Senator SANTORO (12:45 PM) —The Queensland Labor government has the best financial position of any of the states. It is the recipient of the best proportional return from the GST revenue that the Commonwealth collects and distributes to the states and territories under the Grants Commission formula. In the financial year just ended, Queensland got a windfall of well over $600 million in additional GST revenue distributed by the Commonwealth. It has growing revenues from its own sources through Beattie Labor's tax-by-stealth policy and through windfall gains from property transfers and gambling tax. Labor presides over a state with a rapidly expanding consumer economy, fuelled by interstate migration. Every indicator is positive—every indicator except government performance.

In recent days Queenslanders have learned that their electricity supplies are not secure. The lights may go out at any time. They may do this, it seems, because the power utility corporations have not maintained essential delivery and distribution infrastructure. Yet, when we consider why this might be so, we cross into X-file territory. According to Premier Beattie, something is out there, but he just cannot quite work out exactly what. However, he does know that it is not something he is directly responsible for. He is only the Premier of the state, after all. He is only the person Queenslanders have now elected three times to run their state and make sure things work. He has only been in the job six years—I suspect he wants us to believe that he is still trying to find out where the washroom is, for goodness sake. Nevertheless, last week Queenslanders heard again that the Premier would step up to the crease and score runs for the people. They heard that it was not his fault that the lights might go out and the food in their fridges may go off but that the buck stopped with him and he would insist that things were put right.

It is the same old story that Queenslanders are forever hearing from Mr Beattie and that sad little non-performing collective which forms the cabinet he leads. Every Queenslander recognises the pattern. Firstly, there is no problem and anyone who says there is one is wrong and motivated by malice. Then—and how astounding this is—there is a problem and it has come as a complete surprise to the Premier, who up to now had been advised that everything was fine. Next, the Premier insists that the problem must be fixed, or he will want to know why it has not been fixed. And finally, we get to the endgame in every one of Mr Beattie's pathetic little sagas of maladministration—find a culprit, preferably one he can persuade to keep quiet, and make them pay the political price that actually accrues to the Premier's account.

Last week there was another high farce in Queensland reminiscent of the celebrated Winegate affair. This time we had a very novel interpretation of the Dance of the Whirling Dervishes—spin around fast enough and all your problems will disappear. Last week, minutes after his Minister for Energy—and what a non sequitur that title is—said he was not to blame, the Premier told a press conference that the buck stopped in his own office. There was a caveat, however—there always is with Mr Beattie, the doyen of the plausible excuse. This time we find that the cherry tree has been cruelly cut down by someone else who, completely out of the blue, had just that moment rushed past and thrust the axe into the Premier's hand. So, said the Premier of Queensland, he would take responsibility—as long as everyone understood very clearly that it really was not his fault at all; it was the fault of the utility corporations paying huge bonuses to top executives.

The issue of executive bonuses is essentially a separate issue. In this context they are a premier diversionary tactic. I would simply say bonuses of any sort, executive or otherwise, and regardless of the number of zeroes that follow the dollar sign and the primary number, should reflect actual output and performance. I have to say the performance of the electricity utilities has not been good, but the problem with paying bonuses in public power utilities is that these decisions are made at board level and the voting pattern of these bodies, in Queensland at least, is determined by the number of Labor mates on the board concerned. It is very interesting that the Premier did not utter a word about the capital stripping raids he and his acquisitive treasurers have regularly mounted not only against Ergon and Energex in the power sector but also against the port corporations.

I warned in my very first matter of public interest speech in this place, on 11 December 2002, that this practice was ruinous. I have returned to that theme in three other major economic speeches and alluded to this general problem in many more. Stripping away millions in potential reinvestment money is, in my view, a far more effective way of collapsing the capacity of an organisation to run its business properly than is the corporate stupidity of paying undeserved bonuses. Mr Beattie should tell Queenslanders where in his policy for the last election they can find the bit about ruining Energex and Ergon and turning out the lights.

