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

I have no disrespect for the last speaker. But I've been here for 50 years, and every two or three years we get a new inquiry or body set up that's going to save us all. All we blackfellas are going to be saved by you whitefellas setting up a body. That's been going on for 55 years, and I've been following it. Every now and then we set up another body. The one that's always been interesting for me—I can't help but laugh when I think about it—was when Prime Minister Tony Abbott introduced the Closing the gapreport. It indicated in its first year that the gap had widened. That was not good. In the second year it indicated that it had widened again, and in the third year it indicated that it had widened again. He had to do something, so he abolished the annual report! That's what he did.

I make no secret of the fact that Kevin Rudd and I have been good friends since the days he and I were running in Queensland. In screaming frustration, I said to him, 'Mate, do you realise how bad it is?' And he said: 'Yes. Talk to the minister.' 'I did—three times. She burst out crying the last time, so I'm not going back to talk to the minister again.' 'Alright, well, talk to so and so in my office.' Well, two months later we'd had an election, he was gone and we were back to square one again.

I'm going to release certain figures that should shock the nation. I have been reluctant to release these figures, because I think that, if the rest of the world finds out what is really going on, then we will become the pariah of this century—we'll be the South Africa of this century. There's no way you can ride around the figures. Everyone knows what's going on, and no-one is doing anything about it. I don't know that everyone does know. If they knew, then, surely, they could not continue. The figures show the highest crime rate in the world, the highest suicide rates in the world, the lowest life expectancy arguably anywhere in the world and the highest unemployment rates anywhere in the world. That's something to be proud of as a nation, isn't it!

I'm related to people on Doomadgee. I always talk about my mob. 'Murri from the Curry', they call us. All of us that are dark and come from 'the Curry' are all a bit mixed up, and we always identify as 'Murri from the Curry'. My brother was called 'Boori' at school. It never worried him. He was a bad beggar when it came to a knuckle, but it never worried him. Obviously, if you're dark, you come from Cloncurry. Far from being ashamed of it—we Kalkadoons held the whitefellas at bay for nearly 25 years. That's not a bad effort. For guerrilla tactics, you'll find very little precedent anywhere in the world. Vietnam would be one of those examples. But it was a pretty good effort. People say, 'Oh, yeah? How'd it end up?' I'm pleased that they ask that question, because there are only about 2,000 of us. We own three million acres in an above-24-inch rainfall area, so I don't think we ended up too bad.

In fact, we may be the most land-rich people on earth. Freddy Pascoe and Paulie Edwards own the biggest cattle station in Australia. The two families fight all the time, but they're both good blokes. He was also the mayor of Normanton, even though he was a First Australian in towns that can be pretty racist at times. He was the mayor of Normanton and Karumba. Both of them were ringers—stockmen—as young blokes, so they've done a very good job in running the biggest cattle station in Australia. I think we're running about 45,000 head there and have done now for about 60 or 70 years. My great mentor, Mickey Miller, bought the station originally, and they made a success of it right from the start.

First Australian affairs are a tragedy. The Prime Minister was giving an award to the Mayor of Doomadgee, the biggest cattle owner in Australia and a bloke I've got a lot of time for. He said, 'Mate, how's Jason Ned going?' And I said, 'He's going good, mate. He's got about 2,000 of those wild mickeys together and branded behind wire—wild cattle—and he made maybe about $4 million over a period of three years.' He said, 'You know he ran all my camps?' I said, 'All of your camps?' He said, 'Yeah, all the camps.' So I rang up Jason. I said, 'Mate, did you run all the camps?' He said, 'Yeah, for 10 years.' I said, 'Do you realise you've mustered more cattle than any other person in human history?' The Americans have big runs. The Argentinians and Brazilians have big runs, but they're nowhere near as big as ours. He said, 'Well, I've never thought about that.' Anyway, the Prime Minister was coming up to Mount Isa to give him a Good Australian Award, a highly sought after honour, and he died a couple of weeks before the award went through. The point I want to make is that he could not get a pastoral lease. Every whitefella in Australia can get a pastoral lease, but a blackfella living on his own land can't get a pastoral lease. What's going on? So he did what the Europeans that came to New South Wales did. He just went out and squatted. He said, 'It's my land. Don't set foot on it or else.'

I wrote a history of Australia. I agonised for 3½ years as to how I would start that book off, and I just couldn't get it right in my head. To get a history book published is a really big achievement. I'll be very proud of that till the day I die. But it suddenly occurred to me—I will mention his name: Clarence Waldron. He was mayor, off and on, of Doomadgee. Clarence had his shortcomings, but he could be really brilliant. A whitefella came up, and he said he was solving all of our black drinking problems: he was going to ban alcohol in Doomadgee, he would preside over it, and he'd had a meeting with the representatives of the community. The five missionary ladies, who all hated the grog—that's who he had the meeting with, and everyone screamed out and yelled that at him. But Clarence didn't say anything until right at the end. He was mayor of the town. When it was his turn to talk—he doesn't look at you, Clarence; he speaks like this. He said: 'Don't you come here and say what's what and that's that. Dis mah lan.' That's how the book opened: 'Dis mah lan'—d-i-s-m-a-h-l-a-n. God bless you, Clarence.

