Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Mr President, it is very worthwhile and useful advice. I will take it on board. It has come to me: it was the former Prime Minister, Mr Kevin Rudd. He was the cabinet secretary to Wayne Goss. I grew up around the area of Waterford West. There was a proposal for a dam to be built there, called the Wolffdene Dam. It was completely kyboshed by that government. They built houses on that dam site and so we can no longer build that dam. If we had built that dam, the 2011 Brisbane floods might not have been as bad as they were. So we could look at that. Indeed, we could look at the floods more generally, because there were a lot of them. Remember how the former Bligh government merged all those departments

According to the commission of inquiry report into the 2011 floods, there was a complete breakdown of communication between the department of the environment, the department of water and the Premier's department at the time. It was a comedy of errors with, I think, Mr Stephen Robertson as the water minister at the time. They received advice ahead of the floods that there was a potential major La Nina event and nothing was done to help protect the people of Brisbane. That is another thing we can look into.

As I mentioned last week, there is a lot more we can look into. There is the former health department official who took off with $16 million of Queensland government funds. He got away with it by explaining to his senior officers that he had this wealth because he was a Tahitian prince. The department of health believed him that he was a Tahitian prince, and it subsequently came to light that he was a fake Tahitian prince and he ran off with $16 million of Queensland government taxpayers' money. I note that, under section 11 of this inquiry, we are to visit a number of towns and centres in Queensland, including Nambour, Ipswich, Mackay, Rockhampton et cetera. One area not on this list that we should go to is Tahiti. Let's go to Tahiti and investigate the royal lineage of the Tahitian family and see if there is any connection to the department of health officials in Queensland. Perhaps, if we go to Tahiti, we will discover that it was a credible story and should cut the former Queensland Labor government a bit more slack.

Unfortunately, only one of our side of politics will get that opportunity to go to Tahiti, because, as was outlined earlier in the debate, there are five members of this committee and only one has been allocated to the coalition. That is only a fifth, despite this side being almost half of the chamber. I would also like to note that, with the establishment of this committee, the chair of this committee will receive an 11 per cent increase on their base salary, which works out to be about $20,000 a year, as per the decision of the Labor Party and the Greens. The committee will determine who the chair is, but it may go to Senator Lazarus. It is very kind of the Senate to provide Senator Lazarus with that increase in his salary, but for what purpose is it? I go back to where I started: why is the Australian taxpayer being asked to pay the chair of this committee an extra $20,000-odd a year? It will provide no benefit for the federal parliament, it will change nobody's life in this country and it is a complete abuse of power.