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

For the first time in my life I am worried not about me and my future but about the future of our country. I have absolutely no confidence that the Prime Minister, Mr Rudd, or the Treasurer, Mr Swan, have the ability or the understanding to do anything about the difficult situation our country is in at the moment. I have absolutely no confidence in the current Minister for Climate Change and Water, who knows better than everybody else but is about to put all of those working Australians that the previous speaker just talked about on the employment scrapheap. I have no confidence in the union movement—a selfish movement of a few people, usually union bosses whose jobs are to manipulate workers so I have no confidence in them—or the party that it controls, the Australian Labor Party, of which the Prime Minister is the leader, in dealing with the problems which confront Australia at the moment. I fear for my own state of Queensland. I have absolutely no confidence in the Premier, Anna Bligh, and her Treasurer, whose name I cannot recall, in looking after the state in the difficult times that are going to confront Queensland because of the actions of the Rudd federal Labor government.

Madam Acting Deputy President, I do not need to tell you that Queensland is the only mainland state that does not have a AAA credit rating. When you compare that to the basket case of New South Wales and note that Queensland has a lesser credit rating than New South Wales has you ask why. It is because of the incompetent management of Ms Bligh and her team. Queensland will now be paying an extra 0.4 per cent on its borrowings. That means an extra $200 million per annum in interest because of the economic mismanagement of the current government. At a time when we have record borrowings by Queensland of $74 billion, they are increasing those borrowings. We thought it was bad when the previous Labor government racked up $96 billion worth of debt but my own state of Queensland, just one state alone, now has a debt problem almost equal to the Australian debt problem back in 1996. Queensland’s daily interest payments are already $10 million a day. Imagine what we could do with $10 million a day for our failing health system! Queensland has benefited from rivers of gold in royalties over the last 11 years, but what has happened to the Queensland budget? It has gone from a projected surplus of $600 million to a projected deficit of $1.6 billion this year and $3 billion next year.

Madam Acting Deputy President, if you need an example of the inability of the Queensland government to properly manage the state, let me briefly touch on the Traveston Crossing dam. I have spoken before about what an environmental disaster it is and what a social disaster it is, but let me just mention briefly today that it is also a financial disaster. The Queensland government has already spent $570 million on that dam, which does not even have state government approval let alone federal government approval. It is total economic irresponsibility. That $570 million that has been wasted could have been put into 50,000 extra elective surgeries performed over the last two years, but the Rudd government continues to waste money on a project which even its strongest supporters know will not go ahead despite Ms Bligh’s determination to see it go ahead.

I turn to Queensland’s communications. We all know how important communications are to a state, particularly to one as diverse and vast as my state of Queensland. I have no confidence in the federal minister for communications in delivering the National Broadband Network. One only has to see yesterday’s announcement from Telstra to understand that Telstra is going to cut the ground from underneath the National Broadband Network by looking after the high-paying capital city areas. But that means that most of my state will not have an adequate broadband system. If the OPEL contract that the Labor Party cancelled on coming into government had continued, it would have been up and running in Queensland at the moment and we would have had a decent broadband service. But what has Ms Bligh said about it? We have not even heard a pipsqueak from the Queensland government on the stupidity of the federal Labor minister in his mismanagement of national broadband.

Regrettably, you cannot talk about Queensland these days without a reference to the state hospital system. I know the state hospital systems are bad in every Labor state—and that is all of Australia’s states with the exception of Western Australia, who are now trying to deal with the mismanagement by the Western Australian Labor government of the health system—but Queensland’s is the worst. Headlines for the last four years about the hospital in Townsville, the city where my office is, have highlighted the awfulness of the state health system. At the last election, three years ago, we had Ms Bligh promising that all would be fixed up; it would all be sweetness and light. But here we are three years later with the same promises coming out, so how can we possibly believe anything Labor might say about the health system? Queensland has fewer beds per 1,000 people than 10 years ago as the Labor Party in Queensland made a conscious decision to decrease the number of beds available in that period.