In the past, the Premier has tried to justify the policy of bailing up the public utilities to hand over capital the government decides it wants, but only by arguing that successive governments have done this. That may be true but, apart from a period of just short of two years in 1996-98, those successive governments have been Labor ones for the past 14½ years. It will be 15 years at the end of this year. So actually the buck does stop with Mr Beattie and the Labor Party. They are out of excuses. If there is a mess in Queensland, it is the mess that they have made.

As state Liberal leader Bob Quinn said just the other day, the Premier is playing fast and loose with the truth when he claims his government did not know the full extent of the problems with Queensland's ramshackle electricity network. In June last year, the Beattie government was provided with the Energex-Powerlink emerging network limitations report, which warned of drastic measures such as emergency load shedding if corrective action was not taken urgently to replace ageing infrastructure. At that time, both the Premier and his then energy minister—the same Mr Lucas who is now working up the fogging machine to hide Labor's transport infrastructure failures in Queensland—publicly dismissed the report. At that time, Mr Lucas told Queenslanders that only acts of God would cause blackouts. In the days immediately before the February state election he said Brisbane CBD and suburbs were extremely well placed in terms of electricity supply.

That was an act of electoral fraud in the circumstances. The reality is the Beattie government was desperate to hush up and discredit the report prior to the election. What is needed now is for the Premier to come clean with the people of Queensland, rid himself of non-performing ministers and purge the energy boards of the Labor stooges who have helped him create this crisis. That particular call was made last week in the wake of news that the Beattie government would like people to generate their own power. Yes, Mr Acting Deputy President, you have heard correctly: he suggested that people now generate their own power. That call to come clean was made by the deputy leader of the state Liberals in parliament, Dr Bruce Flegg. As Dr Flegg rightly said, we urgently need independent industry experts on the boards of Energex and Ergon, not ALP lackeys.

The state Liberals are also calling on the Beattie government to quickly adopt the key recommendation from last year's report to develop electricity tariff structures for major customers in order to increase energy efficiency and reduce total loads at times of peak demand. It is not only Queensland's electricity system, however, that has fallen apart under Mr Beattie and Labor. We all know about the problems of the public hospital system—a topic for another time. We all know about the tragic difficulties in the child protection system—also a topic for another time soon.

We all know that the Queensland Premier cannot resist an easy stunt as an alternative to the hard work of producing a viable policy, putting it into effect, and making sure it works. A case in point is the state's transport infrastructure. It has fallen well beneath the capacity that it needs to cope with the rapid growth of population and consequent travel needs for both people and goods. The Pacific Motorway linking Brisbane and the Gold Coast is there, in the form it is and working as well as it is, because of the decisions taken and the work which commenced during the 1996-98 state coalition government's term—a government that I had the privilege to serve in.

Most recently, Queenslanders have had their intelligence insulted by the Premier and his government over the AusLink national transport infrastructure plan, specifically the measures designed to fix the problems of the Ipswich Motorway. It is a national highway. It is infrastructure for which the Commonwealth government is appropriately responsible. But the Ipswich Motorway suffers horribly from the inadequate state road network that services the area through which the motorway passes. Mr Beattie and his government consistently avoid this issue and this reality. They say that the Commonwealth is not spending enough money on the national road system in Queensland, including the Ipswich Motorway. They do this with a straight face, while consistently failing to outlay sufficient funding to provide south-east Queensland with a state road transport network able to meet today's demands and tomorrow's forecast demands. This phenomenon is not confined to the south-east of the state.

Only last week the new Minister for Local Government, Territories and Roads, the Hon. Jim Lloyd, was forced to tell Mr Lucas, the Queensland Minister for Transport and Main Roads, to do his homework on flood works on the Bruce Highway at Tully in North Queensland. Mr Lloyd found it necessary to remind Mr Lucas that the construction of works that will eliminate the flooding problem on the Bruce Highway north of Tully cannot start for another three years on the most optimistic estimates provided by the Queensland government. On 29 July 2004 Mr Lloyd approved a $1.5 million grant to the Queensland government for a round of surveys, studies, traffic investigations and other preconstruction measures that will take three years, even for a bypass route or floodproof road to be designed. Mr Lucas claimed that the Commonwealth was delaying consideration of the project.

