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

I want to back up what the honourable member for New England and the Leader of the Opposition said earlier on. I was a minister for a long time in a state house, as I think you were, Mr Deputy Speaker Adams. If someone came up with a good idea—and I am on record on many occasions as saying, ‘That’s an idea that sounds good; we’ll have a look at it and get back to you on it’—as often as not, we would do it. The member of the opposition would get kudos out of it, but it was my duty to see that the best possible job could be done for the country. In this place, as the honourable member for Lyne has said on a number of occasions, it is all about playing party games. It is not what is good for the country at all. It is what is good for political interest. That is a very true thing to say. I am not saying that everyone did that in the Queensland parliament. They most certainly did not, but I am on record many times as saying that I could never see how it was to my detriment to take a good sensible proposal and say, ‘Yes, we will do that.’ I thought it made me look good and made the others look good too. It would have made me look bad if I had not done it.

Having made that political point, I want to come back to the point that the Leader of the Opposition made about us being a big country. Yes, we are. In area we are almost as big as the United States, not all that much smaller than Brazil or China and bigger in available land than Russia or Canada. So we have this huge area of land. We have in that land only one-fifth as much carbon as other countries; so the name of the game for us should simply be putting the carbon back into the soil. We cannot control, and will never be able to control, the huge fires that occur in World Heritage and national parks. It is somebody else’s choice to make them into national parks and you will still have the problem there. But over the rest of Australia not only do we have an ability to stop the fires, which I think result in the lack of carbon in the Australian soils, but also we must have the ability to inject bacteria fertiliser which locks in the carbon. One per cent of the soil should be bacteria—dead or alive—and that bacteria is principally carbon, as all plants and animal life, including human beings, are hydrocarbons. Simply using bacteria fertiliser, which we are using very extensively now along the wet coastal plain in the sugar and banana industries, is very kind to the environment. There is no doubt about that. There is virtually no chemical run-off if you use that first. The farmers are doing it because it works out infinitely better financially. So here is an option for the government.

As far as the science goes, I do not impugn in any way what the Parliamentary Secretary for Climate Change said but I do have to put on the record that the official government report, which is still out there, from the Australian Greenhouse Office—as I understand it, the office has now been abolished; it should have been abolished long ago—said that ethanol would marginally increase the CO2. Throughout the world there have been hundreds of studies done—and you can get all of the studies that are available via the United States Congressional Library, so this is the flow of information to the congressmen and senators in the United States—and every single one of those reports centres around a 27 per cent to 29 per cent benefit for the environment, as the honourable member for New England pointed out earlier on. We can take the position that every single one of those hundred-odd studies is wrong and that the United States Congressional Library is wrong and that the Greenhouse Office in Australia is right, but I do not think many people would come to that conclusion. I am simply saying that the flow of information coming from the so-called scientific flow of information is very substandard. I hope that the government takes that into account and does its own scientific work. It is not difficult to ring up some of the institutes of marine science in Australia and find out, as I did, about the oceans—(Time expired)

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