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

I rise to speak on the Civil Aviation Amendment Bill 2009 and the cognate bill and to vent my extreme anger with CASA, which I think is a disgraceful organisation that takes no responsibility for responsibilities it is supposed to be exercising. In the case of bananas, I hope we will prosecute the public servants responsible personally, because we just cannot go on having government in Australia like this.

Karumba is a little town of nearly a thousand people who were completely cut off during the floods, being some 15 kilometres from the nearest land. The nearest town was three hours away by a glorified dinghy; that was the only way for nearly a thousand people to get out of that town if they broke a leg or had a heart attack, because there is no airport, because thanks to privatisation no-one is looking after the airport and the airport has fallen into disuse and cannot be used anymore. So there is no way of getting in or out except by helicopter. There are no helicopters in the area that have CasEvac stretcher facilities, so if people had a heart attack—as you would be well aware, Mr Deputy Speaker Washer—or a broken limb, there was no way we could transport them out except in a glorified dinghy, for a journey of nearly three hours across raging, crocodile-infested floodwaters up to Normanton.

After being venomously attacked in the media, the state government—they must be condemned—eventually put a helicopter there, but the helicopter had no stretcher facility. After being venomously attacked again, the government gave us a stretcher facility. But when the helicopter was put there—and this was the second week of what became two months of Karumba being cut off in this way—it had no night-flying capacity. There are very few choppers in Queensland that do have night-flying capacity, and this is not a problem. I use helicopters a lot and the arguments over safety are absolutely, totally spurious. If you ascend 50 or 100 feet above Normanton, you can see Karumba. You can see it during the day and you can see it at night. Even though it is three hours away by boat, because you have to follow the river, it is only about 35 or 40 kilometres as the crow flies. You can clearly see it, so the arguments about deep holes and disorientation and all of that rubbish are enormously spurious.

In addition to that, the helicopter has an instrument that tells you whether you are horizontal, so if you have a GPS and an instrument that tells you whether you are horizontal or not and if you can see the lights of both towns then any argument that says that the helicopter cannot be used at night is spurious. I rang up three of the leading helicopter operators in Queensland and asked them about it. They said: ‘Why wouldn’t you be allowed to do that? Sure, you need a night rating’—and these people do not have night rating—‘but why would anyone refuse you the right to do that?’ I said, ‘CASA is point-blank refusing to give it.’ At this very moment those people up there—a thousand Australians—have been deprived of that right and possibly of their life. If anyone dies there, let there be no doubt I will be in Slater & Gordon’s office so fast all you will see is a blur of speed for me to get in there and sue these people.

The clause says that in an emergency the helicopter can be used. But who is to say it is an emergency? All we wanted from CASA was for them to say that there was an emergency situation there. The chopper pilot, according to CASA, was going to risk his life. But he is now risking his life, according to CASA, and his job because the onus and burden of proof shifts to him to prove why he should not be prosecuted. They made it quite clear that they were not going to declare an emergency situation at Karumba.

These people are drunk with power. Dick Smith needs to be put back in charge. Dick Smith used the phrase ‘affordable safety’. For people sitting down here comfortably in Canberra, it might be very nice to make it impossible to have an aeroplane crash; that would be very comfortable for them. My grandad put a lot of money he could not afford into a little company called Qantas because it might just have been a matter of life and death for us to have aeroplanes operating. They may not have been really safe but they were a hell of a lot better than having nothing. My father, a wonderful man, said that if ever on earth he had met a saint it was ‘Flynn of the Inland’—the Reverend Flynn—who instituted the Royal Flying Doctor Service. We do not know how many lives they saved, but they went out in little aircraft that in today’s terms would be very unsafe indeed. They risked their lives to save lives and they saved hundreds and hundreds of lives, and to my knowledge they never lost an aeroplane.

I will come back to my own family’s experience—and I do not have to go any further than my own family’s experience, living on the frontiers of Australia for four generations on the Katter side. My uncle—who I never, ever saw; he died before I was born—was injured in a football match, and there was a previous car accident. He was in very desperate straits and, because my grandfather was perspicacious enough to know that you could get an aeroplane to fly him to Brisbane, after some phoning around—this is back in the 1920s—they got an aeroplane. But by the time they got the Qantas aeroplane to come across from Longreach to Cloncurry it was really too late. By the time he arrived in Brisbane it was too late.

