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

Before I left Innisfail, the last two people I saw as I was racing down the street to catch a taxi were Carl and Jenny Hockey. I promised that I would table in the House this photograph of their house. You can see that there is just one panel of about three feet left on it. I have asked for the photograph to be photostated and distributed. Mr Deputy Speaker, I seek leave to table the photograph.

Leave granted.

I promised also that I would mention that the Allianz insurance company said it could not pay until it saw whether their electrical goods—their refrigerator and those sorts of things—were working when they were dried out. But you will see no electrical goods or anything there at all—there is just nothing. I think it would be dangerous. There are two people in the photograph.

My first image of the destruction was of an irregular watering hole of mine, the Marillion Hotel—a beautiful old building. The upper storey was only about three or four feet off the ground. My mouth dropped open as I got out of the car and looked at it. Three voices from inside yelled out: ‘Come in here, you mongrel, and shout! It’d be the first time ever!’ That will give you some idea of the resilience of the people in the area. In the first street I went down, the first two houses looked all right to me—though one seemed to have damage to its shed. The third house was gone completely. The fourth house had a tree that was much bigger than me—it was 40 feet—right across the top of it. Our building code is magnificent. That house took the full weight of that tree, which was just sitting on top of it. When the people opened the door, water came out and went down the stairs. They said: ‘Don’t worry about us; we’ve got no problems. But the poor people over the road!’

I walked over the road and found that all the back and top of that house was gone completely. The next house had a whole roof in front of it, but I do not know whose roof it was. The next house has to be demolished and replaced and the next one is badly damaged. Coming back up the other street, one house was badly damaged and another was completely destroyed—those were the four houses in that street. That is pretty much the situation for about half of Innisfail—East Innisfail. Kurrimine Beach and Bingil Bay might be worse than that. That will give you some idea of what we are dealing with—and, if that photo is passed around, you will also see what we are dealing with.

I want to publicly thank Peter Beattie. A lot of us have our differences and disagreements, and I am not always his admirer, but he was on the ground immediately. We faced a very angry crowd and the Prime Minister and Premier very rightly steered away from that crowd. There were 400 people there who had been standing in teeming rain, and a lot of them were into their third day waiting for handouts. So, when everyone says it was marvellous, I am sorry: 400 people were standing out there! They were different people, because the queue came and went. The Premier went down and faced the music later in the day. I really confronted him—took him aside, of course, not in front of the crowd—and said, ‘This is simply not working. The only time it worked was for the four or five hours you were in here acting like Mussolini.’ That is absolutely what you must have in that situation: someone giving orders—not arguing, not explaining but just giving the orders and getting it done. To give him his due, the next day the announcement was made about Cosgrove. He said he was coming to the same sort of conclusion. I said, ‘You need a military chain of command here—a definitive chain of command.’

In those two areas, those people stood in the teeming rain because we had no tarps. I went with a bloke on Monday to get a tarp. There were no tarps, and I had a fight on Monday lunchtime with all the powers that be—I was very unpleasant and made myself very unpopular over it. On Wednesday the same bloke was still looking for a tarp. They had arrived at the airstrip and they were being distributed by people to certain people, but they were not at the distribution point even on Wednesday afternoon. Things were going wrong. I must emphasise that there was one official living north of this area but, except for him, I would really find it difficult to criticise a single person. Everyone was in there trying hard for 20 hours. On the Monday night, one policeman had been there all day. He was there early in the morning when I was there and he was still there at nine o’clock at night and he had not eaten. I said, ‘I bought you a pie, mate,’ and he said, ‘It’s stone cold.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but the Coca-Cola’s hot!’ Everyone sort of laughed, but it really was not that funny.

You learn things. The thing I would plead with anyone in the future is: you must have a centralised command system; there must be one person who has the authority to give orders. The SES did a magnificent job—Pat Russell and the minister, Wayne Coutts, did an excellent job—but they were not in a position to say, ‘Go over there and do that.’ They did not have that sort of power and that sort of power was needed. We have it in place now, but these are things we learn. The powerlines must go underneath the ground. There is no other way. In fact, there has been a controversy raging about them putting another huge transmission line along the coast. There have been 2,000 turn out in the demonstrations against it, but the powerlines must go underground. They cost more money, but I would say the losses in electricity alone to the state government would exceed $100 million, and that may even be a very conservative figure. My principal secretary lives down that street in the first town where the hotel was. The big steel lamp that hangs over the intersection there was bent right over, all the powerlines were across the street and a telephone pole was clean snapped off. I saw another wooden telephone pole snapped in two places, to give you some idea of the force that we were dealing with here.

The highway is supposed to be able to handle everything but a one-in-100 year flood. Quite frankly, if it was not a spite against me at the last election, there would still be no work on that section between the Murray Flats and south of Tully. The Australian National Highway is pretty well one in 100 years—I am very familiar with it—but that section is going out every three years. When people were in desperate straits for electricity, the generators arrived at Tully and could not get through. They had to go back to Townsville, back to Charters Towers, all the way up the inland highway and then back down again down the Palmerston Highway. So we lost virtually a day in that round-trip because nobody had bothered to upgrade the highway.

