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

I rise in this condolence motion to extend my deepest sympathies to the Barbagello family. I have worked with diesel pumps down wells and taken lighted candles down to see if it was safe to find it was not safe. It is very difficult to conceive that, even in a room, this could have happened. It is just one of those things that did happen as a direct result of the power being out. When I was minister for power in Queensland, I decided that we really had to put all future transmission lines underground on what we might call ‘Cyclone Alley’ along the coast. We do not want people to get too carried away that we are a disaster zone up there. We are not. In the last six years we have had two terrible cyclones outside of Cyclone Tracy, the worst cyclones in Australian history. But in the 135 years before that we only had two bad cyclones. So, yes, we do get a lot of cyclones but they are not difficult events for us to cope with.

I tried to get some publicity on the night before the cyclone to tell people that they should understand that we lost 2,000 houses in Cyclone Larry but that there were 9,000 houses that were not destroyed. These houses are built like fortresses. We had 320 kilometre an hour winds and the houses were just like the day they were made after the cyclone. Our building code and—for once I can say—the legislators have done a brilliant job. The scientists at James Cook University who have done the wind tunnel research have done an absolutely brilliant job. Most of the homes I have seen that were seriously damaged in Cyclone Larry were built before this or had not met the building codes, for reasons I will not go into.

I would ask both the Attorney-General, who is in the House now, and the previous minister not to say that everything is going well. I would never advise a minister to say that in this sort of situation. I have given a lot of thought to whether I should say these things, and I just cannot see that I cannot say them. I am not going to mention names here, but you can see these little pieces of paper that I have been carting around when I lost my notebook.

One person has no roof on his house, and they told him he cannot have any tarps for his house. I was in his house when he said this to me. There were 16 people at another house. A man from Cairns was there, and he was not allowed in to help his friends and his second cousin because people were not allowed into that area. Another gentleman cannot get out of his house because there are big logs all the way along and he does not have a chainsaw, and he cannot ring up because the towers are out.

Nearly 100 mobile telephone towers are still out, and we are at the sixth day of this cyclone. On the second day of Cyclone Larry, all the towers were operating. I praise Optus. They have put in mobile towers in a number of centres and given out free telephones. I am not going to stand up and criticise everyone. I want to praise Optus. The rest of it stands for your own reading. There are three people who have been harmed. They are not dead, although I think one of them will ultimately die. If there had been telephones, maybe those three people would not have reached the situation that they have reached now. Those three people will be totally disabled for life.

Another gentleman has no water, no phone, no electricity, no tarps—no anything. Another person said, ‘Could you please speak to the business houses in Tully,’ because 20 of them cannot operate because they cannot get tarps and they cannot get access to the assistance they need. One of them said, ‘There’s asbestos in the building next door and maybe some of it, with the rainfall that is coming down, could come into our place.’ People imposed upon him that all his staff now have to work with masks on. That did not help him.

There are at least six people in these lists who went to get tarps and were told they could not put the tarps on the roof if they did not have proper authority—that is, they had not been properly trained to put tarps on the roof. I would say that that is ridiculous except that I got it from seven separate people. I have not got all my little bits of paper here but I have got some of them.

For one of those people, yes, it was not her house—legally you can do it if it is your house—but she owns a guesthouse and there were a lot of people in the guesthouse. After two, three or four days of trying, she got a tarp from friends and put it up. One of the officers—official people who are supposed to be helping us; they are not helping us but some of them are really creating great problems for us—told her to get down off the roof because she had no authorisation to put the tarp up. I cannot say in the Parliament of Australia what this lady said back to the official—and she continued putting the tarp on the roof.

