Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party, Leader of The Nationals in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

It is a shame that Senator McLucas does not understand what we are talking about, because we currently have a case of drug resistant tuberculosis present in the Cairns Base Hospital, but of course she would not know about that, would she, because she does not pay much attention to what happens in the part of the state which she sometimes visits.

The Torres Strait Island Regional Council Mayor, Fred Gela, has said of this government:

I thought the Australian government would be a bit smarter than that. You can't close down and hope for the best. We know that the services are non-existent in the Western Province side.

Last year the Australian reported on this almost negligent lack of foresight. According to their reports, a young, desperately ill girl from PNG, Papua New Guinea, was brought to one of the previously operating clinics on the Torres Strait Islands. The four-year-old girl weighed only nine kilograms and was unconscious, suffering from cerebral TB. She had been receiving ineffectual treatment for several months in PNG's Western Province. As a last resort, her mother brought her to the Australian clinic, but it was too late. After she was transported to Cairns, a scan confirmed that she was brain dead. Graham Simpson, a Cairns based respiratory specialist, had to tell the girl's mother to take her daughter home to die. He said that had she been presented to the clinics that we used to have operating in the Torres Strait Islands before the Labor Party closed them down, she would have had a fighting chance. According to a colleague of Dr Simpson's, it only takes one case of XDR-TB to get into the Torres Straits to be a public health disaster. By the time that patient was picked up she may have infected 15 to 20 other people. It should be noted that the capacity and the prevalence of this disease has spread especially around people who are lying out, long-grass people, those in the Indigenous community of the north. The total cost of running the Torres Strait clinics is—or was—$22 million a year. Previously the Queensland government had contributed $18 million and the federal government $4 million. The clinics have closed because the Gillard government refuses to increase its contribution.

The introduction of body scanning technology is estimated to cost $29 million. This would seem to be a reasonable investment of money for the extra security that it will deliver, and the coalition will not oppose these measures. The coalition will support measures which will provide benefits greater than their costs. It will support bills that come into this place after detailed consideration and review. What the coalition does not support is excessive uncosted and wasteful examples of government spending. This government has given us many examples of public extravagance—the school halls, the NBN.

On the NBN, it is worth reflecting on the update of the figures that were announced last weekend in the updated NBN Co. 2012-2015 corporate plan. As expected, the corporate plan reveals the NBN, which is the next budget nightmare, is taking longer and costing us more to roll out than the government claimed when it initiated the project. It is also attracting fewer customers and earning less revenue. Labor still claim that the NBN will be finished by 2021, but every deadline so far has been missed. In 2007 they were claiming that the NBN would require a total of $4.7 billion—