John Howard (Bennelong, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Fairfax for his question. I have been quite amazed at developments in Queensland today where the Queensland Labor government, led by Mr Beattie, has taken the extraordinary step of proposing legislative amendments to enable them to sack any local council that seeks to hold a plebiscite to provide Queenslanders with a democratic say in the proposed amalgamations. We will come to them in a minute. What Mr Beattie said today is this—and I ask everybody on both sides of the House to listen:

… we will amend the Bill today to provide for the immediate dismissal of any council which goes ahead with plans for a poll or referendum or plebiscite.

This is a slap in the face for every Queenslander. It is the act of a Labor government that is drunk with power. It is the act of a man who in his hubris boasted in the Queensland parliament the other day that he could govern for 100 years. And it is an example of what this whole country would become if you had state Labor governments everywhere untrammelled by the check and the balance of a coalition government at the federal level.

He is proposing to fine the councillors. He now wants to sack them. I suppose the next step will be to put them in the slammer, because that is essentially the attitude of the Queensland government in relation to this matter. We are not arguing that all the amalgamations are wrong; we are not arguing that all of them are right. We are arguing to give the people of Queensland the right to vote to express their view, which is a fundamental right of any citizen when you are talking about dismantling a structure of government. So, Mr Speaker, our offer stands: we will finance the holding of plebiscites in local government areas so that Queenslanders can express their views on these proposals.

Once again we have seen Mount Solitary at work. I stand up here and say, ‘Let us have a referendum to let the people of Queensland decide whether they like the amalgamations,’ and back it comes: ‘Yes, let’s have a referendum to let the people of Queensland decide.’ But everybody in this parliament knows that if the Leader of the Opposition were now the Prime Minister he would not have proposed the referenda. Everybody knows that, just as he would not have proposed those referenda, if he had been Prime Minister on 21 June this year he would not have proposed the intervention in the Northern Territory because it was totally against everything that the Labor Party had said and done in relation to Indigenous policies. The only reason that the Leader of the Opposition has faithfully echoed, in a very rapid-fire fashion, what I have said is that he has become a follower rather than a leader on these sorts of issues. He knows how monstrously unpopular the tactics of the Queensland government are in relation to local government amalgamations.

Every man and his dog, including Rusty, knows that Peter Beattie is going to retire in September or October this year and his retirement gift to the people of Queensland is to put the jackboot into the democratically elected people of various local government bodies. Let me say to the people of Queensland that, if you were facing a federal Labor government as well as a state Labor government, you would not be getting any help from that federal Labor government. It is only the check and the balance provided by a coalition government at a federal level that is giving to the people of Queensland the opportunity to express their disdain for the violently undemocratic way in which their Premier has behaved.

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