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

I rise to speak on the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2015-2016. The modern economic era in Australian history—and I speak with some pride in saying that my book on the history of Australia was a best seller—started with the deregulation of the wool industry. Mr Keating, lauded as the 'world's greatest Treasurer', deregulated the wool industry. At that point in time, wool was the biggest export earning item for Australia; it was bigger than coal. Wool was worth six thousand million dollars a year, whereas coal was 5.9 thousand million dollars a year. To completely destroy what was the economic base of this nation for 170 years was a fairly remarkable achievement by the great deregulator, the father of market fundamentalism, and the other advocates of extremist zealotry of the free market in this place. That is how they started their procession of disasters.

We look, over the next 12 months, to the loss of the motor vehicle industry. When the Holden motor car came out I was only a little fella. My daddy walked around the car about seven times and he said, 'This is made in Australia. This is Australian.' That we could build a motor car! In my history of Australia it occupies nearly a 10th of the book. This was one of the greatest achievements of the Australian people.

The other great achievement was the Snowy Mountains scheme, which is still one of the 27th leading engineering achievements in world history. This parliament closed down one-third of it. The ALP and the NLP voted unanimously to flog it off to a foreign corporation. But God bless the Australian people. My history book was called 'An incredible race of people'. We rose up in rage, anger and fury, and the government got so terrified and a little bit enlightened from a decent fellow—John Howard, the Prime Minister, who was a big enough man to reverse his judgement. But it was only the people of Australia that reversed that decision. The 30 per cent taking and destruction of the agricultural production has gone and it has not been returned.

When I was a young fella we bought our motor vehicles in Australia; 62 per cent of them were Australian made. We bought our whitegoods in Australia. The fridge in our home was Australian made. Our air conditioner was Australian made. Our stove was Australian made. Our washing machine was Australian made. The television was Australian made. When computers first started, believe it or not, we produced some computers. Our clothing was Australian made. Our family owned a number of clothing stores and at the clothing store that I was involved in almost all of our clothes were Australian made. Furniture was made in Australia.

In 2002, almost all of our petrol came from Australia. We sent $1,000 million overseas to buy petrol and diesel in 2002. This year we will send $25,000 million overseas. We are going to have to find $16,000 million to buy our motor cars and our spare parts from overseas. How much money has Australia got to buy something from overseas? This is pretty simple. I am one of the few people in this place that makes money out of my own business acumen, my own energies and my three businesses I created out of absolutely nothing; there was nothing there when I started. So I speak with great authority from my own private experience and, of course, I was the minister that introduced prawn and fish farming in Australia. I will talk about that a little bit in a moment.

Where are we going to get the money to buy all of our motor vehicles, all of our whitegoods, all of our clothing, all of our furniture and all of our petrol? Talking about food, if we take out two elements, live cattle and coarse grain—you cannot eat live cattle and you cannot eat coarse grain, obviously—you are left with the food element. Actually, we are importing now almost as much as we are exporting. In actual fact, we are 50 per cent dependent, if you like, for our food from overseas. At the present rate that is a 125 per cent increase in imports every 10 years and only a 28 per cent increase in exports. You do not have to be Albert Einstein to work out that we will be a net food importing country. So we have no petrol and now we have to get our food from overseas, as well as our motor vehicles, our clothing and our whitegoods. Where are we going to get the money to buy these things? We were told we were going to get it out of iron ore and coal.

I have just had my 70th birthday so I have been around for a fair while. I have been in business for myself since I was 23 years of age. This is the first time in my entire life that there has been nothing happening. Every single year of my adult life the coal industry surged forward. The Queensland government built 3½,000 kilometres of railway line, each year opening up more and more coalfields. In the last 25 years there has not been one kilometre of railway line built—not one kilometre. So the coal industry now has to rely upon old, worn-out coalmines. They are old, they are worn out and they are non-competitive. Unless the railway line is built into the new fields, the Galilee coalfields, then that industry will continue to die. It has already shed 15,000 jobs in Queensland, and there is not a town in Queensland that is not feeling the hurt.

Mr Keating announced this free market and said that we were going to be a free and open economy. And I remember this very vividly, because in those days I used to switch my radio on and listen to the news—I do not anymore, because it is too depressing—I thought: 'Is the man mad? How can we compete against the Asian countries? The average income there is under $5,000 a year. How can we possibly compete?' People say that wages are too high in Australia. Well, what is the solution? To go down to coolie wages, is it, of $5,000 a year? I thought: 'Is the man mad? There are only two things that can happen here. Our wages must fall to their level, or we close the industries.' I thought that it was an either-or proposition, but I found out that it was not an either-or proposition—it was both. We are now seeing our wage structures going down, and we are watching our industries close down. We have scored the double!

But that is not the end of the madness. When history books are written of this century—I wrote my history book of the last century—they will record that these were the worst governments in this country's history. That is saying a lot, because the people that left us completely unarmed before the pending Japanese invasion of Australia have a lot to answer for, as do the people that drove us into the Depression. Australia was driven into the Depression and never worked itself out. We never figured out that we had to expand the money supply; we listened to an idiot called Sir Niemeyer, from the Bank of England, instead of listening to our own Treasurer, Edward Theodore, who had the solutions.

