Cameron Thompson (Blair, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure to be speaking this evening on the Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2005-2006 and addressing some issues of grave concern in my electorate of Blair. Recently I received a letter from the Premier of Queensland, Peter Beattie. I was not the only one; there were lots of Queensland coalition members who received letters from the Queensland Premier. He wrote to me and he wrote to the other members, and he called us ‘champions for Queensland’. Indeed, that is a correct assumption by the Queensland Premier—we are champions for Queensland and we work very hard for Queensland. But it was a ridiculous and absurd letter from the Premier of Queensland, Mr Beattie, who spent $150,000 on ads in newspapers carrying on about what a disaster the Queensland health system has become. We all know that to be true—the Queensland health system is a disaster, and it is a disaster because of Mr Beattie. It is not a disaster because of the actions of anybody else.

The Queensland health service is run by the Queensland Premier and the Queensland ministers. They administer it and it is a mess and a disaster. Apart from the depredations we have seen as a result of Jayant Patel and the recent Caboolture hospital crisis, we have seen basically a winding down in health services in Queensland over many years. The Queensland Premier had the hide to write in his ads and to write in his letters to me and my colleagues that the problem with the Queensland health service was inadequate training of doctors at the federal level. That is the greatest tissue of lies in relation to Queensland that you could imagine. The problem in Queensland is that the Queensland system is so underresourced that doctors who train in that state leave the state. He is unable to keep the people in the state.

In this appropriation bill the question of health is so important to all Australians, and doubly so at the moment to all Queenslanders, who are faced with this abominably ramshackle state run system. We have an obligation here at the federal level—and I must compliment successive coalition health ministers for the efforts that they have gone to to increase the training of doctors and to facilitate the training of doctors from country areas. That has, I think, been a series of exemplary moves by those ministers to combat what is a very real problem. But for the Queensland Premier—who finds himself in more strife than Flash Gordon because of his continual neglect of the state and of the proper administration of the state—to try at the last minute, in a panic, to blame the Prime Minister of Australia and the federal health authorities for problems of his own making I think is just shameful. He wrote me a letter and I wrote him a letter back. I want to put it on the record:

Dear Mr Beattie

Thank you for your letter about the Queensland health crisis.

The state of our Queensland health system is of grave concern to me. I have noted your recent advertising campaign. It reminds me of earlier attacks you directed at me and the Commonwealth in relation to the Ipswich Motorway.

You cannot continue to blame others for the parlous state of planning and administration within your government departments.

Poor planning and under-funding by Queensland Health, workplace bullying, and the failure to direct resources to the coalface has resulted in the decline in Queensland health services.

Similarly, incompetence, politicisation, a focus on cost shifting and a failure to plan has produced a deficient proposal to upgrade the Ipswich Motorway. It falls short of the needs of our region in terms of traffic carrying capacity, network redundancy, separation of traffic streams and serviceability during construction.

Successive state ministers and their departmental side kicks have created a motorway plan based on self interest and a real political fear of nimby-ism. Sadly for your shoddy administration, motorists and industry in our region have a different requirement. They require a road that can actually carry the current and projected traffic numbers.

Your government has endorsed and continued to promote a motorway plan that would be redundant within five years of completion but only if unrealistically small assumptions about traffic growth are conjured into effect.

In reality, the motorway today is carrying more than the accepted capacity of a six lane road (80,000 vpd) on every day of the week.

Madam Deputy Speaker, it is a four-lane road that we are talking about here. I continue:

On Fridays, it is carrying 105,000 vehicles. If anyone in Main Roads still claims your plan can cope with these numbers or the real rate of growth, they should be sacked for incompetence or (more likely) sycophancy.

The rest will tell you that the alternative scheme for the Goodna Bypass devised by me and endorsed in the subsequent Maunsells Report will do the job for this region at least until 2035.

In your letter, you address me as a champion for Queensland. Thanks. Like all my colleagues (so named), I am concerned about issues like health and transport, where your government has failed.

In Queensland, the abysmal state of health services, the contribution of Jayant Patel, the Caboolture emergency crisis etc., all have occurred courtesy of Peter Beattie and the government you lead.

In our region, the Goodna Bypass will be the cornerstone of transport infrastructure for at least 25 years. It will be the basis of continuing development and regional capacity building for many decades more.

There is no viable alternative to the bypass.

Now the question for you is whether your government will help the Commonwealth to deliver this essential piece of infrastructure and do so in a timely manner.

