Now, 250 years ago, we Australians—I think I've got one of those original Australians in the family tree—said: 'We don't need to have a population. We don't need any sophisticated weaponry or machinery or anything like that. No, no, we don't need any of those things.' Well, I can't speak for the rest of Australia, but my part of Australia—North Queensland and western Northern Territory—would have been wiped out. As a people, we would have been wiped out. If it weren't for the Christian missionaries coming in at the last minute, we'd have been an annihilated.
It wasn't a good idea, and it's not a good idea now. It is a very, very bad idea indeed. Hughenden is a town right in the centre of Queensland. If you draw a demographic map of Queensland, right in the centre is Hughenden. The Prime Minister of Australia, Anthony Albanese, has been there twice. Why? Because it is the site for five giant windfarms. But, even more importantly—infinitely more important still—it is the site of where it turns around. There are six local people there who are great heroes of Australia, and they say, 'No, we're going to put population back. We are going to have 120 farms here. We're going to put a dam in and catch a bit of the flood water.' The greenies and people in this place are crying and howling all the time about the planet coming to an end. They don't understand. We don't have a river; we have a flood. We just want a little bit of water— (Time expired)
]]>Someone said, 'What about the employees of Woolworths and Coles?' There won't be any. You've all been down there, and if you're waiting at the check-out to be served you'll wait 20 minutes. If you go and serve yourself, you can go straight through. That's good, but what happens to the workers that have jobs there? Their jobs are vanishing at a rate of knots.
I'm not going to go into the farmers and how they are suffering, but I will say this: at the time of the deregulation of the milk industry by the National Party, on the Friday we were on 61c a litre; on the Monday, we were on 29c a litre—that happened in one day. And who did it? It was the National Party in this place, and I was a member. Shamefully, I have to admit I was a member of that party. That was the final straw for me, and I got out as I watched my poor old dairy farmers vanish. There were 258, but then it was only 58. At a meeting, the state member, Shane Knuth, a member of our party, said, 'Try 48,' and the lady behind him said, 'Try 38.' That area had the highest suicide rate in Australia. That is what you did to the farmers. To your shame, Liberal and National parties, they still vote for you. Doesn't it make your sin infinitely worse that those poor people still believe in you. Shame, shame.
There are the figures. There are people in this country going hungry now because no-one has the moral courage to stand up and act and do what should be done and is done in every other country in the world. When I looked last time, the worst country in the world was England, where the big six food retailers had 36 per cent of the market. Here we have the big two, with 85 to 90 per cent of the market. Every country has laws that say you can't have a monopoly, a duopoly or the centralisation of market power. We have those laws, but they are a joke. They are not being enforced and never will be enforced. Also, the laws themselves are grossly inadequate, and that is why we are introducing this bill. I will be very surprised if everybody on the crossbench doesn't vote for it. We got more than 33 per cent of the vote in the last election, whilst you mob got less than 33 per cent, and you mob got less than 33 per cent. So watch out, because it's growing and it will grow even further when people learn of the perfidious behaviour of this government and the last government in doing absolutely nothing and watching the farmers get destroyed.
I think something like 30 per cent now of our fresh fruit and vegetables is coming from overseas, where people work for slave labour wage levels. And that's the farmers and the retailers—how many times have I heard the word 'affordability' in this place. Here's food, the most important commodity, and the people who are selling it have got mark-ups of 200 per cent. And we accept it. This legislation will stop that. (Time expired)
]]>This is the interesting part. In 2001, we took a basket of items—just a little tiny basket—like what people would eat every week, including potatoes, milk, sugar, eggs and bananas. The mark-up in 1991, when they had 50.1 per cent of the market, was 108 per cent. That is outrageous. My family had clothing stores. We also briefly had a couple of supermarkets. There's just no way in the world—my father said, 'People will kill you if you go over 30 per cent.'
In 1991, they were at 108 per cent. But when they get market share going over 70 per cent, the mark-up jumps to 179 per cent. The market was 108 per cent and now it's 179 per cent. People in this place are going to wait till they're making 300 per cent profit. You've never done anything. You realised there was a problem, because there have been 15 inquiries. You had two inquiries going at the same time, and, to quote the great Winston Churchill, 'When you absolutely must not do it, then you must, of course, have an inquiry and, the wider the breadth of the inquiry, the less likely it is to hit a target.' I mean, after 15 inquiries, not one single recommendation has been implemented in this place!
