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

I greatly respect the member for Werriwa, but in two years time the money from the package will be gone and the jobs will be gone. However, I do not share the view of the opposition that we should not be spending money in a depression. There are some 20 books in the library on the Great Depression and how it affected Australia and other countries, and one very clear message emanates from all of the experience of the Great Depression, and it is that you have to spend money in a depression, you absolutely have to. Whether or not the money here is being spent wisely, I put on the public record that I do not believe that it is being spent wisely. I urge the opposition not to continue with their carping criticism of the government over spending money. By all means criticise them over the way it is being spent, but do not criticise them for spending, because history will condemn you, the same as it condemned the Lyons government, which delivered Australia the worst depression of any country on earth. On this, I refer to Boris Schedvin, who is the major commentator on the Great Depression, and his book Australia and the Great Depression. But there are many other books that say exactly the same thing.

If we are looking at infrastructure need, I have the honour of representing the greatest mineral province on earth. Last year, we produced around $15,000 million from the mines in north-west Queensland and just across the border into the Territory. At present, there is a proposal by the Indian Farmers Fertiliser Co-operative and Joseph Gutnick to establish up there one of the 15 leading phosphate mines in the world. There are not a lot of phosphate deposits in the world, but we are gifted with one in the member for Lingiari’s electorate and two in my electorate. But two of them are not developed—the one in Lingiari and the one north of Mount Isa. It is the intention of the Indian Farmers Fertiliser Co-operative and Mr Gutnick to produce eight million tonnes a year. Mr Deputy Speaker Scott, I do not have to tell you that we have been paying over $1,000 a tonne for diammonium phosphate and processed phosphate is worth $1,200 a tonne. It will fall in price, as with everything else, but it will go up again. If you are talking about eight million tonnes at $1,200 a tonne, you are looking at an incredible amount of money. I am not saying they are going to process all of it there, but they will process some of it there.

They need some assistance with the infrastructure. The infrastructure requirements in this case are absolutely colossal. Let me start with electricity. The area has no electricity supply to a single mine outside of what is being supplied and the area will be in serious trouble within three years based on the current supply of electricity. North-west Queensland is not connected to the national grid. In fact, there is not a single baseload power station in the northern half of Australia. Where are all the mines? Where are all of Australia’s hard-rock mines? They are all in Northern Australia—though, of course, there are a couple of exceptions, obviously, but it is a fair call to say that.

We need the power where the demand is. It is very inefficient to carry power great distances. We need power into that area. We need a transmission line from the national grid at Townsville to Pentland—and the huge coal deposits there where, ultimately, a power station will be built—and through to Mount Isa and surrounding areas, including, for example, the Gutnick project, Legend’s phosphate deposits. We need $100 million from the federal government and $100 million from the state government to make that infrastructure happen. We might need $150 million. I believe that every single cent of that will ultimately be repaid. Asking people to knuckle down and commit themselves to $700 million of expenditure to put a line to the coast will not happen. That is simply not going to happen. And there is the issue with rail. It may well be that it is time to build Everald Compton’s railway line from Cloncurry, just north of Mount Isa, through to Tennant Creek and out to Darwin, instead of coming back on the existing line which is very overtaxed in its existing state. If you are talking about nation building and you provide that infrastructure then the mining product will flow, but if you do not provide the infrastructure then the mining product will not flow.

The recent floods left us with some $10 million worth of fruit and vegetables in storage. I have the privilege of representing about six or seven per cent of Australia’s fruit and vegetable producers, but my complaints about four Caribous sitting at the airport in Townsville whilst the food was rotting 200 kilometres away is a story for another day. Mr Deputy Speaker Scott, you will appreciate this well. There are two highways heading from the vast market garden of the Atherton Tableland and the super wet belt of the Tully and Innisfail area, which produces, for example, most of Australia’s bananas—we hope it will continue to but we do not know. The flooding this time put out the coastal route for two weeks, which was unprecedented. If we got the assistance needed in the Seymour River area north of Ingham then we could cut that down, even in exceptional flooding such as occurred this time, to maybe a week. But we need an alternative route for a whole host of reasons—apart from anything else, to relieve the pressure. The inland route is a single-lane highway, built by the great John McEwen—it is called the McEwen highway, part of the beef road scheme—which is now over 40 years old. It desperately needs to be widened.

