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

No, the three Queensland members are affiliates of the Liberal Party. It is the Liberal National Party of Queensland—the LNP. You can check it out. Ring up the people that determine these things—the Electoral Commission. The tariff subsidy and the AQIS decisions were principally carried out by the last government, to their shame. The history books will read that it was the National Party ministers who carried out those actions, which destroyed industry after industry after industry in agriculture in Australia.

The last member talked about there being no level playing field in corrupt markets out there. I would like him to demonstrate—and I do not criticise him because he was not in this place at the time—one single act by the previous government that was a concession to the fact that we had a corrupt world marketplace. Just the opposite took place. Whether it was grapes, tobacco, oranges, sugar or whatever, these people imposed upon us a free market system and forced us into a situation where we were competing against other countries whose farmers had a 49 per cent tariff support level. It is quite extraordinary to me.

To those people in what is left of the National Party, the six members that are here: ask yourselves why you were reduced from 19 members when I came into this place to six members now. Ask yourselves that question. I can answer it for you. In speech after speech after speech in this place, and at great cost to myself, with vicious personal attacks in the party room, behind my back and in the media, I spoke up against the things that my own government was doing. It was not because I liked doing it. In the end it became a matter of personal integrity. I had to leave the party because clearly their policies were the antithesis of every policy I had been brought up with in the Country Party through most of my life and also in the National Party as it was in Queensland up until Bjelke-Petersen was stabbed in the back by his own National Party colleagues in 1987.

I will return to the bill proper. We do not have an exceptional circumstances declaration. The minister has been kind enough to give me another meeting on this, but we must bring the following to the minister’s attention. We have just experienced not the worst but the most extensive flooding in our history. In almost every town in North Queensland, in a belt from Ingham to Normanton—which is right through the centre of North Queensland—we have experienced either the second or third worst flooding in our entire history. If that is not an exceptional circumstance, I really do not know what is.

The last speaker talked about drought. We have droughts—there is no doubt about that—in North Queensland, but we do not have a drought at the start of the year. At the start of every year we have just the opposite; we have flooding. On the extent of the flooding, when I flew from Cloncurry to Normanton a few weeks ago, I thought, ‘Jeez, what a magnificent season,’ because it was green on either side of the aeroplane for the whole 400 kilometres. When I got within 150 kilometres of Normanton it turned brown. I had assumed the flooding was still there because there was 150 kilometres of brown. We were flying over green and suddenly we were flying over brown. When I got on the ground and said to Ashley Gallagher, a prominent grazier and ex-Mayor of Normanton, ‘It’s all brown; is the water still up?’ he said, ‘No; all the grass is dead and it won’t come back.’ This is much worse than a drought, because we have no grass at all.

Minister—through you, Mr Deputy Speaker—we desperately need an exceptional circumstances declaration. In that area, which is maybe 200 kilometres going east from Normanton and maybe 150 kilometres going south—do not pin me down on the exact dimensions of the catastrophe—it would appear that between 10 and 30 per cent of the graziers’ cattle has gone. If you lose 15 per cent of your cattle you have no chance of survival. I do not see how you could have any chance of survival. I must emphasise that the sugarcane farmers at Ingham are in exactly the same hole. They are talking about 20 and 25 per cent losses over a very large area of the Herbert River basin. That would probably be about seven to eight per cent of the Australian sugar industry, which—we have very good prices for sugar because India has withdrawn from the market—may well be bringing in $3,000 million a year.

No-one here bothers to read any books on the Depression, but if you read the books on the Depression in Australia—

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