Barry O'Sullivan (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I must comment to Minister Cormann that he demonstrated some better dance moves there than the member for Dawson—if that is even possible!

But now a change of pace, if I might. In the time I have I want to make two parts to my contribution to the chamber. The first is to place on the record, on behalf of, I suspect, all of us, our congratulations to the Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia as they celebrated their 90th year of providing essential life-saving services to the people of Australia. I'll focus a little bit more in relation to my case as a senator for Queensland. Without the Royal Flying Doctor Service in Queensland, arguably over that period of time quite literally hundreds of thousands of people would have lost their lives. We have nearly 37,000 airlifts each year. When you're airlifted, for the most part it's because your injuries are very, very serious; indeed, in so many cases they are life-threatening. You're airlifted only because the most practical and essential thing to do for a patient is to take them to areas where there is a higher order of care. In my home state that's Cairns, Townsville, Rockhampton, Brisbane, Toowoomba and places like that. Think about that for a moment as we pay tribute to this organisation.

Almost 37,000 patients are transported by air every year. I ask colleagues in the chamber to contemplate communities in their states with a population of 40,000 people. Imagine, if you will, that every one of those people found themselves in need of critical or life-saving care and one organisation was able to service that entire community. It is an amazing achievement on the part of this wonderful organisation. It comes as no surprise to those of us who are big fans of the RFDS, and of course that view is not just my view. For seven years in a row, according to the charity reputation index of this country, they have been the most reputable charity.

On top of the airlifts that I spoke of, of course, there are almost 70,000 road transport movements of patients each year. This isn't someone across town. This isn't someone who is taken from one medical institution in Brisbane, Rockhampton, Cairns or Townsville to another; these are movements that are largely from remote places where, again, if so many hundreds of thousands of these patients were not moved by the Royal Flying Doctor to be taken to acute care, many of them would be in a lot of trouble.

There are 336,000 patient contacts a year across the country. This is where the Royal Flying Doctor Service provides clinics where they go into really inaccessible areas where the patients or people who are consulting them still might have to travel 300, 400 or 500 kilometres by dirt, making their way to these clinics and taking days out of their lives in many cases to be able to take advantage of the delivery of this service. I'm very proud to say this on the part of the government. I don't want to make a political point here, because I suspect that, even if it were a Labor government, they would quite properly pay attention to the proper funding of the RFDS.

The second part of my contribution here to the chamber will be about drought and particularly drought in my home state of Queensland and the impact it's having. With the drought has come a massive increase in the incidence of people needing mental health care. So, accordingly, the Royal Flying Doctor Service have established a new mental health outreach service, and they've been given an $84 million funding boost by the coalition government to do that. Again, I don't want to try to make any political point about the funding announcement—although, of course, supporting the Royal Flying Doctor Service and organisations like that which service provincial, rural and regional Australia comes very naturally to the coalition. We've had a long and very close association with those remote areas of Australia. I think it is fair to say, unless someone wants to contradict me, that from a political point of view they support our government as well. Very few of the larger electorates away from the metropolitan areas are not held by a member of the coalition or a fellow traveller. I want to spend time speaking about the impacts of the drought in my home state, but let me close the first part of my contribution by congratulating—and I hope I do so on behalf of the entire chamber—the Royal Flying Doctor Service for a wonderful delivery of service to our nation over the last 90 years.

On the drought, I'll concentrate on where I know best—my home state of Queensland. We've got 31 councils that are completely droughted and three councils that are partially droughted. This represents over 66 per cent of my home state. So two-thirds is under drought. Some of those areas have been under drought for almost seven years. I'm not going to repeat my arguments from before about how weakened these communities were as they went into the drought as a result of the issues that presented with the suspension of the live cattle trade into Indonesia in 2011. But in seasons that should have prepared them with more resilience to go into this dry period and drought they were denied that opportunity because of the impacts on the marketplace when quite literally millions of head of cattle came into the domestic market. That drove prices down to the lowest we had seen, in some instances, in 30 years.

But I want us to consider something again. I want to, for a moment, pretend that we're in the House of Representatives and that we represent an electorate out west and that electorate has 100,000 people. I did this with my colleagues in our joint party room, without disclosing our discussion, some time ago. Imagine that, wherever you live, a third of the school population has left. They've gone. They're just not attending school anymore. They've actually left the district. In western Queensland, which is that far western area west of the Great Dividing Range, the population has decreased by 20 per cent in the last six years due to the impacts of the drought. We've got projections that suggest that Queensland will have a population growth of 32 per cent between now and 2025, but in these areas the projections are minus three per cent. Our unemployment average was at about six per cent. We had periods in the west where our unemployment was down around five per cent. It is now, in some places, up as high as 27 per cent. So these are people who don't have a lot of choices. The value of their homes has collapsed, in many instances by up to one-third, because of the drought and because of the migration out of the west of people who don't have jobs or job prospects, so they're left with the property they bought three or four years ago and it's now worth a third less than it was at the point of their purchase.

I have so many more facts, and at my very next opportunity I'll finish with respect to my presentation on this point. This is critical. This is a natural phenomenon, if we accept all of the arguments, and it's a disaster. This is a natural disaster in the same way that cyclones, floods, fires and other catastrophes are. I urge all senators, at least for a part of their day, to turn their minds to the struggle that people of the west are having and reflect on it as they make decisions in this place.