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

It is great to rise to speak in the adjournment debate this evening because I have got a bit of a tale to tell. The Beattie government in Queensland is getting a deserved reputation across Australia for its incompetence. This is a government that obviously cannot run a hospital or build a road—there is very little that they can do there—but they have now come up with a new policy of devolving incompetence. They are devolving incompetence right down to the local member level. We have now got an incompetent state member for Ipswich, whose stunt, to demonstrate her own incompetence, is to create a petition on the very vexed local question of the Ipswich Motorway.

You would think that would be a simple ask—you would simply get a form and get people to sign it—but, no, the member for Ipswich has come up with a wonderful way of creating a petition. What she did was to write a postcard and distribute it all across the electorate saying, ‘Sign the petition and post it back to me.’ It is actually a postcard. She sends it out and, apparently, people sign it. But next to where you sign your name she has written, ‘I guarantee’—or something like this—‘that I will not reveal the name that is signed on this paper to any third party’. So here is a petition that is not a petition.

If people sign these ‘petitions’ and send them back, the question is what happens to them. They are expecting to sign a petition, but they cannot possibly be signing a petition because the member for Ipswich has promised them that she will not reveal their names to any third party. So she cannot present it to the government or to the Premier as a petition—though he probably would not know what to do with a petition. She cannot send it down here; she cannot send it to the Prime Minister. She has guaranteed all these people that she will not reveal their names, which is probably the most incompetent version of creating a petition I have ever heard of, and I think people in Ipswich are probably scratching their heads trying to figure out just what is going to become of this.

People locally have a right to an explanation from the member for Ipswich on this issue. If it is not a petition, then it seems as though it really is a dodgy way of creating a wonderful mailing list. I think all those poor souls who have been taken in by this process, if there are any, and who have signed the form can expect from the member for Ipswich, the Beattie government and the Labor Party is a deluge of mail through their mailbox come election time saying, ‘You sent me a petition about the Ipswich Motorway, blah, blah, blah.’

It really is a con, and I think the member for Ipswich owes the locals an explanation and most likely an apology. Locally, we need people to take seriously the question of the Ipswich Motorway. We need to have the promised solution by the state government delivered in line with the promise given by the Queensland Minister for Transport and Main Roads, Mr Lucas, when he stood on the back of the truck with the federal Minister for Local Government, Territories and Roads, Jim Lloyd, and promised that he would get out and build the Goodna bypass and the other parts of the Ipswich Motorway project, as outlined in the Maunsell report, with great alacrity. He gave that commitment, but now we have been left with local state members of the Labor Party pulling stunts such as this one from the member for Ipswich.

We have seen from the Labor Party on the Ipswich Motorway an incredible show of incompetence. This is the government that had a railway line drawn through the middle of one of the intersections on this great plan for the Ipswich Motorway which they had drawn up. But they drew it in the wrong place. So now we are sitting here with $320 million allocated by the Commonwealth to this project and having to wait while the state government redraws the railway line in the right place. They had this railway line going down the median strip and disappearing off forever in the median strip. It would have been terribly disconcerting to people who might have tried to get off the train now and then to be mowed down by the traffic on the Centenary Highway.

The same lot has also created a plan for the Logan Motorway interchange. The money for that was allocated in 2004, and more than two years later we are still waiting for them to announce a tender. It really is an appallingly bad situation. The member for Ipswich would do well to assist in speeding up the construction instead of confusing everybody with petitions that are not petitions and with dodgy attempts to generate mailing lists for her own political purposes instead of assisting the people of Ipswich by getting on and helping us build the Goodna bypass and the rest of those important projects on the Ipswich Motorway. (Time expired)