Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

With all these speeches about the Tax Laws Amendment (Small Business Measures No. 1) Bill 2015 and how wonderful it is, I thought there must be something here that I do not see. The average difference is about $2,000 to the average small businessman. I am sure they are out there celebrating and breaking out champagne bottles on the $2,000 that is involved here! Most small businesses that I know of in North Queensland do not have much profit, so they would not be paying much tax to start with.

The speaker before last said that it is about jobs, and that we live in a country that has now run straight into a brick wall. People like me have been yelling and screaming, but nobody is listening. The government is telling everybody that they are going to have this big, huge development in North Queensland. I hate to tell them but they have only got about 15 or 18 months of their term in office to go, and I do not think any dams are going to get built in the next 15 months. So what exactly are they talking about and doing here?

I never bothered to go to any of the white paper meetings because the green paper comes out after the white paper, and I am told they will then have a blueprint. I think we will all be colourblind by the time we are finished, having had all these papers, and there will be many giant forests felled to fill all the paperwork. I can honestly say that I do not think there has been a single report done in this place that has been read entirely by one person. I always felt a bit weird because I would not be game to admit in public to reading some of the reports that I have read, and I suppose I should not have done it now.

We have been given some concessions for spending money on farming. The sugar industry will not be taking it up, and I was very surprised to hear the member for Bundaberg say that he had farmers that were taking it up. There would be no farmers in my area that would be spending money on new plant. They could not afford to take the risk. They would be very foolish people indeed because they are battling on the margins now. In the cattle industry we are battling well below the margins.

I do not want to criticise the government, because we will be putting these propositions up to government shortly. We have a thousand cattle stations in North Queensland. If the government had taken a different approach and if they had said that each of those cattle stations could now have 200 hectares of untrammelled, unfettered, unrestricted land, freehold title with irrigation rights, then, quite frankly, droughts would be over for us because in a time of drought, instead of fattening cattle on that 200 hectares, you green-chop. You cut the grass and put it in a trough. In that way, you can run not five beasts to a hectare but 15 beasts to a hectare. You can bring 1,500 or 2½ thousand breeders through the drought by use of the green-chopping arrangement.

A very famous North Queenslander, Freddie Tritt, and I spent a pleasant afternoon in the Richmond Hotel and we worked out that over 80 per cent of the stations in North Queensland have a river or creek that runs every year. There is an odd year—one in 25 years—in which some of these rivers and creeks may not run. It might be two years in 30 sometimes. But, basically, it is a fair call to say that every one of those stations is on a river or creek that runs every year. That means that every year they can put in some big flood lifter pumps—like the cotton farmers do—to lift water out of the river and utilise it.

It is quite staggering to contemplate that Cape York Peninsula is bigger than Victoria. When you are talking about creating opportunities for small business, all of our small businesses are in towns that are dying. Cape York Peninsula has nearly three times the rainfall of Victoria. Victoria has four million head of cattle. We have 140,000 head of cattle. There are two problems. One is that we are not allowed to use the water. The other is that heaven only knows what process of logic could have seen government arrive at not giving us the water. The Goss government, when the last Country Party government fell back in 1990, told us it could not make any decisions till it did a proper assessment, and it spent $24 million doing proper assessments. Then the LNP came in. They could not make any decisions until they did a proper assessment. They spent another $20 million. Then Mr Beattie came in, and he could make no decisions till he made proper assessments. Each of them got out white papers and pink papers and blueprints and everything else, but $126 million has been spent.

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