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

I am not saying that he is an imbecile, Mr Deputy Speaker. I withdraw that. I am just saying that he is smiling and grinning. We had the same people in here smiling and grinning at that time. But, unfortunately for him, people write and read history books and they remember with very great bitterness the people who left our country open to the terrible invasion that was pending in 1942.

It will cost $73 million to put a patrol boat out there with five guided missiles. It costs about a million dollars apiece for a cruise missile. The interception capability is very expensive, and I am told it runs to about $32 million. You need a helicopter with radar equipment so you can see a long way—and you might be talking about $1 million or $2 million there. So you have a figure of about $75 million. You would want 100 of those, and I dare say that is seriously what we need. If you are serious about denying our coast, our waters, to these people and you are serious about being able to defend our country, instead of throwing $2,000 million away on two destroyers when five Exocet missiles were able to take out two in the Falklands War, I would think that it would be infinitely more valuable to go down that path.

Mr Deputy Speaker, you might say, ‘How do you finance this?’ If we have a coastline of 15,000 kilometres or so to patrol, we are entitled to charge people a customs charge of 10 per cent on everything that comes into this country. That just might help some of our manufacturing and primary industries in this country to get back on their feet. One thing is for sure: if you are going to build 100 patrol boats over a 10-year period, you most certainly will become the leading small boat builder in the world. You will have great technologies in this country, and at long last you will return to having a serious technology availability in this country. So there are enormous side benefits to going down this particular pathway.

If you do not control your own waters there will be problems. I have watched something like 2,000 North Queenslanders lose their livelihoods because of the actions of this government in protecting our fisheries from our Australian fishermen. It would be very nice if they protected our Australian fisheries from foreign fishermen instead of destroying the livelihoods of Australians. I put on record again that the parliamentary secretary at the table thinks that it is funny when 2,000 Australian families lose their livelihoods—

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