The Queensland election campaign might well turn on three issues: the environment, bikies and privatisation.



On all three, the Newman government has polarised Queensland voters and put policy daylight between it and the Labor opposition.



Environment

Campbell Newman’s regulatory reforms in favour of large mining corporations – most notably the removal of most people’s legal right to object to mining developments – go further than even the excesses of the Bjelke-Petersen white-shoe era, the veteran environmental activist Drew Hutton has argued.

There is speculation that the early election was timed to avoid a potential piece of very bad news that may emerge in either February or March: Unesco’s decision on whether to recommend the Great Barrier Reef be listed as endangered.

Such a move – amid the government’s support for a controversial plan to allow one of the world’s biggest coalmines to increase shipping traffic through reef waters – would be a bad look for an administration that embraces tourism as one of the “four pillars” of the state economy.

“The previous Labor government was bad enough but this government is a complete disaster,” said Hutton. “They’re a one idea government and that idea is to remove as many obstacles from the large corporations, especially mining corporations, as possible.

“That means environmental protection is seen by them as no more than simply an obstacle to economic growth.”

The Newman government abolished licences that regulated use of water by coal seam gas companies amid fears of groundwater contamination.

It removed Labor’s wild rivers protection laws to allow shale gas exploration in western Queensland, brooking a formal complaint to the United Nations from Indigenous custodians of the land that they were not consulted.

“The biggest thing was removing the right of 99% of all Queenslanders to object to mining projects,” Hutton said.

It only left local councils and directly-affected landholders with the power to challenge – notably shutting the industry’s green activists out of the land court.

On the plan to dump dredge spoil in reef waters to enable the expansion of Abbot Point port for Indian coalminer Adani, Hutton said the government was “deluding itself” to think the community and Unesco would approve of the alternative of dumping on sensitive wetlands.

Hutton says Unesco “takes a hard line whenever governments take a recklessly pro-development stance with world heritage areas”.

“I think they will certainly put the Great Barrier Reef in danger,” he said.

Hutton says he expects Labor to re-introduce wild rivers laws and environmental protections in the mining approvals process, despite the fact that the party is certain to come under withering pressure from the wealthy mining lobby.

But Labor does not come with clean hands, Huttons says: its “rorting” of the approval processes for CSG developments in 2010 was “disgraceful”.

“There’s clearly a difference but unfortunately that difference is least when it comes to the mining sector.

“Labor has always been very reluctant to challenge the mining industry on anything, least of all the environment,” he said.

A challenge for the LNP government is that the investment phase of the mining boom, as commodity prices drop off, is over – meaning those many thousands of local construction jobs are drying up just as the money increasingly flows overseas to foreign interests recouping their billions in investments.

Gangs and crackdowns

It was a backflip worthy of Newman’s predecessor Peter Beattie. After opposing blanket laws attacking outlaw motorcycle gangs on civil liberties grounds both in opposition and early in government, the administration proceeded to unleash in October 2013 the most draconian laws any state government has ever tried against bikies.

The trigger was a punch-up in a Gold Coast restaurant involving a large crew of Bandidos. The ensuing political campaign quelled any other questions about police resourcing on the coast after an officer was shot in the head while pursuing an armed robber a day before the brawl.

The attorney general Jarrod Bleijie, disparaged by lawyers as the “conveyancer general”, spearheaded the government’s audacious plan to wipe out the local manifestations of a worldwide subculture which unites the fringes of the working class and criminal worlds.

The crackdown hinged on laws that choked the life out of the gangs’ everyday existence as much as enabling police to investigate crimes in their ranks – laws that declared these leather-clad secret societies criminal organisations without any evidence in court, that made them liable for jail sentences if they so much as set foot in their clubhouses or went to a pub in a group of more than two, even if they were family.

The looseness of the definition around gang “participants” who could be punished under the laws was highlighted by the arrest of librarian Sally Kuether, a bikie’s girlfriend with no criminal record who faces six months jail for visiting a pub.

Other controversies have abounded, including the use of prolonged solitary confinement of jailed bikie “participants” – including one who had quit a club six years earlier. Bikies – even those without criminal records – will soon be banned from becoming builders, electricians and even tatooists.

The use of the Vicious Lawless Association Disestablishment (VLAD) act was designed to make bikie supergrasses roll on superiors with the threat of an extra 15 to 25 years’ jail on top of a sentence for a serious crime committed in the name of a gang.

But many of the bikie underworld’s acknowledged kingpins have yet to be caught.

VLAD has also been used to charge – so far without convictions – non-bikies, ranging from a couple allegedly running a large-scale cannabis growing operation to a small time dealer who sold several MDMA pills and a bag of speed to his friends.

Many lawyers and judges oppose the laws because they give short shrift to principles such as equality before the law and freedom of association.

A major controversy – raising the near universal ire of lawyers and fellow judges – was the rapid elevation of Tim Carmody to chief justice. It came after a stint as chief magistrate in which Carmody took charge of all bikie bail applications and explained to lawyers his job was to channel the intention of the “new sheriff in town”.

One of his key decisions as magistrate, a 17-page refusal of bail for members of the Yandina Five – friends and family associated with the Rebels who faced jail for a pub visit and were held in solitary confinement for weeks – was overturned in three pages by a soon to be colleague in the supreme court.

Police say the crackdown has given an unprecedented opportunity to slow gang recruitment and open a window into a secretive arm of organised crime. Some in the ranks say the laws are “Nazi laws” and it would be a mistake for crime fighters to be entirely preoccupied with groups that sport the most obvious examples of organised crime while drug lords above them play golf in polo shirts.

Senior police and the government keep pointing to drops in reported property crimes as a spillover effect. But car thefts and break and enters are the province of petty crooks, not bikies, and it’s not clear how many of the 1,000-plus gang “participants” are either actual bikies or truly instrumental in their crime networks.

The crackdown’s most serious cases – the alleged multimillion-dollar Hells Angels, Bandidos and Rebels “ice” trafficking rings and the Bandidos extortion rackets – are yet to go to full trial.

Labor has flagged plans to wind back the laws to its previous model, in which police will have to go before a court and produce evidence to show a gang is a “criminal organisation” and then seek orders to stop individual bikies from gathering with clubmates in public or going to clubhouses.

The LNP has attacked Labor as “soft” on the gangs issue.

Which side a see-sawing electorate falls on will depend on to what extent they have sympathy for the rights of people who otherwise might not invoke their sympathy.

Privatisation

The Newman government has attempted some wordplay with its pitch to privatise electricity networks and ports.

In a nod to how toxic the notion of “selling” public assets became for the former Bligh government who copped an electoral drubbing last time around, the LNP unveiled a plan to “lease” them out instead – for up to 99 years, which in corporate financier language equals a sale anyway.

And even before seeking, as it promised, voter approval for the leases, the Newman government has already quietly unloaded some $10b of public property, mainly buildings and land.

It hopes the electorate will see the fiscal sense of a $28bn dividend from opening up for private investors stakes in electricity netwroks, poles and wires.

The risk is that voters – despite Newman’s arguments that the competition authority already controls prices in a highly regulated industry – will see privatisation as a cue for more of the steep household power rises that followed privatisation of electricity retailers.

They might also question the utility of selling off income-producing assets whose essential services can be kept in price check while cross-subsidising other government programs.

Labor, which ran seriously afoul of its union support base on the issue last time around, is promising to keep the farm in the family investment portfolio and will shout “price hike” to anyone that listens.