Bootcamps for Queensland

I have before me a rather depressing document compiled by the Youth Affairs Network Queensland, the state’s peak youth organisation which, after twenty-one years of service, has had its state government funding cut. The document, ‘Cumulative List of Funding and Staffing Cuts to Services, Staff, Funding and Programs by Campbell Newman’s LNP Government 2012’, tells of swingeing cuts to various health, welfare, criminal justice and other sectors in Queensland. A cursory overview of what is a long and still growing list of cuts to staffing, funding and services across the state, quickly exposes what looks suspiciously like a process of arbitrary decision making, or possibly a deliberate strategy of doing away with anything that hints of advocacy (of any sort), Labor sympathies, ‘left-wing’ tendencies, or worse, gratuitous ‘do-goodery’.