RECORD OF PROCEEDINGS - Queensland Parliament ...

2332 Appropriation (Parliament) Bill; Appropriation Bill 31 Oct 2012
number of temporary positions would have detrimental effects on front-line service provision. This
stands in direct contradiction to the minister’s earlier statements that every front-line service under
national parks will be looked after.
The non-government committee members were disturbed by the fact both the minister and the
director-general refused to answer simple and direct questions on the percentage of protected areas
covered by a management plan. The minister deliberately misled the committee on the previous
government’s legacy by stating that a 2010 figure for the percentage of protected areas covered by a
management plan was current. The minister was unable to explain the meaning of the cardinal principle
for national park management. It is troubling that the minister could not articulate that national parks
exist to provide to the fullest extent possible for the preservation of an area’s natural condition. This is a
clear indication that the cardinal principle is no longer a factor in the management of Queensland’s
national park estate. In addition the minister stated that the Newman government is determined to open
up national parks to motorbikes, four-wheel drives, horse riding, logging and mining, as well as assorted
other damaging activities with little to no scientific assessment and without applying the precautionary
principle which has traditionally been considered.
Due to the insufficient amount of time allocated to the examination of the budget estimates for the
portfolio of National Parks, Recreation, Sport and Racing we must express severe reservations.
Moreover, the conduct of the minister raises legitimate questions as to his suitability to oversee the
expenditure. Evasion is not a substitute for reasoned and diligent policy development and delivery.
Hon. LJ SPRINGBORG (Southern Downs—LNP) (Minister for Health) (10.46 pm): Can I first of
all start by thanking the Health and Community Services Committee for their examination of the
estimates of the Department of Health and also their report to the parliament, of course minus the
dissenting report. Can I acknowledge the chair of the committee, the honourable member for Redlands,
and the magnificent stewardship that he showed in keeping an unruly opposition under control during
the course of that day.
Reading the report of the committee, and particularly the dissenting report, I was thinking I must
have been living in a parallel universe. We have the shadow minister for Health writing some form of
dissenting report where she fundamentally fails to understand what the KPMG report into the bungled
Labor Party Health payroll system was all about. She tried to dismiss the whole $1.2 billion as though it
did not really matter; you could walk down the back of the garden and pluck another $1.2 billion off the
infamous Labor Party money tree. She indicated it was not really such a problem because
$1.008 million of that was operations and it was going to happen anyway. I have news for the
honourable member for Bundamba. If she actually reads the KPMG report, on page 28 there is a very
instructive graph where it is indicated that those operational costs were indeed more than twice what
they should have been because in actual fact twice as many staff than what was originally envisaged
had to be put on just to operate the system. So the cost of running the system over a period of time
operationally was at least $500 million more than what was originally envisaged. Not only that, of
course, there was another $200-odd million worth of projects that we knew about where we had to
invest to try to fix that system up. Is it any wonder that we have this problem with the Labor Party in
Queensland. I have a graph here that explains the job losses very well. The ones in the red column we
can attribute directly to the Labor Party because of the payroll—1,537 of them adding up to $150 million
this year unfunded. I will take credit for the corporate office ones of around about 1,217—in actual fact,
myself and Anna Bligh because we were both going through a corporate office restructure.
There is another part of this parallel universe. I do not know what the understanding of the
opposition is with regards to national health reform, but under national health reform they envisage the
establishment of local hospital and health networks. We call them boards. The whole point of those
boards is that, as the former Labor Party treasurer and deputy premier said, we need local area
governance of our health system in Queensland because no longer can we trust the corporate office to
do the day-to-day operational things of the health service in Queensland.
One really has to ask the question: in this so-called Labor parallel universe, what does the
honourable member for Bundamba envisage? Was the honourable member for Bundamba going to
appoint those people to chair the hospital and health networks? Many of those people were already in
the equation prior to my coming in and they were appointed because they are the best people for the
job. Was she going to let them do the work or was it going to be a bit like Nightmare on Elm Street with
Freddy Krueger, aka the honourable member for Bundamba? Every time Dr Alexander goes to make a
decision, up pops the member for Bundamba, like Freddy Krueger in Nightmare on Elm Street, saying,
‘Don’t make that decision’. Out in West Moreton, Mary Corbett would face the same sort of thing: ‘We
want to give you discretion, but we don’t want to give you that much discretion. We want to have all this
wonderful central Labor Party control, which has given us such a wonderful Health system in
Queensland.’
I say this to the honourable member for Bundamba: in the future, when people write to me about
the reorientation—as the Labor Party called it—of services at Eventide, I will write back to them
personally. I will remind them that Gordon Nuttall’s apprentice, the honourable member for Bundamba,