The Bligh government have said that Labor will reduce waiting lists. Don’t talk; let’s have a look at your record! They intend to throw $90 million at it. Why didn’t they do that three years ago rather than two weeks before an election? But it is all too little, too late; the horse has bolted. It is a sad indictment on the Queensland government, who seem to see cases as numbers and not people. We are talking about category 1 patients here—cancer and cardiac patients—who should be seen within 30 days but who are on huge waiting lists. There were 34,257 Queenslanders waiting for elective surgery on 1 October 2008. With 7,074 sick people waiting longer than the clinically recommended time for surgery, 10 per cent of people were forced to wait for up to 35 days for life-saving surgery, when the recommended time is much less than that.

In Queensland, there are 94,128 patients waiting for a new case appointment with a surgical specialist. There have been royal commissions, there have been inquiries, we are going through the ‘Doctor Death’ scandal—again an indictment on Labor administration—and nothing seems to happen in Queensland so far as the health system is concerned. Where I have an interest in rural and regional Australia, the Queensland government is cutting back, forcing patients to travel to regional centres for even the most basic health care and maternity, rather than being able to remain with their families and their communities. The patient travel subsidy has fallen back in recent years, but I am delighted to see that Lawrence Springborg has announced that an incoming LNP government in Queensland will be giving real and urgent impetus to that scheme and bringing it up to where it should be.

Our education system is worse than every other state, except for the Northern Territory. Our literacy and numeracy in Queensland schools, after 10 years of state Labor administration, is the worst in Australia. And this government has the hide to go to the Queensland people and say, ‘Re-elect us,’ when we have the worst schools, the worst health system, the worst education system and the worst financial management of any state in Australia—and that is saying something.

I want to conclude by saying what a disaster for my state of Queensland the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme will be. The minister knows that better than everybody else here, but she will not listen to people who understand its impact. I cannot understand why the union movement and members of the Labor Party are not there at the front of the campaign to get this minister to listen and understand what is happening. We had evidence at a Senate committee a couple of weeks ago that said that up to 216,000 Queensland jobs are on the line because of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme of their minister, Senator Penny Wong. And she will not listen. Sun Metals in Townsville have made it clear that with the tax on zinc production they will not be able to continue in Townsville. So what will they do? They will sack all of those Townsville workers that the Labor Party and the union movement are supposed to be looking after; they will put them on the scrapheap and move their production centre, their processing centre, over to a place that does not have a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme and is unlikely to. So we are not going to help the climate change problem in any way; it will get worse because there will be no rules where those factories go to.

In central Queensland, the coalmining industry employs thousands and thousands of working Australians, and yet the evidence is there that this CPRS will put those people’s jobs at risk. And to make matters worse for Queenslanders, when it comes to free permits, in Queensland’s case they are only going to receive two per cent or $60 million assistance as a trade exposed industry. But hang on! In Victoria, they are going to get 75 per cent support for their brown coal industry. I do not want to be parochial as a Queenslander, but where is our Premier saying: ‘What has Victoria got that we don’t have in Queensland? Why is the federal Labor government favouring Victorian coalmines and ignoring Queensland coalmines?’ I suspect it is because there are more Labor members, more union people in important positions of power in Victoria than there are in Queensland, and so they go where the votes are. But this is just appalling.

Queensland is being attacked by the federal Labor government and the Queensland Premier is not game to stand up for Queenslanders. Why won’t she do something for the state she is supposed to be leading? All of those workers in all of those coalmines in central Queensland, the Bowen Basin and the Mount Isa area, why aren’t they saying something? Why aren’t their union bosses or their union representatives making this an issue for them and saying to Anna Bligh, ‘Do something about this, protect our jobs, look after us.’ But no, we have a Labor government in Queensland not game to take on their Labor mates in Canberra over this ridiculous CPRS.

I know there are many senators sitting opposite me who agree with me that this is a stupid scheme, but why won’t they show some courage, get a bit of backbone and tell Mr Rudd, tell Ms Bligh, that we will not put up with this, that we need to look after workers’ jobs? It would be different if the CPRS were going to do anything about global warming, but all it will mean is that the biggest thermal coal exporter—Indonesia, who won’t have a CPRS—will increase their production and put Australian producers out of business and workers out of jobs.

I conclude where I started: I fear for my country, I fear for my state. I only hope that the people of Queensland—I mean the workers of Queensland, the people who are going to be thrown out of business and the people on the hospital waiting lists—will take a small step towards reversing a trend which makes me feel sad for my country and my state.