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

You've taken about five minutes off me, Madam Deputy Speaker, and he's succeeded in taking five minutes off me, which is very complimentary. He's scared to listen to what I'm saying. He's laughing now; he thinks it's funny. Well I don't think it's funny, my friend. I don't think it's funny at all. Let me just continue. If you elect someone—let's take a bloke like John F. Kennedy. He's elected because he was an outstanding warrior, a man of very considerable bravery and leadership. He was also a Pulitzer Prize winner. Now that is a reason to have a person as the governor, the ruler of your country. I could use other examples.

Let me use an example that all these people will be shocked with: Joh Bjelke-Petersen. Is this bloke a good bloke to elect to parliament? He built one of the first peanut threshing machines in Australian history. He also came up the idea of a heavy bore for when you're clearing country to improve that country. He also founded the town of Hope Vale, which is the most successful First Australian town in the country. It produced Matty Bowen, one of the three greatest rugby league players ever. It produced the first blackfella member of parliament, Eric Deeral. It produced the first ordained priest in Australia—a Lutheran priest—of any denomination. It produced Noel Pearson. People would not like to say it, but I think he's one of the better intellects in the country, even though I strongly disagreed with him in the recent debate.

But it's extraordinary. That's Hope Vale, and it was founded by this bloke Joh Bjelke-Petersen. So, if you're going to say, 'Who are you going to put into parliament?' Well he's a good bloke to put in parliament. He's an achiever however you look at it. This bloke's a super achiever. He camped out for three months on horseback with Leo Rosendale—as I understand it, Noel Pearson's grandfather—as missionaries, in founding that town. So he's a great bloke to pick. When you pick him, what does he do? He creates the coal industry, the biggest earner of money for this country outside of the wool industry in the country's history, and he creates it out of nothing. This is a coal-importing country, and he turns Queensland into the biggest coal-exporting state on earth. He doubles the production of cattle, he doubles the production of cane, he quadruples the production of copper and he creates the tourism industry. It was a joke—they called it Beau Geste. There was a three-story building built on the Gold Coast, and everybody laughed at it because it was surrounded by a kilometre of sand. That was the way it was for nearly 10 years. Have a look at the Gold Coast today! When he was in his fifth year as Premier of the state, we had Beau Geste, just a big sand dune, which is now Broadbeach and Surfers Paradise.

You elect those people and that's what happens, but if you go around saying that our head of state is some lady living in England, or some bloke living in England—I mean, honestly, have you grown up as a nation? Are you proud of being an Australian, or are you ashamed of it? That point is a demonstration that you're ashamed of it. In the Second World War—the Americans were going to come and save us, or the British were going to come and save us—nobody came to save us, and we were so stupid and sycophantic that, with our entire three armies, we had two of them defending the desert, one of them defending a British port that had no ships in it, and no-one defending Australia! So the 39th Battalion was sent up there. I don't know all the ins and outs of the 39th battalion, but I tell you what: if you're going to put someone on your coin, I'd start with the leader of the Kalkadoon wars, when they tried to fight off the whitefellas. I'd put him on that coin, with his spear and his woomera. The previous speaker referred to this, but if you want to know whether we fought to keep the whitefellas out of my homeland, these are the names of the creeks: Spear Creek, Massacre Creek, Gunpowder Creek, Rifle Creek, Police Creek, Battle Mountain—you wouldn't need a lot of imagination to know what was going on there. So these people fought for the idea that we were different and we didn't want people coming in here telling us what we should do and what we shouldn't do. We were Australians, and we fought and died as Australians.

Let me go back to the 39th Battalion. I wasn't in the 39th; I was in the 49th Battalion, when we were at war with Indonesia. Thank goodness it blew over before we went up there, but I was the unit historian. All of the reports, I said to the colonel, were negative. We fell back. We failed to hold ground. We retreated and wilted under fire. 'So what do you want to do, Katter?' 'I want to go down to the RSL and ask around.' This was only about eighteen years after the Second World War finished. Maybe we were a fallback battalion, but, then again, maybe we weren't. So I went down there: 'Anyone here know anything about the 49th Battalion?' There are about a thousand men in a battalion. There were three battalions sent up there to stop the Japanese. The 39th did most of the fighting, but this was the 49th, one of the other three battalions. Someone said: 'Yes, mate. Come down here. The 49th was the worst hit of all. When they were relieved at Sanananda, there were only 28 of them able to walk out unassisted.' And he said, 'Do you know how many men left Port Moresby?' I said: '843 men left Port Moresby, and only 28 of us were able to walk out. That was all that was left of us.'

So surely you'd put Ralph Honner on your coin, not some British monarch, demonstrating that you don't believe that all people are born free and equal and that you don't believe you're a separate country, that you're a nationalistic Australian. You're not proud of being Australian if you've got that coin! I do not applaud what the government is doing here. They could easily have removed the monarch and put, in its place, as I am moving, the sovereignty of the Australian people. But you don't believe in the sovereignty of the Australian people, I'm sorry, if you're in the ALP, because you're doing nothing about it. And you most certainly don't believe in the sovereignty of the Australia people if you're in the Liberal Party, because they oppose even this point of change.

In conclusion, we have got to grow up. We have got to realise that we are in the same moral position that we were in 230 years ago, with no-one living on a continent the size of China, two or three times the size of Europe, the same size as the United States. There's no-one living there. There's just a little, narrow coastal belt of population, and the rest of it is empty. Well, guess where everything comes from—the copper, the coal, the cattle! It's open, and it's because we have not become patriotic, flag-waving Australians.

See this speech in context