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

I had the great honour of being the state minister for community services, and that gave me the community areas in Queensland, the First Australians areas—my brother-cousins out there—and we had about $25 million a year for housing. I'd like to put on the record the names of the people that I put in to run the department. Eric Law and the late Lester Rosendale, a cousin of Noel Pearson's, were put in charge of the department. In their wisdom they decided that all houses would be built exclusively by blackfella labour—no outsider whitefellas at all. I thought that they'd gone a bit far and I wasn't particularly happy about the decision, particularly since I wasn't consulted about it, but it turned out to be a roaring success.

The labour costs were cut almost in half because they were getting the dole money, and we topped it up to award wages. We had enough money to build about 200 houses, and we ended up building 900 houses. They were concrete-block constructions. Donnie Fraser at Doomadgee decided that we should have our own block-making machines, so two factories were set up. They cost us $100,000 each. We produced our own concrete blocks, and they had to meet besser specifications—so blocks exactly the same as besser blocks. That enabled us to build the best part of a thousand houses over a period of about four or five years.

Now (a) there's really no money for Aboriginal housing at all; (b) there's no provision for First Australians to build their own houses; and (c) they can't get any land because they've got to go through a process run by whitefellas in Brisbane, and we all know what that means when you're trying to get hold of some land. I could go on.

But let me say this. A cavity-block-construction home is so simple. You just stack the blocks and you pour concrete down the cavity. Anyone can do that. You can buy a window frame that goes from the ceiling to the floor off the prison in Mareeba; they make them for about $300 a panel, which is very, very cheap. There you go. There's your wall; there are your windows. If you have curved, galvanised iron—ripple iron, as we had in the old days—so long as your house is not more than seven or maybe eight metres wide, you don't need any timber underneath—no supports. It is tremendously strong, and I'm talking about heavy galvanised iron which is used in culverts. The cost of building a house should be negligible.

Let me take my own home town of Charters Towers as an example. My wife and I bought 20 acres, and we couldn't afford to complete our little Logan unit, which cost $23,000—in terms of today's money, it was about 60 grand—so she had to go down and subdivide. It took her 25 minutes to fill out a form. She had to give the clerk of the mining warden's court 25 bucks, and she said, 'When can I sell it?' The clerk said, 'Right now; go up to the real estate agent.' So she went down to the real estate agent, and two days later we sold the block and were able to complete our house. That process now takes two years and costs $75,000. How can you possibly countenance this level of incompetence? The only reason that we haven't got houses in Australia is that no-one can get around to doing these subdivisions and get through the barbed-wire entanglements of red tape that lie there. I think everyone in this House knows that, but you don't do anything about it. What we are proposing is abolishing— (Time expired)

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