Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is not tourism, the member for Blair is right. That is because of the failure of the Goss government to build the Wolffdene dam in the early nineties. The chief adviser to Premier Goss is now the Leader of the Opposition in this place. The member for Griffith, Mr Rudd, said to Wayne Goss, the then opposition leader in Queensland, in 1989: ‘Let’s get our green credentials right. We’ll oppose the Wolffdene dam, in the foothills of Mount Tamborine. We won’t allow this water storage plan that apparently has been on the books for decades to go ahead. We’ll create a political environment where we can say that there’s plenty of water in Queensland, we don’t need it, there’ll be no problem.’

Tourists now arriving in south-east Queensland are facing the prospect of having every drop of water they consume being metered. That is the sort of circumstance we are facing in Brisbane and the Gold Coast. The Gold Coast, of course, is slightly more fortunate than Brisbane in one sense, because the Hinze Dam is overflowing. But again, it was a failure on the part of the Goss government to put in place a water strategy to share around the water resources of south-east Queensland. It is being hastily cobbled together by the Beattie government.

Six years after the Beattie government were told water was going to be short in south-east Queensland, six years after they failed to tell the people of south-east Queensland, ‘Let’s start restricting your water usage now so we can make it last for longer,’ the mad panic is on. And what is that going to do to the tourism industry? Queensland—not the Smart State, not the Sunshine State; the dried-up state. That is where tourism is going to go in south-east Queensland. The reality is a big difference from the slogans and the marketing.

There is this dumb approach by the Queensland government, which is saying, ‘All these people moving up from down south are stealing our water because they’re drinking it, using our power because they’re switching on lights, driving on our roads and causing traffic jams.’ The ‘Bombay express’, which is the Gold Coast to Brisbane train—literally missing are the seats on the roof of this train—only starts at Robina. It does not service all of the tourist strip anyway; it is just a joke.

Every part of the basic infrastructure problem is being blamed on people coming up from other states, and yet the Beattie government are going to their mates at Virgin and saying, ‘Paint up your plane and put “Head to Queensland” on the plane.’ They are advertising in every part of Australia: ‘Move to Queensland.’ Fifteen hundred people a week are moving to Queensland, and they are wondering why the traffic jams are getting worse, why the water supply is getting worse, why the power system is about to fail and why the Bombay express is getting stacked with people every day. When you add it all up, the failure of state Labor governments, starting with the Goss-Rudd government through 1989—

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