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

I rise to speak on the Wheat Export Marketing Bill 2008. It is curious to me. I find it so extraordinary after coming into this House to go home to my electorate to try to explain what happens here. Here was a government elected on the issue of collective bargaining. And I worked hard for them. I spoke at trade union meetings all over the place. I carried, on my ports, workers rights stickers. I felt passionately that the worker had the right to collectively bargain, and I felt that way because I had watched what had happened to the farmers when they were deregulated.

It is an exercise in hypocrisy for the National Party in this place. I have here the memorandum of understanding entered into by the National Party, clause 8—the agreement with the ALP government of Queensland to deregulate the sugar industry. How can members of the National Party come into this place with a straight face and say they are so passionate about this—some people in that party were nearly crying tonight—after they have deregulated every one of our industries? I watched the maize silos being torn down at Atherton after they deregulated the Maize Board. I watched the tobacco industry close down. Half the main street of the city of Mareeba closed down. We had 1,500 farmers; now we have none. I watched the peanut farmers, at the Woolworths-Coles inquiry, say that they were getting the same price as they were getting 40 years ago, thanks to deregulation.

The first industry to be deregulated was the greatest industry this country had. It carried this country from its foundation, and in 1990 one-tenth of the nation’s entire export earnings came from wool. As a young man I left university and I went home. I did economics at university and I was told that if you had one person selling and hundreds buying then it was a sellers market; on the other hand, if you had two people buying—like Woolworths and Coles—and you had 10,000 sellers, it was a buyers market. That was what I was taught when I went to university. But here we are saying that we will be better off with thousands of sellers of grain. Don’t any of you people ever read an economics book? Doesn’t anybody here ever bother to think about what they are doing in this place?

I say with great passion that in the wool industry I watched a great man. I have not seen many great men in my lifetime, but Doug Anthony was one of them. He took that silly, stupid, dumb, squattocracy leadership of the UGA and told them to—well, I will not tell you exactly what he told them to do! Doug Anthony introduced, under another great man, Sir William Gunn—a man with a tonne of courage and a tonne of intelligence—the wool scheme. When they did that the price of wool was 65c; within four years they were getting $1.84.

We were told that Mr Keating was the greatest genius Treasurer in the world. That was what the OECD told us. He deregulated this industry—and the price dropped. From 1988, which was effectively the year before deregulation, it had dropped by 1995 to $3.95. So when you had collective bargaining you tripled the price; when you took it away it halved. I was at a very impressionable age. I had gone to university and been told free markets were marvellous. I began to realise that this was not correct.

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