Bob Katter's recent appearances (OpenAustralia.org)
National Security | Constituency Statements | House debates
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...
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)
Water Infrastructure | Questions without Notice | House debates
They've been waiting for eight years!
He's been to Hughenden twice—the Prime Minister.
Treasurer, young mothers today must have a paying job and be a wife, cook, family bookkeeper, kid chauffeur, house cleaner, laundry lady and go to church on Sunday. Not surprisingly, when 20...
Treasurer, young mothers today must have a paying job and be a wife, cook, family bookkeeper, kid chauffeur, house cleaner, laundry lady and go to church on Sunday. Not surprisingly, when 20 Australians die, only 15 will be born. Advance Australia Fair is Hughenden's irrigation scheme. Fifteen Hughendens would create 3,000 farms, 10,000 owner-operator businesses and 100,000 homes with backyards. Hughenden has had $170 million allocated now for eight years. Queensland dithers. Will you create a water authority and call tenders? Treasurer, you won't get a portrait; you'll get a statue!
Excise Tariff Amendment (Draught Beer) Bill 2025, Customs Tariff Amendment (Draught Beer) Bill 2025; Second Reading | Bills | House debates
Could I just interrupt for a moment and point out these great beers from North Queensland that have my picture on them?
I could tell a thousand stories, but I have just a quick one. I was in the pub at a little place called Garradunga in North Queensland, and I was going to a Lions Club meeting. I had my Lions...
I could tell a thousand stories, but I have just a quick one. I was in the pub at a little place called Garradunga in North Queensland, and I was going to a Lions Club meeting. I had my Lions badge on. Someone said, 'I didn't know you were a Lion.' The bloke across the bar said, 'Mate, he's been a lion all of his life,' and everyone roared laughing at my expense. It's fun, but it's also ironic that the ALP is moving this, because the ALP was founded in the pubs in North Queensland—you know, Barcaldine, Cloncurry and also western New South Wales. But I would say 'Red Ted' Theodore was the real founder of the labour movement in Australia. The story is told about him and 'Big Bill' McCormack—about 'Red Ted' Theodore and 'Big Bill' McCormack. He goes into the pub and says to one of the blokes drinking there, 'Tommy, you haven't taken out a ticket'. It's a union ticket. He just starts writing him out the ticket, and Tommy says, 'Stick it up'—well, we know the rest of 'stick it up'. 'Big Bill' McCormack comes up and says, 'Did you say to Ted that he should so-and-so and so-and-so?' and he says, 'Yes, I'll say it to you too.' So McCormack grabs him by the hair and punches him in the mouth. He goes down. He kicks him all around the floor, then lifts him up by the belt and says, 'Now take the bloody ticket out,' so he takes the ticket out. He says, 'Well, why didn't you take it out in the first place, Tommy? It would have saved you a lot of trouble,' and Tommy says, 'Oh, well, you didn't go to the trouble of explaining it to me properly, like Bill did.' He was bashing the hell out of him. I tell that story to indicate that the labour movement—and both sides of the house would agree—has made a magnificent contribution to the people of Australia. One in 30 of us that went into cane fields never came back out alive. One in 30 of us that went down into the mines never came back up alive, until the Labor movement came along. I'm very proud to say that my family were very well off and threw their full weight behind the labour movement in its early years. But the point of the story is that the labour movement was founded in the hotels just the same as the democracy movement was founded in the coffee houses in France. I always thought this was very funny, but it was probably not so funny when the revolution took over. The revolution had been made in the coffee houses in France, and the minute the revolutionaries took over, the first thing they did was close down the coffee houses, because nobody else was going to make a revolution there. The minute the Labor Party gets in, they start banning pubs. The same story really is being repeated again. Now, I don't want to get too dramatic here, but the good lord Jesus turned water into wine. There can't be anything much wrong with alcohol if the good lord turned water into wine. Deputy Speaker Freelander, if you're looking for money, you are importing, now, $62,000 million a year of petrol. In 1990 you imported no petrol at all, virtually. There's no reason why we can't move back to that immediately. In Brazil they're on about 60 per cent ethanol and other things, and they supply the other 30 per cent from indigenous crude. We have 30 per cent indigenous crude. Just one thing alone: if you buy the petrol here in Australia instead of importing it, the same as we did in 1990, then you give a gift to the Australian people of $62,000 million a year—a gift to the Australian people. What if you built the Bradfield Scheme? He wasn't exactly an idiot, Bradfield. He built the Sydney Harbour Bridge, built the underground railway system, won the world prize for engineering and built the University of Queensland. But, if you build that great water transfer scheme, that's 40,000—it was a hundred thousand million in two hits. That's $25 billion in tax revenue for the government. Deputy Speaker Freelander, I'm sorry. Let me just repeat that. If you buy the government motor vehicles in Australia instead of importing them from overseas, there's a $40 billion or $50 billion benefit there for Australia. The Bradfield was $42,000 million. If you stop the importation of petrol and go back to the way the country was run in 1990, then it's $62,000 million. There's you go. There's all the money you could ever want to replace the little pittance that you're getting. The honourable member for New England is dead right. Australia's identity very much comes out of the bush pub, and you are eroding the identity of Australians if you take that away. You are also eroding our ability to talk