Bob Katter (Kennedy, Katter's Australian Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a very great honour to be able to say a few words on behalf of my homeland. My homeland gave to Australia Qantas, Waltzing Matilda, the Royal Flying Doctor Service and the labour movement—I doubt whether there's a single family in this place of old Australians that didn't receive a benefit from the great labour movement. Dame Mary Gilmore, who is on our $10 note, one of the great ladies of the Labor movement—I hope I'm not embarrassing the Prime Minister about his great-great-aunt—is buried in my home town of Cloncurry.

Briefly, what's this area about? It's one-tenth of the surface area of Australia. There are hardly any people living there: there are only about 12,000 or 15,000 of us. I think the best poem that sums it up was by Richard Magoffin, the great historian of Waltzing Matilda: 'For what do we strive? For what do we fight? For a slab of dirt on a windswept plain that'll keep us broke till we go insane.' And you say, 'Well, these people are stupid, aren't they.' My best friend is a guy called Ronnie Purse. When he went up into the wilderness there, there were no cattle. He and I owned half a million acres together. I contributed absolutely nothing, I must emphasise. I'm not saying that out of any humility; it's just the truth. By the time he'd finished 45 years up there, we were producing $50 million worth of cattle a year. These are the people that produce for you the fourth-biggest export industry in this country, and the sixth-biggest secondary industry, meat processing, is one of the biggest employers in this country.

I just want to quickly mention three families. One of them, whose family I went to school with right through, I'm going to call Gary. I knew his great-grandparents. One was Chinese and came out in the gold rushes; the other was an Afghan camel driver. They didn't have it easy, I can tell you. Nor did the Scottish Presbyterians. For five generations, they've battled it out there, starting with nothing. Even three generations ago, they were just shearing. Now they've got probably one of the biggest middle-range cattle stations. They went through the TB eradication program, which took 650,000 of our cattle off us. They went through the live cattle dispute, which halved our incomes for three or four years. They went through the Japanese embargo, which the Australian government did nothing to fight, where we got $1 a head for our cattle. It's normally $100 a head. They went through the '74 flood—the most unbelievable thing I'd ever seen in my life and maybe the worst flooding in Australian history. They went through Cyclone Ted. I lost half of my cattle in Cyclone Ted. There were 127,000 head of cattle, and maybe one-tenth of our entire herd went to Cyclone Ted.

They went through the fires. For those of you who haven't read Colleen McCullough's book: you've got a front of 60 kilometres; it's rolling at 60 miles an hour and it's 60 feet high. This family's neighbours did a wonderful thing—well, it was a terrible thing. He had a rifle in his hands, and the television interviewer said, 'You lost your father and your brother.' He said: 'My father and brother and the ringer. The ringer got tangled in the fence. They went back to save him, and all three of them were incinerated.' That was 20 years ago to this very day. He was loading his rifle, and they said, 'What are you doing now?' He said, 'I have to shoot my sheep.' The sun was going down; the sheep had their entrails hanging out. Bang, bang, bang! 'It's all over for us.'

In this case, I rang this bloke up and I said, 'Mate, I'm just on the phone to listen.' He said: 'Bob, I went down to one of the bottom paddocks. There were 2,000 breeders in that paddock, and I didn't count 200.' That's just one paddock. He's probably got about 12 or 15 paddocks. So you'd have to say he's gone; he's got absolutely no hope of surviving. After five generations, coming out with camels—the Chinese and the Scottish Presbyterians and all of it—there's nothing left. He didn't say, 'I want some money.' He didn't say, 'I want some help.' He just said, 'Bobby, I went down and counted the 2,000 breeders, and there are less than 200 of them left.'

