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

The Tax Laws Amendment (2010 Measures No. 1) Bill 2010 is an extraordinary piece of legislation. I know this government is not a socialist government but it is a government to the left of the mob on the right here, and it is moving to protect tax deductions. The briefing paper actually says that the measures will protect tax deductions of 19,000 investors in forestry MIS from an unintended outcome. It is a most extraordinary statement—to come forward and say, ‘We are moving this legislation to protect tax dodgers.’ ‘Extraordinary’ is the only word that keeps leaping to my mind.

It behoves me to back up the statement I will make that there is no social, community, environmental or economic benefit in the MISs; in fact, the complete opposite is true. I opened an olive farm somewhere west of Warwick and, yes it was a new industry in Australia. We were importing a lot of olives from overseas, and it was providing industry in a western area in Queensland. It was, in all ways, a good operation. Since then, what was originally a good operation has metastasised into a most malignant phenomenon. I speak with authority because, in my homeland of Far North Queensland, the MISs have announced that they want 40,000 hectares of sugar cane land to convert it to growing trees. If they do that, I can assure you, Madam Acting Deputy Speaker Saffin—and you would know this as well as I—that we will close sugar mills. They will simply close. I do not know how the AWU justify their existence. There are 5,000 members in the sugar mills but we have not heard a single bleat from the union. I can tell you what: their own membership is going to start bleating about them very shortly. Far North Queensland has a very wicked record as far hitting the AWU goes. I am speaking with some vehemence on this. Quite literally, 2,000 or 3,000 people in Far North Queensland will lose their jobs when those mills close. We are battling to keep open three or four of those mills now—they are hanging by a thread—and taking 40,000 hectares of cane land away from them will seal their fate.

The government want to protect the people who are doing this, so let us have a look at some other aspects of this. We are going to replace sugar mills which, let us say, in Ingham employ 2,000 people, and we are going to replace them with forestry. As it turns out, we have a forestry operation in Ingham already, which was put in by the government many years ago—some 10,000 to 15,000 hectares of plantation timber—and it created 12 jobs; that is all. So we are going to replace 2,000 jobs in the sugar industry with 12 jobs in the forestry industry. The word ‘extraordinary’ keeps leaping to my mind. There are public servants here today—and they have no ability to defend themselves—and the government must be taking advice from somebody here. Not only must the government wear the opprobrium and the blame but also the public servants, if they have not gone to their minister and said: ‘Hold on a minute. Where’s the social benefit here? Where’s the economic benefit here? Where’s the environmental benefit here?’

For those of you who have an interest in the environmental benefit, I most certainly always describe myself as antigreen, but the honourable Deputy Speaker will have great respect for her predecessor Mr Causley in this place. I asked him, ‘Don’t we want plantation timber?’—because I actually thought plantation timber was good from a range of viewpoints—and he said, ‘Have you driven north of Brisbane?’ I said, ‘Say no more.’ They call it the ‘pine desert’. I have been fascinated by it, and I have actually pulled up the car and walked around. There are no butterflies, there are no insects and there are no birds; it is just a silent, deathly chamber producing very few jobs now because we do not do the processing of wood in Australia, as it is sent overseas for that purpose. All we have is a big machine that goes along and cuts down the timber and puts it on a truck and it goes to the port and then overseas. We have 15,000 hectares in North Queensland that produce 12 jobs—and I can speak with authority.

The MISs and Timbercorp envisage monoculture on a vast scale, and remember that they are not going to the other side of the Great Dividing Range. All of Australia’s landmass is west of the Great Dividing Range. But, oh no, they are not putting trees in west of the great divide. They are putting the trees in east of the great divide, on the only little bit of country which we have left in Australia on which we can produce food. They are taking food production away and, in our case in Far North Queensland, they are taking sugar production away and replacing it with an absolutely disastrous monoculture. But that is not the end of this story.

In greening Australia we planted a million trees in North Queensland. I am reliably informed that we have somewhere between five and 15 per cent of them left. Trees need an awful lot of looking after. These fly-by-night tax-dodge merchants move the corporate money into their own pockets. There is no money left to look after the trees, and trees need a hell of a lot of looking after. White ants kill trees and they get choked off by grasses. Mr Geoff Bush, one of the biggest farmers in North Queensland, if not in Australia, gave us a look at some of the plantation timber opposite his farm, and the guinea grass was higher than the trees. What they were actually growing were weeds. I am not saying guinea grass is a weed, but there were plenty of other weeds in amongst the guinea grass. It did not even remotely resemble a plantation. There is no money being put into looking after trees at all: ‘We just grab the tax dodge and run away—that’s all.’

In Ingham they claim there are some 7,000 acres of trees put in. A very significant proportion of them went underwater in the floods there last year. I wanted to get out and embarrass the people that advised the government this was a good idea and also embarrass the minister because of his incompetence in this area and take a picture of all the trees that were not there, that were all gone. Seven thousand acres of trees had simply vanished. I was taken again to have a look at them and was shown the photographs. But within two weeks of the floodwaters receding they were out there replanting, because they were deadset terrified that someone like me was going to go out there and get those photographs and get national publicity for the sort of chicanery that is taking place with the MISs.

Let me detail another aspect of the MISs. A close member of my own family was advised by his accountants, because he had a big tax problem one year, to take a lot of money and invest it in the MISs. I said: ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You’ll never see that money again.’ He did not believe me and got in touch with the retired head of a bank in Queensland. The retired head of the bank said: ‘I’m not aware of a single dollar of capital that has been returned to an investor. Never mind about paying any profits or any operating surplus; not a dollar of capital has been returned.’ So why are we doing this? Timbercorp were running around skiting that they were going to own 20,000 square kilometres of Australia, beating their chests and telling us all how marvellous, powerful and rich they were. Where are they now?