Jason Ned said: 'Well, you're not ever going to give it to us, so we're just taking it, right? We're just taking it, the same as'—well, he didn't say this, but it's the same as what the Europeans did when they came to New South Wales. They just took it: 'You don't like it? Well, too bloody bad for you.'

When I became minister, a bloke jumped out from behind an oleander bush, a journalist, and he said, 'What qualifications have you got for becoming a minister for Aboriginal affairs?' I just said the first thing that came into my head. I said: 'Playing rugby league. It's pretty hard to feel superior to someone when he's buried you upside down in the dirt eight or nine times in a football match.' This bloke laughed, and the comment got a lot of publicity. It was just a quick, off-the-cuff, honest answer. There is no doubt that rugby league has been a great equalising mechanism, and I pay my own sport a very great tribute in this area.

Having said that, I want to go back—I'm coming to the end of my run here—to two quotes. One is from Winston Churchill, and the other is from Carl von Clausewitz, who wrote what is always regarded as the best book on warfare in human history. Churchill said, 'Those that cannot learn the lessons of history are doomed to again suffer its miseries.' Carl von Clausewitz said, in On War, 'There is one truism of history: a people without land will look to a land without people.'

Read Mein Kampf. On every third page, Hitler uses the word 'lebensraum'—living room. 'Well, we Germans have got the population; Russia's got the land.' We know what's going to happen here, because it's happened every other time in human history. The result was, I don't know, about 32 million people dying in the Second World War, which was really more about Russia versus Germany than any other explanation.

To revert back—why won't you whitefellas give us a piece of paper saying we own our own land, like every other person on the planet gets? I didn't know anything about the community areas. I was brought up in a town that was very much—everyone was dark in Cloncurry. 'You Murri from the Curry'—all of us are dark, and who knows what's in the family tree, not that anyone would care anyway. When I went to the community areas, which I'd never been to before, it struck me that—the first one I went to was Yarrabah, the biggest community in Australia, with about 4,000 people—every single bloke I talked to was a whitefella. Every single person running the community was a whitefella, not a blackfella. What's going on here?

In Cloncurry, my father was partner to a cattle grazier—a cattle owner, for the sake of a better word—on a big station outside Cloncurry. They were partners in three or four copper mines together. He was a First Australian and one of the more glamorous station owners in the Mount Isa area—a very famous First Australian family. It's normal in that area.

At Doomadgee, Jason went out and got 2,000 head together. Two weeks before he was to get a Good Australian Award off the Prime Minister, sadly, he died. But, please God, his family are carrying on up there and a whole lot of them now have taken up blocks, saying: 'We don't care whether you whitefellas give us a piece of paper or not. It's our land. We're putting a fence up. Don't you set foot across that fence.'

Earlier today, I was thrown out of the chamber. I'm pretty proud of that, really, because I just can't help but get angry. I think people that have been brought up in a very strong Christian tradition and also people that have been brought up in a very strong Australian tradition don't like watching underdogs get picked on, and their natural reaction is to fight anyone that does that. When I was trying to defend today, a bloke from the ALP kept screaming abuse and I said, 'Mate, on the subject of race, you don't know your history books.' The great John Curtin was easily our best prime minister. But, all the same, he said, 'All we want coming into Australia are Europeans, but not Poles, and no-one from Asia.' I was sad that a great man would say something like that, but that's what he said.

Cocky Calwell, the leader of the Labor Party for about 15 years—everyone laughed at it, but I didn't really think it was all that funny—said that 'two Wongs don't make a white', referring to the White Australia policy. Well, the people that weren't white in Australia copped it as well. When it comes to the lesson for Australia, as Churchill said, 'those who cannot learn from history'—we had an empty land, and there were people that were looking for an empty land. People that didn't have land were looking for an empty land, so they came out here and took it off us. We had no standing armies. We had no ability to resist. We had no rifles. So we got nearly annihilated.

I can't talk about the rest of Australia, but I can most certainly talk about my homeland—where I come from. My grandparents went out there in a Cobb & Co stagecoach in the 1890s and the Kalkadoon Wars were still pottering along at that stage. My partner in mining was always referred to as the 'last of the Kalkadoons'. His mother had been one of the few 'piccaninny' survivors of the big battle on Battle range. So, if anyone knows about it, I do. But I can tell you, absolutely, if it weren't for the Christian missionaries, my mob would've been annihilated. There's no question about it.

I don't want to go into who picked the fight first or anything like that. The fact was that there was a huge fight, and we knew who was going to win it. One had Martini-Henry rifles and the other one had spears and woomeras. We knew who were going to win. But the Christian missionaries roped these people in and secured huge areas of land. I think it was 3½ million acres in North Queensland, and it's all above 26-inch rainfall—most cattlemen in Australia would cry to get 26-inch rainfall—and they can get the cattle in at Pormpuraaw. I went there. Jackson Shortjoe and Eddie Holroyd said, 'We want to have a go at the cleanskins.' I said: 'Alright. Have a go,' and they got 6,000 head together. On that note, I'll sit down.

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