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

After spending 48 years in parliaments, I find that we have reached a stage in Australia where government bears no relationship to reality. I couldn't agree more with the previous speaker, the Leader of the Greens, in his comments. What sort of a country sells all of its gas for six cents a unit and then buys it back, its own Australian gas, at current prices of around $32—not the six cents we sold it for but $32? Qatar produces the same amount of gas that we do and exports the same amount of gas. It gets $29,000 million for its people from its gas and the moronic governments of Australia get $600 million. So if we want to do the sorts of things that the previous speaker, the Leader of the Greens, spoke about, well, there is one answer straightaway. The only country on earth that has no import charges is Australia. In fact, the first act of significance of this government was to subsidise imports of motor vehicles.

We have discussed moving forward on electric vehicles. Even though a troglodyte like me is going along on this one, they're going to subsidise their introduction to Australia. In sharp contrast, the crossbenchers want them to be built here in Australia. If you're going to put out money then put out money to have them built here in this country. Why wouldn't you do that? Are you so locked into the primitive laissez-faire capitalism of 1800s? Didn't they teach you in school that little children worked for 20 hours a day, believe it or not, at the ages of 8, 10 and 12 in factories. That's what laissez-faire capitalism delivered to you. We may not be as dramatic at this stage, but there are a lot of people, even in North Queensland, now living in the streets. In the wealthiest country on earth, there are people in the streets.

You gave away all of your mining companies. Four of the big five are Australian owned. The price of metals has gone up 300 per cent. What do Australians get out of it? We get nothing because we don't own the mining companies. You let them all be sold to foreigners, so all of our mineral resources are foreign owned. We don't get any benefit from the huge surge in mineral prices. In fact, we have to get much more aggressive. My own trade union—I am a great supporter of the CFMMEU. We must get more aggressive because our wages have actually gone down. We've gone down in the coalmining industry from close to $200,000 to close to $125,000. They've actually pushed our wages down in mining thanks to their FIFOs, their labour-hire companies and their section 457 workers—all initiatives of ALP governments. They provided the levers that have pushed our wages down in mining, and our blokes have got to get much more aggressive. I serve notice to foreign mining companies that we're not going to sit back and watch our wages be driven down through the floor while your incomes go up 300 per cent.

As for the cost of living, I live in a town called Charters Towers, and we were under the Mining Act, as was Mareeba, another big town in my electorate, and as was Mount Isa. Under the Mining Act, if I went out, bought a piece of land and wanted to subdivide it, a bloke called Michael Power signed a document. My wife and I had 20 acres and weren't wealthy enough to complete our demountable house that we bought, so we had to subdivide the 20 acres into two. It took my wife about 15 or 20 minutes to fill out the form. Michael Power stamped it and signed it, and she walked out and sold that block for $3,000 the next day.

Now, Malcolm Turnbull, no less, and an Australian professor who teaches at Oxford, in Britain, did a report on why housing costs are so enormous in Australia. It's because we can't get at the land. Your subdivisional impositions upon the people have skyrocketed the land in Charters Towers, a good example to use. We had no restrictions. It was one person, a local bloke, that made the decisions, and he made good decisions, as most local blokes do. The land went from $7,000 a housing block to $72,000. Government intervention in the marketplace, imposing ridiculous conditions that were impossible to meet, drove the price of land straight up through the roof.

Malcolm Turnbull and the Oxford professor said the average cost of land in Newcastle, Sydney and Wollongong is now $890,000. You can get a good demountable house for about $140,000. So where's the land? In a big, empty land—125 kilometres from Sydney you can buy land for $5,000 an acre. Divide that into quarter-acre blocks and you've got a piece of land for 20 grand with a few add-ons, I suppose. You try to get a block of land to build a house on within an hour's drive of Sydney for that money. The government is also required to build high-speed highways, spoke roads, that will enable us to do 120 kilometres an hour so we can get to work within an hour. They should be designed and in there now. Of course, it's not taken place.

There is no country on earth that has anything like the centralisation of market power in food as Australia. There are only two people to sell food to and only two people to buy food from in Australia. So is it any surprise that when they deregulated the sugar industry the price of sugar on the shelf went up 300 or 400 per cent? When they deregulated the price of milk, the price of milk on the shelf went up 200 per cent—and the price to the farmer went down 30 per cent. Potato farmers were getting paid about 52 cents the last time I looked for a kilogram of potatoes. In Cairns I saw them for $3.90. That's less than they were down here, in Canberra, at $4.20. How about that for a mark-up! What's the most staple element of your diet? Potatoes. As far as milk goes, Coles said, 'We sell two litres and it's so cheap.' Check out how many two-litre volumes of milk are on the shelf. It's one-fifteenth. Yes, they brought the price down for one-fifteenth of the milk sales—and doubled the price for the rest.

In the meantime, the farmers are out there shooting themselves. That's literally true. I had the most centralised dairy area in Australia, and the highest suicide rates in Australia were in that area: the Atherton Tableland. We had 248 dairy farmers, the biggest dairy farmers in Australia, on average, about 400 or 500 milkers. I said the other day that we're now down to 54. A state member of parliament corrected me and said it was 48. Then a lady there corrected him and said it was 32. Thirty-two is all that's left. And 6,000 went in Victoria. What? To make Woolworths and Coles rich?

As the honourable member said, what are the heads of these corporations paying themselves? The head of Qantas pays himself $25 million a year; therefore, Woolworths and Coles think they should pay themselves $25 million a year. Instead of coming to grips with the monopoly powers of foreign mining corporations and giant supermarket corporations and giving Australians a fair go, and taking away your stupid restrictions on land to subdivisions in an empty country, what are you doing? You're giving a tax break to the super rich, to the boys on $10 million a year. They get a tax break. That's your initiative. This new government's two major initiatives are to give a tax break and to subsidise imports.

Every pub in Australia—not that we've got many left. I always reflect upon the first thing the revolutionaries did in France. Their revolutions were made in the coffee houses, and the minute they took power the first thing they did was close down the coffee houses. Every revolution in Australia has been made in the pub, and they're desperately trying to close the pubs down! There are a few of them left. If you go into them, you'll realise that every single one of you in this place is a laughing stock. They have nothing but contempt for you. You've gone down to the second lowest ranking of respectable people in this country, and you deserve it.

We can't afford to buy food. We can't afford to buy a house. We can't afford to buy a car. We subsidise the import of cars. But I hope that we on the crossbench are a little bit more reactive in listening to the people. We'll be bringing forward legislation that will reduce, at least, the cost of fuel in this country and will also do something for lowering CO2 emissions, which is more than I can say the government and the last government have done for Australia or the planet.

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