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

We are very appreciative that the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister is in the chamber to listen to this debate on the motion of the member for New England. I had the pleasure of reading the report that he did on housing in Australia with the Oxford don, and it was one of the few reports I have read on housing in Australia that made some sense—although I would say that there was a little variation that I would have liked to have seen him put in. But we hope that we have an intelligent person, a person determined to do the right things.

Mr Deputy Speaker Lindsay, you and I know what happens when you take property rights away from people, because both of us are familiar with the situation on Palm Island. If you have a place on earth where nobody is allowed to own any property, as is the situation on Palm Island—and you and I have advocated our views on this on many occasions—then there is no reason to get out of bed in the morning. Is it any wonder that these people are in the state that they are in?

In Australia, we are rapidly moving to a situation where our property rights mean absolutely nothing. You are not allowed to cut down a tree in your backyard. You are not allowed to take any water out of a stream that might flow through your backyard, whether you are in an urban or a bush situation. It amazes me that people in the cities—and I never realised what a Sydney-centric place Australia was until I became a federal member of parliament—can draw a distinction between a water right and a share certificate. Suppose I have a piece of paper here that says I am entitled to take this amount of water and suppose I have a piece of paper here that says I am entitled to own one-millionth of BHP Billiton. I fail to see what the difference is. If you take the share certificate away from me, you are a thief and you will be put in jail. If you take the water right certificate away from me, you are a person who is saving the nation from the terrible damnation of salination. I fail to see the difference here.

If there is one single distinguishing feature of the Anglo-Saxon race, it is that in the year 1290 they passed legislation called Quia Emptores, and they gave people the right to own property. Over the next 300 or 400 years, it became a sacred right. The French did not get it until 1788. The Germans did not get it until about 1820. The Russians did not get it until 1984. But the Anglo-Celtic people had it and it was one of the reasons that they leapt ahead of the rest of the world.

We have lost the right in my area to clear timber off our station properties. I do not hesitate to say that the family of the famous footballer, Martin Bella, bought a big area of land there on the basis that they were going to clear it and turn it into a partly sugar and partly cattle area. Of course, they had the ground cut right out from under them. That family—a very wealthy, prosperous and successful family—have been placed in a very desperate situation because of the actions of government. Yet they are allowed continuously to take these property rights away from us. We have been told that we cannot clear timber—a right taken away from us that we had before. We cannot access the water in our rivers—a right we had previously that we do not have now. I am talking about Queensland now, not New South Wales. And now we are having the riparian rights taken away from us under Queensland wild rivers legislation. I hope that the parliamentary secretary takes note that half—42 per cent, to be exact—of Australia’s agriculture comes off the Murray-Darling system, off a tiny little 22 million megalitres.

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