Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Every now and then in political life you are bowled a ball that moves so slowly and so predictably, bounces that little bit short and simply does not spin but rather falls into the corridor and is ripe for the picking to be sent over the grandstands and out of the field, and this is one of those motions. When the inexperienced member for Dobell came forward with this motion there was a cacophony of desire on our side of politics to speak to it tonight. There was a cacophony of voices on our side of politics wanting to talk about the lack of infrastructure that we have seen in decades of state government mismanagement and then to look at the stimulus package, which is intended to address the needs of infrastructure.

If you are after a basic summary of what has occurred in the stimulus package on infrastructure then, without embarrassing anyone, the Parliamentary Library quote was, ‘The only thing that has happened with transport infrastructure is boom gates.’ So I thought, ‘We must read it in a little bit more detail just to see exactly what is happening in the stimulus package that pertains to transport.’ After seeing the member for Dobell speak about netball courts until he had two minutes and 33 seconds to go, I thought to myself, ‘Clearly we are completely off the rails.’ Through some incredible revelation, with two minutes and 33 seconds to go he got us back on the topic, because the government know that they have about two minutes and 33 seconds of economic sunshine before they are looking down at the true impotence of their stimulus package, and they only have about two minutes and 33 seconds of things to say about transport infrastructure in toto.

I see across from me a Queensland colleague who knows just what the struggle was like on the issue of the Ipswich Motorway. It was so tough. When the money was committed by the former federal government, was that money spent? Was it committed? Was it actually used on the ground? No, it was not. It was hunkered down in state government coffers as they struggled to find ways to roll that money out.

We have been up there in Queensland and seen what 12 years of the Beattie and Bligh government has done to our state. Before we all draw breath, let us remember precisely what the debt is in Queensland. At the moment it is $74 billion and ticking. That is approaching Australia’s total government debt from 1993 to 1996. Of that amount, $68 billion was accrued prior to the economic slowdown, so let us not for a moment think that we are running into troubles due to the slowdown in Queensland—oh, no; this has been a problem running for years. The rivers of gold ran to nothing and the providence that Queensland knows, that economic wealth, was frittered away. What we have seen in the last month is a discussion about the lack of transport infrastructure available to Queenslanders.

Given the complete enthusiasm on our side of politics to talk about this motion, why did I prevail? It was because I am from Queensland, I am from an outer metropolitan seat, I have seen the neglect by the Queensland Labor government and I have seen the futility of the stimulus package to deliver on economic infrastructure. If you were to do a simple matrix and have a look at the stimulus packages around the globe, you might look at where the tax incentives and tax breaks are compared to where the cash splash is and where the economic infrastructure is compared to the social infrastructure. While our Prime Minister makes great mileage of having moved swiftly and decisively, his stimulus package virtually neglects economic infrastructure. Let me say that there is never a bad time to invest in schools and, for the benefit of the member for Dobell, that there is never a bad time to invest in netball courts. I am not about to criticise that. You may employ two people, a cement truck and a netball ring. But let me say this: there has never been a better time than now to invest in economic infrastructure.

What will we be looking back on that arose from when we went into debt to the tune of $60 billion? I will answer my own question: we will be looking back on a cash splash, proven once to be completely impotent but repeated this month and next in the hope that, having lost at the roulette wheel in December, we will somehow get a different result from the same act in March and April. Let us look at the retail figures and at the final household consumption in May-June. When people reflect in a sober moment, having received the payment gratefully from their government and worked hard to earn that payment, let us see what it does to deliver on transport infrastructure. That is a fair question.

Let us take my electorate, on which I can speak with some authority. We have Mount Cotton Road, which regularly leads to deaths, which has been nominated as a non-priority road and which, in the stimulus package, receives sweet nothing from the federal government. We have the Cleveland-Redland Bay Road, a road that is travelled daily by thousands of cars and is a single-lane byway. I point out to those who have not visited those undulating hills of Bowman—that soporific route down from Brisbane as you go over the hills, through Bonner and through the koala corridor—that when you get to Bowman you find communities of the size of Redland Bay and Victoria Point. These are thriving megalopolises of 22,000 people, and to leave those communities you have to use a single-lane road. There is not a byway or a highway with more than a single lane by which you can leave those communities in 2009.

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