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

In rising to speak to the Therapeutic Goods Amendment (Repeal of Ministerial responsibility for approval of RU486) Bill 2005 the first observation that I want to make is that there is an endeavour being made here to introduce some oversighting by this parliament into the issue of this particular drug and, arguably, similar drugs.

The Therapeutic Goods Administration and the people backing this bill are saying: ‘Trust me. Trust the Therapeutic Goods Administration.’ The Therapeutic Goods Administration told us that thalidomide was quite safe. And, frankly, it was people in this place—and the media, it must be said—who contributed very greatly to exposing what was a horrific mistake by the TGA and one that they were not rectifying. It seems there is a belief in this place, as I have said many times in the context of free trade, that this place is some sort of a spectator’s club and that government is a spectator sport—that we do not actually participate or take any responsibility for decisions; we just come here and look at it all going past and let someone else do the hard yakka.

Our socialist friends—inappropriately, on my right—would be very interested in, and are obviously very ignorant of, the fact that under the free trade agreement the TGA and the PBS are now oversighted by a joint committee which comprises 50 per cent Americans and 50 per cent Australians. I doubt whether there would be a single intelligent person or a single thinking person in this place who would doubt for one moment that that committee is going to be dominated by the Americans. And those Americans will, of course, be from the drug lobby in the United States. So what we have here is the TGA being oversighted by—a nice phrase; I would replace it with ‘emasculated by’—an oversighting committee consisting of 50 per cent Americans, who will be representing the big drug corporations of the United States. If you read the free trade agreement you will realise that, yes, it is about quarantine and, yes, it is about the motor vehicle industry but it is also, mainly and principally, about destroying and emasculating the pharmaceutical benefits arrangements in Australia.

Those who vote for this bill will be putting their futures in the hands of the United States drug corporations. When the disasters occur, we will know who to sheet the blame to. It is an extreme reflection on the people on this side of the House that they have sat here and criticised the free trade agreement and yet they have not seen the implications of their own stupidity in what they are doing today. All that the amendments are asking for is some oversighting by people who are paid salary packages of $120,000 or $130,000 a year. Surely there is some responsibility on you to do some sort of oversighting of a highly questionable drug that is on the market at the present moment.

There is not a single person in this House who for one moment questions that this bill is about abortion. Of course it is about abortion. Absolutely it is about abortion. There is some argument about whether this drug should be taken earlier, or later, creating more horrific circumstances. The current estimations are that there are about 100,000 abortions taking place. There are only 126,000 births taking place. Soon we will be killing more unborn children than the number we will be having. I will return to that.

Why is this occurring? Let us simply look at the figures. Average earnings are $52,000 a year. Taxation, with GST and indirect and state taxes added to it, is pretty close to 40 per cent, but I will use a figure of 36 per cent, which is a bit low. That works out to $18,700. What if you are a family that wants to have three kids? The economic and physical constraints are such that it is very hard for a mother to work if she has three kids. The option is that the mother does not work and the husband receives an average income of $52,000.

Where will that leave this family that decides to have three kids and have a mother for their kids? They will get $52,000 less $18,700, which is $33,000. That is divided up amongst five people. The Courier-Mail, the biggest newspaper in Queensland, recently estimated that it cost $250,000 to raise a child. It is fair that that be divided by five. That leaves a family with a full-time mother and three children on $9,600 per person. If you have both mother and father working, it works out to $16,200 per person. But if you are a DINK—two people living together with no children—you will have a disposable income of $33,000 per person. The argument really is: do you want an income of $9,500 per person, an income of $16,000 per person or an income of $33,000 per person? Is it any wonder that we have 100,000 abortions a year? What a disgraceful statistic.

I am going to do one of those things that I very rarely do and read part of my speech. There are some things that I want to say, and I want to say them properly, so we have written them down.

This legislation has come from the Leader of the Democrats, who propelled her arguments by announcing to the world that she had had an abortion. I doubt whether there is a single person in this parliament who would find abortion—the killing of a human being before it is born—a desirable event. This lady herself, I hope, would not. To publicise such an event in the national media, most would agree, was distasteful to say the least.

