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

Excuse me for reading this document out, but it's one of the rare occasions that I'm going to do it. What's happening in our northern waters right now should worry every single person in this country. Illegal boats are coming into our northern waters in numbers we have never seen before. They're coming quietly, they're coming regularly, and they're coming because nobody is watching the gate anymore. And why aren't we watching? Because governments have regulated our fishing industry out of existence. Australia has the longest coastline of any country on Earth, yet it has the lowest per kilometre fishing effort of any coastline on Earth.

For generations, our commercial fishermen were the eyes and ears of the north. They knew every tide channel and every strange light on the horizon. If something moved that shouldn't have been there, they knew about it. But they've been pushed off the waters. We strangled them with paperwork, bans and city based ideology, we shut down gillnets, we sidelined trawlers, and we told the very people that protected our coastline for free to stay at home. Now, Australian seas are empty—no, they're not empty. They're filled with people who are not Australians.

Karumba had over 240 boats licensed to operate and probably another 240 boats on North Queensland's east coast. Now, I doubt whether there are 200 licences in the gulf and the east coast. Carl von Clausewitz's chilling aphorism is that 'a people without land will seek a land without people'. Similarly, people without seas will seek seas without people. Ask the First Australians how they fared, or ask the Red Indians, the Aztecs or the Zulus. When you don't have Australians on the water, someone else will fill the void. Illegal fishing boats, people smugglers, foreign interests testing how far they can push—they're not stupid.

We need our trawlers and our netters back doing the job our Border Force is clearly not resourced to do. Every Australian fishing vessel is a moving surveillance platform. Every skipper is a sentry. Every crew is a deterrent. And where is Border Force? Where is our biosecurity? We have 14 patrol boats with no armaments on them to cover the longest coastline on Earth. It's a joke; nobody is there. There's no meaningful presence, no real defence, no boats, no boots and no eyes. Let me remind this country it was only two years ago that we found out China has control of Yam Island—which is halfway between New Guinea and the tip of Cape York, Australia—and the mouth of the Fly River and was then in the process of purchasing Pajinka, at the tip of Cape York. So we've given it three key control points. (Time expired)