Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Forty million dollars ripped from your local hospital service, courtesy of Kim Richards and Don Brown, the local state members, is nothing to be proud of. Nor do I derive any great pleasure in riding these MPs like a donkey to make sure they give every cent of that $40 million back. The community deserves that money, and we don't want to see massive Labor cuts like this. It is exactly what we're facing up in Bowman; they've even preselected a decoy doctor, in the hope that that will defend and deflect some of the criticism for ripping off our hospitals. What happens on the weekend, on a Sunday—you'd think they'd be getting penalty rates, these state Labor MPs—is they sneak up to the hospital to do a little announcement: they're putting $1.7 million—of the $40 million they ripped out a couple of weeks ago—back in. Yep, they're doing a trip to Bunnings and putting in four more emergency beds, a bit of a renovation, and putting in a hoist and a tub in the maternity suite. A trip to Bunnings does not qualify for returning $40 million of funding ripped out of our hospital. Nor does solving the parking problem. This is a hospital grinding under the lack of car parking—and the solution is a business study that will take just over a year to do! That's right, half a million dollars of hospital money spent planning a car park—for goodness sake. We could get it wrong; you might make the car park too big! This will probably be a privately run car park in a hospital that deserves it, and yet they're taking a year to think about it and wasting half a million dollars. This is a Labor Party lost in their own incompetence. They're a government that should know better, but, clearly, Redland Hospital and those that use it are the victims of poor policy.