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

I could tell a thousand stories, but I have just a quick one. I was in the pub at a little place called Garradunga in North Queensland, and I was going to a Lions Club meeting. I had my Lions badge on. Someone said, 'I didn't know you were a Lion.' The bloke across the bar said, 'Mate, he's been a lion all of his life,' and everyone roared laughing at my expense. It's fun, but it's also ironic that the ALP is moving this, because the ALP was founded in the pubs in North Queensland—you know, Barcaldine, Cloncurry and also western New South Wales. But I would say 'Red Ted' Theodore was the real founder of the labour movement in Australia. The story is told about him and 'Big Bill' McCormack—about 'Red Ted' Theodore and 'Big Bill' McCormack. He goes into the pub and says to one of the blokes drinking there, 'Tommy, you haven't taken out a ticket'. It's a union ticket. He just starts writing him out the ticket, and Tommy says, 'Stick it up'—well, we know the rest of 'stick it up'. 'Big Bill' McCormack comes up and says, 'Did you say to Ted that he should so-and-so and so-and-so?' and he says, 'Yes, I'll say it to you too.' So McCormack grabs him by the hair and punches him in the mouth. He goes down. He kicks him all around the floor, then lifts him up by the belt and says, 'Now take the bloody ticket out,' so he takes the ticket out. He says, 'Well, why didn't you take it out in the first place, Tommy? It would have saved you a lot of trouble,' and Tommy says, 'Oh, well, you didn't go to the trouble of explaining it to me properly, like Bill did.' He was bashing the hell out of him.

I tell that story to indicate that the labour movement—and both sides of the house would agree—has made a magnificent contribution to the people of Australia. One in 30 of us that went into cane fields never came back out alive. One in 30 of us that went down into the mines never came back up alive, until the Labor movement came along. I'm very proud to say that my family were very well off and threw their full weight behind the labour movement in its early years. But the point of the story is that the labour movement was founded in the hotels just the same as the democracy movement was founded in the coffee houses in France. I always thought this was very funny, but it was probably not so funny when the revolution took over. The revolution had been made in the coffee houses in France, and the minute the revolutionaries took over, the first thing they did was close down the coffee houses, because nobody else was going to make a revolution there. The minute the Labor Party gets in, they start banning pubs. The same story really is being repeated again.

Now, I don't want to get too dramatic here, but the good lord Jesus turned water into wine. There can't be anything much wrong with alcohol if the good lord turned water into wine. Deputy Speaker Freelander, if you're looking for money, you are importing, now, $62,000 million a year of petrol. In 1990 you imported no petrol at all, virtually. There's no reason why we can't move back to that immediately. In Brazil they're on about 60 per cent ethanol and other things, and they supply the other 30 per cent from indigenous crude. We have 30 per cent indigenous crude. Just one thing alone: if you buy the petrol here in Australia instead of importing it, the same as we did in 1990, then you give a gift to the Australian people of $62,000 million a year—a gift to the Australian people.

What if you built the Bradfield Scheme? He wasn't exactly an idiot, Bradfield. He built the Sydney Harbour Bridge, built the underground railway system, won the world prize for engineering and built the University of Queensland. But, if you build that great water transfer scheme, that's 40,000—it was a hundred thousand million in two hits. That's $25 billion in tax revenue for the government. Deputy Speaker Freelander, I'm sorry. Let me just repeat that. If you buy the government motor vehicles in Australia instead of importing them from overseas, there's a $40 billion or $50 billion benefit there for Australia. The Bradfield was $42,000 million. If you stop the importation of petrol and go back to the way the country was run in 1990, then it's $62,000 million. There's you go. There's all the money you could ever want to replace the little pittance that you're getting.

The honourable member for New England is dead right. Australia's identity very much comes out of the bush pub, and you are eroding the identity of Australians if you take that away. You are also eroding our ability to talk to each other. As a member of parliament, I like to find out what people are thinking—what their attitude is towards the government's policies—and the best way to do that is to go down to the local hotel. But I'm well aware of the foundations of the Labor movement, in which my own family was a very important little cog in the machine, and I can tell you that it is ironic that people are coming in here to abolish hotels when their very movement was founded in the hotels—including the bush hotels—of Australia.

There's a little town called Maxwelton, and I love pulling up there because of all the cockies in the area and all the contractors and various other people that are employed in the cattle and sheep industry. You find out what's going on. You could have a good time at the Maxwelton pub. Well, it doesn't exist anymore, because of the impositions that you placed upon it. In a pub in Queensland, you are watched by Big Brother. There's a camera there. When I went to university, on the reading list in the schools and in the university was 'Big Brother is watching'—Nineteen eighty-four, a very scary book. That Big Brother is now watching us all the time in hotels.

What sort of people would demand that you have the government watching you in a hotel when you're trying to have a bit of fun, a bit of good time, to let down your hair and get away from the stresses of the world? It's interesting to watch the graph of suicides amongst males in Australia. It parallels the graph of the decline of the hotels and people going into the pubs. I know that, if I myself am really down, I just go down to the pub, have a lot of good fun with my mates and go home a lot happier and more relaxed than before. But, for people who are more traumatised by reality than, probably, I am, it really is a matter of life and death in many cases, and that's not an exaggeration.

So I want to say: 'Hey, you people. Your party was born in the pubs, and the first thing you do is close them down.' The first thing that leaps to my mind is the Puritans, a very ugly group of people in Britain. The first thing they did, of course, was to ban people from celebrating Christmas, having a few beers and any other type of fun that they might have. Well, the people dug up the body of Pym and the other leader and they tore their bodies to pieces in the streets, such was their hatred of those two men, those two Puritans. There are very few examples in human history where the people just went out, dug skeletal remains out of the ground and tore them to pieces in the street. But their hatred of those people that stopped them from having fun, stopping them having a good time, stopping them talking to each other and maybe coming up with an improvement in society—that was the reaction of the English people, our forebears that came from England.

There's terrible and very sad irony here that the party that was founded in the pubs is the party that now is closing down the pubs. Shame upon them. Shame.

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