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

In rising to speak in the debate on the Fisheries Legislation Amendment (Cooperative Fisheries Arrangements and Other Matters) Bill 2005 I do so as someone representing one of the areas hardest hit by what will be looked on by future generations of Australians as an appalling series of decisions. Recreational fishing is a very important industry in the electorate of Kennedy. The town of Lucinda, which, as you would be aware, Mr Deputy Speaker Lindsay, is north of your own electorate, burgeons to an estimated population of 2,000 people during the winter season. I meet many of them in the little supermarket in Lucinda and they tell me that they are there for the fishing.

This government cannot resile from the responsibilities of office. I find it extraordinary that people can come into this place, and into other places, and represent themselves as something entirely separate from the government. If you want to disempower people then you tell them that they have no power or influence. The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority is an organisation known over a long period of time for its deceitfulness. If it is trying to make amends of late then it has left its run very late. The authority told us that it was going to close 15 per cent of the Queensland coastline but it also said: ‘Relax; don’t worry. It’s not locked in concrete.’ You were at one of the meetings, Mr Deputy Speaker, when we were told that it is not locked in concrete. Some 6,000 people in North Queensland attended the public meetings. They said, ‘Don’t do this.’ Well, the authority did not close 15 per cent; it closed 32 per cent.

If there was the remotest justification for this, it would be that we were protecting these fisheries for future generations of Australians—or for the trees. The greenies seem to hate people and do not want people to be here, so I presume that it is for the bioecology of the area. Whatever the justification may be, we have reduced the number of licences, in addition to the closure of 32 per cent of the marine park, which is effectively the whole of the Queensland coastline. So in that area from five kilometres off the coast, to 200 kilometres from the coastline of Australia, we have reduced the number of licences to about 6,000.

I do not often get to watch television in the early hours of the evening, but I most certainly dug out of the library a recent recording of 60 Minutes which featured a report on that poor naval commander. I do not know where he has been sent to—he is probably tendering a boat on Lake Eyre at present. From that report we discovered that, whilst only 6,000 Australian fishing vessels are allowed in our waters, last year 8,000 foreign vessels had been sighted in our waters. So, whilst only 6,000 Australian vessels are allowed in our waters, we know—because we have seen them—that there were 8,000 foreign vessels in Australian fishing waters. If 8,000 were sighted, there would most certainly be around 20,000 vessels in our waters. So it is very good that we have excluded Australians—recreational fishermen and commercial fishermen—from our waters! It is wonderful! The foreign countries that are enjoying those waters and taking huge fish harvests from them must be saying, ‘What a bunch of fools those Australians are!’

I had discussions with GBRMPA and, as I have done on many occasions in this place, I stated what GBRMPA’s position is. When I met with them, I said: ‘You are going to take away the livelihoods of some 2,000 Queenslanders—most of them North Queenslanders—with these proposals of yours. Have you no heart? Have you no thought for these people? Do you just want to carelessly go out and destroy their lives?’

Apropos of this, a gentleman came into my office. He later walked up the street and when I saw him he was slumped over a table crying his eyes out, because his whole life had been taken away; it had been completely destroyed. A lady who came into our office lost complete control: she was running around screaming at the top of her voice. She was out of her mind with worry and despair. That is what GBRMPA have done—they torture and torture and torture until we commit suicide, until we throw away our lives through drunkenness or until, through stress, we have a heart attack and die. They continually torture us. They do not care about human beings. They have the most callous, vicious attitudes towards these people. At the very least, 2,000 people in the commercial fishing industry in Queensland lost their livelihoods. I am not talking about the recreational fishing industry.

Then there was the little matter of theft. The anthropologists and the palaeontologists tell us that we North Queenslanders have fished those waters for some 20,000 years. No person in authority has come along in a uniform and said, ‘You can’t fish these waters.’ That only happened in the year of our Lord 1990, when people in this place and in the Queensland parliament were so arrogant that they took away from us those rights that we have enjoyed for 20,000 years.

