KAP Leader and Traeger MP Robbie Katter has announced his electorate funding and project priorities ahead of the Queensland Budget's release next week, with a focus on health, crime, and energy production.
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Mr Katter said addressing the rural health emergency and delivering fair and adequate healthcare to all Queenslanders remains a top priority and he has written letters to Health Minister Yvette D'Ath outlining reports of sub-standard care.
"Acute staffing and funding shortages, the failure of the North West Hospital and Health Service, and media investigations linking Indigenous deaths in Doomadgee to negligent healthcare have failed to spark the change needed to restore an adequate standard of care," Mr Katter said.
Mr Katter called on the Queensland Government to create a $15 million workforce attraction fund to recruit and retain doctors, nurses and specialists to rural communities and specifically to reinstate full ophthalmology services to Mount Isa.
Mr Katter said the crime crisis was eroding the liveability of regional communities and wants the Queensland Government to spend $15 million to trial its Relocation Sentencing model as an alternative to jail for recidivist youths.
"Even in the midst of a crime wave of inexplicable proportions - more than 550 cars stolen this year in Cairns, about 500 in Townsville and about 50 alone in little old Mount Isa, a town of 20,000 people - the Palaszczuk Labor Government is refusing to acknowledge alternate solutions to the problem unless they are their own," he sai.
In energy Mr Katter called on the Queensland Government to advance its support of the CopperString 2.0 power transmission line to the North West.
He urged the Government to work together with Spanish infrastructure giant Iberdrola, which recently bought the rights to the $2 billion Mount James wind farm near Hughenden, which sits in the path of CopperString, to seal the deal on the transmission line.
"CopperString would bring down the region's astronomical power prices, enable major mining and renewable energy investments, and allow mining to commence on decades' worth of increasingly valuable minerals," he said.
Mr Katter also wants more funding to improve the Flinders Highway.
"The Flinders Highway is notoriously bad for fatal traffic accidents ... safety issues are compounded by high numbers of caravans during tourist season and large amounts of road haulage vehicles ... we've seen tragedies time and time again along this road," he said.
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