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

I seek leave to speak a second time on this. There was some confusion before.

Leave granted.

I will continue with what I was saying. I spoke about the example of Tasmania, where they went from having the cheapest electricity in the world to probably the most expensive in the world. Tasmania is more expensive than the Australian average. How did that happen? It happened through privatisation. All the same generators and all the same distribution systems are operating. The state has not grown in population, so it is not as if they had to spend money on capital outlays to expand the system. There has been no capital expenditure whatsoever, and yet the price for electricity down there—as in the rest of Australia—is 400 per cent higher than it was prior to corporatisation and then privatisation. How many arguments have you got to put up for the fools in this place to realise that policy must be judged on its outcomes? Surely you cannot come into this place and put up some ideological rubbish that is based upon not a single shred of substantial economic argument or reality.

Let me give you another example, Mr Speaker, used by one of the founders of our little political party, the KAP. The government I was in built the Gateway bridge. We said we would keep the toll on it for 20 years, until it was paid off and we had serviced the interest owed to the people who lent us the money. After 20 years, the toll would be taken off and the people would have this magnificent asset that they would own and be able to use for free. Well, two years before the 20 years were up, the ALP government sold the Gateway bridge. Some 100,000 commuters a day use that bridge—and the member for Moreton probably has a lot of constituents who use that bridge. So 100,000 Brisbane people are now paying $50 a week that is a tax imposed by the ALP government in privatising that bridge. Let me again quote the member for Mount Isa, a person called Robbie Katter. He said:

When you corporatise—

or privatise—

an essential service – you give to that corporation, the right to tax you, at whatever level they feel like, for forever.

So here it is. The ALP government got themselves $400 million to buy their way through the election—which they won, so it probably did help them. They got $400 million to throw some baubles and blankets to the dumb masses, or 'We'll build you a nice little civic centre in your suburb,' and 100,000 people in Brisbane were taxed at the rate of $50 a week—not $50 a month or $50 a year; $50 a week. That is the taxation that was levied upon those poor people.

The cost of corporatising the electricity industry in Queensland is $1,700 a year. It is on a continuous growth curve. In fact, that curve now is slanting upwards in Queensland—it is 400 per cent higher now than it was before corporatisation. But even assuming that privatisation does not make that graph steeper—which of course it will—and it stays where it is, the consumers of Queensland will be paying over $6,000 a year for electricity in four years time. But, not only are they not admitting to their mistakes, they are actually compounding, dramatically, their mistakes by forcing the privatisation of everything else in the state of Queensland.

Let me give you another example. In Queensland the state is bankrupt—it was bankrupted by the ALP, but the LNP are spending $51,000 million more than the ALP spent, so if they were the great bankrupters, the LNP are even greater bankrupters. What are they spending this money on? We just heard about the BaT tunnel, but the Premier spending $670 million on tearing down a virtually new building—25 years is virtually new: you get a lot more than 20 years out of high-rise construction—and putting in its place an even bigger you-beaut building. The current offices of the Premier, the Deputy Premier, the Treasurer and all of them are in what used to be called the 'Power Tower'. It is the equivalent of the Pentagon—most people understand America better than they understand their own country—and is where the public servants and all the powerful people reside. They are going to tear that building down and get one of their corporate cronies to build a building in its place for $670 million. And they are going to say, 'This is good for the people of Queensland, we can get it for $670 million.'

Hold on a minute. They have got to get a capex return on that and they have got a maintenance cost, which Treasury says for all buildings is one-seventh of the cost. Then there is the servicing charge on the capex, so that is another 15 per cent. That is $70 million, roughly, plus another $60 million, so we up to about $150 million a year. It was costing the people of Queensland virtually nothing for the building that is there. Now they are up $170 million a year so that (a) the Premier can live in even more palatial digs and (b) their corporate donors are going to be looked after with the building of this building. That is the real reason, of course, why we are privatising the assets, so that the big corporations can get hold of an essential service and charge what they like. This is the greatest fix that you have ever seen. There is precedent for it, as I said. In 1215 at a little place called Runnymede in England—some of my forebears, I am told, happened to be there on the day—we said, 'Hold on, Mr King, the Crown doesn't own England, the people own England.' Well, that is not a concept that is abroad in Australia. The concept abroad in Australia is that the Crown owns it.