That is the difference with ‘affordable safety’: it is our decision if we wish to have a situation where it may not be safe. But we have no aeroplanes. At Ingham, we simply cannot get in or out because there are no light aircraft left in North Queensland. They have all been closed down because of the cost structures that have been imposed principally, they tell me, by CASA. The privatisation of the airports has created another huge problem for aviation affordability in Australia. There is no use us saying that the planes may not be safe, because there are no planes at all. If you break a leg on a cattle station, too bad for you; you just have to die. You may have something that might be a headache or it might also be an aneurism in the brain and you might be about to die.

The famous Saxby case, which down through the years got an awful lot of publicity, was just such a case—there was a kick in the head at the rodeo and a headache. You cannot justify sending a Royal Flying Doctor Service plane a thousand kilometres every time a person gets a headache. I defended the Royal Flying Doctor Service in that situation. But the fact of the matter was that the man had brain damage and died. If there had been a light aircraft in the vicinity, he would have been flown out by that light aircraft and he would be alive today. It was that sort of case. The doctor said, ‘If this man had been flown out when the owners of the station requested him to be flown out then that man would be alive today.’ I am saying that Dick Smith’s concept of affordable safety is where we should be at.

To demonstrate the towering hypocrisy of CASA, I can tell you that I sent two letters to them concerning an aviation company in North Queensland. To my knowledge, there was not one single thing done about that airline—not a single damn thing. I do not think I even got the courtesy of a telephone call from CASA. There was evidence there of a series of conduct that was not in line with what I would expect from an airline in terms of safety. So, for the only problem I had in that area, CASA was not there at all; they might as well have been on Mars.

The other case is the case of the helicopters. They tortured our mustering helicopters. They imposed all sorts of conditions that were almost impossible to meet. If they had got away with it at the time, it would have doubled the cost of mustering in the cattle industry in Australia and achieved absolutely nothing in the way of safety. It concerned fatigue. I have lost some very close friends in chopper accidents, so I take a very keen interest in chopper accidents. Having had cattle all of my adult life, almost since I was a kid—just me, not my parents—obviously it is a matter that concerns me greatly. The mustering industry—not necessarily the cattle industry—is one of the major industries in the electorate that I represent.

Out of seven accidents—before this controversy with CASA arose, which I will come to in a moment—not a single one had the slightest, remotest element of fatigue associated with it. It just so happened that in all seven cases the bloke had had a very long and adequate night’s sleep—and there was no-one sharing his sleep, if you get my drift. There was no fatigue element, yet these people were going to go out and impose a regime that would have nearly doubled the cost of mustering cattle on the big runs in the areas I represent—not to achieve a single iota of extra safety. Worse still: they were acting out of complaints by one company against another company. So they acted at the behest of a big corporate company against an owner-operated company in North Queensland.

The point I am coming to is that I have written to CASA again and again. I have had personal meetings with them to plead with them to put electrical powerline sounders on helicopters, because five of those seven deaths were the result of helicopters running into powerlines. That is the gravest of dangers that continues for any helicopter operator. Whether he is a tourist operator or a parachute facilitator or a crop duster helicopter—whatever the hell he is—the greatest danger is powerlines. It is a very simple device. When you come close to a powerline, it starts shrieking and tells you: ‘Hey! Stop! Stop where you are. Don’t go any further, because you are about to run into a powerline.’

The cost of these units is $5,000. If you are paying a couple of hundred thousand dollars for a helicopter, $5,000 is not a lot of money one way or the other. Purchased in bulk—through a government contract, of course—I would say they would probably be under $3,000. But CASA has not done one single thing to put the sounders in. There will be friends of mine who will die in the next five or 10 years as a result of the irresponsibility of these people. These are the same people who said: ‘You can’t take the chopper into Karumba.’ I will tell you why: because they get a big buzz out of the power. They get a big buzz out of deciding who will live and who will die. It made them feel really powerful. It was the only reason that this occurred.

