My name is Andrew Powell and I have had the honour of serving the wonderful people of the Glass House electorate since 2009. In its current form, the electorate includes Beerburrum and parts of Elimbah and Caboolture. Previously, it also included residents on either side of Pumicestone Road.
I’ve had a long affinity with the area and grew up in Burpengary. I spent plenty of time in and around Caboolture, Beachmere and Bribie Island. It’s an amazing part of the world and a great place to raise a family or enjoy a well-earned retirement. But with the extraordinary population growth we’ve seen we also need infrastructure to keep pace to maintain our quality of life.
This includes health and hospital facilities. Just before the last Queensland election, the Member for Pumicestone and the Palaszczuk Labor Government made a big promise to the people of Bribie Island. It was a promise to deliver the Island’s very own hospital to save locals the trip to Caboolture and give them the confidence they wouldn’t get cut off from services, if there was an incident on the bridge. It was also touted as taking pressure off the Caboolture emergency department.
But with no overnight beds, no emergency department and very limited services, the promised Bribie Island Satellite Hospital is little more than a clinic. The Australian Medical Association Queensland (AMAQ) is on the record as saying that the facility is only a hospital by name and certainly not by nature.
The AMAQ has also expressed concern that the ‘clinic’ may force the closure of local general practices and do nothing to reduce pressure on the emergency department at Caboolture Hospital. With ambulance ramping at Caboolture Hospital hitting 50% for the first time during 2022, the Member for Pumicestone’s Bribie Island health ‘clinic’ will do little to take the pressure off Caboolture Hospital and may in fact further reduce the critical health services currently available on Bribie Island.
I know that access to critical health services is very important. The feedback received by the LNP at our health crisis town hall meeting on Bribie Island last year made that crystal clear. The LNP team will keep speaking up for you and demanding the Palaszczuk Government deliver the health services you rightly deserve. We want you to have access to health services and we want you to be safe.
Another major concern to locals and communities across Queensland is crime, particularly juvenile crime. In the past two years nine Queenslanders have allegedly been killed in incidents involving stolen cars driven by young offenders.
In the last two months alone, four Queenslanders have allegedly been killed by teenagers in brazen robberies gone bad. One was a mother trying to defend her family as youths broke into her North Lakes home in the middle of the night.
Why is this happening? Because in 2015 the Palaszczuk Government watered down the Youth Justice Act. As a result, juvenile offenders neither respect the police nor fear the consequences.
The current youth justice system is broken. It is failing to protect Queenslanders from the 17% of youths who are hardcore repeat offenders. It is failing to rehabilitate those children who are only starting down the path of crime.
After listening to Queenslanders across the state, the LNP has consistently put forward three practical solutions that could be swiftly implemented:
making breach of bail an offence so that police don’t need to wait for the criminal to steal another car or break into another home.
unshackling our judiciary so they can sentence as appropriate for the case AND
reviewing and reforming early intervention services to help guide kids back onto the rails before it’s too late.
Faced with widespread community outrage and consistent pressure from the LNP, the Palaszczuk Labor Government last week reluctantly introduced some law changes to give the appearance of addressing the youth crime problem they created. While they agreed to introduce breach of bail (literally copying word-for-word the LNP policy) they haven’t taken the additional steps to unshackle the judiciary or reform early intervention. I’ll leave it at that for this edition. Feel free to get in touch if there’s a local issue you feel I need to know about.
Andrew Powell MP
Member for Glass House
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