Peter Lindsay (Herbert, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Defence) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker Scott, you will know as well as I do that Townsville is the garrison city of Australia. On many occasions you have visited Lavarack Barracks and you know the fine work done by the men and women of Australia’s Defence Force. Lavarack is Australia’s largest Army base—and soon to get larger with the arrival of the 3rd Battalion. During the election campaign the current Minister for Defence, Joel Fitzgibbon, made an election promise and announced that there would be a new defence health clinic opening at Lavarack Barracks. It will be a defence families health clinic. That was part of an announcement to fund an initial 12 family healthcare clinics across Australia, and the first two of these clinics are to be established at Lavarack Barracks in Townsville and Robertson Barracks in Darwin.

Townsville’s military personnel are often away on exercises or deployed on overseas operations, and that of course places significant pressure on the families left behind. These families have been waiting since November to get news of the free GP and dental services to be made available at Lavarack Barracks. I call upon the defence minister to let us all know and to let my defence community know when he expects to open the new defence families health clinic. Lavarack Barracks already has a fully operational medical centre, the Lavarack Barracks Medical Centre, and James Cook University is providing a steady supply of doctors and dentists to our local community. So I wonder what the hold-up is. It is time for the government to prove that they will do something more than pay lip-service to the sacrifice being made by Australia’s defence families.

I hope we are not in for another backflip, as we have seen on the Super Hornets. I remind you that the defence minister’s stance after the election was, ‘No way, Jose!’ for Super Hornets. There was a lot of thunder and lightning in what was said about the ‘inappropriateness’ of the former government’s choice to purchase 24 Super Hornets. Surprise, surprise—yesterday, suddenly, the Super Hornets are exactly what Australia needs, and the defence minister announced that he had changed his mind. Well, let us not have another backflip on the defence families health clinic. Let us get an announcement from the defence minister on when we are going to see that opened in Townsville.