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

We got the drought package today, and one has to look at government decision making in the light of comparisons. Unfortunately for the LNP, we have to compare their performance with the ALP. The ALP gave us $420 million and this mob gave us $280 million. So if we are comparing performance levels then I would have to be standing here praising the Labor Party, and God forbid that I would ever do that!

What the drought decision really says is, 'We will not be having agriculture in Australia.' We were given $280 million in loans. To put that in perspective I rang up the leader of the Cattle Crisis Council, and I asked, 'How many people have you got in serious trouble?' in a particular town. He said, 'About 50 per cent.' So 50 per cent is 60 cattlemen in one town and they have an average debt of $5 million. So the amount given today will fix up one town out of 400 towns in western Queensland. Small thanks.

This could be fixed up immediately within three seconds, but what has every government in Australian history done? They have simply set up a reconstruction board—a lairy name for putting four or five people in the Department of Agriculture here to one side and a couple of Treasury officials. Six people together in a room, they borrow some money at three per cent and they loan it out at two per cent. The one per cent is a deferred interest payment and it is picked up further down the track when these people come good.

I speak with authority because I was the minister in charge and responsible for the state bank in Queensland. We borrowed, in terms of today's money, about $1,000 million and we put it out there at two per cent interest. We borrowed it at three per cent and put it out at two per cent, and within five years we had made about $300 or $400 million of profit because the sugarcane farmers came good. The commercial interest rates went back up, which were then about 7½ or eight per cent. Of course, with those commercial interest rates we were able to pay back the deferred one per cent interest payment.

What this says is that we do not want agriculture in this country. Within seven years the country will be a net importer of food. I say that repeatedly in this place, and I do not think that anyone is the slightest bit interested in listening to me saying that. But anyone can go to the library, or to the Bureau of Statistics or to ABARE and get the figures. There is a 128 per cent increase in the last 10 years in imports and a 26 per cent increase in exports. You do not have to be Albert Einstein to work out that the graphs cross! Bye-bye agriculture!

The decision at SPC Ardmona reduces the wage levels there, I am told, to $30,000. Let us face facts: nobody in Australia is going to stay in a job for $30,000. It would be impossible to stay alive with $30,000 if you had a couple of kids. I think the result there is: bye-bye food processing in Australia. We already know that because they have announced it. I said in the election that within seven years there will be no motor vehicle manufacturing in Australia. I was wrong, wasn't I? Within seven months they said that there would be no motor vehicle manufacturing in Australia.

Few people here realise that the economy of Australia was carried for 25 years by the coal and aluminium industries, not the iron ore industry. Iron ore is a pretty recent phenomenon and is very big now. We now have amongst the highest electricity charges in the world—surprise, surprise!—because we corporatised the electricity industry and there are only three or four operators in the marketplace. They have put prices up 130 per cent in nine years in Queensland—and they went up 30 per cent last year. Aluminium is congealed electricity, so goodbye aluminium industry. That is one of the two industries that have carried the Australian economy. The aluminium and coal industries have provided nearly 20 per cent of our entire export earnings. Clearly, it is going, going, gone. The steel industry has had $70 million of profits this year, but three years ago the industry took two $1 billion losses two years in a row. So I would not be holding my breath about the steel industry.

What about petrol? The NRMA report was released yesterday. We are at nine per cent self-sufficiency now. The government is proposing that we double tax ethanol. That is rather fascinating. Imported oil from the Middle East gets taxed once at the bowser but Australian produced ethanol gets taxed twice: once at the point of production and again at the bowser. Ethanol gets hit twice. It would be good to have explained to me how the Sarina, Dalby and Manildra plants are going to pay 80c in the dollar tax when their competitors pay only 45c in the dollar tax. It will be rather interesting to hear the government explain that to us.

In five months the government has presided over effectively writing the death warrant on agriculture, on food processing, on the motor vehicle industry, on the steel industry, on the aluminium industry and on the petrol industry. You might think petrol is not important. When I left school as a young man at 17 I thought: 'Good on that John F Kennedy. He stood up to those dirty rotten Russians and we won't have any more wars.' That was when I was 17. When I was 18 they handed me a rifle. I had to give them two telephone numbers and I was on 24-hour call-up to go and fight a war in Indonesia—a war we were fighting to protect our oil pipeline. Every single year since 1964 we have been fighting a war to protect our oil pipeline, yet we have a government today—and the last government were just as bad, if not worse, if that is possible—that has decided we will not have a petrol industry at all or an ethanol industry either, so we will import all of our petrol. The rest of the world has thought they have to fight wars to protect their oil pipeline. Since 1964 till 2014 we have been fighting wars almost every single year.

Let us go back in history and have a look at the Second World War. Why did Japan go to war? Can anyone tell me why Japan went to war? Because the Americans cut off their oil supply. Where did it go? It immediately made a thrust down to Indonesia, and to protect the Indonesian periphery they had to take Australia. Where was the great battle that turned into the Second World War? Stalingrad. What is the significance of Stalingrad? It is the gateway to the oilfields. The Germans threw all of their resource might to make sure they could secure and get access to the oilfields. That is what wars are fought over.

