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

I congratulate the Assistant Treasurer on his excellent contribution, but I would not hold my breath expecting any change from this particular parliament or the new parliament next year.

This is a very wealthy country. In fact, from where I sit, it should be one of the wealthiest countries on earth. I stand in a unique position because, when Premier Bjelke-Petersen was going to Canberra, Bill Gunn and I were effectively running the state of Queensland. We lost government as a result of the Fitzgerald inquiry—and, I might add, we only very narrowly lost government, with only a single minister ever convicted for corruption; some of them were convicted of misusing their ministerial allowances, an entirely different issue. But I saw the great wealth that you can create very quickly in this country.

For the last 10 years I was in the cabinet room, every year that government saw a $200 million tourist development, every year we saw a new mining town open up and every year we saw a new major irrigation dam built. In the 22 years since that government fell, to my knowledge there has not been a single new mining town built in Queensland, there has not been a single $200-plus million tourist resort built and there has not been a single dam built—not one of those items. So those great wealth creators that were leaping into Queensland every year have been destroyed. Why have they been destroyed? Because every time a person wants to do a development, the greenie elements of the Liberal Party or the greenie elements of the Labor Party think of 4,000 reasons that the development cannot go ahead. Eventually the developer just rolls his swag and walks away. That is what has happened again and again in Queensland. So there is no money in the till; there is no tax revenue base to provide the services.

When I was preparing this speech, I was really quite amazed when I added this up—if you are a pensioner couple on $35,00 a year, wipe out an extra $2,000 for insurance. That is how much insurance has gone up in the last 12 months or two years, and that is because the state government insurance offices were flogged off by the ALP and the LNP governments. They sold our state government insurance offices. So now the big corporations that own the insurance companies can charge whatever they like. There is no benchmark that we can apply to bring them into line. The SGIO was not there as a socialist endeavour; it was there as a benchmark—a policeman to keep the insurance companies honest. If you take the policemen away, you will be charged whatever the oligopolistic corporations want to charge you.

When I went to university I was taught that if you had a monopoly, then there was no free market determination of pricing, that if you had a oligopoly there was no free market determination of pricing and that that means few buyers and/or sellers in the market. I was also taught that a competitive market is defined as an unlimited number of buyers and sellers. So, if you wanted a proper determination of price, you had to have an infinite number of buyers and an infinite number of sellers. Where we have just three electricity generators—I would say pretty soon it will become two generators in Australia—they can charge whatever they like. It is rather interesting—they put electricity charges up 10 per cent every year.

See this speech in context