Peter Lindsay (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome interventions, Mr Deputy Speaker. The member for Shortland is a very good friend of mine. I have been thrown off the track—that is what interventions are for! What has finally happened with the health debate is that the government has taken back some GST from the states, which it then gives straight back to the states, saying: ‘Here’s our money’—and of course it is not new money—‘but, by the way, we’re not taking over the hospitals. You can still run them. Oh, and here’s our budget this year. We’ve got another $500 million for a whole lot more bureaucrats.’ Already, more bureaucrats than health professionals work in the hospital system. We are getting more bureaucrats, and it is the bureaucracy that stuffs up the health system in this country.

In Queensland, which I know about, the health department in Brisbane runs like a Soviet-style bureaucracy. It is awful. Nobody can make decisions. The local hospitals cannot make decisions. And the Rudd government says, ‘We’re going to have local control of hospitals.’ It just gets out there, bald faced, with these paid television commercials saying, ‘We’ve introduced local control’—utter rubbish. The policy of the Labor government was to basically have a local board to run a number of hospitals in each region. So it was not going to be that the Townsville Hospital would have its own local board—which would happen under the alternative government—but that an amalgam of hospitals would be run by a local board, meaning there would just be another bureaucracy. It has been an abject failure of public policy on the part of the Rudd government. It has been an abject failure of the expectations that were generated in the minds of our community. I will give you another example. Mr Rudd came to Townsville and said, ‘You need a PET scanner.’ Of course we need a PET scanner. ‘Hey, I’m going to give you a PET scanner—here’s the money.’ What he did not say was that it will not happen until 2014. It will be so disappointing when the community finds out they have been sold a pup.

I would not mind betting that, if the Rudd government stays in power, in another three years we will have another set of promises. And nothing will have changed. People will still be on waiting lists—to get on a waiting list. That is pretty disappointing. The Deputy Prime Minister came to Townsville last week. There was a great big fanfare. We were all ears as to what she might promise or what she might say. Do you know what she promised? Do you know what she announced? Nothing.

The Deputy Prime Minister comes to Townsville and she says, ‘We are really interested in looking after skill shortages in North Queensland.’ But nobody took her seriously because she was the one who defunded the Australian Technical College—Townsville. It was the most significant technical college in the nation and Julia Gillard took the money off it because it was a Howard government initiative. Nothing more. The tech college struggles on. It could train twice as many apprentices as it is doing at the moment, but it does not have the money. The government then says, ‘Oh, well, we’ll have trade training centres in schools.’ How many have been delivered? They actually promised one in every high school, but that is not going to happen. They then promised 2,650 across Australia. One or two have been completed. We will probably see the rest by about 2020 or something like that. But they do not work. The technical college model, where students were able to do their apprenticeship and get their senior qualifications all at the same time—and get a job—was much, much better. It was just a wonderful model.

In relation to the Broadband Network, in Townsville we have got one of the five demonstrator projects. Do you know what they are going to do with broadband in Townsville? This is just utterly unbelievable. It is a demonstrator project and they are going to string the cables along the telephone poles. Hello! Haven’t you ever heard of cyclones in north Queensland? Why would you prejudice the reliability of a National Broadband Network in a cyclone area by stringing the cables along telephone poles? They should all be underground. All the electricity supplies should be underground. Of course, in all new developments in Townsville all electricity cables are put underground. But for the Broadband Network, no. We are spending $43 billion—and we are borrowing it all, of course—without a business plan. Well, hello! I think we have got to get a bit of sense here and make sure that the security of our National Broadband Network is in fact protected by making sure the cables are underground in cyclone-prone areas. That goes for both sides of the country and the Top End. So often the North is forgotten by these bureaucrats down here and by the government. Senator Conroy, particularly, should take an interest in this, and he should be making sure that we are protected in relation to the security of our Broadband Network.

Let me finish now on defence. This has really disappointed me. Mr Rudd made a commitment that the Defence vote would not be cut in the budget. But there are some really creative things that you can do: you can have your cuts and maintain spending at the same time. It has happened through a thing called the strategic review program. That is the cuts of $20 billion out of Defence over the next 10 years, and it is biting everywhere. Let me tell you where it is biting in the reserves. You cannot get the training days and you cannot get the ammunition. The reserves are just such an important part of our ADF these days. Many ships cannot deploy unless they have reserve officers. We have reservists right through our overseas areas of operation. And, of course, they work in the military justice system. They are all across the Defence Force. But the government is knocking off all of this money and they are not actually going to where the waste is—in the bureaucracy. I am disappointed to see that that is happening to the Defence Force, but our members of the ADF know and I think they will continue to mark down the Rudd government at the next election because of what they have done to the Australian Defence Force.

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