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

Well, you are going to have to be told. The catalyst was a decision by the state government, because the state government had been saying, ‘We are not going to build a railway line unless the mines are there to service that railway line.’ The potential miners, Thiess and Utah, were saying, ‘We can’t build a mine until you build a railway line.’ As one senior official in the Queensland government who will remain unnamed told me recently, ‘It’s the chicken and the egg, Bob,’ and that is exactly right.

The person who broke the egg and hatched the chicken was a very famous man, Joh Bjelke-Petersen. At Bjelke-Petersen’s funeral, the then Premier, in a very generous act, quite rightly attributed the coalmining industry of Queensland to Bjelke-Petersen. He included the tourism industry, but he should have included the aluminium industry as well because the Queensland government built the biggest power station in the world and, because they had negotiated coal for virtually nothing, they had the cheapest power in the world. But we built that power station without a single customer, we built the railway line without a single customer and we built the port without a single customer. So the Queensland government put out some $3,000 million dollars in their money terms—not in our money terms—to build three items of infrastructure for which there was not a single customer.

In the sharpest of contrasts, after some 25 years of economic rationalism architecture by Mr Keating and continued on by Mr Costello and, to a lesser extent, Mr Howard—those two dominating forces—and also the conventional wisdom in Australia created by journalists, the media, banks and all those other people who determine in which direction the country is going to travel, they decided that we would not do that any more, that we would not build infrastructure, that private enterprise would build infrastructure. Now we can see the results of our handiwork.

I represent the biggest mineral province on earth, producing some $13.4 thousand million worth of product each and every year. It cannot expand and in fact a number of its mines are under very serious threat because it has no land on which to build houses for employees. It has no land. That was one of the four major issues, I might add, at the Eureka Stockade—the government would not provide the miners, the owner-operators, with any land to build their houses upon. They had to somehow have a shack or a shed above the mine shaft. We have two towns that service this giant mining province, the biggest mining province on earth and arguably this nation’s greatest asset. One is carting their water in by train from Mount Isa, and Mount Isa is down to only 100 days of water.

This is not an area bereft of water. Cloncurry, my home town, every year on average has 400,000 megalitres flowing past it. All we want or need is 20,000 megalitres. This giant river has run every single year in white man’s history. I can say that because my family were amongst the first Europeans to get there. I can speak with authority because we have been living there for 110 years. Each and every year the river has run. The people of Australia want this to be done but the governments have decided that they will not even allow you to build a weir in that river.

Mr Deputy Speaker Sidebottom, I am sorry to tell you this, but you are a member of the Labor Party, which rules Queensland and now rules Australia. We have actual legislation on this in Northern Australia. I represent about half of Australia’s entire rainfall runoff. Half of the water of Australia is in the Kennedy electorate. For those looking quizzically at me I will give the figures. There is 134 million megalitres of runoff in the Gulf country and there is 80 million megalitres of runoff in the super wet belt, the rainforest where it rains all the time. That is on the coastal part. If you put those two together it is 214 million megalitres, and Australia only has a rainfall runoff of 304 million megalitres. Are you happy? Then I will continue.

We have a law in Queensland called the wild rivers legislation which says you are not allowed to touch any of the water, you are not allowed to take any of that water; the fish need it. But that surprises me because when I am down on the beach there seems to be an awful lot of water out there for the fish. You may say the water has got to flush every year. You can build all the dams you like, you can build four million dams up there, but our flooding, all of our rainfall, comes in three months. That flooding will never be stopped. It does not matter how many dams you want to build, they will never contain the giant floodwaters of North Queensland. I would very much doubt that it would be possible to ever harness more than about 15 per cent of those floodwaters. We do not have rivers that run like the Murray-Darling, we do not have running rivers; we have floods and we have dry river beds. We only have those two propositions. As the great Ernie Bridge, long-serving minister in the Western Australian government, said, ‘All we are asking of government is that our mighty rivers, on their long and great journeys to the sea, pay a small tribute to those people living along their banks.’

Let me now be very specific. Not only does the area I represent have no land to build houses on, so we cannot get workers—we have to fly them in at absolutely disastrous expense—but we also have no water. It is being carted into one place and the other place is on 100 days, that is all that is left in the dam. We also do not have any electricity. We had a minerals conference last week and Steve de Kruijff, the head of Mount Isa Mines’ copper division, quoted the figures that we have 350 megawatts of generating capacity and we have over 300 megawatts of demand. That is a very near run thing in itself, but because of the new mines coming on stream and the increase in population, we will be in very serious trouble to meet our electricity demands within two years. But of course all of the potential new mines cannot open up because they have no power, unless they want to build diesel power stations. The cost there is about $200 a megawatt versus $35 a megawatt on the grid. They would be enormously non-competitive with their international competitors in the marketplace.

Finally, we have no rail capacity. The railways had informed any potential new miners that there is no rail capacity. Curiously, in Australia we tear up infrastructure; we tear it down. There is a weir in the Cloncurry River and it is broken. It was, by determination of the government, left broken. We pulled up the railway line to Kajabbi, which Dugald River and the mining leases at Mount Roseby desperately need. Joe Gutnick and his Legend phosphate proposal want to move eight million tonnes. If that is processed in Australia, as we hope it will be, that is worth $10,000 million, just that one mine, to the Australian economy. They have been informed by the railways there is no railway capacity. The previous speaker, the member for Leichhardt, God bless him, told us how wonderful the government was and that they were doing all of these things. Unfortunately, Mr Deputy Speaker, you did not allow my interjection to be taken, but I pointed out that the current government are not doing anything. They say they are intending to do it. Mr Deputy Speaker, you had better start moving because one-third of your life has gone and you have done absolutely nothing.

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