.
Not just that, but from where will our farmers, with an average age of 60 years, get their understudies?
Not from a Queensland Agricultural College thats for sure.
No doubt the monetary systems creator John Maynard Keynes and free traders Adam Smith and Tom Malthus still hold their hallowed positions in the Liberal Party hall of fame.
from an Atherton Tablelands resident