"I think we need to look at the options that are there," he said. "It may involve a combination of all of those three, but let's have a discussion with Queenslanders first and see what they would like to see happen." Mr Nicholls said he would continue his asset sales conversation tour - an initiative he would not confirm or deny as the brain child of outside consultants embedded within Treasury to help the department address its "strategic communications" issues, earlier this year. Union leaders have been invited to take part in a round-table discussion with the treasurer, an invitation which has been accepted by the Queensland Council of Unions. QCU president John Battams said union representatives would meet with the Treasurer on behalf of affiliates, but he also called on Mr Nicholls to honour his promise to hold public meetings. While this stage of the tour is invitation-only, internet involvement and town-hall style meetings have also been flagged. But the government won't have all the answers to give voters - such as how much potential asset sales would reap - for some months.

The scoping studies the government ordered late last year on the Gladstone and Townsville ports and electricity generators CS Energy and Stanwell were due back at the end of last month. Mr Nicholls said they were still being "finalised" and the government would need to review them before their findings were made public as he expected they contained confidential information. The government's actual sketch for moving forward won't be available until budget time. In the mean time, Mr Nicholls, using modelling provided by Queensland Treasury, had some new numbers to present.The current $80 billion of state debt had been broken down into bite sized pieces for easy soundbites - $450,000 in interest payments every hour and $15,000 for every "man, woman and child" in Queensland. Using Treasury's modelling, Mr Nicholls said without "corrective action" the debt "could potentially blow out to around "$21,000 for every man, woman and child" or "up to $121 billion under the current projections" by around 2022. "We will reach a fiscal balance and we’ll maintain that for a couple of years but in the longer run we will not be able to sustain the growth and the jobs that people will require in the future," he said.

In response, the opposition has accused Mr Nicholls and the government of 'scare mongering'. "This is a desperate act from a treasurer who knows that Queenslanders don't want the asset sales he is campaigning for," Curtis Pitt said. "...First the Costello audit used wild assumptions to fabricate a $100 billion figure, now the 'scenario' is $120 billion. Statements like these are as irresponsible as it comes from someone who purports to be the treasurer of this state." Mr Pitt said the government was selling one message to investors and another at home. "What we know is they have a message overseas where they are telling people that Queensland is a great place to invest and at home, they are saying the state is going broke and we are at the edge of a fiscal cliff," he said.

"...When you look at what the income in this state is, we have very strong prospects going forward, around about $6 million an hour. This is a scenario which is essentially a concocted product of this $20,000 a month spin doctor group coming out of treasury." Mr Pitt said the government was committed to selling assets because of ideology. He said his party's policy would be built around "patience". In the last mid-year fiscal and economic review the state's revenue was forecast at $52,151,000,000 which equates to $142,879,452.05 a day or just under $6 million per hour. Expenses were forecast at $55,787,000,000 or $152,841,096 per day - which equates to just over $6 million an hour.