to each other. As a member of parliament, I like to find out what people are thinking—what their attitude is towards the government's policies—and the best way to do that is to go down to the local hotel. But I'm well aware of the foundations of the Labor movement, in which my own family was a very important little cog in the machine, and I can tell you that it is ironic that people are coming in here to abolish hotels when their very movement was founded in the hotels—including the bush hotels—of Australia. There's a little town called Maxwelton, and I love pulling up there because of all the cockies in the area and all the contractors and various other people that are employed in the cattle and sheep industry. You find out what's going on. You could have a good time at the Maxwelton pub. Well, it doesn't exist anymore, because of the impositions that you placed upon it. In a pub in Queensland, you are watched by Big Brother. There's a camera there. When I went to university, on the reading list in the schools and in the university was 'Big Brother is watching'—Nineteen eighty-four, a very scary book. That Big Brother is now watching us all the time in hotels. What sort of people would demand that you have the government watching you in a hotel when you're trying to have a bit of fun, a bit of good time, to let down your hair and get away from the stresses of the world? It's interesting to watch the graph of suicides amongst males in Australia. It parallels the graph of the decline of the hotels and people going into the pubs. I know that, if I myself am really down, I just go down to the pub, have a lot of good fun with my mates and go home a lot happier and more relaxed than before. But, for people who are more traumatised by reality than, probably, I am, it really is a matter of life and death in many cases, and that's not an exaggeration. So I want to say: 'Hey, you people. Your party was born in the pubs, and the first thing you do is close them down.' The first thing that leaps to my mind is the Puritans, a very ugly group of people in Britain. The first thing they did, of course, was to ban people from celebrating Christmas, having a few beers and any other type of fun that they might have. Well, the people dug up the body of Pym and the other leader and they tore their bodies to pieces in the streets, such was their hatred of those two men, those two Puritans. There are very few examples in human history where the people just went out, dug skeletal remains out of the ground and tore them to pieces in the street. But their hatred of those people that stopped them from having fun, stopping them having a good time, stopping them talking to each other and maybe coming up with an improvement in society—that was the reaction of the English people, our forebears that came from England. There's terrible and very sad irony here that the party that was founded in the pubs is the party that now is closing down the pubs. Shame upon them. Shame.
I've remained incredibly silent about these issues. I was the minister in Queensland for six years. The First Nations people, as they are referred to here in this place, were kind enough to name...
I've remained incredibly silent about these issues. I was the minister in Queensland for six years. The First Nations people, as they are referred to here in this place, were kind enough to name the freehold titles issued under my administration the 'Katter leases'. My son, in a meeting, said: 'Cattle leases? There are no cattle on any of these places.' I said, 'Not cattle—it's Katter, your name!' Now, that was because I simply went out to the 24 community areas in Queensland that are blackfella areas—they're not whitefella areas; they're blackfella areas—and I said, 'What do you want us to do with the land?' Do you know what they said? We put up all the alternatives on a big board: you can have tribal ownership; you can have community ownership; you can have local government ownership; you can have private ownership, the same as all the other places in Australia—whatever you want. Over 3,000 people voted. Three voted against private ownership, and the other 3,000 voted for private ownership. They did not vote for tribal ownership. What does this place do? It moves for tribal ownership. Well, I don't know about you, but I'd be flat-out naming all the people in my bloody family tree. They come from everywhere. I'm dark and I come from Cloncurry, so I identify as a Murri pretty often, and no-one would object to that—'Murri from the Curry'. You said that you were going to look after the land for them, right? You're going to protect nature so that it'll be kept the way it was. Well, it may have passed your knowledge that these people are starving to death. Their life expectancy in this country has slipped from 54 to 49 years of age, when the rest of us enjoy 82 years of age. If you want to know why, it's because you won't let them own property the same way everyone else on Earth owns property. The Mystery of Capital was one of the most important books written in the last half-century. The World Bank economist Hernando de Soto has said, 'The creation of capital comes from the ownership of property.' Now, let me be very specific. There was a very great Australian. He was getting a great Australian award from the Prime Minister because he'd mustered more cattle than any other person in human history. He became the mayor of Doomadgee when he returned home from running all the cattle station camps, and he got a thousand head together. He could not own land where his family had lived for 30,000 years. There was no process by which he could own land. So he did the same as the Australians from overseas did when we came to New South Wales. We just took up the bloody land and squatted on it. That's where the word 'squatter' comes from, because all the land in New South Wales was taken up by squatters. And that's exactly what he did: 'Righto, I'm taking up this 10,000 acres'—or 20,000 acres—'It's my land. Don't set foot on it.' That's squatters rights. He's sick of waiting for you whitefellas to do anything. He's been waiting 200 years for you whitefellas to do something for him, except for a brief period when a bloke who is referred to as a blackfella—me—said, 'What do you want?' They said, 'We want private property rights.' So I gave them property rights. I'm just an ordinary, knockabout bloke, and I think most people that know me would say that. They named the lease after me because they were so appreciative that someone listened to them—to what they wanted. I ran into a lovely young lady and I said, 'What do you do?' She said, 'I'm in economic development.' 