I don't know how much the Liberals are getting and the National Party are getting, but I do know that we paid an investigator to investigate it, and he said, 'They've really covered their tracks.' But we went along to a fundraiser, and he said, 'There were 13 people out of about 40 or 50 people who had their names down.' I don't know which retail outlet it was, but they were managers of either Woolworths or Coles shops. They'd gone along and made a donation not under the name Woolworths or Coles, but under their own personal name. For deceit, that'd take some beating I would think.
I've got nothing against the shoppers union—good on them—but they get site coverage, and I can assure you that they won't have site coverage if the Labor Party does what they should do for the people of Australia. People come into this place and they say 'affordability'. It's the latest buzzword, like 'climate change' has now been replaced by 'affordability'. What have you done on affordability? You just come in here and mouth buzzwords and, of course, you do absolutely nothing about it except hold an inquiry again and again.
I was in a state parliament, and we had a problem in places like the Gold Coast and Mission Beach because rich people went there, and suddenly the price of land shot through the roof, and, of course, poor old pensioners and retired railway workers couldn't pay the rates. So Russell Hinze, a much maligned minister, immediately moved to put A plus B divided by two. There's a problem there. He solved it. We had a trucking problem, and, within two weeks, he'd solved the problem.
When you see a problem like a 200 per cent mark-up on food and you come in here and have the hypocrisy to talk about affordability, how do you sleep with yourself at night? I hope you don't believe in Jesus and the hereafter, because you're going to go to a very hot place, I would think, with your cowardice.
]]>Before, if you robbed a bank, it was the bank that took the hit and quite rightly so. It was a shortcoming in their security system that led to the robbery. But there's a shortcoming in their security system and there are robberies going on 100 times a day, and there is nothing being done about it. The banks take no responsibility for their own incompetence.
They've also knocked back cheques. Carol Mackee, a constituent and a very prominent person in the sugarcane industry in northern Queensland, tried to cash a cheque, and the bank said, 'Oh, no, we don't cash cheques.' Banks don't acknowledge cheques anymore. What the hell do they do? They can't secure our money, they can't provide a medium of exchange and they don't provide any money for housing, outside of principal— (Time expired)
]]>There is a chilling aphorism at the bottom of this map: 'A people without land will look for a land without people.' That was von Clausewitz's On War, the greatest book ever written on the history of warfare. A people without land will look for a land without people. Have a look at the First World War, the Second World War and any bloody war you want to have a look at—and the Boer War before that. My family lost a son in every one of those wars. In that golden Australia, all of Australia's iron ore, aluminium, gas, gold, copper, silver, lead, zinc, uranium, oil and fertiliser and almost all of Australia's coal and cattle come from that area. There's no-one living there. Do you seriously think that that is going to continue? The history of the world says you're kidding yourself.
I pay credit to Scott Morrison, but, then again, his family, the Gilmores—Dame Mary Gilmore is on the $10 note; his mother's a Gilmore—come from my homeland, the mid-west. If you want to draw a map of Queensland, and you want to pick the demographic centre, the exact centre, of the landmass of Queensland, you'll come to Hughenden, where the Gilmores come from. Anthony Albanese has visited Hughenden not once but twice. It's a tiny little town, and he's visited it twice, because, to give the Prime Minister his due, it sits right in the centre of the landmass of Queensland. It is on a key road which he put the first federal government moneys into. He can claim the credit for cutting costs in the giant fruit and vegetable producing area that I represent in Far North Queensland and the giant food producing area of Victoria. That road has cut 2,000 kilometres off the round-trip. He will have the honour of giving the first federal moneys to that road. It is also the home of the biggest wind farm initiative in the country. It is the best site in Australia by a fair distance. Twiggy Forrest has a proposal for two 1,000 megawatt wind farms at Hughenden.
What I want to talk about is a group of people who said, 'We're not going to let our town die.' Why did it die? Because the ALP federal government, Mr Keating, deregulated the wool industry. The industry had carried this country for 200 years, and he destroyed it. Within three years it was gone: 78 per cent of the sheep herd was gone. You deregulated the industry and you destroyed this nation's greatest asset. Anyway, that's past tense now.
The incoming Labor government—representing the workers—wiped out 12,000 jobs on the railways. Hughenden was a railway town. They took 1,500 jobs out of the town. The railways union didn't have one single stoppage, because they're controlled by the ALP. The Liberals keep saying, 'The unions control the Labor Party.' No, it's the other way around. The ALP controls the unions, and here was a classic example of it. (Time expired)
]]>A government member: Where's Tassie?
