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

For many years of my life I was responsible for the Torres Straits. There is great potential in this area for fish farming and crustacean farming, which lend themselves very much to development. In the Torres Strait Islands they have rock walls going out into the ocean, which are fish traps. At high tide the fish can get in; at low tide the water rushes out and they cannot get out and the people can go round in the morning and pick up their food for the day.

It gives me no joy to relate to the Houses that whilst we are here—and quite rightly so—to mourn, and to pledge our support for our northern neighbours, the tragic reality is that we are very good at crying about others but not about looking after our own. A few of us went on the Closing the Gap trip to the Torres Straits. I was quite staggered actually when I went out there at what I found—and this is our little part of the South Pacific Islands that we are responsible for and this is how we are looking after them. When I was up there the last time, in 1990—and 1990 was last year, I think, I was minister—I would say that 90 per cent of the food I ate was locally grown. It was seafood that had been caught, and taro and yam and other vegetables that were locally grown.

This time when I was up there I cannot remember having a single piece of food that was grown on the islands. AQIS, the quarantine service, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, the Australian Fisheries Management Authority, and Queensland, had effectively stopped those people from having a source of food. The net result of this—and we were the Closing the Gap committee inquiry—is that there is a 50 per cent higher rate of diabetes and heart problems among the Islanders there than for average Australians and, as we all well know, those things are very much diet-related.

The people of the Torres Strait have no way of earning any money anymore because their crayfishing and other fishing operations have been stopped. Their chooks and pigs have been taken away from them by the quarantine service. The people say that even their farming has been taken away from them. We are still investigating whether that is true or not, but that is what they told us. When we went into the supermarket, we saw that four to seven per cent of the entire shelf space was filled with rice. This is a drivingly poor Third World country, where the death rate is 50 per cent higher than in the rest of Australia. Why? Because of the actions of this place. People are dying up there at a 50 per cent higher rate than anywhere else because of the actions of this place. And do you think anyone cares, Mr Deputy Speaker Washer? With all due respect to the chairman of the Close the Gap committee, to my knowledge the committee has still not put out a report. I am not cognisant of any report having been put out. So whilst it is very good for us to be supportive and sympathetic towards the plight of our northern neighbours, we have a responsibility to the Pacific islanders, and that responsibility is being discharged in such a way that there will be shame on this place and, unfortunately, on my nation for the historical future.

The gulf cattlemen live pretty sparsely; they live pretty hard. They do not have many of life’s good things. They live hundreds of kilometres from the nearest town. My station property was 230 kilometres from the nearest town, and that was the little town of Croydon, with 200 people. So we were right out in the middle of nowhere. Many of the people who were caught in the floods this year were in an even worse situation than we were distance wise.

For the last 50 or 60 years, the fifth or sixth biggest export item of this country has consistently been beef. We have the growing area for the beef industry. If you wipe out the breeding herd in the gulf then all Australia will suffer. When the floods hit, it was communicated to state and federal governments. There was a request for fodder drops for the cattle. No fodder drops took place. No government even bothered to reply to the people. They did not come back to them and say, ‘We’re not doing it.’ They did not even bother to do that. So these people watched in horror as their cattle were washed away into the gulf and drowned. We hear a lot of people criticise their own. There is a name for these people: traitors. I will shortly be fixing up a few of them when I get up to Normanton and Karumba. These people said that we were crying wolf.

The web and all the newspapers in Australia showed pictures of the hundreds and thousands of cattle that had died and the wildlife that had died in the great floods at the start of this year. It was the furies of February for Australia. Whilst the southern part of Australia was on fire, the northern part was under water. Once again, I make the point, as I have made a thousand times in this place: what is wrong with us as a race of people that we do not take some of the water from up there and move it south? It is quite extraordinary.

Many of the cattlemen, the contractors who served them and the employees who worked on the stations are in diabolical straits. Many of them will be bankrupt as a result of what has taken place there. These are our frontiersmen. The people who live in the Gulf Country have no restaurants to go to; they have no picture theatres to go to; and they have no friends that they can visit. Our nearest neighbours were 40 kilometres away. You think twice before you drive an 80-kilometre round trip to say g’day to your neighbours. A lot of the time the telecommunications, which are very substandard, do not work. We are completely cut off.

Sadly, many people that I know have had mostly children die as a result of that isolation because the telephone does not work or they do not have a telephone or the pedal radio is not working or the flying doctor could not fly in because the airstrips were too muddy and they had no access to a helicopter. So many of these people have died. The part that enraged me was that I could get in an aeroplane at Ingham, just north of Townsville on the Pacific Ocean, and fly all the way, 1,000 kilometres to Karumba and Normanton, and, except while crossing the Great Dividing Range, I could see water out both sides of the aeroplane. It was a flood of massive size. We have had worse but it was still a flood of massive size and all of the people have suffered as a result of this: the cane-farming people, contractors, employees and mill workers, who have had a short season because of the lack of cane. Many of them will lose their stations, their farms or their houses in the town as a result of this. But whilst this was happening the government announced three per cent interest rates from the Reserve Bank. If those people could have been able to access the three per cent that was made available then they would have had no problems. If the government is lending it at three per cent, why wouldn’t you lend it to these people at three per cent? But, no, the obsessive, stupid, brainless policies of the free market say, ‘No, you must go through the marketplace.’ Well, the banks do not compete against each other; they compete with each other. I defy anyone to point out to me where there is more than a one per cent difference between the banks. But if they can pick up three or four per cent before they send it out to you, why wouldn’t they?

