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

He built the Story Bridge. He built the Burrinjuck Dam. He built the weir that supplies Sydney with its water supply even to this very day. He was not a fool. The Bradfield scheme, of course, in every way was an excellent proposal. It took a little tiny bit of the giant floodwaters of North Queensland and turned it inland into Lake Eyre. Lake Eyre would then evaporate—if it is full of water, it will evaporate—bringing 30 million megalitres across the Murray-Darling Basin, which is only 22 million megalitres, and it would make it rain in inland Australia, specifically over the Murray-Darling Basin. The other way he proposed that it could be done—but it was the day before big D9 dozers and heavy earthmoving equipment—was to dig a ditch up from Spencer Gulf and fill it that way.

In 1986 a professor from the University of Queensland who would prefer not to have his name mentioned, a bloke called Roy Stankey, who is the smartest man I have ever met in my lifetime and a very great Australian, and I drew up the revised Bradfield scheme. Roy Stankey's family were pioneering—drilling bores—back in the 1890s. Instead of sending the water down to Lake Eyre we said, 'We'll use it in inland Queensland on the great rolling black soil plains of North Queensland,' and we said that you would fill Lake Eyre from Spencer Gulf. Have we lost our vision in this country? Can't we think big anymore? Have we become intellectual pygmies? Is our vision restricted by closed lenses?

Let me move from the area of what should be to the area of what will be. Through the machinations of the democratic system, my little tiny political party that I belong to now has immense power. We have an extremely close relationship with the Speaker of the House, Peter Wellington, and he has said that he will back us on irrigation. We remain very confident that Minister Joyce will achieve big things down here for us as well.

I suppose it is a political point, but in the 26 years since Bjelke-Petersen was stabbed in the back there has hardly been a single irrigation licence issued in Queensland. In North Queensland, with 220 million megalitres of Australia's 380 million megalitres, we use just a little over one million megalitres. Out of 220 million megalitres we are allowed to use just one million megalitres. In the Murray-Darling, which covers a fifth of Australia's surface area, they have 22 million megalitres and even now they are still allowed to take seven million megalitres out. We have got 10 times that amount of water and we are only allowed to use one tenth of the water that they are using. What is wrong here? For 25 or 26 years—whatever it is—in Queensland there has been no water development whatsoever except the dirty, filthy corrupt thing which no-one else is going to talk about, and I am not going to talk about either. The one exception in that period of time is a disgrace to government.

After 25 years, the LNP gets elected and they then move to do something about it. This is their idea about doing something about it. This is according to the newspaper, because they will not give us any information—and the incoming government will not either, I might add. They issued three licences: one to the person who owns the biggest cattle station in Queensland, one to the third-biggest cattle owning corporation in Australia and the third one to an absolutely great bloke. He is a good mate of mine and one of the most fantastic blokes, but he also happens to be the fourth- or fifth- biggest cattle owner in Australia. We give a golden handshake to three giants, and nobody else gets anything.

Shortly, we will be releasing the KAP policy. That will synthesise and bring together all the great ideas that have been going around and distil them into a working framework from which we can move forward, and I hope we enjoy positive attitudes from the LNP and the ALP towards these water development programs. We are uniquely placed, and I served for almost a decade as the northern development minister. For those critics of where we have been going, I might add that we secured the Bradfield Scheme. Bjelke-Petersen announced it and put up $5 million to start engineering work immediately. That was back in the eighties. Some three months later, Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser also announced that they would be involved in the building of the Bradfield Scheme, so we got it. Within eight months both of them were gone, which tragically is what happened when Bradfield first put it up. Edward Theodore, of course, was a wildly enthusiastic backer, and he was gone eight months later because of the Great Depression. So we have not had a lot of luck.