It's a map of Australia shorn of the eastern seaboard—a little 100 kilometre strip there—and shorn of Victoria, but who'd miss Victoria!
]]>If you want to go through that process in Charters Towers now, you're looking at two years, about $50,000, getting an expert environmental opinion, getting an expert anthropological opinion and getting an engineering opinion. When the mining court was abolished in Charters Towers, the price of an undeveloped housing block was $7,000. Within one week under the new regime, it went to $142,000.
Now, you don't have to be Albert Einstein, and I am no fan of Malcolm Turnbull, I can assure you, but Malcolm Turnbull and an Oxford don who was an Australian but a professor at Oxford did a report on why housing prices are unattainable in Australia, an empty country. Two hundred kilometres from any city in Australia and you're in empty land. No matter which direction you travel, the land is empty—unless, I suppose, you're on the coast. When I say 'coast,' I'm talking about 50 kilometres of coastline. How can this be? How can an empty land with the cheapest land in the world have housing prices of $820,000 in Brisbane and $1.2 million in Sydney? Well, if you're a Liberal, look no further than your leader Malcolm Turnbull and his report. He simply said it is not a demand problem. Governments keep giving cheap loans, subsidised loans—giving people money—to buy houses. That increases the demand but, of course, it further, relatively, diminishes the supply. The problem is on the supply side.
Get rid of all the regulatory impositions and go back to the old mining act in Queensland. You say, 'Oh, you couldn't just let people build a house anywhere they like.' That's what we did in Charters Towers, a town of 16,000 people, a hundred years ago a bigger town than Brisbane. They've been doing it for 100 years there, and I, as the member of parliament there for 50 years, have never had one single complaint about that arrangement—well, for the 20 years while we were governing, until the socialists came in and, of course, went over to the Local Government Act and abolished the magnificent legislation of Red Ted Theodore, the founder of the Labor Party. It's a pity that some of you Labor blokes didn't go back to your roots.
We now have a situation where land prices are absolutely colossal. The biggest developer in North Queensland died recently, but I think he'd appreciate me quoting him in the house. Bobby Norman, Sir Robert Norman's son, the founder of the other airline in Australia, said: 'I've sold the 2,000 acres at the back of Cairns because I have not got enough years in my life to complete all the rigmarole that is required of the Australian governments, state, federal and local. I haven't got enough years left to subdivide that 2,000 acres which we desperately needed for housing in the greater Cairns region.' That's a region, I might add, of 300,000 people. It's not like we're small; we're anything but and rapidly growing. The answer is so simple. Surely you can see that, if you put 200 impositions upon a subdivision, you're going to set housing prices through the roof. I'm not going to go into the cost of housing. Similarly, they are applying all sorts of rules and regulations to house building, which adds, I am told by people who know, some $48,000 to the cost of a house. If you put together what government has done to land prices and what government has done to housing prices, we end up where we are.
As for foreign takeovers and acquisitions—I mean, if I were a member of the Labor Party, I'd go and hang myself, drown my head in a toilet or something. I withdraw that remark. I'm just trying to find an analogy for the shame that you must feel—and the Liberal Party probably more so. They say that Queensland is about the four Cs: coal, cattle, cane and copper. The copper industry was owned by an Australian company, Mount Isa Mines, proudly created by a wonderful Australian. It's now owned by a foreign corporation.
On the coal industry: I'll give you 200 bucks—and I'm a pretty stingy beggar—if you can find an Australian owned coalmining company. Coal is gone. On cattle: the two biggest cattle aggregations in Australia are both foreign corporations: the AA Company and Consolidated Pastoral Company. What the hell are we left owning in Australia? The entire cane industry, which has carried the Australian economy along with wool since the nation's inception, got Australia out of Great Depression. The Labor Party was founded in the cane fields of North Queensland.
God bless Red Ted Theodore and the great Theodore Labor movement. I say 'Theodore Labor movement' because it bears no relationship to the Labor Party here today. In fact, I'd say it represents the exact opposite position. They were free marketeers, and we are anything but free marketeers. When it went down, half of us went over to the Country Party and half to the Labor Party. Kevin Rudd's family and my own were classic examples of that phenomenon. They were the same policies and the same party and had the same people in the Country Party! We had a wonderful government for nearly 100 years in Queensland.
