Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

You can see, Mr Acting Deputy President, that the truth hurts and they do not like it to be heard, and they will do what they can to shout me out of the two minutes I have here. They are obviously protecting Senator McLucas. Thanks to your colleagues, Senator McLucas, who protected you very well and protected Mr Craig Wallace, the state Labor member for Thuringowa, I am not able to get around to some of the porkies he has been telling about the Mount Low Parkway. Obviously, I need a lot more time to highlight some of these misconceptions—these nuances from members of the Labor Party that, as I said, tell a story that is far from the truth.

Senator McLucas, in a fairly untoward, almost contemptible address, accused both Mr Lindsay, the excellent member for Herbert, and me of being anti nurses. Both Mr Lindsay and I have more reason to understand and be grateful for nurses than Senator McLucas—and that is because we were both inmates at the Mater Hospital when we had heart operations many years ago. We understand what a great job nurses do. What my and Mr Lindsay’s point was was that the Queensland government is so absolutely hopeless in the way it has run its health system that it has to resort to measures which skew the whole health system in Queensland. They skew it for a little while by giving huge wage increases. There is no denying that nurses deserve very good pay, but why has Mr Beattie not increased wages before? Why has this only happened on the eve of a state election? If Mr Beattie were so interested in the nurses, why didn’t he do this in any one of the last eight years when he has ignored nurses and doctors and destroyed the Queensland health system?