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

In speaking this evening on the Tax Laws Amendment (2006 Measures No. 4) Bill 2006, I give notice that, all going well, I will be moving an amendment to remove the sections of the bill that allow a person from overseas to not have levied upon him the capital gains tax. I find it a most extraordinary measure. Thank heavens I am not still on the government benches! To think that I would have to vote that an Australian gets taxed the capital gains tax but a foreigner does not. I believe in discriminating on behalf of Australians; I do not believe in discriminating against them. It is one of the most extraordinary propositions. She is a little ripper! I will not be giving too many speeches without dropping this little clanger in.

I will be carrying it around with me, because people do not believe you when you say that they voted for this. They simply do not believe you. I carry this big briefcase with me to show them. When I do show them, they shake their head and say, ‘Can this actually be happening?’ This section of the bill says that if you are an Australian you pay capital gains tax but if you are a foreigner and you do exactly the same thing you do not have to pay any capital gains tax. The only explanation given to us is that the OECD told us to do it. I think the prosecutors in Nuremberg would love that one: the OECD told us to do it. In actual fact, today is a very sad day for Australia.

There were seven major mining companies. I have been heavily involved in the mining industry all of my life. I was working in the Flora Dora copper mine and floating my own company at the tender age of 26—of which I am very proud. We brought the mine into production, which is a very great achievement. I have watched great institutions be purchased and created by great Australians. Essington Lewis was a very great Australian. He was a man who saw the bigger picture for not only his company and his employees but also his nation, and he built the ‘Big Australian’. Sir Robert Menzies—the king of this place for nearly two decades—unashamedly did an awful lot of things to ensure that the Big Australian stayed the Big Australian. He would turn in his grave if he saw what was happening here today. I am writing a history book, and this section of our history in Australia is entitled ‘The rise of the Lilliputians’. The previous section of the book is entitled ‘Walking with giants’. The people who created BHP, and the people who created the Australian motor car, Larry Hartnett and Ben Chifley, were truly great men. However you measure men, these were truly great men.

Let me be very specific: if you own, as we Australians did, the seven great mining companies that dominate the Australian economy, there is only one thing that we now have that we can sell overseas. Our agriculture in this country is collapsing, and there is not a person in here who does not know that now. Manufacturing is gone. There is not any manufacturing in this country. The motor car industry is all that is left, and it is rapidly closing down. In fact, every time I go to Melbourne, I always read the newspapers and I collect the cuttings of which new companies have closed down in the motor vehicle supply industry. And let me say that, whilst Chifley may have instituted the Holden motor car, there was no doubt that the Menzies-McEwen government continued on as the strongest of supporters. In fact, they always acted as if they had been the architects of the whole initiative.

But let me switch back to the mining companies. The seven great mining companies that dominated the Australian economy some 12 years ago were all Australian owned—every single one of them. Metal prices moved up 350 per cent. Zinc, copper, silver and lead moved up, on average, 350 per cent. So when a mining company—I will not specifically mention them because there are a lot of good Australians associated with these companies—is making $1.5 thousand million a year and it has a certain cost structure of about $1.2 thousand million a year and the metal prices increase by 350 per cent, this nation should be receiving an extra $2,000 million a year. But of course this nation is not, because the cost structure has stayed the same and that extra $2,000 million of profit has gone overseas. That has taken place with each of these companies, whether it be BHP, MIM, Normandy or whatever.

When I was floating my own company, the people who knew informed me—young as I was—that: ‘You only need to hold about 30 per cent of the shares to in fact control the company. You would be a pretty weak sort of bloke if you couldn’t control a company with 30 per cent ownership.’ We saw investors in that great institution, Qantas—and I am glad to say that my grandfather was one of the very early investors—lose all their money. They refloated and put all their money in again, and they lost it again. The third time, they gave it to the government. Grandad never resented having lost a lot of money because he was really doing it for his country. Great people like Sir Hudson Fysh did not make a lot of money, but they were doing it for their country. The Fysh family still live out there. They are not wealthy people, but I think they are very proud of what they did for their country in creating that great institution, which I believe—from the magazines I read—is now controlled by British Airways. The profits and the company serve the interests of a foreign corporation.

I am informed that Optus is owned by SingTel of Singapore. And I find this quite extraordinary: ADI, which makes firearms—what little defence capability we have—is owned by the French. I hope they stay on side with us. Their government might say that they should not be producing any rifles or bullets here. When I was handed an SLR rifle and told that I was on 24-hour call-up to go and fight the Indonesians in Borneo—in what was delightfully called ‘confrontasi’; it was not too confrontasi for us who were going there—we had to go without any weapons to deliver a body blow at a tank. We had the Carl-Gustaf recoilless rifle. The Swedes, of course, did not like us going into Vietnam so they said that we were not allowed to use that weapon.

If you think I am off the track, I will repeat to you that ADI is foreign owned. The incentive for coming in and buying up this country is being increased dramatically by the actions of this government tonight. That is bad enough in terms of money, when you have a country that is dying with a $60,000 million a year current account deficit. That is bad enough in itself, without handing over the manufacturing defence capability of your country. And, if I am a French owned company, it is an awful lot better to supply all of the parts from France rather than produce them in Australia. Before the war we were producing an aircraft called the Wirraway. We thought it would be pretty easy to change from producing Wirraways to producing Beauforts, but we did not produce any Beauforts—until the last year, when it was all over. We could not convert over.