On the cane industry: every single sugar mill was Australian owned, and all bar three of them were owned by the farmers themselves, the local people. There were 23 mills owned by the people and three mills owned by an Australian company. Now all 23 mills—because that's all that's left—are foreign owned. Who's responsible for that? Who deregulated and destroy that industry? The people in this room destroyed that industry and handed it over to foreign corporations. You abolished the right of the farmers to what the employees call arbitration. The farmers had arbitration. The Theodore family were cane farmers as well as being miners and as well as being workers and employees. They understood arbitration. They fought for it, and they created arbitration in Australia. Not surprisingly, they extended it to the farmers. Farmers all had the protection of arbitration whether it was the wool industry, the cane industry, the grain industry or whatever it was. They had arbitration until it was removed.
Let's have a look at their dirty work. Every single sugar mill now is foreign owned. Three have closed down, and the rest are foreign owned.
An honourable member: Except Rocky Point.
Well, we'll leave that up in the air. You and I both know there's a huge question mark there. But I take your point. It's a 'rocky point', but I'll take it anyway. Let me just say that we are now at the mercy of foreign corporations. Every single cane farmer just has to take what the mill feels like paying. Unlike any other industry, we have only 12 hours to get that cane into the mill before it starts losing its sugar content. So we are at the mercy of the mills. Who put us at the mercy of the mills and foreign corporations? People in this House did. People on both sides of this House did. Let's talk about copper. Mount Isa Mines is arguably the second-biggest mining company in the world. Jim Foots bought it off the Americans and turned it into arguably the second-biggest mining company in the world. It's now foreign owned. It's now Glencore.
If you want to put the ownership of your country in the hands of foreigners, have a look at Mount Isa. They have a working mine which has copper in it. But, of course, if you're an international commodities trader, you don't want to have all the worry of working a mine. You just want to trade the asset: the copper in the ground. So surprise, surprise! They closed the mine. It puts in jeopardy the whole copper industry in north-west Queensland, which doesn't matter a great deal, because the incoming Labor Party took away the 'use it or lose it' clause in the legislation that the Theodore governments had put there. Now you can be a foreign corporation, own the mining lease and do nothing with it except trade it on the stock market. That's all you have to do. There's no necessity for you to create a job here in Australia. In fact, Glencore has just announced the sacking of 2,000 Australians in Mount Isa. Twelve hundred direct and 800 indirect jobs will vanish. Does the government do anything about it?
We carried on, by the traditions of the Country Party in Queensland—the much-maligned Bjelke-Peterson governments—the wonderful Theodore government's policy. We continued on exactly the same policy: you use it or you lose it. As the mines minister in Queensland, the town of Emerald is the size that it is today because I said to the coalmining company, 'You open up your operations to that line, or I am taking it off you and giving it to somebody who will work it.; That is a matter of public record. I got attacked at the time for doing it. The ALP removed the Theodore legislation: use it or lose it. So now our great mining wealth is just a plaything for the stock markets of the world and the share market sharks in Sydney—and I apologise to all sharks for saying that. Can it be worse? There's coal, cattle, cane and copper. We're talking about a few houses being owned by foreigners when you're whole economy is owned by foreigners! They can pay you whatever they like to pay you, and the profits don't go here. I'm a mining man; I'm not a cattleman. I've had cattle all my life, but I'm not a cattleman. I'm a mining man. Minerals have doubled in price. No matter what it is, they've doubled in price over the last 10 years. Boy, oh boy, that's wonderful for Australia. No, it means absolutely nothing to us. We don't own the minerals! The foreign corporations do. In actual fact, our mining wages have been driven down, and I won't say anything about the coalmining leadership. I won't say anything about that; I might get a defamation action. But we have been forced down from 185,000—and I addressed the workers at the workers club at Moranbah, and I said, 'Hey, fellers, we were on 185,000'—and everyone nodded their head—'and now we're on 135,000,' and everyone nodded their head. And I said, 'Well, soon we'll be down, down, down.' Now, this has been in a time period when coal has arguably doubled in price. So coal has doubled in price and the workers have had their wages cut! That will be a good indication of some of the unionism in Australia.
