If there was one week that captured the bold and the bad of the nearly eight-year-old Palaszczuk Government, last week was it. It was also a week that could well decide the outcome of the next state election.

At one end of the scale was the Government’s long-awaited grand plan to decarbonise the state’s energy system at a guessed-at cost of $62 billion, launched by Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk on Wednesday.

It’s full of heroic assumptions, some of them verging on magical thinking, such as building two of the world’s largest hydroelectricity projects from scratch in barely a decade.

It will require absolutely everything to go right – from finding the money, the labour and the materials to solving the innumerable attendant social, environmental and managing community impacts.

It’s also more than any other state or federal government – past or present – has yet come up with.

It is indeed visionary. And it’s got enough detail to track progress over time.

At the other end was the also long-awaited and damning report into the Mackay Base Hospital’s obstetrics and gynaecology unit, released by Health Minister Yvette D’Ath on Friday.

The expert investigation team found “multiple examples of substandard clinical care, poor clinical incident monitoring, poor management of safety and quality, complications and clinical deterioration and poor human resource management”.

“Our health system can and must do better,” D’Ath said while announcing new strategies “aimed at strengthening safety and quality processes”.

And somewhere between those two extremes was State Treasurer Cameron Dick trying with increasing desperation to defend Treasury’s daft new plan to boost its land tax take by making Queensland land holders include their interstate land holdings in calculations.

Palaszczuk finally cut Dick off at the knees on Friday but only after she’d spoken to other sceptical state leaders in Canberra for a National Cabinet meeting.

This was even after Dick had discussed the plan several times with his interstate collegues at regular Board of Treasurers meetings and after he’d won the support not only of State Cabinet but also State Parliament, which had passed the new land tax laws month again.

Whatever the history, the outcome was weeks of bad headlines for Queensland and the impression of a government at war with itself.

The next State election, the first under fixed-term legislation, is now almost exactly two years away, to be held on October 26, 2024.

The various events of the past week, as well as other still unfolding developments, such as the continuing forensic DNA testing inquiry and the Government’s consideration of the final report of Robert Gotterson KC’s  inquiry into Stars Queensland casinos, which it received on Friday, could well decide the outcome depending on how they play out between now and then.

The Government says the first two years of its renewable energy plan “will focus on laying the foundations for a clean, reliable and affordable system”.

“It is about delivering the right investment environment, providing market signals and critical decisions on large-scale, long duration pumped hydroelectric storage, which will underpin the future system.”

That means by the time the election arrives, the Government will need to have some solid renewable energy investment commitments locked into place and have made good progress on plans for its massive new hydroelectric plants.

It will also need to show real progress in improving health care standards.

As the team investigating Mackay Base Hospital says in its report, “Consumers of public hospital services have a right to expect that those services are staffed and resourced and governed to national and Queensland health standards.”

And in terms of Dick’s failed land tax swifty, there’s not much we can do except hope that investors don’t remain too wary of Queensland Treasury and its too-clever-by-half revenue raising ideas.

On a final, unrelated note, I found the following in the latest annual report of Singtel, which owns Optus:

“We value the privacy of our customer data stored within our networks and systems
as they may be harmed if their data is compromised or misused. We have in place appropriate safeguards and controls to ensure the security and protection of our customer data.”

Good to know.