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

This is a grievance motion. My grievance is there's no action in the state of Queensland. The previous speaker talks about extra facilities and a better lifestyle. But we as a government—we were there for 40-odd years in Queensland—we saw government in terms of doing, making the cake bigger. There was plenty of money to spend on highways and everything else if you concentrated on making the economy bigger. When the Country Party came into government from the Labor Party, in the last 20 years of the Bjelke-Petersen government we laid 300 kilometres of railway line to open up mines every single year for 20 years. We laid down 1,000 kilometres of bitumen on dirt roads every single year. We built a new mining town every single year, and we built a billion-dollar tourist resort every year.

To my knowledge, in the 30 years since, under the lily pad leftie governments—and there are plenty of lily pad lefties in the Liberal Party, I can tell you; I can describe them in the same way, in all honesty—there has been not a single inch of railway track laid. There has not been a single thousand kilometres of dirt road converted to bitumen. There hasn't been a single mining town established and there hasn't been a billion-dollar tourist resort built. Every year we were doing that. But you stop completely at a dead wall.

I don't want to criticise the previous speaker. He's talking about spending government money. I'm talking about creating government money. I'm not talking about asking the government for money. I'm talking about convincing the government that this is money-creating investment for the government. If you built a railway line into the Galilee, half Australia's coal is in the Galilee. Coal is earning a quarter of our total income. In fact, with iron ore, more than half of our entire income from overseas comes from those two items. I'm talking about hard rock mining. I represent the biggest hard rock mining area in Australia, the north-west mineral province, Mt Isa and the fertiliser plant being prominent amongst those figures. But if you want to open up the Galilee, you've got to build a railway line and a port, and they've got to be multi-user.

Everyone is clapping and cheering on Adani, the Liberal Party being the major clappers and cheerers when they're with their constituency. When they're with the people, they believe by 2050 no coal. But we're singing a different tune here, and so did Mr Shorten in the last election. One of the reasons the Liberal Party failed so miserably in Queensland in the last election was because they told one story in Brisbane and another story in North Queensland where they needed to win the seats. So we're preaching an anti-coal agenda in Brisbane and a pro-coal agenda in North Queensland. Do you think we're all a bunch of mugs up there in North Queensland, that we don't see that? So they thought, you may as well keep voting for the dumb socialists, right.

Honourable Member:

An honourable member interjecting—

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

I'm just telling you what happened in Queensland. I don't think anyone in Queensland would deny that they were preaching one story on coal in Brisbane and another story on coal up there.

But we don't preach the story. We say build the railway line into the Galilee, as did every Queensland government for 45 years in Queensland. As did the sort of governments you had in Western Australia, the Charles Court type government, building infrastructure. We will shortly disclose the Liberal concept for the Bradfield Scheme, which produces no jobs, no development—nothing. It's a greenie's paradise, the Bradfield Scheme. We'll produce the Labor Party's Bradfield Scheme, and it's another greenie's paradise. There's not a single job created by it. But, if you build the revised Bradfield Scheme, as announced by the Bjelke-Petersen government and by the Malcolm Fraser government, then you will produce $30 billion a year of income. It more than duplicates, along with other water developments in North Queensland—I won't go into all the detail here—the Murray-Darling. The Murray-Darling is one river. In North Queensland, we have one river that's bigger than the Murray-Darling: the Mitchell River. We have the third-biggest river in Australia, after the Murray-Darling: the Burdekin River. The fourth-biggest river in Australia is the Gilbert River in North Queensland. The sixth-biggest river in Australia is the Flinders River. All of Australia's water is in North Queensland. If we were a separate country, we would be the most water-rich country on earth, but unfortunately it comes in three months. So, unless you build a little receptacle to hold a bit of it back, you will get no benefit. You can't build a single farm on the basis of having a water supply for a month or so. It doesn't work. You've got to have a receptacle to hold it back.

My government built the last dam in Australia, on the Burdekin River, the third-biggest river in Australia. It's a very big dam and it resulted in about $3 million or $4 million of extra production, basically in the sugar industry and the fruit and vegetable industry in the Greater Ayr region. We have a project—and God bless the Prime Minister—in Hughenden. I just hope he can stay the course. The Hughenden project is a model. That's all it is. It's a prototype. Once you build the Hughenden project, you can then build another 15 Hughenden projects in North Queensland, very easily and much more cheaply. Unfortunately for people in Hughenden, it's at the top of the river. All the others are downstream, in the great rivers of North Queensland. But we can build at least 10, 15 or maybe 20 of those schemes.

We have a fifth of Australia's cattle population, or whatever it is. We have five million head of cattle. We should be running eight million head of cattle. We turn off one ox for every six oxen we have. We only turn off one, and the rest of Australia is turning off one in three. That's because we have no fattening capacity in North Queensland. We have to ship the cattle 2,000 kilometres down to South-East Queensland, to the lot feeders, and then they're processed out and shipped back 2,000 kilometres to where we send all our beef to Northern Hemisphere destinations. If you do these schemes, just as a side benefit you get an extra $6 billion a year, because then the cattle industry is running eight million head of cattle and is turning off one in three, the same as the rest of Australia. It's an ancillary benefit.

I've talked about the Galilee, which brings in $30 billion a year at the very least. It's the first stage of development proposed by four of the 12 major people present at the Galilee Basin. Do you think that Mr Adani—the biggest infrastructure magnate on earth and a personal friend of the Prime Minister of India—will let other people use his railway line to compete against him? If you do, I would ask you to have a little yarn with Twiggy Forrest, because, for all of his good points, Charlie Court would not build a railway line. He said, 'BHP would force them to be a multi-user.' Well, according to Andrew Forrest, 'For 23 years, I was stupid enough, and Rio Tinto was stupid enough, to believe that we could enforce the law against BHP.' He said, 'What a joke. You don't enforce the law against a big corporation.' If you enforced the law against Adani, who would make people look like pygmies, then you'd believe in the tooth fairy!

If you think you're not going to send coal to India, read Scientific American, the fourth-last Scientific American. It says that two-thirds of the homes in India are still energised by burning cow dung and firewood. Think about the CO2 that's going up into the atmosphere from that! But if you think you're going to tell India that they can't have any coal, you'd believe in the tooth fairy. You seriously believe that you're going to tell what will soon be the biggest country on earth, one of the most powerful, that you're not going to send them any coal? Well, I'll quote von Clausewitz, from the best book ever written on warfare: if goods don't cross borders, guns will. If you look at history, that's very much a truism.

We have silicon deposits. One alone will produce $5,000 million a year if it's processed in Australia. But I can assure you that there is no intention by Labor or the Liberal Party to have anything at all processed in Australia. The great Sir Leo Hielscher—two of the four biggest bridges in Australia are named after Sir Leo Hielscher—when they came in and said they wanted to export bauxite, he burst out laughing. Well, of course the biggest mine proposed for our deposits of bauxite—it's not going to be exported as bauxite. The reason he was laughing is that you don't export bauxite from Queensland. Under this government, you export aluminium. So, if we export the silicon we'll get maybe $60 million a year, and of course if we export high-tech silicon we'll get $23,000 a year. So, of course we're exporting it at $20 million or $30 million a year. But we can give you $90 billion a year, and $30 billion in taxes a year, and that is just doing what we did as a government for 20 years— (Time expired)

David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The time for the grievance debate has expired. The debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 192(b). The debate is adjourned and resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.

Federation Chamber adjourned at 18:27