I am very proud of my union, the CFMEU, and I want to make the point that the coalminers are not part of the CFMEU. I am very proud of my association with my union and very proud of our performance. If we were in charge in Mount Isa Mines, if we had coverage—and I fought, as a young bloke of 19 years of age, to get coverage for the CFMEU in Mount Isa Mines—then I can assure you that that mine would be reopened. Now, I'm good friends with three people who ran Mount Isa, and they all said that that mine should never be closed. (Time expired)
]]>Chillagoe mineral province had 12,000 people a hundred years ago, and in the North West Minerals Province we had about 700 maybe. Now it's the other way around. We've got maybe 6,000, and Chillagoe's got nothing, because industrial mining requires huge freight loads. We simply can't open up the magnificent, giant Chillagoe mineral province. Three of the five biggest rivers in Australia are in that country behind Cairns, including the biggest river in Australia, the Mitchell River. It produces nothing at all, and it should be producing. (Time expired)
]]>I think the first and most important thing with any race of people is that they simply don't vanish from the gene pool; they simply vanish off the face of the earth. When 20 Australians die, they are replaced by 16 Australians. You don't have to be Albert Einstein to figure out that we are a vanishing race. We are a race of people who are eliminating ourselves from the gene pool. Some anthropologist in a thousand years' time will look back and say, 'Who were those people there who decided they disliked people so much that they eliminated themselves from the gene pool?' It's a pretty sad comment upon a country that it doesn't want to have children—that it doesn't love children. In fact, it's dreadful indictment of a country when they murder about 30,000 before they are born every year and a few of them after they are born, under the same laws. That's particularly true in Queensland. Does anyone care about Australians being a vanishing race? Surely we would love our young people to have the joy of having a family.
I was among the first generation where women were supposed to have careers. Well, they're careering off into nonexistence. A lot of them, very sadly, are old people now. They sit at home. They have no kids to love and no kids to love them, no grandkids to love and no grandkids to love them. It's very sad because society cheated them and lied to them. It told them they had to have a career. I go no further than my own wife. She's been a stay-at-home mum, and her assets are quite substantial. She climbed up on roofs in the middle of summer, painted them and did up houses with a partner of hers—a bloke, I might add, who was illiterate, but boy oh boy he was master of everything.
Let me switch completely. I do not know how families in Australia are living. Careers—what, you're going to be a rich person, are you? You want every woman to be out there having a career and being rich. Well, I'll tell you that a bloody lot of women in this country are not rich; they're extremely poor because they've got kids. If you have kids, I just simply don't know how you can survive economically. Even if you're on $100,000 a year, after tax of $25,000 is taken out and $75,000 is left, you'll need $40,000 for a home. According to a Courier Mail study from 10 years ago, education costs for two kids were $30,000 a year. So, if you've got a take-home pay of $70,000 and spend $40,000 a year on the home and $30,000 on education, how the hell do you stay alive?
Needless to say, most boys in Australia are not living in a home with their natural father. So how successful are we as a race of people? We're a vanishing race. We can have no children. It is financially almost impossible for the average person, and that's assuming he's on $100,000. The average person is not on $100,000. But, assuming he is on $100,000, it's just not possible. I don't know how they are managing. Do we care about them? Does the word 'family' ever come up in this place? Does the phrase 'the future of our nation' ever come up in this place? No.
We go around crying about minority groups. What's that about? Do you really care about my mob—the Murris, as we call ourselves? Do you really care about us? You wouldn't be seen dead with any of us. Do you play on our football teams? No. Do you have any social intercourse with us? No. Do you have anything to do with us at all? No, but you want to cry about us so it makes you look good. You don't care about us; you care about yourself looking good.
If you want to give families a fair go in this country then it's about time the word 'family' started jumping up in this place, because there aren't going to be any of us very shortly. For those of you who are young people in here today, when you get old there's going to be nobody looking after you. It's the Chinese syndrome, as we all know. That population is old and there are no young people to look after them. It's infinitely worse in Australia. Our rate of having children is lower than China's now—not in the past, but now. So if you want to do this and you want to give them a fair go, you can't expect them to pay the same tax as DINKs. They're on $100,000 each. They pay $25,000 in tax each. Their disposable income is $75,000. But for the poor bloke who has a family, who has a bit of love in his soul for young people and a bit of a care for his nation, he—the five of them—has a disposable income of $15,000. So do you want a disposable income of $75,000 or do you want $15,000?
C leo magazine ran a series of excellent articles on why Australian women don't have children. Most of them—the vast bulk of women—intend to have children, but they don't because they're just waiting until they've got enough money together and they've settled down and they've got a stable relationship. I used to think the Christian churches' attitude towards marriage—that you married for life—was a bit primitive, but I'm not thinking that now. I've seen the terrible pain and sorrow. Has anyone ever met a kid where the father has left the family? Has anyone seen the heartbreak that they suffer? No. Does anyone care about them? No. Needless to say, a lot of them rebel, and who could blame them for that.
Let us say that we are going to provide a lot of extra money to people with families. How are we going to do that? For starters, we're the only country on earth that doesn't have a charge on imports. So let's start with a five per cent charge on imports, a primage charge. Billy Wentworth was one of the finest men ever to set foot in this parliament; Billy kept going on about primage. Just a five per cent charge on everything coming into the country would give you $20 billion a year.
