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

Yes, Deputy Speaker Sidebottom. I speak to the Parliament of Australia in saying this and I do not apologise for my remarks—far from it. On almost a weekly or monthly basis at the very least, I have to sit and watch people I know in North Queensland committing suicide thanks to the decisions of this place. If I speak with great passion and anger, it is because I feel great passion and anger.

I conclude by saying that we were a Queensland government of business people—people who had backed our judgment with our own money and who had dirt under our fingernails. We had not asked other people to do the work for us; we had done it ourselves. We had lived in the mustering camps; we had worked down the mines; we had cut cane by hand. Of the cabinet ministers, 13 had cut cane by hand. Those were the sorts of people who  manned the cabinet in Queensland.

We decided that we could do a lot better by having our own bank—one that would look after our people. We conceived of this bank to help people, but it was the government of Queensland that it helped most. We made a huge amount of money out of it. We laugh at all the great free marketeers. Unfortunately, the party lost its way. It was actually the National Party that sold the bank and they made a thousand million dollars out of it. Bill Gunn and I were made responsible to cabinet for that bank. It pulled 25 per cent of the sugar industry through. In this place a lot of people dragged up the fact that I had been personally responsible for sacking the head when we were turning it into a bank. Yes, I had been. He said: ‘Bob, we are men of the world. Thirty per cent of the sugar industry has to go.’ I said: ‘Listen, Graham, the price of sugar goes up and down like a yo-yo, you imbecile. I will bring you down the graphs.’ I did not say ‘imbecile’. I was more restrained in those days. I took him down graphs of beef industry prices, wool industry prices and sugar industry prices. They go up and down, but what happens to us in agriculture is that, when the price goes up, it is truncated by taxation. When the price goes down, the banks add on, add on, add on. The interest rate was 17 per cent. In my last year in St Francis, we paid 29 per cent—an extra 2½ per cent because we were an at-risk industry, an extra three per cent because we were in an at-risk area and another three per cent because we were in drought. By the time you added it all up, we were paying 29 per cent and that is how we overcame the development bank. (Time expired)

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