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

You say, ‘Don’t worry.’ I am quite proud not to have been in that category at any stage of my life. I am immensely proud, as a matter of fact. On my reading of history, half the Matabele nation was wiped out. On my reading of history, nearly a million people died in the Boer War, including one of my distant relatives. Why? To make Cecil Rhodes rich. When he got control of the South African government, which he had created, he brought in workers who worked for nothing at all. Why? To make him rich. The people who populated South Africa woke up one morning and it was no longer their country. They had very badly treated the other Africans, and it was fairly predictable that they would get a bit of their own back when the other mob took over.

The important point of this is: people work there for nothing. The wage in the Phillipines for agricultural work—as this man from regional Australia would know—is $2.70 a day; ours is about $15 an hour. It is pretty poor pay for the work that they do, but it is good compared with what they get in Indonesia. So this company, quite predictably, is bringing workers in from Indonesia. What that is going to do to the wages and conditions in this country scares the hell out of me.

There are new members in this place—and the member for Watson is one of them—but there are older members too who have a lot to answer for on the issue of the TAFEs. When I was elected to this parliament, the first two functions that I went to were TAFE—I do not know what they called them—graduation ceremonies. There were nearly 1,000 people at the one at Innisfail, and nearly 1,000 people at the one at Mount Isa. They had 30 or 40 employees in both those TAFEs. Innisfail TAFE is now trying to sell off and get rid of two-thirds of the building. It is empty. It would be flat out having a dozen people in it now. As for having a graduation ceremony: there is no-one there to graduate. There are hardly any people graduating or going through them at all. I cannot speak for all of Australia; I can only speak for the area I represent. But if I were associated with the government, and started talking about TAFEs, I would hang my head in shame. There are none; they have simply ceased to exist in areas that I represent.

If you are short of labourers out in the bush or any other part of Australia, there is one sure way to get them—ever since the Phoenicians invented money there has been one sure way to get more workers—and that is to increase wages. When I was a young man, thanks to the enlightened governments of the day—of John McEwen and Joh Bjelke-Petersen—we had huge mining booms and beef roads being built, and we were paid colossal money. As an unskilled labourer, within two or three months I had saved enough money to go out and pay cash for a brand new small car—in today’s money, nearly $20,000. I played up a bit, Mr Deputy Speaker, so I was not saving all of it.

There is another way to supply those workers—to bring people in from countries where people are used to working for absolutely nothing, under no conditions whatsoever. That is the other method of doing it. There is no doubt which pathway the member for Goldstein wishes to take us down.

I would like him to do a little bit of reading. I have represented mining areas. My family have come from mining areas in this country since the 1870s; we have lived on the goldfields and the copper fields of Australia. I know that, in those days, before the immigration was tightened up, one in 32 people who went down the mines never came back up again—or came back up again and died a wicked death from miner’s phthisis. That is what happened in those days, until the immigration laws were pulled up by the incoming government in 1901. In that year, the new federal government was created, and the first member for Kennedy in this place spoke about exactly the same issue that I am speaking about today, 105 years later.

Let me just go back to the NFF for one moment. This fellow presided over the NFF. Have a look at his success story.

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