We are claiming this is the worst natural disaster in Australian history. I have not got time to go into all the figures, but there is not a single banana tree standing—and 92 per cent of Australia’s production comes out of that area. There is $300 million lost in that one industry alone. On the early reports from the sugar industry, I do not doubt that it will be pretty close to $200 million lost there. We went through all the other industries at Atherton, and I clocked it up at over $120 million in avocados, lychees and macadamias—about 20 or 30 per cent of Australia’s production coming from that area. It will be five, six or seven years before a lot of those trees bear again. Whilst it is still hard to put a figure on the houses that have been damaged, the original figure was that 5,000 homes were in a desperate situation and needed tarpaulins. Most certainly I would be surprised if there were not 2,000 houses that need to be rebuilt there. That may be high, but they are my estimates. I just reeled you off one street that I drove down. I would say that is a pretty fair estimate for about a third of the entire area with about 35,000 people living in it. That is not much fewer than in Darwin, which had under 50,000 at the time of Cyclone Tracy. I look over here at my colleague Warren Entsch and thank him very much for his assistance. His area is a bit out of it, and we appreciate his help.

When the economy in Indonesia collapsed, we found a thousand million dollars to help the Indonesians. This disaster involves our own people, here. At the moment, 2,000 or 3,000 people are living in sheds or lean-tos or under tarpaulins. It has been teeming with rain. It rained almost the entire week, which is why I am a bit croaky in the voice.

Almost the entire council at Innisfail—George Pervan; Tommy Mauloni, who is the local poet as well as being a councillor; Dave McCarthy, who got onto us about the excise, an issue which the Prime Minister has acted on so swiftly and with such generosity; and our mayor, Neil Clarke—and I made it our business to be seen in the street, from sun-up to sundown. It meant a lot to the people. I know politicians get criticised but, where they are innocuous and just trying to give a helping hand, we appreciate very much their assistance and put it on the public record, as with the member for Dawson.

Turning to the substantial matters: the banana industry is worth $300 million. Economists work on a ratio of 20 jobs for every million dollars—that is six thousand jobs. Certainly, over 4,000 jobs have been directly affected by the cyclone. They are not highly paid jobs. Many people work in this industry. Some of them are pretty hard cases, but, whatever criticism might be made of them, they pick your bananas for you. Probably about 800 or 900 people will be retained. But it is not only bananas; there are the other industries.

Many people are now walking the streets; they have no income and many have no homes. We need the Newstart allowance to be made available—I know it is difficult, because we have to work out guidelines. We need it to go into wages, maybe $400 a week. There is $450 coming from Newstart and $200 will come from farmers, tourist operators and rebuilders—the people who are rebuilding homes.

There is a huge gap, as the member for Leichhardt said, between the cost of rebuilding and the insurance payouts. I am not condemning the insurance companies, and I single out the NRMA for praise—their staff were standing in the main street, with their ties and white shirts on, from day one, on Monday. But I am concerned that there is a huge gap between the insurance cover and what it is going to cost people to rebuild. Fred Luzio rang me just before I came into the House. He said to rebuild the cinema will probably cost $500,000—I hope he does not mind me saying this—but the insurance on it will probably be $220,000. He is not certain of either figure at this stage, but that is what it looks like. There is a huge gap.

We need subsidised wages, if I can use that term. Are we going to pay people virtually nothing to sit on their backsides to do nothing or are we going to pay them a decent wage and have them rebuilding our communities for us? We plead with the Prime Minister to get onto that. Quite a few people I have spoken to do not know that a mill is in danger of closing in this area. It was very seriously damaged in the cyclone. I spoke about it to a bloke from another mill, and he said, ‘No, they’ll be taking people with seniority from that mill and people that were just newly put on, like myself, will be gone.’ I thought he and his wife would be nice and safe, but he said, ‘No way. I’ll be losing my job at the mill that will stay open.’ His wife, who is a schoolteacher, said, ‘I’m a relief teacher, but I get three or four days work. But if all of those people move away from that area’—and she said that two families had already left—‘I won’t have any relief teaching, so we’ll have no income in this family at all.’ I plead with the government to understand that many people are in that situation. They do not fit within the guidelines and will get nothing out of this.

People need to understand what the situation has been like there. I was caught out myself when I came into town with 50 or 100 bucks—whatever it was in my pocket—and I ran out of money. I went to buy some food, and I had no money. Plastic magic does not work if you have not got electricity. The banks are all closed because they have no electricity; they cannot operate anything. So I said to the shopkeeper, ‘Cheque?’ and the bloke burst out laughing at me. Then I said, ‘You know I wasn’t serious.’ So I went hungry for all of Tuesday. Everyone else was in the same situation as me. If they were lucky enough to have fuel in their car, they went to Cairns, but a lot of people were not in that category. A lot did not have a car. They had to stand in a line to get money to buy food, which was the reason they were out there in the teeming rain all the time. (Time expired)

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