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

That is a very good contribution from the honourable member, who knows this well. The steel industry is there because the federal government of the day, under John Button—who was sacked really for what he did here, I might add—put some $500 million behind John Prescott and his initiatives in conjunction with the steel industry of Australia and made us the most competitive steel industry in the world. They took us from 70 tonne per man per year not to the world’s best of 240 but to 700 tonne per man per year. That is how efficient that industry was under the enlightened government. That is nation building but there is nothing in this budget. The member for Isaacs went through it all. There is solar and wind power—that is very nice, it will help the environment. I am not condemning it; I am just saying do not call it nation building. It is a lie to call that nation building. Do not say that green jobs are nation building. That is nation destruction. That will take jobs away. If you demand that we do it this way when the electricity costs are going to be $200 instead of $40 a megawatt, you will be closing industries all over Australia—if you proceed down that path, which the government seems determined to do.

And sure, it is nice to have bigger classrooms for our kids—although, when we are having fewer kids, I would wonder about the wisdom of going in that direction. It is nice to have swimming pools, it is nice to cut our traffic flow times in the cities—those are all nice things, but do not call them nation building. They are not nation building.

Let me tell you what nation building is. Nation building is just providing approval for us to build a dam where all the water is in Australia. Three-quarters of our water is in the north of the continent which, except for a tiny belt of sugar cane on the coast, produces virtually no agricultural production. We are trying to do all the agricultural production down south where there is no water. This is extraordinary. Just give us an approval for 120,000 hectares of irrigation and let us be nice to the greenies and the environment because it will be producing ethanol. As Mr Gore said in his book An inconvenient truth, his first solution is ethanol. He said it reduces CO2 by 29 per cent. Sugar cane does not reduce CO2 by 29 per cent; it reduces it by 194 per cent because we do not plough. We do not put the steel through the ground or we do it once every six years. Unlike growing corn where you have to put the steel through the ground four or five times a year, with sugar cane we put it through once every five or six years. So the benefit for the environment is ginormous here—ginormous!

Just as good, the bagasse—what is left after you take the sugar out and turn it into ethanol—is then burnt to produce power. We can produce 25 per cent of North Queensland’s power and about four per cent of Australia’s power, which would be clean renewable energy. Bagasse is like ethanol—you burn it, CO2 goes up, but the next year every hectare of sugar cane pulls 73 tonne of CO2 back down out of the atmosphere and into the ground. So instead of it going up and staying there, it is now going around in a circle and that is what we mean when we talk about renewables.

Just give us the approval because the project will pay for itself. It would be nice to give us some of the superannuation money and to give us 10 per cent ethanol in our petrol, instead of what the last government did which was to give us a tax on ethanol, and Australia is the only country in the world to tax ethanol. We can do this one ourselves. Just give us the approval.

Probably everyone in this chamber would be familiar with Joe Gutnick. He is a very prominent man in industry and commerce in Australia. He wants to build a phosphate mine with money from India. India has a huge population to feed. They must fertilise their fields every year. They do not particularly like the Americans; they do not buy fertiliser from the Americans. They most certainly will not buy it—for religious and conflict reasons—from the Moslem or Arabic countries. They buy most of it from Russia at the moment but they are going to buy it from Australia. They are going to buy it from their own mine, which Joe Gutnick is setting up here in Australia. That is where they will get their superphosphate from.

Even if dumb government does not force them to do some upgrading in Australia—even if that does not happen—we will still probably get $3,000 million a year out of this project. If it is done the way that I would like to see it done, with a third of that being forced to be processed here in Australia, we will get $5,000 million a year. But that mine cannot go ahead without increasing rail capacity through an upgrading of the line from Mount Isa back to Townsville, and it cannot be done without north-west Queensland—the biggest mineral province on earth, producing $15,000 million a year—getting electricity capacity.

What we say is: ‘Give us that transmission line and we will give you an extra $5,000 million a year in income for the Australian economy. Give us that rail capacity’—and both these things will cost no more than $200 million or $300 million—’and we will give you $5,000 million a year in income for the Australian economy. That will give you back in taxation revenue $1,500 million a year, at the very least.’ That is the sort of logic used by the great men of Australian history—the men whose pictures we have up on our walls, like Theodore, Ben Chifley, Jack McEwen and Bjelke-Petersen. Those were great men who created the wealth that we enjoy here in Australia today. (Time expired)

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