'Righto.' This was in Cairns. I said, 'I'm not too sure what economic development is taking place.' And she said, 'Oh, no, I do it in the'—she used these words—'Aboriginal areas.' I said: 'Righto. So what does that entail?' She said, 'I'm preserving nature for them.' Well, you're not preserving it for them, because you're not allowing them to do anything there. They've been taking kangaroos for the last 40,000 years, and you've said they're not allowed to take kangaroos anymore. God bless Murrandoo Yanner. He had many shortcomings, did Murrandoo, but good on him for taking them to court: 'No, I've got a right to take that kangaroo, and I've had that right for 20,000 years. You whitefellas that came here have got no right to take that off me.' Good on him. That's what he did. You've taken away their right to take game. You've taken away their right to use the water. You've taken away their right to use the land. God bless Jason Ned. The Prime Minister of Australia was going to Mount Isa to give Jason Ned a Good Australian Award—there were two other people getting that award that day; they were equally distinguished—but he died before he got the award. The point of the story is, if we want people to have a decent income and a decent way of life and some opportunity for their kids, then the First Australians are left with no alternative but to simply defy the people in this place and those in the Queensland parliament and take the land and squat on it. God bless the people that came from Europe and did that in New South Wales. Where I come from, we probably had maybe a thousand people living in north-west Queensland, or maybe 1,500—I don't know. It's an empty land. There is a message here for everyone in this parliament, and that message comes from von Clausewitz, the greatest commentator on warfare in human history. He wrote in his book On War, 'There is one truism of history: a people without land will look for a land without people.' Go and talk to my blackfellas—you can talk to me; I'm a blackfella too—and ask how we got on with a policy that we didn't have to have a population here, how that went. Well, it went real bad for us—real, real bad for us. So what are we doing now? If you take out a little, tiny strip around the coastline, about 120 kilometres wide, and a little dot around Perth, there's no-one living here. I represent half of Australia's water run-off. I get all the great rivers of Australia in the Kennedy electorate except the Murray-Darling. We're not using any of that water—we are; we're using 0.2 per cent of that water—we're not using it. What right have we got to do that when a thousand million people are going to bed hungry every night? Do you think the rest of the world is going to continue to accept this? When we stand up today and talk about racism in this country, it takes many forms. I don't want to be disrespectful to my colleagues, but, when you start looking after us because we're blackfellas, we start to get a little bit toey, we blackfellas, because we don't want to be different. The whole idea is we just want to be ordinary Australians. Where I come from, my father was in partnership with a bloke who owned a very big cattle station. He was a First Australian. They owned three or four mining undertakings together, and I was in a couple of those mining undertakings. My partner was Les Prosser, who was regarded as the 'last of the Kalkadoons'. His mother was one of the few 'piccaninny' survivors of the big battle on Battle range—which wasn't a battle, really. It was a massacre. That's a story for another day. When they were doing guerrilla warfare, we Kalkadoons did real good with guerrilla warfare. But, when we stupidly took them on in open combat, that was not a good idea at all. That's a story for another day. They don't want to be regarded as different. You don't want different laws. All they want is the same laws that every other Australian has, which enables them to own their own house. You don't even give them a provision to own their own house in the land that they've been living on for 30,000 or 40,000 years. They're not allowed to own a house. There's no process in Queensland by which you can own your own house. Why haven't you got off your backside instead of crying about them in the Queensland parliament or the federal parliament? Why don't you go out and listen to them about what they want? If you do, you might be surprised at how much they appreciate what you do out there. So I plead with people here to read The Mystery ofCapital. De Soto was a World Bank economist, not a lightweight. A cousin of his was the head of Rio Tinto, the second-biggest mining company in the world. These are heavyweight people. In The Mystery of Capital, he said that the thing that enabled the West to get ahead of the rest of the world is that they had property rights. If you got property rights, you can borrow money from the bank. I and one of my best mates, I'm ashamed to say, were a little bit under the weather. We bought half a million acres one night for $25,000 in a 24-inch rainfall area. That's good rainfall area. (Time expired)
Water Infrastructure | Statements by Members | House debates
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...
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)
Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism (Firearms and Customs Laws) Bill 2026; Consideration in Detail | Bills | House debates
Speaking to the amendment, this is all about 15 people being murdered. Why were they murdered? Because the immigration department allowed some extremely dangerous people into this country. So the...
