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

The centre of the education system, when I went through it in Queensland, had a number of hallmarks. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four were on the reading list for some 60 or 70 years. They've recently been taken off the reading list. For those who are not familiar or have forgotten these works, I found them extremely scary. In both cases they had thought police, and they were monitoring what you said and what you did. If they didn't like it, watch out. They talk about an Orwellian spectre. It conjures up images of Big Brother watching you continuously. If you go into a hotel now in Queensland, there is a camera there on you. If you use any language that may be considered racist by the thought police—and what is racist is their opinion of what is racist. If you exemplify anything against LGBQTs or whatever they call them then, again, you're breaching laws, and Big Brother is watching you.

I was on the front of the Australian newspaper the election before last, because I had two of my grandsons coming up and I said, 'Oh, beauty, we'll get the Diana air rifles going and set up the targets.' My wife said, 'No, they're under 16'—the boys—'and they're not allowed to have them.' They're just old air rifles. They couldn't hurt a flea. But, oh, no, you're not allowed to do it. It's illegal. I said, 'Alright, let's rig up the flying fox'—zoom, zoom, zoom and splash into the swimming pool. But, no, we couldn't take a panel off the swimming pool fence. I said, 'They won't come out and inspect us; we're two kilometres out of town.' But they were out last week, and our fence was 2.8 centimetres lower than it should have been and he wanted to replace the whole fence. He goes, 'In order to replace the fence, it's $3,800.' I said, 'Alright, we'll start work on the second stage of the tree house.' She said, 'No, a kid fell out of a tree house two months ago in Brisbane, and tree houses are banned.' I said, in desperation and exasperation, 'We'll go down to the flat'—we have 11 or 12 acres—'and we'll teach them how to boil the billy and make damper.' The most iconic Australian image is boiling the billy! It's part of our national identity. But, no, you cannot light a fire in the open without getting a permit, and it'll take two or three months to get a permit.

Is this a free country? When that song was chosen to mark the 200th anniversary of Australian settlement, there were only 300,000 or 400,000 people—maybe only 200,000 people—living here, and then suddenly there were lots and lots of people living here. To commemorate that, they kicked it off with a song which was sung, quite rightly, by Slim Dusty, 'We've Done Us Proud'. It goes:

We've done us proud to come this far—

two hundred—

… years to where we are,

Side by side, hand in hand, we've lived and died,

For this great land, we've done us proud.

The song says, 'We sailed the seas in search of freedom.' Freedom? Freedom? Your kid's not allowed to boil the billy. Your kid's not allowed to have a tree house. Your kid's not allowed to zoom, zoom, zoom into the swimming pool. Your kid's not allowed to have an air rifle. Is this a free country?

What you believe people should and shouldn't do is your business. Don't impose those values upon me. This is a free country. Don't impose those values upon me. Well, of course, they impose those values now, every day of the week.

Tonight was the result of the election in the United States. There's a hell of a lot of wokies in this place. You better start saying your prayers—although you don't believe in God, so I don't suppose you could do that. But you better start worrying, because there was no doubt that was an election of the wokies versus the Americans.

There's an election coming up here, and you've already seen the results in Queensland. I was working on those booths. Those people weren't interested in anything other than getting rid of the Labor Party.

If you want to know what the Labor Party are about, have a look at their last week in office. They passed anticoercion laws. If I raise my voice to my kids, watch out, that's coercion. I don't care what definition of coercion you want to use. Legally or in the dictionary, coercion falls into the category of: if you scream at your kids or your wife screams at you or you scream at your wife, that's coercion. So they've passed a law to go into your house and decide what you can and can't say and how you can and can't say it. That is the extent to which these people have destroyed our freedoms.

The Department of Home Affairs—I have felt ashamed of being an Australian, but this one really made me feel ashamed, and the government has sat there and done nothing about it. They've spat upon our Australian flag and said it can't be flown. A government department? The people running this country are the people living here in Canberra. I don't want to be nasty, but it's a very small gene pool. If you've got to get the brains of a country out of 300,000 people who are inbred now over five generations of public servants breeding with each other here in Canberra and who think that they know everything about everything and that they can impose their will upon the rest of Australia, I'll tell you what, mate: you're in for a big shock.

If you'd worked on those polling booths and you were a Labor supporter in Queensland, you would have gone home, visiting a certain place before you went home, because you would have been scared silly and quite rightly so. The people now are rising up in their righteous anger. They know that you're un-Australian. They know you represent all the values that we fled Europe to get away from. Graeme Connors in his magical song said, 'I sailed the seas in search of freedom.' If you want to really look at what they were after, yes, ostensibly it was gold, but gold meant freedom to them. They lived under a regime where rich and powerful people could tell you exactly what to do. They could take advantage of you if you were a young lady working as a maid in their big mansions. They could take advantage of you. They were running the world slave trade and the world opium trade, and they controlled what you could say and what you couldn't say. Our forebears fled to Australia to get away from that, and here it is coming at us again.

