Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I have been looking at some interesting figures on profits before income tax. I think income tax in the case of the Future Fund versus a government Telstra should be included in the profits. My reason for saying that is that we in the mining industry have found that, even though the price for metal has doubled and the price for coal has more than doubled, we do not see very much increased tax revenue. This would indicate very effective price transfer mechanisms are operating within all of these companies. The profit margins in the mining companies should have gone up manyfold, because if your cost structure stays the same and the price of your product doubles that does not double your net profit—it quintuples it or even increases it tenfold. With all due respect to the honourable spokesman, I do not think there has been a tenfold increase in the income tax paid by the mining companies.

I do not criticise those people; I criticise the government that allows them to get away with blue murder. If Telstra is put on the market, I do not care what assurances we get from this House—those assurances are not worth a tinker’s damn. A large proportion of the companies that have been privatised are effectively in foreign hands. When I say that, they may be owned by a superannuation company where the majority of shareholding in that company is now held overseas. One of the reasons is that the massive increase—a 100 per cent increase—in income from hard-rock mining and coal has not been reflected in the current account deficit. It has worsened dramatically in that time. That is simply because all of that extra money has been taken and moved overseas. Our seven major mining companies were all Australian owned some eight years ago; now they are all foreign owned.

I want to speak of the late, great John McEwen. We hear people in the media continuously making fools of themselves by saying that the National Party is an effective force or that it is a force at all—in fact, that it actually exists in any way. My first speech in the joint party room referred to John McEwen. Someone yelled out at me, ‘Oh no! McEwen! Back in the dungeons!’ I said, ‘Yes, it would be terrible to go back to that period, wouldn’t it? Two per cent unemployment and a current account surplus.’ I reeled off the figures and a number of people roared with laughter because they realised that what I was saying about these sorts of policies was true.

John McEwen took the profits—and the moneys in certain cases—from the government and put them into the Commonwealth Development Bank and such institutions. He set up the AIDC to buy back the farm, which basically meant the mining companies. He succeeded in doing it very successfully. For example, Mount Isa Mines had been foreign owned until after McEwen had put in place what he wanted to. Indeed, at that time the much-maligned RFX Connor—I thought he was a numbskull at the time but, on reading the history books and finding out in detail what he had done, I realised that it was the media which had portrayed him that way; he most certainly was not a numbskull and appeared to me anyway to be a great and patriotic Australian—was fairly effective but became bull-headed in the end.

What we are saying here in the Future Fund Bill 2005 is that this money can be used for the purpose of owning Australia’s assets—our mining companies. Ten years ago, all of the seven major companies were Australian owned. This government and the preceding government have presided over all of those giant owners of our resources falling into the hands of foreigners. The only people who can be blamed and who must bear the brunt of that are those people who served in government under Mr Hawke and Mr Keating and those people who have served in the current government—and I am ashamed to say I was one of them.

It is proposed that this money would be routed into a fund through an investment agency. If there is one thing in this country that is not needed, it is another investment company. One of the more successful German governments in the days before the Second World War went to the people on the basis of no predatory capital and no speculative capital. I would to heaven that some governments in Australia would say this, but they have done just the opposite: they have moved Australia’s very small savings funds into investment funds that have done nothing but speculate and predate.

Let us talk about predatory behaviour for a moment. The fair trading inquiry conducted by this House—many called it the Bruce Baird inquiry—delineated how Woolworths and Coles, two giant retailers, moved from 51 per cent in 1991 or 1992 up to 68 per cent of the market in about 1998. According to their own figures, they are now on 82 per cent of the market. That is predation. They have taken the nation’s riches and used them to make themselves richer and more powerful. They are so powerful in the economy that they secured the deregulation of the dairy industry, which took 30 per cent of farmers’ incomes. That is a figure that anyone in this House can verify. They then put the price of milk for consumers up by nearly 40 per cent. This delivered to the retailers of Australia over $1 billion a year in extra profit. That is predation. This money is going to be used to fuel that engine of predation.