Speaking to the amendment, this is all about 15 people being murdered. Why were they murdered? Because the immigration department allowed some extremely dangerous people into this country. So the first people who should be held to account are the immigration authorities. When this person was put on an ASIO watchlist, there was no effort made to remove registered high-powered firearms from that person, so the people who were enforcing the ASIO watchlist are the second group of people who were responsible in the end for the deaths of 15 innocent Australian people. This happens in the background of what happened many years ago. In the year that that happened, Queensland had no gun laws at all. I went in to buy a pair of socks and ended up buying an AK-47 rifle and 350 rounds of ammunition, which was a lot better than those socks. There were no gun laws at all. We had eight deaths with guns in Queensland. With draconian legislation in Victoria, they had 54 deaths with guns in that year. So much for your gun laws! You might think twice about shooting somebody if that person can shoot back. Whenever men of great wisdom— Government members interjecting— Here are the men of great wisdom! I said 'men of great wisdom', and they all spoke up. When the men of great wisdom sat down and wrote documents by which we live—the Bill of Rights in Britain, the Magna Carta, the American Declaration of Independence, the French declaration of independence—every single one of them put in the right to bear arms, which you want to remove. You say you've got greater wisdom than all of those people. That's what you're saying. I'll tell you, mate—you haven't. If they get their way, then the only people who will have guns are the people in uniforms, and we know what sort of society that is where the only people who have guns are the people in uniforms. North Dakota has the highest gun ownership in the world. The last time I looked to find out how many deaths there were with guns, they had no deaths with guns for two years. Similarly, Switzerland, where, by law, every single house has to have a gun, has the lowest death with guns rate in Europe. If you put forward a proposition, then you want to have hard evidence that backs up that proposition. When you are standing in defiance of the greatest wisdom in human history, then I think you should also put forward a bit of evidence. The evidence is very clear-cut that where you have the most stringent gun laws, you seem to have the most deaths with guns. In an interview I did, I said: 'I don't know why, when you ban guns, you have more fascination with guns. But all I can say is that, in Victorian England, they banned sex, but, geez, they had a population explosion during those years.' In conclusion, Queensland had eight deaths with guns with no gun laws at all. Victoria, with draconian gun laws, had 54 deaths with guns. There really isn't any more that needs to be said in recommending this to the House.
I move: 28 At the end of subsection 36(1) (1) insert: ; (e) A person put on ASIO watchlist has his firearms automatically revoked
Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism (Firearms and Customs Laws) Bill 2026; Second Reading | Bills | House debates
Mr Speaker, do I have the right to move an amendment?
Bondi Beach Attack Victims | Condolences | House debates
My uncle was killed in a football game, and for the next 50 years of his life no-one could ever say my Uncle Norman's name in of my grandfather, because he'd just go off and vanish, lock a door...
My uncle was killed in a football game, and for the next 50 years of his life no-one could ever say my Uncle Norman's name in of my grandfather, because he'd just go off and vanish, lock a door and cease to be with us. Right until the day he died, no-one could mention Uncle Norman's name in front of my grandfather. Now, how infinitely worse the pain must be if your child is just 10 years of age. I have a rage in my soul, and it's very hard for me to talk nicely, because I just have this passionate rage. Some of these people were demonstrating outside of the Queensland parliament with their usual anti-Jewish hate. And two of our members of parliament from the party I belong to just couldn't bear it, and they ripped down their signs and got into a melee. Both our blokes look after themselves pretty good, and they really enjoyed the physical fracas before they were dragged off by the police. But there should be a rage in our souls if you hate any group in society. Obviously, I run into this sometimes with our First Australian people. But going back to Matilda, 'Waltzing Matilda' is our national song, and I just wish more people knew the song 'Waltzing Matilda'. It was written in my hometown of Cloncurry. In my hometown, we created Qantas. We created the Royal Flying Doctor Service. Dame Mary Gilmore is buried in Cloncurry; she's on the $10 note. Matilda can't be a more Australian name. These people came to this country, they loved this country, and it gave them so much that they didn't have before, so they named their daughter Matilda. And her name is now one of the names of the people that were murdered on this day and in this tragedy. A great tragedy should lead to a result that ensures, to the best of our ability, that it doesn't happen again, and we will be talking about that tomorrow. So I just wish for North Queensland—we don't have a lot of Jewish people in North Queensland, but two of them I know very well, the Kamslers. They and two other families created Cairns, which was a greasy little hot backwater. It became one of the tourist meccas and destinations of the world. So God bless the Kamsler family and what they did for Australia in North Queensland. They also fought extremely hard for First Australians—the only hotel in Cairns that employed First Australians—so they were people that fought not just for their own faith but for other people as well. Professor Wronski got the first medical school built in Australia in 42 years—there were two other people involved; he was one of three—and some 18 medical schools have walked through the door that he opened. He made the medical school to cater to people and to the community. It was inculcated in their graduates that they were there to create good happiness for the people. There are truly great people, and maybe there's something wonderful in that religion, the Jewish faith, which is, of course, our father religion, or our mother religion, for people that are Christians. We sometimes forget that Jesus Christ was a Jew—arguably, not just a Jew but a rabbi. It's the most illogical thing I could ever imagine—that people from supposedly Christian countries should be antisemetic. But I cannot think about little Matilda dying so tragically without thinking of the worst people, maybe, the planet has ever seen, the Nazis—or the Russians, with their pogroms against the Jews. Most of Israel were actually Jewish people fleeing from Russia and the continuous persecution that has taken place there. Now, I don't know why people have this thing called 'antisemitism', but I know that, like Nazism and communism, it is a cancer. It is a cancer upon the soul of any country—wherever it is. As for me, I have a rage in my soul and it won't be quenched till we eradicate the basis upon which this attack occurred. People will talk about the gun debate. I watched the murder—I was sick at the time—on the television of 3,000 people in the Twin Towers. My automatic reaction was to reach out with my right hand. I thought, 'What's going on here?' I was reaching for my rifle—sorry, it was Port Arthur. I was reaching for my rifle—'Hasn't anyone got the wherewithal to cut this dreadful creature down?' I say here again that every single person—it's not just our feelings for Matilda, and that's what we're emphasising today. It also should touch off in us a rage in our soul against the people who are driven by hate and violence. We want them out of our community. Jesus Christ, the leader of the religion that I adhere to, said, 'Love even your enemies,' so we have to abide by that, but it is very, very hard when you have a little girl who was called Matilda because her parents loved Australia so much that they called her by the most Australian name they could conjure up. My heart goes out to those parents. I kept thinking of my grandfather. Till the day he died, no-one could ever say his son's name in his presence.
