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

I rise to speak about Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2008-2009 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2008-2009 and two rather interesting realities. The first is that probably two per cent and maybe as much as four per cent of North Queensland is currently under water. You can fly for hundreds and hundreds of kilometres and not see much land—virtually no land at all. Australia is a dry continent but the north-eastern quarter of Australia is not dry, nor is the north-western quarter. They are not dry places at all. The extraordinary fact about our country and the reality of government and where it has dismally failed our country is that the top third has 300 million megalitres of water and the bottom two-thirds has only 80 million megalitres of water. It is really very dry, and 95 per cent of our agricultural production comes from the dry area. There seems to be something very strange here.

Our water comes in a great rush, as it is doing at the present moment, and then it is all gone. We need to build little receptacles to hold some of that water back so that we can use it later in the year or in our dry years. They are called dams. Every other country on earth has maybe seven or eight per cent of their entire rainfall run-off retained and available through dams and irrigation systems. For those that say these things are destructive, the Chinese built most of their canal system 1,000 to 2,000 years ago and 1,300 million people attest to the sustainability of their agricultural approach.

The second thing that dominates the current consciousness is, I think, the financial crisis. The most powerful leader on earth now is a man called Barack Obama and when he was asked whether he would give tax concessions—that is really a handout to people—he said no. He said that they were going to expend money that would provide jobs into the future.

A lot of what the previous speaker said was very laudable, but her basic premise is that of the current government. Yes, I applaud the current government for what they did before Christmas. Yes, I applaud the current government for spending money in the building and construction industry. But not one single permanent job will be created by the current government program—not one. If you look back to the Great Depression in Australia, you see that it was characterised by the hopeless failure of government in Australia. And if the Prime Minister is looking for advice from Treasury here, well, you can thank them for a country that has no manufacturing base, a dwindling and negligible agricultural base and a mining base that has collapsed because of world prices, which we in the mining industry know are cyclical. Any person in the mining industry can tell you: ‘Do not rely upon the situation that exists.’ They would have told you three years ago, they would have told you four years ago and they would have told you two years ago: ‘Do not rely on this. This is a spike in the market.’

I come from the mining industry, and I have been in and out of mining all my life. That was what I was doing before I came into parliament. But I was not someone who worked as a labourer, although I did for quite a long time, in the mining industry. I owned my own mines, I found my own ore reserves and I floated my own company. I know the industry inside out and backwards. My entire livelihood for almost all of my life has depended on knowing that industry, and I was Minister for Mines and Energy in Queensland. And I can tell you that only Third World countries rely upon mining. That is for African countries, not for advanced countries. If you base your economy around mining, you are so foolish—and I say that as a person who represents the mining industry.

I am sorry that the current government policy does not agree with the policy of the American President. He is looking at creating jobs out into the distance. Every single thing that this government has done in this great package of expenditure has provided jobs for two or three years, that is all. At the end of two or three years, it will all be gone. Wherever I go in the northern half of Queensland people say, ‘Do you ever get sick of bashing your head up against a wall?’ And I suppose that you really have to say that.

Currently, the state government of Queensland has done a dirty, filthy, slimy deal—for which the AWU is going to stitch them up very shortly—with the Greens to get their support in the forthcoming election. They are very stupid people. Didn’t they see what Mr Latham did in Tasmania? Yes, you will get five per cent of the vote from the Greens; you most certainly will get their preferences. But the 95 per cent is what I would be going after in an election. It is the mistake Mr Latham made, and the mistake the Queensland government is making now. If you take 25 per cent off each of those sugar mills, they will all close—every single one of them. They could not possibly take a 20 per cent reduction in their gross. They will all close and 50,000 people will be out of work.

This government has given the stamp of approval to the last government’s decision to bring bananas in from overseas. I don’t know whether I live in a lunatic asylum! Does anyone look at the figures? Australia is a net importer of food, in fruit and vegetables. We no longer feed ourselves. We went from a $400 million surplus to a $50 million deficit, to a $90 million deficit, to another $90 million deficit, and last year it was a $300 million deficit. That is something we can be proud of as a nation: we can’t feed ourselves! If you bring the bananas in, it will blow out to a $700 million deficit, assuming there is no growth, which of course would be a ridiculous assumption. So there is no doubt that one-seventh of our fruit and vegetables next year will have to come from overseas. We will not employ Australians to grow and produce fruit and vegetables and their downstream products; we will provide jobs to people overseas.