My chief of staff pointed out to me that the graph from the latest economic publication put out by the Parliamentary Library, which is a graph on house affordability, shows house affordability to have decreased sharply. Is this something for the government to be proud of? They have given $7,000 as a gift to everybody but affordability has gone down. I am no friend of Mr Turnbull’s, but Mr Turnbull and another gentleman, an Oxford don who is an Australian, did a report on housing in Australia. They said that instead of the government encouraging demand—which puts the price up through speculation and inflationary pressure in the housing sector—they should increase supply. That is something that we were in the process of doing in Queensland. We were building high-speed highways. This is the centre of what I am saying will happen if that $18 billion is used in an investment agency for predation and speculation, which have driven the price of housing out of the reach of almost everybody in this country so that they can no longer afford a house. Just pick up the library’s publication if you question me on that, Mr Deputy Speaker McMullan!

When the government fell in Queensland in 1990 we were in the process of creating four major high-speed spoke roads allowing a speed of 120 kilometres per hour right into the centre of the city, along with two ring roads. We were doing that so people could live 60 kilometres from town and arrive within 20 minutes at their place of work. It was very satisfying to me to realise that at least Mr Turnbull and this Oxford don have said the same thing in their report. I might add that they did not say it as well as we said it and that their programs were not as good as the programs we were offering.

People could live on two or three acres in a very civilised way. They could recycle their water, which was part of the program. You can recycle water if you are on two acres. It is very difficult to do that if you are in a city; health problems and other sorts of problems arise from grey water usage. So we could deliver land at negligible cost. Mr Turnbull and the other gentleman’s report also said that council and government inefficiencies had not only created a huge cost for land but also created a logjam which people could not get through. The provision of infrastructure would bring the price of houses down so that more Australians could buy those houses more cheaply, taking the heat out of the speculative boom. But this approach is doing the very opposite. This will look after the big end of town. The big end of town will have more of our money to play around with, to play their Monopoly games with each other.

This has reached its zenith many times in the last three or four decades when we have moved away from McEwenism in the economy and the sort of approach used not only by Joh Bjelke-Peterson but by Henry Bolte in Victoria, by Thomas Playford, by Charles Court—enormously successful governments—and in my own state of Queensland, of course, the legendary governments of the Labor Party before the war, which were probably the grandest and greatest governments in Australian history. But that was where all of these enormously successful governments saw the public money going. This government is expert in just the opposite field—of putting the money into the field where it will manifest itself in fuelling speculation throughout the entire economy.

There was a wonderful article in the Bulletin magazine by Maxine McKew. The heading read that the Australian economy is in an artificial boom fuelled by property speculation financed by overseas borrowings. I suppose there will not be so much overseas borrowing, but the rest of it will stay in place, and it is a true statement. That bubble will burst. For people that do not know anything about economic history, there was a wonderful statement published recently in the Australian. It said that the American economy and share prices are buoyant but that they have hit a permanently high plateau now and will remain on that plateau indefinitely into the future. Things are good. That was in October 1929. After the crash, share prices went to one-tenth of what they were when Professor Irving Fisher, a leading American economist, made that statement. We have a lot of economists and we have the Treasurer telling us the same things now, but there is not an intelligent commentator in the country who does not realise that we are floating on a speculative boom which will be fuelled by another $18,000 million if the government gets its way.

I represent an area called the Gulf of Carpentaria, known as the Gulf Country. The Gulf Country, the mid-west and the central west of Queensland—if you like, all of outback Queensland—is a huge black soil plain, the richest soil on earth. Except for three or four farmers, a plough has never been put into any part of that magical landscape. I think most people in this place are aware that half of Australia’s agricultural production comes from the Murray-Darling Basin. It comes off a tiny 22 million megalitres of water. We have 126 million megalitres of water flowing over Queensland’s inland plain. It is so flat that you can easily bring the water back to irrigate the whole of that plain. That is just the plain; there is more land available. It is a thousand kilometres long and 600 kilometres wide. On the experience of the Murray-Darling Basin, you can feed a population of 70, 80 or possibly 100 million people. It can grow you ethanol to fuel your motor cars.

