Queensland budget: Pre-election cash splash for Labor seats

Steven Miles’s first budget as Queensland Premier splashes cash to build new hospitals and expand existing ones in Labor’s must-win regional marginal seats.

Queensland Premier Steven Miles, right, and Deputy Premier and Treasurer Cameron Dick. Picture: Liam Kidston

Steven Miles’s first budget as Queensland Premier splashes cash to build new hospitals and expand existing ones in must-win regional marginal seats, in an effort to shore up the government’s chances at the October 26 poll.

Already underpinned by an ALP-funded advertising campaign launched at the weekend, the pre-election spend boasts a new hospital in Bundaberg (Labor’s most marginal seat, held by Tom Smith on just 0.01 per cent), and expansions of hospitals in Cairns (5.6 per cent), Hervey Bay (2.0 per cent), Ipswich (16.5 per cent), Logan (13.4 per cent), Mackay (6.7 per cent) and Redcliffe (6.1 per cent) – all crucial Labor-held electorates.

Bundaberg MP Mr Smith won the seat in 2020 by just nine votes.

In Townsville, where government MPs hold three seats on margins of less than 3.9 per cent, the government will spend $530m, including $136.1m in 2024-25, to expand the Townsville University Hospital.

The budget also includes $200m over seven years for a revamp of the Cooktown health service facility, to add an operating theatre and extra beds, in one of the largest population centres in Labor MP Cynthia Lui’s far north Queensland electorate of Cook (6.3 per cent margin).

In the ads paid for and authorised by ALP state secretary Kate Flanders, Mr Miles tells regional voters: “I’m new Premier Steven Miles … we’re building 653 more beds in regional hospitals”.

The government says its “capacity expansion program” will cost $11bn over six years and deliver 2200 extra overnight beds, which the LNP criticised as a “whopping” blowout from the last budget where the same program was forecast to cost $9.8bn for the same number of beds.

Also in the marginal Labor seats of Bundaberg and Hervey Bay, $48m will be spent to upgrade police stations as youth crime remains a persistent issue for voters in regional Queensland.

When Mr Miles was elevated to the top job in December, one of his first orders of business was to announce a police helicopter for Townsville (funded in Tuesday’s budget at $24.9m over five years). He has since announced two more police helicopters, one to service Cairns and far north Queensland (where Labor holds three seats on margins under 6.3 per cent, as well as Speaker Curtis Pitt’s electorate of Mulgrave on 12.2 per cent) and the other for the Sunshine Coast and Wide Bay regions.

Labor’s Jason Hunt unexpectedly won the LNP-heartland seat of Caloundra, on the Sunshine Coast, at the 2020 election, and holds it on a narrow margin of 2.5 per cent.

Also in the Wide Bay region is Maryborough, where Labor’s Bruce Saunders has dramatically increased his margin at each election since winning the seat from the LNP in 2015, and where the government is spending $786m on its train manufacturing program.

More than $109m will be spent on “planning and enabling works” for the new wall for the problem-ridden Paradise Dam, 80km southwest of Bundaberg. The dam is in the LNP-held seat of Callide but services the Bundaberg region, and the LNP’s candidate for Bundaberg is Bree Watson, CEO of the Bundaberg Fruit and Vegetable Growers lobby group.

Ms Watson was one of the most outspoken advocates for the dam to be restored to full capacity.

In Labor MP Brittany Lauga’s electorate of Keppel (5.6 per cent), the budget includes $5m in new funding for safety and security works on the former resort site on Great Keppel Island, which was left abandoned in 2008.

There’s also a bucket of money, worth nearly $185m, for promises yet to be announced.