It is absolutely essential for this government to have some sort of technological and manufacturing base. We should not be increasing the incentive for foreigners to come here and take over. The reason that they want to come here and take over is that they want to make money. They produce these items overseas. If, for example, they buy SPC—as the foreigners have—then they do not produce or process here in Australia anymore. They utilise the retail arm. Golden Circle is high on the hit parade. The incentive for these takeovers has been increased dramatically by the actions of this government with discriminatory legislation which flagrantly, openly and patently discriminates against Australians. We pay the capital gains tax; they do not.

I want to come back to the mining companies. I mentioned just one company, which produces about $1.5 thousand million worth of ore. The average price of the ore bodies has gone up by 350 per cent, as I said previously. That means that it is now making $5,000 million. The cost structure remains at $1.2 thousand million, so all the extra $3,000 million, or whatever it is, is now going overseas. We do not want foreigners to own our country. It is not my vision for my country for my children to work as wage slaves to foreign landlords and, because of the deregulation of the labour market, increasingly work for less and less. The less money that goes into the pockets of the employees and the workers, the bigger the profits are that will move out of this country and overseas.

To me these things are very elementary. I do not think there is anything very complicated about this. With one company we might not be worried about the current account deficit. We lost $3,000 million as a nation as a result of that one company. But there were seven companies, and that one was one of the smallest of the seven. Seven times $3,000 million is $21,000 million that this country has lost because it stood aside and let its strategic mining companies be taken over by foreigners without any effort at all to keep those companies in Australian hands. They have even tried to speed up the process. We have held that out on account of the Senate, but for how much longer I do not know.

Coles has been the subject of a takeover bid. There is incentive to take over Coles. I am not one for conspiracy theories, but it seems to me more than strange that the Coles bid comes in the same month that we decide to abolish the capital gains tax. One would have to be very naive not to view this with some small degree of suspicion. But if Coles is taken over we in the rural industries of Australia have paid the terrible price for the free market policies of not only this government but of the previous government. When they deregulated the wool industry, we lost half the price of our wool. Half of that industry has vanished—gone completely. It will never come back. I know what I am talking about here: I represent a wool area, albeit a small one. It will never come back.

In 1989, when that brilliant man Mr Keating deregulated the Australian economy and the wool industry, one-tenth of this nation’s entire export earnings came from wool. The one thing that you would not muck around with was wool. There will be all sorts of explanations, such as that we lost some customers, the price was going down and the wool pile was building up, but that occurred about every three or four years. When we were deregulated, we lost half of our income; half the industry has gone. To quote the commentator Alan Jones: ‘You deregulated the industry and now you have lost half of the greatest industry this nation has ever had.’

They then proceeded to deregulate eggs, and farmers lost nearly 40 per cent of their income over the next six or seven year. They deregulated the sugar industry on the home market, and farmers lost 50 per cent of their income over the next three years. They deregulated the dairy industry, and farmers lost 30 per cent of their income over the next five years. Since the cost to the consumer for each of these commodities went up, the people in the middle—who were substantially Woolworths and Coles—made an extra $2,000 million just on sugar, eggs and dairy deregulation. In my third year as a member of parliament, which was 27 or 28 years ago, I decided that every time legislation came forward I would look at who profits and who loses. With food deregulation, we know that the losers have been the consumers and the farmers, producers and processors and that the people in the middle have gained hugely.

If we apply that test to Coles, I do not think that there are many commentators in Australia who are not saying that it will remain a target and will be taken over. On the best of authority, I have been told that it is only a matter of time before Wal-Mart take over Woolworths here in Australia. The two companies have a very close relationship now. All of those massive profits were purchased over the broken backs of Australia’s farmers. And let me be very specific: I represented 240 dairymen when I came into this place and now I represent 80. And every one of those people who left that industry suffered enormous pain, the destruction of their entire lives. In the sugar industry, we have a suicide every month as a result of deregulation and the free trade policies of this government and the last government.

And have they learnt anything? No. Like the Bourbons, they have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. We are looking down the gun barrel of a huge increase in incentive for Wal-Mart and the other vultures and vipers that are circling around Coles at the present moment to come in, because the potential profits have gone through the roof. And they have been put through the roof by this government.

In writing a history book, I read a lot of history books. Do you know what? They pass a judgement upon you. You look at a man like McEwen, and you think: ‘This bloke is bigger than Ben Hur. What this bloke did for this country you could never measure. He was a man who had immense compassion, immense intellectual capacity and immense determination to see this country succeed.’ Those giants have very much been replaced by pygmies. It is the rise of the Lilliputians.

Those history books are going to say that when you took government in this country, Mr Keating, you had a very competitive economy. You had manufacturers who could compete on the world market; you had agriculturalists who could compete on the world market; you had viable industries in this country. Mr Keating, when you left, half of them had been destroyed by your policies. Did the incoming government learn anything? They were very quick to attack Mr Keating. We had the debt truck running around Australia. We heard daily from the Liberal Party and the National Party about the great debt that the Labor Party had rolled up. We do not hear very much about the debt truck these days because the current government has more than doubled that debt.

I have been a businessman in this country all of my life, and my daddy, my grandaddy and my great-grandaddy were businessmen before me. We have always been businesspeople. It is very simple: if you cannot trade—if you cannot sell anything—then you cannot buy anything and you will go broke. We salute those giants, we condemn the Lilliputians and we will be dividing in this House on the issue of that clause. (Time expired)

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