We could fill up our motor cars at a price of 70c. The price at the bowser in Brazil for ethanol, as I speak, is between 68c and 72c a litre. They are filling up their cars right now for 70c a litre. I have not got time to go into why, but the Australian government gets more money out of an untaxed ethanol industry than it does out of a taxed petrol industry. By the way, this country is running out of fuel, but our supplies are quite safe: they come from Indonesia and the Middle East. You can get the figures from ABARE or Geoscience Australia, the old BMR, and you will see that over the next four or five years we will drop down to about 30 per cent self-sufficiency—we have to date been on about 95 per cent self-sufficiency. This will be one of the most oil-poor countries on earth, and there is not one single program being undertaken by the federal government to address this looming crisis in Australia. In fact, we are paying $1.20 at the bowsers now, which is almost twice what Brazil is paying, and all we get from people on the government side of the House is a thousand reasons why they cannot mandate ethanol. Don’t they look criminally stupid now!

Last week President Bush said that 75 per cent of America’s fuel will come from ethanol. He also mentioned electricity, but I will not go into the reasons why electric powered motor cars have very limited usage. Seventy-five per cent ethanol is what the President of the United States said. How stupid do these people look! We hear the National Party saying that they are in favour of ethanol. I am in favour of motherhood too. What they do not realise is that such comments just anger the people. They are the government. The reason Mr Beattie is collapsing and has at this stage no hope whatsoever of winning the next election in Queensland is that he keeps saying, ‘I’m going to fix this up.’ We are not interested in him saying, ‘I’ll fix this up.’ All we know is that we have a law that allows us turn our taps on for two hours a day to water our lawns. We have no water. We know that our power is flicking on and off. They cannot deliver electricity, they cannot deliver water and they cannot deliver doctors in hospitals.

With a tiny bit of that money—a thousand million dollars—and some legislative effort by the  state and federal governments we can deliver to you just in the Gulf alone an ethanol supply. But I am sure that the member for New England is going to tell us rightly about how ethanol can be produced in his areas. Whether it is produced in his areas or our areas, it is now absolutely naive to talk about 10 per cent ethanol—we are now talking about 50 or 60 per cent ethanol. The Americans are talking about 75 per cent, and they have a limited resource. They cannot go into the Gulf Country and open up half a million or a million hectares of land to irrigation. They have irrigated everything they can irrigate in the United States.

For those in this place who are of a Greens bent, what are we doing with that huge plain in inland Queensland? All of western Queensland is in a huge black soil plain. I will tell you what we are doing with it. We are growing the prickly acacia tree—a weed. The prickly acacia tree has taken over six million hectares of that plain. It has destroyed all native flora and all native fauna, and of course it has also destroyed any chance we had of making a quid out of that land from cattle or sheep. Those trees stand as a monument of shame and disgrace not to the people of this nation but to the way this nation has been governed.

We could build a hundred patrol boats. We are a tiny little country. We are Europeans. We live in an area where people call themselves Asians and they are very reluctant to accept us as Asians. Let us face it: we look different. In the last war we believed that the British would come and save us if we got into trouble, if we got attacked by the Japanese. Their contribution was 12 fighter planes. To put that in perspective, the British were producing 2,000 combat planes a month and they gave us 12 when the Japanese were at Kokoda.

We can build a hundred patrol boats with guided missile capacity, with interception capacity, with helicopters with radar, and we can defend our country, we can defend our island. We can also by so doing deliver to Australia a manufacturing industry, and to hell with free trade agreements—the Americans treat them like dirt. Those boats should be built in this country and create for Australia secondary and tertiary industry, which we also desperately need. That is what that money could and should be doing. We do not want to sell Telstra. The most important thing is that it stays in government and Australian hands. (Time expired)

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