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

I move:

That this House:

(1) notes that:

(a) in 2015, the Northern Territory Government foolishly awarded a 99-year lease of the Port of Darwin to Shandong Landbridge Group, a privately held company with ties to the Chinese Government and Communist Party of China; and

(b) the foreign ownership of the Port of Darwin represents a significant threat to Australia's strategic interests; and

(2) calls on the Commonwealth Government to:

(a) immediately prioritise Australia's sovereignty and strategic interests;

(b) take steps to force the immediate sale of the Port of Darwin to an Australian-owned company; and

(c) ensure that the Port of Darwin stays in the hands of the Australians serving our national interest.

We witnessed on the international internet and other parts of the media the image of an Australian soldier slitting the throat of a baby—an image put up there by the Chinese government, presumably, or other nefarious groups in China. The media in China called for the bombing of Australia. You can say, 'Oh well, that's just craziness.' Well, you ought to read the history books about Adolf Hitler and what he was saying. Because our Prime Minister had the temerity to say that COVID came from where everybody on the planet knows where it came from, because he said that publicly, China has taken $29 billion of trade off us. We were told in this place, again and again and again, how wonderful the free-trade deal was.

And we had the then Prime Minister of Australia, Tony Abbott, giving a standing ovation to Andrew Robb, the person who sold the Port of Darwin to China. According to media reports, Andrew Robb was then put on a salary of $999,000 a year—and no-one was punished, no-one was brought to heel, nothing was done about it whatsoever.

Mr Gosling interjecting—

The grains industry has suffered, the beef industry has suffered, the wine industry has suffered, the seafood industry has suffered, the timber industry has suffered and the mainstream of the Australian economy, coal, has suffered. Those are the king hits put in so far.

My colleague on the crossbench referred to Global Switch. It is extraordinary. You couldn't dream this up. All of the information storage and retrieval systems are owned by a Chinese company. At this stage, I'm so shocked that nothing will shock me now. When a young lad at the University of Queensland got up and expressed his opinion about what was going on with the Uighurs and students being put in jail in Hong Kong he was bashed up by four Chinese thugs—and no action was taken. Who gave the orders that no action be taken? We know who gave the orders. When it went on the television the first time, the police force started getting a little bit twitchy. God bless my colleague here from the neighbouring electorate of Dawson, who called for an inquiry into what took place at the University of Queensland. Then and only then, when it went on television a second time, the police, after 13 months, suddenly took action. It's on the television, the bloke being bashed. It is unprovoked assault and battery. The police don't get punished, and there's not the slightest doubt in my mind that instructions came from the Queensland government. There is no other way that those police would not have acted. That's bad enough in itself, but, returning to the young fellow, he was punished vilely. Three years of his life at university were taken off him. He had been elected to the university's senate, but they took the position off him, even though democratically they had no right to do that. But then, I suppose, if China is pulling the puppet strings at the University of Queensland—which brings me back to the port of Darwin.

I simply asked the question in the parliament last week, if you'll give me the indulgence of reading it out: 'Defence minister, wouldn't a China oil embargo, cutting off our sources in Singapore and South Korea'—the vast bulk of our petrol comes from those two places—'combined with regular trading vessels disembarking crews at a Chinese port'—they disembark a crew and the crew turns out to be a Chinese commando unit, so they now have control of the Northern Territory in one hit, and the peripheral mining areas— (Time expired)

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