The lack of infrastructure is just appalling. Take Kagara Zinc, for example. At Georgetown there is no way that they can get the product out. The National Party pulled up the railway line from Greenvale to Townsville, so we have no railway line into the area. We have no road coming out of the area. Putting all that mineral product down through Cairns and Townsville—to have millions of tonnes a year coming down that road—is the last thing in the world we want. There needs to be an alternative inland highway. The money is desperately needed to widen and repair that road, which is now 40 years old.

We talk about nation building, but nation building is not about building schools. Children are getting educated now. It most certainly is not about putting in insulation batts. That might be a good thing to do but it is not nation building. Building bikeways is not nation building. Nation building is Ben Chifley building, with government money, the Holden plant to build our own Australian motor cars. Nation building is Ben Chifley—and later the McEwen-Menzies government—using government money to build the Snowy Mountains Scheme, that mighty project which makes every Australian proud. In our own home state, nation building was Joh Bjelke-Petersen building the giant Gladstone power station to create the aluminium industry of Australia. Peter Beattie, the former Premier of Queensland, was kind enough to say, in his panegyric at the funeral of the late Premier Bjelke-Petersen, ‘This man created the tourism industry in Queensland and he created the coal industry.’ No reflection upon Peter, but he should have included the aluminium industry as well. The major export of this country is coal, which can be attributed to that man building that giant railway line and the giant Gladstone port. We had no coal to put on it, but that is what nation building is—you build the railway line because you believe in your country, you believe in its future and you believe that the industry will happen if you give it a bit of help.

Mr Deputy Speaker, nation building is about the Theodore government in Queensland building the grain silos in your area. The original grain silos were built with government money provided by the Theodore government. Almost all of the sugar mills in Queensland were built by the Theodore government, which put up government money. They were very profitable. The government made a huge amount of money from later onselling them to the farmers—as it did with the grain silos, as you would be well aware, Mr Deputy Speaker.

These things are nation building. They provide jobs that are going to be there in the future. Under the current government’s policy, in two years time we will have no jobs and no money. I do not want to get into a debate on this too, but I do not think the government should be just borrowing money. In the Great Depression, Japan issued Treasury bonds to its central bank and the central bank provided the money. They did owe the money but they owed it to themselves—they were not in great danger of being foreclosed upon. As a lot of people would know, Germany simply printed money. Britain really printed money too. It took interest rates down to 0.65 per cent and held them there for six straight years. So Britain did not have a depression. In fact, there was very great prosperity in Germany and Japan. In Japan, undoubtedly, rearmament was part of that economic recovery, but that was not the case in Germany. Everyone would be well aware, from the history books, that Germany did not rearm until late in 1937, and economically it was flying at that stage.

I am saying that we have the biggest mineral province on earth and we cannot get the product out. The railway line is at full capacity. Further east, in the Georgetown area of mineral deposits, there is no way of getting the product out at all. They are coming down a single-lane highway that has hardly been touched in 40 years. And it is built up—personally, I drive off it into the table drain when there are oncoming vehicles. For the cattle industry, of course, it is essential as well.

A bridge across the Oxley River is all we need. We do not really need much more than that. We need a little concrete deck to take the boats—because we will have to supply by boat to Normanton during the season—and we need a road from Normanton to Karumba down the western side of the river instead of in the swamps, where it is at present. We need a bridge across the Norman River and we need Karumba to be a port. What is a port? A heap of rocks going out into the ocean in an L-shape. That is all we are asking for—that, and a bit of dredging. Then you would have a port in the gulf, and the most central demographic point for that port is Karumba. The brave souls up there will be cut off for two months by 15 kilometres, at the very least, of raging floodwaters. It takes three hours to get by boat from Karumba back to Normanton, through those crocodile-infested, raging floodwaters. In this day and age, to have no port in the Gulf of Carpentaria is disgraceful. That is the only thing I can say about it.