The Department of Home Affairs has banned the use of the Australian flag. My family lost a son in the First World War and lost a son in the Second World War, so please excuse me for having strong feelings about the flag. Where it came from and what it's about is not the point. The point is that it is our Australian flag. If you don't believe in those values, for heaven's sake, leave this country because you're not an Australian. For all the years I've got left that Jesus provides me, I am going to very aggressively fight you. All my uncles and cousins and my father and everybody went out to try to defend Australia from being taken over and having all of our freedoms taken off us. Yet we now have a fifth column in Australia. The Americans dealt with their fifth column in fairly rough justice.

ACMA is going to control what we can and can't say. Who are ACMA? They'll be people selected by public servants here in Canberra, and they will be deciding what you can and can't say. Most of the democracies in the world were based upon the works of Alexis de Tocqueville, the Frenchman. America is of course the first really, truly democratic state, and their constitution was very much based upon the works of Alexis de Tocqueville. His most famous idea was the tyranny of the majority. The tyranny of the majority is bad enough, but this has gone a lot further than that. What we're watching here is the tyranny of the minority.

When you say there is an elitist gene pool here in Canberra—I claim to have a bit of blackfella, First Australian, in the family tree. I don't know whether I have or not, but I come from Cloncurry, I'm dark, and we always identify as a 'Murri from the Curry'. Also, I have many, many relatives of course that fit into that category. We have our own way of doing things, in the way we approach things, and they may not necessarily be the values that are exemplified here in Canberra, but they're our values. Now, a little group of elitist, well-educated people that are in Canberra are going to tell us what to do and not do. Let's just view how these people have administered the First Australians. The life expectancy of a First Australian living in their homelands is 56. For the rest of Australia, it is 82. So Australians live to 82, except if you're First Australian.

I tried for four years desperately to get the late Jason Ned, who was the mayor of Doomadgee—he had mustered more cattle than anyone else in human history—a Good Australian Award off the Prime Minister in front of 400 or 500 people at the Mount Isa Rodeo. Jason sadly died a couple of weeks before that. Of Jason, the biggest cattle owner in Australia, someone said, 'How is Jason going?' and I said, 'Good, mate. He has got over a thousand head now. It's worth about $1½ million, what he has got together.' You try sitting in a saddle all day and having to go again and again at a flat gallop to wheel a breaker into the mob and risk your life. If your horse hits a hole in the ground or a branch, you're literally dead. Yet this bloke had done it. He'd also mustered more cattle than any other person in human history. However you measure a person, this was a great man, and he was getting, quite rightly, a Good Australian Award.

The next two people who will get it are, as the architect of the year, CopperString, which will open up massive mining developments and the biggest wind farm maybe in the world at Hughenden—a wonderful leap forward; he's getting an award—and the builder of the first medical school in 44 years in Australia, aiding medical schools to walk through the door he opened. They're the people who are getting this.

Jason Ned was getting this. He was a good Australian. He was a famous man. He had sat in the saddle for years of his life and got together $1½ million for his family. And this is how his country said thanks to him. I applied for four years to get him a pastoral lease so that he'd have some sort of ownership of his own homeland, where his family had lived for 30,000 or 40,000 years. 'No, we want to look after you! We want to look after you!' I don't want to use the word 'socialist', because I don't think there are any socialists left in here, to be quite frank. What's more is that, as a very active member of the CFMEU, I'm called a socialist all the time. So I won't use that turn of phrase. But the people that run Australia say: 'We want to look after you, you poor downtrodden blackfellas. We just love you and we want to look after you!' Well, to quote Percy Neal's brother at the big riot demonstrations against the COVID lockdowns: 'We don't want you to look after us. You whitefellas, we don't want you to look after us; we just want you to go away. Get out of our lives. Go away. We don't want you to look after us.' But, no, you say you've got to look after us.

So you're looking after the land for us? We can't actually use the land for the purposes which we used it for the last 40,000 years? No, a little group of elitists down here in Canberra say, 'We're looking after the land for you.' Well, go up and have a look at how they're looking after the land for you. Go and have a look at the Forty Mile Scrub, the most iconic national park in northern Australia. There's nothing there—nothing there at all. It has been burnt to a cinder because you don't look after it; the cattlemen look after it. At all the cattle stations around it, there is no fire at all. But the national park's gone. That is what is being imposed upon our First Australians.

They want to control what we say and what we don't say. Well, we've seen how you run things. We see a graphic indication of that. I really hate to say this, but what is taking place in the Torres Strait must get to the United Nations sooner or later. Among those people, the women had fruit and vegetable gardens. Every single house had fruit and vegetable gardens. They've been banned. They got their income from fishing. It's been banned.

Debate interrupted.

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