Gas—this is the nation's disgrace, and you know what I mean. You people, Labor, have been in government for most of the last 30 years. You people, the coalition, have been in government for most of the last 20 years. So what did you do about gas? You gave it away. You gave our gas away for 6c, and my union—God bless the CFMEU!—are the ones that have brought up that figure. Now we're buying our own gas back for $16. We can't have a fertiliser plant in Australia, because no fertiliser company can afford to pay that amount for gas. The biggest fertiliser company in Australia, and there is only one—there are two, but one is a little fertiliser operation in Western Australia; the big fertiliser operation is in North Queensland—is buying its gas in America for $6. Another outfit is buying it for $4. And they're paying $16 here! It's diammonium phosphate. It's two parts ammonia—from natural gas—to one part phosphate. We've got the phosphate, but to get the ammonia—our own ammonia—we have to pay $16, whereas our competitors are paying $6. How many times can we repeat that?
When Qatar, which produces and exports the same amount of gas as us, gets $29 billion for their gas and we're getting only $600 million for ours, surely there is a case. Let's be conservative: surely, we would should be getting $15 billion. If Qatar is getting $29 billion or $30 billion, we should be getting at least half what Qatar gets. So there's $35 billion that you've got in the till.
Far be it from me to talk about taxing share transactions—the rich people. My two old aunties on separate sides of the families—they're both deceased now—used to go down and have their little games on the pokies. That was their fun and their intellectual challenge for the week. They'd pay about 20 per cent tax. My rich relatives in Sydney play the share market and they pay no tax, and the share market is much more socially damaging, I can assure you, than my old aunties putting five bucks in the pokies once a week and having a bit of fun with their friends.
Now, that's before you touch development. I was in a government and I cannot believe it when I look back on the figures, and I think the history books will say: 'Did this really happen?' Yes, it really did happen. There's a place called the Gold Coast. My family had a house there, right next door to Cavill Avenue. It was a swamp. It was worth nothing. We bought it for nothing. Surfers Paradise was just a big swamp, and a bloke called Les Thiess said, 'I can put canals in, drain the swamp and create a beautiful city here,' which he did. The tallest building in Surfers Paradise for half of my life was a three-storey building, the Broadbeach Hotel. Go down there and have a look at it now. Similarly, who created the tourism industry of Cairns and the Whitsundays in Far North Queensland?
So I watched this incredible government, the Bjelke-Petersen government. We were a coal-importing country when Bjelke-Petersen and that great man Leo Hielscher—who was the chief executive officer, for want of a better term, of the Queensland government—decided that they were going to put out a massive amount of money to build a giant railway line to export coal and then to make giant outlay on a coal export port. I thought they were quite mad. We were a coal-importing country, and they said we could become a coal-exporting country. Well, much of this nation's income for the last 60 years has come from coal, and there are people in this place who want the coal industry abolished. What are you going to do? Bankrupt the country? One-quarter of your nation's entire income comes from coal. What if you want to buy all your motor cars and fuel from overseas? I don't, but the ALP and the LNP do. They've done absolutely nothing about supplying our own fuel; we buy it all from overseas, and we buy all our motor cars from overseas. Whose decision was that? It was Mr Keating's decision on the motor cars, and it was the other mob on the fuel. So you've got a lot to be proud of yourselves about, haven't you? The history books will be terrible to you. Who broke this country? You did.
We can produce our own fuel tomorrow. In Brazil, 49.2 per cent of their fuel is ethanol. We are the best-suited country in the world for ethanol. It comes from grain or sugar cane, in both of which we are big players on the world stage, so we are uniquely programmed for that. Tell me the only country on earth that has no ethanol in the fuel tank. By law in Europe they are at five per cent. China claims it's on five per cent; I don't think it is, but it's going there, anyway. Japan is on five per cent. America is on 15.5 per cent. In the great juggernaut economy of Brazil, which has 200 million people and is going at 100 miles per hour—it produces aeroplanes, computers and every other sophisticated thing you can think of—49.2 per cent of their fuel is ethanol, and they fill up at the bowser for $1.09. Why aren't you doing it? Are you so owned by the oil companies that you can't do one single thing to make us self-sufficient?
