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

I want to pay a very fine tribute to the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. When I first discussed with him the Farm Household Support Amendment (Additional Drought Assistance Measures) Bill 2008, he said, ‘I’m from the city.’ I said, ‘That’s not a drawback here. To come in with clean paper is probably a good thing not a bad thing.’ In every debate, the minister has been in the House. In the state house in Queensland, the minister was always in the house for his legislation. We could speak to the minister and he could get a perspective on what was going on. It has appalled me in this place that ministers do not come into the House. Rather than condemn ministers for not coming into the House, three people from this side have come over to me tonight and said, ‘Isn’t it good, Burkey being in the House?’ We commend and thank the minister for that.

Minister, a lot of people would tell you that this is the worst drought in Australian history. Reading the history of the honourable member for Maribyrnong’s electorate—he was on the AWU—and reading that very fine book about the AWU, I was surprised to find out the extent of the drought which started in 1884. With one short break, it extended all the way to 1914 and was referred to as the ‘Federation drought’. This was nothing to do with carbon dioxide. If it was, they must have had terrible carbon dioxide problems back in the 1880s.

Our country is prone to droughts but the northern half of Australia is not. My family live at the headwaters of the Cloncurry River where they have lived for close to 120 years. Even though it is 600 kilometres from the sea, every single year that river has run. In Northern Australia, we have security of supply of water. As a person who owned a quarter of a million acres of Australia and half a million acres on another occasion, I can see that it does not reflect upon us well that we have not used this water up to date as graziers. The reasons for that are not entirely the fault of the cattlemen. For the last 15 years we have, in fact, been told by the Queensland government that we are not allowed to take any water out of these rivers. This is extraordinary legislation. You have a river that runs 400,000 megalitres a year past your doorstep at Cloncurry and six million megalitres a year at Normanton at its mouth, and you are told you are not allowed to take any water out of it!

The whole Murray-Darling system has only 20 million megalitres. The Gilbert River has nearly 10 million megalitres by itself. The Upper Burdekin has 10 million megalitres. There are something like 20 or 30 rivers in the Gulf Country and just two of them have more water than the whole Murray-Darling system. We know that those rivers are going to run every year, so all we are asking for is the right to take some of the water to put it on the ground. Let me explain that to the House.

We went into very great detail on our station property and costed it out, and there are some stations doing that now. If we could take out enough water to do 40 hectares, which was really all we needed, in a good year we would put our weaners onto the 40 hectares and fatten them, which meant a doubling of my net income—not a doubling of my gross income but a doubling of my net income. In a bad year, we would sell the weaners off to somewhere else in Australia and we would put our breeders onto those 40 hectares. It would be better if it were 60 or 100 hectares, but that is all we needed, that tiny amount of water. It may be 10 megalitres a hectare and, let us say, 100 hectares; that is 1,000 megalitres. At Cloncurry, 600 kilometres from the mouth of the Flinders River, we have 400,000 megalitres flowing past. All I wanted for my station was 1,000 megalitres. Almost all of the stations in the gulf can be drought-proofed. One of the reasons that we have not been able to do that is lack of finance. We have to go to a bank and borrow money. In our case we had to borrow money to do something like 300 or 400 kilometres of fencing. We had to put waters in. The best use of money is to put water down so cattle can drink and that area can be brought under production. Cattle can walk only five or 10 kilometres.

The honourable member for Leichhardt and the honourable member for New England mentioned carbon in the soil. I did not realise this until about four months ago. It took me many, many years to understand that Australia has only one-fifth of the carbon levels that we should have. When we have those carbon levels in the soil, we do not need anywhere near as much water. There is something like a 20 per cent retention in the ground, so the grass will grow for a fifth of the year longer. That is very important to us. Whilst we have this massive water supply in Northern Australia, it is only there for three months—hence, the necessity for dams and weirs so that we can extend the flow in the river to enable us to get at it. We can drought proof.

The very famous Freddie Tritton, one of the great pioneers of agriculture in Australia, and his son, Corby Tritton, who was right at his side even as a little kid, built such drought proofing at Richmond. We hope that the minister can come up and visit us at Richmond, where we have a project. You can see what this wonderful pioneering family have done. They have been able to go year in and year out without worrying about droughts, because the Flinders River, similarly at Richmond, runs nearly every year. It is not quite as good as at Cloncurry. They were able to put forage sorghum in the ground and they have been able to have silage to carry them through those years. Sir Graham McCamley—the greatest cattleman the country has ever seen—pioneered the Brahman breed in Australia. If we did not have pure Brahmans on our property the cattle would just die late in the year; we just could not keep them alive. That is the importance of the Brahman breed, particularly to the northern half of Australia.