I went down to the Riverina recently, and Bill Shorten was there that day and gave one of the addresses. Every one of those speakers got up and said they are destroying our industries. They are paying huge amounts of money, double the market price for the land. They put the trees in, they take the water off farmers that are producing genuine product, there is no water left for the farmers and, of course, the trees are never going to be harvested. There is not a single person in North Queensland that believes that a single tree will ever be harvested. Carol MacKie showed me the photographs in Ingham of where the trees had been, and there are no trees because of the floods. At Cardwell Geoff Bush and Robbie Singh, and I am being very specific here, showed me the plantation where the guinea grass is higher than the trees. Don’t you realise that this is all a farce just to dodge tax? That is all it is about. But how stupid are the people who are investing in it? You do not want a tax dodge unless you are going to get some money back somewhere. You may as well give it to the government if you are going to give it to a bunch of charlatans who race off with the money. It will be interesting to see how much the people get back out of these corporations that have fallen over.

Where a sugar mill is closed down because of a very serious environmental issue, I and a lot of other people thought it would go back to native forest land, rainforest in our case. That is not what has occurred. On the last farm that I inspected that had gone out of sugarcane production, there were 230 acres of giant sensitive weed and singapore daisy. I could not believe it. I walked for about a kilometre around the place and I just could find no patch of it that was not singapore daisy or giant sensitive weed. When the government closed down the tobacco industry, again I thought it would go back to natural scrubland. There is no scrub there. It is all weeds. Weeds are the great competitor and they have choked out all of the natural scrubland. So we now have the situation that we are cultivating weeds where these sugar mills and other things have closed.

If the government said that you have to go west of the great divide and you have to put irrigation in, that would guarantee the growth of the trees and no competitors to the trees but never in a million years would you be able to cost out irrigating trees. There is just not enough money in the trees. Even if you cost it out over a 30-year life cycle, it is not going to happen. All over Far North Queensland there are giant pine trees, and I mean really giant pine trees that are 70- to 80-foot high. They were all planted because there was going to be a fortune in pine trees. Quite frankly the government’s pine tree plantations in north Queensland, which were very intelligently put in as small pods so that we did not have a monoculture type situation that we have with the MISs, have never been harvested nor will they ever be harvested. Most of them have been knocked down in a cyclone, broken off or something. We were told that it would be a good thing—it was a great investment and we would make a lot of money out of it over a 15- or 20-year time frame. That has not come to pass.

To be very specific one of the senior people associated with one of the sugar mills told me: ‘We are making 120 million gross and our cost structure is 115 million. We grow about 25,000 hectares of cane land in the area’—it might have been a bit more. He said: ‘They say they are going to take 40,000 hectares in north Queensland. That means we have to lose at least 7,000 here but, if we lose 7,000 of our 24,000 hectares, then we will close the mill. Instead of grossing $120 million as we are at the present moment, we will lose a fifth of that or whatever it is and we will only be making $95 million. We’re not going to be trading insolvent, so we will close the mill. So you understand if your friends in Canberra continue with the MISs then they will close all of the mills in north Queensland if they get their target amount of 40,000 hectares.’ Of the three companies up there one of them wanted 15,000, one of them wanted 12,000 and it added up to a target of 40,000 hectares in north Queensland. The old-time Labor Party would be turning in their graves if they saw a Labor government moving legislation to protect tax dodgers who are in many cases nothing more than con merchants.

There is one last aspect of this which I should address. These people say that they are going to plant a tree, it is going to grow into a big tree and it is going to yield a great benefit for Australia when harvested. I point out that that is an absolute myth. We do not process trees in Australia anymore, they are taken overseas to be processed and that arrangement will increase rather than decrease. When they plant the tree they are planting a foreign item—these trees are Indian teak, they are exotics. White ants, for example, do not attack them if they are a foreign tree—so we are bringing in a foreign culture into our environment, which does very great damage as well.

In wrapping up, the principle of defending people who are dodging tax is the worst possible type of principle. In fact, just the opposite should occur. They are taking good productive land and turning it into nonproductive land. Even if it were productive, even if they took this through to processing and we accepted their argument that it was profitable, we already know that the outcome is that 2,000 jobs will be replaced by 12 jobs. We already know that. We have plantations being harvested at this very moment and they are worth 12 jobs. We know that we have 2,000 jobs in the sugar industry.

They announced the opening of a new sugar mill in Ingham, which willbe a wonderful thing. It will be a mill be based on ethanol and biofuel production rather than sugar, which give a lot better return over a long period of time and would use the bagasse. There would be high-pressure boilers, which hardly any of our sugar mills have, so that all of the sugar cane fibre, which is left over after you take the sugar out and convert it into ethanol, would be transformed into electricity. We can produce 2,000 megawatts of electricity from these sugar mills with a little bit of assistance from the government—not a lot, but a little bit. There are 40,000 megawatts of electricity produced in Australia. We can give you 2,000 megawatts, which is five per cent of Australia’s entire electricity production, for virtually no cost at all forever. The first mill that was supposed to produce this has announced that it is not going to open as a result of your MISs. The other issue is that the state government is saying that they are not going to allow any more licences to harvest water for the immediate future. So the industry says that, under those circumstances, they cannot open up this mill. An extra 400 or 500 jobs in Ingham have already gone up in smoke as a result of this. I can say the same thing at Mareeba, Gordonvale, Tully, Innisfail or any of the towns in the far north.

Mr Deputy Speaker Scott, you would be well aware of this—if there has ever been a disaster, it has been the corporates going into agriculture. There is hardly a single solitary corporate left in the cattle industry in Australia. That is, arguably, our biggest agricultural industry and there is hardly one left, one of them is in very serious trouble, there is another one and that is about it. What a failure. (Time expired)

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