The second case—and I'll try to be as brief as possible. This bloke's a real rough nut, a real hard man. He's one of the big men in the cattle industry in Australia. I was with him at the rodeo. A bloke knocked down three people, and he came over and joined us. It was his brother. I said, 'Why didn't you go and help him?' He said, 'Well, he didn't need any help, did he.' These are hard men. This bloke drove 200 miles into town for a rugby league meeting, to get it going. I said, 'Good of you to come down, mate.' He said, 'I didn't come down to town for rugby league. If the boy can't play football, he's not coming home.' That's the sort of people they are. I rang up one of his brothers. He's in a chopper. I said, 'I'm listening, mate'. He said, 'There's no hay in the country. Even if there was, there are no choppers to deliver it.' Then he made some emotional sounds, and the telephone blanked out. His brother—again, one of the hardest people I've ever met—on television broke down and cried. We don't cry in our country.

In the third case, an extremely good-looking young woman—in one of our many disasters, her father took Cromoxin, the cruellest way possible to die; his kids had to survive on a station out in the middle of nowhere—lost one of her children from a very strange disease that we have in these areas. I rang her up. She didn't cry. She just said, 'Thank you for ringing, Mr Katter.' They're selling up their stations, one by one. Presumably, they'd been wiped out—not by the banks. I'm not trying to condemn the banks, but that's what's happening. So they're watching them go, one by one. They're a fifth-generation family. They've lost everything. She was there at the meeting in a big straw sombrero. I kept looking at her and thinking, 'Thank you for ringing, Mr Katter.'

One-tenth of the nation's cattle herd is in this area. It's the fourth-biggest export earner the country has. In Cyclone Ted we lost 127,000 head, and they're telling us that the number will be four or five times those losses. And if we lose 300,000 calf factories, 300,000 cows, once you process them out you're looking at $600 million a year. If you say, 'Well, I'll capitalise that,' then you're looking at $6,000 million worth of losses. In passing, I must mention, Mr Prime Minister and Mr Leader of the Opposition, we need a centralised control. Peter Beattie was passionate and very good. He brought in General Cosgrove for Cyclone Larry. Finally, I can't help but say: 'Why are you stupid? Why do you keep going up there?' They say: 'Yeah, well, we're giving our country one-tenth of its entire cattle industry. Please, get behind us—for us to keep going.'

I praise the Prime Minister very greatly here. If we can hold a little bit of that water back it's not going to solve our problems, but one-tenth of that floodwater—where it's 30 or 40 feet over the bridge at Normanton, it will only be one-tenth less than that height. That's a big thing. If we do those water schemes that we're doing now—thank you, Prime Minister, and thank you, Mr Leader of the Opposition, because you people have been very positive towards it—in those three towns, the water is stored and we can grow fodder so that when we get in these situations we have an answer. The fodder is there. With each of these cattle stations—all of them—their creeks and rivers run every year. We're not like the rest of Australia. Our creeks and rivers run every year. Our wet season is compressed into a tiny month or two-month period. So if you give them that, on their stations and in their towns, we can solve these problems.

I can't speak today without mentioning the reconstruction authority. In every disaster in Australian history, up to 20 years ago, the government went in. They bought the debt off the banks. The banks wanted to offload it, so the banks would give you a 70 per cent cut. Your debt was immediately cut by 30 per cent. Then you'd have government interest rates. I don't know what they are now. They were a bit under three per cent last time I looked. And that's all you'd pay. These blokes are now paying, maybe, $100,000 a year. The banks are suddenly paying about $30,000 or $25,000 a year. That's how we brought all of our industries through. I speak with great confidence because that's exactly what we did in the sugar industry when I had responsibility for the same thing.

Finally, I hope, Mr Prime Minister and Mr Leader of the Opposition, that our country has not lost its vision. Surely we can see that we can hold back a little bit of those massive floodwaters drowning Townsville, regularly drowning Ingham, and send it out onto those barren western plains, which have the best soil in the world—that's the research station talking, not me—flat, rolling, treeless black soil. I'll finish on that note. There is a vision for the future. Out of all of this hardness and trauma and heartbreak, please let us be able to see a vision for our country.

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