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

I am freely and frankly admitting that, which is more than the member for Dickson’s colleagues do. And if you are pitting yourself, my friend, against Sir Leo Hielscher, who was offered the World Bank position, then good luck to you, son. The member for Dickson will not, in 10 lifetimes, get anything on the record similar to what Sir Leo put on the record.

It is not my idea, I would emphasise to the member, but the idea of the most successful state government economically—probably in the nation’s history. This country, at the present moment, rides in the coal truck. Where do you think the coal is coming from? And who do you think put it there? They put it there with government payment for infrastructure. There was no money put up by private industry at all, so, if we had this government’s policies, we would not have any coal industry in Australia. I am giving the member for Dickson a little bit of a lecture so he can have some serious knowledge instead of the superficial knowledge that he has.

At least when I have not been happy that I have done enough work on it, I admit that. But I know this for a fact: we do not tax the purchase of money. If you are saying how much was spent in Australia today, a huge volume of that—it might be a third or a quarter or some figure like that—is spent buying Australian money. Again, I am just a poor, simple Cloncurry man, so I would not know. But Mr Tobin—he got a Nobel Prize for economics, so I think he might know a bit more than some of the members in the House—suggested that we should put a tax on the purchase of money. George Soros, one of the most successful money makers in recent history, said exactly the same thing, and that is the reason we are not putting the tax on, because it is a stock market and it is those speculators. (Time expired)

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