Marl Baker
PERHAPS Parliament House needs to bring back the pomp and ceremony because this year's state of the state speeches were a real fizzer.
The annual address, delivered by Premier Lara Giddings, replaced the traditional opening of the parliamentary year about a decade ago.
Then the governor would detail the government's agenda, and there were honour guards and royal salutes and much fanfare.
I had in my mind a kind of 1812 Overture, replete with cannons firing into the waterfront but Speaker Michael Polley assures me that hasn't happened in his time.
That's a shame because now we get the state of the state address; a chance for the premier of the day to outline the government's agenda for the year and allowed its opponents to reply.
They became a mini-budget of sorts, where the premier spreads largesse.
Unfortunately for Premier Lara Giddings, there is very little largesse to spread, just the dim promise of a budget surplus somewhere in the offing.
With an economy in dire conditions, the best Ms Giddings could do was to introduce power concessions for people with medical conditions who needed to run air- conditioners to ameliorate their symptoms.
That's not to diminish how welcome the concession must be for those sufferers but it's hardly a "we choose to go to the moon" moment either.
For the most part, Ms Giddings's speech was a reiteration of ideas that are already in motion - Tassie being the nation's food bowl, support for a National Disability Insurance Scheme, affordable housing.
The Premier also spent a fair degree of her address slagging off the Liberals for being a party bereft of ideas and saying one thing before an election, then doing the other: pot, kettle, black.
She saved most of her vitriol for her conclusion, urging voters not to trust the Liberals at an election that's still 12 months away, when she should have been expressing concrete plans for those next 12 months.
Sadly, it looks like Tassie has fallen into the campaigning, not governing, cycle that federal Labor is at such pains to deny.
Opposition Leader Will Hodgman's reply was no more inspiring - motherhood statements about jobs, stable government, plans for a brighter future, cutting red and green tape, reduced spending.
And, of course, slagging off the government.
At least the Greens offered what legislation they planned to introduce this year, such as increasing the size of Parliament, setting $1 bet limits on pokies, establishing a protection scheme for firefighters and calling for real time disclosure of political donations - whether they will say where their donations come from or hide behind receiving them from the national party remains to be seen.
In May, we will go through all these recaps of grand ideas, motherhood statements and legislative agendas that will not get up when the budget is handed down.
The budget is where these speeches belong. At least they can be backed by new ideas, initiatives and money.