Does anybody think about this parasitic economics, where you go and borrow money, you print money or create money, and then you go and spend it on self-indulgence? Sure, it will be nice to have a lot of new schools. Sure, it will be nice to have a lot of community halls. Sure, it will be nice to have plenty of work doing up our houses. But what happens in three years time?

The argument of the current government against the last government is, ‘You blokes have based it all on the mining industry.’ I do not know. The current government seems to be basing it upon nothing at all. I do not know whether anyone is cognisant of the current account. I am only a lowly Cloncurry boy; I would not know these things. But Mr Keating, who was Treasurer of Australia for 12 years and Prime Minister for another four years, said, ‘When the current account is $15,000 million, we are going to be a banana republic.’ The then Leader of the Opposition, Mr Howard, who was himself Treasurer for some four or five years and then became Prime Minister for 12 years—a man who should know—reminded Mr Keating of this and said, ‘You said we would be a banana republic at $15,000 million but it’s now $23,000 million.’

I am only a simple Cloncurry boy, but it is now $75,000 million and rising. That means that this country has to borrow $75,000 million from overseas this year. I am rather intrigued to know who is going to be loaning us $75,000 million. That will be very interesting indeed. Substantially, money has come from the Americans. It came from the Arab countries, from China, from India and from Brazil, those countries that are going forward at a hundred miles an hour—the BRIC economies, as they are called. They have a lot of money to spare. They have been very competitive and they have given money to the Americans to invest, who have loaned it to us. But that most certainly will not be occurring this year. So it will be rather intriguing to find out. We are talking about a $20,000 million package for this year. The whole package is over three years. Madam Deputy Speaker, let me tell you what it should be spent on.

Firstly, this government should decide that we will put ethanol in our petrol tanks and not petrol. Petrol destroys the atmosphere and is causing global warming—I do not know about that, but it is certainly causing problems in the ocean which will get worse. Why would you not use ethanol? We have a record flood in the Burdekin River, the third-biggest river in Australia. The Murray-Darling, which produces 60 per cent of our agriculture, has 22 million megalitres. The Burdekin has 12 million megalitres, so it is smaller but not all that much smaller than the Murray-Darling. It is running at a record height. I have not seen it—I left before it really rose—but it is at the highest level in white man’s history. Surely we can build a dam in the Upper Burdekin to hold some of that massive outflow and use it to produce ethanol?

A dam was proposed at Hells Gates above Charters Towers to hold a tiny bit of these flood waters back. This year, the Burdekin River will probably run 20 or 30 million megalitres. We just want one million megalitres a year out of it; that is all. If you give that to us then we will give you 1,200 million litres of ethanol every year. At maybe a dollar a litre, we will produce $1,200 million of wealth. That will not stop in two or three years time, as this program will. That will go on forever and ever. We can produce our fuel forever and it is not harmful to the environment. At Georgetown, the Gilbert River is nine million megalitres. Remember that the Murray-Darling, which produces 60 per cent of our agriculture, is 22 million megalitres. This one is nine million megalitres. The Gilbert River is very suitable for farming. You can get 2,400 million litres of ethanol a year out of a moderate scheme on the Gilbert River.

The deputy head of the Department of the Premier and Cabinet in Queensland observed to me that there are fools out there who talk about the Bradfield scheme. I said, ‘Sonny’—and I used the word ‘Sonny’—‘what university degrees do you have?’ He said, ‘I’ve got a degree in engineering.’ I said, ‘And what have you built?’ He had not built anything. He had not even built a hole in his backyard. He had built nothing in his whole life. He was a very young person and a quite intelligent person too. I said: ‘Dr Bradfield built the Sydney Harbour Bridge. He built the Story Bridge in Brisbane. He built the University of Queensland, the beautiful old sandstone building there. He built the underground railway system in Sydney and he built two of the biggest dams in Australia even to this day. He may know a little bit about what he is talking about. I have to say, with all due respect to you, you do not have any experience at anything that would qualify you to make an authoritative statement like that.’ Dr Bradfield’s scheme is nothing very dramatic. It just takes a little tiny bit of the flood waters from where it rains all the time at a very high level—in Innisfail, Tully and the heartland of the electorate of Kennedy—and puts it back through the ranges. We can only do a little tiny bit at the top, but it is a very big picture if you put it out on to the western plains.