Political Advertising | Questions without Notice | House debates
Alright. I withdraw that aspect of the question.
My question is to be Minister representing the Special Minister of State. An infamous evil in history—and I quote—devised his movement: 'Repeat a lie continuously, continually and...
My question is to be Minister representing the Special Minister of State. An infamous evil in history—and I quote—devised his movement: 'Repeat a lie continuously, continually and constantly, and people will believe it's the truth even though it is a lie.' The LNP Townsville are obviously fellow travellers. The Hinchinbrook by-election has had the worst lying I've encountered in 25 years in politics, and that's saying a lot. The LNP said, 'We support castle law.' They've opposed its introduction three times. 'We're not going to abolish coal.' They've kept the coal tax, which will abolish coal. Three mineshave effectively closed. The LNP said KAP candidate Molachino had been for Labor. We have the text messages showing the LNP approached him as their first-choice candidate for Hinchinbrook. Minister, do we have an avenue to stop flagrant, unconscionable LNP lying?
Defence Amendment (Parliamentary Joint Committee on Defence) Bill 2025; Second Reading | Bills | House debates
I'm speaking on the Defence Amendment (Parliamentary Joint Committee on Defence) Bill 2025. I would like to quote two people—one is one of the soldiers that has seen the most active warfare...
I'm speaking on the Defence Amendment (Parliamentary Joint Committee on Defence) Bill 2025. I would like to quote two people—one is one of the soldiers that has seen the most active warfare than any other soldier in Australian history, probably, and the other one is a very close friend of mine, a Cloncurry boy, whose best friend was one of my best friends. To the soldier with great experience, I said, 'What do you think about the new rifles and the light calibre of the bullet?' He said, 'It stinks.' I said, 'Why?' He said: 'When you squeeze the trigger, I want the bloke dead. The idea that it will only wound him and will take three men out of the front line—in warfare, that is not how anyone looks at it. When I squeeze the trigger, I want him dead.' Now, the last head of the armed forces is reputed to have given orders that they were not to use the word 'kill'. This person has spent $40,000 million buying patrol boats that have no ordinance. They can't kill anybody. Well, what is the bloody use of having them? They're supposed to be our front line of defence and they can't kill anyone! They've got a machine gun! So we spent $40,000 million buying 15 machine guns. My platoon—in two wars, we were on 24-hour call-up to fight in Borneo and, later, in Vietnam—had 23 machine guns amongst the 32 of us, and he spent $40,000 million buying 15 machine guns. The man should have been jailed. And he issued instructions that they are not to use the word 'kill'. Well, I tell you, I was a weapons instructor for about 11 years of my life, as most of us were at my age. I was born in 1945, the year the war ended. Obviously, no-one was going to be doing bayonet charges in the sixties or seventies. That was not going to happen, so why were we doing bayonet drills? You charged and you let out a bloodcurdling scream and you plunged your bayonet into the dummy and you screamed out 'en garde!' and then charged the next dummy. What was all that about? It was about training people to kill without thinking. That goes back to my good friend—the soldier whose probably seen more combat than anyone else in Australian history. He said it's about killing people; don't have any illusions about this. It's interesting that America calls them armed forces. We call them defence forces. That is a very interesting comment. The second person I want to quote is a very good friend of mine from my home town of Cloncurry. His mutual friend was one of my closest friends. He'd come back from Vietnam, he came to see me and he said, 'Robbie, I was in the unit that was responsible for the so-called massacre.' I felt so sorry for the blokes that went to Vietnam. It was a terrifying experience and I don't think any of them came back the way they were before they went there. He said, 'Our commander, our lieutenant, said that there are VC coming down the track'—Vietcong—'and he said, "When I fire, you will all fire, you hear me?" and the 23 of us nodded our heads.' Then he said, 'Anyway, coming down the track were some women and young people and he started firing.' He said, 'I was on a GPMG'—a machine gun—'so I started firing.' He said: 'Robbie, they were women and children that we killed. But I swear to you that they were carrying ordinance.' Are you people in this place going to judge these people that have to make those sorts of decisions in a fraction of a second about whether they're going to die or not or whether they're going to let down their platoon and have their platoon wiped out? You're going to judge them? What the hell would you know about it? You've never been near a firearm in your life, most of you, apart from any other consideration. There are people here talking about how wonderful our defence forces are. What a joke! A flotilla of Chinese warships circled Australia and, I don't know about other people, but it had a very bad psychological effect upon me. I felt like I was on the side of the road in a road accident with the kites and hawks circling around overhead. We didn't even have warships that could've tracked them. They just sailed around Australia, letting us know that they were the bosses of the southern Pacific and we were nobody and nothing, and we're here at their pleasure or displeasure. You say America—well America happens to be about 4,000 or 5,000 kilometres away from Australia, and I didn't notice any Americans around at Kokoda or at Milne Bay. In fact I didn't notice any Americans there at all when our country was about to be invaded. My own father was sitting behind a machine