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

I spent 20 years of my life in a government that believed it was our duty to make work for our people, to grow the economic cake. So, every year, we built a giant irrigation scheme; every year we opened a giant mine of some description; and we had to provide towns, and all that infrastructure, and railway lines, to make those things happen. But here, we argue that this group of people should get more money or that that group of people shouldn't have got more money. It is not about how you cut up the cake. Surely you should emphasise making the cake bigger.

Now, we can't even borrow money to build a house in regional Australia. The banks have redlined all of regional Australia—they will not lend money to build a home. There still happen to be about 20 electorates based in regional Australia. Yes, sure, we've lost about two or three every 10 or 12 years, but there's still a bloody lot of people—excuse my language—living there at the present moment. And we can't get the money to build a house.

The honourable member for Mayo talked about having no specialists in country areas. Well, alright, that might be something we have to live with, but give us some money to be able to go down and see specialists. No, that doesn't happen.

You know that, if you drive into any city in Australia, there are high-rise cranes all over the place. Well, you won't even see a contractor in regional Australia. There's nothing being built there.

You pass laws putting a tax upon people who own land, and all you could think of was the cities. In country Australia—which is like 20 per cent of the population still—we all have a bit of acreage. We're not rich people; we're ordinary people. But if you want to live in the Moranbahs, or the Charters Towers, or the Mount Isas, or the Yarakas, or wherever you want to live, you like a little bit of space around you. It's the one thing you can have that people in cities can't have. Well, now you're going to tax it. There's no tax on people owning $4 million houses in Brisbane or Sydney or Melbourne. But the ordinary poor people that live in rural Australia—you're taxing them. You just don't even realise that we exist.

And you, members of parliament that represent country electorates, should stand in shame. But don't do it on the basis that the Liberal Party are the good guys. No way! No way, Jose.

All I can say is: you could give the green light to coalmining—and both sides of this parliament have continuously opposed coalmining, though they're making a few sounds now and changing a little bit; it's just a little bit late in the game to be talking about it now—and open up the Galilee coal basin. You could build the Bradfield Scheme. He was exactly a fool; he built the Sydney Harbour Bridge; he built the water supply for Sydney; he built the underground railways, which won the world prize for engineering; and he built the University of Queensland—not exactly a fool, this bloke. Build the Bradfield Scheme. It could bring in $40,000 million or $50,000 million a year and could provide a wonderful living for some five million people in Australia that will move onto a rich farm which will give them everything that no-one else on earth can enjoy—an income of $1½ million a year, for starters.

So these things are available to us. But in this place we are so petty and so small-minded that all we talk about is whether that mob of people are getting more money than that mob of people. It's the same budget that I've heard in this place now for the last 20 years.

That was not what happened in this place previously. Whether it was the ALP or the other mob, they talked about development. That's not a word we use anymore in Australia. Our national anthem says, 'Advance Australia fair'. 'Advance'? We've been in retreat!

The biggest income earner for this country for 200 years was the wool industry. And Paul Keating—a loud-mouthed know-all, dictatorial and arrogant—abolished the wool scheme and completely destroyed the biggest source of income— (Time expired)

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