We will have discussions with the minister for agriculture. We have already had discussions with the Minister for Resources and Energy about the Pentarco project. At Pentland we have a power station proposal that will have zero emissions. It is a front-end technology, but the back-end technology is very relevant to what we are talking about here. They are going to put the carbon dioxide into sugar cane and, ultimately, into ethanol. It is a very big irrigation project because we need a very large area to absorb eight million tonnes of CO2 from a power station. The minister will be interested to know that, when you put bacteria in the ground, it will take that carbon, put it into the ground and resuscitate tired ground. I presume a lot of that carbon deficiency comes from our First Australians who did firestick farming and we later Australians who did firestick mustering on our station properties. That is one of the contributing factors to the very low carbon levels in Australia. As the member for Leichhardt and the member for New England, who are better informed than I, spoke about, restoring those carbon levels makes a hell of a difference to the ability of the soil to hold onto that moisture. It will be able to hold onto that moisture for 20 per cent longer. BHP Billiton has done trials in Townsville. I would have thought the idea of just putting carbon dioxide on the ground and it being absorbed into a plant was Disneyland, but it has already been done. JCU and 15 other sites throughout the world have done it. When they released the carbon dioxide, they had 36 per cent greater production of pasture—just native, natural grasses. At sites in other parts of the world they have had up to a 44 per cent increase.

A very good friend of mine—a lady whom God had made quite handsome, I suppose—is a young mother with three children. During the last drought I asked her to tell me what it was like for her in the mid-west plains country, where I come from—the flat country in north-west Queensland, the rolling black plains. I am sure that when Banjo Paterson coined the phrase ‘the everlasting sameness of the never-ending plain’ he was at Winton, which is on the great inland plain of Queensland that stretches for 1,200 kilometres from Barcaldine—home of the Tree of Knowledge where the Labor Party was founded—all the way up to the Gulf of Carpentaria. On Monday morning, she would get up at 3.30 so that she could be ready to leave with the three kids to drive to Charters Towers—because that was the only place where she could get a job. It was nearly 400 kilometres away. She drove for four hours so that she could get to work at half past eight and have the kids in school. On Friday night she packed up and drove four hours back home again with the three kids. Then she worked on the station at the weekend—because it is hard to run a cattle station with only one person. Almost every job requires two people, and they could not afford to employ someone. Her husband chose to stay at home on the station. Some would criticise him for doing that. All of the neighbours worked. One of the neighbours worked in my office. His brother was out driving an old second-hand grader they had on the station, which they hired out to do a bit of work, just to stay alive. Another one of them went fettling on the railways. Another one was out selling Amway. These are not people that sat on their tailbones or stood on their pride or were arrogant. They went out and did fairly humble jobs. Some people would regard selling Amway as a humble job, but they went out and did those things. They did whatever they had to do to survive. So we very much appreciate some relaxation of the income testing.

It is important for me to tell the House that Babinda is one of the very few sugar areas in Australia where there is no debt. They are all little farms. They tell you, ‘If you get big, you’ll be profitable,’ but these are only little fellas. But because they are little fellas they have to get a job, so most of them work in the mills or on haul-out bins. Most of them have union tickets. But they survive because they have the income from the wage working in the sugar mill as well as their income from the farm. When we run into hard times we need this.

Looking back on it, I came from a very wise government. The history books will be very kind to the Bjelke-Petersen government, as was the last Labor Premier. He attributed the existence of the Australian coal industry and the Australian tourism industry to his political opponent Bjelke-Petersen, which was very generous of him but also very truthful. He should have added, of course, the aluminium industry. In our wisdom as a government, we decided to set up a development bank—as the great King O’Malley did, as the great Ted Theodore did and as the great John Curtin and Ben Chifley did. All of them enhanced, developed and established a development bank, as did Premier Playford, Premier Bolte, Western Australian Premier Charles Court and Bjelke-Petersen.

