Sue Boyce (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Acting Deputy President, for acknowledging the state which I am so proud to represent. Whilst responding in general to the Governor-General’s address to this house, I will firstly just touch on a couple of issues that have been raised by senators already. I thank Senator Hurley for her suggestion that nuclear energy is an issue that must be addressed and properly assessed and properly debated by this house. This is not a view that is shared, I know, by a lot of her colleagues but, if we are to go to a low emissions, energy efficient future, nuclear energy must be on the list. More and more of the research that is becoming available suggests that this can now be done, given rising power prices, at comparable cost to the ongoing use of coal. Of course the coal industry will continue to be a core part of Australia and Australia’s prosperity, not just internally but externally, for many years to come. But it is only sensible to now put nuclear energy on the agenda and I was pleased to hear Senator Hurley mention this as something that should happen.

I will also comment, Mr Acting Deputy President, on some of the remarks that you made during your contribution to this debate. I can understand perfectly that you would want to comment on New South Wales—that you would not want to mention Queensland. Yet I would suggest that, if you had perhaps listened more carefully to the contribution of Senator Macdonald, you would have noticed, in his forensic analysis of what was wrong with Queensland Labor, that the attempts, over and over, to parachute people into seats where they were not known by the locals were one of the reasons for the complete slaughter of the federal Labor Party in the election in Queensland. As Senator Macdonald pointed out, there had been no Northern Queensland LNP members of the House of Representatives before the last election. There are now no Labor representatives in that area. It has been a clean sweep.

Moving further south to the seat of Longman, for which I was the patron senator, we were delighted to have a young man—in fact the youngest person ever elected to this parliament—Mr Wyatt Roy, win the election very convincingly. He is a local young man whose family has lived for generations in the electorate and who knows the voters of the electorate and the issues of the electorate. It is that sort of care taken when selecting candidates that is responsible—in part, along with very strong campaigning skills—for the success in Queensland.

So I certainly understand that Senator Hutchins would not want to reflect on the national result for Labor and would want to stick very carefully to his own state, which is one of the very few states in which Labor almost survived. Certainly there is nothing for Labor to be proud of in the election result that they achieved at the last election.

As many people have pointed out, it does seem a long time ago—and like a different world—that the Governor-General made her address to this place. As Senator Macdonald pointed out earlier, the Governor-General delivered a speech that had been written for her by the government, and I think if we look through that speech we will see that one of the biggest problems with it was its lack of a ‘vision thing’. There were very few real, practical suggestions for a way forward other than to continue some of the proposals that had been put up by Mr Rudd. As we know, most of those proposals have since been trashed completely. They have disappeared from the face of the earth.

It is interesting right now to reflect on the brave new world that Mr Rudd and Ms Gillard were supposed to be creating, where the blame game with the states would end and COAG would become a hotbed of collegial, fraternal and sisterly love. I do not know that we have seen any of this actually happen yet. I had the pleasure yesterday of attending the national conference of the Australian Health Care Reform Alliance. The alliance brings together 40 national and state organisations of health professionals, health consumers and health services. In the sense that it represents those three constituencies, it is unique. It has advocated actively for many years for a more equitable, efficient, robust, sustainable and accountable healthcare system and has put forward a lot of policies and principles that it believes will lead to a healthcare system that seamlessly and efficiently focuses on the needs of the individual and meets those needs. Can I say that the mood in the room at the conference yesterday was sombre at the very least. There was, in my view, a quiet sense of desperation. There was a sense of: ‘Why are we bothering to be here to talk about health care reform when sitting on our shoulder is the likelihood that the big, shiny hospitals and healthcare reform agenda of Mr Rudd and, allegedly, Ms Gillard is likely now to go down the drain, leading to even more inefficiencies in the system than we currently have?’

As an example, there was a session yesterday that talked about mental health. I have spoken in this place a number of times on mental health and the future of mental health. Labor has continued some of the Howard-Costello reforms, such as the introduction of PHaMS, the personal helpers and mentors scheme—after initially getting a bit confused around alternative therapy programs and better access to medical health, Ms Roxon yet again backed down on what she had initially thought was reform, put the program back pretty much as it was when the Howard government established it and put some more funding in—and the Labor government got ticks for that, but that is all they got ticks for.

Yesterday Senator Colbeck, from Tasmania, moved a motion in the Senate regarding the end of funding to a Tasmanian mental healthcare service. He characterised this as an organisation that is designed to stop people slipping through the cracks itself slipping through the cracks. I would also mention the Cairns Mental Health Carers Support Hub. This organisation was set up by professionals, consumers and carers in North Queensland, where there is a dearth of services. Wherever you go in Australia there is a dearth of services, but the further you get from the capital cities, the fewer are the services. This service in Cairns had been set up and was functioning well; it meant that for the first time in a very long time the parents and carers of adults with schizophrenia were somewhat more comfortable about the safety and care that was being offered to their adult children. Their funding is about to lapse, although it appears no-one can quite be bothered telling them whether or not it has lapsed. So, once again, we have a group designed to stop people slipping through the cracks that is itself slipping through the cracks. This is apparently the brave new world of the Labor government in the area of mental health.