There was a time when there was enlightened government in this place, when truly great men walked in this place, and let me name them: King O’Malley, Ted Theodore, Ben Chifley, Jack McEwen and Doug Anthony. Each of these people put in place a banking mechanism that enabled people, when there was trouble through no fault of their own, to take money, effectively from the Reserve Bank but in some cases not from the Reserve Bank, at interest rates of two per cent. I am one of the people that set up one of those banks. I had responsibility from a state government under the Treasurer, Bill Gunn. He and I were assigned the responsibility for the QIDC. The argument is that this costs us money, and if you are a brainless, incompetent government it does cost you money. Perish the thought that a brainless, incompetent government would go into banking!

When you are a smart government going into banking, you make an awful lot of money. Let me tell you, Mr Deputy Speaker, that we started off with a $200 million loan—it was a loan and no money was actually ever allocated—and the bank was sold for $1.5 billion some seven or eight years later. I deeply regret to say that the QIDC was sold by the National Party. It was the last of the banks to be sold. The Commonwealth Bank was sold, the Commonwealth Development Bank was sold, the Primary Industries Bank was sold, the AIDC was sold and, yes, the QIDC in Queensland was sold. Properly handled, and I have not got the time to say why nor are we canvassing the issue of banking today, a development bank makes money. But I will give you a quick hint that when you lend money intelligently to a farmer who is in trouble through no fault of his own he will give the money back to you and he will stick with you. So if you lend him $300,000, the amount of a debt to some other bank at the start and you take over that debt, then you have $300,000 worth of gilt-edged business which is secured by the value of the farm and you are dealing with a person who you know is going to pay it back when things turn around. So, Mr Deputy Speaker, that gives you a quick view of why you make money.

These people have now been languishing since the start of this year, and my understanding is that not a single dollar of any substantial assistance has gone to a single person in the Ingham area or in the Gulf Country. Neither category of people has had a single cent of assistance, and yet the government down here is telling us they have money available at three per cent. We have not seen it. Some of those people, tragically, might join the ranks of the farmers who last time I looked were committing suicide at the rate of one every four days, thanks to the deregulation of the dairy industry, probably, more than anything else—actions by this place and, I might add, the National Party in this place. If they join those ranks then let it be upon the heads of the people in this place. Heaven only knows that representatives such as me have hounded endlessly and ceaselessly the ministers involved in this, trying to get some of that three per cent money made available to the people out there. If you have it and you are handing it out, why don’t you give it to them? Name me a more deserving group of people in Australia. What we asked for was so little.

It shows the hypocrisy of this place and the hypocrisy of government as it operates at the state and federal levels that they would not give us any flood drops. They would not give us a helicopter to ferry people out of Karumba. Karumba is a little town, and it was surrounded by 15 kilometres of raging, crocodile-infested floodwaters. The airstrip was out the whole time. They do not effectively have an airstrip out there. The state government has done up the existing one in such a way as to ensure that we will continue not to have an airstrip there. So we do not have an airstrip, for about 2,000 people. The floodwaters were rising. We had no way—even if you broke a leg or broke an arm—of getting out of there except for 2½ hours in a dinghy in raging, crocodile-infested floodwaters. That is the only way we could get anyone out of there.

We went to the media with the pictures of the raging floodwaters and everything, and we told them that they had not even got a helicopter there. We showed them the airport at Normanton, and there was no helicopter there. They told us that they had a helicopter. It was all right and I did not have to worry, because they had a helicopter based at Cairns. I said, ‘Do you think we should run the emergency services for Brisbane out of Sydney?’ He said, ‘No, why would we want to do that?’ I said, ‘It’s the same distance. You could save a lot of money.’ That is exactly the same as you saying to me that you had a helicopter based at Cairns that was going to be available to evacuate people from Karumba. But when the spotlight of public attention was turned upon them, and when the pain of these people, and the dead animals—the cattle and the kangaroos—were flashed onto the national media, suddenly we had politicians parachuting out of the sky and suddenly we got money through.

But it was a bit too late for the fodder drops, because the cattle were all dead at that stage. These people did not have the money or the wherewithal to be able to get those fodder drops made to rescue those cattle. We do not do that to help the grazier. They say, ‘If they live up there, they should be able to live with these sorts of thing.’ We are not doing that to help the grazier. We are doing that to preserve the Australian cattle breeding herd. Heaven only knows! In India it is a religious belief that you are not allowed to kill the cow. The cow is the calf factory and it is the tractor. The sanction is not upon the ox as an animal. The religious sanction is upon the female ox. Similarly here: it is our belief that we should preserve the herd. That is why government should become involved.

It always amazes me to see the animal welfare people that go running around and crying about the animals. We did not hear from them. They were pretty silent. Whilst hundreds of thousands of kangaroos, wallabies and other animals drowned, and whilst maybe 100,000 head of cattle drowned as well, they did not seem too worried.

I certainly feel, as everyone in this place does, for our brothers and cousins up in the Pacific Islands. We have a very, very close relationship with those people. The Filipino people have had a western democratic system there for 60 or 70 years now, arguably longer. They have been an American colony—an Anglo-country colony, if you like—for a large part of their recent history. They have a similar religious belief system to our own—they are Christians—and we have many, many of those people in Australia. In some of the areas I represent it is a male society—we cannot get Australian women to live there. A lot of those men marry Filipino ladies and they are extremely successful marriages. One of only six people who were invited to my own wedding married a Filipino bride. I will mention their names: Col and Melinda Jenkins. They have a beautiful family—a really outstanding family. I think they are a great credit to anyone in Australia.

We have a very strong kinship with these people. Many of our rugby league teams have Polynesians and Melanesians playing in them. They come to Australia and they always will. They have always been a race that has moved in and out of Australia, and we welcome them greatly as our cousins and our brothers. But let us start with our more immediate family that has suffered greatly and has not received the assistance that they should have received. In fact, they have really received callous disregard from government. That is still the situation as I speak. To my knowledge and information, no money has been passed out at all.

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