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

I apologise and withdraw. For the edification of people in this place: we have the lowest manufacturing base in the OECD, except for Turkey. So there are two turkeys out there—us and another country called Turkey. People coming in here and seriously saying that we are going to do this are insulting the intelligence of all of us, and they are people who obviously do not think about these things. Our manufacturing base has been destroyed because in every other country governments regard it as their responsibility to get behind and to back up their industries. We give them a lecture on free markets and say how they should be tough and be able to compete against the rest of the world. In the real world, you try competing when other farmers are given a 49 per cent head start. That is the average subsidy and tariff level in the world—49 per cent. Australia’s is four per cent. You try competing when your competitors have a 49 per cent start. You are running a 100-metre race and you are giving your competitors a 30-metre head start. I could beat Linford Christie over the 100 metres if I were given a 30-metre head start, I can tell you. You are setting us an impossible task. It is worse in manufacturing. When we get behind our industries, look at what the results are.

This government has talked about nation building. There are two items in this budget, neither of which I might add are costed out—which means they are just a wish list. They are not actual items in the budget. One is the tunnel to the Tamworth coal. That is nation building. It will enable coal to flow and it will enable us to open up the coalfields of western New South Wales. There is also the proposal to put the transmission line into the north-west mineral province, which I represent, and into the Pilbara region. We thank very much the minister, Martin Ferguson—a minister doing an excellent job—for his initiatives in these two areas. They are not line items in the budget, so I do not know whether I am being a little bit hasty in thanking the government for them.

Nation building is not about insulation batts in the roof. It is not about cutting the wait time for motor cars in the big metropolitan areas. It is not about making a bigger classroom. With all due respect to the last speaker, making classrooms bigger is not going to create any jobs for Australians. The government policy will mean we will end up in three years time with no jobs and no money. I have applauded the government, and I just cannot believe the attitude of the opposition in this place. I would like the representative of the opposition to tune in here. The opposition are either economically illiterate—as they have absolutely no idea what they are talking about in criticising the government for borrowing money—or, alternatively, they are being extremely politically mischievous and irresponsible. In an onrushing depression you have to spend money. There is absolutely no question about that. There is not an economist on earth who would agree with having a balanced budget when you have an onrushing depression. If you cannot see an onrushing depression out there then you must be one of those blokes standing on railway lines and saying: ‘No, no. Those lights are going away from us, not coming towards us.’ What if the opposition happens to get into government and carries out these policies?

Those of us who read history books—and there are very few of us in this place who do—will recall that in 1932 the people of Australia had a choice in backing Ted Theodore. He, along with Bjelke-Petersen, was named one of the two great Queenslanders in the state’s history. I would say in Theodore’s case he was easily the most important person in Australia’s history. He created your labour movement, Madam Deputy Speaker Saffin. He was the person who created that movement. One in 32 of us went down the mines and never came back up again. People died a terrible death from things like miner’s phthisis or were killed in dreadful accidents. All that was changed.

When we talk about nation building, we think about ‘Red’ Ted Theodore, who built the sugar mills in Queensland. They were built with government money. This is horrific heresy for the opposition—and, I regret to say, also for the government because the government also is still officially and formally, in spite of some rhetoric from the Prime Minister, very much a globalisation, free-market government. The policy of this government is marketism, the same as the policy of the last government. What do you need to convince you?

You know your country has no manufacturing. The honourable member for Gippsland must know that agriculture in this country is collapsing and he must know that there was $200 million of debt when the Howard government came in and $700 million of debt when they went out. Where did that debt come from? It came from the fact that we could not trade anymore in this country. We have asked our farmers and manufacturers to compete on the most unlevel playing field in the world. Barack Obama in the last few months has said that every single government job will use American steel. I am sure every American said: ‘Good on you, Barack. We’re in there barracking for you.’ Are we likely to get that sort of result in Australia? When President Bush was there he said, ‘We’re not going to stand aside and see our steel industry collapse,’ and he bunged in intermediate tariffs. Is there any intermediate tariff coming in to protect Pacific Brands? No, there most certainly is not.

Let me return to the concept of nation building. In this place we praise greatly the Minister for Resources and Energy, the member for Batman, for his initiative with this and the tunnel into the Tamworth coalfields, but, with all due respect, these are very small items in a budget of $270,000 million. The $43,000 million for nation building went to putting insulation batts in roofs, building bikeways and making classrooms bigger. I am reminded by the member for Throsby, who has just come in, that nation building is about Senator Button providing $370 million to restructure the Australian steel industry. He was a very great Australian. This is one of the outstanding success stories of postwar Australia. Our steel industry was reconstructed so it was the most efficient steel industry on earth. One man in the Australian steel industry produced 700 tonne of steel. That is nation building.

Nation building is ‘Red’ Ted Theodore building most of the sugar mills in Queensland with government money. Nation building is Ben Chifley building the Holden plant with government money. We were producing our own motor cars in Australia, until this stupid, brainless marketism was introduced by none other than Mr Keating and continued by the last government with great aggression and happiness. It halved the number of National Party members in this place because we never agreed with those policies. True Country Party men never agreed with those policies. They were an anathema to us. We believe that governments should build dams, factories, power stations and railway lines. The National Party of today are proponents of marketism, as opposed to developmentalism. Let me continue in that vein.

