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

I would like to commence by thanking Gary Ward and the fishermen of Karumba who were instrumental in securing 60 Minutes, and I would like to thank 60 Minutes staff on the wonderful expose they did on the appalling failure of the federal government. I am very much in sympathy with the opposition on the issue of a coastguard service, but I am not in agreement with the opposition on how to go about it. I always feel that I am a minority of one here on the issue of defence. I do not know whether that is a northern perspective, because we were to be handed over to the Japanese in the last war—we that were north of the infamous Brisbane Line were to be sacrificed. I have news for the Western Australians, because the Brisbane Line included them. The Brisbane Line actually only recommended the defence of the golden boomerang from Brisbane through Sydney and Melbourne and around to Adelaide. The rest of it could not be defended, to quote General Mackay.

Gary Ward and other fishermen at Karumba have been saying for ages that these people have been coming in. I needed something substantial to go forward with and we could not get people to come forward with photographs or anything of that nature, but 60 Minutes were alerted by the fishermen at Karumba and other people and they came in and exposed fully and completely exactly what was going on. If ever one has seen an absolute farce, it was this Australian boat—and I think the poor old commander of that patrol boat is probably rowing a patrol boat out at Boulia or Bedourie at the present moment for allowing 60 Minutes on the boat.

But they assailed this Indonesian fishing vessel and they called out in English for it to heave to, that they were in Australian waters. The Indonesian vessel gave the Indonesian equivalent of two to the valley and took off. So they again hailed them on the loudspeaker—in English, and none of them spoke English—and they just kept taking off. Then they put out a rubber dinghy as a boarding party. This Indonesian boat had sharp poles that were poking off, and if the dinghy got close, of course, they would have punctured a hole in the dinghy. They kept going and eventually crossed into international waters, again waving the Indonesian equivalent of the two-up signal to the Australians. Anything more farcical would be hard to imagine.

I want the House to know what exactly takes place here. Most of these sightings are not by Coastwatch at all. In fact, I suspect very few of the sightings are by Coastwatch. They are by fishermen. But whether it is fishermen or whether it is the Coastwatch aeroplanes that fly over, they then communicate back to the Coastwatch base, which is in Brisbane or somewhere down south where people have no understanding of what actually takes place in North Queensland or how North Queensland works—but, anyway, that is the way it works.

They then contact a patrol boat in Cairns or in Darwin, and sometimes they have some of these new boats which are available to Customs, Quarantine and Coastwatch. These boats are not equipped with armament or anything of that nature. They are just a big fast boat. They have a very big draught, so they cannot go into any shallow waters, and the area near and dear to my heart, of course, is the Great Barrier Reef and its surrounding waters and also the Gulf of Carpentaria, where my own family comes from. There is so much shallow water in those places that a small typical dory fishing vessel out of Indonesia can go in any of these places and none of these boats that are sent out to assail them can. In addition to that, they simply wait for nightfall. Also, as the previous speaker, the member for Chifley, pointed out, these are wooden vessels, so they cannot be sighted by radar at night—not that sighting by radar is a very efficient method of picking up boats of an evening. They simply slip away into international waters.

In the days not so very long ago territorial waters went to 23 kilometres out. Why 23 kilometres was chosen was that that was the range of a cannon. The concept was that you could control the waters the distance that you could fire a cannon over. That is pretty effective today. You own what you can control. In the most disgusting and appalling piece of insensitivity and stupidity, this government has limited the number of our fishermen to 6,000. That is all that are licensed between the five-kilometre and 200-kilometre distance. Only 6,000 Australian fishermen are allowed into our waters, but we find out now that in 2004 we sighted 9,639 foreign fishing vessels—and we do not sight all of those that come here. So we authorise 6,000 Australians to go in the water but we allow 9,639 foreign fishing vessels to fish in our water. That is bad enough, but in 2005 that had leapt up to 13,018.

My problem here is that we do not have anything that remotely resembles an efficient system for picking these people up, because the patrol boats are only based at Darwin and Cairns. For those people who are ignorant of seagoing, you cannot really average a speed of more than about 15 or, at the very most, 20 knots. So you are going at about 30 kilometres an hour, and for those who do not know their geography it is about 1,000 kilometres from Cairns up to the Torres Strait, where you can turn west and then come back down into the Gulf of Carpentaria. So, if you are waiting for a boat to arrive from Cairns, I think we can all rest assured that the Indonesians will long since have gone by the time it arrives. Night falls in the meantime—probably twice before the patrol boat gets there—and of course no-one knows where they are. They have gone; they have vanished.

