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

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. Today it is being made easier for people to sell their water rights in the main to the government. But one of the catchy pieces in this bill—and the minister can clarify it—is that it also makes it easier for foreign people to take that water. The most important aspect of this is that if the government buys—as it intends to and as the opposition intend to, if they go in there—15 per cent of Australia’s agricultural production, but four or five farms close down, as happened with our dairy factory, then the dairy factory will no longer be viable. There is not enough rice going through the rice factory, there is not enough cotton going through the cotton gin and there is not enough beef going through the meatworks to keep it open. So they close down. Then your cost structures become much higher because you have to send the product a lot further away because your local sugar mill has closed down.

The facilitating of the sale of the Murray-Darling water rights is further fuelling this movement. Farmers are going broke and they have no alternative but to sell. They do not want to sell, but they are watching five and six generations of their families going up in smoke. If you cannot make a quid you have to sell. That goes for water rights or anything else. What we are saying to you is: you do not realise that when you make these decisions you are putting another nail in the coffin of your country. We will just be a land of serfs working for foreign landlords. If the labour market is again deregulated we will be increasingly working for nothing.

If you cannot see that your dairy industry—the biggest of your agricultural industries—is now foreign owned, if you cannot see that your 15th biggest export item, sugar, is now foreign owned, that 66 per cent of your entire nation’s earnings are coming from your mining companies and 80 per cent of that is now foreign owned, and you are still doing nothing about it, and you are leaving Woolworths and Coles out there to screw the farmers down further, then they will sell off more and more and more. It will not only be their water licences but they will be selling their land and anything else that they can sell. This is the farming sector as well as other sectors of our economy.

Today I will, once again, be a minority of one, or two or three, but people in latter years will say, ‘Wasn’t he right?’ and ‘Who sat in this parliament and let the entire nation be sold off? Who did it?’ Did galahs out in Gunnedah do it; did they?

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