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

I was very pleased to be able to listen to the speech of the previous speaker. He is an intelligent observer and an intelligent member of parliament, and I think he is very conscientious as well. But he has said that the Nation-building Funds Amendment Bill 2009 will mean less time wasted in cars, that car-idling time will be saved, that there will be more of a free flow of information via the broadband, that there will be swimming pools, that there will be more space in our classrooms, that there will be better traffic flows in outer Melbourne and that there will be more port facilities for exported manufactured goods. I am rather curious to know what manufactured goods we export and what we would have in the past.

Clearly we cannot compete against cheap labour in a lot of the Asian countries. They still have very cheap labour. They have economies of scale that we can only dream of. They have captive home markets, through tariffs, of hundreds of millions of people. We have no captive home markets. We have no tariffs. But, even if we did, we only have 20 million people. So we have no economies of scale. They have government-provided capital. If they want to build a factory, the government provides them with the money to build it. We have got none of those things. We cannot possibly compete in manufacturing. To say that you want to expand a port for manufactured items is quite ridiculous.

To give you specifics on my contention, I can talk about the motor vehicle industry. Seventy-two per cent of the motor vehicles purchased in Australia were Australian made in 1984, before that ratbag Mr Keating introduced his free markets. It was not a ratbag idea but it was a ratbag idea when nobody else in the world was doing it. It was an incredibly disastrous move when nobody else in the world was doing it. But he could not be told, he would not listen to reason and he would not look at reality. So now we have only 19 per cent—I have not got the latest figures but two years ago only 19 per cent of the cars purchased in Australia were Australian made. Over the next 10 years, on present trends, it will only be five per cent. So I do not know why you are expanding the port down there. The Liberals told me when they were building the railway line through the centre of Australia that it was going to cut the cost of imports dramatically. I said, ‘Oh, it’s a subsidy for imports,’ and no-one at the table laughed. It was quite extraordinary to me. I thought it was quite a good joke. But nobody laughed. They took it quite seriously. Was the previous speaker erudite? Yes. Intelligent? Yes. Conscientious? Yes.

I turn to the issue of green jobs. You must understand that if you want solar power—and I am not saying it is not a desirable social or environmental aspiration—you will be less competitive and all of your industries will be running on an extra handicap. Not only do we not have the cheap labour, not only do we not have the economies of scale and not only do we not have government investment but now we are asking them to run on a handicap. Let me be very specific. I was the Minister for Mines and Energy in Queensland and I secured the national prize for science in 1985 or 1986. As the minister, I personally won the national prize for science for the solar energy that we put into the first standalone system in the world on Coconut Island. So I speak with some considerable authority in these areas. I had a $30 million decision to make, which in terms of today’s money would be probably the best part of $100 million, in electrifying the Torres Strait islands. In that situation it is cheaper, on an isolated island in the Torres Strait, to put in solar power. But $140 to $200 a megawatt is the cost of solar or wind power. The cost to grid system power is $40. If you want to render every single industry in this country non-competitive, then go down that pathway. We have people who stand up here and say, ‘Oh, we will have 20 per cent renewables; isn’t that wonderful and marvellous?’ Yes, it is, but you just put the job of every single person in this country at risk. This is because you have made their industry—whether it is manufacturing, mining or agriculture—less competitive. You have put another handicap on the runners here in our country. Just how much burden do you think they can carry before they fall over? Look at the car industry and look at the agricultural industries of Australia and you will see that the last government, and the government before it, placed such a burden upon our industries that they are now falling over.

It is no use the opposition coming in here and saying what remarkably wonderful economic performers they were. Yes, they balanced the government budget, and they deserve credit for that, but did they balance the country’s budget? No, it was the most unbalanced budget in Australian history. The current account deficit was running at levels that simply could not be comprehended by anyone that had followed Australian economic history for any period of time.