If you ask what should be happening here, the first thing you need is for boats to be properly based at Karumba permanently. I am not saying that they should live there permanently, but you can have a crew there and they can be rotated out to Darwin or to Cairns. They are hardly in a position to be living at Cairns, one of the great tourist destinations of the world. But you cannot base boats of any size or capacity at Karumba because it is not a proper port. It is made for small fishing vessels and we have enormous difficulty getting boats to take even 1,000 head of cattle on them—and that is a very small boat—up the river at Karumba.

It does not take a lot of time, money or effort to build a port in the gulf. At the very most you are probably looking at about $25 million to build an adequate port that can house two, three or four patrol boats. If you are saying we should adequately patrol with these boats, then you are going to need a lot of boats. The coastline of Australia is greater than that of any other nation on earth, with the exception of Canada and Russia but there is hardly any necessity for them to patrol their northern coastlines, being all ice running to the North Pole. But that is not so in Australia’s case.

In 10 years time our two nearest nations, the Philippines and Indonesia, will have a combined population of around 300 million and a lot of those people, probably a third or possibly as many as a half, will go to bed hungry each evening. If you are going to attempt to deprive people who are hungry of this fishery then they are going to get pretty mad. Say we as Australians envisaged the people of Arnhem Land deciding to have a vote on whether they should secede from Australia. Say they invited the Indonesian army to come in and oversee the elections with the blessing of the world body, the United Nations, who came in and oversaw the decision by the people at the ballot box. If the people decided to secede from Australia and the Indonesians stayed to see that the independence of these people was respected, I think a lot of Australians would be pretty mad. If you put your feet in the shoes of the Indonesians—and a lot of them do not have shoes—you will see that they have a very good reason to be seriously antagonised by us.

As a result of this legislation we are going to have a lot of photographs in the Indonesian press of people going to jail in Australia for trying to catch some fish to feed their families, and the people up there are going to get pretty mad. I am not saying that we should not do these things, but I am pleading with the government not to go racing around the place forcing its own viewpoint upon other people, acting tough and generally having an extremely loud mouth. A person I admire greatly in history is Theodore Roosevelt, whose famous quotable quote was, ‘I speak softly but I carry a big stick.’ Unfortunately, the governments of Australia have had a very loud mouth indeed but we have no stick at all. What our stick amounts to is six frigates; that is what we have to protect Australia with. I do not know if people are familiar with naval warfare but in the Falklands War there were two British destroyers—not frigates; these were big vessels that you could pump a few bombs into and they would keep going. In the Second World War many of the destroyers took something like 40 or 50 hits and were still able to be operated. All that the Argentinians had were five Exocet missiles and two of those five missiles took out those two destroyers. So I leave it to your imagination how fast someone could deal with six frigates, and we are now going to spend what will be, ultimately—I do not think anyone is questioning this—the best part of $2,000 million on two destroyers.

Those of us who had the pleasure of going along and listening to the missile boss from the United States noted he was asked about the danger and the threat of attack from a low-technology country. A few of us laughed and he said, ‘What would you consider to be a low-technology country?’ A few of us laughed again and he said, ‘If you’re thinking of Indonesia, they had contracted to buy the latest generation of Exocet missile.’ One of those destroyers that went down in the Falklands had an interception capacity on it. But the Exocet is a very sophisticated piece of weaponry and it penetrated the interception system of the British Navy—and that was a mark 1 Exocet. He said the Indonesians had contracted to buy mark 3 Exocets and that, as luck would have it, their economy collapsed. If you want to read the book by Joseph Stiglitz, Globalisation, you will find the book mainly concentrates on what the International Monetary Fund, the Anglos—as far as the Indonesians are concerned—did to their economy. When the dust had settled, instead of there being $1,800 in income per person, there was $1,000 in income per person. To put that into perspective, we have $19,000 in income per person and the Japanese have about $30,000 in income per person.

This government seriously thinks that it can go on provoking its neighbour—with a population of 200 million and dominated by Java, a country that has a very strong history of colonialism and expansionism and very aggressive religious beliefs to go along with that—and then protect itself. I see the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for the Environment and Heritage sitting at the table grinning. There was someone sitting in this place grinning in 1939 when people got up and said, ‘Hey, these Japanese could come down here,’ but the people were told by the government of the day that we had a wonderful navy and a brilliant army and that the Japanese were a third-rate Asian power. I think there were 17 naval engagements between the Americans and the Japanese in the Second World War and the Japanese won every single one of the engagements with the exception of Midway. In the last engagement, the battle off Guam, the Americans lost 12 of their 13 vessels and the Japanese lost none. If you like to read your history books, read the three books on the Kokoda Trail and you will find that there were no American aeroplanes flying around Kokoda because most of them had been taken out of the sky by the Japanese at the time. But yet in this place we have the same smiling, grinning imbeciles, as the parliamentary secretary—

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