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

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. My son said, 'In a very fragile post-GFC environment to have a massive cut in government spending is very dangerous policy indeed. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it's extremely irresponsible policy.' Then he went on to say that those people who are out there cheering and saying, 'Beauty, we're getting rid of all these bludging public servants'—because a lot of the business class see public servants as bludgers—are exactly the same people who, in four months time, are going to be checking their cash registers and whingeing, crying and howling that they are in serious trouble and are going to want to leach the Queensland government. On this one, my son was wrong when he said four months because it was four weeks. I met with two of the biggest retailers in North Queensland and they said, 'Mate, he's driven us straight through the floor.' One of them is a rabid LNP supporter. He would die before he would vote for me or for any KAP people, but he was in terror. His figures have just collapsed.

We went to a motelier at one of the most successful motels in Northern Australia and also one of the biggest. Their figures are down a third. They just got a telephone call to cancel all government bookings for the next 12 months. The lady involved said, 'I didn't take much notice because they'll ring me up next week and say "Can you book four". They'll do it on a piecemeal basis. In the last two months, I doubt whether we had a single government booking.' I said, 'What would it normally be?' She said that 20 per cent to 30 per cent of all her available accommodation is taken by state government officials.

We have had the longest outage in Charters Towers history. I went away there to boarding school in 1959. So I am familiar with my family's home town. They went there before there was a Charters Towers. Since 1959, we have never had an outage like this. Maintenance has not been done in the electricity industry since before the sacking of 500 Ergon workers. So I leave it to your imagination how much maintenance is going to get done in the future, because these corporatised industries are being price gouged by the former ALP government and now by the current government.

We praise and thank Minister Shorten for what the government are doing today. I have discussed this with the minister because there is some worry on the part of some of my public servants that, if they have to be paid the same rate after this legislation comes in—'If you employ a public servant to continue to do that job, they have to be paid the same rate'—they will sack us and put someone in who can be paid less. The whole idea of going to contract work is that workers will be paid less. I would hate to think that the state government is doing this just to look after their crony rich friends. I am sure they are not doing that. The idea is that the price is going to go down because workers are going to be paid less. If they cannot pay workers less, they will get rid of those workers.

From lengthy discussions with Alex Scott—and we appreciate his time—and Ben Swan in Queensland from the AWU, and, particularly, the Together union's Belinda Johnson in North Queensland, they are not going to be able to sack, for example, all the laundry workers in the hospitals. They cannot just go in and sack all of them.

So, for the time being anyway, what the government is doing is going to be very helpful, and we appreciate the government's and the minister's involvement, and we back the initiative being taken by the government in this area. We would like the minister to keep an eye on the situation in Queensland and give any other assistance he could provide, until—well, clearly, if the government keeps going the way it is going, it will not be the government; please God, we will be. So I would like the ALP, the government of Australia, to be nice to us and listen to us. Any further assistance it can give to the people under attack in Queensland would be very much appreciated, and we thank very much the minister and the government for the initiative.

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