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

We appreciate the government's initiative in this matter and I regret to say this. In a poll taken in Queensland in 1988-89, if you said the phrase 'National Party' the first words associated with that were 'Bjelke-Petersen', and the next words were my name. So I was the standard-bearer—No. 2 to Bjelke-Petersen himself—in the later years of the National Party's existence in Queensland. I use the term 'National Party', but I'm describing people who were then Country Party. In Queensland, of course, there is no National Party now; they are all members of the LNP. People who state that they are members of the National Party here are not; they are members of the LNP. And the LNP is an affiliate of the Liberal Party. I don't mean to have a go at them—and one of the finest members of parliament I have worked with in my lifetime in the parliament would be George Christensen. George is rapidly being pushed into the same situation that I was pushed into in this place. He was well-brought-up on Country Party principles—John McEwan, no less.

We have seen the extraordinary phenomenon of the ALP moving for a minimum price scheme for milk and five speakers who claim to be members of the National Party get up and oppose a minimum price scheme for milk. Well, if they are the Country Party—the Country Party was formed to deliver a minimum price scheme for milk; that was the reason it was formed. Blackjack McEwan, at the age of 28, in the most famous event in Australian history, called a meeting and a few of them there said all milk should be sold through a cooperative and we should have quotas and a minimum price. He belted the living daylights out of them and, from that day forth, he was called Blackjack McEwan. And the other great founder and pillar upon which the Country Party was built was the Anthony family. And it was exactly the same story. It was reputed that Larry Anthony took two of them there out the back of the tent and belted the hell out of them over the banana farmers' cooperative—bananas were to be sold through the cooperative and, if you didn't like it, you took a hiding. Whether you agree with this behaviour or not—Jack McEwan was called Blackjack from that day forth. This party was formed to deliver minimum pricing, and we have come to the extraordinary position where the five speakers against the minimum price for milk are all from the National Party—and they all gave exactly the same reason that McEwan faced back in the twenties and thirties: 'We have international agreements and we may offend our trading partners and the world will come to an end!' They sounded to me like the CO2 doomsayers: 'The world will come to an end if we give the farmers a decent price for their product!'

Look at what has happened in agriculture. John Anderson, as Leader of the National Party in this place and Deputy Prime Minister of Australia, at an infamous meeting in what was later to become his own electorate—I think it was Gunnedah or Bourke—said: 'Australia has 240,000 farmers. We can produce what we produce with 120,000 farmers.' People in my area interpreted that as: 'What's this bloke coming at? Does he reckon 120,000 of us should go to the wall, does he?' Well, 120,000 farmers have gone to the wall. The figure now is that there are 87,000 farmers in Australia. There are different series, and I don't want to mislead the House here. On the series they were working on, there are about 120,000 farmers now and there were 240,000 then. On another set of series, in 1990, the year of the deregulation of the wool industry by Mr Keating—I don't want anyone to believe that the National Party were entirely responsible for the destruction of agriculture; I wouldn't want to leave the Labor Party out—there were about 140,000 Australian farmers and, on this series, there are 87,000 today.

I don't have to be told that. Where we had five sheep stations, we now have one cattle station. We had 1,000 shearers and backups in the wool industry in the midwest towns—my homeland—stretching from the Northern Territory border, or Mount Isa if you like, back to the coast. We had five sheep stations and 1,000 people employed—in shearing and all the backup industries that were required. But we now have only one property where we had five before. So where there were five families employing people, there is now one family employing nobody.

The populations in these towns have dropped clean in half. Through all of the central west and North Queensland's mid-west, the towns' populations have dropped clean in half. That can be attributed to the deregulation of the wool industry by Mr Keating. It doesn't account for the destruction of the tobacco industry in the electorate that I represent. A town in Victoria had 3,000 tobacco workers and we had 2,000 in Mareeba in North Queensland. The industry has gone completely through deregulation by the National Party. In the dairy industry we had 240 farmers and we now have around 40 or 50 farmers. That is all that is left, and a lot of them exited in the worst possible way.

Why is agriculture collapsing? Everywhere else in the world a farmer gets 41 per cent of his income from the government. Be it a good thing or be it a bad thing, the reality is that farmers throughout the rest of the world get 41 per cent of their income from the government. In Australia, the farmer gets 5.6 per cent of his income from the government. Do we think that we are 34 per cent better farmers? I did a quick trip into America and into southern Brazil, and I can tell you that you would want to get up very early in the morning to compete against the cattlemen of South Dakota and you would want to get up bloody early in the morning if you want to compete against the sugar farmers of southern Brazil. So, in our government's wisdom, we give them a 41 per cent advantage less 5.6 per cent. So let's call it six per cent. So it is a 36 per cent, or whatever it is, advantage. So we are not competing against farmers in other countries; we are competing against the subsidy given to the farmers in other countries.