As I have said in this place many times—and I can never say it enough in this place—Bjelke-Petersen built a giant railway line for which there were no customers. Would there be any National Party person in this place who would agree with that? No way, Jose. They are marketism men. He built a giant power station for which there were no customers. He was vilified in the media, as was Ted Theodore when he built the sugar mills and as was Ben Chifley with the Snowy Mountains scheme and when he built the Holden plant. They were all vilified, but they were men who believed in nation building. And John Button, quite frankly, was sacked for what he did. He would never bow and bend his knee to marketism. He believed in developmentalism. He would not bend his knee, so he was sacked. When I said that to him one day, he did not say yes or no, but burst out laughing. I think he was very pleased that someone had been watching.

It is not good enough to come into this place and criticise; you have to put forward something positive. It is in the budget—and it was proposed by the member for Batman—that we will be going to a true national grid. We will put the iron ore region of Australia, the Pilbara, and the hard metals area of Australia, north-west Queensland, onto the national grid. That means instead of paying between $100 and $250 per megawatt for electricity, which accounts for one-quarter of our mining costs, we will only be paying between $40 and $60. And there are three major mines in north-west Queensland that will close unless we get that cheaper electricity.

The honourable member for Batman is going to go down in the history books, because there happen to be five clean energy projects along the transmission line from Mount Isa to Townsville. There is the huge solar energy project in Cloncurry. The latest edition of National Geographic features the plant at Acciona, in Nevada. That is going to be duplicated at Cloncurry, which is the hottest place in Australia. So at the first town along the transmission line there will be a giant solar energy initiative. The Queensland government has already put $23 million into this initiative and the Rudd government has committed $150 million. If the government comes good with the money for that solar energy project then we will have 70 megawatts of electricity.

There is a problem which I understand will be shown on 60 Minutes shortly. In the biggest ever environmental holocaust in Australian history, six million hectares of native flora and fauna has been completely destroyed. The bilby, a famous little hopping animal that we have in the Julia Creek area, along with some other native flora and fauna, is threatened with extinction by the terrible prickly acacia tree. This tree covers six million hectares, or about three per cent of the surface area of Australia, and it is spreading rapidly. It is proposed that the prickly acacia trees be burnt to create power. During the day we will boil a fluid at the solar energy plant, but during the evening they might burn the prickly acacia trees. This is a geothermal target area, so maybe we will boil the fluid of an evening with the geothermals. So there is a project at Julia Creek, along that electricity line, for 50 megawatts of electricity from the prickly acacia tree.

At Pentland there is a major biofuels project to produce 1,000 million litres of ethanol per year. That project has been around for a while and it has been discussed at the highest levels of government in Queensland. When you harvest sugar cane, the sugar cane fibre that is left behind produces a gas when it is burnt. We are burning most of that gas in our sugar mills in Australia just to get rid of it, but we should be burning it to create electricity. If the government gives us a little bit of assistance—I do not want to speak for other areas, but $60 million or $70 million should get us through in the northern third of the industry—we can convert all of our sugar mills. In Pentland a 300-megawatt power station will come on stream and burn the sugar cane fibre. And, because there is a high dam at Hell’s Gates at the back of Townsville, it will have 100 megawatts of hydroelectricity as well.

So we have all this renewable energy along this corridor—it hits the coast between Ingham and Townsville—and if the four sugar mills in the greater Ingham area convert there will be another 200 megawatts. So there will be nearly 1,000 megawatts of electricity, all clean renewables, in this clean energy corridor along the transmission line which is the brainchild of the member for Batman. So we must go out of our way to pay very great tribute here.

During the Great Depression, Australia decided to do what the opposition have recently been advocating. They are criticising you people for borrowing money. If they were criticising you for misspending the money, I would enthusiastically agree with them, but they are not—they are criticising you for borrowing the money. During the Great Depression, Australia took the advice of Otto Niemeyer from the Bank of England, and we had the worst depression of any country on earth. There are three books by Schedvin in the library—anyone can borrow them. He is the leading commentator on the Australian depression, but no commentator will tell you anything else except that Australia had the worst depression of any country on earth, because we were the only country on earth that decided it would balance budgets—actually we reduced budgets—in the middle of a depression. That is what the opposition want to do now. Did Britain do that? No way, Jose. They got Otto Niemeyer and threw him out a window. Winston Churchill said the worst mistake he ever made was to take the advice of Montagu Norman and Otto Niemeyer. He said, ‘It is a disgrace that both those people are still employed by the government.’ John Maynard Keynes attributed the Depression to Otto Niemeyer.

But the Niemeyer prescription is being advocated by the opposition. Don’t they read economics books? The Americans brought in the New Deal economists. Britain brought in John Maynard Keynes—they did not have a depression; America did. America acted very late, but they did bring in the New Deal economists. They built the wonderful Tennessee Valley Authority project, which is probably the most magnificent project of its type anywhere in the world. And they did it all for free because the workers were on the dole, so the wages cost them nothing.

Japan and Germany had great prosperity. Some people say, ‘Germany was re-arming.’ I say, ‘Read your Nuremberg trials.’ There was no re-arming until the end of 1937 and Germany was one of the most prosperous countries on earth by 1937. Hjalmar Schacht, the architect of it, was a very brave man. He was the only German who spoke out publicly against the persecution of Jews and he ended the war in Dachau death camp, as did his priest, Pastor Niemoller. They just printed money in Germany; they did not worry too much about it. The British were a bit sophisticated: they took the interest rates right down to 0.6 per cent, held them there for six years and borrowed the money at 0.6 per cent, effectively off themselves. In Japan, Takahashi Korekiyo issued treasury bonds and gave them to the central bank and the central bank gave them the money, so there was a debt, but I do not think the central bank of Japan, owned by the government, was going to foreclose on the government. That is what those governments did—they were very successful. We did not and we had a horrific depression. (Time expired)

See this speech in context