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

I doubt that. I would be very careful about accepting that proposition, I can tell you. Regarding overcoming the massive consequences of drought, each drought that we have sets our numbers back, and it takes us 10 or 12 years to build those numbers up again. You build up and then you just go down, and you do not get back up. It is a continuous loss and bleeding away of the cattle herd. If we move up to where we should be, running an extra four million head of cattle, and if we are turning off four out of six, the same as the rest of Australia, instead of one in six, the benefit for Australia will be $8,000 million a year. I do not regard a farmer as any different from a small business, and if all of those hundreds of small businesses are running at a dramatic profit, the little towns of Georgetown and Normanton and Karumba and the mid-west will benefit. In the mid-west we have a different proposition.

Before I leave the gulf country, it is important for me to say that it was a most extraordinary decision to cut off the food supply to Indonesia. It went down similar to swallowing a porcupine with the people of Indonesia. To repair the damage, we undertook to build a super-fast, efficient highway for our beef into Indonesia. To do that, we need 30 1,200 hectare irrigation blocks, big irrigation blocks that would enable us to move a lot of cattle onto ships to go for processing overseas. They would also facilitate the building of quartering works to make into big meatworks at places, we hope, like Charters Towers, where we will have big abattoirs. All of these little towns will no longer be little towns. A town like Georgetown would become a town of 10,000 people.

Let me move onto my own home country, the mid-west plains. All of inland Queensland is beautiful rolling black-soil plains. With how we are husbanding them, that seven million hectares of beautiful Mitchell and Flinders grass plain is growing prickly acacia trees—a weed—and we have the most endangered species in Australia, the little Julia Creek dunnart. Hughenden, in my opinion, is shovel ready if the money is made available tomorrow. Our superannuation money is going into the highly inflated property market—overinflated, I would argue, at $1 million for a house in Sydney—and it is going into the share market. That is nothing more than a roulette wheel these days, but, again, it is highly inflated by $25,000 million worth of superannuation money being pumped into it each year. In the days of more enlightened government, 60 per cent of all superannuation moneys went into government securities—government bonds—where they were paid five per cent. Heaven only knows that the—Mr Deputy Speaker, I do not normally complain—

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