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

In recommending the bill to the House, I have just come back from a tour of the Murray-Darling area. To see what this place has done to the Murray-Darling would make any patriotic Australian blush with embarrassment and shame. It should make every member of this place feel utterly ashamed of themselves. At Mildura, we were told that 85 shops in the town have closed. I drove around the vineyards and the orchards and I felt one in 10 were closed down and was informed that the figure was much closer to one in five. In Griffith, they said 120 shops were closed. I do not know if this is true or not, but these are the things that were being told to me. There most certainly seemed to be many shops closed. In Deniliquin, we were told that there were normally 60 or 70 houses for sale; there are now 155 houses registered for sale.

This place has destroyed the economic base of all inland New South Wales. This place has destroyed the economic base of Northern Victoria and south-eastern South Australia. This place has not destroyed Queensland, because Queensland's Murray-Darling allocation is mostly Cubbie Station. No, this place has kept all the water intact at Cubbie Station and handed it all over to a foreign corporation, when there were other bidders in Australia. What the government should have done was to break up Cubbie Station into 10 or 12 civilised sizes where there would be owner-operators instead of fly-ins from the coast. Most of Cubbie Station is done by fly-in work out of Brisbane, in the main. But instead of doing that they sold it as one big heap, and they sold it to a foreign corporation.

The allegations in this case are very interesting because they are similar to the allegations in the case concerning—and it is not sub judice at the present, so I can speak up—the South Johnstone sugar mill, which was sold. Two mills smaller than it had been sold for over $130 million. We are talking about a mill worth $150 million. It was sold for $2 million because the people that are liquidators are people who are corruptible to a point of being illegal and should be committed to jail. This is happening again, again and again.

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