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

Qantas has announced further cutbacks to their maintenance staff. We have a government in power in Australia that do not seem to have any interest whatsoever in the fact that Qantas is being hollowed out. The only remotely nice thing I could say about the federal government is that they would be extremely better than their opponents, who are the last of the great free traders. Well, you free trade and you hand your Qantas over to overseas interests—as you have handed your entire mining industry over to foreign interests. I see one gentleman over here with a grin on his face. Well, I would not have thought it was funny when the six great mining companies in Australia that accounted for 82 per cent of this nation's mining output under his government were handed over to foreign ownership. Would I have been proud of that?

As to the dairy industry—every single factory in Australia was owned by Australians. You people handed over four-fifths of those factories to foreign ownership, and then you deregulated us so they could pay what they felt like to us, to we poor farmers. You people do not listen to your constituents, but I would like you to have been on the telephone yesterday to one of my constituents and to have listened to the plight of the dairy farmers—the plight that you left them in in Australia. Within two years of your deregulation, there was a farmer committing suicide in this country every four days. Those are not my statistics—they are your statistics. And do you know what your leader on agriculture, your leader of the National Party said? He said, 'Your figures are wrong.' That was his reaction: 'Your figures are wrong.' He attacked the figures.

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