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

The hypocrisy and mismanagement of the ALP knows no bounds. If they had not stopped the OPEL contract, which was in place at the change of government two years ago, all of the people that Senator McLucas and Senator Farrell talked about benefiting from broadband would have had broadband today. This thing that Senator Conroy has announced today might happen, but I regret to say I probably will not be alive by the time it is in place. We could have all been using it today if it had not been for the Labor Party.

I wanted to draw attention to Senator Wong’s answers, or lack of answers, to the questions over the Traveston Crossing Dam on the Mary River in South-East Queensland, the home of the critically endangered lungfish and the Mary River cod and turtle, all of which could be destroyed as a result of this dam, which the Labor Premier of Queensland is determined to construct. A few months ago, just before the Queensland state election, she promised Queenslanders that it would be delayed for four years—that is, two state election periods—before any work was taken to construct the dam. In another massive breach of trust and promises that this Premier of Queensland is becoming renowned for, she has upgraded the work and has just this week sent to the federal Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts the draft proposals for the Traveston Crossing Dam. She tells Queenslanders every day, ‘The dam will go ahead.’ I do not know how she can be so confident, unless her lobbying, which has been reported in major Queensland and national newspapers in the last couple of days, of the Prime Minister, Mr Rudd, is achieving results. Why else would she spend the time talking to Mr Rudd—in her own words, ‘lobbying’ him—for this dam approval if she did not believe that the close political association between Ms Bligh and Mr Rudd would not bear fruit?

We all know that, under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, introduced by my Liberal colleague, former minister Robert Hill, the decision on the dam has to be taken by the environment minister on certain grounds and bases, mainly on the science and environmental aspects. But here is the Queensland Premier talking to the Prime Minister. Can anyone imagine that the time for a decision will come and Mr Garrett will say, ‘Oh, sorry about the lungfish; I’ll stop it’? If he does that the Queensland Labor Premier will stand guilty of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a dam which nobody wants but which she is determined to press ahead with. How is she going to get the approval? If Mr Garrett has an ounce of environmental sensitivity within his body he will refuse the application. The Queensland Premier should know that, but she is circumventing that by approaching the Prime Minister and lobbying him over the dam, as the headline in the Australian says.

I am not one of those conspiracy theorists, but I do wonder how Mr Garrett, when he was head of the Australian Conservation Foundation, and Mr Rudd, when he was a senior adviser to Premier Wayne Goss, worked together to stop the Wolfdene Dam. It is well recognised in Queensland that, if the Labor Party had not stopped the Wolfdene Dam, we would not have had the critical water situation that we have had in South-East Queensland for 10 years. One could be forgiven for thinking that perhaps Mr Rudd and Mr Garrett feel some guilt at having stopped water to South-East Queensland and, for that reason, will roll over and give Anna Bligh what she wants with the Traveston Crossing Dam. I certainly hope that does not happen. I think that we have made it very clear that we on this side—and, on this rare occasion, the Greens agree with us, even though they gave preferences to Ms Bligh to help her win the election, knowing that she would construct a dam—will be watching Mr Garrett very, very closely as he makes his decision on this awful abomination of a proposal for a construction.