Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

through you, Madam Acting Deputy President—I welcome taking that fight to you. That is what we call a Third World health system. It does tug on my heartstrings to hear that nonsense coming from those on that side.

Since we are talking about Western Australia, let us talk about ending the blame game, because it is under that guise that the MPI was presented, even though for senators opposite it is: ‘Let’s talk up the election in Western Australia at every opportunity we can’—and I welcome that opportunity. But let us talk about ending the blame game. As my colleague Senator Bishop said, Australians went to the last election fed up to the back teeth with the blame game. Australians do not give a damn what government it is; they are just sick of all tiers of government blaming everyone else. And that is all we had before the last election. So the Prime Minister, Mr Rudd, made it very clear that he would end the blame game.

While we are on the subject of health, let us talk about one of the Rudd government’s initiatives: investing in high-quality hospitals and medical care. The government has formulated the National Health and Hospitals Reform Plan, putting in no less than $3.2 billion, to ensure that Australian families have access to high-quality and affordable health care, by working with the states and territories, not against them. So we can start talking about good things happening in health.

Let us come back to what is happening in WA, because I do not want to waste too much of my time. We will talk about the election and the moribund party that is the Liberal Party. Let us talk about leadership in Western Australia, shall we? Shall we talk about 2005 when Mr Colin Barnett was the leader of the Liberals? Mr Barnett had a spectacular crash and burn, as you all remember. He had a dream of building a canal from the Ord down to Western Australia. My mates in the Labor Party called it the ‘cane toad national highway’. Things were going along well. Mr Barnett was hanging his leadership and the election win on the canal. But you see Kununurra or the Ord are a long way away—about 3,400 kilometres by road and, as the crow flies, it is probably a couple of thousand—and he had this massive blow-out in the costings. We call it the cane toad highway; they call it ‘Colin’s far canal’, because it was a long way from Perth. It was a spectacular crash.

They have gone through three or four leaders in that time and if we want to talk about spectacular crashes let us look at the last leader of the Liberal Party of Western Australia, Mr Buswell, shall we? If any truck driver had performed like Mr Buswell in the workplace and they had come to seek my support and guidance on what they had done with bra snapping and sniffing chairs, I would have told them, ‘Not only are you sacked, take this advice: pack up your lunch bag and get the hell out of here before the husband gets here and lands one on your sniffer.’ It was absolutely disgraceful, but that is Liberal Party in Western Australia.