If you want to see the result of that, come to my house in Charters Towers. I am 150 kilometres from the coast. Two of my five neighbours have boats in their backyards—tinnies. I do not hesitate to quote one of those neighbours; he and his wife are great local citizens. In fact, the park opposite my house is named after them—McCormack Park. I said to Jack McCormack, ‘I don’t notice a boat around.’ He said: ‘No, mate, we sold it. We can’t buy GPSs and I can’t read those navigational charts. I’m going to go out there and have the coppers chasing me all over the place—it’s no fun anymore.’

The little people, the ordinary people—a truckie with the council—do not have money to go overseas or to go to Surfers Paradise for holidays or to buy a house at Mission Beach. They can’t afford to go to the cinemas. They are retirees and they do not have much money. They live in a town where housing does not cost very much. This was their recreation; this was their fun. But this government and the state government in Queensland took that away from them, thieved it from them. They paid them no compensation. They just said: ‘You no longer have that right. We have taken that right away from you. We have taken that freedom away from you.’

As young blokes, we used to go fishing down the river and go shooting, because I lived in a very inland town. But people on the coast did the same thing. Then the guns were taken off us, and now the fishing has been taken off us. What fun can we ordinary Australians have anymore? What can we do? We cannot break branches off trees in our state any more—that is all illegal—so we cannot go camping or take the kids camping. What exactly can we do in this country? These were all the things I did. I enjoyed a wonderful boyhood in North Queensland, as did many others—and there are a million of us now living in the northern part of Australia. It was said northern Europeans could never live in the tropics. We proved them well and truly wrong. In spite of it all, we are flourishing in numbers. However, I do not know whether we are flourishing in freedom.

Let me move on. This government in its wisdom signed the free trade agreement. That means that Americans can sell boats to us but, under the Jones act, we cannot sell boats to them. This is a pretty good free trade act. The Americans can sell sugar to us, but we cannot sell sugar to them. I always call it the American free trade act, because it certainly was an American free trade act. It was not an Australian free trade act, that is for certain. They have the Jones act in the United States. I strongly believe that Canada has completely ignored the WTO agreements with respect to government purchasing arrangements. The United States has most certainly ignored them, and Japan has most certainly ignored them. I would most strongly recommend that we simply ignore them, and we will use the same pretext that those people have found.

That brings me to the policing and protection of our waters. In Queensland we have a government that cannot supply electricity, medical services or water, and yet they call themselves a government. I am sorry to say that the federal government cannot defend its waters. If you cannot defend your country, then you are not a government. The government have also abrogated the control of money to the international speculators; that is a free market now. There are two important things that we gave to the federal government upon Federation. We gave them control over the money, which they have abrogated to the likes of the international money marketers—it is in safe hands, I am sure—and control over our defence.

We have two destroyers, proposed to be the defence of Australia, and a number of patrol boats that have machine guns on them. In the year of our Lord 2006, we are going to defend Australia with a dozen patrol boats with machine guns on them. Is it any wonder that there are 20,000 foreign fishing vessels in our water treating the Australian government and the Australian people with absolute contempt, raping and pillaging our waters and taking fish that should be available for the Australian catch? We have about a dozen of these patrol boats, and we are proposing to have two destroyers. For the information of the House, in the war between Argentina and Great Britain, the Argentineans had five Exocet missiles—just five, like the fingers of one hand. With those five Exocet missiles, they took out two destroyers. So, if one of our neighbours happens to buy themselves five Exocet missiles, I think we can fairly safely say there will be no Australian Navy—and those missiles were mark 1 missiles.

There may be members here who attended the briefing by the head of the missile program in the United States. When some imbecile asked him, ‘What about a threat from a low-technology country?’ he said, ‘What would you consider a low-technology country?’ I burst out laughing, because there are no low-tech countries now. Those countries are sophisticated. But he said, ‘If you are thinking of Indonesia as a low-tech country, they have contracted to buy the Exocet mark 3.’

