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

with a huge majority, was titularly run by Premier Goss but directed by none other than the current Leader of the Opposition and would-be Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. It was Kevin Rudd who had the influence at the time to look forward to the problems of water in Queensland 10 years hence. Mr Rudd did not have that vision. He succumbed to political pressure at the time. Mr Rudd crumbled with the first iota of pressure. He crumbled like a badly made cake. With no substance at all and with a bit of pressure put on him, he crumbled and pulled the Queensland government out of a proposal which, if it had been built, would have been looking after Queensland at this present time.

What has Mr Beattie done? And Beattie was part of that team at the same time. He has come up with this ridiculous proposal for a dam at Traveston Crossing, and a few other proposals besides that. Unfortunately, I have been at other meetings and have not heard what my colleagues have said, but I feel fairly certain that they have clearly enunciated the stupidity of this dam. Very importantly, not only is it going to affect the lives of many ordinary Australians but it is going to achieve nothing. It is a huge cost; the dam is not big enough; it is not deep enough; and we will lose more water in evaporation than will be usefully applied to south-east Queensland if the dam is ever built. Quite frankly, I do not think that Mr Beattie ever really intended for this to go ahead. He came up to an election a few months ago and had a number of crises to deal with—one of them was the health crisis. I must say, a democracy is a democracy and you accept the result, but I cannot understand my fellow Queenslanders rewarding Mr Beattie’s maladministration of the hospital system by re-electing him by almost the same massive majority he had before. Similarly, I cannot understand how they overlooked this water position.

Mr Beattie, clever though he is—and I like Peter Beattie; I admire him for his political nous and his political foresight; he is a great politician; he is not a great administrator, not a great Premier, but a great politician—needed something to defuse the issue of lack of water in south-east Queensland. So, what did he do? He picked some area where he knew the vote would not worry him, because it is an area where his party would never get much support in any case—