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

You will find that I have never done that. You will find that that would not be a part of what I have said. I was a senior minister in a government for the best part of a decade, and I will stand on my own record as far as government expenditure goes. But, if those patrol boats can be paid for and manned by people, they will project this country back onto an industrial base once again because the building of those patrol boats over an eight- or nine-year period would give us the technological base which we now do not have. It is very heartbreaking for us Northern Australians—and I think also for the people of Fremantle, who had this great technological base which has just dissipated. The company concerned, the NQEA, does not operate as a shipbuilder now, I am informed. Most certainly Don Fry, the principal, has retired.

So back to a cost estimate for those patrol boats, with interception capacity and missile capacity. I was quoted in the media as advocating that the patrol boats should run around with the missiles on and assail Indonesian fishing vessels, which I derived a lot of humour from. Obviously you do not go running around with missiles on when you are in a patrol boat role! But you can very rapidly convert from a patrol boat role to a very serious naval presence that can defend this country. It is not good for offence—I hope that we are not running around picking fights with anyone—but if anyone tries to pick a fight with us then we would be well capable of looking after ourselves.

I would like to mention the issue of border patrolling. Our territorial waters extend 23 kilometres—that was the reach of a cannon. That water, which we can control, is ours. If there are 20,000 foreign fishing vessels in our water and only 6,000 of our own vessels in our water then I think we would be hard put arguing in the international courts that we are in control of our waters—that they are under our cannons and not somebody else’s.

This proposition has been put forward so many times to me by the most serious people with naval experience in Australia—I cannot say anything more than that. I said: ‘Why are we putting all of our eggs in the destroyers basket?’ For those who are not familiar with the Falklands war, the Falklands had just five Exocet missiles. That is all they owned. But, with those five missiles, they took out two destroyers. Say we have a potential enemy. Say Indonesia, for example, one of our neighbours, had a contract signed for the purchase of Exocet missiles when their economy collapsed; I presume they would go back to that contract. Say there are five Exocet missiles—and that was the mark I; the mark III Exocet is an infinitely more sophisticated weapon—and you have two destroyers, I do not think you are really in a very happy situation at all. But, if you have 100 patrol boats, they might knock out 10, 20 or 30 of those and you would still have 70 or 80 hurling cruise missiles. It is not a very happy event at all.

On the issue of border patrol, we have here a cost-effective way of protecting Australia in times of warfare. Just this week I was reading the story of Holden’s Hartnett. He said, ‘We were producing Wirraways, and actually it was quite a simple task to switch the Wirraways over to Beaufort fighters. But we needed the tools, the dies and the casting, and we could not get any of them. In a two-year period, we were still left with nothing.’ One of the reasons that John McEwen was such a strong man on tariffs was, as he said to me personally, ‘I will never see my country placed in a war again without the ability to build a battle tank.’ I doubt we would be able to build a machine gun at the present moment. All of our technology is simply dissipating and vanishing.

So I would urge the government in relation to the wastage at the present moment with these silly little boats that Customs, the police, National Parks and Fisheries have. I have been out fishing on a couple of these boats in days past. I am not denying the boys the right to have some nice fishing boats to use of a weekend! But, in terms of effectiveness, having all this government duplication is colossally wasteful. These patrol boats can service our Defence, our Navy and our fortress walls. They can also serve to win back Australia’s fisheries for Australians, to give our own fishermen a fair go out there. We have a saying in the bush: good fences make good neighbours. It would be very good if we used those patrol boats to establish our fences, which are well and truly down at the present moment.

See this speech in context