The previous speaker, the member for Isaacs, also commented upon that fact. It troubles me deeply that the opposition is constantly attacking the government for spending money and deficit budgeting. I do not know whether these people are economically illiterate, but let me just compare three countries: Canada, New Zealand and Australia—dummies. The colonial pock marks were flashing in neon lights in 1932. Hjalmar Schacht took the Germans on an expansionary policy, John Maynard Keynes took Great Britain on an expansionary policy and Shikata, the Japanese economist, took Japan on an expansionary monetary policy. America, belatedly, went on an expansionary policy. The only three countries on earth that did not—the three dummy countries—were Canada, New Zealand and Australia. You can go down to the library and get any of the books out on the Depression and look at the graphs for those three countries.

The last speaker said that they are advocating exactly the same policies that they advocated in 1932. That is correct. It is really scary. They have learned absolutely nothing. They plunged Australia into the worst possible depression on earth. There is not another country in the world where anyone is advocating deflationary or non-spending policies. If the opposition were concentrating their attack upon the government and this nation-building amendment, as a government you have really got a hide to call this ‘nation building’. Building bikeways and putting insulation vats into your roof is not nation building. It is anything but nation building.

I have just done a series of interviews with the media—I do not know how much media we get out of these things—and I have said that if you want to see whether this is a nation-building budget look no further than the allocation of money for the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. That is a nation-building department, a producer department. It has been reduced from $3,000 million down to $2,000 million. On the other hand, an anti-nation-building department is the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts, whose job it is to stop us from building anything in this nation. I can give you a thousand examples from my own backyard without drawing breath. The department that stops things from happening—and, Mr Deputy Speaker Adams, you would be an expert in this area—has had its budget increased from $4,500 million to $6,000 million. So we have a budget and an amendment in the House touted as nation building which increases the money for the anti-nation-building portfolios and decreases it for the nation-building portfolios. This is Nineteen Eighty-Four—the brave new world is with us. If ever there was a case of doublespeak, it has to be calling this ‘nation building’.

It behoves me to point out to the House what nation building is, because clearly the opposition have no understanding of it whatsoever. In 13 years they never did one single dollar of nation building. The government have been there now for half their term, 18 months, and they have clearly demonstrated in this budget and in this amendment before the House that they simply do not understand what nation building is. I will tell you what it is. Nation building is Ted Theodore, the most important man in Australian history, using government money to build all of the sugar mills in Australia. They were almost all built with government money. That is nation building. There are 40,000 Australians employed in those sugar mills today as a result of the great wisdom and perspicacity of that one man and his enlightened governments, the early Labor governments of the last century.

Ben Chifley—probably the greatest Prime Minister we have had in this country, excluding Jack McEwen, because he was there for only a brief period—built the Holden motor car factory with government money. It was not GMH money; it was government money. That was nation building. That factory is still there today employing 5,000 or 6,000 Australians. It is still making most of the cars produced in Australia.

The building of the Snowy Mountains hydro, which is producing cheap, clean energy for Australia—and will do so forever—was built by Ben Chifley and government money. Governments do not build power stations in Australia any more. If you ask commerce to build a power station, it will build a power station where it has customers. There were no customers for the Snowy. It was built in the hope that customers would come. Massive areas came under irrigation. The great agricultural juggernaut of Australia took off with the diversion of those waters providing secure water supply to all the farmers along the Murray River. The vast bulk of Australia’s agricultural production comes from that area and security of production was provided by water from the Snowy. It was all government money, but in the last 22 years we have not built a dam in Australia—not one single dam. Not one single factory of any significance has been built with government money in this country.

When I was a young man, just elected to parliament, the government of Queensland was in the process of building a giant power station that did not have a single customer. Not one single megawatt of that 1,400 megawatts of electricity had a customer. Queensland built a giant railway line to a little siding called Blackwater. There was not one single mine out there to service that railway line. That would be unthinkable today. People would expect private enterprise to build it. In that day and age, governments built them because they had confidence in our country. That was nation building. As a result of that giant power station and that giant railway line, Australia today has a coal industry and an aluminium industry.

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