Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

The appropriation bills before the parliament each year are a report to the nation on the conduct of the government’s affairs and the priorities it sets on behalf of the people of Australia. In that context, I take the opportunity to speak on the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2006-2007 and cognate bills as a way of reporting to the parliament about the conduct of government programs in the federal electorate of Moreton.

Last Saturday I went to Runcorn State School—my old school where I went to in the seventies. The school is 105 years old this month. We celebrated with a fantastic bush dance and we were able to watch the kids enjoying that. I was also able to officially launch the results of the Australian government’s sponsorship of that school through the Investing in our Schools program. The P&C had sought money for the rejuvenation and top dressing of the school oval and also the installation of sprinklers. If only we had enough water in Queensland for those sprinklers to actually work! The dedication of $38,552 to Runcorn State School, which we celebrated last Saturday night, was fantastic.

All up in the federal electorate of Moreton there is some $532,000 in project funding so far under Investing in our Schools. ICT at Algester State School has been upgraded. The music facilities at Calamvale Community College, to which I will refer in a moment, have been refurbished. The special school at Calamvale got an undercover walkway and a multimedia room. MacGregor State School got $50,000 to refurbish the senior students’ toilets. Nyanda State School got shade structures and open learning spaces. These big schools received assistance. Rocklea State School, a small school which is a bit like a bush school in the city, received in the order of $29,000 to deal with the school oval and also the installation of airconditioning in some of the classrooms. Only 60 or 70 kids go to that school and there is no way the parent body has the capacity to raise those funds.

This underscores how the government’s program Investing in our Schools has made an enormous difference to support the work of parents in fundraising for schools. It is disappointing that things such as the refurbishment of toilets are not undertaken by the owners of the schools—the state governments. The P&Cs, frustrated by a lack of progress by state authorities, have been able to get the funds directly from the feds.

The government trusts local communities and local schools to understand their needs very clearly and we pay the funds directly to the schools without losing the 25 per cent that state governments tend to take off the top. When we pass grants to the states for school projects, they take about 25c in every dollar to administer the rest of the grant. We think this direct investment gets more bang for the buck and real results that count for the schools involved.

Last week we officially opened the marvellous new sports hall at Calamvale Community College—a $4 million project with $1 million coming directly from the Commonwealth, $1.3 million from the Brisbane City Council and about $1.8 million from the Queensland government. This place is going to have a terrific community flavour about it. The local community are going to have an opportunity to use this great school facility which has been funded in part by this government and will be used by the entire school.

Another good school that I want to mention briefly in this address, which received funding under our direct investment in non-government schools, is the Southside Christian College. Graham Johnston and his teaching team are expanding the school and growing new opportunities for more students. The school has grown in leaps and bounds over the term of this government. We have now invested another $360,000 to build six secondary general learning areas, computer labs, storerooms, two verandas—unenclosed travel—an undercover area and a covered link and for the conversion of a locker room into a new secondary, general learning area. This is a $1.5 million project funded mainly by the parents and partially funded by us. But, in the end, our commitment to the non-government schools sector takes a lot of pressure off the government schools sector because, as parents dig deeper, pay taxes through the income tax system and then support the education choices they make for their students, we back those choices with programs, which will be further invested in through the budget this year.

Recently, Anzac Day gave me an opportunity as the local member to refocus on how significant this day is in the hearts and minds of most Australians. It is not a day to glorify war. It is an extraordinary day, though, on which the community has an even greater sense of obligation to those, some who are long gone in many cases and some who have more recently departed, who have served this country to create a circumstance where we can claim today to be the sixth oldest continuous democracy in the world. If it had not been for those who served we would not have all that we do have in this nation. We would not stand in this building and debate these bills and freely express our views.

I know that Sunnybank RSL in particular is very concerned about passing that sense of heritage on to the next generation of kids. Last year we began a process, and this year we enhanced the process further, whereby Sunnybank RSL, dealing with more than 20 schools in and around the electorate of Moreton, has been able to say to the senior students of those schools: ‘Here is an Australian flag, the symbol of our nation. You now have as a school leader of today and a community leader of tomorrow an obligation to carry on this tradition of thanks for service of many years past.’ Through the Department of Veterans’ Affairs program Their Service Our Heritage, we have seen the creation of Anzac Day oriented but school based memorials. I was able to go to Eight Mile Plains State School. I saw the member for Rankin in the Main Committee chamber a moment ago, and he and I were both there that day to dedicate the memorial, just days before Anzac Day.

