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

Obviously, the seat of Bowman, on the outer metro fringe of Brisbane, and hugging the Moreton Bay islands, presents significant but also unique infrastructure challenges. We're deeply concerned about the quality of water transport and also the main roads to our CBD, as are many outer metropolitan seats. There's nothing unusual about our hospital, Redland Hospital, except that in recent data, while we have mailouts to letterboxes around the electorate talking about cuts by the coalition, it's in fact the state Labor government that reduced funding to Redland Hospital by about $40 million last year. This is part of the give and take arrangement in a Commonwealth-state arrangement, where additional federal funding of $83 million should have led to a dollar-for-dollar arrangement and an increase. But, instead, the state government has taken the opportunity to reduce funding to the metro south hospital area by around $40 million. It's money we have to get back. Redland Hospital is just one of five hospitals in the metro south area, so it's hard to know where the money has been taken from in metro south and, of course, the federal government doesn't know where the $83 million of Commonwealth activity investment is actually directed.

But, clearly, at Redland we're at crisis point. QEII and Logan Hospital have been seen as comparable hospitals in our region. QEII and Redland are most in need of urgent infrastructure upgrade. Parking at Redland has become an almost impossible task. Throughout the day it can often take half an hour of driving around for frail and often older residents to find a car park. With the recent visit of the Queensland government to Redland, what we saw taken, with the one hand, was $40 million from metro south. The return that we got with the visit of Health Minister Steven Miles last week was one birth tub, one hoist, four beds in the emergency department and a feasibility study into parking at the hospital. The whole thing added up to barely $2 million and it represents just a fraction of what has been taken out by the state Labor government.

It's hard to make parking a priority at a hospital, but it's also not that hard to ask the private sector to do a feasibility study for you, when, in the end, most of these hospital car parks are run by the private sector. It surely would take a couple of weeks to do that study, but instead what we have is a delay of up to six to 12 months while a half million dollar feasibility study is carried out. Redland Hospital needs the parking, it needs the upgrades and it needs an MRI. In fact, my entire region has a supply area of around 250,000 people, all relying on one partially licensed MRI. That's simply inadequate for that area. It is all right to be relatively close to the city and still have either very limited or overrun public infrastructure and an MRI licence—either to the hospital, where they can look after in-patients, or nearby—is absolutely critical.

The other large infrastructure in the outer metro area is the three or four arterial connections that we have to Brisbane. At that level what we have are Rickett and Green Camp Roads, which run through the electorate of Bonner. They've had a $3 million upgrade through the federal government, working with the Brisbane City Council. That's great news. It was halfway there last week, with the traffic switchover occurring on 23 November. It is great to see the work happening. But, again, it's the only work that we're actually seeing in the entire electorate. It is actually federally funded. These other state roads that supply the needs of Redland residents are simply lying idle.

We have the suburb of Redland Bay, with a population of nearly 10,000 people, with not a single two-lane road out. It must be the largest community in Queensland that you can drive out of on a one-lane road only. There are one-lane roads in all directions and they are completely blocked up. In the last two state elections it has been the LNP that has committed to double-lane the roads. Labor has managed to win the state election without making any commitment. That's unfortunate for Redland Bay. Instead, what we had was Labor scurrying around trying to find another road to upgrade. At last November's election, they guaranteed to fund a Victoria Point by-pass plan. Before the election that was a by-pass, but straight after the election it was just a feasibility study. This is a constant refrain: funding a feasibility study when in fact you're not going to fund the road upgrade. All that money from developer contributions is actually sitting in the bank at local government level, but we just don't have the wit locally to turn that into a two-lane road running each way.

For our fast-growing parts around metropolitan Brisbane, this work needs to start happening. We have had a Labor state government that for too long has been a government that knows no better. It's time they start placing infrastructure as a priority, for the sake of the population of Bowman.

House adjourned at 20:00