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

God bless the member for Indi for her perspicacity and initiative, and I thank the minister for his enlightenment. We were told it was going to be a reasonable government, and this is a good example. I say that with all sincerity because previous governments have not listened to a good idea and incorporated it. They've been too arrogant and obfuscating. I'll leave it at that.

I have a meeting this afternoon with the minister for the army. We cannot get 10 truck drivers to simply take the sugar cane from Mareeba to the Mosman mill. If we can't find those truck drivers, then that cane will rot in the field and not only will the farmer lose his income from that cane for this year, but he will also have the cost of disposing of that cane. Many of them have been now 15 years below cost of production, and they're not going to survive. That's one example, we can't get 10 truck drivers. It's been on the national news. Doctors: we have no doctor at Mission Beach, we have no doctor at Julia Creek and we have no doctor at Cardwell. We're in a desperate situation. Two of our leading medical practices where people are over 70 years of age are not going to continue much longer. Then there are fruit pickers. I saw half a kilometre long of mangoes almost up to my waist. They just can't get pickers. The bloke who owns it—and he's 83 years of age—and his son are down there picking mangoes. It's one of the biggest operations in Australia. There are avocados on the ground all over Australia. We can't get pickers.

I pulled up at a roadhouse because I was dying of hunger and we needed petrol in the car. The roadhouses were all closed because they couldn't get anyone to work there. Roadhouses are now being closed because we can't get people to work there.

A lady came over to me in Mount Isa the other day saying they were desperate for chemists. They simply can't get them. And I have a tiny job for a steel fabricator. I have been to seven of them and they say that they can't get anyone to work in steel fabrication.

There are two Australias: the honourable member for Indi and I represent one of those Australias—I call it the golden Australia—and there is the other Australia. Of course, in New South Wales you know that NSW stands for Newcastle, Sydney and Wollongong and nothing else. In Queensland there's South-East Queensland, and the rest of us simply do not exist. In the democratic system the winner takes all. If you have the majority, you have the power and the minority gets nothing. That's the nature of democracy and it's one of the shortcomings.

Guess where the coal is? We export only two things now: iron ore and coal. We're going to close the coal industry down, which rather intrigues me. But guess where the iron ore and coal are? They are two-thirds of our entire exports. There are the two big ones up there and sort of nothing underneath. What's underneath that? There is aluminium and cattle maybe. Iron ore, coal, silver, lead, zinc, copper, aluminium and cattle are all in the golden Australia.

In every single redistribution in Australia we lose a seat from rural Australia. So the 1.2 million people who are on 95 per cent of the continent are leaving. Do you think that the world accepts a vacuum? No, it doesn't. Some 265 years ago Australians said: 'We don't need populating. We don't need an army. We don't need any of those things.' I don't think we Australians have changed very much. The colour of our faces might have a bit, but nothing else has changed.

So the initiative taken by the member for Indi is very good. I commend her and I commend the minister for accepting these proposals, because this is the only way that we can address these problems. I will give you one example before I sit down—the United Kingdom backpackers. We desperately need them. They were the biggest group of backpackers we had. The government said that backpackers from the United Kingdom don't have to go to rural areas anymore, so now we have no fruit pickers and no backpackers. They're not coming back. That's the nature of it. Hopefully, this will address those problems.

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