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

There have been a number of speakers who have been honest enough to get up and say that we, as a nation, do not have a very happy record in dealing with the First Australians. When I was minister I psyched myself into concentrating on the positive. We say that we have not been able to get it right. I will read out a document presented to the House when I was minister on the economic achievements of Queensland Aboriginal and Islander communities from 1984 to 1989. In 1984 community stores went from a $200,000 loss to a $900,000 a year profit. Cattle turnover rose from 965 to 5,800. The increase in crayfish turnover was from 0.3 million to around seven million. The turnover at the Massey freezer for the fishing industry rose from 14,000 to 291,000. The number of businesses went from three to 52. Twenty per cent of public servants were replaced by community workers—for that, read people of European descent as opposed to people of Aboriginal descent. And the building program went from 40 people of Aboriginal descent employed to 288 people.

We did not, regrettably, keep figures on trauma rates in the Aboriginal communities in Queensland, but I remember Matron Gray, who is now a lecturer at the university in Townsville. She is the wife of the very famous Roy Gray, who was a big contributor and architect of this success story. She said that the trauma rates at Yarrabah had simply ceased to exist. Where they had handled 50 to 100 trauma cases—that is people who had been bashed up basically as a result of alcoholism—the vast bulk of those figures had gone to virtually nothing. I remember the figures on Palm Island. The crime rate there dropped clean in half. The honourable member for Page said the crime rate is due to boredom and that they have nothing to do there. They are incredibly boring places. The rifles and guns have been taken away so you cannot go shooting. Most of the rivers in Queensland in these areas have been closed off to fishing because the rivers have been declared ‘wild rivers’. There is no career path. Virtually all of the council clerk positions have been taken by whitefellas and not given to blackfellas. There is no business opportunity because you cannot own land.

If you impose those conditions upon the people of Canberra or Brisbane, I dare say that your social statistics that were so capably espoused by the Leader of the Opposition—and I pay him tribute—would be the same for these areas as well. Add to that what may be one of the better addresses I have ever heard in my life by Noel Pearson to the Canberra press club, where not a single member of parliament bothered to turn up. He talked about an inherited capability. He said that people in this room have inherited capabilities. My family knew how to run businesses. You were teethed on running businesses. Other people knew how to be tradesmen. Other people knew how to get jobs on the railway. These people had none of those inherited or given-to-them capabilities. They have nothing to do; no career opportunities and no businesses opportunities.

I pay the minister a tribute because he is determined to do something. That is more than I can say for any other federal minister I can remember. A lot talked, waffled and wandered all over the place, but this minister has a steely determination to deliver something. For that, we pay him tribute.

Having said that, I simply cannot see how you can force parents to send their children to school. Our options have been taken away from us. We cannot force children now; it is not longer an option available to us. You cannot belt your child. If you do, someone will come along and take the child from you. You cannot threaten to take away their food or to lock them up in their rooms. They were punishments that many of us suffered in our youth, and quite deservedly, but parents cannot do that now. There is no capacity to discipline people. There is no use flogging the parents because they simply cannot force their children to go to school.

I will provide a perspective on that. In Camooweal there are two wonderful schoolteachers. One would go in the front of the houses and the other would go around the back. As the kids would run away, at nine o’clock in the morning, the bloke at the back would grab them all and put them on a bus. They were literally kidnapped and taken to school, but those kids got an education. However, we passed laws to prevent that, and now many kids do not get an education at Camooweal.

With all due respect, no society on earth has succeeded in banning alcohol. I said, when it was done in Queensland, that people would die as a result of that decision—and people did. A person was killed on Palm Island. I felt terribly sorry for the person that died, but I also felt terribly sorry for the policeman. Clearly, if you try to take grog away from people who are drinking they will get very mad indeed. There will be a fight and someone will get hurt. I ask the government to name a single society on earth that has succeeded in prohibition. The Americans tried it, and it was a pretty sorry old experiment.

In respect of welfare payments, the government is saying they should not be able to just get the money and not work. I do not know how this mechanism will deliver that. We cannot hold a gun at their heads, and we cannot flog them with whips. If in a mustering camp you decided not to get on the horse, someone would go over and give you a knuckle sandwich and you would get on the horse, I can assure you. And that is the way things were done up until very recently.