Yours sincerely

Cameron Thompson

Federal Member for Blair

I wrote that letter to the Queensland Premier because the continual incompetence of the Queensland government presents itself in so many ways. As I said, we had the health crisis. But in my local sphere, the greatest question is: how the heck are we going to carry the huge traffic volume funnels through the Ipswich Motorway if we produce deficient plans that will be redundant before they can be implemented? That is the nature of traffic planning in the Beattie government.

The Beattie government, at the moment, have embarked on a proposal in which they intend to duplicate the Gateway Motorway. That motorway is a Commonwealth road. Why have they chosen it on which to implement a grandiose scheme? It is because they believe that they can implement enough tolls to recoup more money than it will cost them in the outlay. That is the only area in which they are prepared to contribute to traffic planning in our area, and it sucks. It is extremely deficient and the people in our region, who expect the services needed by the fastest-growing region in Australia to be met by the Beattie government, are being woefully underserviced and underrepresented by that government.

I want to speak some more about the Goodna bypass, because it will gobble up a lot of Commonwealth money. We have a strong Commonwealth commitment to going ahead with the Goodna bypass, which basically means duplicating the most congested section of the Ipswich Motorway. Instead of just having one road to drive on, there will be two. There will be proper network redundancy in the event that one road gets blocked. But what do we have from the Beattie government? We have a proposal to merely upgrade the existing road. They have continued to flog that plan even though, on the basis of studies that have been conducted, that road as envisaged by the Beattie government will be a dead duck before it is completed.

I have spoken on that matter before in this House, but I want to bring to people’s attention something that has happened recently. The Queensland transport minister, Mr Lucas, in a last ditch attempt to try to get the upgrade idea up front and proceeding again, came up with a proposal. I have a schematic diagram of it here. In it, he claimed that they could construct the entire Ipswich Motorway, which is 19-odd kilometres long, build this new road while 100,000 vehicles a day try to drive on it and complete this entire project within four years.

The timing that the Queensland transport minister, Paul Lucas, presented to show that he could do it in four years demonstrated that they would dig up every inch of the road from Dinmore through to Granard Road—the full 19 kilometres. He divided it into five projects, so that everything except for the interchange at one end would be occurring at once. So if you hopped in a taxi or on your treadly and you set out from Dinmore to drive to Gailes, as 100,000 people do every day to try to earn their living, you would be riding or bicycling your way through construction sites, up and down and past the workmen and the excavators, every day for at least a full year of the project.

There would be five of those projects going on at once—that is, every single one apart from the interchange on one end. Then, for a period of at least two years, there would be four of the five projects all going at once. You can see that for a four-year period, the disruption to users of that road would be so woefully horrendous as to basically bring the entire economy of Ipswich to a halt, not to mention the grave impact it would have on every employer across the whole of the south-east Queensland region who draws workers from that region.

It is a shameful and disgusting plan. What really angers me more is the absurd party-first notion of representatives of the Ipswich district who continue to promote that project, as dead a duck as it may be. They continue to promote that project to the detriment of every single stakeholder in it. The state government will not be advantaged by a project that will basically strangle our region. Even though it continues to advance it, it will not be advantaged by such a proposal.

The Commonwealth, the road users, the transport companies—if you go to Australian Meat Holdings at Dinmore, the largest abattoir in the southern hemisphere, you will find that they have about 4,000 workers who have to get to work every day for the three or four shifts there. They have to arrive on time. They have 700 tonnes of meat going out every day. They cannot afford to have that disrupted by construction continuing for four years—they say, but in reality it will be at least seven years—in order to complete that project.

But we have now found that, after the state government and the state transport minister wilfully tried to con the people of Ipswich with a plan to basically squash the whole project down into four years, after they tried to rip off people with this notion that they could somehow conduct all this work while people are trying to drive on the road and that somehow this would be good for us, the reality of what is doable is now starting to come to light. The Commonwealth had funded one part of this project prior to the state government announcing its four-year scam. The Commonwealth had put up the funding for the most direly needed part of this road—that is, the interchange between the Logan Motorway and the Ipswich Motorway. The Commonwealth put up $160 million for that project back in June 2004, under the AusLink program. It was signed off by the minister and that money was allocated back in 2004.

