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

We have done some national publicity recently, and we highlighted to the best of our ability that North Queensland, if it was a separate country, would be the wettest country on earth, wetter than Brazil. We have massive water assets, and we highlighted that we have the richest mineral provinces on earth in North Queensland. We have the North West Minerals Province, the vanadium deposits along the mid-west, the lithium deposits and the giant Chillagoe mineral province at the back of Cairns, which hasn't been touched. We have the richest mineral province on earth, we have the richest water province on earth, and the Queensland government doesn't allow us to touch either! The only water they've given out in 30 years they gave to two corporations with absentee landlords, and one is a foreign corporation. The only people who got any water were a foreign corporation and an absentee landlord company. I want to say to the ALP in Queensland that that dumb government gave a golden handshake worth tens of millions of dollars to the two biggest hitters for the National Party, now called the LNP, in Queensland. I'll give you the dimensions of how inappropriate, irresponsible and dumb the people who are running Queensland are.

Having said that, the other issue is the mineral province. We are desperately short of copper. We have a $5,000 million copper and fertiliser industry that is dependent upon the copper industry. We are having to get the copper from Olympic Dam. I mean, Mount Isa is near the Gulf of Carpentaria in Queensland, and Olympic Dam is in South Australia. That is the desperation of it! When we looked at the resources—and there are major copper resources—the entire North West Minerals Province is covered by mining leases, mining lease applications or exploration permits—the entire area—so you're locked out. To give you an idea of who owns these resources, one of the major resources is owned by a person I spoke to, but I won't use the gentleman's name. I said, 'So what have you got up there?' He said, 'Copper, silver, lead, zinc.' I said, 'Yes, but what have you got, so how big is the resource?' He said, 'We don't worry about things like that. ' He doesn't worry about things like how much ore he's got in the ground! No, he doesn't. All he's doing is playing stock market games with his other bludging, blood-sucking mates who call themselves corporates. They've given the entire mineral province to these people.

The great 'Red Ted' Theodore, the founder of the great Labor movement in this country, immediately on taking office in 1915, moved the 'use it or lose it' clause. The resources of Queensland will not be used as a play thing for the idle rich to play monopoly with each other, so he introduced use it or lose it. Every government in Queensland history has kept the legislation, use it or lose it. Now we haven't got that legislation, the entire field is locked up, we can't access any copper and the copper stream for Mount Isa Mines—and I won't hesitate to say it—is in great jeopardy.

Five years ago, they announced the closure of the entire copper stream in Mount Isa, costing the Australian people—about $3,000 million a year was vanishing. I won't go into the extraordinary efforts that you yourself, Mr Speaker, went to, and you played a vital role in rescuing us, and we bought time—but all we bought was time. We have not bought the access to the copper that we need to keep that production facility going. The copper is there. I myself, of course, am an ex-mining man, and I know the copper is there, I can tell you. But you can't access it while there are people there. So 'use it or lose it' must be restored in Queensland. (Time expired)