Bob Katter (Kennedy, Katter's Australian Party) Share this | Hansard source

It took us eight or nine years to get the Townsville medical school. It was the first medical school built in Australia in 44 years. We live 2½ thousand kilometres from Brisbane, so our young people went to Brisbane to become doctors, and they were never going to return the 2½ thousand kilometres to North Queensland. In spite of turning out 200 doctors a year, our crisis may be at its worst ever. Mission Beach, for two years in a row voted one of the four most beautiful places on earth, is without a doctor. I never wanted to be a state member of parliament at a time when we didn't have a doctor for Julia Creek, so I carried around the names of 12 doctors with me for years. They were the names of doctors in England, South Africa and America who I could ring up and get them to come to Julia Creek. But Julia Creek is now without a doctor. Now there are towns all over without a doctor. If you've got 1,000 people in a town with no doctor and if it's an hour or over to reach the nearest doctor, the official figure is that one person will die every year. We now have the situation in North Queensland where there are probably three or four people dying every year that don't have to die.

I'll tell you what is infinitely worse. When you walk into my office you will see a picture of Red Ted Theodore, the founder and creator of the Labor movement in Australia and the greatest man in Australian history. I didn't say that; Paul Keating said that. I didn't say that; Malcolm Fraser said that. Ted Theodore introduced the free hospital system in Queensland, and I could proudly say that, in the year of our Lord 1990, the only place on earth that you could walk in 24 hours a day every day of the year and get free treatment was in Queensland. Now the free hospital system has gone. Outpatient services have closed. You can see it graphically in my home town of Charters Towers, where the outpatient service has a big wooden sign across it: 'Closed'. Fifteen metres away is the entrance to the hospital, and it says 'inpatients'. So it can't be more graphically illustrated than that. We had the great Labor governments of Red Ted Theodore that created so much good for this nation, and now we have the pygmies that claim to be Labor but are about as much Labor as I am a communist or a Martian or something, and they have removed the free hospital system in Queensland.

There's no money. Why is there no money? Because the Premier has committed $62,000 million to her fairy floss fantasies of lowering CO2 emissions. Well, she's been there for nearly 10 years, and I haven't seen a single act that she's committed that has lowered any emissions anywhere. We got 4½ per cent ethanol through, and she refuses to enforce the 4½ per cent, so the one single thing she could have done to reduce CO2 emissions she has failed to do. But she's managed to find another $1,000 million for pleasure domes for herself and her government on the Brisbane River—another huge Taj Mahal going up beside the existing Taj Mahal. She's found $62,000 million for her fairy floss fantasies that she's going to save the planet with, and she's found hundreds of millions for her national parks that are being burned out everywhere and are nourishing every single invasive species known to man, because there's no-one left to man them. If you create hundreds of thousands of acres of national parks every year and don't include a single extra person to look after them, the cost of national parks, even without the increases, is colossal. If you want to spend money on all of your fantasies, well, I'm sorry: there's no money left to pay the doctors to man your hospitals. That is the reality in the state of Queensland. If you bear the name 'Labor' then you bear the imprimatur of the people who abolished the free hospital system in Queensland, and for that you will be eternally condemned.

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