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

I have praised the minister on a number of occasions for being in the House when legislation is going through—he always is—but it disappoints me greatly to have no-one here from the departments. Without their presence here, you are just speaking into a hollow, resounding symbol. In the state house whence I came, the head of the department—if there was legislation that concerned any matters within his portfolio of responsibility—was always in the house to face the music. Vince Gauci, the very wonderful leader of Mount Isa Mines for many years—he turned Mount Isa Mines around and made it into the very profitable company it is today—insisted that management at all levels face the music. If you made a decision, you would front up to the men; you would meet with those people and talk to them. It behoved you to do that as a boss.

Here, in this place called Canberra, senior public servants hardly ever front up and sit over there in that box. I have hardly ever seen a senior public servant sitting over there. Instead, a couple of junior-junior-junior people are sent along. It is beneath the dignity of senior public servants to come down here, where the people’s voices are to be heard, and face the music. But very serious issues are being canvassed here. In my opinion, the equine flu case will be won by the racehorse and related industries. That means that the people of Australia will have to find $1 billion, because they are going to be successfully sued because of the irresponsibility abroad at the quarantine station from which this disease got away.

Let me be very specific—I do not have permission from the senior vet to say this, but he is one of the more prominent people in this field in Australia. I am sure he would be only too happy for me to use his name, but without his permission I cannot. He said he went to inspect a horse at this quarantine station. Because of the nature of the illness of the horse, he had to feel all around the horse. He said, ‘Not only did nobody require that I wash my hands, but there was no washbasin or anything in which I could even wash my hands.’ He said, ‘You are familiar with dairy factories?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ For example, in a dairy factory you have to remove your shoes, put their shoes on, put on overalls which cover your entire body and put on a hat. Before you leave, all those things are taken off, put on the ground, completely fumigated and cleaned. Also, when you walked in, you walked through a bath of disinfectant or antiseptic of some type for your shoes. That is a dairy factory. This was a quarantine station—there should be 20 times those precautions. People could just walk in. He could have taken material off the horse—cut a little piece from the flesh or the skin of the horse—and taken it out. And some procedures would have required that he do that.

I have spoken on this again and again in this place because I represent electorates on the receiving end of the incompetence of AQIS. I have spoken in here about the black sigatoka outbreak, which cost us $120 million. I have spoken in here about the papaya fruit fly. There is a case going through the Queensland courts. The Queensland government should be utterly ashamed of themselves. That case alone has probably cost $12 or $15 million—so far. The government will lose that case and, as a result, they will be paying out a hell of a lot more. There was also the white spot disease in prawns. There is hardly any inspection taking place of the prawns coming in to this country from countries where white spot is endemic.

The previous minister, the current Leader of the National Party, has borne the brunt of my anger. You have to be angry with him—he was the minister who made the decision on the citrus canker. Material was allowed to be brought in from overseas after they had already had an outbreak. They had an outbreak at Emerald, and they allowed and licensed them to bring material in from a country that is rife with citrus canker. He made the decision to bring the grapes in. I think he did that—I do not think he makes any decisions on anything except for being told what to do by the public servants. There was a party committee of the Liberal Party and National Party, and I think there were about 20 people at the meeting that day, and there was not a single person there who did not criticise him in a most unrestrained manner for having allowed the grapes in from California in exactly the same month that it was announced that one-tenth of all of the Californian grape industry had been wiped out by Pierce’s disease, carried by the glassy-winged sharpshooter—a little animal.

They allowed meat in from Brazil—a foot-and-mouth disease country. If America allowed meat to come in from a foot-and-mouth disease country, the beef industry of Australia would be bankrupt tomorrow. If that proposition, which is so abhorrent to every other country on earth, was accepted by Australia then we would be bankrupt tomorrow. What if Japan had accepted the principle that Australia accepted? We are out there showing a ‘good example’. What if that example was followed by other countries? Other countries believe in looking after their farmers instead of being acolytes at the high altar of economic rationalism or free trade—that is their religion, not their philosophy or policy.

The meat from Brazil ended up on the dump at Wagga. I think, as we talk, there are probably wild pigs nudging around at the dump at Wagga. If foot-and-mouth disease had got into the wild pig population we would never have eradicated it in Australia, and we would have become a foot-and-mouth disease country from which we could not export any cattle. To put that in perspective, Australia has about 25 million or 26 million head of cattle and Brazil has 176 million head of cattle. If the foot-and-mouth disease problems they have were ignored by America and Japan, we would have had our industry wiped out in three seconds. We have set a bad example and, by some miracle, we have not paid the price for it. I pay very great tribute to Senator Heffernan and his very unrestrained criticisms of AQIS.

During my time in this place—I do not know what it is but it is probably 14 or 15 years—and my 20 years in the state house, I doubt whether I have ever heard a positive comment about the performance of AQIS in even the most simple, elementary thing that is required of them. And I do not criticise their staff. In fact, I get stories from a lot of the people that they employ. The boys on the ground are fine; they do the best they can. I have said continually in this place that it is very simple. For example, there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that the papaya fruit fly outbreak or the black sigatoka outbreak, which cost the Australian economy $100 million, came in from the Torres Strait. All of these diseases are endemic in the Indonesian archipelago—Oceania. They come in through the Torres Strait, where at any time you can go to any of those islands. Melanesians and people from New Guinea, on the Torres Strait islands, come and go as they please and have done so for thousands of years. They bring those diseases with them. We can stop that: 99.9 per cent of every single thing that comes into Australia from the Torres Strait goes through the Horn Island airport, which is the airport for the Torres Strait, or crosses the ferry at the Jardine River, south of Bamaga.

So you have to have an inspector at the airport on Horn Island and you have to pay the ferryman. If you had just trained up the ferryman and paid him, you would not have had the black sigatoka and the papaya fruit fly outbreaks. Those two outbreaks might have cost the Australian economy $200 million or $300 million. It was recommended that the cadmium levels in peanuts be raised to enable Chinese peanuts to come into Australia. I thought the name of the game was to try and keep stuff out so that we could look after our own people in Australia. We decided that we should have more renal cancer as a result of that.

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