Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to speak on the Bureau of Meteorology Report for 2007-08. At question time today I raised with Minister Wong whether it could possibly be true that the Townsville weather office in North Queensland was getting staff cuts of 50 per cent for forecasters and 25 per cent for observers. I asked the minister if it was true that this would mean that this meteorological office in Townsville, in North Queensland, would now not be able to operate a 24-hour service. I asked these questions during a week when a category 5 cyclone has been running right down the coast of Queensland. It started up north of Cairns and went right down the coast and it is still there. In this week when we have had the most severe tropical cyclone you could ever get, we highlight the fact that the government is shutting down the Bureau of Meteorology offices in a part of the world which desperately needs the services of a weather bureau.

I also asked the minister if it was true that the staff of the Cairns office of the Bureau of Meteorology was being reduced by two, that the Mount Isa office was being reduced to a one-man show, that the number of staff at the Rockhampton office—which just in February the Prime Minister promised in the other place would keep going at the same rate—was being reduced as well, and that in Mackay the staff was falling from three to one. How can you run a weather office 24 hours a day with one person? I asked the minister about this. Because it was Minister Wong, naturally we did not get an answer. But we knew the answers from Senate estimates, and I wanted her to confirm or deny them. I had hoped that following this exposure at Senate estimates she and Mr Garrett would have instructed the weather bureau that they were not to reduce services in this part of Queensland, which is prone to severe weather conditions—but no.

That in itself is bad enough, and I have been doing what I can, along with a lot of other people in North Queensland, to highlight how services are being reduced in the part of Australia that is most prone to severe weather conditions—