Garth Hamilton (Groom, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Queensland Premier has been caught out in a lie. It gives me no pleasure to report that her supposedly detailed proposal for a quarantine facility at Wellcamp airport was revealed in the media last week to be nothing short of a 15-page document, nine pages of which were just pictures and diagrams.

For the last four months, the people of Toowoomba and I have been asking the Premier to provide details about how this plan would impact our local community, and these are reasonable questions to ask. Our main concern was how this proposal would keep Toowoomba safe, how it would keep our economy strong and open. If there was a load for Toowoomba to bear, we were happy to bear it. We just wanted to know what that load would look like, what the details would be. These are reasonable positions that the good and reasonable people of Toowoomba took, and I took it with them.

But, after months of the Premier refusing to answer these questions, I came to the view that the details never existed and, sadly, that was proven correct in the media last week. Unfortunately, this will continue on as the Premier continues to play politics with this issue—blocking a right to information request from the ABC to access the letters and correspondence with the Prime Minister's office that are supposed to carry the details of this.

An honourable member: You are joking!

I'll take the interjection. Sadly, I'm not joking. It's terrible that this was proceeding without detail, without consideration for how this would impact the people of Toowoomba, who I'm here to represent. I make absolutely no apology whatsoever for continuing to ask the questions that the people of Toowoomba have put to me to make sure we keep the Toowoomba region safe.

See this speech in context