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

Every year in Queensland under the old Country Party government, we built a major dam. I will quote but three examples. There were 800 people living in a little town called Griffith in New South Wales. They built a dam. Now there are 28,000 people living and making a very good living in Griffith. There were, ironically, 831 people living in a town called Mareeba. They built a dam, and now there are 26,000 people living in Mareeba, all on very, very high incomes. God bless them. There was a third town in Queensland—a little railway siding, Emerald—that had 1,100 people and it now has 17,000 people.

There has not been a dam built in Queensland in 33 years—or whatever it is since the Bjelke-Petersen government fell. Bjelke-Petersen was stabbed in the back by his own mob. Not one single dam has been built. I represent half of Australia's water. Half of the water that falls on Australia falls in the Kennedy electorate. We were building dams, and now we've stopped building dams. The water just runs down the street, taking millions of tonnes of topsoil— (Time expired)