Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

If that wasn't a case of the pot calling the kettle black, I don't know what is. I'm actually delivering this speech early in response to today's MPI, where Labor is alleging that the coalition government is failing to deliver for regional Australia. I asked to speak on it, but it was booked out in 20 minutes—no doubt because my colleagues on this side of the chamber are sick to death of Labor pretending to care about the bush. It is disgusting that Labor are exploiting the worst drought in a century in cheap, political pointscoring. If there is one party that doesn't have a leg to stand on when it comes to defending the bush, it's the Labor Party. Labor sold regional Australia down the toilet a long time ago.

Let's take a walk down memory lane, shall we? First, it was the great neoliberal traders Hawke and Keating who decided to sell Qantas. What a great idea that was! Now regional Australia has to pay more for flying regionally than it costs to fly overseas. After that there was the privatisation of the Commonwealth Bank. In the old days, the Commonwealth Bank used to have a development bank that would lend to farmers. After privatisation, that got rolled into business banking and the CBA, like every other bank in this country, became obsessed with housing rather than driving business and investment, especially in the regions. Of course, selling the CBA also meant that branches would close down in regional centres—and they have.

The next thing Keating did was introduce superannuation, and what a boon that has been for the bush—not! Superannuation has destroyed the income of people in the bush. Can you imagine if we went back, say, 40 years to when people used to get their pay in little yellow packets and some white-collared finance shark with their hair slicked back drove around all the country towns, pulling up in a sports car and taking 10 per cent of your income and telling you to come and see him when you turn 60 and he may or may not give it back to you depending on how good a strategy he had investing and risking your money? Why would you give this guy your money? You wouldn't. But, of course, that's exactly what happens every week. Millions of dollars gets sucked out of the pockets of the battlers in the bush and sent to the blowhards in Sydney and Melbourne to manage, all for a small cost of around $37 billion a year in management fees. That's great for creating jobs in the inner city and for Labor voters, but none of this money is ever reinvested in the bush, is it? No. The Hawke-Keating Labor government destroyed the bush with their reckless, neoliberal privatisation and centralised saving agenda. The industry funds are laughing all the way to the bank. The unions can't believe their luck. I'll be honest: the coalition sold out its personal responsibility values when it didn't stop this cancer called superannuation.

Of course, no discussion about Labor and the bush would be complete if we didn't talk about the complete and utter devastation that Queensland Labor has imposed upon regional Queensland. When I first moved to Brisbane in 1988 to start my studies at UQ, after 30 years of responsible coalition government Queensland was the powerhouse state of the nation. We had the cheapest energy in the world, we were a tourist hotspot and, most importantly, there was very little difference in opportunities across the regions. That's no longer the case, as the only growing sector in the Queensland economy is the bureaucracy sector in George Street, funded by bribes from ditzy Anna and dodgy Jackie to try to win votes in their ever-shrinking inner-city base. The rest of the state is broken, thanks to Labor mismanagement.

Thirty years ago, my home town of Chinchilla had a maternity ward and no poker machines. Today it has poker machines and no maternity ward. There is no greater indictment of how utterly incompetent and morally bankrupt the Labor Party is than this statistic. The introduction of poker machines in Queensland by the so-called virtuous Goss government at the behest of unions was the start of the destruction of regional Queensland. As battlers in the bush became addicted to these dirty, stinking, one-armed, mechanical parasites, the royalties flowed to the corrupt Labor government. We never heard a word from corruption-busting Tony Fitzgerald about the destruction that gambling does to regional communities, did we?

Then, in the late nineties, Labor started shutting down regional maternity wards. Today, over 30 regional maternity wards have been shut down across Queensland and women in the bush are left to fend for themselves. The biggest cause of premature death of women in Third World countries is childbirth. Thanks to Labor, Queensland has become a Third World country.

Hospitals in the bush aren't just about health care; they are critical economic drivers. Just about every nurse at Chinchilla Hospital—