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

I volunteered to go to Indonesia as a lad of 18. We had to give out three telephone numbers, and we were on 24-hour call-up to go over there. I want to make the point that I do not think I was being very patriotic; I just assumed everyone was going. My logic at the time was that it was better to get in first. So I do not want to make out that I was a hero, because I most certainly was not.

My electorate takes in Townsville and has for a long time, so I am very familiar with the biggest Army base in Australia and the people who man that Army base. The family breakdowns in the Army are horrifically higher than in any other areas in Australian society. Mining is another very bad area. Because of fly-in mining, people are away from home all the time, and loneliness creates problems in family relationships. There are forced separations. There is the Child Support Agency, which makes it very easy now for a woman to leave. And then there is a very oppressive regime that falls upon the soldier, because now he has to make child support payments and is left with no money.

So when you go into the Army there is a very grave risk to your family. When you go into the Army you go and fight, and there is a grave risk to your life. We recently had probably one of the most moving events in North Queensland's history in the last 20 or 30 years: Ben Chuck's funeral. He was from a very prominent and well loved family up on the Atherton Tablelands. The Prime Minister—God bless her—and the Leader of the Opposition—God bless him—both turned up to honour a man who had given his life for his country. If you knew that family, you would never doubt for a moment that—unlike me, who joined up because everyone was joining up, not for the best of reasons—they really are very patriotic people. Ben was a very, very patriotic person. My chief of staff was at school with Ben. You would never doubt their patriotism. And they made that point that his death will not be used as an argument with respect to Afghanistan. It is the decision of our country to be there, and it is our patriotic duty to stand by our country. That is the line they took—and I hope I am interpreting that correctly.

Service men and women are just very patriotic people. They risk their life, they risk their family—out of all proportion to anyone else in our society. And because of these factors, particularly the marriage one, we have a very high attrition rate in the Army. People start thinking about it and then decide they do not want to be in the Army, so we lose people with very great attributes that our country simply cannot afford to lose. When the opposition spokesman spent his time passing gratuitous insults to me and wasting three or four minutes of his speech time—rather stupidly, I thought—I was thinking: 'Well, you were there for 12 years. If this was so dreadful and horrific and terrible, why didn't you do something about it in the 12 years you were there, as the government of Australia?' I, amongst many others, including some of your own members, were screaming for action on the indexation issue with respect to our soldiers.

You stand here in a position of colossal hypocrisy, because you were there for 12 years and you did nothing about it. If these are such burning questions, were you just a bunch of numbskulls who did not understand it or were you very callous people who did not even bother about it?

The government and the opposition agree, as do the crossbenchers, although I speak for myself and not for them, that these are good moves. The people in the Army I have spoken to have advised that these are very good little things. The pharmaceuticals is one; travel is another. It sounds like a small thing but it is not. It is 20 bucks to get a taxi to go anywhere these days, and $20 is a hell of a lot of money to a veteran on a pension. To be able to do that afterwards is very important, because you get sick and you cannot ring up and get permission in a time frame that is acceptable. The bereavement payment and clean energy are very good things.. But I am not going to go through them all as other members have already done so. There are a lot of good things here.

The second reason we will be voting for this is that as we understand it—I cannot get any sense out of the opposition on this—if we vote for the opposition's amendment all of this is lost. I cannot see any purpose in losing all of this.

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