Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I thought a great hallmark of the Whitlam government—it was also a hallmark of the Gillard government—was the concept that education would provide a way forward for poor people. Once upon a time the poor were called 'working class people'. The working class in Queensland are not poor anymore; it is probably just the opposite. God bless the coalmining boom! There is this concept that if we get an education all will be well and it will be wonderful. Well, it might be for you individually, but in this place we have to look at the overall, bigger picture.

I stagger at the cost of government. When we left government in Queensland in 1990, our outlay was $8,000 million. It is quite unbelievable to me that when Anna Bligh's government in Queensland fell, they were spending $45,000 million. I suppose that it should not surprise me that the Liberals have only been there for 18 months and we are already up to $51,000 million.

I always like the Liberals claiming they are a small-spending government! You want to have a look at your record for the 12 years you were there; you doubled taxation and trebled the national debt. I hardly think that you people inspire us all. You ran an election campaign about the $315,000 million of debt that these useless people on the opposition benches had rolled up. I could not agree with you more about that, but then you asked permission to run up another $150,000 million. And you have only been in government for eight weeks!

I had the responsibility, with Bill Gunn in Queensland, of running the government when Bjelke-Petersen was going to the federal parliament. We were spending $8,000 million. You could take a survey in Queensland and ask, 'Are your dental services, health services and roads better now than in the year 1990 when the government fell?' I think that you would find, almost universally, that the answer to those questions are: no, no and no. Yet the Liberal government in Queensland is spending $51,000 million a year.

See this speech in context