Let me just say what needs to be done. The minister has moved in this direction, although not as far as the government should have moved—he should have given them a simple piece of paper, the same as anyone else in Australia holds. It is called a freehold title. Do not talk about tribes and tribal relationships with the land. Heavens! Dozens of people I know really well have shot themselves rather than be run off their farms by the banks. It happens every six weeks in the sugar industry and every four days in the dairy industry. This is not a characteristic of people of Aboriginal descent. Give them title to the land. This is the ridiculous nature of the Aboriginal question: if you look at a map of Australia and you will see that some 40 per cent of the surface area is owned by people of Aboriginal descent because they are of Aboriginal descent, yet if you go to Yarrabah the chairman of the council will bang the table and say that the only place on earth where you cannot own your own home is at Yarrabah—or at any other Aboriginal community in Queensland. That is sadly and regrettably true.

Think about it. If you want to open a service station or to start up a cattle run or a fishing operation you have to get money from somewhere to do it. How do you get the money? I do not know anyone who started up in business by saving his pennies and putting his saved pennies into the operation. You have to get it by borrowing money from a bank, and a bank will not lend you money unless you have ‘mortgageability’. That is where we have failed dismally; we have not provided the ‘mortgageability’. There was the tremendous success story that I read out here. Two text books have been written on what we did in respect of Aboriginal affairs in Queensland which are set in university courses throughout Australia, and the television show 60 Minutes ran two stories on what we were doing in Aboriginal affairs in that period of time. However you looked at it, it was an amazing success story. But the first thing we did was to provide freehold title to the land. Regrettably, very little of it got out in that period, but it was enough to set up nearly 100 businesses, most of which are still running today.

To overcome the boredom that the honourable member for Page referred to, we started a rugby league competition. We started rodeo training. We started country music festivals. This is the culture of black Australia, the First Australians, and it is most certainly the culture of rural country Australia. These people are no different from anyone else. Very few of the people in most of our country towns are not purely white—including me, I might add—and very few of them are perfectly black.

The social welfare is to be replaced by a voucher system, and I think that is a very good move. You just cannot give people taxpayers’ money and allow them to spend it on grog and let their kids go hungry.

My first impression of what it meant to be a Christian was at a meeting with the local Catholic priest about YCW. He said, ‘You have to go now because I’ve got to feed all these little kids.’ He had to feed 15 kids, and the stairs leading up to his house were very dangerous. He was a very poor man, but he fed these 15 kids because they were not being fed during the day. Their idea of being ‘fed’ was their parents giving them money to buy coca-cola and chips, usually, when they started crying late in the day.

On the subject of housing—the honourable Leader of the Opposition and other speakers mentioned this, and it is very relevant—if you pack 12 or 15 people into a house, someone is going to get killed. People living that close together, grating upon each other, is just not going to work. When I was minister, the average house occupancy was 11½ people. The average occupancy for the other welfare housing in Queensland was below two people. So we used it, unashamedly, as a social tool. All contractors of European descent were removed; all building of houses in Queensland—and I had about $40 million or $50 million to spend per year—was to be done exclusively by First Australian labour. It took us a long time to get agreement on that but we did. Then the brother of the famous Noel Pearson came up with the idea that we use CDEP money so that we could get through these 11 houses a year in Doomadgee. They now build two houses every three years with the same amount of money at Doomadgee.

We put a block-making machine there, so the blocks were made locally. The houses were erected with CDEP labour and, amazingly, people started looking after their houses, even in the worst communities. Some of the things that the minister has done are very good. But, Minister, you cannot force people to do some things. Force will not work. It is clear that you are seriously trying. That is what characterises and separates you from all of your predecessors, in my parliamentary lifetime, anyway.

The time allocated to me has been curtailed, which I have agreed to. If you have any doubts about these people’s ability, with respect to getting 6,000 head of cattle behind wire, where there are no fences at all, then just look at Jackson Shortjoe, and particularly Eddie Holroyd, as they did at Pormpuraaw. Watch Travis Fraser at Doomadgee, where they have won three premierships in a row, where they have to travel 2,000 kilometres to get a game—that is, if we can hold the other teams upright in the competition. Look at Colin Saltmere. He took many people—some of them very drunken people—and got them to build a magnificent bridge at Camooweal. Speak to Leon Yeatman at Yarrabah—I think the minister has gone there—and you will see they are a great community, a beautiful community, clean and well presented. Speak to Joseph Elu at Seisia—one of the greatest commercial success stories in the country—who has now had his right to self-management taken away by the Beattie government, or to Eric Law and Lester Rosendale. They, to a large degree, are the architects of what we did in Queensland. Any of those people will tell you where to go and, please, have a look at a successful model: Queensland in the 1980s.

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