That is the record, but let us forget about the past. Let us now say that the ALP has a positive attitude and the LNP has a positive attitude. I must thank both of them in this House, because the ALP decided to contribute $3 million for an update on the figures on the key dam for all development in North Queensland. The Hells Gate Dam is the key dam for Bradfield and for any movement forward. It is just west of Townsville on the third biggest river in Australia, the Burdekin River. The ALP allocated $3 million. They lost government, and the Liberal Party, after some consternation, sent the $3 million cheque through. So both parties in this place now have a positive attitude towards water development in the north. And this is a very big scheme.

Let me start where the scheme should start. Instead of the very rich and powerful, we have four—and one of them is a great mate of mine. There are few people on the planet I admire more than him. But why did you not give it to everybody? This proposal would give it to everybody. Some 1,500 families would benefit, not four and not a corporation, which is not even a person. In fact, everyone who would want water would be able to get it. Every single person would benefit at the first level.

There is a second level. I was heavily involved in negotiations to get the live cattle trade reopened. The Indonesian ambassador in the discussions with me said, 'We are paying $4 to land in Jakarta, and your cattlemen are being paid only $1.80. What is happening to the $2.20?' We were only getting $1.20 at that stage. The cattlemen were getting $1 and Indonesians were paying $4. What was going on here? I thought it was price gouging, and there is a lot of price gouging, but it really was not. It was just a hopelessly inefficient system we had for transferring live cattle out of Australia to Indonesia, the Philippines and everywhere else.

They hold them in a yard for a week and have to bring hay, in the case of Townsville, 500 or 600 kilometres from Clermont. In the case of Darwin, I do not know. But, in the case of Townsville, no-one is going to take cattle—if they have any brains—in a truck from Queensland nearly 1,000 kilometres across to Darwin. They just cannot afford that. They are only getting paid $1,000 for the beast and it probably costs them 160 or 170 bucks to get it there, so their margin would be gone.

All I can talk about with authority is Townsville. You have extremely valuable land being used for holding cattle. You do not hold cattle in the middle of a big city. That is the last place you would do that. The inefficiencies of doing that—having to bring the hay in to feed them for a week, keeping them under veterinary conditions and then bringing in the hay for the boat—are quite crazy. So we will be proposing 30 or 40 medium-sized irrigation projects that will see cattle walk from irrigation block to irrigation block, onto a ferry and out to a big boat, so that instead of $2 out of every $4 going to this inefficient system it would be in the range of 30c or 40c. This would benefit the people of Indonesia and would benefit the people of Australia. It would honour, from our side, my undertaking, as the self-appointed chief negotiator, to fix up the efficiencies, so they do not have to pay $4 but $3. Our cattlemen, instead of getting $1, would get $2 a kilogram. That is the second rung.

The third rung concerns towns like Mareeba, Georgetown and Charters Towers as well as the mid-west towns of Cloncurry, Richmond and Hughenden. These towns will have microdevelopments of from 7,000 hectares up to maybe 15,000 or 20,000 hectares. We call them microschemes because they are very small, but they will create tremendous benefits for the people of those areas. In the case of Richmond and Hughenden, it almost certainly will double the population. On their population figures, they are both dying at the moment, and Cloncurry is not faring that much better.

I will conclude on this note. We have a map, which I should have brought to the parliament—I will table it later. It has Cape York Peninsula in red and Victoria in red, and they are both about the same size. There is a big difference between Cape York and Victoria. Cape York gets a nearly 70-inch rainfall, nearly three times the rainfall of Victoria. Victoria has 4½ million cattle, and you might say, 'Well, Victoria is half sheep and half wheat, so Cape York, which is all cattle, should have maybe six million head of cattle.' It does not have six million head of cattle; it does not have four million; it does not have one million—it has 150,000 head of cattle. And it is not only about irrigation here; it is about title deeds for the first Australians, which I have spoken on 100 times in the House. But if you do this for us and give us these schemes, not only will you create 10,000 or 15,000 jobs but you will also provide an extra $7,000 million a year in income for the Australian people. (Time expired)

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