The Commonwealth has now agreed to proceed with that as part of our plan to build the Goodna bypass and duplicate the road west of the Logan Motorway. The state government said that it could build that entire project. As to its timing, it said that it would start construction of the interchange in June 2006 and complete it at the end of August 2008. But what has happened now? Now that we are actually down to signing off on that individual part of the project—because the interchange is universal to the bypass and the upgrade project, the reality is becoming clear—the state transport minister says that the best he can do is start in December 2006 for a completion date in December 2008, and that is being optimistic.

So a six-month slide in the schedule from Mr Lucas shows you how much he was prepared to gild the lily. He was prepared to tell the people of Ipswich that he would have his ill-conceived construction project going on six months earlier than it was feasible for him to do it. So that is a six-month con for motorists, who basically are left with another six months to cover in that process. Similarly, he said in his ill-conceived four-year plan that he would start construction of the Wacol to Darra section in September 2006 and complete it in February 2009, I think. That has slid out again at one end—by more than a year. That is another part of the project that the Commonwealth is now endeavouring to proceed with. But of course the state is not able to meet their half-smart rhetoric with reality, and they are sliding back by a year.

So that is a year more construction and interference by the state than they had sworn on a stack of Bibles it would take and, if they think that that is small beer, they are wrong. To people who earn a daily living by using this road that is a disgusting act for them to do. We expect honesty from the transport minister in Queensland. We expect a straightforward depiction of the facts of this argument and all we get is him continually leading the chorus of ee-i-ee-i-oh with all his Labor mates in the Ipswich area to the detriment of every single soul endeavouring to use the road. This is no small project. It is going to be over $1 billion. In the end it is probably going to be something like $1.3-odd billion to deliver up the fully upgraded section of the Ipswich Motorway and the Goodna bypass as envisaged by the Commonwealth.

What is really important about this is the vision in the Commonwealth scheme, as it has been articulated, to separate the heavy through traffic onto the new road and to create a new route whereby all of those trucks will follow the Goodna bypass and go down the Logan Motorway and cross over the Gateway Bridge, so we have a purpose-built road capable of carrying B-doubles and that kind of heavy freight. According to the study that has been done by Maunsells, if the Goodna bypass is built, 60 per cent of the traffic that is currently on the Ipswich Motorway will find itself on the new road and to a large extent it will be those heavy trucks with the through freight.

Our vision, the vision of the Commonwealth, does not end there. We are saying that the state’s insistence that we continue to force those trucks down the Brisbane urban corridor and up and down past the QEII stadium is to the great detriment of all people who live in that area, with the pollution and the damage to the road that that causes. That will end under our proposal. But the state government, that supposedly have the responsibility for traffic planning in our region, are the donkeys determined to force the negative outcome by forcing that traffic to continue to use that abysmally underprepared road, past all those letterboxes and up and down past the QEII stadium. That is absurd. They know that it is absurd and it is insane for them to continue to force this detrimental outcome on the people across the whole of southern Brisbane and Ipswich.

There is another point to this concerning the section of the motorway west of the Logan Motorway between Dinmore and Gailes. If we build the Goodna bypass we are going to have all that heavy traffic on the road and traffic that will remain on the existing Ipswich Motorway will be mostly the traffic that comes out of Brisbane Road. It will be the traffic of Ipswich, the people of Ipswich going shopping. People such as the member for Oxley and others in my area who continue to insist that even after we have built the Goodna bypass we should come back and build the state government’s grandiose scheme of a huge superhighway through there are just giving one more in the eye to the Ipswich people. We do not want the superhighway going through there if we have diverted all the heavy traffic into that other area. We want something that facilitates our community. I have heard that Queensland transport believe that if we do proceed as the Commonwealth is proposing, we might actually be able to reintroduce buses on the Ipswich Motorway. It would facilitate people shopping in Ipswich shops. Isn’t that incredible! That is anathema to the Beattie government. They want everyone to keep on using Ipswich as a dormitory and shop somewhere else—down in Indooroopilly or somewhere.

We have a vision of being able to reclaim the centre of Ipswich, the part of our town that has been a wasteland of trucks roaring by at 100 kilometres an hour, a sewer of trucks roaring by. We can reclaim it for the use of mums and dads and for people to go shopping and these sorts of things. We want greater access, more on-ramps and off-ramps on that road, more bus stops and more opportunities to access the train stations. The idea being paraded by the member for Oxley and the others in the region is insane, and the mayor has given vent to frustration about it from time to time. A great big motorway being built there would only inconvenience people who were seeking to shop and to take their kids to school. The Commonwealth is about building greater function into our area, greater service and greater flexibility for the people of Ipswich, a proper future under a proper plan. (Time expired)

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