IT'S BEEN Marching Week in Queensland politics! The images dominating the political playbook
are that of public servants marching, shouting, waving placards and, erm, their
boots.
That’s followed by images of the State Treasurer with an air
of worry, saying “we’re sorry, we had to let all these people go”. I think his worried countenance is for real,
and is poll-induced.
Question: why are public servants mobilising so visibly? Why
is Brisbane appalled on their behalf?
Answer:
Brisbane has always been a public servant town, from its earliest days.
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| Thanks to "A History of Queensland" by Raymond Evans. |
Getting rid of public service jobs undermines a very old part
of Brisbane’s character, for the public service is a long-established segment
of Brisbane’s economy.
Our First (Reluctant) Public Servants.
From 1824, Brisbane was constructed by those most unwilling
of public servants – the convicts and the soldiers who guarded them. Brisbane was a prison they had to construct
themselves.
It was the convicts who provided all of Brisbane’s early
labour and constructed its infrastructure.
They carved the rocks out of the Kangaroo Point cliffs, cleared hundreds
of hectares of land, then tilled it by hand. They even built a 1.2 kilometre palisade, five metres high, around the grain
depot and Women’s Factory at Eagle Farm.
It was the start of a pattern where the state provided the funds
and labour to make Brisbane. There was
an expectation and a necessity that the public purse would
provide.
And the Crown did provide that labour, right through to the
1850’s. In 1852, 35% of all white males
in the colony were still ex-convicts and ticket of leave men.
Horses and Cattle: Keep Them Beasties Moving.
From the 1850's, the pastoral industry dominated the Queensland economy, but it relied on these unwilling public servants to be the labour for their capital ventures. The Leslie brothers on the Darling Downs
needed 27 convicts in their workforce.
Another form of public servant did more to secure the future of the pastoral industry than
any other group. This was the Queensland
Native Mounted Police.
The Mounted Police was the military arm of the Queensland
government. It “quietened” vast areas of
Queensland and made it safe for cattle and sheep. They were young men who were brutally
effective, and were brutalised in return.
It was in the latter half of the 19th Century
when the utter reliance on public service expenditure to build this city and
this state really took off.
The huge wave of migration to Brisbane was a public service
venture. Three quarters of all public
money spent on assisted migration in
Australia was spent on Queensland migrants.
And there were 114,000 of them between 1860 and 1879.
It was a time of boom and bust, and a secure public service
job would have been the goal of many of the migrants who lurched off the ships.
How Queensland (and its Pounds) Were Railroaded.
And then the public purse was really opened wide, its gullet exposed red raw, to provide the finance
to make Queensland’s infrastructure. From
1887 to 1883, the Queensland government splurged on colonial railways,
borrowing 7 million pounds to construct a shining 3,000 kilometres of it.
We had the highest per capita debit in the British Empire. And not a Labor politician in sight.
Yet if the government didn’t do it, the railways would not
have been built. The pastoral industry
would not have happened, nor Brisbane’s tea-stained ochre buildings been
constructed, without public servants.
So we have the expectation
that government jobs would be at the centre of the Queensland economy and its
capital city. There was an expectation that the Queensland government
would cough up its pennies and pounds to provide the workers and the
infrastructure.
For the LNP government to undermine public service jobs,
they are undermining the social expectation of many workers in this fair city, as
well as a very old strand in Brisbane’s economy.
And that is why you get lines of ambos, firies, teachers and
other respectable Brisbane residents lining up and throwing their boots at
Parliament House. We are as big a public
service town as Canberra.
* Thanks to Raymond Evan's "A History of Queensland". If you love this State, read this book.*
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