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

The member for Blair has just torn into me over the issue of dairy deregulation, and I just pointed out that it was his government. I resigned from this government after the dairy decision—I had the decency to resign—because my policies are different from this government’s policies of deregulation. You are the free trader; you are the person responsible for these decisions.

Let me move on. The government speaks about GDP growth, and I know it is wrong because I know that the Australian economy has not grown. So what I did was get out the GDP figures. They are very interesting because the only areas of the economy that have grown above CPI are wholesale and retail sales—Woolworths and Coles. They have grown above 50 per cent. Finance and insurance—primarily the banks—have grown above 50 per cent. Property and business services, which includes accounting, which of course has had a huge revenue boost from the GST have grown above 50 per cent; and of course property—ownership of dwellings—has grown above 50 per cent. But it is only those five sections of the economy that have grown over 50 per cent. Really, they are facades of illusion. Extra profit for Woolworths and Coles is hardly an increase in GDP for Australia; an increase in income for the banks is hardly an increase in GDP.

Whilst I have great admiration for the Prime Minister himself, and whilst I think in many of these areas he has tried very hard for us, the simple fact of the matter is that there has been a massive increase in the budget and that massive increase has gone to health, which is a good thing, and social security and welfare. Health got a $31 billion increase and social security, welfare, got $75 billion. So the increases have come in those two areas—and it is mainly social security. If you look at the unemployment figures, which the Treasurer was skiting about today, they look great. But you get a bit disillusioned when you look at the increase in disability pensions, because if you add the increase in disability pensions to the unemployment figures you come up with a whopping great increase of about 50 per cent in the unemployment figures. But the government is still to be praised for lowering unemployment to some degree.

Finally, if you mandate ethanol and move up to the level we should be at, all of our cars should be running on ethanol. It is cheaper and cleaner than petrol; it takes 25 per cent of our CO emissions out of the atmosphere. These figures are well researched and they are all scientific knowledge. We can develop the water resources of North Queensland and put in a customs duty to finance the building of 100 patrol boats to properly defend our country with guided missile capacity and interception capacity. If we do all of these things, we will have a secondary industry and a primary industry once again in this country. (Time expired)

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