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

We will be putting a formal request into the government that some land be acquired on the high-speed highway planned west of Townsville, heading west from Townsville and surrounding areas, about 300,000 people, not all that much smaller than Canberra. And along that high-speed highway, which will be about 15, 20 minutes from the Jezzine Barracks in Townsville, the home of the Australian taskforce, we are proposing that there be 2,000 homes built. We are proposing that the army, or the government, do what the person who later became Sir James Foots did. James Foots was an engineer sent to Mt Isa, and he did exactly that: he provided 2,000 homes.

If you do it on a scale like this the cost of the land is fairly negligible. Services might be $15,000, purchase of land—again, fairly negligible—let's just say $30,000, and I've priced a three-bedroom house with two toilets at $140,000. So we could provide a house and land package—if we do this—for $170,000. That will cost the soldier 150 bucks a week. The best part of $50 would go in taxation, but let's call that $40. So he's up for 110 bucks a week—that's what it's going to cost him—and in 6½ years he will own his own house.

The attrition rate in our army is one-eighth—that is, one-eighth of our soldiers are leaving each year. The cost of retraining a soldier is absolutely ginormous. The cost to the government of that attrition rate would be much higher than the $35 million a year that this proposal would cost the government. So for $35 million a year, we will have an army that will be there—the same army and the same personnel—in six years time. And there's the secondary factor that, when they get out, they will own their own house.

I've spent two weeks of my life doing nothing but talking about this, and a lot of time before that when we invited Jacqui Lambie and Heston Russell to come up to Townsville. We held a series of meetings, and over 2,000 people attended those meetings—although a lot of other people wanted to get on the bandwagon. Warfighters Coffee is a cafe in Townsville where about 15 or 20 of us used to meet regularly. The Warfighters Coffee club decided to raise the problem of what happens to soldiers when they get out, and the horrific rates of suicide and trauma.

A very good friend of mine—one of the great Australians—carries around with him a photograph of his platoon. There were about 21 of them in the platoon. Seven of them are all right. Of the other 14, six of them have done away with themselves, and the others are in a very bad way—let's just say addiction and leave it at that, but it's all sorts of addictions. Their lives are pretty much wrecked. My friend carries that photo around with him everywhere he goes. It's been explained to me this way: when you're in the army, you've got a home and you've got security. If you're a single man, the army is your family, and you've got your ordinary family as well. And you've got a secure income. When you get out, your secure income vanishes. Your two families vanish—your army family vanishes, and as often as not your real family vanishes as well. And you've got no home. When those four things hit you, then the outcome is very, very sad indeed.

But if they own their own home—after 6½ years—when they get out, then I think we've got a good chance of keeping their real family together, because there would be no cost for housing at all, and they'd have an income from the army—or an unemployment benefit, if you like. We've been meeting with Soldier On, and I think a lot more work could be done in that area. But I want to return to the housing. This is really very simple, and I speak with considerable authority here, since I was one of the three biggest housebuilders in Queensland—I might have been the biggest housebuilder in Queensland.

I had the First Australians portfolio, and we had enough money to build 400 houses. Thanks to the excellent work of the First Australians that I'd taken in to run the department and the First Australian people on the ground, we built 2,000 houses, not 400. We had enough money to build 400; we built 2,000. They got going and mobilised Work for the Dole labour to the build houses. They got agreement and regulations from the government that all houses in community areas would be built exclusively by local Indigenous labour. The cost of flying people in, paying accommodation—which was enormously costly at a couple of thousand bucks a week—and then flying them out every fortnight was just horrific. We took all those costs out, we provided people that had no income with a serious income, topped up to award wages, and we were able to build 2,000 houses. So I had a lot of experience in building houses.

We can provide for the Army, but, if you're going to take up 2,000 housing blocks, you take up 4,000 housing blocks and you sell 2,000 of them. And, because you're the federal government, you can bypass all the ridiculous impositions referred to very well by the federal Treasurer in the budget this year. He said the real cost of housing is created by the impositions and restrictions placed on it by government rules and regulations. It was wonderful that Mr Chalmers said that because that was absolutely spot on. I'm not going to go into any detail, but I've said it on many occasions in this place: under the mining act, you could buy land in Charters Towers for $7,000; when we went over all these ridiculous impositions from the various regulatory bodies, it went up to $140,000 and settled back to $75,000 to $80,000. We went from $7,000 with no restrictions up to $80,000. So the Treasurer in his budget speech had this dead right.

The Army has at their disposal the ability to bypass all those ridiculous legislations and deliver the land very, very cheaply to themselves and another 2,000 blocks to the public of Townsville, which will virtually pay for the houses. Selling the 2,000 land blocks will pay for the houses. You have to stay in there for 6½ years, and then you'll own your own house in Townsville, which, on average, is worth half a million dollars. So you leave the Army with a wealth of half a million dollars, as well as your Army pension. That's what we want to offer the people of Townsville and the troops based in Townsville, and that's what we intend to do. I give notice of that today. We'll put the detailed proposals before the minister in the next month, before Christmas. We would urge everyone in the House to look at this sort of approach and use the powers of the federal government and the defence heads of power to simply bypass all the ridiculous rubbish and rigmarole that you have to go through at the present moment to do a subdivision.

My own wife who did a number of tiny subdivisions—two or three housing blocks—said she'll never do it again because of the cost and the time. On the other end of the spectrum is the biggest developer in North Queensland, Sir Robert Norman's son, Bob Norman, head of the North Queensland development association and probably the most important person in North Queensland. He owned a thousand acres in the most beautiful place on earth, the Atherton Tablelands, which is 3,000 feet above sea level. It's the only part of Australia that's green all the time. He resold the thousand acres without doing a single subdivision. He said, 'I haven't got enough time in my life, nor am I prepared to take the risks because you don't necessarily know whether you're going to get the right to subdivide, or the cost imposition upon the subdivision will be such that you won't be able to make money out of it.' So he just threw his hands up and said, 'We're not going to do it.'

In the houses that have been built in Townsville and Cairns I can put my hand through the window and shake hands with my neighbour when he puts his hand through the window. There is not enough room for a pot plant, let alone a tree. And one of these areas is called Bushland Beach! If there's one thing that's not at Bushland Beach it's bushland! Two, five, six, seven, eight kilometres of trees were felled. If that was a proper house, a quarter acre, those trees would have been restored. I'm not preoccupied, like a lot of people in this place, with CO2, though I am in favour of us cutting back on CO2. But reducing an area to a barren, galvanised-iron roof wasteland from a beautiful nature wonderland called Bushland Beach is what is happening in all new developments in Townsville and all new developments in Cairns.

It can be overcome by a simple imposition and action by the federal government overriding the ridiculous state government and local authorities that have put in place so many restrictions that the price of land has shot straight through the roof! I bought half a million acres one night—I'll admit, under the influence of some celebrations from some cattle that I'd sold—that a friend of mine was selling for $25,000! Land is worth nothing in North Queensland once you get a little bit away from the coast. If you put a two-lane fast highway, where we're allowed to do 120 kilometres an hour, west of Townsville, you're into that cheap land just 40 or 50 kilometres from Townsville. I'm not saying it's as cheap as what we purchased that night, but there's no comparison with the cost of land in Australia or the cost of land in Townsville now.

The opportunity is available, and the government can simply act and make it happen. At least let us do that for the people who risk their lives in the defence of this country and whose life after they leave the Army is a very, very sad story for which this country should be ashamed.

See this speech in context