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

Every single cent from the public purse of course could be accounted for by the opposition leader’s wife, who seems to have made huge amounts of money, which I cannot relate to and my electorate cannot relate to. But I want to make the point that we do not blame people for their wives’ activities and I most certainly would not blame the opposition leader nor hold him accountable on that score.

The Treasurer has said that we have never had it so good in Australia. He has said that he has a balanced budget and there is terrific growth in the economy. I wish I could agree with these three premises. A document was produced in 2003 called Electoral rankings: census 2001. I do not know whether these figures have been upgraded since but I do not doubt for one moment that there would be no change. I note that the honourable member for Grey is here. Of the 40 electorates that are poorest, every single one of them is a country electorate—every one of the 40 with two exceptions. So if you are looking for the poorest people of Australia, start looking in the bush.

Let me put a figure on that. The average income in the country seats—this is a 2001 figure, I emphasise—was $37,232. The average income in the in-between seats was $50,024, nearly 50 per cent more. And the rich seats, the top 30 seats, are all of course in the inner city. They are all the rich people and their average income was $75,868, which is more than double that of the 40 seats of rural Australia. So the rich 30 seats get more than double the income of the poor 40. When you consider that this is a median family income, and that country people tend to have more children than rich city people, that figure is infinitely worse.

When you say that Australians have never had it so good, I look at rural Australia, where our sheep numbers are down 50 per cent, our cattle numbers are down about 22 to 23 per cent, our milk production is off 12 per cent—I do not understand that, really—and our butter and cheese production is down over 20 per cent. I do not know anything about the wheat industry, so I will not speak about it, but we are simply closing our sugar industry down. We are closing a sugar mill every year and we have only got about 26 mills left. Brazil is opening 25 mills this year. You say we have never had it so good; it may well be that in rural Australia we have never had it so bad. Almost every single country town in Queensland has lost population and has continued to lose population for the last 25 years. My own family have owned stores in country towns in Queensland. Every year we have watched our stores go backwards. Whereas the rich people in the big cities have watched all of their businesses grow, we have not. Our populations have dwindled and so all of our richness of lifestyle—which we thought was very rich, anyway—has diminished very greatly.

That is the first thing: we have never had it so good. Let me move on to the second thing. The Treasurer constantly reiterates that he has balanced the budget. This is a very interesting principle. If you control your revenue, you can set the revenue at whatever figure you like. If you choose to set it 300 per cent higher than the last government did, you should be able to balance your budget. If you have increased the tax revenue from $105,000 million to $282,000 million in the space of 12 years, for that is the increase, you should be able to balance your budget.

The honourable member for Eden-Monaro is shaking his head. I want it put down in Hansard that he is shaking his head. Are those figures wrong, are they? Are the budget figures the Treasurer has produced lies, are they? The figure is $282,000 million. If you add in the revenue from the GST, you come up with a figure of $282,000 million. The tax has increased from $105,000 million under the so-called socialists—and heaven only knows they were disgraceful spendthrifts. You could hardly hold your head up high, Mr Deputy Speaker. The government could hardly be proud of their record in spending money because they have an excellent record of spending money. If they say they balance the budget, surely there is some responsibility on the Treasurer’s shoulders to balance the budget of the country. The Treasurer should not go out and skite about how the government have balanced the budget, when the country he is supposed to be the Treasurer of has one of the most unbalanced budgets on the entire planet.

What would I know about economics? I am just a boy from Cloncurry whose daddy owned a clothing store. I would not know anything about economics. But the former Treasurer of Australia and the former Prime Minister of Australia, Mr Paul Keating, said that when the current account hit $13,000 million—actually $12,597,000 million—the country was in danger of becoming a banana republic. And I saw him in ‘Labor in Power’ and he said: ‘I do not resile from that statement. This country needed a jar and it was my duty to give it to them’. So he said it was disgraceful and we were about to become a banana republic. The then Leader of the Opposition, Mr Howard, in 1995 on a Perth radio station, reminded Mr Keating of his remarks about the banana republic because the current account then was at $26,000 million. He said: ‘If we were a banana republic when it was $13,000 million, what is it now that we are $26,000 million? Tell us, Mr Keating.’ Remember that Mr Howard has also been Treasurer. So here is the second person who was Treasurer and became Prime Minister. The first one said, ‘Banana republic’, and the second one said on Perth radio in 1995: ‘This is the overwhelming problem. The problem above all else is the continuing, worsening deficit on the current account.’ This was not a poor, simple Cloncurry boy; this was the Prime Minister and former Treasurer of Australia, Mr Howard. And there is also the former Prime Minister and former Treasurer of Australia, Mr Keating, who said, ‘$13,000 million; banana republic.’ Mr Howard said, ‘At $26,000 million, it was the overwhelming problem above all else.’ Well, it is now $56,740,000 million. If we were a banana republic at $13,000 million, and it was an overwhelming problem at $26,000 million, I leave it to your imagination what should be said of a current account of $57,000 million.

