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

I am very flattered indeed, Mr Deputy Speaker. I have the incredible egoism to say that mistake is often made! Policy must be judged upon its outcomes. You do not wander off with some ideological theory. There is a magnificent cartoon—at least, I thought it was magnificent—of Mr Keating reading a book entitled Japanese Protection and saying, ‘It’s doomed! It may work in practice, but it’ll never stand up in theory!’ It was a magnificent judgement upon privatisation.

I am not coming in here with prejudices; at least, I hope I am not. I suppose I have developed prejudices now, one way or the other, but if you turn the clock back 20 years, I was never one for saying that everything should be in the hands of government. I belonged to the Country Party, which was very pragmatic in these areas. In fact, in the 20 years of Bjelke-Petersen, we were supposed to be the conservative government. It just shows how outmoded the terminology is. If conservative meant privatisation, we did not privatise or even remotely look like privatising anything in the period when we were in office. But every minister was expected to make his department perform. Don Lane, for all of his shortcomings, actually had the railways in Queensland working for a profit for two years there. It was a remarkable and very creditable effort.

You must judge these operations upon their outcomes. On the sale and privatisation of the Commonwealth Bank, I think the best statement upon the banks that one can find is in the Sydney Morning Herald dated 12 May 2005. It says:

Ahmed Fahour, who heads NAB’s Australian operations ... made headlines last year because of his $34 million salary, ...

I will repeat that slowly in case everybody has not heard it: ‘his $34 million a year salary’. The article goes on to say that he believed that 4,200 jobs had to go from the National Australia Bank. I represent one of those areas from which the jobs went. I am not referring just to that area; I am talking about the northern suburbs of Townsville as well, where branches were closed. I used one of those branches, in fact.

If you are looking for an outcome, where we had a local bank manager who made decisions locally, based upon the knowledge of the local economy, we now have managers in Brisbane making decisions over whether you should be allowed to borrow money in Cloncurry, Mareeba or Tully. The outcome in that same year? That article gives the profit for NAB for the year 2005: ‘NAB reported a 17 per cent jump in first-half net profit to $2.5 billion’. So in the first half of the year they made $2.5 thousand million in profit. Did interest rates come down? I have not checked up over the last four or five years, but for that crucial period—the latter Keating period and the first eight or nine years of this government—our interest rates in Australia were 50 per cent higher on average than those in Japan or the United States. So did it deliver cheap interest rates? No, our interest rates were 50 per cent higher than those of our competitor nations.

Did it deliver better services? I spent a lot of time reorganising the Mid West Rugby League, which covers all the western towns between Townsville and Mount Isa. The railways cut back 500 jobs: in a little tiny area of about 10,000 or 12,000 people, we lost 500 jobs. Those jobs were removed mainly from the local railway station, which closed down virtually completely, and local overnighter depots handled all of their work.

Did this deliver a better and cheaper outcome? No. Our parcel prices went up sixfold in that period. The cost to transport a parcel from Townsville to any of those towns went up 600 per cent. Motor car parts doubled in price as a result of the privatisation of the railway system in western Queensland.

Did the airlines profit from the privatisation of Qantas? What is the situation now with the airlines? In fairness, there has been significant diminution in the price of airfares between the capital cities but, as my worthy colleague from Calare explained to the House, that is because they cherry picked out profitable routes and totally withdrew their services from the non-profitable routes. It was a fairly easy task and of course they put themselves in a position where they had a monopolistic position in the marketplace.

There may have been transportation benefits for the intercapital cities—most certainly the Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane connection—but for those outside of that connection, particularly for people in rural ports, the cost of getting to Townsville from Mount Isa doubled in that period. Similarly, the cost of getting from Mount Isa to Brisbane doubled. Yes, city people got it cheaper, but it was over the broken backs of these people outside the metropolitan areas of Australia.

We have dealt with transport and banks, but one of the most sorrowful issues from where I sit was the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories. There are certain things that simply should not be privatised. The magnificent book entitled Privatisation: Sell off or sell out refers to the cost of selling these items to the public and what the value now is of those items, and there is a $45,000 million difference. We sold Commonwealth Serum Laboratories being told that that was the value of Commonwealth Serum Laboratories. Who was telling us that? Surprise, surprise—the head of Commonwealth Serum Laboratories. I am told that he is now on the list of ‘The 100 wealthiest people in Australia’. His wealth is colossal, and he was a humble public servant prior to privatisation.

It always fascinates me at election time that those who are now my political opponents in the major parties will have $20 million or $30 million to spend throughout Australia. In my electorate in the last election campaign they spent some $350,000. We want to know where this money comes from. How come they had $350,000 and we had only $70,000?

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