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

I must emphasise that my remarks apply far more to the last government, who were there for 12 years and left us with this situation, where not a single cent was spent on infrastructure. They were not short of money; they found $660 million to build a railway line from nowhere to nowhere. I do not mean to be disrespectful to the Adelaide people and the Darwin people, but it is nowhere to nowhere through the biggest desert on earth. I said, ‘Why did we do that?’ A number of Liberal members explained to me that I did not understand that it saved demurrage. I said, ‘There are no exports going out of Adelaide or Darwin.’ They said, ‘Yes, but it is imports.’ ‘How stupid of me. I hadn’t realised that we were subsidising imports.’ But nobody laughed; they did not catch the joke at all. Yes, we spent $660 million so that the Liberal Party could buy their way through the South Australian elections. That is where the $660 million went. If you want to come to my electorate, you can see how they spent some $300 million in handouts to try and get rid of me the election before last. I just say thank you. Some of them possibly should be looking at some jail time, but I simply say thank you.

I want to be very specific. Dr Bradfield, one of the greatest men in Australian history, is a man we have chosen to name an electorate after. He built the Sydney underground railway system. He built the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Story Bridge in Brisbane. He built the University of Queensland. He built a number of the major dams in New South Wales. In fact, there were not a lot of things that were not built by JC Bradfield. He conceived the scheme to take a little tiny bit of the giant floodwaters in the super wet belt where we get drowned every year by the floods that occur. I am not saying we can solve the flood problem, but we will alleviate a tiny bit. We could bring a little bit of that water back on the great inland plain of Queensland.

The greenies fascinate me because they are people who must have studied to achieve the level of ignorance they have achieved. You would have to study to achieve that level: ‘The tiny patina of topsoil in Australia will be threatened by farming.’ The tiny patina of topsoil in my electorate is about a thousand feet deep. They say, ‘You will get salination.’ I doubt it is going to happen in my area, because our watertable is a thousand feet deep. I do not think any watertable can rise a thousand feet. It slopes towards the Gulf of Carpentaria as well. How incredibly stupid. ‘We must preserve the native flora and fauna.’ Six million hectares, an area as big as your home state, Mr Deputy Speaker Sidebottom, have vanished under the prickly acacia tree, which has destroyed all flora and fauna. Do we hear any whinges from the greenies? No. They would not be able to spell Acacia nilotica tree, let alone understand those things. But if you dug a trench and you filled Lake Eyre up with water, which would cost you about $1,200 million, not a lot of money, you would make $4,000 million a year in the salt reduction from one-tenth of that area. What a magnificent asset for this country.

We are in a financial crisis, and in America during the Great Depression they built the Tennessee Valley Authority project. Somebody should study that. If ever there was a great project in the history of the world it was that project. We do similar things in the Snowy. But unfortunately Mr Chifley, Mr Curtin and Mr Theodore were not listened to; in fact, they were voted out of office when they said that in a recession government should borrow money and spend on major public works. This government has taken the money in but there has been no spending on major public works. The biggest mineral province on earth is starved of land, of water, of rail capacity and of electricity. But if you build the Bradfield scheme and you build the ancillary water schemes in North Queensland, just three of them, then you have $14,000 million worth of ethanol production which will solve your CO2 problem because it is coming from sugarcane. There is $14,000 million for the Australian economy. The Alligator and Daley, the Ord and Fitzroy—there is another $7,000 million. We can grow all of Australia’s petrol in northern Australia just by taking a minuscule five per cent of the land and seven per cent of the water.

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