Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a shame. All the money has been taken away and spent. Utilities have now been made into corporate entities and are therefore responsible to nobody. Take Sydney Water, a corporate entity. Is the minister responsible? Of course not. He is just a shareholder—the only shareholder, or maybe there are two. He is not responsible anymore. Where do they report to? A shareholder meeting cannot be called to bring them to account because they only have a government minister as their shareholder. They are accountable to absolutely nobody. If it were in the private sector—totally privatised—you would have not only shareholders asking for proper returns but perhaps class actions being brought against people for not managing things properly.

We have this enormous waste, and the Commonwealth government is funding the states and territories for at least half their budgets and in some cases more. We are providing in New South Wales 47c of every dollar spent on public hospitals, and yet the state government want to close down my hospital in Mona Vale so they can flog off the land and put a high-rise development on it. They also want to close down Manly hospital, which has a similar lovely site overlooking the harbour and out through the heads. They want to close them down, get their hands on the land and flog it off.

We got a miserable $2 million in the last state budget so that we could finally enlarge the emergency ward, which required a whole lot of equipment—and it required it 18 months ago. Within my electorate, with the help of good people who care about the hospital, I held a fundraiser. We raised $95,000 and we bought new equipment for the emergency ward because it could not cope without it. Yet on other hospitals there will be sums like $30 million spent. All they are interested in is depriving us of the services that we need. We got a lousy $2 million to expand the emergency ward.

At the same time, the state government is telling us that we must take a higher residential population, that we must have more high-rise development so that more people can come and live on this peninsula. Yet, at the north end of the peninsula, we are still surviving with a sewage farm. It only has secondary treatment. Do you know where the outfall is? Right at the rock face, right on the beach. When the rains come—and we have not had some for some time, so we have not noticed—what happens? We get solids in the water and deposited on the beach. One of my constituents came and told me how he went down to swim in the Narrabeen pool and there was all this brown stuff up against the side of the pool. Guess what it was. You are quite right. That is what it was—sewage.

There is a doctor in my electorate who will be able to tell you when it has rained and the sewage farm has not coped, because he gets the same people coming through his door with the same earache. He does not need to ask. He knows that, once the earaches are there, the sewage farm has overflowed. We have high-density housing now, right up to the gates of the sewage farm, and they are going to put in a retirement village. It has been approved. It will have elderly people, who are susceptible to germs. One of the conditions was that before that could occur they had to get an agreement that the overflowing ponds of the sewage farm would be covered over, capped, so that the solids could not flow out quite so quickly and the smells would not come into the area. I went to see it fairly recently. There is no cap yet. They have moved from a chlorine treatment to an ultraviolet treatment. Again, that was part of an insistence for development.

But here we are, in this day and age, with more and more population being forced upon us, with a downgrading of our hospital, with an outfall on the beachfront and we, the Commonwealth government, supplying half the state’s budget. They have twice as much money as John Fahey had when he was Premier and they are going into deficit funding. We have water rationing, no infrastructure, trains that cannot run on time and we are supposed to say that federal-state relations for fiscal management are in good order. The Premier has the hide to say that the problem is horizontal fiscal equalisation. At the time of the new tax system they agreed that there were mendicant states—that is the old-fashioned term for states that cannot raise as much money as the richer states—that they would share part of that money and that the Grants Commission would be the vehicle that we would use to do that.

We are talking here about a difference of around $2 billion, yet, since we introduced the new tax system, the increase in the amount of money that New South Wales has received above and beyond that which it otherwise would have received is 7.1 per cent. That is an average annual increase, a total increase of 50.8 per cent. To put that in money terms, it is around $4 billion. So the excuses are not enough. The fact of the matter is that there is no management left in my state, in New South Wales.

We have an election coming in March and the people will have an opportunity to have something to say. It will be difficult because the government have a very large majority. Nonetheless, I was almost disappointed when Mr Iemma said that he was now not going to sell the Snowy Mountains authority. I thought that a good thing we could have said was: ‘If you vote Liberal, the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme will not be sold.’ Make it a referendum; let the people say. But he saw the writing on the wall, didn’t he? As soon as we said that we would not sell our 13 per cent, he could see that the writing was on the wall and he could not get out of it quick enough.

So a time has come when the premiers with no clothes, the emperors with no clothes, who say ‘Follow me; isn’t it wonderful?’ have got to be seen for what they are doing—that is, walking around nude, without a fig leaf to cover themselves with.

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