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

In the electorate I represent, where about four per cent of Australia’s fruit and vegetable growers are on the Atherton Tableland, some 4,000 kilometres away from the markets in Sydney, we have to rely very, very strongly upon the road hauliers and road freighters of Australia. But they have been oppressed by government—and I use the word ‘oppressed’ because I think that is probably the best word to describe what has been happening here. The livestock hauliers came to a decision that they should have a stoppage. It took place, with mixed success: cars were certainly taken off the roads all over Australia because of the stoppage, with a figure of 15 per cent of the trucking operations involved, but I would put that figure in North Queensland, where I am very familiar with the operators, at more like 70 per cent. But whether it was 15 or 70 per cent, they are organising nationally now.

In the 1870s and particularly the 1880s and 1890s in Australia, the working or labouring employee class had to organise themselves to confront their oppressors head-on. In those days the oppressors were the employer class. One in 32 of those who went down the mines never came back up again or died of the dreadful miners phthisis. Today, it is the self-employed class who are being driven to the same sorts of decisions that were taken by the employee class back then. But if they could not get the message to government with that national stoppage, the difference now is that they are organising. In every road trucking centre throughout Australia there will be representatives of the National Road Freighters Association. That body will be formed as a result of the pressure coming from the government. And it will be formed to achieve the same results that were achieved by the then working-class to secure the arbitration commission—if you like, a fairness tribunal—because of what is being done here.

If you say to me that we have a problem with road accidents, with large road trains, B-doubles and semitrailers, firstly, the statistics do not bear that out. Secondly, if you do not carry on rail but on road, then, yes, there is a higher incidence of these sorts of problems. But let me tell you: we do not have the option of going on rail. We have been informed that in the mid-west, between Mount Isa and Townsville, there is no more capacity on the rail, so we cannot carry anything on rail even if we wanted to. In terms of all of our mineral products from the Georgetown and eastern Gulf of Carpentaria area, the port of Karumba has all but collapsed, so we cannot go that way. The railways have informed us that they will not allow us to go down the range to Cairns. And the government has pulled up the railway line to Greenvale. So the only way of getting the product out is a 40-year-old single-lane highway from Georgetown to Charters Towers. I am absolutely amazed that there have been no accidents there—it is by some miracle. Either the country is going to mine and there is going to be great danger on the road, or the country is not going to mine. In my homeland, the Cloncurry-Mount Isa area, we have eight, arguably nine, mines waiting in the wings because they simply cannot get the product out.

We are faced in the road trucking industry with a massive increase in charges. Under this new agreement, for B-double configurations we are going from $8,000 for registration to $14,000. Has anyone’s cost structure been doubled in the last two years? I would hope that not many industries have had cost structures double. But in this industry their cost structures have trebled. Let me be very blunt about this. Who is to blame? The people applying registration increases from $8,000 to $14,000 are to blame. On a semitrailer configuration we are going from about $5,000 to pretty close to $10,000.

We also have to pay for petrol, and petrol has trebled in price for diesel operators over the last three years. Quite frankly, at any time in their 13 years the previous government could have moved to ethanol and moved to a price in the range of 75c to 85c a litre, the same as in the United States and Brazil. But in their wisdom they chose to listen to the big oil companies and the big mining corporations who were opposed to ethanol. The net result of that is that we have suffered a 200 per cent increase on the previous charge for diesel.

On another plane entirely: I once loved driving. Julia Creek was some 700 kilometres from my home town of Charters Towers, and I always used to drive home after meetings. I would drive home very late at night. I loved driving. It was a great experience. It was a freedom thing. I drove millions of kilometres, and I had no accidents whatsoever in that period of time. In fact, in the whole of my life I have had only two accidents. One was when I was very young and I was doing three kilometres an hour and the other one was when I was doing five kilometres an hour—both times someone hit me; I did not hit them. Now it is pure misery to drive. Quite frankly—and I do not know about other people—I spend my time looking for stop signs and slow-down signs and looking over my shoulder to see if police are around and trying to figure out what I am doing wrong. It is just torture to drive. When you do as much driving as I do, you get pulled up on average about once a month for a breathalyser test or something like that. I actually count the number of police cars between Ingham and Charters Towers. It is about 200 kilometres. We average 2.9.

In a short ethanol tour overseas—I had never been overseas before and I probably will not go again—but in my short time touring Vancouver, Minnesota and Sao Paulo I would have seen three police cars, I suppose. We did not have random breath testing in Queensland until Bjelke-Petersen was stabbed in the back. He and I were the two opponents of it, and we were the only teetotallers in our political party. He said, ‘We don’t want to live in a state where police are pulling up people all the time and looking into their cars. That is not the sort of state we want to live in.’ We used to go fishing, camping or out on the ocean to toss in a line—we are not allowed to shoot anymore—but probably most of the recreation that we used to enjoy throughout our lives is now illegal.

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