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

I am quite sincere in these comments. I think the member for O’Connor’s comment that people who work here work very hard is very true. I am not saying that they always work hard for the good of the people—a lot of the time they work pretty hard for themselves to get re-elected.

Let me come back to the effect of this. I cannot speak for everybody in this House, but I can speak for myself. It is a two-hour drive from Charters Towers to Townsville. If I were in Mount Isa or Cairns, or the Mareeba area, it would be a hell of a lot longer, but let us just take the best option: that I am in Charters Towers. It is two hours to the airport, there is half an hour’s wait time at the airport and then it is two hours to Brisbane, effectively, by the time you get off the aeroplane. There is a 1½-hour wait time for a connection and then it is effectively two hours to Canberra, by the time you get your ports and everything off, and then it is the best part of half an hour by the time you drop off your stuff at the motel and get to your office. So we are talking about nine hours of travel, and that would be true for all of the Western Australians, all of the Territorians and all of the North Queenslanders. So, if we finish on Friday afternoon, all of Saturday is gone. If I stayed overnight in Brisbane, it would be much worse, but I am taking the best option: that somehow I can get straight through in nine hours. That means that all of Saturday is gone, but of course I have to get back here by Monday morning, so I have to leave home on Sunday morning to get back here. That goes on for 23 weeks of the year.

There are a lot of new faces here. I have seen new faces come and go for 34 years in parliament, and I will tell you: those of you who will still be here in four years time are those who are seen all over your electorates. Ron Camm, the great leader of the Country Party in Queensland, used to say, ‘There are no votes for you in Brisbane.’ I am telling you: there are no votes for you in Canberra, so you had better get back to your electorates. If you are not back in your electorates, then you will pay a price for that. Just go through who lost their seats and who retained their seats in the last election. For those on this side of the House, you and I both know: those that worked their electorates are still sitting here; those that did not are not. But you people will not be able to work your electorates because you will be down here in Canberra. I will tell you something else: these blokes on this side of the House are not all drongos. They are going to get leave. They are not going to be here on the Fridays and Mondays. They are going to be working in your electorates to win government back off you. Those are the political implications of what is taking place here.

What is profoundly important to me at this stage of my career is that the politicians in this place communicate with the electorate. You could see vividly in the IR reforms that here were a government that did not really know what was going on, what their people were thinking. If they had, they would have picked up much, much quicker the extreme damage that was being done by the IR reforms and moved much earlier to head off what was going to happen to them. But, because they did not have the communication with their electorate—they were not there, close to the people—they did not understand what was going on. Do not think that you can service your electorate by being there for 20 weeks of the year. Remember that you lose December. Even if you want to work over December, there are no public servants and nobody else wants to work with you over that period. So there is not much left of the year if you go ahead with what you are doing here. I can tell you right now that a lot of you are signing your own death warrants. I have a very good whip in my party. He gives me a lot of leave. So it is not going to worry me particularly, but here is a helpful hint for you blokes: if you want to stay here, you had better think twice about this one.

As far as communication goes, in the state parliament, where I served for 20 years before I came to this place, I could not understand why Canberra was so much out of step with the people. But when I came down here I found that one of the profound effects of that travel time is that you just do not have the time in your electorate that a state member has. The state parliament sat Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, so I had Monday and Friday in my electorate as well as the weekends. In this place, it might be out of step now, out of kilter. If you people in government now think you have some sort of magic wand and that you are going to be able to understand what the people are doing out there when the last mob could not, you are wrong. I can see clearly that there is a fundamental difference between federal government and state government. Federal government is nowhere near as close to the people as state government, and that is why the state governments have tended to survive where federal governments have not tended quite so much to survive.

So I would plead with the House about this. If our job is to listen to the people, to learn their pain or to get their ideas and to implement them in this place, then you have to spend a lot of time with those people. A lot of the time, all those people want from you is a sympathetic ear. They know there is nothing you can do to help them in their plight, whatever their plight might be, but it is really important for them to be able to talk to you. If you deprive them of the right to speak to you, you are not doing the right thing by your country. So I would plead with the government. I do not think you are going to back off, because that would be a sign of weakness, but I would plead with you: over the next few months, when you begin to realise just how badly this is hurting you in your electorates, reverse this decision. I would plead with you to consider that and, if you do not, then all I can say to you is: it’s been nice knowing you. A lot of you will not be here.

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