There is a lot of competition as to which is the worst government, but the governments of the last 25 years or, arguably, 30 years have cold-bloodedly destroyed each of these industries. Each of these industries has been destroyed by government action. What was the government action? In the case of the wool industry, it was deregulation. In the case of the prawn and fish farming industry—which should be worth $10,000 million a year—it was the greenie movement. They imposed conditions upon us which nowhere else in the world has to meet, and we cannot possibly meet them and compete. In the motor vehicle industry, it was the removal of tariffs and the high Australian dollar—clothing, whitegoods and furniture, similarly. In food, let me be very specific, it was the removal of tariffs. If every other country on earth has a 39 per cent tariff subsidy regime and you have four per cent, clearly your food industry is going to close down. Do you think that our farmers are 32 per cent better than the farmers in the rest of the world?

I have only been overseas for about nine days, but two of those days were spent on what they call a cattle ranch, in America. I tell you what, you would want to get up very early in the morning to compete against them. We got up at four o'clock in the morning with an axe to smash the ice. Their industry is very similar to ours; I was amazed that their station properties were about the same size as ours. They had no grass; it was the middle of winter. We have no grass at the end of the year. But they have distillers grain from the ethanol industry, so they can get through their dry period. During our dry period, our cattle just die because we cannot afford to feed them anymore. We are up against 39 per cent versus four per cent. It is impossible to compete against that.

We have only two people to sell to on the home market. This is the only country in the world in this situation. The Americans are screaming because Walmart and their other competitor have 23 per cent of the marketplace. Heavens! Woolworths and Coles have 90 per cent of the marketplace. That is not my figure, by the way; that is the ABS figure for 2002, and I am using Woolworths's and Coles's own figures for their market growth, and the AC Nielsen series figures. So that is not a figure plucked out of the air.

The third issue is the dollar. This is rather curious, and this is probably the most important thing. We once had a political party called the Country Party, and it defended the interests of the exporters and, to some degree, the manufacturers, because they compete against imports. So the dollar was crucial. As Doug Anthony said to me as a very young person: 'Don't worry about subsidies and tariffs; we don't worry about that. What we worry about is the dollar.' In his last year parliament, I think it was, he said to the Australian public, 'You bring down the dollar or I'll bring down the government.' McMahon had announced a revaluation, Menzies had announced a revaluation and he did not listen to McEwen, so McEwen threw him out on his head. He was eight years in the wilderness before he came back in again. This taught them a very salutary lesson. The Liberals learnt from the actions of the Country Party.

Now, we do not have a Country Party and so now we have interest rates that are at 2.7 per cent—the average for the last two years. That sounds pretty low, doesn't it? Well, it is pretty low until you compare it to the rest of the world, that has 0.2 per cent! Now it looks very high indeed. In fact, it is nearly 1,000 per cent higher than the rest of the world.

We are out of step on food—subsidies and tariffs; we are out of step on interest rates; and we are out of step on Woolworth and Coles—the Americans scream because they have 23 per cent, their big two. Where are we in step with the rest of the world?, I said to my son when he was very young, 'It is not very clever: take a bashing once, son, but not twice. You just figure out how he bashed you and you do it back to him, right?' It is the same with trade and business. If someone is beating you, you find out how he is beating you and you beat him back. But we belong to some sort of numbskull organisation called the Parliament of Australia. History will record that this place was responsible for the destruction of each of these industries.

I am going to help Mr Hockey out here—and I speak with authority because I was the second-ranking minister in the Queensland government, which was easily the most successfully-performing one, economically. Even our worst enemies said we were the economic superstars. We ran Queensland on $8,000 million a year. The Liberals skite about being 'small spenders'. They could not run it on $51,000 million a year! We were running it on $8,000 million and they could not run it for that. And the bunch of brainless in the ALP could not run it on $49,000 million, but they looked pretty good after the Liberals had finished and taken it to $51,000 million.

What did they spend it on? They spent it on tunnels. Let me quote Robbie Katter. My son is a member of state parliament. He asked, 'What did you spend the money on? You spent it on tunnels in Brisbane. You are the most tunnelled city in the world.' We were told there was no money for the budget next year. He said, 'We spent $5,000 million for another tunnel. What do you get for that? A few thousand people get home 10 minutes earlier to watch the television. That is a big return!' Why have they not build a railway line into the Galilee coal fields and created 20,000, 30,000 or 40,000 jobs?

If you move to ethanol, there is a $25,000 million benefit to the Australian economy. If you say that all government vehicles are to be Australian made there is a $16,000 million benefit to the Australian economy. If you build the Galilee rail line there is a $7 billion-a-year profit to the Australian economy. If you give us a fair start in prawn farming, the same as everyone else in the world, there is $10,000 million for the Australian economy. There is $4,000 million in the fertiliser industry if we get a reserved resource policy—and you will have no fertiliser industry if you do not. You will probably have no steel or aluminium industries either. If we proceed on the water development schemes for northern Australia we will get an $8,000 million benefit out of the cattle industry and 70,000 jobs.

If you applied a 10 per cent customs duty to everything coming into the country that would give you $35,000 million to spend. And I strongly suggest that you spend that in helping young people to have children. If we go towards what is a proper birthrate, where we can replace ourselves and stop being a vanishing race as we are at the present moment, then each of those babies that are born will generate one job in the Australian economy. That is 700,000 jobs, Joe, and $50,000 million that you can fix up your budget with. Listen to me, please. (Time expired)

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