Peter Lindsay (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is dangerous. The officer got home and was just worn out. That is how the Beattie government is running the ambulance service in Townsville at the moment. It is running the police service the same way. Our police almost went on strike last week because they do not have enough officers to keep up with the workload. They are 40 officers understaffed. There is only one patrol car on duty at night to cover the whole city. When there was an altercation in Flinders Street East the other night, there were no cars anywhere to cover the rest of the city—and that is dangerous.

What about our hospital? The Townsville Hospital is a level 6 hospital, the tertiary treatment hospital for the whole of North Queensland—larger than the state of Victoria. It is 100 per cent full 100 per cent of the time. Do you know how the staff deal with the overload? They park the patients either on the floor or on trolleys in A&E. That is outrageous. A further indictment of the Beattie government is that there are no plans at all to provide additional accommodation. There has been no plan set in train to design a new wing at the hospital, so it will be years before we get extra beds at the Townsville Hospital. How is the hospital going to cope in the intervening years?

I demand that the Beattie government looks at the proper provision of beds in our hospital, looks at the proper provision of men and women in the Queensland police service and looks at the proper provision of staff in the Queensland Ambulance Service.

See this speech in context