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

No, I am not interested in whether he listens or not, but Mr Turnbull should take note that in Charters Towers, where we had no restrictions, every time the land price went over $6,000, we would dump 15 or 20 blocks on the market. So once they removed restrictions—we kept the price at $6,000—when they abolished the mining act, which was a criminal stupidity, we lost control of the land and it went under the restrictive regime of the state government and the local councils. Under that restrictive regime, within six years we were up to $127,000 for a block of land in Charters Towers. We had gone from $6,000—which is absolute proof that what Mr Turnbull and the Oxford don's paper put forward was absolutely dead spot-on, and there was the proof of it.

I would like to speak about foreign ownership, but I do not have time. Suffice to say that some 15 years ago the six great mining companies of Australia were all Australian owned. Last week I had the very great honour of going to Fortescue Metals and looking over their operations for a day. They are still one big mining operation that is Australian owned. But the six great mining companies of Australia that were once all Australian owned are now all foreign owned. They account for 83 per cent of our metals. Almost the entire gas industry, around 90 per cent, is foreign owned. We are taking the water off inland Australia and giving it to the gas industry—what for? There are no jobs in the gas industry. Just build a pipeline and the gas is pumped out to the coast and away it goes.

The Australian flag will fly over a country that cannot make a motor car, that cannot make an electric motor, that cannot make a tyre. It will be a Third World technological backwater. It will fly over a country that is predominantly foreign owned—its resources, its land, its water. We have six rivers that we can develop for water in Australia. Two of them have been put under national parks—a piece of mindless stupidity; two of them have been given to the Chinese; and that leaves just two for Australia, neither of which are being developed, because the government will not allow them to be developed. (Time expired)

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