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

The people are not entirely fooled. I hope and pray that it will go up again next time. But where does this money come from? I do not blame the political parties in the sense that they are in competition with each other. They have to take this money and there is a price to be paid for taking it. But if you were a merchant banker and you were going to handle the agency for the sale of Telstra, and you were to take two per cent on the sale and divide it up amongst half-a-dozen or a dozen of you, you would have an awful lot of money to play around with. One of the political parties in this place has had very prominent people indeed associated with merchant banking. I think that some people need to do some real hard and heavy research on the connection between the merchant bankers, who get the agency for the sell-off of these assets, and when someone gives you a golden handshake for $20 million—‘Well, gee whiz, I think it’s only fair, right, decent and honest to give $2 million back.’

I cannot help but tell the story, at the expense of one of my great heroes Ted Theodore, of someone who you, Mr Acting Deputy Speaker Lindsay, would remember well: Mr Tom Aikens. One of the great history books of Australia stated that the two great speakers in Australia were Menzies and Aikens, but it was said that Aikens was better because he could resort to humour. Aikens tells the story of being invited to rejoin the Labor Party. He said, ‘What—join that mob of rogues and scoundrels?’ Labor said, ‘That’s unfair, Tom.’ Tom replied, ‘Theodore—Mungana?’ I am saying this at the expense of one of my great heroes Ted Theodore, but they said, ‘That is unfair, Tom. That money was divided up equally between all of the boys.’ I do not think things have changed a real lot.

I cannot speak with authority for metropolitan areas and I do not intend to. I do not represent them. But, as far as non-metropolitan Australia is concerned, the privatisation of the railways—or corporatisation, if I want to be technical—was an absolute disaster.

I turn to the privatisation of air transport. My grandfather was one of the original people involved in getting that airline off the ground. We lost our money. We put our money in again and we lost it the second time. Then we gave it to the government. That great movie—Ned Kelly, was it? No. I am struggling for the name. Young Einstein was another movie—

See this speech in context