I and about 3,000 or 4,000 other North Queenslanders are only alive after having heart attacks because we have special tablets that have to be imported from overseas. We simply would not be alive without them, and I am sure there are many people with other diseases who would not be alive if they could not buy tablets from overseas. But if you cannot sell something overseas then you cannot buy something from overseas. And if you are running in the red to the tune of near enough to $60,000 million a year then you had better take a pretty serious look at yourself and say, ‘What the hell is going on here?’

What is going on here is that we decided to free-trade. Excellent; laudable; I would be the first to praise the government for that decision. It was the Keating government’s decision. To some degree it was Mr Whitlam’s government’s decision, actually. Mr Whitlam decided in his great wisdom to take away 25 per cent of our tariffs. Mr Keating took most of what was left, and the current government took out what was finally left. So we are free trading now.

Anyone can go and get the OECD agricultural economic outlook. You can get it off the internet at any time of the day or night. You can go down to the library here and get it. The latest figures I have got here are for 2003—they are a bit slow in getting them out at the OECD—and they show that the average subsidy tariff level is 49 per cent for the OECD countries. For Australia and New Zealand it is virtually nil: six per cent to be exact. But that of course is accounted for mainly by the sugar levy and the dairy levy, both of which are now either phased out or being phased out. So I suppose we are at about four per cent.

That explains why our rural sector is collapsing. We simply cannot survive giving our competitors a 45 per cent start. We are running a 100-metre race and giving a 30-metre start to our opponents. Heavens—I could beat Linford Christie over 100 metres if I was given that sort of start! I would most certainly back myself.

So that is the reason. The OECD does not produce figures for secondary industry, but I know that when the American steel industry was in trouble the United States government quite unashamedly imposed a 30 per cent subsidy on imported steel—bang, straight between the eyeballs. And the President mentioned—and he should be praised for doing so, and he did several times in his speech on the subject—the words ‘communities’ and ‘jobs for people’. So they are not going to stand aside. Rudy Giuliani, in the copy of Time magazine which had Al Gore on the cover, was reported as saying in his speech to the Republican executive conference: ‘The one thing that you have all left out on Clinton’—referring to Hillary Clinton—‘is that she is a free marketeer, and this country cannot free-market.’ There speaks the Republican candidate for election in the United States. Maybe our leaders here know more than the Republicans know in the United States; maybe they know more than the Democrats in the United States—neither of whom are going to free-trade in secondary industry, and neither of whom are going to free-trade in primary industry.

There are other ways of helping your primary industries, as seen in the United States. I had never been overseas, but I decided to break my duck early this year and do a quick ethanol tour. I went to Minneapolis, and I filled up my petrol tank there for 70 cents a litre. We fill up, where I come from, for $1.30 a litre. And, in a lot of places, we are lucky if we fill up for $1.30. But the Americans, by giving their country ethanol, have lifted the grain prices from $2.50 a bushel last year to $4 this year.

This is one of the giant industries of the United States, and those proud people have stood by their farmers and rescued their farmers and made them prosperous. This year they will build 40 ethanol plants in America—and all of the Americas are under ethanol. When I was on this tour Canada announced that they are mandating five per cent ethanol. The Americans—I do not want to go into the legislation—have already effectively mandated 10 per cent ethanol. Brazil—with 200 million people, an annual growth rate of 19 per cent and a GDP bigger than Australia’s—has 25 per cent minimum ethanol. China, hang your head in shame! In one fell swoop, this government, with a 10 per cent mandate—I see that the member for Eden-Monaro is again shaking his head

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