Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will acknowledge the interruption from the member for Hotham and also say that school based apprenticeships never existed until this government came to office. We have the Leader of the Opposition trying to pretend to get in on a bit of the action 10 years down the track. Every schoolteacher in my electorate who has spoken to me about this issue has said: ‘I’ve got a question: how are you going to find 2½ thousand extra plumbing teachers? How are you going to find 2½ thousand extra carpentry teachers? How are you going to find 2½ thousand extra electrical teachers and mechanical teachers? We all know from the way that the economy is motoring along—particularly in a state like Queensland with the mining industry and its support services that are generating a lot of activity and, of course, with the building industry as people leave states like Victoria and flood the north of the Tweed—that there we have a genuine shortage of people with trade skills. These people are not going to be available for the classrooms. They are going to be available at the work sites, being productive tax-paying members of our economy.’ The Leader of the Opposition is off on a veneer-thick tangent here, with no detail to back his rhetoric. It is doomed to failure. That is a great pity because the enormous vote of money that he is putting forward for this has merit. The reality is that it is actually what the Australian Education Union want, and that is for the teachers union to be in complete control of the destiny of the young people in this country. The Australian technical college program is all about liberating them.

On top of that, the Australian government, through Minister Bishop, is now providing an opportunity for teachers to expand their own personal kinds of excellence. One of the problems we have with teaching in Australia is that the very best teachers are paid at the same rate as the very worst teachers. A teacher has to leave the classroom to get better pay. The way the system operates in this country is enormously unfair to a teacher who works hard at their job, who prepares for their lessons, who arrives at school, say, an hour before class starts and who puts in a lot of effort so that at a minute past nine the kids are motoring along on their studies. But working in the classroom next to them is somebody who arrives at school at a minute to nine and who has their breakfast during the first half-hour of a class. You cannot say this does not happen; it does happen. Plenty of teachers have talked to me about it; they know it happens.

The budget contains a measure that says to teachers: ‘If you want to improve your skills, we’ll pay you a bonus’—a performance bonus proposal which is being rejected by one state government after another, I must say. However, the Queensland government has announced—no doubt using Commonwealth funds in a perverted way—another raft of buying out the worst teachers. The plan from the Queensland Minister for Education, Training and the Arts, Mr Welford, is that the poorest performing teachers in Queensland will have another opportunity to get a $50,000 bonus to leave teaching while the top performers will get absolutely nothing to stay. As a government, we are determined to pay performance bonus payments to teachers who want to put in the effort to improve their skills. We want to see the best teachers getting the opportunity to earn a better wage. This is not about time served; this is about competence and ability. We want the best teachers to stay in the classroom. We want the best teachers to offer their insight and experience in a positive and constructive way and to be paid good money for it.

If you listen to the state Labor governments or the federal Labor opposition, you will hear them mouthing the same rhetoric from the Australian education unions, which is that all teachers must be paid the same—good and bad teachers must all get paid the same. That is no way to run a school system. Is it any wonder that so many teachers are leaving the classroom? Is it any wonder that so many teachers are moving on to other positions? Yet you do not hear a peep from those opposite about a better pay rise for good teachers; it is simply a one-size-fits-all approach. Even tonight we heard the member for Lilley lamenting the need to maybe crash the economy and slow it down. ‘Slow down these 15 years of growth’ is what he said tonight. He laments the idea that maybe we need to slow things down.

I want to talk for a moment or two about a couple of specific items in the electorate of Moreton that have been well served by the government’s strong economic management. One of the big issues has been the heavy interstate vehicles—B-double trucks in the main—that travel through my electorate as a rat-run short cut between the Ipswich Motorway and the Gateway Motorway. These trucks use the Kessels Road continuum. It has been called the Griffith arterial corridor and the Brisbane urban corridor, but the locals know it as Granard Road, Riawena Road, Kessels Road and Mount Gravatt-Capalaba Road.

The state government has recently banned trucks above 4½ tonnes from travelling on that route, unless they are local trucks. This is a campaign success for me. It has taken 10 years for the state government to finally yield to community pressure and to the pressure that I have been applying. I am pleased about that. But what is of critical concern to me is that, while the government has announced in recent months the $2.3 billion Goodna bypass—which will hook trucks on the Warrego and Cunningham highways straight onto the Logan Motorway, thereby avoiding the electorate of Moreton—the federal Labor Party still has on its books a policy to widen the existing Ipswich Road corridor, starting at Granard Road, Rocklea, and heading west. Labor’s plan is very simple. It will continue to cement into place forever the Kessels Road corridor as the route for big trucks.

The federal government has spent $1.7 million on a night-time truck trial. It has taken the toll off the southern Brisbane bypass—the Logan and Gateway motorways—at night. For just $1.7 million over the last two years, there have been 221,000 fewer trucks on local roads between 10 at night and five in the morning. This government has also spent $14.3 million to upgrade the intersection at Granard Road and the Ipswich Motorway. It has constructed a new overpass and also fixed up the lane alignment. It has done all of this work; yet, if there is a change of government, the federal Labor Party will turn all of that around on its ear: they will waste all of that money completely and widen the Ipswich Motorway, starting at Rocklea and heading west. I would be delighted to say, ‘Well done,’ if they were to have any sense and cancel this policy, but they will not. They will listen to the member for Oxley and a few other misguided members on the other side. I call on the Australian Labor Party to cancel that policy. If they do not, people in my electorate will be consigned to heavy trucks being back on the roads, after campaigning for 10 years to get rid of this problem.

I also know that people in my local area are suffering from a failure to properly invest in water infrastructure. There is no point in banging on too long about the fact that decisions that should have been taken six years ago were not taken. I am pleased the state government is now putting in water pipelines that are going to link various dams and water storage facilities around south-east Queensland so we can try and even out the flow. I am concerned, though, that the Wolffdene dam was never built back in the late eighties or early nineties. The member for Griffith was in the cabinet office when he told Wayne Goss, ‘Don’t build the dam,’ and he will have to carry responsibility for that decision.

Equally, I am concerned that someone in authority like Kerry Rea, the Brisbane city councillor for Holland Park ward, who pretends that she wants to be a member in this place, told the council chamber some six years ago that even if it did not rain for five or six years we would still have plenty of water. She was wrong, and she is no doubt as misguided still today.

The point I make is that this government has put a national water policy in place, $10 billion for the national plan for water security, and yet locally it can also do things such as put in $49,000 so that Griffith University can use a recirculating water system to cool lasers and other scientific equipment in science labs. We are working with local communities to make a difference while looking at the national picture. Strong economic management has delivered on this. The dividends are being spread far and wide, and I congratulate the Treasurer on his ability, his prowess and his vision for the future.

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