The western plains currently have an area the size of Tasmania where all flora and fauna have been destroyed by prickly acacia trees. That is how we are husbanding the resources of Australia. We should be ashamed of ourselves. We should replace the prickly acacia tree with ethanol-producing crops. Ethanol from sugar cane reduces CO2 emissions not by 29 per cent, like corn ethanol does, but by 194 per cent. Not only is that magical in itself but also with sugar cane we will be producing about 1,000 megawatts of electricity, so there will be another $400 million or $500 million in electricity income coming in as well. Once again, this is something that will go on forever. It will create jobs for forever and forever and forever.

If that power station, which also has coal, is built, it will supply much-needed power to the greatest mineral province on earth, the north-west mineral province. I am being quite technical. It produces $13,400,000 worth of product every year. There is no area as small as that in the world that has anything like that amount of mineral production. But, big as it is, we have 500 million tonnes of iron ore that has not been touched. We have the Roseby copper, silver, lead and zinc deposits and the Rocklands deposits. The Cannington will double its size, and that is BHP’s most profitable mine in the world—or it was the last time I looked. That is the biggest mining company on earth and its most profitable mine and it wants to double it in size. None of the other projects—not the oil shale nor the vanadium at Julia Creek, which are world-class resources, nor the iron ore, silver, lead, zinc or copper—are as big.

Joe Gutnick is proposing an eight million tonne a year phosphate production operation. If we could convince him to process that in Australia, that would be $8,000 million a year for the Australian economy. But, however you look at this, if you can enable and facilitate these mines to open we will double that $13,000 million production.

This is not just a job for the next two or three years. Mount Isa Mines started operation, I think, in 1926—at the latest, 1929. It is now 2009. That mine has been operating for 80-odd years. It has created great wealth for Australia for 80 years. We have people being put off at the giant nickel plant in Townsville. I do not doubt for a moment that we will be putting people off at the giant zinc plant in Townsville. Both these plants employ a thousand people. But they have very expensive electricity. People must understand that aluminium, for example, is just congealed electricity. The vast bulk of the price of aluminium is electricity. If you have cheap electricity you will get aluminium processing. If you have cheap electricity you will get nickel processing and zinc processing. If you do not have that, then these great projects will close down or they will find it very difficult to keep going.

There is not a single baseload power station in Northern Australia. If you were to draw a line across Australia stretching from Rockhampton across to Geraldton, you would find that there is no baseload power north of that line. Yet all of Australia’s mineral wealth—except for coal, of course—is north of that line. It is crazy that you would put the power stations away from where you need the power stations if you want to be internationally competitive. It costs an awful lot of money to take power great distances. But if you were to build the Hells Gates dam and you built a power station beside it on the coal reserves there, you would produce 500 megawatts of hydroelectric power and renewable power from bagasse, and you would produce 1,000 megawatts of coal-fired power. The proposal that we have there is for zero-emissions power—but that will be a story for another day.

The great Dr Bradfield proposed that we fill up Lake Eyre with water. I do not think it would be a good idea to fill it up with water from North Queensland. But if you were to dig a ditch and fill it up with water from the Spencer Gulf, it would cost about $3,500 million. And you could put 100 square kilometres there under salt production. You have a giant lake of which you could take a small proportion—I am not quite sure of the exact proportion, but 100 square kilometres would produce $2,000 million worth of salt every year. It could be barged out in the irrigation ditch through which the water comes in, at virtually no cost at all, and we would become one of the great salt producers of the world. One of his alternative proposals was to fill Lake Eyre with a ditch dug between the lake and Spencer Gulf.

So I stand up today and say Joe Gutnick—to be very specific—says: ‘Yes. I will open up that mine and I will build a phosphate plant here and I will process that phosphate into diammonium phosphate—which is very, very valuable: $1,200 a tonne—and maybe send two-thirds of it overseas unprocessed because my partners are Indian and they want it unprocessed. So we will do that for you. We will produce $4,000 million or $5,000 million dollars worth of income for Australia. But I need land to build houses for my workers on’—land which our forebears fought and died for at Eureka—‘and I want some water. I want some electricity. We are on a 90-days water supply.’ Now we are in a record flood but, you know, a month ago we were on 90 days supply—to close down all the mining operations in north-west Queensland! ‘If you give us that electricity and that water, we can give you $20,000 million a year, and jobs that will be there year after year, out into the foreseeable future—or even the unforeseeable future. Those are the wonderful things we can do for you.’ We plead with the government to redirect some of that money away from self-indulgence, from nice little things that are wonderful to have. You have to sacrifice yourself to build for the future, as Barack Obama has said. (Time expired)

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