The Townsville Bulletin's lead articles for January 2011 will be....

Did you see the Bulletin's "tell the editor" readers survey in last Saturday's Bulletin or here online?  We've seen this ploy from the Bully around this time every year for a while now - run a survey and then use the data collected to con advertisers about local consumer sentiment and to generate an endless stream of "Townsville residents think ..." and "Townsville residents outraged at ..." articles during the silly season when the Bully would rather have staff on leave.

 

In January you should expect articles on:

1. How everyone loves the "new look Townsville Bulletin"
2. An announcement on a change from Saturday to Friday for the publication of the Bully's Property Section
3. How times are tough and people are cutting back on discretionary spending
4. Voters demand the return of Council Divisions
5. (more) Anger at Council over water rates / "sack the lot of them readers say"
6. A report card (with ratings) on all the local pollies 
7. CBD Upgrade has little impact on shoppers intentions / Shoppers prefer Myers at Stocklands over a road through the Mall
8. Something about a shortage of GPs (interestingly, there are very few questions about the Townsville Hospital)
9. Public live in fear of rampant hooliganism, hooning, cabbie bashing, rude drivers and bad neighbours
10. Everybody loves sport and The Fury must be saved
11. Most Townsvillians don't visit Maggie Island
12. The Government isn't doing enough about homelessness and Townsville demands a mandatory detoxification program be introduced although  no one seems to know whether it should be for Flinders Street nightclubbers or parkies

And, believe it or not, you should also expect those old chestnuts:

• Voters demand a separate NQ state, and
• Maggie Is to become a tourism mecca if the bridge is built

Finally, I have no idea what sort of story they will beat-up out of responses to the question "Should council or business owners be responsible for the upkeep of heritage listed buildings?" but I'm sure a few developers around town (perhaps with interests in the Mall/Drive-through) will have written the article for have them.

 

Of course, all of this dribble that we will read over the holidays will all be meaningless, just as the survey is meaningless.  It will reflect the views of those people who buy the Bulletin or visit their website and choose to fill in a survey - nothing more and certainly NOT IN ANYWAY any kind of representative sampling of the local population (or even of the Bulletin's readership for that matter, advertisers take note).