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

I have never entered a debate where there has been more prevalent towering ignorance of what is actually going on. It is really very simple. In 1993, householders paid $642.87. In the year 2000, they were paying $642.87. When I was minister, we had the cheapest electricity in the world, and I can prove that, because we got the aluminium industry. There were two huge smelters that were going to Canada, which has very cheap power from hydroelectricity, and they found out we had cheaper power. This is a radical idea these days, but we had a thing called a reserved resource policy: we took one per cent of the coal for free—'Too bad, so sad, Mr Utah and Mr Mitsui; we're taking one per cent of the power, and we're putting it into the biggest power station in the world, Gladstone, owned by the people of Queensland.' There was no privatisation in the Bjelke-Petersen years, I can assure you—just the opposite. There is the proof. I do not deserve any credit; in fact, I came in afterwards. But I was right-hand man to Ron Camm under Bjelke-Petersen in the end.

This is interesting: why does it then leap from $642 in 2001 to $2,010 by 2013? We do not have the figures for 2014 and 2015, unfortunately. Why does it take a 250 per cent leap through the sky in Queensland? These are the graphs for South Australia and for Victoria, and again you can see there is a flat line until we get to the year 2000, and then there is no longer a flat line; it is almost a vertical line.

So what happened? If there is someone in this parliament who is not a free marketeer—outside of me, the Xenophon party, my colleague from Hobart and, I am ashamed to admit, the Greens—I have not run into them. I have never heard a single person get up in this place and say, 'We're going to build a railway line into the Galilee.' They all talk about Adani as if somehow the Galilee Basin is Adani. It is not; it is just one of 20 businesses on the Galilee. You see that all of it is flat line until the year 2000, and then suddenly it is vertical—so what happened in 2001? It was not the greenies because they came in little increments, here, there and everywhere. What happened? It was the year of the introduction of National Competition Policy and the year we abolished a government system, owned by the people and delivering at operating costs. It is no use the ALP saying differently. I have great personal respect for the Labor member of parliament, but he talks like it was the fault of the Liberals. Listen, mate, you were the one who corporatised the electricity system and watched 2,000 ETU members lose their jobs. You are the one who did that—not the LNP. The ALP did that. On the railways, I could not believe Pat Dunne when he said, 'The ALP government will annihilate us.' There were 22,000 members in the railways in 1979 and 22,000 members in the railways in 1989. It was the time of Bjelke-Petersen. Not one single railway job was removed in 10 years. Under the socialists, within 16 years there were only 7,000 railway employees in Queensland. All of the freight went off the railways. All that the railways carry in Queensland now is minerals. They do it very efficiently and make a lot of money, but all of the rest of it was given over to road transport. So the taxpayers picked up the bill. As for us poor people at the end of the line, we paid nearly 700 per cent more for our rail freight. But here it is. It is free marketeering that has put up the electricity prices and there is no way to overcome it except to go back to regulation. (Time expired)

Debate adjourned.

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