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

I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

Our country has been in the grip of the economic rationalists and the policies of market fundamentalism now for some 25, arguably 30-odd, years. The net result of it has been that we now have to buy all of our whitegoods from overseas, we will soon have to buy all of our structural steel from overseas and our roofing iron from overseas, so your house and its contents will all be purchased from overseas. By the end of next year there will be no motor cars built in Australia, so you will buy your motor car from overseas. You will also buy your clothing, of course, from overseas, and your footwear. The only item that you will not be buying from overseas is food. But let me just have a look at that quickly. Over the last 10 years exports have increased at 10 per cent and imports have increased at around 125 per cent. So you do not have to be Albert Einstein to figure out that within 10 or 15 years Australia will also be a net importer of food.

Where are we going to get this money to buy everything from overseas? With a relatively small item, petrol, we were sending one thousand million dollars overseas in 2002 to buy petrol. We now send $25,000 million a year overseas to buy petrol. Where are we going to get this money? You cannot just keep buying things from overseas unless you are selling something overseas.

Mr Keating, an economic rationalist, destroyed the wool industry. It was our biggest export item. Sixty-three per cent of it has gone now. Our biggest export earning item is coal. We were getting over $100 a tonne, on average, for coal. We are now getting about $60 a tonne for coal. Coal is in desperate straits.

The next item is iron ore and that is what we are talking about today. Production figures for iron ore this year will be over 700 million tonnes. This will bring in or should bring in revenue of $110 billion. But, because the price of iron ore has dropped from around $140 a tonne to just over $70 a tonne, the revenue coming into Australia has been cut clean in half. The current account has suffered a crippling blow of some $50 billion a year. With respect to the 'do nothing' approach, it is not as though they have a policy of free market; it is a policy of do nothing and the marketplace will look after us.

If you revert to the jungle, which is what they of course are proposing, you will find out that the big tigers eat everyone in the jungle. We are not the big tigers. The big tigers are the big multinational corporations that stalk the earth and we are on their menu! That is what is happening here.

I can tell those naive enough to believe that big corporations, big powerful figures, throughout the world will sit back idly by, whilst everyone white-ants by overproduction and thereby undermines the price of iron ore that that is not going to happen. They will destroy the small players, and even a number of the big players, and will get rid of them.

As was explained to me by, arguably, the then leading mining corporate on earth, if we have the volatility of the international marketplace, then we must be big enough to ride that volatility and survive. But what he is not saying is that if we remove the volatility and the competition we can prosper and, magically, make huge profits. As I have said a million times in this place, the problem in this place is that your mummies and daddies did not have you play Monopoly because, if you had played Monopoly as a child, you would know that the name of the game in making money is to destroy your opposition and to become a monopoly. And if you have a monopoly, for example, in the game of Monopoly, on public services, essential services—electricity and water is the name of the game in Monopoly—then you get seven times more money than you would have got if you did not have a monopoly. What game do you think the Rio Tintos and the BHP Billitons are playing out there? They are playing monopoly, whereas you fools are playing some sort of ideological, primitive jungle-type ideology that you are perpetrating upon the rest of us. It is not done in any other country on earth.

In fact, in a more enlightened period, Australia called together the sugar-producing nations of the world and said: 'We are five per cent, 10 per cent overproduction and the price has collapsed. All of us are suffering.' The great Jack McEwen—I sit under his picture in my office—was responsible for an agreed-upon cutback in the production. It is no use producing sugar if there is no-one out there to buy it. If people are only prepared to buy it below your cost of production it is not right and it is criminally stupid to continue to produce product at a loss. You are subsidising overseas consumers. Farm debt is doubled. All of our production figures are down—let me cite them quickly—the sheep herd is down 63 per cent; the cattle herd is down 23 per cent; sugar production is down 17 per cent; and the dairy herd is down 31 per cent. Clearly, the farmer is running at a loss and subsidising the rest of the world.

There has been criticism, a withdrawal of support and a balance of statements made by the head of Fortescue, the chairman of the board, Andrew Forrest—and I do not hesitate to say that he is a very great Australian. One of my passionate concerns in this place is the First Australians. And we see over there Mr Brough, one of the very few ministers that we have ever seen in this place do anything for First Australians. He desperately tried to issue title deeds. I wish to heaven he were out there again now. Andrew Forrest has trained 2,000 of our First Australians and 600 of them are working at Fortescue today. There is only one mining operation substantially owned and controlled by Australians and that is Fortescue. I do not come here today to represent them. I speak today to represent the Australian interest and the interests of my own electorate where there is a mass of iron ore reserves along the Northern Territory border.

Are we going to destroy the Australian economy, because this is our major export item? Its price has dropped clean in half. Are we going to sit on our hands and do nothing? Where Treasury should be getting maybe $30 billion or $40 billion a year in revenue from the iron ore industry, Treasury will now be getting maybe $15 billion in revenue. Just the dictates and the interests of the Australian people in terms of the loss of tax revenue should be enough to galvanise support for this inquiry.

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