I could go on and on and on. If you are down here in Canberra or if you are in Brisbane—if you are the head of the state of Queensland—and you are saying what a wonderful job everybody is doing and how well it is going and how heroic the people are, I am afraid that you are not going out to Tully Heads or to Hull Heads and looking people in the eye. Just to give you a scene from Taylor Street, Tully Heads: every single house is smashed to pieces. You can drive down the street and see the ocean through the houses on your left. In some of the houses on the right are the remnants of the houses on the left that have come over to that side. They are not cleaned out because there is nothing to clean out. The ocean has already done that for us. People are huddled around. Some of them have glazed eyes. Some of them are saying, ‘Come over here,’ passing words that I cannot repeat here and giving me a wave—a funny sort of wave with two fingers in the air. They have a carton of grog and they are doing their best to drown their sorrows, and I think that may be the best way to attack things.

They cannot get any help because they have no cars. They cannot get any help because nobody has come down to see them except to tell them: ‘We’re down here to look at things. We can’t do that for you.’ They cannot walk to get any help because Tully Heads is a long way away from the nearest town. They cannot get any help because they have no telephones. They cannot have a shower or a bath because there is no water, and they have no electricity.

If I could single out people for praise, the Ergon workers impressed me so much in Cyclone Larry and they have impressed me so much this time. You get up early in the morning, at six o’clock or something, and they seem to be out there working everywhere like ants, just going at it so hard, doing dangerous work in dangerous working conditions. Late at night, they are still out there. I praise the company as well because hundreds and hundreds of Ergon workers have been flown into North Queensland. When people say that the thing is working, that is as good as it could be working, so I single them out for praise, as I single Optus out for praise.

I would like to think that Peter Beattie and I go back a long way in our friendship. Peter and I got in a corner on the fifth day of Cyclone Larry—I think it was the fifth; it might have been the third day; all those things are confused in my mind—and the net result of that was that he made a decision, and three hours later General Cosgrove was appointed. I understand, although I do not know this—I have not had telephones, so I do not know what is going on in the world outside; if it were not for ABC radio I would have no idea what is going on except on a face-to-face basis with these people—that something like 30 small towns have been destroyed. I would say that in Tully, which is the biggest of the towns, with maybe 6,000 people, one in 20 houses is destroyed and one in five is very seriously damaged. In maybe one in 10 the damage is so critical that the insurance company may insist that the house be rebuilt. That is in Tully, and that was not the eye of the storm. Tully Heads and Hull Heads were in the eye of the storm. That is the picture from the coalface.

You have people over here sitting around doing nothing, you have tarpaulins in a shed and you have no-one being told to distribute them. People come in and they are told, ‘No, you’re not allowed to do it because you might hurt yourself when you climb up there on the house with that tarpaulin.’ Whether that is real or not I do not know, but seven people have told me that and I have to accept it. All I know is that there most certainly are tarpaulins in the shed. There most certainly are close to 1,000 houses that need those tarpaulins. Very few houses have tarpaulins on them. There is no water and no food. As a result of discussions yesterday, we now have distribution points for water and food. But—heavens!—this is on day 6 from ground zero, and we say things are working well.

I will go back to Cyclone Larry and the decision that was taken—I think it was on the fourth day, if my memory serves me correctly—that Cosgrove should be brought in. There were a lot of people who criticised ‘St Peter’, as I call him, and criticised the decision and criticised the way that it worked. But I will say this: Cosgrove was appointed at three o’clock in the afternoon. I think it was Tuesday. By Wednesday at 11 o’clock he was in the streets of Innisfail. The mayor did not share our view on the decision, but I got the rest of the councillors together and we walked down the street behind Peter Cosgrove to say, ‘We are behind this man. This is the bloke that’s in charge now; everyone understand that.’ He walked the streets, face to face with people.

For the next six weeks, as far as I can make out, every single waking hour that man was eyeballing the people who were in dreadful pain. A lot of people came through that psychologically for no other reason than that Cosgrove was there, standing in front of them, eyeballing them. He was a powerful man who could ring up the Premier or the Prime Minister in the next second and get them on the telephone. The attitude was: ‘Here he is, coming to see poor little me. I haven’t even got a house. I’m just a banana worker on no money at all, but this bloke cares about me.’ If he was not doing that then he was directing traffic and he was delivering the services.