As to the morons on my right here, they ask—and I'll name him. Mr Angus Taylor was ordered to have emergency supply, and he put the emergency supply in Texas—not Texas, Queensland, but Texas—
]]>Here is an article with photos on it: 'Why Egypt and other Arab countries are unwilling to take in Palestinian refugees from Gaza'. These people say, 'It's unfair that Israel is not taking us back into Israel.' Well, no other Arab country is going to take you either. There's got to be a reason why all these aggressive Arab countries whose governments have all passed resolutions to destroy the State of Israel won't have any of the Gazans come into their country. There must be a reason here. If you say, 'Oh, the naughty Israelis are retaliating,' well, when you fire a bomb, it doesn't have a name on it, and when it explodes it kills people. You picked the war—you started the war—so don't come blaming everyone else when you reap the whirlwind. You sowed the seeds, and now you reap the whirlwind.
Now, let it be a message to every other country on Earth that what Russia is doing and getting away with in Ukraine is because of the very dangerous weakness of the European countries. But at least in Israel they have sent the message, 'If you invade our country and hurt our people then we will retaliate.' No country can defend themselves without having that principle. So there was a retaliation. You started the war; now you will have to live with the war.
Having said that, there are still hundreds of hostages being held by Hamas. Are you entitled to go after the people that took those hostages, that raped and brutally murdered 1,200 people, and then advertised it on the television? You could say, 'At least the Germans had the decency to try and hide what they were doing to the Jews.'
As Australians, we have traditionally stood up for the underdog, the persecuted minority group. I am very proud, as an Australian, that we have had that reputation. If ever there were a persecuted underdog throughout history, it would be the people that adhere to the Judaic religion. I cannot fathom how or why, and people say, 'Jesus was crucified.' Well, hold on a minute. Jesus was not only a Jew but also a rabbi that preached in temples. That would hardly be logical there—in fact, just the opposite.
There is a principle involved here that, if you invade somebody else's country, you must expect retaliation and that other nations might help in that retaliation, because we don't want people just walking around invading other countries and starting wars. The Israeli people are surrounded by some 700 million Islamic people. I want to make a point here that it's not about the Islamic religion as such, because I've had great interface with Indonesia over the years through the cattle industry and in various other ways. I have found them to be a very good and decent people. They have been wonderful neighbours to us, and they are a Muslim country. But there is a big difference between how it is practised there and how it is practised in certain Middle Eastern countries.
If we are letting people into this country, surely there should be criteria. Are they coming from a democracy? Are they coming from a country with a rule of law? Are they coming from a country with Christianity or some similar belief like the Sikhs: love your neighbour, be humble, make the world a better place? Do they have that sort of philosophy and commitment? Do they have egalitarian traditions? The vast bulk of the people who come to this country—no, no, no, no, no, no. Over 850 people have come in from Gaza or have got permits to come into this country from Gaza since that invasion and murder of 1,200 people took place. No Muslim country and no Arab country will take them. Why is Australia taking them? That is a big question for the ALP to answer.
We know the answer to that. It's because so many of their branches are controlled by these people coming in from the Middle East. Let me state very clearly that I have been told by the best of authority—and I hope that the ALP side of this parliament can prove I'm wrong—that the mosques in Sydney control the ALP in Sydney and Sydney ALP controls Australian ALP. I hope that you can convince me that I'm wrong. But, if you are allowing 850 people in from Gaza and no-one else in the world will take them, you've got to ask a question: why is the ALP—and I say the ALP here, not the government—taking these people?
I'll make another point here. Antisemitism: if the people in Europe had stood up aggressively against this pernicious and dreadful sectarian hatred in the early 1930s, the terrible catastrophe of the Second World War would not have occurred. The worst murder in human history, mass murder on racial lines, would never have taken place if they had stood up aggressively right at the start. If more people had joined Pastor Niemoller in his courageous stand against the Nazis and if more people had backed people like von Stauffenberg then it wouldn't have happened.
We have here an embryonic anti-Semitism coming from elements of the crossbench. They're anti-Semitic. Don't muck around: they hate the Jews. If you watched the television of that mob in Sydney, they were chanting—I saw it with my own eyes and heard it and I replayed it later on the evening; I turned on again to watch it again—they were chanting, 'Gas the Jews.' They're weren't saying 'Gas the Israelis.' The were saying 'Gas the Jews.' It was racial. Not one single one of those people were stopped from chanting, advocating the murder of people. Not one single person was stopped from doing that. Not one single one of them was apprehended. Not one single one of them was sent back to where they came from. Nothing.
You've got to ask the question, why did the ALP government of New South Wales do nothing? Why did the ALP government in this place do nothing? Absolutely nothing. Ask yourself this question: if those people had been chanting anti-Muslim chants, what do you reckon would have happened?
