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

In Tolstoy's War and Peace, there is a great quote. The corporal says: 'I gave her the bread, and she gave the three pieces to her children and she left nothing for herself. Is she not hungry?' The sergeant major says, 'She is a mother.' We talk about the survival of the fittest and Charles Darwin. That led to the Nazis, didn't it? We didn't descend from people that carried weapons; we actually descended from people that were mothers, that mothered their children and looked after them. You can have your attitudes on abortion. To me, it's very good because you're vanishing from the gene pool. The sooner the better would be my opinion.

Having said that, I don't think that there's any feeling for the mothers that are traumatised by a situation where they proceed with something like that. They have been programmed for 3½ million years to be a mother, and suddenly they're doing the opposite. I don't think they're going to get away with that. No-one addresses the trauma of the mother that is confronted with this situation and does something, in many cases, that she regrets for the rest of her life. There should be a looking after of the mother, before and probably afterwards too, sadly. I'll say that.

As for the Greens and their attitudes, where I come from we get the monsoonal rain and everything is green, and then it turns brown and it blows away. I think that's a wonderful metaphor for those that sit behind me. Ultimately, it is whether you survive as a race of people. If you are a vanishing race—and we are vanishing at a faster rate than anywhere else in the world except for five nations, the last time I looked. We are vanishing faster than any other group of people on earth, and that is the price that you will pay. You will be gone from the gene pool. You can read history books and prehistory books, and you can see the mistakes that people made in their survival. They're not with us anymore, those people.

I'll conclude on this note. In the Torres Strait the women were the producers of food. They had fruit and vegetable gardens in the backyard. Yes, the men fished, but the women grew fruit and vegetables. In some 200 or 300 meals that I had in the Torres Strait when I was minister, I did not have any food from the mainland at all. It was mangoes and bananas and sweet potatoes and yams and taro and, of course, fish and dugong and all those things as well. When I went up there last time it was really sad, because the governments in this place took away from those women the right to have their vegetable gardens. Now they have to get fresh fruit and vegetables from the mainland, which are overripe by the time they get there, and they can't afford to pay for them. They've said this again and again and again. This place has ignored the cries of those people in my homeland of Far North Queensland and in the Torres Strait. We have ignored them.

There is a terrible day coming for us. There's a word that describe nations that eliminate a race of people. You took away the right to fish, because we had to protect the Great Barrier Reef, but what about protecting the people that have lived there for 40,000 or 50,000 years? What about protecting them? They should care about them. There's little made of the fact that the Great Barrier Reef is 350 kilometres away. I don't know how some poor beggar going out in a tinny is going to adversely affect the Great Barrier Reef. You took away their right to fish and you took away their right to have a vegetable garden, so you're starving them to death. They are dying on a massive scale from diabetes. There's not a single person in this place I've heard raise their voice about it. You don't care about them. You were crying to hell about the yes/no vote, but what are you doing about the people that have the highest death rate, maybe, in the world? Their life expectancy is 56! Is that something to be proud of as a nation—that their life expectancy is 56?

I'm talking about women because they were the people that provided the food. (Time expired)

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