It was the Exocet mark 1 which took out the two destroyers in the battle with Argentina. This is Exocet mark 3, which has much more ability to evade and invade the interception systems of our boats—not that our current Navy, with its patrol boats, has any interception capacity. There are some frigates too. They are a little bigger than a patrol boat but not much bigger. Indonesia had contracted to buy the mark 3 and their economy collapsed, but they most certainly will be buying the mark 3 in due course.

I suggest that we look at countries like Israel, which are able to defend themselves against overwhelming forces because they have a commitment to it, an intelligent determination to protect their borders and to protect their people. I suggest to the government in the strongest way that I possibly can that they purchase for themselves 100 patrol boats with guided missile capacity—which the current patrol boats do not have—and with interception capacity. The guided missiles are very cheap—$5 million for a patrol boat. Interception capacity is not; it is $35 million a patrol boat. I suggest they also buy helicopters so that they can see as far as they want to. You can go 400 or 500 kilometres over the horizon with radar, and that is in just about all types of weather. If you do that then you will have an adequate coastguard system for Australia that can police our waters and remove those fishing vessels currently violating our waters.

For those of you who like reading history books, I recommend that you read a bit about the history of Texas. The Mexicans felt that it was all right to allow the Americans to come in there. Then they woke up one morning and found that there were a hell of a lot more Americans in Texas than there were Mexicans. The Americans said, ‘This belongs to us now, not you.’ When they had a fight about it, the Americans won because there were a hell of a lot more of them than the Mexicans.

If someone else controls your waters then you have to decide whether or not they own them. If they happen to be very big, as our neighbour happens to be, and if about 100 million of them are going to bed hungry—of their population of 200 million it is estimated that some 80 to 100 million are going to bed hungry every night—it might be that they have a fairly moral sort of an argument for coming into our waters. It might make them very angry indeed when we start to try to eliminate the 20,000 boats that are out there, some of them owned by very influential people in that government.

We have a saying in the bush that good fences make good neighbours. It is about time that this government did some fencing. If we want to apprehend them, why are there 8,000 vessels? Those who watched 60 Minutes would have seen the bloke on the patrol boat, the naval commander, who called out through a loud hailer in English to the Indonesian fishing boat: ‘Halt! Heave to. We are boarding you. You are in Australian waters.’ The Indonesian, it appeared to me, gave him the equivalent of the two of the valley, as we call it in North Queensland, and took off into international waters with the Australians trailing along behind. This is farcical! You might say it is difficult to deal with. No. We lead the world in corralling fish down off Port Lincoln. You simply drop a cable off behind with buoys on it and you surround a vessel with that. If he crosses that it fouls his propeller, so you can easily capture these vessels.

But there is no commitment to this because there is no coastguard. There are patrol boats and naval officers but they do not want to be cast in this role. We need a serious coastguard, and I think that one of the reasons this government has shied away from that is that it was suggested by the opposition. The opposition proposed it for just one purpose: apprehending fishing vessels or smuggling—having that sort of role—but with no defence role. But to put out the money on 20 or 30 patrol boats when they cannot effectively defend us would be an act of criminal stupidity. Surely you would use those patrol boats to work in a defence role. If they throw out half-a-dozen Exocet missiles and take out half-a-dozen boats, if there are another 60 or 70 patrol boats there all throwing missiles at them, it will not be a lot of fun for anyone who tries to take our waters from us. Good fences make good neighbours and that is what we want to have in the relationship with our neighbours.

Those vessels can be built in Australia. Yes, they will cost about $8 billion over 10 years. That is a lot of money, and I do not like to get up here and say that we should spend this money without saying how we get so much money. Arguably, we have the longest coastline of any country on earth, so we have a right to a huge customs duty of 10 per cent primage charge on everything coming into this country. Billy Wentworth—no fool, one of the finest intellects to set foot in this place—constantly advocated that sort of tax, a simple 10 per cent charge on everything coming into our country. We are entitled to it. It does not breach WTO regulations and it will pay for those patrol boats. In addition, we will have a technological industry in this country, which we do not have now. We have no manufacturing left in this country, but suddenly we will become the leading small boat builders in the world. We will protect our waters. Finally, give us back our waters. Give back to Australians our waters. (Time expired)

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