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

Before question time I was referring to luxury car tax. My daughter drives an SUV, but it is a very small SUV. They are very high off the ground; they have a very small wheelbase and are prone to instability. You need a very big car with a very wide wheelbase to be stable. A few days before Christmas, she rolled the car on the highway and from the evidence it is thought she rolled some six times. She was very nearly killed. If she had been driving a vehicle with a wider wheelbase then in all probability the car would not have rolled. For those of us who have to drive very great distances, this is a reality for us. Both my daughter and my son live in Mount Isa, some 800 kilometres away from our home in Charters Towers.

In its wisdom, for the past 20-odd years, the government of Australia has allocated members in rural areas very wide wheelbase vehicles. The reason for that was the tragic death of the wife of the then member for Riverina—a good friend of my father’s—and it was decided that where we were driving great distances in country areas, we needed a bigger and more stable car. The very wide, big cars were made available to us. If we applied those rules to ourselves, for our benefit, it is terribly unfair for us to say that people should be charged a punitive tax for adopting exactly the same principle. It is really bad that we would set one set of rules for ourselves and another set of rules for other people. Knowing the government as I do, whatever their political hue, maybe the solution to that would be taking our vehicles away.

I used those two examples, and I can also remember driving some 320 kilometres up to our cattle station in a Toyota HiLux—very unstable vehicles, but we could not afford much more in those days—and my eyes were bulging and my teeth were hanging out and sand was in my eyes. Driving back with a mate in his LandCruiser was such a pleasure. When you arrived at the town you were still ready for a day’s work.

So what is most certainly a luxury in the Ascots and Clayfields of Queensland and the Vaucluses of Sydney is most certainly not luxury for the people that I represent. They are a very great necessity for us. We have very high death tolls on the roads—the accident toll in Queensland is really mostly outside of the south-east corner and outside of Brisbane—and the more stable the cars that we have, the better it will be. God was very good—my daughter escaped without serious injury from her accident. When she was buying the vehicle I explained to her that it had a very narrow wheelbase and would be very unstable on the road. She could have bought something that was much lower to the ground that was not an SUV and she most certainly could not afford a big SUV. So as late as a few months ago it was brought home with a vengeance to my family the necessity for having wide wheelbase vehicles.

I have to say there is an element of hypocrisy on the side of the opposition. For the new members of parliament here, it was the opposition that introduced the 25 per cent tax on luxury vehicles. This mob have only put 10 per cent on it. I do not want the ministers to interpret that as suggesting they should try to catch up by making it 25 per cent, the same as the other mob did. The opposition are new in opposition, and they should try to veer away from what is arch hypocrisy. To get up, as previous speakers did— (Time expired)

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