gun outside of Brisbane. He wouldn't have been very happy if he'd known that the government of Australia had already given northern Australia to the enemy—the decision had already been made. If you want to be serious, then clearly you have to have a fortress wall. Ever since man has been man, he has had a palisade—maybe thorn bushes, maybe fire. He's got a fire in the cave where he's living. We have had a protective wall of some description around us. Obviously, in days past, that was a huge construction that was very, very high, which people had to breach if they wanted to take the city. The modern fortress wall, clearly, is the missile umbrella that is over Israel, given to them by the Americans. We have a coastline that precludes us from that approach, but, if we have 80 vessels—I'd call them defence forces, because we don't actually have a vessel of this type. It's a bit bigger than a patrol boat, but able to carry missiles and interception capacity and interception of drone capacity. If we've got 80 of them—maybe 40 in Darwin and 40 at Cairns or Townsville—then you come sailing around our waters, we'll say hello to you and it won't be a very friendly hello. We'll now be stalking you; it won't be you stalking us. You say, 'What can we do against a country the size of China?' Well, China had better make the best of it, because in 25 or 30 years, the vast bulk of the population will be over 70 or under 13. They better make hay while the sun shines, I say to them. I spoke to one of the leading people in the Australian Army about Ukraine. Obviously, my electorate goes into Townsville. I said, 'What's your take on Ukraine?' They said, 'It's very interesting, isn't it? It's not about rockets or missiles, as everyone thought it would be.' They're too expensive apparently, but they're hurling 10,000 mortar bombs at each other every day. Where are our mortar bombs? I doubt we have 150 or 200 mortar bombs. We probably need about 2,000. The other interesting thing—and I hate to say this because I have very great respect and very great admiration for John Howard, and it wasn't entirely his decision. I'm not going to go into what happened. I was still in the party room at that stage. There were two million or three million rifles in Australia that were taken off us, so we could not defend our homes. I will add the largest number of signatures ever collected in Queensland history were on castle law: your right to defend your own home. There were 130,000 signatures by the time period closed. It was the highest ever recorded in Queensland history. Those people want the right to protect their home. You can try defending your home with a cricket bat if you want, but I know what I would need to defend my home. You say, 'Oh, what will happen if everyone has a rifle?' Lady, I was brought up most of my life when everyone did have a rifle in this country. I'll give you one statistic that wipes out your arguments. When Queensland had no gun laws at all, I went to buy a pair of socks, and they had AK-47 rifles for sale, so I bought an AK-47 rifle and 350 rounds of ammunition instead of buying my socks. There were no gun laws at all in Queensland, and there were eight deaths with guns. Just remember that figure. In the same year, in New South Wales, with its Draconian gun laws, there were 36 deaths with guns. With fierce Draconian anti-gun laws in Victoria they had 54 deaths with guns. If you think that's an isolated phenomenon, check the deaths with guns in Switzerland, Sweden and Finland where every home has a gun. Check the figures. East Germany had the highest death rate with guns in Europe, and guns were banned in East Germany. The neighbouring country Switzerland, where every single home had a gun, had the lowest death rate with guns in Europe. In America, North Dakota and South Dakota have the highest gun ownership in the world, and there were two deaths with guns in three years. Places where there are very restrictive gun laws—guess where the highest death rate with guns were? They were Chicago, Washington DC and California, the capital city. I am not keen to rob a house if I think that house might have a gun in it. I think I'll raid that house and not this house. But every house in Australia now has a sign on it saying, 'You're quite safe to rob this house.' Not only do we not have castle law, the right to defend ourselves in our own homes; we don't have the wherewithal to defend ourselves in our own home. You say, 'Oh, the police will look after you.' Well, the down time in Queensland is about 40 minutes, so I think it will be all over red rover by the time the police arrive. So don't even think about that one. Once upon a time, my country, Australia, believed in the right of the individual, not the government. This bill is the complete opposite. It takes away the rights of the individual and says, 'We people sitting in our ivory towers, in our plush, air conditioned rooms, here in Canberra will pass judgement on men that are out there risking their lives for this country.' Young men are risking their lives for this country. They're on bivouac and they're marching 40 kilometres a day with a 40-pound pack on their backs. They're not even in combat, but they're doing it for their country. It amazes me that the young people in the Army, and a lot of them are in the Kennedy electorate, do it for patriotic reasons. You sit down at the pub with them, listening to them. It's amazing how many of them actually do it out of patriotism, believe it or not. Here we are today, taking away the rights of the individual and taking away our right to protect our country, and now we have a Star Chamber. For those of us who have had legal training—I was in the final year of law at the toughest law school in Australia, with a 72 per cent dropout rate, so, when it comes to the law, I know what I'm talking about. We have a Star Chamber here. The Star Chamber is notorious in English history. There was a period under one of the totalitarian kings in England when they could simply pass judgement upon you in closed shop. No-one knew what was going on, and they could pass any judgement on you they liked. They were not bound by the rule of law. Do you want to know the difference between a civilised country and an uncivilised country? The country that has democracy, rule of law, industrial awards and Christianity—I make no apologies for saying that—are the civilised countries. As far as I'm concerned, people that come from countries that don't have those four things should not be coming into our country. I feel very, very fearful of what is going on with immigration. Whether that undermines the security of our country, I won't address today— (Time expired)