The remarks I have just made are unassailable. There is nothing in the regulations that requires an electricity transmission line sounder on helicopters—nothing at all. I have spoken to hundreds of mustering pilots over the years, and they all say: ‘Yeah, it would be a good idea, but I don’t do it, Bobby, because I drive very safely.’ These blokes all consider themselves bulletproof. They are blokes who are roughriders in rodeos and play rugby league football. The chopper pilots are a pretty good mob. They are my mob, and I know them all well. They are people who are of the very essence of the business that they are in. They love the sense of adventure and excitement—and, of course, they believe they are bulletproof. Take the example of safety belts in cars: all of the opinion polls that were taken before safety belts came in said people did not think they should be compulsory. But no-one put them in voluntarily; that had to be done by the government. It is a similar situation here.

So I would plead with the minister. I do not like the increased search and seizure provisions. These are people who have clearly demonstrated—in the case of Karumba—that they like throwing their weight around and having their power. People are terrified of them. Every single person involved in aviation in Australia is absolutely terrified of them—and quite rightly so. They literally have the power of life and death, and they have the power of taking your income away from you as well. We have reached a situation in North Queensland where we really have to ring up probably a week in advance now to get aeroplanes, because there are no aeroplanes left. We had five charter operators working out of Townsville, and now we have effectively one—that is all. Where we had maybe 20 charter planes there, we might now have two or three at the most.

People tell me—not necessarily people in Townsville—that CASA has imposed such heavy cost burdens upon this industry that they no longer can operate, and ‘If we charge what we have to charge to make a quid, there’d be no business out there; no-one would use us.’ That is the reason behind the ridiculously high charges, but they have to charge like that to meet the requirements. These people have no reason to tell me lies, and they did not say these things with any vindictiveness towards CASA—far from it. I said to them, ‘Costs have doubled over the last seven or 10 years’—or whatever it was; it might have been three years—and they said, ‘Mate, the costs of meeting the regulations these days have exploded; they’ve skyrocketed.’

People in the country, where I come from, will die if we do not have aeroplanes. It has become almost impossible to have aeroplanes. I would say that, when I was elected to parliament, we had 100 or maybe 200 aeroplanes in country North Queensland—if I could use that expression. I doubt whether we would have 15 or 20 now. Why have they gone? The price of an aeroplane has not increased all that much. The price of fuel most certainly has, but that is not a huge item in this case. And the wages for pilots have hardly moved much at all, unfortunately.

There are rules. Rules are made for the guidance of wise men and the obedience of fools, and every single person who has lived under a regime of rules will know that that is a very, very true thing to say. But this has a different dimension to it. When you know that people’s lives were placed at risk at Karumba due to something which cannot be described in any other way except pedantic arrogance, you know that that is a group that needs to be called into question. CASA are there to deliver safety for people. How conscious are these people of safety when a thousand human beings were left for three hours in tiny, glorified dinghies, in raging, crocodile-infested floodwaters, thanks to their decision—which not a single operator in Queensland thought was anything more than ridiculous?

When I rang people, they could not understand why I was ringing them. One person said, ‘How could it be dangerous? Are there storms around?’ I said, ‘No. If there are storms around that is a dangerous situation, but I’m not talking about storms; I am just talking about an ordinary, star-lit night.’ He said, ‘Well, why wouldn’t you do it?’ And I said, ‘Because they won’t give us a clearance. The bloke has to risk his job’, and—according to them—risk his life. We all know that there is no risk to life over and above what is the normal risk with a helicopter. We know that, but they are now told that they risk losing their job if they go in and rescue someone. I am sure that, if called upon, those young chopper pilots—decent, terrific people; exciting people to be with, actually, in every respect—would have gone in and risked their jobs. I do not think that they would have been risking their lives, but I think that they most certainly would have been risking their jobs. That stress was put upon them by CASA. I see no reason to praise this organisation—none whatsoever—and I see every reason to condemn them. (Time expired)

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