I have thought about this a lot. A lot of those services are not being delivered this time. They are simply not being delivered. I am informed that there has been a person appointed to be in charge of rebuilding after the cyclone. I am not going to go into any more details than that. The person is in Brisbane. Ground zero after Cyclone Larry was Innisfail. Ground zero this time is Tully. Peter Cosgrove was in ground zero as fast as was humanly possible and he was walking the streets. This time I am told that there is a person in charge and he is in Brisbane. He is based in Brisbane.

After Cyclone Larry I do not think I made a negative comment. I do not think I am on record making a negative comment—not that I made any comments at all; I never went near the media throughout that period. Another official there spent a lot of time with the media and he got annihilated at the next election and I got a record majority. I just do not know whether it is a good idea to go racing around and performing in front of the media in these sorts of situations. I did not avoid the media for that reason. I had a choice of either doing media interviews or being on the telephone saying, ‘We need to cut so-and-so out because he is not in a good condition and he can’t get in or out of his home. He’s starting to get short of food and his situation’s starting to deteriorate.’ You had to have a preference for doing one of those two things. You really could not do both of them.

Both the Prime Minister and the Premier gave me their telephone numbers and they were accessible on an hourly basis throughout that period of time. It was hard for them to react and deliver services on the ground, but they put Cosgrove in and he could deliver services on the ground. People were scared of him because they knew that if they did not do what he told them to do then he would just ring up the Premier and it would be too bad for them. Similarly, he could ring up the Prime Minister and it would be too bad for them.

I will give you one other example from Cyclone Larry. On day 3, people did not have enough money to buy anything. We have the same situation now, but not quite so bad. People did not have any money. I went hungry on the second day. I never ate on the second day, until I drove back to Cairns that night, because I ran out of money. You do not think about it, but we live in a plastic card economy, not a cash economy. Suddenly you have to revert to a cash economy and you run out of money. I had plenty of money in my pocket on day 1, but by day 3 I had no money at all so I just went hungry. But I had a big four-wheel-drive car and I had petrol in the tank. A lot of people in these areas are banana workers who do not have cars. A lot of these people, like pensioners and single mothers, do not have cars. Even if they did, they did not have the petrol to get to Cairns. Some of them did not have any money to buy the petrol, if it was available, to get to Cairns.

I heard people criticising and saying, ‘All these people are asking for handouts.’ In actual fact, 70 per cent of them were not asking for handouts at all. All they wanted was the cash. Only 12 officers had been allocated to do that job and on the third day there were 600 people in the street who still could not get any cash out. I pay Peter Beattie a very great tribute. He was a man who had tremendous courage. I think it comes from his family. Peter walked straight into the crowd, which was almost in riot mode. I was very scared; I was in the middle of the crowd. You could not blame them. I said to one bloke, ‘Didn’t I speak to you yesterday?’ He said, ‘Yes, in exactly the same spot, Bobby.’ I said, ‘Didn’t you get your money?’ He said, ‘No. They finished at six o’clock and I was 12 short of the head of the queue so I had to come back this morning. Today the queue was so long—I came almost at sun-up—that I am only just back to where I was yesterday. As you can see, there are still 100 people in front of me. I may not get to the front of the queue today.’ John Howard reacted very quickly. I think we had 60 people handing out money by the fourth day after the cyclone.

