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

I've remained incredibly silent about these issues. I was the minister in Queensland for six years. The First Nations people, as they are referred to here in this place, were kind enough to name the freehold titles issued under my administration the 'Katter leases'. My son, in a meeting, said: 'Cattle leases? There are no cattle on any of these places.' I said, 'Not cattle—it's Katter, your name!'

Now, that was because I simply went out to the 24 community areas in Queensland that are blackfella areas—they're not whitefella areas; they're blackfella areas—and I said, 'What do you want us to do with the land?' Do you know what they said? We put up all the alternatives on a big board: you can have tribal ownership; you can have community ownership; you can have local government ownership; you can have private ownership, the same as all the other places in Australia—whatever you want. Over 3,000 people voted. Three voted against private ownership, and the other 3,000 voted for private ownership. They did not vote for tribal ownership.

What does this place do? It moves for tribal ownership. Well, I don't know about you, but I'd be flat-out naming all the people in my bloody family tree. They come from everywhere. I'm dark and I come from Cloncurry, so I identify as a Murri pretty often, and no-one would object to that—'Murri from the Curry'. You said that you were going to look after the land for them, right? You're going to protect nature so that it'll be kept the way it was. Well, it may have passed your knowledge that these people are starving to death. Their life expectancy in this country has slipped from 54 to 49 years of age, when the rest of us enjoy 82 years of age. If you want to know why, it's because you won't let them own property the same way everyone else on Earth owns property. The Mystery of Capital was one of the most important books written in the last half-century. The World Bank economist Hernando de Soto has said, 'The creation of capital comes from the ownership of property.'

Now, let me be very specific. There was a very great Australian. He was getting a great Australian award from the Prime Minister because he'd mustered more cattle than any other person in human history. He became the mayor of Doomadgee when he returned home from running all the cattle station camps, and he got a thousand head together. He could not own land where his family had lived for 30,000 years. There was no process by which he could own land. So he did the same as the Australians from overseas did when we came to New South Wales. We just took up the bloody land and squatted on it. That's where the word 'squatter' comes from, because all the land in New South Wales was taken up by squatters. And that's exactly what he did: 'Righto, I'm taking up this 10,000 acres'—or 20,000 acres—'It's my land. Don't set foot on it.' That's squatters rights.

He's sick of waiting for you whitefellas to do anything. He's been waiting 200 years for you whitefellas to do something for him, except for a brief period when a bloke who is referred to as a blackfella—me—said, 'What do you want?' They said, 'We want private property rights.' So I gave them property rights. I'm just an ordinary, knockabout bloke, and I think most people that know me would say that. They named the lease after me because they were so appreciative that someone listened to them—to what they wanted.

I ran into a lovely young lady and I said, 'What do you do?' She said, 'I'm in economic development.' 'Righto.' This was in Cairns. I said, 'I'm not too sure what economic development is taking place.' And she said, 'Oh, no, I do it in the'—she used these words—'Aboriginal areas.' I said: 'Righto. So what does that entail?' She said, 'I'm preserving nature for them.' Well, you're not preserving it for them, because you're not allowing them to do anything there.

They've been taking kangaroos for the last 40,000 years, and you've said they're not allowed to take kangaroos anymore. God bless Murrandoo Yanner. He had many shortcomings, did Murrandoo, but good on him for taking them to court: 'No, I've got a right to take that kangaroo, and I've had that right for 20,000 years. You whitefellas that came here have got no right to take that off me.' Good on him. That's what he did. You've taken away their right to take game. You've taken away their right to use the water. You've taken away their right to use the land.

God bless Jason Ned. The Prime Minister of Australia was going to Mount Isa to give Jason Ned a Good Australian Award—there were two other people getting that award that day; they were equally distinguished—but he died before he got the award. The point of the story is, if we want people to have a decent income and a decent way of life and some opportunity for their kids, then the First Australians are left with no alternative but to simply defy the people in this place and those in the Queensland parliament and take the land and squat on it. God bless the people that came from Europe and did that in New South Wales.

Where I come from, we probably had maybe a thousand people living in north-west Queensland, or maybe 1,500—I don't know. It's an empty land. There is a message here for everyone in this parliament, and that message comes from von Clausewitz, the greatest commentator on warfare in human history. He wrote in his book On War, 'There is one truism of history: a people without land will look for a land without people.' Go and talk to my blackfellas—you can talk to me; I'm a blackfella too—and ask how we got on with a policy that we didn't have to have a population here, how that went. Well, it went real bad for us—real, real bad for us. So what are we doing now? If you take out a little, tiny strip around the coastline, about 120 kilometres wide, and a little dot around Perth, there's no-one living here. I represent half of Australia's water run-off. I get all the great rivers of Australia in the Kennedy electorate except the Murray-Darling. We're not using any of that water—we are; we're using 0.2 per cent of that water—we're not using it. What right have we got to do that when a thousand million people are going to bed hungry every night? Do you think the rest of the world is going to continue to accept this?

When we stand up today and talk about racism in this country, it takes many forms. I don't want to be disrespectful to my colleagues, but, when you start looking after us because we're blackfellas, we start to get a little bit toey, we blackfellas, because we don't want to be different. The whole idea is we just want to be ordinary Australians.

Where I come from, my father was in partnership with a bloke who owned a very big cattle station. He was a First Australian. They owned three or four mining undertakings together, and I was in a couple of those mining undertakings. My partner was Les Prosser, who was regarded as the 'last of the Kalkadoons'. His mother was one of the few 'piccaninny' survivors of the big battle on Battle range—which wasn't a battle, really. It was a massacre. That's a story for another day. When they were doing guerrilla warfare, we Kalkadoons did real good with guerrilla warfare. But, when we stupidly took them on in open combat, that was not a good idea at all. That's a story for another day.

They don't want to be regarded as different. You don't want different laws. All they want is the same laws that every other Australian has, which enables them to own their own house. You don't even give them a provision to own their own house in the land that they've been living on for 30,000 or 40,000 years. They're not allowed to own a house. There's no process in Queensland by which you can own your own house. Why haven't you got off your backside instead of crying about them in the Queensland parliament or the federal parliament? Why don't you go out and listen to them about what they want? If you do, you might be surprised at how much they appreciate what you do out there.

So I plead with people here to read The Mystery ofCapital. De Soto was a World Bank economist, not a lightweight. A cousin of his was the head of Rio Tinto, the second-biggest mining company in the world. These are heavyweight people. In The Mystery of Capital, he said that the thing that enabled the West to get ahead of the rest of the world is that they had property rights. If you got property rights, you can borrow money from the bank. I and one of my best mates, I'm ashamed to say, were a little bit under the weather. We bought half a million acres one night for $25,000 in a 24-inch rainfall area. That's good rainfall area. (Time expired)

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