I should mention that I know there were some people in the room at the Australian Health Care Reform Alliance conference yesterday and there are many others in the health area who are bitterly disappointed in this government. They listened to the talk that was talked by Mr Rudd, Ms Gillard and others and they thought there was going to be change; they thought there was going to be improvement. They are bitterly disappointed not only that this government has done almost nothing in this field but also that this government has betrayed them by talking about doing wonderful things and then doing less than nothing.

I would like to also mention the vision that could have been developed in the speech provided to the Governor-General by the government as to the development of Australia long term. If you look at many of the reports that are now being made, you see we finally seem to be getting people talking about a two-speed economy. Anybody in Queensland last year could have told you that there was a two-speed economy. If you were involved in the mining industry or supplied the mining industry, you were probably going okay. If you were not involved in the mining industry, you were in trouble as your business was in trouble. There were people talking about their turnovers being down 30 per cent or more. This was all happening last year whilst the government congratulated itself on full employment and whatever else. In some sectors, yes, there is a lack of skilled people to take jobs but this is masking the lack of turnover, the lack of production and the lack of jobs in other sectors of the community. This is particularly felt in a state that is not as reliant as, for example, Western Australia on the mining industry.

This was happening before the floods and cyclones. It has just been exacerbated, magnified dozens of times, by the floods and cyclones. Yet it appears the government continues to be interested in flood damaged businesses, homes and individuals—and it is the same with cyclones—without any concept that you do not have to be flood or cyclone damaged to be flood or cyclone affected. I do not know one individual who has not been so affected and I do not know one business in any part of Queensland, whether it is an agribusiness or whether it is a small business or a large business, that has not been affected in some way by the floods or cyclones. This might be a company where a major customer has gone broke because of the floods and cyclones. It might be a company where a major supplier cannot supply because of the cyclones and floods. It might be a company such as those in Kingaroy that could not actually get products sent to them because there was not an economically efficient route by which to send the products in. Trucking companies have had problems too with lost trucks, roads that they cannot use and customers that have not got anything for them to put on the trucks to send somewhere. It goes on and on and it affects every corner of Queensland but, in my view, this has not been acknowledged.

Nor is there any sort of basic plan underneath, other than to help now, to further build Queensland or Northern Australia or the Australian economy. I would like to look briefly at an organisation that I think deserves support in this place. It is called Australians for Northern Development & Economic Vision. You might recall, Mr Acting Deputy President, a report from what was initially an inquiry, one that was started under Senator Heffernan and finished under the Rudd Labor government, into development in Northern Australia. Perhaps not surprisingly, the focus of that inquiry seemed to change radically. What we ended up with was a report that emphasised—and I do not think any of us needed to be told this—the environmental fragility of Northern Australia. It emphasised the need to develop small-scale Indigenous businesses in Northern Australia. No-one has any problems with those aims, but that is not where Australia’s economic future lies, nor are these things incompatible with real economic development in Australia. Australia’s economic future, as ANDEV point out, is as ‘a regional provider of seaborne minerals and coals and various other commodities’. They believe that without a vision and without input from the government Australia’s resource industry itself is at risk.

So where were the comments in the Governor-General’s address on things like the high rates of taxation in Australia compared to those of our competitors? In fact, if you look at personal tax and company tax, you see we are now looking at a carbon tax; we are now looking at an income tax allegedly to save the government and save the flood-prone and cyclone-prone areas. We have high wages compared with those of other countries. Great, and I think that’s fabulous, but we do need to acknowledge it and we do need to work out how we are going to develop a competitive system if we are to maintain that standard of living. There is absolutely no point in having high wage rates for people who are not employed. I do not think we should be changing the wage rates but we certainly need to acknowledge that we have an issue and a competition problem there.

Slow approval procedures are a very, very serious issue here. So much for the government that was going to reduce all the red tape. We get little reports on how many changes have been made or not made to legislation and yet the government fails to tell us that for every one that has been taken away there are currently about 15 that have been put in place. So the lack of red tape is just not happening.

The other concern is the current development of very large ore carriers by countries that compete with us to sell ore. The Asian ports are being modified to allow for these very large ore carriers. One of the ways we have been able to get over the fact that we have high taxation and high labour rates is that we are close to the markets that want the ore. When other countries in South America, South Africa and Canada can transport huge amounts of ore at competitive freight rates, we have nothing left to make us competitive with the others. So could I please beg this government to think just a little about the future of the country, not just how on earth it is going to stay in power and how it is going to meet the next interest rate bill in the very sad economic situation it has brought us to.