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

There was an interjection, but I could not quite catch it. It cannot have been terribly important. So that is the situation we are in. I have made my position quite clear, unlike the lobotomised zombies on the other side of the chamber, as my good friend Senator Cameron used to call his own colleagues. Remember the lobotomised zombies. It is not me calling the Labor Party that. It was Senator Cameron calling his colleagues and you, Mr Acting Deputy President, and your whip there that. I would not have called you a lobotomised zombie. But, in calling you lobotomised zombies, clearly your friend and colleague Senator Cameron did not have any regard for you.

On our side of the chamber we do have debates. We are able to put forward new ideas. If you have a different idea to the leader of the party at the time, you are not automatically expelled from the Liberal Party, as you are in the Labor Party. I understand that is how the Labor Party is. But I can well understand why Senator Cameron referred to opposition senators as lobotomised zombies, because you just sit there and take whatever is given to you by the great financial intellect of people like Mr Wayne Swan, the Treasurer of the Labor regime that never once had a surplus, in spite of consistently promising that there would be one. On our side of parliament we are entitled to have a different view and we are entitled to express that view.

I have said it publicly—and it comes as no surprise to my colleagues—that I think there are better ways of trying to address Labor's debt and deficit, because I do think that fuel increases impact more heavily on those outside the capital cities. These are people that do not have a tram down at the end of the street, that do not have a public bus service in the next block, that do not have suburban trains and whose schools are more than just a couple of kilometres away so parents can readily get their children there. It has an impact on these people, like the people I represent, who have to use their vehicles for everything.

I know of an instance up near Georgetown were a caring mother drives her children 80 kilometres to the school. If she goes home and then to come back and picks up the child in the afternoon, that is 160 kilometres to get the child to school and another 160 kilometres to pick the child up. That is 320 kilometres in a day just to get the child to school. With respect, I am quite sure that few of my colleagues on the other side of the chamber would understand that. This is not a criticism, but it is a fact of life that most of you live in the capital cities, you represent the capital cities and you would find it difficult to believe that there are places in Australia, particularly in the north where I come from, where a parent would drive 320 kilometres each and every day just to get their child to school. In the city, you could walk the couple of blocks or quickly drive to the next suburb to drop the child off. And that is just schooling. Multiply that by going to the doctor, going to hospital, going to sporting events and going to cultural events.

If you want to get to a cultural event in many parts of rural and remote Australia you have got to get on a plane and fly to Brisbane or Sydney or Melbourne—that is, unless you go to Townsville for the Festival of Chamber Music, which is held annually, and which, as I mentioned in another speech in this chamber recently, has inexplicably not been funded by the Australia Council this year. So, yet again, it seems to me, and I do not want to get paranoid about this, that sometimes these rules seem to be made by capital city people for capital city people. In relation to the Festival of Chamber Music, I will be wanting to see how much money went to cultural events in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Adelaide and Brisbane compared to what goes to places like Townsville.