I think it’s time for a lame excuse competition.

We need something to celebrate what appears to be an emerging new golden age of government and big business alike ducking their responsibilities with barely believable bluster.

There are plenty of contenders and they range from the outrageous to the just plain silly.

“I’m not a tax adviser,” was Deputy Premier and Planning Minister Steven Miles’ clever recent deflection of follow-up questions to his declared support for the Queensland Government’s idea of renting out granny flats to help solve the state’s housing crisis.

You got the immediate impression the proposal mightn’t have been much more than a thought bubble and that no one had bothered considering the tax, legal and zoning issues.

And why, only now, after nearly eight years in office, has the Palaszczuk Government suddenly discovered we have a housing crisis?

Miles used the same excuse Queensland governments have used for ever – blame the southerners who keep moving north.

But he turned to Covid and climate change to give it a contemporary spin, by also blaming “supply chain and workforce restraints and multiple weather events”.

In fact, Queensland’s recent strong population growth is well within historical trends, weather is always unpredictable and supply chain problems are relative new developments.

But never mind because, of course, it’s all Scott Morrison’s fault, according to Transport and Main Roads Minister Mark Bailey.

“There is no doubt that very high interstate migration to Queensland due to our effective management of the pandemic, combined with record inflation left by the Morrison Government, has squeezed housing supply for Queenslanders,” Bailey explained.

This despite the fact that more than 20 years ago Beattie Labor Government’s then-Housing Minister Robert Schwarten was warning Australia faced “the greatest crisis in housing since the Second World War”.

And this despite the fact that State Labor has been in office for almost all the time since then – time enough to do something about it, you’d think.

Blaming the Feds is of course a time-honoured tactic of state governments trying to explain away crowded hospitals and public infrastructure.

But it’s a tactic currently unavailable to the Palaszczuk Government following Labor’s victory federally.

Never mind. The State Government’s got plenty of other options in its lame excuses cupboard.

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has, after all these years in office, patented her own version of a lame excuse – along the lines of “why didn’t someone tell me? But now that they have, I demand action”.

Her first, and possibly still best example was in May 2019, just days after that year’s federal election, when she realised the State’s until-then passive-aggressive opposition to the Adani mine was a vote loser in central Queensland.

Suddenly, she was demanding action.

“I sense the frustration of the community. I am frustrated. I think everyone has had a gutful, quite frankly,” she declared.

“I think that everyone was hoping that it would have happened, and frankly, it hasn’t. And I’m as disappointed as everyone else,” she said with no apparent irony.

Her Government had, after all, just spent its first four years doing everything it could to avoid making a final decision on Adani.

More recently, Palaszczuk declared herself “shocked and surprised” by some of the findings in Professor Peter Coaldrake’s Queensland Public Service integrity review.

You do wonder just how long one of Australia’s most successful and longest-serving state premiers can keep playing the wide-eyed innocent who needs others to point of the failings in her own administration.

But gosh, when someone does point them out, she’s going to act.

Well, possibly. The Government’s response to the Coaldrake report, which Palaszczuk accepted in full, was supposed to be introduced to Parliament by the end of this week. But so far, no sighting.

The private sector is just as creative when it comes to lame excuses.

Remember Qantas boss Alan Joyce blaming “rusty” and “not-match-fit” passengers and under-staffed terminals for the post-Covid queues as airports?

The best private sector lame excuse I’ve seen in recent times comes from Star Entertainment.

It arose during the recent NSW inquiry into the operation of it Sydney casino.

At issue was the question of how and why Star allowed individuals who had been banned from its Sydney facility to continue to gamble in its Queensland casinos.

Star submitted that in one particular case its Queensland operations didn’t have access to the evidence used to ban the player in Sydney and therefore had no grounds to ban him in Queensland.

Inquiry head Martin Bell KC dismissed the excuse.

He said “there was no reason” why Star in Queensland couldn’t simply have relied on the decision of their Sydney counterparts.

In other words, just implement a group-wide exclusion.

The inquiry report noted that Star had had acknowledged there had been “a serious error of judgement”.

And so, another lame excuse bit the dust.

But don’t worry. There are still plenty out there, many of them well worth celebrating.