The government here is so toweringly irresponsible. On both sides they have billy goat brains because they think we can run a country without any petrol whatsoever. I do not have my biofuels map with me that I carry around everywhere, but I have held it up here many times, so most of you have seen it. On that map every single country on Earth is coloured in. Every single country has ethanol. There is only one country on Earth outside of Africa that does not have ethanol and that is Australia. Once again I am sure that the rest of the world is wrong and we are the only clever dicks on the planet! We are the only clever people! Of course, the other possibility is that we are run by a bunch of billy goats and the rest of the world, who have seen fit every single year to fight a war to protect their oil pipeline, have it right. They desperately want to protect an indigenous source of supply.

Speaking on behalf of what is left of the ethanol industry in Australia, the ethanol industry can supply for you tomorrow very easily 55 per cent of your petrol needs and can increase food production because if we take the starch out of the grain then the grain is a much better quality food. So we can improve dramatically our food production by moving to ethanol, which is contrary to what the greenies say. I point out to any greenies listening that their patron saint Mr Al Gore on page 136 of An Inconvenient Truth says that the first solution to the CO2 problem and global warming is ethanol. We might have to build a few dams to get there, but that is not a great problem.

We live in a country where the cost of electricity now is reputed to be the highest in the world. We live in a country where the cost of petrol is 155c a litre while the cost in the United States—one of my friends just came back from there—is 79c a litre. The cost of petrol in Brazil when I was over there was 74c a litre, and I have been told it is still under 80c a litre. Those countries have ethanol. It would appear to me that America is now on about 20 per cent and Brazil is on about 55 per cent, but it is cheaper than petrol. You can buy ethanol much more cheaply than you can buy petrol, hence the cheap price of petrol in those countries.

The cost of a house in this country is the highest in the world. You people who sit in this parliament, who is responsible for this? Maybe penguins from Antarctica are responsible for our having the highest petrol prices in the world, the highest electricity prices on the world? I lie when I say the 'highest housing cost', because Hong Kong has the highest housing cost, but we are No. 2 in the world. Demographia puts out an annual report; anyone can read the report and find that out. How do you solve these problems? With petrol it is quite easy. You simply do what the Americans, the Brazilians, the Chinese, the Indians, the Japanese and every single country in Europe that signed up for 10 per cent ethanol did. We are a gifted nation: we can very easily produce that ethanol from sugar cane, we can very easily produce it from grain. We could do it tomorrow, and we can produce it for around 85c a litre, so we can sell it for under a dollar a litre.

Let me move to electricity. I can speak with great authority on all of these areas, and if I sound confident—sometimes people accuse me of being arrogant—and sometimes it is hard not to be, it is because when I was minister for electricity in the Queensland government, we had the cheapest electricity in the world. That was how we secured the aluminium industry for our country. We heard the last ALP speaker make reference, mockingly, to the Bjelke-Petersen government. Well hey, mate, you have only got a decent wage because of that man, because his government had the perspicacity to take one or two per cent of the coal that was mined in Queensland—they took it for free; they said, 'Thank you, Buster Brown, we're taking it for free'—so our electricity in Queensland was provided by free coal.

The brilliant and clever ALP government gave all of the gas away. I am sure the LNP are very upset because they were not there to give it away to their overseas corporate masters. They most certainly promised before the election there would be 'no gas drilling east of the Condamine'. That is an actual quote from the statement made by the now Premier of Queensland in front of a public meeting that Ray Hopper was also at. Ray could not live with the shame of his people being told a flagrant lie by the government he was associated with. They had not been there two months—no drilling east of the Condamine! You have got to look after your big corporate sponsors. When I played rugby league, we were told, 'You've got to look after your corporate sponsors'. Well that is a lesson that the Queensland parliament has learnt well.

We have some 23 or 25 sugar mills in Queensland. They produce around four megawatts of electricity. The modern sugar mill produces around 100 megawatts of electricity. If you took $1,000 million—I think you could get away with loaning it, but you might have to give it as a grant—and gave it to those sugar mills to convert them to the production of electricity, then you could produce electricity for just about zero. We are burning all of the sugar cane fibre after we have squeezed the sugar juice out, we burn the fibre to get rid of it. Ninety per cent of the energy is just burnt to get rid of it. By spending a little tiny bit of money, we can then get it for free because there is no wage content. The sugar mill with electricity production has the same manning levels as the sugar mill without electricity production.

We can have cheap petrol—America and Brazil have got it now; we can have cheap electricity. We have cheap electricity in Queensland, the cheapest in the world. It is how we got the aluminium industry to Queensland. These things can be done. The cost of housing—I pay the minister at the table, the member for Wentworth, Mr Turnbull, great tribute because he and an Oxford don put out a paper and they said the cost of housing is pretty simple really. Just take out the restrictions, the choke hold of the state and local government laws. Take that choke hold out and you can have cheap housing! Once again, I speak with authority because the local land court clerk of the court and I had control of—and it would be well for the honourable minister, instead of talking to the ALP, to listen to this little anecdote I am going to tell the House.

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