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

I couldn’t quite see there for the shine coming off his head! I had two very bad examples of the performance of the exceptional circumstances committee, where they were very dramatically wrong and then refused to admit their mistake. Whether it was the fault of the Queensland government or the federal government was never clearly indicated, but at the present moment, if the minister could take cognisance of this fact, we have had the second-worst flood in Ingham or Normanton’s history, in 130 years of European occupation, and we do not have ‘exceptional circumstances’. We are returning the people who are overseeing the board and saying, ‘They’ve done a good job; we should leave them there.’ I have to say that I am very curious to know how they justify not giving exceptional circumstances. We would desperately like the minister to take cognisance of the very serious plight of the sugarcane farmers at Ingham and, on the other side of the Great Dividing Range, the graziers, right through, certainly from Croydon and arguably from Georgetown, all the way to Normanton—right across North Queensland.

Finally, I find myself in the situation of having to ask the minister to do a very difficult job. Well, I don’t think it is all that difficult a job. I am sure a person of his capacity would not find this a difficult job. The Reserve Bank of Australia is putting out money at three per cent. All we are saying is: could we please have some of that money at two per cent—so, we might need a million dollars in subsidy—and can we restructure our existing loans? Restructuring is a nice sort of phrase that obfuscates, but, with the money that we owe the banks, they have got us locked into overdraft at 12 and 15 per cent at the present moment. That is going to destroy all of the sugarcane farmers. And when their blocks are sold up, it will not be sugarcane farmers that buy those blocks; it will be lifestylers. Almost every single sugarcane block that is going onto the market is being bought by lifestylers We will close the mills. The AWA will lose their membership of 5,000 people. And this country will lose enormous income which it is enjoying at the present moment in the sugar belt. Over in the cattle belt, if we do not get this money it will take us 15 to 20 years to build our numbers back up to where they are at the present moment. If we get this money we can buy heifers or weaners, many of which would have been spayed—and they won’t be spayed; they will be purchased as breeders and we will replenish our herds so that we can keep this great beef industry of Australia going.

Turning back to the exceptional circumstances, what we are asking the government for is a loan to restructure our existing loans. If we get exceptional circumstances then our existing loans—and many of these loans are in overdraft at 12 and 15 per cent—can be restructured, at the very least at three per cent from the Reserve Bank; but I would hope that the government’s generosity could find $1 million out of the $270,000,000,000 it is going to spend this year to subsidise those loans down to two per cent. I just think there is a principle involved here.

I was soundly criticised—some would say ‘given a flogging’—when we moved the QIDC, the Queensland state bank, to become a fully fledged bank. They accused me of having set the bank up to look after my rich cocky mates. There was no doubt that I was one of the two ministers who had responsibility for the state bank of Queensland, the QIDC—and I was probably the one who had the more immediate responsibility. It was the Rural Reconstruction Board before it became the QIDC. It was set up on the premise that in bad times we would borrow money and lend it out to our farmers and to other businesses and industries in trouble. We would borrow the money and lend it out. The great advantage with the farmers was that they could provide our bank with security. Farming is a magnificently secure lending operation for banks. Land prices, even in the worst situations, do not tend to collapse; that is very rare. In fact, the wool collapse was the only time in my lifetime that we saw land prices go down. The banks have super security. So we could go in and lend the money through the QIDC, knowing that we had super security for that money.

In the old Queensland government we were regarded as pretty cunning blokes—and we were, because when things came good it was not the Bank of New South Wales or the Westpac bank, as it is now, or the National Bank that had that account; it was the QIDC that had that account. We took huge amounts of magnificently profitable business out from under the mainstream banks. They would not carry these people, they would not help these people in their times of plight and necessity—in fact, they tripped them into overdraft rates and cost them a fortune. I will go no further than myself, who started life as a humble labourer at Mount Isa Mines and who owned 250,000 acres unencumbered in the Gulf Country when I went into parliament. I was on 29 per cent interest rates in the second last year on Saint Francis station.

I do not want to go into the details of how farmers get tied into that sort of situation, but the banks say: ‘You’re an at-risk industry, so there’s an extra 2½ per cent. You’re an at-risk person, so there’s another 2½ per cent on top of that. You’re on overdraft rates, we’re not going to roll your loan over, so there’s another 3½ per cent on top of that.’ And, because it is an at-risk area, they lob another 2½ per cent on top of that again. Then they have charges each year. They want the thing to be valued every two seconds. There are numerous charges like that. It worked out to 29 per cent in our second last year on Saint Francis.

These poor people are suffering that sort of oppression at the present moment. They should not have to. They are decent, hardworking people who have done absolutely nothing wrong. They have been thrown a bit of a curved ball here. All they need is a little bit of time. If you have a bloke who knows how to run a cattle station in the gulf, you want to keep him there. These blokes know how to run a sugarcane farm and will continue as sugarcane farmers—they are not lifestylers who will buy a farm, sit on it and do nothing with it. They are providing jobs for mill workers. There are 5,000 AWU members alone in that industry before you get to the AMWSU and all the other unions, which are very good representatives.

Minister, please can you give us exceptional circumstances so we can transfer those bank loans to an interest rate that we can live with, instead of being put on a punitive interest rate and being punished for something we have not done and are totally innocent of. It is in the public interest to keep in the gulf those people who know how to run a property in the gulf. You do not learn overnight how to run a property in the gulf. I speak with very great authority, having had cattle in the Gulf Country all of my adult life. These people are experts in their field. They have honorary degrees from the university of hard knocks, and they are well deserved—and it is similar in the sugar industry. We have to get those exceptional circumstances.

I fail to understand how, when we have had the second worst flood in 150 years of white settlement, it is not an exceptional circumstance. Everyone thinks in terms of drought. In North Queensland we do not have droughts; we have floods. In the days of enlightened government we had banks. There were great men in Australia’s history. King O’Malley set up the Commonwealth Bank. Ted Theodore knew the answers to the Depression. Both Malcolm Fraser and Paul Keating quoted him as one of their two heroes, and of course if you go into my office you will see a big picture of ‘Red’ Ted on the wall. He set up the Commonwealth Development Bank. McEwen put huge amounts of money in the Commonwealth Development Bank and set up the Primary Industry Bank and the AIDC. They did that because they knew we needed these sources of funds so that we would not have to put upon our minister to go cap in hand to Treasury and ask for a loan that was going to return no benefit to the Treasury, but we did it because we were making huge profits out of it, to be quite frank. (Time expired)

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