More importantly, perhaps, is that students from schools like St Thomas More College, at Sunnybank, and Runcorn State High School—featured this week in the Courier-Mail in an excellent article, which I recommend to all members—have started dealing with local RSL Care homes. They are working one day a week with veterans. They have been going to Cazna Gardens, at Sunnybank Hills, and to the Carrington Home, at Parkinson, to understand all about the lives that these veterans have lived; indeed, in some cases in the last year students have dealt also with the passing of veterans that they had cared for and got to know. So I want to congratulate the students who have been involved in this program. I want to congratulate particularly the Sunnybank RSL, but of course all RSLs, in the electorate of Moreton. I want to congratulate the residents of those two homes, Cazna Gardens and Carrington, on the way they have embraced the youth of today and understood them very clearly, and the kids of today have understood the oldies as well. It has been a wonderful journey to watch these students evolve as human beings.

I must also note for the record that the government’s investment directly into aged care has continued in the electorate of Moreton. This Saturday the Minister for Ageing and I will open the Plains Retirement Village, off Underwood Road, at Kuraby, and we are looking forward to that event this Saturday morning.

I want to turn now to the important question of infrastructure. The opposition in their address-in-reply talked a lot about infrastructure. We are used to hearing the Labor Party talk about infrastructure and not much about action. We have only to look at the Queensland government to see a great example. Just yesterday they released yet another glossy document, entitled the South-East Queensland infrastructure plan and program. It is in fact almost a duplicate of the document released one year ago. Methinks there must be a state election about to be called. I have to say that if the Queensland government could build infrastructure as fast as they produce glossy documents we would not have half the problems we have in the south-east corner of Queensland. Let me tell you: the whole thing is revealed on page 6, where it says:

What’s new in this Infrastructure Plan

…            …            …

Project costs have been updated to reflect costs in 2006 dollars.

So what was a $55 billion plan last year is now a $66 billion plan this year. The minister for roads, Mr Lloyd, and I were talking about this earlier. He said, ‘Don’t forget the cost blowouts.’ So lack of action on a plan from a year ago has created a higher cost regime, according to this particular document, and they have reflected that as being some sort of virtue. In fact, it is a confession of complete failure. They have a real ability to produce documents but no real ability to produce outcomes. In fact, what is also particularly interesting for this parliament is that part of that $66 billion, as it now is, includes about $30 billion of federal funds that they are likely to get between now and, wait for it, 2026. This is a program which talks about what they might do if they could—and, heaven help us, if only they would—over the next 20 years.

So the Queensland government are again trying to confuse the people of Queensland by reannouncing federal money—money they have already announced. Worse still for the people in my electorate and in the electorate of Bonner, they have again said quite plainly that the Brisbane urban corridor, which I have raised in this parliament about 15 or 20 times, is going to be protected as the freight corridor through the southern suburbs of Brisbane. Let me spell that out even more clearly. Over the next 20 years, the Queensland government claim that in 2006 dollars they will spend $66 billion on infrastructure projects. But, according to this document, they still want to keep alive the idea of B-double trucks running along suburban roads, running past people’s letterboxes in Wishart, Robertson and Coopers Plains, and running across people’s back fences in Salisbury and people’s front gates in Rocklea.

At the end of it, $66 billion could have gone a long way to making better use of the Gateway Arterial and Logan motorways, which the Queensland government own, and they should recommend to the Australian government they become part of the national road freight corridor. It is not good enough for Queensland to continue to hide behind the fact that in the early nineties the then Goss Labor government worked with the then Keating Labor government to stitch up a deal that the suburban road would become the national highway and all funding and infrastructure costs along that route would therefore be the feds’ problem. They cannot say, ‘This is a federal road,’ because the road in fact is the Queensland government’s road, which the feds have an obligation to assist in funding.

Also, in this particular infrastructure plan is the ambition to build an overpass at Kessels Road and Mains Road. It is an ambition which we are currently funding a study into. It is an ambition that was talked about in the early nineties by the Goss Labor government, but again nothing happened. It really does underscore my earlier contention that, when it comes to infrastructure, Labor talk a lot and produce lots of glossy documents, but even when they have the chance to do something they do not. People in my electorate are basically fed up with the jurisdictional buck-passing. I certainly am. We need a government in Queensland that, when they say, ‘These are Queensland government responsibilities, and we are delivering a planning document’—and that is what they have done with this document—actually deliver a planning document that realises that spending $66 billion, including about $30 billion of Australian government money, on infrastructure and still putting B-double trucks past people’s letterboxes is not a plan; it is a total folly. We need this state government to go.

