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

We are all actors on a fleeting stage, as a famous man once said. Is it fair that one person should get $30,000 for having a baby, and the benefit that flows to another person is a meagre $7,000? It seems to me to be very unfair. To add to that burden of unfairness, the children of the stay-at-home mum do not go to child care. So they are not absorbing taxes—taxes that need to be paid to pay for the childcare facilities which are heavily subsidised, as we are all well aware. They are saving the government a substantial amount of money.

All that is being asked for here is fairness. There is only so much money to go around. What is being said here is that a stay-at-home mum should get an allocation of money and the person who chooses to work, to follow a career pathway, should get the same amount of money. Is one better than the other? Why should one group be discriminated against and the other group be subsidised by the public purse? It seems to me eminently unfair. It also strikes me as a good example of just how out of step we are in this place—and I must start with a criticism of myself, because I had not seen the very discriminatory allocation of funding that is taking place at the present time.

As I have pointed out on many occasions in this place, Australians are a vanishing race. There cannot be a more definitive judgment upon a race of people than if they simply eliminate themselves from the gene pool. We belong to a race of people called Australians who are simply eliminating themselves from the gene pool. When 20 Australians die they are replaced by 17 Australians. I read a major article in the Australian by the leading demographer in Australia at the time, Dr Bob Birrell, a professor at Monash University. In the article he said that the population of Australia in 100 years time would be seven million people. I took off at a hundred miles an hour down to the library because I thought that this had to be wrong—but he seemed like a very eminent person. The librarian who did demography work said, ‘It’s very simple to work out: if 20 Australians are replaced by 17 and then that generation dies off and they are replaced by 13 and that generation dies off and they are replaced by 10, you can do the mathematics yourself, Bob,’ and I did—and yes, that is correct. We will go from the current population down to a population of seven million people—and they will be very, very old people.

So, as a race of people, have we been successful? Have our belief systems dominated over the belief systems of other people on the planet? Where have those belief systems taken us? Where have those valued judgments that we have made in this place taken us? They have taken us to a situation of complete elimination of the human genome—or DNA. That must be the ultimate judgment on whether or not your decisions are right.

We have put this great value upon careers—whether for a man or a woman—and the value judgments that have been made in this place put them as far more important than having some little kid to love or some little kid to love you as a parent. We are here today talking about child care. The difficulty is that we are in this paradigm of child care and we cannot get ourselves out of this paradigm. We cannot think in terms of looking after the women who decide that they need to have a family and they need to bring up that family properly.

I represent farming areas. Unfortunately, within two years of this place deciding almost unanimously to deregulate the dairy industry, there was a farmer committing suicide every four days in Australia. I am afraid that an awful lot of those were in my area, because the sugar industry was also deregulated. The issue really rides higher than that. It is a place where we have a very high suicide rate, both by historical standards and by standards throughout Australia. Each of the people who committed suicide was a man. They were each moderately young. I asked, ‘What are the reasons here?’ People who have made a great study of it at this place asked, ‘How many male schoolteachers do we have?’ This gets back to roles, belief systems and value judgments when we are sitting here talking about child care. ‘How many male teachers do we have in this town at our high schools?’ and I said, ‘None.’ There might actually be one or two, but it is a fair call to say, ‘None.’ He said, ‘How many men do we have working at the banks in this town?’ Out of about 50 or 60 people working at the banks, I said there were none. He said, ‘How many male doctors do we have?’ I said, ‘Fifty-fifty,’ but I was wrong—it was sixty-forty. There are more female doctors now than males.

He said, ‘What exactly is the role of the male in modern society?’ I refer again—it sounds like I read Marie Claire a fair bit—to a quote from the ex-editor of the Women’s Weekly. She said one of the things that she was going to devote the rest of her life to was getting a fair go for her son because men do not really get a fair go in Australian society. There really is no place for men. This bloke added to that. He said, ‘You know, 40 per cent of the children in this town have no father.’ They are brought up with no male role that they can look to. That also means that there is a whole stack of men in this town who have no family and in 72 per cent of cases it is the wife who walks. She walks out and, under child support, the man is condemned to penury for the rest of his life and he will not be able to get married again.

When you add all these things up, you get a viewpoint where it does not really surprise you that we have the highest juvenile male suicide rate in the world. It does not really surprise us. Really, when you analyse it, it would be surprising if we did not have the highest juvenile male suicide rate in the world. So there has to be a reorientation and we have to be jerked out of the paradigm where we think only in terms of careers—people who are very self-centred, who are only thinking about advancing themselves. It is a very sad reflection upon a race of people that we do not love kids enough to have kids and there will be a terrible price to be paid for that decision further down the track. We are biting the bullet now with the cost of aged care, which is increasingly crippling the finances of the government of Australia and the people of Australia.

I think the point that is made by Kids First is a very valid point. The president has an honours degree in law from the university—she is no intellectual lightweight—and she makes a very valid point. I do not condemn anyone else. I will start with my own condemnation because my initial thinking was to praise both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. I think that they are both people who would think the same as me when their attention is drawn to this fact and reconsider the position that they have taken. Mr Acting Speaker, if you think for even a single second about the fate of a young family trying to have their own home and to have kids and about the financial burden which that places upon them, then you can see the very difficult choices which they have to make out there—choices which we impose upon them. I think that most of the difficult choices have been created by the value system coming out of this place. I think it behoves us, in a debate such as this, to reorient our thinking and to go into a paradigm where Australians will be a growing race. I personally have a very great opinion of Australians as a race of people. I think we have an immense amount to be proud of and it is right and proper that there should be more of us and that we should not be a vanishing race.

See this speech in context