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

From now on you will cop it between the eyeballs. There were 2,800 people who attended the meetings. They attended the meetings and we asked them: ‘What do you want?’ They said, ‘We want our land,’ and I said, ‘Right, I’ve got a piece of paper and I have got to put someone’s name on the bottom of it. It is up to you as to what name you want put on the bottom of it.’ I would leave too, if I were you, member for Moreton. I asked: ‘Do you want to put the shire council? We are going to set up shire councils here. Do you want land councils? Do you want the names of the land councils put there? Do you want tribal councils?’ They were not called native councils at that time; they were called tribal councils. I asked: ‘Do you want the tribal council name on it? Do you want private ownership, the same as everyone else in Australia has, do you want a continuation of government ownership, or have you got some other idea?’ They discussed it. Most of these meetings took the best part of a day in each community. Surprise, surprise: we had given them the choice and they decided that they wanted to own their own houses, their own farms and their own cattle stations. They did not want the tribe to own it. They did not want the local council to own it. They wanted to own it themselves. That was what they decided. In fact, in all of those meetings there were only three people who objected. The previous speaker referred to the Bjelke-Petersen government. Of all of those communities, I think at Yarrabah there were over 2,000 people who attended the celebrations at the handing over of the deeds of grant. So either the previous speaker knew absolutely nothing about what he was talking about or, alternatively, he came in here and positively and mischievously misled the parliament. There are only two possibilities here. One is towering ignorance—

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