On top of that, in this document they have also announced yet again more federal funds. This time it is $25 million for the long overdue rail overpass at Acacia Ridge. We have a state owned railway line which leaves the national rail freight yard—it is the Brisbane-Sydney rail line, which is owned by the Queensland government—and crosses a state owned road. Queensland have said, ‘We won’t build an overpass,’ no matter how many people in Drewvale, Calamvale, Parkinson, Stretton, Sunnybank Hills and Acacia Ridge are impacted upon. ‘No,’ they have said, ‘We want the feds to fund half.’ All right; we have decided in the interests of the national rail equation that we will fund half of that.

We put the money down on the table 200 days ago and, despite the fact that two years ago the Labor federal opposition said that they would build it if they were elected and the state government said they would build it if federal Labor were elected—they were not elected—the state government have held onto the money, have not done anything and have not processed any of the plans. Frankly, as the federal member for the area, I find it very poor that state members in the area are not demanding progress of their state government.

The bottom line is the good news: the $25 million along with the $25 million from the state means a $50 million solution. But can we actually get something built? When the Beattie government came to power in 1998, they cancelled the Borbidge-Sheldon government’s plans to deal with the infrastructure planning on this particular location. The first thing they knocked out in their 1998 budget was the commitment to plan for this infrastructure. Here we are, almost 10 years later, still banging on about it. Can we just get some progress? The feds, through this budget, are playing their part. Now all we need is the Beattie government to actually produce some results.

I also note for the record how pleased I am to see that the Brisbane City Council has received the single largest vote of funds under the Roads to Recovery program—a program which federal Labor would cancel and which has produced real road results in local authorities right around this country. Brisbane is the single biggest local authority in Australia and has seen a doubling of our contribution directly to them without losing 25 per cent off the top to the state government. Brisbane now gets another $7 million. That is a $14 million vote from us directly to Brisbane City Council. I hope that the Lord Mayor of Brisbane will make good use of that, and I know that his council roads and major infrastructure project chairman, Graham Quirk, will obviously look very closely at road projects in and around the electorate of Moreton for good use of those funds.

In the minutes left for my contribution, I also want to pay particular attention to a number of child-care based projects which are occurring in my electorate. The Southside Education Centre, which operates out of Lister Street at Sunnybank—giving second chances to young ladies with some difficult backgrounds, realising that in order for some of them to get education and training opportunities they need child care—has been making very good use of the family and community services department Jobs, Education and Training program funding. The JET child-care project, which has been applied through the Baptist church at Sunnybank, has made an enormous amount of difference to the people in that particular school. Young ladies with very small babies are able to access education opportunities as a result of the $140,000 worth of work we have put through a number of JET programs.

I also know that schools in and around Moreton, including Wellers Hill State School, have been able to learn about healthy living and build their scientific literacy through the healthier, happier kids program. Some $60,000 is going to this program, which I think will do a lot to return healthier and happier children. It is also important to state for the record the uncapping of child-care places that we are making possible through our budget initiatives contained in this bill. Reliant, of course, on planning permission from state governments and local councils are the child-care centres that will come to be built. On the most recent figures, in 2003-04, almost $13 million in child-care benefits was paid to families in Moreton, and I have no doubt that it will be much greater once the more recent figures come out.

A lot is talked about in this budget about the River Murray project—the half a billion dollars to deal with the healthy rivers needs of Australia—but, under the Community Water Grants program in the Australian government’s water fund guaranteed by this budget, some very sensible projects have been invested in in the electorate of Moreton. I was recently able to visit with the Friends of Oxley Creek Common and open the Pelican Lagoon Restoration of Water Quality and Wetland Ecology project. This project was worth some $29,353, and I know that Angela Wardell-Johnson and her team put that to very good work.

Griffith University’s Laser Lab Water Cooling Refurbishment project received almost $50,000, Runcorn State High School’s Harvesting Stormwater to Regenerate Environmental Centre and Three Sporting Fields project received almost $50,000 and Warrigal Road State School’s ‘Reduce—Water Efficiency Initiatives’ project received another $50,000.

Back that up by going to a school like Algester where you would see that they have the old dump-and-flush urinal systems. The state government maintains a water system where the water fills up in the boys’ toilets and then dumps automatically, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and the school has to turn to us for funding to try and retrieve that position. You should now start to understand that, even though we are spending a lot of money and we have a trillion-dollar economy, and that this Australian government focuses on the big pictures and the big international initiatives, we are also focused enough on listening to the needs of local communities that we are able to deliver on projects that make a huge difference to individuals and indeed schools and other organisations in my electorate. I am very proud of this budget and I commend it to the House.

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