Probably the most important argument of all in a country like Australia is about when you say that the government is out of building development infrastructure. I have listened to about 12 speakers today and every single one of them has referred to 'infrastructure'. In my day, infrastructure was a railway line into the coalfields, it was a port for coal, it was a beef road—that was infrastructure. Not one single speaker today mentioned that sort of infrastructure: development infrastructure. It is a very simple concept to me, as a person who has had cattle all my life. We always say: you can air-condition the living room or you can water the far paddock. You can increase your productivity and your real wealth or you can spend the money on self-indulgence—that is your choice. Every single speaker here today has spoken on self-indulgence. If I can again quote the welterweight champion of north-west Queensland, Robbie Katter, he asked: 'What do you get for the BaT tunnel?'—that tunnel that was referred to by the previous speaker in this place.

The government is broke in Queensland, but they can find $1,000 million to build a new pleasure dome for themselves and they can find $5,000 million for yet another tunnel in Brisbane—which, I might add, brings this so-called infrastructure to 24 kilometres of tunnelling in Brisbane. Melbourne has got hardly any tunnelling. Sydney, with five million people, has only got 14 kilometres of tunnelling. But Brisbane, with a little over one million people, has got 24 kilometres. But let me go back what Robbie Katter said when he asked what you get for that $5,000 million: 'I'll tell you what you get for the $5,000 million. You get is an extra four minutes of viewing time on your television at night.' A few thousand people in Brisbane will get to watch television for about an extra four minutes a day.

If that $6,000 million that they are spending on the 'Taj Mahal' and the BaT tunnel had been used to build the railway line into the Galilee Basin, coal would now be moving out of the Galilee Basin, which holds half of Australia's coal reserves. That coal would be moving if the railway had been built not by private development, not by Gina Rinehart nor by Adani, but by the government, the people. To understand this we have to turn the clock back to 1960. In that year in Australia there was great consternation because we again had to import coal from overseas. We were a coal importing country in 1960, and I can refer you to a number of books if you want to question me on that. Probably the best is on the microeconomics of development by the dean of the faculty at ANU, but I can quote you many other books..

We were a coal-importing country. How did we go from being a coal-importing country, within 10 or 15 years, to being the biggest coal-exporting country on earth? How did we do that? I will tell you how we did that, because I was there at the time. We built a railway line. The government—the people—built a multi-user facility. We could have said to Utah, 'If you want a railway line you build it.' If they had built it they most certainly would not have let Theiss on that railway line, nor any of the other Australian companies, like BHP.

There was a decision taken by Charles Court in Western Australia. The very, very great Australian Andrew Forrest has said that development was held up by 15 or 20 years in iron ore because BHP was forced to build the railway line themselves. Naturally they said, 'It's our railway line; no-one else is going to use it.' So no-one else could.

In Queensland it was a multi-use facility. When the government's total income was $3,000 million a year we borrowed $1,000 million and built the railway line. That is why you have a coal industry today. Thirty per cent of this nation's total income from overseas, for the last 50 years, has come from coal. Why do we have the coal industry?—because an enlightened government said, 'No; we don't believe in free markets, non-free markets, privatisation or non-privatisation. We don't understand any of this ideological rubbish. There's a whole stack of people who want to mine coal. None of them has the money to build a railway line. If someone individually builds a railway line that will be his railway line and he can screw everybody or stop them from using it.' We said, 'That's a stupid idea; we'll build the railway line.' So we built the railway line.

The rest is history; Queensland became the greatest coal-exporting state on earth, producing $50,000 million in terms of today's money, every single year, for the Australian economy and the people of Queensland. We did that, and we did it by building a railway line. It would have been anathema to the people in those governments. We were considered the most right-wing government in Australia. So I do not know what right wing and left wing mean. All I know is that Adam Bandt is considered very left wing and I am considered very right wing. We both agree on one thing: that this country was built by the government building the ports, the railways and those assets that were necessary for the development of our country.

You may say that private enterprise can do it. Private enterprise would do it for their own selfish interests. If Mr Adani is allowed to build the railway line in Queensland and he owns that railway line then that would not facilitate growth; it would facilitate profits for him. Under section 457 visas, which were introduced by the ALP—do not let them criticise the Liberal Party—and which the Liberal Party say they are going to double, we will get no benefit at all. (Time expired)

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