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

In the last wet season, as usual, North Queensland lost people due to flooding on the highways—six people. At the Gairloch and Seymour River areas, just north of Ingham, the national highway was cut—I emphasise 'national highway'. Nearly half a million people live north of Ingham, in Australia. The greater Cairns region, the greater Innisfail region and greater Mareeba-Atherton region are big population centres by any standard in Australia, and they're cut off every year by rivers. No-one's doing anything about it. They are also cut off by the Herbert River.

I am well aware as an historian that, very tragically, the Aboriginal story for that area—including the town of Ingham, a town of about 20,000 people just north of Townsville—which is Quinkan area, is: 'Don't go there. There's water from mountain to mountain.' At some stage, the whole of the coastal plain went 30 foot underwater. If you have simultaneous floods in the upper and lower Herbert, goodbye, Ingham. The death toll that's mooted would be about 300 or 400 people. Nothing's been done about the Gairloch or Seymour River areas. There's nothing being done about the Herbert River diversion, which Dr Bradfield spoke about back in the 1920s. The Bridle Track tunnel, to some degree, caused those six deaths in the last flooding. We can't get off the coastal plain. We're trapped, because the Great Dividing Range is there and there's about 30 kilometres before you hit the sea, and at Cairns the Great Dividing Range hits the sea. So we're trapped in that area every year. Heaven only knows they know about it, because not only I but numerous other people have screamed about it.

Doomadgee is cut off every year for about three months, and I can't help but think—'they're blackfellas; don't worry about them.' I don't have any other explanation as to why Doomadgee gets cut off every single year for three months. I don't know any other town in Australia that fits into that category. There probably are some that do, but I'm not aware of them. Also if you put a higher level—I make this point to the Parliament of Australia. If we're going to build a bridge, don't build a bridge. In South-East Queensland, they build bridged dams. So they build a dam and they have a roadway across the top of the dam. It serves a double purpose, and, if you like, halves the cost of the dam and halves the cost of the bridge.

A magnificent example of that is Georgetown, which is inland. The gulf country is completely cut off every year by the fourth-biggest river system in Australia, the Gilbert River, and it's an ideal site for a bridged dam—almost right where the road is now. But little, tiny Georgetown would grow to a town of 25,000 people. That's what happened in Griffith when irrigation went in. That's what happened in Mareeba when irrigation went in, and that's what happened to numerous other towns I could quote. So wouldn't it be wonderful if this government put a city out there in the middle of nowhere and developed the beautiful opportunities for tourism? The current failure to have that bridge is costing the Australian people about $15 million a year in lost tourism.

When the Einasleigh bridge went in, the figure was $20 million a year, and this'll be just about the same as the Einasleigh River Bridge. The wonderful governments of the old Country Party built the Australian beef roads scheme. Now it's no use—a mate of mine and I bought 500,000 acres for $25,000. Why? Because you couldn't get in or out of the place. There's no road. If you put a road in, now it's producing $6 million a year— (Time expired)

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