The second lady leading the introduction of this legislation—and this involves all the people who are going to vote for this; this is the flag under which they are travelling—is a member of the Greens, Ms Nettle. She showed off on the national media a T-shirt that had on it a flagrant logo that can only be described as sectarian bigotry and a profound attack on the religious beliefs of members in this place. That is a disease that I thought we as Australians had stamped out in this country a considerable time ago.

That is the flag under which those supporting this bill are marching. I hope that they are proud of themselves. They will be remembered at the polls, because there is a crossover effect here. Those people who are strongly against abortion feel strongly enough to change their votes. That should be fair warning to the people in this place.

I saw the great abortion debate. As you would probably recall, Mr Deputy Speaker, I was heavily involved when Bjelke-Petersen attempted to make abortion illegal in the state of Queensland. As a result of that, I think that his vote lifted 6½ per cent when the election was held three or four months after that cataclysmic event in Queensland.

I want to mention a very courageous act by Keith Wright. He may have been disparaged after some of the events that later occurred, but that is a story for another day. He crossed the floor and voted by himself for Bjelke-Petersen’s bill—the only ALP person who did.

If you want to get down to religion, have a look at the roots of the ALP. They are deeply seated in the Irish Catholic people in this country. I do not know if I have an Irishman in my forebears, so I am not speaking as one of them, but anyone who knows their history knows that if ever the founders of this great party have been spat upon it has been in the debate that has occurred here today. Again and again, speakers made subtle but definite attacks upon the religious beliefs of people in this House—a thing that I have seldom witnessed in my 32 years as a member of parliament. They will pay a price for it. By the way, at the time of Keith Wright’s action the leader of the ALP was Mr Casey, who was a practising Catholic. He was thrown out on his head three months later after having voted against his principles. Mr Wright was put in as Leader of the Opposition.

So, if you want to know where the votes are going to be travelling, that is the way they are going to be travelling, because people respect people who have moral beliefs and who are prepared to act to their detriment. Seventy-two per cent of the people trenchantly opposed what we were doing in Queensland, but people respected the principles of the Premier, who had moral beliefs and was prepared to suffer at the polls as a result of those beliefs—as it turned out, he did not.

This Greens lady has attacked people for their religious beliefs. We will provide for her a short history lesson. To quote Winston Churchill: when Adolf Hitler invaded Russia, Churchill gleefully averred, ‘Those who will not learn from history shall be doomed to repeat it.’ And Hitler met exactly the same fate as Charles XII and Napoleon had prior. Mr Churchill was well aware of the fate of those two gentlemen.

We Australians 250 years ago had a spiritual belief system. A lot of the speakers for this bill do not seem to have any spiritual belief system whatsoever. But we Australians 250 years ago had a spiritual belief system that involved totems—you could not eat possum; I could not eat pigeon et cetera. Preservation of the food supply was at the heart of this particular spiritual belief—no species would be hunted to extinction. I think everyone here would say, ‘Good idea.’ Secondly, they had a belief system that resulted in zero population growth—bad idea: real bad idea.

Over the waves came people from a country with the highest of birth rates. They came here to a country which was empty, with the population of Canberra, only 300,000 people, scattered over a continent of 20 million square kilometres. Maybe the reason for the white fellas coming here was living room. Lebensraum was Hitler’s reason in Mein Kampf for invading Russia; Russia’s reason for taking Siberia and half of Mongolia, and the Americans’ reason for colonising and seizing the West.

History speaks loud of the magnetism of relatively empty land, whether it is the relatively and qualitatively benign taking of a Siberia or an Australia or the brutality of a Hitler type invasion. Empty land, land without people—there is a price to be paid for that policy and those belief systems. And we should learn, because 250 years ago we Australians suffered greatly; we were almost annihilated by people from across the waves. We were overwhelmed by them. Ask the first Australians whether an empty land or zero population growth is a good idea.

Sadly, Australia does not have zero population growth; we are well below zero population growth. When 20 Australians die they are only going to be replaced by 17 Australians. There are those who say that we have immigration. Yes, we might have migrants here, but they are not the race of people who are here now. They are not the 20 million of us who are here now—who I most certainly consider to be Australians, a separate race of people with our own belief systems, our own culture, our own pride in who we are and, I would like to think, our own dignity as well.