Environment Protection Reform Bill 2025, National Environmental Protection Agency Bill 2025, Environment Information Australia Bill 2025, Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (Customs Charges Imposition) Bill 2025, Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (Excise Charges Imposition) Bill 2025, Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (General Charges Imposition) Bill 2025, Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (Restoration Charge Imposition) Bill 2025; Second Reading | Bills | House debates
You've got the best silicon deposits in the world.
I'll move on. What is happening here is about my ownership of land and the undermining of our freedoms, our integrity, our 'comfortableness' and our ease. They are being taken away and given to a...
I'll move on. What is happening here is about my ownership of land and the undermining of our freedoms, our integrity, our 'comfortableness' and our ease. They are being taken away and given to a bunch of bureaucrats sitting on their backsides in air conditioned comfort in Canberra. They're going to tell me what I can and can't do with my land. Who is better qualified to look after the land—a fifth-generation grazier, or fifth-generation cane farmer, or some beggar sitting on his backside here who's a fifth-generation public servant in Canberra? Who'd know more about it? Why is he living in Canberra in air-conditioned comfort, and why is he or she living out there in the wilderness? It's because they love the wilderness. That's why they're living there. Why are you living in Sydney? It's because you're terrified of the wilderness! You don't understand it. You've never set foot in it. You've never lived there. You've never aspired to make your country better off than it is. It would be just wonderful if these people read some books and had an understanding of history. The authoritarian government in Britain said, 'I own your land,' to the people of America, and the Americans said: 'Hey, wait on a minute. I own my land. That's my farm. That's where I run my cattle. That's my land!' The authoritarian government in England said, 'No—we own the land!' That's exactly what you're saying today: 'We own the land, not you. We, the authoritarian government, the ruling class, own the land.' I pose the question again: who would know more about the land—love it and protect it? Would it be the people who live on the land or the person sitting on his shiny backside here in Canberra? Your proposition is that the person sitting on his shiny backside here in Canberra knows best, rather than the person that's living there. I'll tell you your collection of achievements. You brought in some bugs to solve a problem that was there. The bugs ran amok and created enormous problems, so you brought in the toads, to get rid of the bugs. The toads were eaten by the dingoes and by the goannas, so now there are no dingoes or goannas. You took away the predator—for example, crocodiles. There was a balance of nature. A mother crocodile has 60 eggs. My forebears, the blackfellas, took the eggs—a lot of them, not all of them. There was a balance that had been there for 30,000 years, but you took the balance away. You took away the human beings that were taking the eggs. Now, with 60 eggs a year—you imagine if every woman in Canberra had 60 babies a year. We'd solve our underpopulation problem very quickly! That is what is happening out there with the crocodiles. Then there are the pigs in the national parks. In the good old days in Queensland, the Labor Party and its successor, the Country Party—it was dominated by Labor after the split—allowed you to go hunting. There were no pigs in the rainforest, because hunters went in and shot them. Then you removed the hunters. You removed my forebears, the old blackfellas, who used to take a lot of the crocodile eggs, so now the crocodile numbers are exploding everywhere. Now there are no fish in the rivers, because they're being eaten by the crocodiles. You think you know about nature and you start fooling around with it, but all you've done is disaster after disaster after disaster. Since you took the shooters out of the national parks—which is about half of North Queensland, I might add, with all the jungle—the pig numbers have exploded and now the cassowaries are doomed. There is no way that the cassowary can survive with the pigs taking their eggs, and there's no way that the turtles can survive the explosion of pig numbers. Are you doing anything about the pigs? Yes, you are; you've got traps—400 traps for about three million pigs! In a pub, in the real world, where people like myself sort of live—I put on the record that when I said 'in the real world, in the pubs' they burst out laughing. They think it's funny that Australians still go down to the pubs and talk to each other. They are laughing at it. I'll tell you where Labor Party was founded and formed: in the pubs of North Queensland. As a published historian, I can speak with some considerable authority. As the great-grandson of one of the major financial creators of the Labor movement, I can also speak with authority. I speak with authority when I say I am watching the cassowaries—the trademark of most of the councils in Far North Queensland—vanishing