My Queensland colleague the Hon. Warren Entsch, the member for Leichhardt—who welcomed the funding—quickly and effectively put Mr Lucas right. He pointed out that Mr Lucas's department had not researched the project, did not know the flooding, cultural, heritage and economic impacts and could not produce a plan showing what works are required. Preliminary work in seven key areas, including science and engineering and, crucially, public consultation, still has to be done.

Mr Lloyd's predecessor as roads minister, Senator Ian Campbell, wrote to Mr Lucas on 12 July 2004 calling on the Queensland government to bring forward studies of the flooding problem, justifying priority funding for roadworks to relieve flood closures on the Bruce Highway between Corduroy and Banyan creeks. Mr Lucas sent him some old flood studies—but not a road plan or anything else that the Commonwealth could consider as a solution—and a request for $1.5 million to do the necessary preliminary work. The Queensland authorities propose to spend $1.5 million at a rate of $500,000 over three financial years. So if Mr Lucas is a man in a hurry, as he would like people to think, he certainly must be walking on a very slow speedometer.

Mr Lloyd properly says he will not immediately hand over $80 million—which of course is precisely what Mr Lucas wants him to do—for a road project that has not been researched, has not been designed, and cannot realistically be available to road users for another five years. But Mr Lucas says: `I would like $80 million. Why don't you just hand it over, despite the fact that we haven't got a clue what to do with it?'

There is one other area of non-performance by Mr Beattie's government that deserves a special mention today—that is, the matter of ambulance response times. Despite the ambulance tax raking in $92 million in 2003-04, through a levy on electricity accounts designed to fund the improvement to the ambulance service, response times for ambulances in Townsville and other places in North Queensland have failed to lift emergency response times. In July 2003, on the Queensland government's own figures, Townsville ambulances responded to emergency calls within 10 minutes—the benchmark—in 73.37 per cent of cases. By mid-June this year, according to the state minister responsible—who, by the way, caught the lift into cabinet after the February state election and who represents the Sunshine Coast seat of Kawana—that figure was down to 67.31 per cent. How quickly can you go downhill? You shake your head and say, `There's just no explanation.' But there is an explanation.

Senator George Campbell —You put up a better show of opposition in Queensland than the Queensland Liberals did and you're not even in the parliament!

Senator SANTORO —I will take the interjection from Senator George Campbell. The reason why I talk about these matters is that the Howard government gives an enormous amount of funds to a state government that is hopelessly—probably maliciously—incompetent. It goes about its social engineering priorities and projects and it ignores its most essential responsibility. As I said in my first speech in this place, state governments these days are there to deliver services, to deliver them efficiently and to look after those people in our society who are weak and who need help, particularly elderly people and young kids. Your Labor mates in Queensland are failing those people day after day. You will continue to be embarrassed by what I have to say about your mates in Queensland week after week when this place sits, because I am going to keep on pointing out their deficiencies. If that contributes in a small way to their eventual downfall, I will be pleased to have made that contribution. In the meanwhile, no smirking, no pathetic interjections from you good senators across the chamber will be able to justify the neglect of the essentials of good government in a state like Queensland and the poor service delivery in looking after those in its care, particularly young children. Recently, the Queensland government closed the file on 700-plus cases of child abuse. It closed it down because, again, it is indulging in mismanagement practices.

I have spoken today, again, about non-performance. The learning curve for the new Queensland Minister for Emergency Services has clearly stalled, and it is precisely this sort of performance that shines a much needed light—power distribution capacity permitting, of course—on the charlatans and the poor performers who populate the Beattie Labor cabinet and whom senators opposite constantly seek to defend, despite the fact that they are defending the indefensible.