The ABS population figures for Australia in 2100 show that the projection for Australians, the race of people who are here now, is only 16 million. Australia’s present population is 20 million. One-third of those people in 2100 will be over 65. People over 65 are currently about 13 per cent of the population. Someone will have to pay to look after those people.

Professor Blandy of Melbourne University wrote a landmark article in the Weekend Australian in December 1994. I thought these figures were outrageous; I could not believe them. I went down to the library and the demographer in the library said: ‘Of course they are. When 20 Australians die they are replaced by 17 people. How many generations of your family died in the last 100 years?’ I went through it and I said, ‘Five generations died in the last 100 years.’ He said, ‘Five generations: 20 people are replaced by 17 and then 17 are replaced by 14 and then 14 are replaced by 12 and  then 12 are replaced by 10—you will end up with Professor Blandy’s figure of seven million people.’

That is where all these people who are voting for this bill today are leading this country. They do not like people. They constantly talk about how people have wrecked this and how people have done terrible things to this and how we have tortured the original inhabitants and wrecked the ecology and everything. They do not like people at all. They do not want to have any people. Well, I do. I like people—I really do. I think kids are wonderful. It is a great sadness to me that we could be a country with little or no children. Returning to Professor Blandy, he wrote:

As this large baby boomer group of women ages, they will stop having babies and that task will fall on a smaller number of women, born when fertility rates were lower. Under the plausible assumption of continuing low fertility, and if net migration were set at zero indefinitely, Australia’s population would peak at 19 million in the 2020s and shrink quite rapidly. In fact, it would shrink quite rapidly to perhaps five or six million by the year 2100. If net migration were set at 70,000—

it is about 110,000 at the present moment, but it has averaged less than 70,000 over the last seven or eight years, if my memory serves me correctly—

Australia’s population would reach 26 million in 2050 before shrinking to maybe 13 or 14 million by 2100.

Professor Blandy could be wrong. The ABS could be wrong. All these figures could be rubbish and stupid. Or some miracle is going to occur, some flash of lightning in the sky is going to occur, and it is all going to be different. No, it is not. And people will curse the people who were in here and made these decisions. Professor Blandy continued:

Would an ageing Australia with a shrinking number of people in it be secure in the face of an East Asia, burgeoning economically and in population? Would a rational and fair system of world government allow an empty Australia to become less populous than it already is?

Of course, the answer to that is no. I will quote from a book by an American—an adviser to a number of presidents of the United States—called The Death of the West:

In 2000 there were 494 million Europeans aged between 15 and 65. By 2050 there will be only 365 million. But the over 65s, now 107 million, will soar to 172 million. In 50 years the ratio that is now 5:1 will fall to 2:1. Taxation will have to be increased by some 30 or 40 per cent on the 40 per cent that it already is—

which, of course, we know is impossible. The other alternative is that people in their old age will not be looked after at all. This will be a very old country.

Senator Nettle may sneer at religious beliefs, but the greatest scientist of all time, Louis Pasteur, when asked what was his ambition in life, said, ‘To obtain the simple Christian faith of a Breton fisherwoman.’ The other great scientist of all history, Albert Einstein, when asked the same question, said, ‘To study so that I can understand God and his laws of nature better.’ These people would quail before the great intellectual precociousness of a Senator Nettle or the Leader of the Democrats in the Senate and their supporters in this place.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the man who took away the terror of nuclear holocaust—under which my generation lived for most of our lives—gave the quote of the century, according to Time magazine and most certainly according to me. The first thing Mr Gorbachev said when he became the leader of Russia was, ‘The important thing is that when we go on our knees of a night to pray we all pray to the same God.’

Slavery was removed by William Wilberforce and his great mentor John Newman, writer of Amazing Grace. Their driving motivation was their Christian belief. To Senator Nettle and her followers in this place: all religions have in their belief system survival—that is, survival of the clan and survival of the tribe. She will remove that survival from us. (Time expired)

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