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

I rise to speak on the Treasury Laws Amendment (Cost of Living Tax Cuts) Bill 2024. It seems to me that the word 'women' came up in the member for Lilley's speech about 400 times. Are there no men in Australia?

I think the first and most important thing with any race of people is that they simply don't vanish from the gene pool; they simply vanish off the face of the earth. When 20 Australians die, they are replaced by 16 Australians. You don't have to be Albert Einstein to figure out that we are a vanishing race. We are a race of people who are eliminating ourselves from the gene pool. Some anthropologist in a thousand years' time will look back and say, 'Who were those people there who decided they disliked people so much that they eliminated themselves from the gene pool?' It's a pretty sad comment upon a country that it doesn't want to have children—that it doesn't love children. In fact, it's dreadful indictment of a country when they murder about 30,000 before they are born every year and a few of them after they are born, under the same laws. That's particularly true in Queensland. Does anyone care about Australians being a vanishing race? Surely we would love our young people to have the joy of having a family.

I was among the first generation where women were supposed to have careers. Well, they're careering off into nonexistence. A lot of them, very sadly, are old people now. They sit at home. They have no kids to love and no kids to love them, no grandkids to love and no grandkids to love them. It's very sad because society cheated them and lied to them. It told them they had to have a career. I go no further than my own wife. She's been a stay-at-home mum, and her assets are quite substantial. She climbed up on roofs in the middle of summer, painted them and did up houses with a partner of hers—a bloke, I might add, who was illiterate, but boy oh boy he was master of everything.

Let me switch completely. I do not know how families in Australia are living. Careers—what, you're going to be a rich person, are you? You want every woman to be out there having a career and being rich. Well, I'll tell you that a bloody lot of women in this country are not rich; they're extremely poor because they've got kids. If you have kids, I just simply don't know how you can survive economically. Even if you're on $100,000 a year, after tax of $25,000 is taken out and $75,000 is left, you'll need $40,000 for a home. According to a Courier Mail study from 10 years ago, education costs for two kids were $30,000 a year. So, if you've got a take-home pay of $70,000 and spend $40,000 a year on the home and $30,000 on education, how the hell do you stay alive?

Needless to say, most boys in Australia are not living in a home with their natural father. So how successful are we as a race of people? We're a vanishing race. We can have no children. It is financially almost impossible for the average person, and that's assuming he's on $100,000. The average person is not on $100,000. But, assuming he is on $100,000, it's just not possible. I don't know how they are managing. Do we care about them? Does the word 'family' ever come up in this place? Does the phrase 'the future of our nation' ever come up in this place? No.

We go around crying about minority groups. What's that about? Do you really care about my mob—the Murris, as we call ourselves? Do you really care about us? You wouldn't be seen dead with any of us. Do you play on our football teams? No. Do you have any social intercourse with us? No. Do you have anything to do with us at all? No, but you want to cry about us so it makes you look good. You don't care about us; you care about yourself looking good.

If you want to give families a fair go in this country then it's about time the word 'family' started jumping up in this place, because there aren't going to be any of us very shortly. For those of you who are young people in here today, when you get old there's going to be nobody looking after you. It's the Chinese syndrome, as we all know. That population is old and there are no young people to look after them. It's infinitely worse in Australia. Our rate of having children is lower than China's now—not in the past, but now. So if you want to do this and you want to give them a fair go, you can't expect them to pay the same tax as DINKs. They're on $100,000 each. They pay $25,000 in tax each. Their disposable income is $75,000. But for the poor bloke who has a family, who has a bit of love in his soul for young people and a bit of a care for his nation, he—the five of them—has a disposable income of $15,000. So do you want a disposable income of $75,000 or do you want $15,000?

C leo magazine ran a series of excellent articles on why Australian women don't have children. Most of them—the vast bulk of women—intend to have children, but they don't because they're just waiting until they've got enough money together and they've settled down and they've got a stable relationship. I used to think the Christian churches' attitude towards marriage—that you married for life—was a bit primitive, but I'm not thinking that now. I've seen the terrible pain and sorrow. Has anyone ever met a kid where the father has left the family? Has anyone seen the heartbreak that they suffer? No. Does anyone care about them? No. Needless to say, a lot of them rebel, and who could blame them for that.

Let us say that we are going to provide a lot of extra money to people with families. How are we going to do that? For starters, we're the only country on earth that doesn't have a charge on imports. So let's start with a five per cent charge on imports, a primage charge. Billy Wentworth was one of the finest men ever to set foot in this parliament; Billy kept going on about primage. Just a five per cent charge on everything coming into the country would give you $20 billion a year.

