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

I will be uncharacteristically brief. Our motor vehicle highways have fallen into a terrible state of deterioration over the last 15 to 20 years. Most of those roads that I represent are over 20 years old, and highways are only supposed to last for 25 years. I would say the vast bulk of them are over 40 years old. But the cyber highway is available to us, and it is the cyber highway that we desperately need. If we cannot have the other highways, we would like to at least have the cyber highways. It makes us remarkably part of Australia. We can get 35 television channels in the Gulf Country, the same as a person in Sydney or Melbourne. We see a great opportunity for us to be able to be part of Australia and to restore the opportunities we had some 25 years ago when the great McEwen built the beef road scheme for Australia.

In this legislation, once again we see the work of the economic rationalists and the user-pays principle. The user-pays principle applies this way: we privatise the railways in country New South Wales and in country Queensland but we do not privatise the commuter systems in Sydney and Brisbane. So the commuter systems in Sydney and Brisbane get a $3,000 million golden handshake every year, whilst we have the user-pays principle applied to us.

You want to have export industries. Next year you are going to see the price of not having export industries. You will find out next year the price that a country has to pay when it has got nothing that it can produce for itself and nothing that it can produce to export. Last year was the first year—

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