Russell Trood (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I think it would be quite instructive, Senator Wong, if you would listen. Senator Wong made the point—accurately—that this decision is a result of a COAG meeting last month. What she neglected to inform the Senate was that it was essentially a COAG decision which resulted from a specific request made of COAG by the Premier of Queensland, Mr Beattie. Mr Beattie came along to the COAG meeting desperate to find some political cover for the maladministration of health in Queensland and desperate to get some sort of joy from the COAG meeting so that he might take something back to Queenslanders to try to explain the shortage of doctors which exists in Queensland and move himself some way down the track where he might be able to say, ‘I have got the health problems in Queensland under some sort of control.’

Mr Beattie asked the COAG meeting whether there might be some support for an increase in the number of doctors educated in Queensland. The COAG meeting was, as Senator Wong said, obliging—it offered that support. Indeed, Premier Beattie came out of the COAG meeting enthusiastic about the results of the COAG meeting. He said in a press conference later: ‘I’m happy. I’m very happy. These COAGs just get better and you get happier too.’ He was in full enthusiastic puppy mode. Enthusiastic about the decision, he said: ‘I fully support this and I express my appreciation to my colleagues for supporting this proposition from Queensland because we do have a doctor shortage,’—as we indeed do.

So here we have the Premier of Queensland enthusiastic about the results of the COAG meeting but what happens next? The shadow minister for education in the other place, the member for Jagajaga, goes into the public domain and, with her usual and well-known obsessive ideological opposition to full fee paying places in relation to education, comes out and says, ‘We oppose this decision from COAG’—putting herself at odds with a decision which the Premier of Queensland was specifically interested in securing from the COAG meeting. One wonders how this came about. It turns out that this seems to have been a decision taken independently of any decision making within the Labor caucus.