One other issue that came out in the recent floods was that there was a question mark put over the Burdekin River Bridge. Some 50,000 Australians live west of that bridge. It is a very famous bridge, built a long time ago—probably some 50 years ago. If that bridge goes out, there is no way of getting from Townsville out to Charters Towers, the mid-west towns, or Mount Isa, unless you go through Mackay in a 300- or 400-kilometre detour, or through Cairns—another 400- or 500-kilometre detour. So we desperately need an alternative route. There is an alternative route being put in north of Ingham and, with a bit of effort, we can go up the range there and that would give us an alternative way to get out into the western areas with our product during troubled times such as those we have recently gone through in North Queensland.

In summary, we have asked for the government to genuinely spend money on nation building. I have given before the specific example of Bjelke-Petersen building that railway line to nowhere. There were no mines operating when he built that railway line from Gladstone out to Blackwater, which was a little siding on the railway line then—nothing more than a siding. It became one of the great coalmines of the world, of course, once the railway line was built. That is nation building.

We have somehow got to get across to the government that putting batts in your ceiling is not nation building. That is not going to create any permanent jobs. When Barack Obama was asked whether he was going to give tax concessions, he said, ‘No, we want to provide jobs out into the future, not just consumer spending.’ So it is a lot more complicated than just giving money to people to spend. I do not criticise the government for doing that initially. I think that did need to be done initially, to quickly put money in people’s pockets, to stave off the onrushing depression psychology. But now there should be considered allocation of this money. And it should be there.

I see that Parliamentary Secretary Shorten is at the table here in the chamber. One of the great parts of Australian history has been based on and centred around his trade union. I think every single Australian should be proud of the achievements of the AWU. But those men need jobs. We need mines to be opened up. Those people need jobs, and we are not going to have those jobs unless government puts infrastructure there. And there has been nothing done by this government to provide a single solitary item of infrastructure that would provide one single permanent job in the state of Queensland; I cannot speak with authority on other areas. The previous speaker—and I have great respect for the member for Werriwa—stood up and said that spending money on schools is going to create jobs for us in the future! Well, hey—they are getting the schooling now; they are going to get the schooling later on; whether they do it under more amenable circumstances or not is not important in the context of what we are talking about here.

But I can assure the House, having spent Christmas reading 20 books on the Great Depression, that that is not what Japan did during the Depression. That is not what Germany did during the Depression. It most certainly was not what Britain did during the Depression. Money was poured into their giant factories, and Britain was the powerhouse of the world that produced all of the world’s electricity turbines, most of the world’s aeroplane engines and most of the world’s superships. They were all built in England, and they were built with the huge amount of government money that was poured into building up these factories during the Great Depression. Not in this country. I must warn the people on this side of the chamber: read your history books, because the conservative side of politics did not do one single thing in Australia during that period. They advocated restraining money, and they listened to that imbecile Niemeyer from the Bank of England, of whom Winston Churchill said, ‘The worst mistake I ever made was to listen to the blandishments of Montagu Norman and Otto Niemeyer.’ I come from the conservative side of politics, but the conservatives have the undying shame of being remembered as the only government on earth that listened to some imbecile saying that you should restrain credit. John Kenneth Galbraith attributed the Great Depression to Niemeyer, and so did Winston Churchill—a conservative and a nonconservative, if you like. But there is no question where history books lie on this issue.

So we would plead with the government not to go frittering this money away. This is a great opportunity. The Americans did not really do all that much during the Depression. But the Tennessee Valley Authority projects were built, and what a fantastic asset for America they are. I have not got time to speak about them today, Mr Acting Speaker, but if ever a nation built mighty assets, they were the TVA projects, and they were built during the Depression. They cost nothing, because those men would have had to have been paid anyway.

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