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

This is not a new issue. When we were in government in Queensland in 1988 the then Deputy Premier and I had lengthy discussions about this. It is a matter of supply, but it is not about the supply of houses. There are firms that build prefabricated houses. Some of them are quite nice houses now. I live in a Logan unit, which is a pretty humble house but it does the job. Force 10 International can produce a kit for probably $60,000 now. They can have a kit erected for some $50,000. So that is $110,000. There is no housing problem if a house costs $110,000. The housing problem arises because of the cost of land that is added to the $110,000.

As I said, this is not a new phenomenon. In 1988, we as a government looked at a system of spoke roads radiating out from Brisbane, Bundaberg and Rockhampton et cetera. Those spoke roads were to be high-speed roads. I am particularly talking about Brisbane. We looked at divided high-speed roads with speed limits of 120 kilometres an hour that would enable people to live a long way from Brisbane. Quite frankly, they could live up to 60 kilometres away and still get to work in 20 or 30 minutes.

What is the reason that this housing situation has arisen? I must strongly back the government’s contention that the responsibility sheets back to the state government. In Queensland we have the most extraordinary phenomenon. While most of Australia is reeling under a housing crisis, the Queensland government is proceeding to put footprints around every local government area in Queensland. You will not be able to subdivide beyond that footprint. They are in the process of restricting subdivision.

I have the honour of representing Mount Isa in this place. There is the most extraordinary situation in Mount Isa. You can pay $85,000 for a quarter-acre allotment in Mount Isa—let us say a 10th of a hectare—or you can go to the other side of the jump-up and pay much less. When you drive into Mount Isa there is a very big jump-up and you go in through a break in the jump-up. On one side of the jump-up, you have the city of Mount Isa. A block of land there costs $85,000. On the other side of the jump-up, a hectare of land costs $40—not $40,000 but $40! How can this extraordinary situation arise? It arises because of local councillors whose stupidity is beyond belief or who may have vested interests. If you own a lot of property in Mount Isa you do not want land on the other side of the jump-up to be opened up.

In Cloncurry, the mining company there wanted accommodation. We bless Charlie Sartain, the then head of the mining company, who is now head of Xstrata Copper worldwide. He was head at Cloncurry at the time. He said, ‘We will base the people here but you’ve got to give us some land. There’s got to be somewhere for them to live in Cloncurry.’ He did not want to fly people in, but he had no alternative because there was no housing in Cloncurry to enable him to house people there. I am quite sure they would have come into a land guarantee deal.

I do not want to criticise some of the councils in my own electorate, but they most certainly have something to answer for here. However, we are dealing with the background of the state Labor government. The government of Queensland really is a fascinating phenomenon. Here is a government that cannot deliver doctors who speak English. They cannot deliver the water supply to two-thirds of the population of Queensland. They announced blithely last Christmas that they would not be able to guarantee electricity supply to the Gold Coast over Christmas. What exactly can they supply? In housing they are actually moving to restrict, not facilitate, the opening up of areas.

We desperately require the local and state governments to get out of the way. They should allow a station property owner or an owner of any type of property to subdivide that land. You have to supply services. Quite apart from economic rent and supply and demand factors that have driven the price up, there is a separate factor altogether. If you want to put on that land curb-to-curb bitumen, curbing and channelling, floodwater drainage and sewerage, then you are notching back up over $50,000. But there is no necessity for that. In a country where you can fly an aeroplane from Kingaroy all the way across to Karratha and drop a series of atomic bombs and not kill anyone because there is nobody living there, it is absolutely outrageous that people are paying this amount of money.

In Cloncurry, the then mayor, Noel Robertson, because of the situation with respect to Xstrata, actually costed two-acre blocks with a median strip and bitumen with a water pipeline running beside it at $14,000 a block. The cost of two-acre blocks with a narrow frontage onto median strip bitumen was $14,000. Let us add the cost of the land to that—$50 a hectare—and you have very cheap land. It may not be as good as that. In the area that I represent outside of Townsville, which is now an area reaching up to 300,000 people, 15,000 acres was purchased for $650,000 some three years ago. Land is still enormously cheap in these areas. One of the reasons for that is the difficulty with subdividing and getting subdivisions done. It means that people are not going to buy properties for subdivision, because they know they will not be able to get the subdivision through in their lifetime because of local government and state government requirements.

I applaud the opposition today, who are going to lean upon the state government. We applaud their resolve, not their actions, because the only actions we have seen are from the Labor Party in Queensland, and they are heading in the exact opposite, 180-degree direction. If the ALP fail to win this election they can thank no-one else except the Premier of Queensland because, if it is possible to undo any chance the ALP may have had of winning this election, he most certainly has left no stone unturned in the pursuit of the demolition of his own political party.

But I do not come here today to criticise; I come here to say that the honourable member for Wentworth, now the Minister for the Environment and Water Resources, and an Oxford don did a paper for the New South Wales government on housing affordability. It quite frankly said that the federal government had it wrong. They said that the federal government was continuing down the way of helping demand—increasing demand makes the price go up—instead of looking at the supply side. The supply side was being choked off by local government and state government laws. Those were the findings of that report. Their solution did not flow along the lines that we were working on in Queensland when the government fell in 1989—or, should I say, when Bill Gunn and I really lost control of the government whilst the Premier was going to Canberra. Therein lies the solution to the problem. But it is no solution so long as the state governments and the councils are allowed to continue with bumbling incompetence and maybe cold-blooded arrogance as far as the issue of subdivisions goes.

We would urge the government to look at the solutions provided by one of their own ministers. We would urge the opposition to continue to act with great aggression towards the state government, if in fact they are acting with any aggression at all. But if they are, we applaud them in that and would encourage them to keep moving down that direction. We have a desperate housing crisis in Mount Isa. People cannot live in the town. We have to fly people in for almost every form of employment because we simply have no land for people to build a house on and live there. It would also be nice if people in Mount Isa were able to have 10 acres instead of a quarter of an acre. (Time expired)

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