as the pigs take the eggs, and no-one is doing anything about the pigs except for 400 traps. Please excuse me for laughing. If you would license the shooters to go into the national parks, they would take out the pigs and, in 30 years' time, we would have cassowaries and we would have turtles. But, thanks to you people, there will be no cassowaries and no turtles. For those of us that live in this country, we love our cassowaries and we love our turtles. That's why we live in the bush. That's why we live in North Queensland. It's because we love the land that we choose to live there. You don't choose to live on the land; you choose to live in Canberra. That is the complete opposite to the people of North Queensland and their value systems. There is a second thing happening here which is very troubling indeed. I don't say it by way of skiting, but speaking as a published historian, you don't get to publish a book unless you know an awful lot about history. They won't simply publish your book. Believe me, I've tried that. Knowing a little bit about our history, I think about the Mandarin class that ran China for about 400 or 500 years. Once you have a class of people whose children go into positions of power and their grandchildren go into positions of power—that is Canberra: five generations of power people. They haven't had to make a quid out of selling some beef, some cattle. They haven't had to make quid out of cutting cane by hand. They haven't had to make a quid milking dairy cows. They have made a quid by milking the Australian people. That's how they make a quid and you want to give them the power. Well you want to read about the history of China and find out how the Mandarin class went against the property respecting countries like America, England, France and the European countries that had this institution called private property. When they got that institution going and speeding up, they became the rulers of the world, for good and for bad—and I won't go into good or bad. I'm just saying that that created the enormous power of the Mandarin class, as they were called, in China. That is what is happening today. I lose my land rights, as a person that loves the land and has lived in the land all my life, and they're given to someone down here. My wife is from a city background. She got 15 acres of land in Charters Towers and put a thousand trees on what was land without a single tree upon it when she went there. You can multiply her by half a million in North Queensland, because we are the group of people who plant trees. We are the group of people that love nature. That's why we live there. You are the group of people that don't plant trees and don't live in nature. There's another one laughing. He thinks that's funny. He thinks it's funny that a Mandarin class should rule Australia and have all the power, and the people that live on the land should have no power at all. He thinks that's funny with his very peculiar sense of humour. Honourable members interjecting— There you go. They're laughing again. That's very curious to me, very curious indeed. Let me name a name: a gentleman called Daniel Messina—a hell of a good young bloke. He worked in the mines and was captain of the rugby league team in Cloncurry. He comes from Gordonvale near Cairns. He saved his money and bought a small block of land. Then he bought another block of land. And then he bought 100 acres of very prime agricultural land, and he wanted me to see it. He insisted on me coming down to see it. I said, 'Daniel, why do you want me to see it?' He said, 'Just have a look at the ground.' Every single square inch of that ground was covered in Singapore daisy and another weed—the name's escaping me at the present moment. The entire land was covered by them. That's what he wanted me to see. Two gentlemen that had lived there together were greenies, and they wanted to return to nature. So they took all the agriculture out and returned it to nature. And, within 25 years, every square inch of that land was covered in Singapore daisy and this other introduced species that I can't think of. You are naive if you think that you just step away and it'll go back to being nature. No, it won't. The most powerful of the plants will take over. When you have a country that now has tens of thousands of plants coming in each year, whether we like it or not, then the most powerful plant will prevail. Invariably, amongst those 10,000 plants you brought in, there will be some very aggressive plants. Sadly, that is what is happening in North Queensland—except on the land that people in North Queensland occupy. They live there because they love the trees, they love the jungle and they love the environment. That's why they live there. So they're going to protect it, and they're going to keep those weeds and bad guys out. There are no pigs in sugarcane lands, on the farms or in the areas where we're grazing cattle on the coast. There are no pigs there because we get rid of them. But on your land—the land that you look after, the national parks—there are 3½ million pigs estimated to be living on your national parks. You're breeding the pigs. We're trying to shoot them out, but you're breeding them. There, again, he laughs! He thinks it's funny that there are 3½ million pigs destroying all environmental native flora and fauna. He thinks that's funny. He keeps laughing at it—a very peculiar sense of humour. There's the other issue of authoritarian rule, the Mandarin class: 'We are the rulers, and we know what is best for you. You don't know what's best for you, but these people down here do.' The incredible arrogance of the presumption that is built into this bill is breathtaking. And I commend Barnaby Joyce for his words earlier on in this area. I'll tell you how to look after North Queensland. The Forty Mile Scrub is the most iconic national park in North Queensland—completely wiped out by fire! (Time expired)
She has planted thousands of trees! Where?