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

I second the bill. I point out to my fellow Australians that if you move 100km west of Sydney, Newcastle or Brisbane and the Gold Coast, you could drop a series of atomic bombs right across Australia and you would kill nobody. There's nobody living there. In fact, if you take a narrow 120-kilometre-wide belt out of the east coast of Australia and a little dot from around Perth, there would be less than a million people collectively living on a continent the size of the United States or China or Europe. There is no-one living there, so why do you have to take up prime agricultural land when, if there is one thing that Australia has, it's empty land?

The demography of Australia is heartbreaking. People are living on a tiny, narrow coastline paying $270,000 for a piece of land in an empty land, and who's responsible? The people in this place are responsible. The people in the state parliaments are responsible. They have created this situation, and they must be held responsible.

No-one in this place would deny that the average Australian can't afford to buy a house now, and that is mostly a product of land prices. There are real estate sharks all over Australia, and they have a great vested interest in keeping land prices up high. But if Australia is a food producing country, and it can't feed itself now—I'll quote the figures to you. According to the figures of the federal government, 40 per cent of our fruit and vegetables are coming in from overseas and almost all of our seafood.

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