We have anti-Semitism here, and it needs to be stamped out and stamped out with aggression. It is hateful and it is completely opposite to what every decent Australia believes in. If ever there is an underdog, a tiny little country of 3½ million people surrounded by 600 or 700 million people, all committed to the destruction of their country—and if you say they shouldn't have been there because the Gazans really own that country, hold on a minute. What would you have done? Six million of you persecuted, and to the shame of my country, the ship of shame that went all around the world. Brazil wouldn't take them; the United States wouldn't take them; no European country would take them. They came to Australia, these Jewish people escaping the Nazis, and we wouldn't take them, these poor people. So where were they going to go to escape to massacre that was occurring? Who can blame them for going back to their homeland? It's called Israel and they are called Jews. Why are they called Jews? Because they come from Jerusalem, which is the capital of Palestine, Israel, whatever you want to call it.
If we start adopting a principle that some other group of people were there originally, I have some Britons in my family tree, so you Anglo-Saxons go home to England. You Norman French go home to France. And I will say we British copped it. We can't turn the clock back, and we want to live in harmony with each other. If somebody invades another country, like Russia has done or the Hamas invasion of Israel, the Russians haven't systematically murdered the people. It's terrible what they have done, but they didn't systematically murder the people and then put the murder and rape on the television, promoting their murder and rape on the television. And that people in the parliament of Australia could have got away with what they got away with two nights ago, it was a disgrace and a reflection on every person in this parliament.
I have great pride being an Australian. Someone should be holding up the Australian flag. My family lost a son in the first World War and in the World War II. We went out west in a stagecoach there when the terrible Kalkadoon wars were still raging. We have a reputation for being involved in public life and making things a bit better for everybody. So who else should stand up? It should be me. I think there are a whole lot of people in this place that should be standing up as well. We as Australians will not accept racial hatred. And we will not condemn people for trying to stay alive and protect themselves. There's a great saying: if you want peace, prepare for war. Yes, that's right: if you want peace, prepare for war. So, you send a message out saying that if you attack us, we will hit you back and we will hurt you. My relatives—uncles and father, cousins and everybody on Kokoda, Milne Bay, Aitape and the islands—were telling the Japanese, 'You tried to invade our country and, mate, you're gonna pay for it.' We did everything humanly possible to see that they did pay for it. The message we sent out is, 'Don't touch my country.' The Israelis, surely, are entitled to the same attitude.
You know, we want peace. My great sorrow is that my generation have left my country. If you want peace, prepare for war. Well, we're not prepared for war. Our defences are a bloody joke. They're really just a joke. I'll give you one simple example. When I was put in uniform and was on my way to Indonesia—we were at war with Indonesia—we had one and a half million combat rifles. You don't pick a fight with a country with one and a half million combat rifles. Half a million were in the hands of the army and a million were in private hands. My family had three or four, I think, if my memory serves me correctly. Now we have 36,000! Not one and a half million: 36,000 little rifles with which to defend the country! There are virtually no artillery shells. They spent $40,000 million buying 15 patrol boats that have got one machine gun on them. That's $40,000 million for patrol boats and for drones with no ordnance whatsoever, except 15 machine guns. My platoon of 32 men in the 49th Battalion had 16 or 17 machine guns and we cost the Australian people $20,000. But this government—and the last government; you blokes are just as guilty as this mob—spent $40,000 million to buy 15 machine guns. I mean— Time expired.
]]>That so much of the standing and sessional orders be suspended as would prevent the following:
(1) the Member for Kennedy moving:
That this House:
(a) expresses its strong support for the people of Israel who, on 7 October 2023, were subjected to an appalling and unprovoked terrorist invasion and attack upon Israel; and
(b) calls on the Parliament of Australia to condemn the terrorist organisation Hamas and demand that the people responsible for the invasion of Israel and consequent war release the hostages taken in this invasion;
(2) debate on the motion being limited to the mover, seconder and two other members;
(3) amendments to the motion not being permitted; and
(4) any variation to the arrangement being made only on a motion moved by a Minister.
Question agreed to, with an absolute majority.
I move:
That this House:
(1) expresses its strong support for the people of Israel who, on 7 October 2023, were subjected to an appalling and unprovoked terrorist invasion and attack upon Israel; and
(2) calls on the Parliament of Australia to condemn the terrorist organisation Hamas and demand that the people responsible for the invasion of Israel and consequent war release the hostages taken in this invasion.
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