The logic behind a development bank is that, if you have long-term profitability—and we do not want to prop up an industry that does not have long-term profitability—we ask the government to help us through the bad times. What happens in bad times? I use myself as an example. Whilst interest rates were running along at about 16 or 17 per cent, we had added 2½ per cent imposition because we were in the cattle industry. Then we had added another 2½ per cent because we were in an at-risk area, so that was five per cent on top of the 17, and I was up to 22. Then, because I was an at-risk farmer, I had added another three per cent to that—and then there were bank charges. And I do not profess to be a cattleman; I was a businessman who had cattle. In our second-final year on St Francis we paid 29 per cent interest. But what should happen to these people? And I do not mean people like me—I was a businessman with cattle; that is fine for me. My neighbours were people who lived 300 kilometres from the nearest town, which was Croydon, with 120 people in it. For these great pioneers who stand on the ramparts of our country, surely when the bad times come the government can loan them money.

It did not cost the government of Queensland anything. We made indecent profits out of the state bank, which was called the QIDC. I was the primary minister responsible for the QIDC, so I speak with authority. We took $200 million out of an ag bank account, as it was called, and turned that into a bank. It was sold, I am ashamed to say. The National Party government, I suppose, predictably sold the bank, though not the same government that was there in the Bjelke-Petersen days, I can assure you. The Borbidge government sold the bank for $3.5 thousand million. So we started with $200 million; we sold it for $3.5 thousand million. But when the next drought came along there was no bank there to carry us through.

Mr Deputy Speaker, you understand that, even if we only take $40 million a year in help, if that subsidises an interest rate, it enables the cattle industry to borrow $1,000 million and provide interest rates of about four per cent. In the last sugar crisis that enabled everybody to get through.

But do not think we were without our globalisers and free marketeers. The head of the bank told me as the primary minister responsible that he had to let a third of the sugar industry go. I pointed out to him that our prices were cyclical. I was getting nowhere, so I saw him the next day—I went to him; he did not come to me—and I showed him the graph. I said to him, ‘We’re going to look pretty stupid if we wipe out a third of this industry and we’re at the top of the graph next year.’ He said, ‘Oh, you don’t understand it. It’s beet sugar from Europe.’ I said, ‘Beet sugar collapsed the industry in 1898. Please, don’t tell me about the sugar industry.’ Anyway, within a week we sacked him, which made a lot of waves at the time. Eight months after that conversation took place, the price of sugar had trebled.

But I have to say in all honesty that I would not take that decision today because, whilst the cycle is still there, the cycle is low now because Brazil has ethanol, which means the long-term average price has dropped by about 30 or 40 per cent and Australia cannot live with that long-term average price. Whilst we had long-term viability a development bank would carry a long-term viable industry through that period.

What the minister has to contend with here is that he has inherited the responsibility for agriculture in this country. When they deregulated the dairy industry, I said, ‘Within 10 years this country will be a net importer of food.’ I regretted having said it because I meant 10 years metaphorically. So I went out and faced the music. I very seldom quote a figure, but I did mean a metaphorical figure. But I found out that I was wrong—it was not 10 years; it was nine years. Within nine years this country would be a net importer of food.

I happen to be a Christian believer. The gospel book tells about people who are given talents. One bloke went out and hid the talent under a rock, another bloke was worried that he would lose it and another bloke went out and did what he should with it, used it and multiplied it. We have been given great talents by the good Lord; we have been given 300 million megalitres of water a year in North Queensland. Remember that the Murray-Darling, which produces half our agriculture, only has 20 million megalitres, but we in Northern Australia have 300 million megalitres. We are using about two million megalitres of that—that is all. The great Ted Theodore came down to this place to build dams and railway lines across Northern Australia. He got no sense out of the Australian government, so he said, ‘Damn, I’ll come down here and take it over,’ which is exactly what he did—a great man of Australia and a dominant figure in Australian history.

The other problem we have is that we went and free-traded—a great idea if somebody else was doing it. You can get the OECD Agricultural Outlook document—I have the latest document from the year before last—and it shows the total support estimates are 49 per cent. That means that one-third of the income of all the farmers in the world that export is coming from the government via tariffs or subsidies. They get a 49 per cent tariff subsidy and we get six per cent, which is virtually nothing. Most of that was from the dairy and sugar levies. When they are removed, I suppose it will be down to about three or four per cent. We cannot possibly survive giving our competitive farmers that sort of figure.

The Americans pay $172 for their grain; Australians pay $300. They have dried distillers grain from methanol. They can produce cheap food; we cannot. (Time expired)

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