Gas—this is the nation's disgrace, and you know what I mean. You people, Labor, have been in government for most of the last 30 years. You people, the coalition, have been in government for most of the last 20 years. So what did you do about gas? You gave it away. You gave our gas away for 6c, and my union—God bless the CFMEU!—are the ones that have brought up that figure. Now we're buying our own gas back for $16. We can't have a fertiliser plant in Australia, because no fertiliser company can afford to pay that amount for gas. The biggest fertiliser company in Australia, and there is only one—there are two, but one is a little fertiliser operation in Western Australia; the big fertiliser operation is in North Queensland—is buying its gas in America for $6. Another outfit is buying it for $4. And they're paying $16 here! It's diammonium phosphate. It's two parts ammonia—from natural gas—to one part phosphate. We've got the phosphate, but to get the ammonia—our own ammonia—we have to pay $16, whereas our competitors are paying $6. How many times can we repeat that?

When Qatar, which produces and exports the same amount of gas as us, gets $29 billion for their gas and we're getting only $600 million for ours, surely there is a case. Let's be conservative: surely, we would should be getting $15 billion. If Qatar is getting $29 billion or $30 billion, we should be getting at least half what Qatar gets. So there's $35 billion that you've got in the till.

Far be it from me to talk about taxing share transactions—the rich people. My two old aunties on separate sides of the families—they're both deceased now—used to go down and have their little games on the pokies. That was their fun and their intellectual challenge for the week. They'd pay about 20 per cent tax. My rich relatives in Sydney play the share market and they pay no tax, and the share market is much more socially damaging, I can assure you, than my old aunties putting five bucks in the pokies once a week and having a bit of fun with their friends.

Now, that's before you touch development. I was in a government and I cannot believe it when I look back on the figures, and I think the history books will say: 'Did this really happen?' Yes, it really did happen. There's a place called the Gold Coast. My family had a house there, right next door to Cavill Avenue. It was a swamp. It was worth nothing. We bought it for nothing. Surfers Paradise was just a big swamp, and a bloke called Les Thiess said, 'I can put canals in, drain the swamp and create a beautiful city here,' which he did. The tallest building in Surfers Paradise for half of my life was a three-storey building, the Broadbeach Hotel. Go down there and have a look at it now. Similarly, who created the tourism industry of Cairns and the Whitsundays in Far North Queensland?

So I watched this incredible government, the Bjelke-Petersen government. We were a coal-importing country when Bjelke-Petersen and that great man Leo Hielscher—who was the chief executive officer, for want of a better term, of the Queensland government—decided that they were going to put out a massive amount of money to build a giant railway line to export coal and then to make giant outlay on a coal export port. I thought they were quite mad. We were a coal-importing country, and they said we could become a coal-exporting country. Well, much of this nation's income for the last 60 years has come from coal, and there are people in this place who want the coal industry abolished. What are you going to do? Bankrupt the country? One-quarter of your nation's entire income comes from coal. What if you want to buy all your motor cars and fuel from overseas? I don't, but the ALP and the LNP do. They've done absolutely nothing about supplying our own fuel; we buy it all from overseas, and we buy all our motor cars from overseas. Whose decision was that? It was Mr Keating's decision on the motor cars, and it was the other mob on the fuel. So you've got a lot to be proud of yourselves about, haven't you? The history books will be terrible to you. Who broke this country? You did.

We can produce our own fuel tomorrow. In Brazil, 49.2 per cent of their fuel is ethanol. We are the best-suited country in the world for ethanol. It comes from grain or sugar cane, in both of which we are big players on the world stage, so we are uniquely programmed for that. Tell me the only country on earth that has no ethanol in the fuel tank. By law in Europe they are at five per cent. China claims it's on five per cent; I don't think it is, but it's going there, anyway. Japan is on five per cent. America is on 15.5 per cent. In the great juggernaut economy of Brazil, which has 200 million people and is going at 100 miles per hour—it produces aeroplanes, computers and every other sophisticated thing you can think of—49.2 per cent of their fuel is ethanol, and they fill up at the bowser for $1.09. Why aren't you doing it? Are you so owned by the oil companies that you can't do one single thing to make us self-sufficient?

As to the morons on my right here, they ask—and I'll name him. Mr Angus Taylor was ordered to have emergency supply, and he put the emergency supply in Texas—not Texas, Queensland, but Texas—

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