We established a sugar industry in Thailand. Aren't we good boys; isn't that wonderful? Thailand farmers were getting 22c a pound for their sugar, whilst our farmers were getting 7c a pound for our sugar. That will give you some dimension of the subsidy in Thailand. In India there's $23 billion a year in subsidies just for fertiliser alone and in the European community they get $700 a tonne for raw sugar on the world market and we get $400 a tonne on the world market. As for free trade, our sugar is not allowed into Europe or into America. They are the two biggest markets for food in the world and we are not allowed into either of them, and sugar is the fourth biggest agricultural item in this country—and we get preached to about free markets.

So the first reason is the 36 per cent advantage in subsidies, or tariffs or whatever you want to call it. The technical name is 'support level'. So we are disadvantaged in support levels by 36 per cent. Secondly, we have only two people to sell food to in this country. We are the only country on earth that has a concentration of market power such as we have in Australia with Woolworths and Coles of around 90 per cent. I would say it is around 93 per cent or 94 per cent—and we can all argue about that. So we have two people to sell to and two people to buy it from. When the LNP in their wisdom deregulated the dairy industry, we went from 59c a litre on the Friday to 41c a litre on the Monday—no free market there; classical oligopoly pricing. Did the consumers get a benefit? No, the price went up nearly 30 per cent to the consumers. So consumers got hit and the farmers got hit, and the people in the middle get $1,000 million a year of extra profit.

Our cattle numbers are down 23 per cent from where they were and where they should be. Our sugar production is down 16 per cent from where it was and where it should be. Our sheep herd is down 60 per cent from where it was and where it should be. Our dairy herd and dairy production are down around 20 per cent from where they were and where they should be. We are a net importer of seafood, pork and, believe it or not, fruit and vegetables. Now, that goes up and down. I think at present we are not a net importer of fruit and vegetables, but it goes up and down. Over the last 10 years, it's a fair call to say we've been a net importer of fruit and vegetables. We have had what I can only describe as a galoot—a National Party member, a big tall bloke walking around wearing a stupid hat on his head. He said, 'We will be the food bowl of Asia.' Hey, listen: thanks to your policies, we'll be the begging bowl of Asia. You can see where this is going. In seafood, we are a net importer. In pork, we are a net importer. In fruit and vegetables, on average, we are a net importer. We can clearly see where we're going. Our cattle herd is down. Our sheep herd is down. Our sugar production is down. Our dairy herd is down. We know where agriculture is going. We had 240,000 farmers and now we have 120,000.

What we are talking about today is family farm assistance. You blokes had better watch out, because the farmers are not all stupid, and they're watching. It was these blokes, the ALP, who introduced the family farm assistance scheme. If ever I have seen a Treasurer who did everything he could for us, it was Wayne Swan. There's no doubt about that. He introduced the family farm assistance scheme. For the first time ever, when we were going broke and on our knees, we got at least a welfare payment. The terrible part is that, if there are 87,000 farmers left in Australia and there are 9,000 that have received the home assistance grant, that means one in 10 farmers in Australia are on welfare payments. We tried to do something about it. I'm still in a state of shock over the ALP moving for a minimum price scheme in dairy, I must admit, but they did. So farmers out there might start questioning their loyalty. One in 10 of them are on a family assistance program introduced by the Labor Party.

Where would the dairy industry be if our milk marketing bill were introduced, bringing the price scheme back? I'll tell you where it would be: the price would be over $1 a litre. Our farmers are getting 58c a litre in Queensland. They were getting 59c prior to deregulation in the year 2000. Twenty years ago, arbitration at a fair tribunal—the arbitration commission for milk, the milk marketing board or whatever you want to call it—gave us 59c a litre. Twenty years later, we are on 58c a litre. I can tell you that, when it was 59c, I didn't see many of my dairy farmers driving around in Mercedes-Benz cars or even in top-of-the-range Range Rovers; they didn't have them either. They were making a quid and staying alive, but they weren't taking trips overseas every year or anything of that nature. But now, 20 years later, when money is buying 30 per cent less, they are on less money than they were 20 years ago.

It was very, very sad for me to see the once great party of Jack McEwen and Larry Anthony, founded by them physically bashing people to get a minimum price, being led by the Labor Party and opposed by— (Time expired)

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