Having disorientation and things not working is part of these situations. Our emergency services can cope with small situations but when you move into these sorts of situations you really have to have a Premier or Prime Minister running the show. In Queensland we have the unfortunate situation of having two areas that have been very badly damaged. I will be having discussions with the Prime Minister today on behalf of the people I represent. I have no criticism of the Prime Minister—not even remotely. She came straight up and stood in the teeming rain for a good hour. She was soaked to her skin. She talked to people at Cardwell. It took her an hour to get in on the chopper and nearly an hour to get out because of the safety measures. There was some danger involved in her visit. We thank her very much. I have no criticism of the Prime Minister. I really am the representative of the federal government on the ground and I did not attempt to speak to her until yesterday afternoon. I sincerely hope I will speak to her today because the situation is very grave indeed.

Frank Barbagello’s life was surrendered during the cyclone. It is terrible to reflect on the fact that his death helps all the other people realise the very serious problems that arise in these cyclones. If I had been living at Hull Heads or Tully Heads, I would have said: ‘We’ve heard this story 100 times. I’m not getting out. I’m staying here,’ and I would have been terrified out of my mind when I found myself in the sea—not on land; it was sea as far as the eye could see. With lightning flashing that night all I would have been able to see was sea, which was rising. It was up to eight feet in my house. If I was not on the second storey, I would have been drowned. Three people did stay down at Tully Heads and Hull Heads and they survived. Two climbed up to the second storey and were hanged on the rafters towards the end of it. A death like that brings home that we should not take lightly the warnings that we receive. Only one out of 20 cyclones really hits the coast, so we older North Queenslanders tend to yawn a bit when we hear a cyclone is coming.

The media started scaring people, which was a very good thing to do. I praise them greatly for doing that. They started the day before the cyclone and they kept it going for a good 20 hours. At that stage it had become a problem in itself. The Mayor of Newcastle rang me and said: ‘Bob, two years later you will get the problems.’ I have very good friends. One of them was a very tough rugby league player of great note. I just lost him. I said: ‘He’ll never be my friend again. I will never be able to communicate with him.’ All of his mates said the same thing to me. He said, ‘You are not Robinson Crusoe, Bob.’ Well he has come back to life. It is five or six years later and he has rejoined the human race. So many people will not be redeemable; they will not come back to life.

Yes, we had to face the cyclone, but I remember when I was a kid—and you may not have gone to the same school as me—that getting the cuts was nowhere near as bad as the terror while you were waiting to get the cuts. I think the terror has very bad psychological effects. I do not criticise the media. I think they did an absolutely brilliant job and I think that is one reason that we came out of it without any deaths. The town of Innisfail was founded by the Catholic Church, and they are still pretty influential people there. A lot of them believe profoundly in prayer. We came through two cyclones with 300 kilometre gale winds with no-one dying, except in an indirect way. The power of prayer may have been at work in this case.

The media made a very significant contribution to the fact that we did not have deaths, but there may have been a bit of overkill. I do not want to say that that is the definite truth at this stage—it is too early to assess that. That night I wanted to say in the media that, whilst we lost 2,000 houses, 9,000 survived and, of the 2,000 that were wrecked, the people inside them survived. We build houses like fortresses in this country. We have done a magnificent job with our building codes and God bless every single one of the builders who have implemented those codes for the safety that they have provided for us. I have faith in that fact. I do not know whether it was a bad decision, but the media chose not to run what I was saying there.

I say in this parliament to the people of Australia that at least 1,000 people tonight will not have a house to live in. No alternative accommodation has been provided for them and they have no tarpaulins. We have got water. I am not at liberty to single this person out, but an official in North Queensland is responsible. He is a great man. He has had to defy his superiors and his inferiors to deliver supply points where people can find out what is going on. They are in the horrific situation of not having a house, not having water, not having money, not having phones or any of these things and then not knowing anyone they can talk to and say: ‘Don’t you know we haven’t got any of these things? We are suffering dreadfully.’ They cannot even talk to anyone. Part of that problem is being addressed as I speak.

I thought a lot before I said these things today. I could not see how I could stand up and say anything without saying that. I hope this is interpreted in the right way. I ask everyone to please let me get home as fast as humanly possible. Let me be first on the speakers list on the levies et cetera.

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