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

Mr Deputy Speaker, I take your admonition most seriously and I will come back to a closer perusal of the bill. However, to complete what I was saying, at the end of Young Einstein he says, ‘I’m going to give this E=mc² theory to the government because you couldn’t trust anyone else with it’—and there are atomic explosions going off in the background. We gave up Qantas. That was not the smartest thing we ever did because Qantas has completely left the people, where it was birthed.

The people who put up the money to create this great asset for Australia have been completely abandoned by that airline. The only services they can get are at huge cost. They are not available to the ordinary person, who simply cannot fly on the airline. What does that mean? It means, as the member for Calare said, that if you think you might have cancer and you need to go down to the city for tests—which most certainly cannot be done anywhere in western Queensland—you do not have enough money to go down and do them. And you cannot afford to take two to three days off work, so it cannot be done. So whether it is the railways, Qantas or the banks, we got a dreadful deal out of privatisation. If Medibank Private is sold, I do not doubt for a moment that we will get the same sort of deal.

Let me be specific about the Medibank deal. The National Rural Health Alliance recently produced some figures, which were published in the Australian Journal of Rural Health. There are 55 dentists per 100,000 people in the major cities compared with 17 per 100,000 in western New South Wales and even fewer in western Queensland. Over one-third of practising dentists are over 50 years of age and 83 per cent of dentists work in the private sector. Medibank Private gives the government some ability to direct traffic. Every time the government gives away this bit of control, their ability to deliver services becomes increasingly difficult.

I hark back to my days in the Queensland government because they are most relevant to this bill. We did not need to privatise anything and yet we were the most successful as a private enterprise government in Australian history. I do not think a single person in this parliament—they may accuse us of many other things—could say we were not. Our political opponents in those days acknowledged—whatever else they might have said—the terrific success of the Queensland government in enterprise. We did not create the aluminium industry by selling off the Gladstone power station; we created the aluminium industry by building the Gladstone power station. One of very few places on earth you can walk in off the street and get free hospital treatment is in Queensland. We did that by holding control ourselves and having a determination to deliver services to the people not only in the capital cities but everywhere in the state of Queensland. I am not saying that people in the cities are faring much better with medical services than we are in the country, although they have better access to specialist services. There is no doubt that there will be a tremendous loss in the government’s ability to control, direct and deliver that most important of all services—medical health services.

If you say that the free market system will guarantee the delivery of services then I strongly recommend you read the books on Enron. Classic economic philosophy—or ideology; whichever word you use—says that if the supply decreases, the price will go up and then the supply will increase. In California, when the power supply went down, as the result of a drought and lack of hydroelectricity, the price went through the roof. So if the price went through the roof by taking a bit of power away from the system, the price could be sent through the clouds if you took a lot away. That is exactly what happened. Every one of the congressional and Senate inquiries in the United States clearly indicated that once you have a significant hold upon the marketplace, such as Enron and three or four other suppliers of power in California had, then you were able to manipulate the free market system.

As I have said in this place on many occasions, the problem with members opposite is that when they were little boys and little girls their mummies and daddies never had them play Monopoly. If they had, they would know that when you get hold of all the utilities you can quadruple the price you charge for electricity or for water. But I played Monopoly when I was young, and I know the rules of the game well. If they think this is not playing Monopoly, then they believe in the tooth fairy.

I have mentioned the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories—they had a lot of fun. The Commonwealth Bank had a lot of fun. Telstra are going to have a lot of fun. The people who will pay the price will be ordinary, average Australians—the sorts of men who fought tenaciously to create these wonderful institutions for Australia. And they were not all on the right-hand side of the House, where I am standing; they were not all in the Labor Party. They were on the other side of the House as well. The Commonwealth Bank was kicked off by King O’Malley, but there is no doubt that every conservative government enhanced and solidly backed that bank. The pygmies who are ruling Australia now consider themselves intellectually superior to Bob Menzies, Jack McEwen and Ben Chifley. They are not. The failure of privatisation in Australia is already on record. I cannot believe that a government would continue with it. (Time expired)

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