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

You are doing it and you are most certainly continuing on exactly the same as your predecessors. Do you want to take any bets on whether the sugar applications for sale will be knocked back? Do you want to take a bet for a thousand bucks down on the table tomorrow? I would willingly part with it if I knew I could retain ownership in Australia of these assets.

To some degree you cannot maintain an asset if it is going broke. I have said again, again and again in this place that it is impossible for our farmers. They have to sell their water rights because they cannot make any money out of farming. Why can’t they? Because the only country without subsidies or tariffs in agriculture is Australia. Get your latest OECD report out—39 per cent OECD subsidy tariff level—and the subsidy tariff level in Australia is four per cent. If you think our farmers can run a 100-metre race and give their competitors a 30-metre start you do not know much about farming or any other damn thing in the competitive and economic world that is out there.

I most certainly feel very, very strongly in opposition to this bill. If the House does not divide in the vote on this bill I would like my opposition to be registered on it because I see it as another nail in the coffin of agriculture in Australia. Not only has this parliament sat idly by and watched this nation’s great assets, which were built up by our forebears, being flogged off overseas but they have watched agriculture sink to a point where within five years the nation will not be able to feed itself. Isn’t that something to be proud of as a nation—that we cannot even feed ourselves! I disagreed with the report last week that said that that is the situation now. I do not think it is. But within five years there is absolutely no doubt that it will be. That is what we have fallen to in Australia.

I have not done the figures recently and I do not know if the figures are available. Within two years of the dairy industry deregulation, arguably three years, this nation went to a farmer committing suicide every four days in this country. This is something for this parliament to be proud of! I am not. I am ashamed to have my name associated with this parliament over a period of 16 years. We sold off the farm. We sold off our mining industry. We closed down our manufacturing industry. We have oppressed our farmers to a point where one of them decided that it was better not to live in this world at all. The Australia that you have created is such a horrific place for farmers that one of them thought that he would be better out of it, and he exited in the most terrible way possible.

I conclude by saying that we are burying so many now in North Queensland. As the coffin is going down we play that magnificent and beautiful song written by our northern son, Graeme Connors. The song, which was sung at the Opera House to commemorate 200 years of Australia, is Let the cane fields burn and says:

Well let the cane fields burn

Let the flames rise

Let the politicians and the bankers in the city look up

In wonder at the glow in the skies

Let the cane fields burn—

as the bloke incinerates himself in the middle of his cane fields. I know two people who have done that.

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