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

You are a primary producer, so you have a vested interest. But the honourable minister does have some interest in my electorate. When these people come in here and talk about climate change and people down here being without water, he would realise that we are inundated at the present moment. I am ringing up almost half-hourly not only Tully and Innisfail but also Burketown, Mornington Island, Normanton and the like about flooding. We, in fact, have enjoyed good seasons over the last 10 years—and, unfortunately, in the super wet belt, we have had an excess of water.

I do not know whether people in this place have read Al Gore’s book, but if you look at the increase and decrease in rainfall shown there you will see that there is no pattern. One offsets the other, which is the experience in Australia. Quite frankly, the wet areas are getting a bit wetter and the drier areas might be getting a bit drier, if you go on the figures from the last 10 years. But we people who are close to the land know that it is absolutely ridiculous to look at a 10-year cycle. If you look at the rainfall pattern for Australia—a magnificent map done by the DPI in Queensland—you will realise that these years are not too bad as far as seasons go in the overall picture of Australia.

I want to commend the Minister for the Environment and Water Resources for being here. I think this place would be a much more effective reflection of the Australian people if ministers did what he has done and came into this place. I also commend the other minister at the table, the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, and my colleague here, the member for New England, a very wise investor in the electorates of North Queensland.

I want to give the ALP a little bit of gratuitous political advice: if you want to win the next election, you have to win the seats of Flynn, Bundaberg and Herbert. They are marginal seats. You have to win those seats. Those seats are coalmining seats.

Don’t you realise what you are kissing goodbye? This nation has one single source of income now, and that is coal. It is 20 per cent of the nation’s entire export earnings. And guess what the No. 2 earner is? Aluminium. Guess what aluminium needs? Cheap power! No cheap power, no aluminium industry. You can only get cheap power with coal.

Let me be very specific. The ALP has come in with some vague, airy-fairy notions. For heaven’s sake! Put up solutions. Do your research. But, for the sake of the ALP, I will help them out. If you want to have wind generation or hydro generation, let me give you the figures. It is $35 a megawatt for coal-fired power. Gas is $60 a megawatt. I know because I was the minister; I am intimately familiar with these figures. It is $60 to $80 a megawatt for nuclear. So forget about nuclear. No-one is going to pay $60 a megawatt for nuclear. But hydro is $140 a megawatt. Are you going to pay $140 a megawatt for electricity? For heaven’s sake! Think of the poor people who are struggling to make ends meet out there, paying the huge debt on their houses because of the way we have run things in Australia. How the hell are they going to pay a 300 per cent increase in their electricity charges? But that is hydro. I have not got to wind yet. Wind is about $135 a megawatt. Solar is higher than that—maybe $240 a megawatt.

Are you seriously saying that we are going to close down the Australian aluminium industry and the Australian coal industry—which are bringing in about 20 to 30 per cent of the nation’s entire export earnings? Is that seriously what you are proposing here? What about your own unions, the people who pay the money to fight your campaigns for you? Who are they? They are the miners of Australia. Look at the mining seats in Queensland. You people got absolutely annihilated in the mining towns. These people are not stupid. The miners of Australia are not fools.

Let me just zero in. I do not think anyone here, on either side of the House, is questioning the increase in CO—at least, I hope not. There has been a huge increase and that increase has been man-made. I do not question that. If you jump to stage 2 and say that therefore that increase is causing climate change, I think you are on very shaky ground. If you look at the evidence that is coming forward, you will see that it is very equivocal. I do not hesitate for a moment to say that we should be doing something about it, but you cannot possibly be seriously proposing that we close down the coalmining industry. The world will laugh at you but the people of Australia will crucify you—and justifiably so. I will do my part to ensure that they do, I can assure you.

But what have we got? Look at the world authorities. Speaker after speaker for the opposition has got up and quoted Al Gore. Look at his solutions. What is his first solution? His first solution, as I said yesterday, is ethanol. Look at Newsweek magazine, a most intellectually accredited magazine. It is Time and Newsweek but Newsweek is the more intellectual one. The first solution it puts forward is ethanol. In his state of the union speech last year and again this year, President Bush, who you would expect to be on the other side of the argument, said ethanol is the answer. Are all the people who live in the Americas idiots? Are the people of Canada, the United States and Brazil fools? The US and Brazil have mandated ethanol and it is in the process of being passed in Canada.

As my worthy colleague from New England has said, there is an ethanol plant being built every 11 days in the US. We build one every 3,600 days in Australia. We have only built one in the last 3,600 days. One plant was built during the Second World War, at Sarina. The other plant, Honan’s plant, is the only plant that has been built since 1945. One plant! Another one is being built, and let me state to the House that the people at Macquarie Bank are not fools. It was a little bank that opened up with $300 million. It is now one of the major banks in the world. Macquarie Bank is an equity investor in the new plant going ahead at Dalby. So the smart money is going on ethanol.

The dumb governments are not doing that. So I ask the minister to reflect upon the fact that the United States, the greatest economy on earth, is building a plant every 11 days. Brazil, the 12th biggest economy on earth and the fourth biggest country in population, is building a plant every 14 days. Australia has built one plant in nearly 60 years. Please! We have the water and we have the land in Northern Australia.

The minister, who is in the House, has raised great hopes throughout this nation. This is a nation that reveres the building of our own motorcars. This is a nation that reveres the building of the Snowy Mountains scheme. We have done great things in this country. The minister and the Prime Minister have raised very great hopes. And, quite frankly, I praise the Leader of the Opposition as well on this insofar as he has restrained himself from attacking it. With the Snowy Mountains scheme, to his detriment, Mr Menzies attacked the idea. But, of course, when he became Prime Minister he embraced it as his own creation—and God bless him for doing that. He was very proud as an Australian of what his country had achieved in the Snowy.

I say that the answers are there. In the case of ethanol, every hectare that you put under sugar cane takes 72 tonnes of CO out of the atmosphere every year. It produces 8,000 litres of ethanol, which puts back into the atmosphere—I cannot give an exact figure but I will track one down over the next couple of days—about 21 tonnes. So it takes 72 tonnes out and puts 10 tonnes back. There is the answer. That is why Mr Bush, Mr Al Gore and Brazil, Canada and every nation on earth are going down this pathway—

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