Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Speaking as a former mines and energy minister in Queensland, I know that when the government fell we had the cheapest electricity in the world. Why did we? Because we simply passed the cost of running the electricity industry onto the consumer. It was just the cost of running the whole thing. We didn't charge them for power stations, because we had already paid off the power stations. We didn't charge them for the transmission lines and reticulation, because we had already paid that off. So we had the cheapest electricity in the world. The absolute proof of that was that we got the huge aluminium industry, which was going to Canada but re-sited itself to Queensland. The second element to that is that we had a reserve policy. Almost all of our electricity was coming from Gladstone and it was running on zero-priced coal. We had a reserve resource policy.

The great Dick Honan—and I am very, very proud to be a strong supporter of Manildra—has a quote in the United States of $4 for electricity, a quote in Australia of $18 and another quote of $19. Even worse than that is the situation out in my area. Mount Isa Mines employs about 10,000 people, directly and indirectly, and there are 5,000 in the fertiliser plant. They are all dependent on gas, which they now can't buy for under $16, and their competitors are buying it for $4.

I want to switch off that completely. The Liberal Party continuously asserts in this place that it is the greenies who have put the price up. I would like to join the Liberal Party in saying that, but it's just simply not true. The price element taken by the greenies is 20 per cent. It's about 5c on a price of 27c. It's 25 per cent. So it's not coming from the greenies. The price went up—and this is fascinating—by 18 per cent from 1984 to 1997. So, over a period of 17 years, the price went up 18 per cent. In other words, it hardly went up at all. It went up one per cent a year. And then suddenly it went through the roof. In the next nine years it went up five per cent. Let me quote you the figures. In 1993, it was $643. In the year 2000, it was $643. So it didn't move at all. What happened after that? It then leapt from $643 to $2,010. So what's going on here? (Time expired)