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

I rise to speak on the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Debit Card Trial) Bill 2015. In the 26 years, 25 years or whatever it was since I was the responsible minister in Queensland, all I have ever seen is an effort to suppress the symptoms. It is really like we just want to make sure that nobody sees how bad it is. We do not actually want to do anything to fix up the problem; we just want to make sure that nobody sees the problem; that is really what we are doing here.

Andrew Forrest would be one of the Australians who I most admire. His neighbouring mining entrepreneur—I am not in the business of running people down—said, 'Until Australians are prepared to work for $320 a week then I simply have to get my workers from overseas.' On a sharp contrast, Forrest trained up 2,000 First Australians—some cannot read or write much at all and some cannot even speak English properly—and he still had 600 the last time I was there on his employment rolls. If a person does not turn up for work—people that are not used to working do this—he has a team of five people that go around and see them and coax them and encourage them to come to work. They do not just give up on them and forget about them and sack them. It is a really remarkable achievement.

When we get down to the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Debit Card Trial) Bill 2015, I think a blanket approach of doing this is just absolutely not where we want to be going. Let us take the AMP, the Alcohol Management Program as it was delightfully called. Clarence Waldron was a long-time chairman at Doomadgee. I thought a confrontation between Clarence Waldron and a state government official was so good that I put it in my—should I be modest—bestselling history book. He said to the state government official, 'You do not come here and say what is what and that is that. This is my land.' And that is the way it should be. God bless Clarence Waldron.

There are do-gooders like Mr Fitzgerald, who gave us a real good touch-up in the state parliament and did not capture the person who was at the heart of the police corruption. We had police corruption, and this government very courageously went ahead and tried to weed it out, and all we did was destroy ourselves with the help of that particular person.

Mr Fitzgerald also did an inquiry into what is wrong in the Aboriginal communities and basically said, 'They are drinking too much,' and that the answer was to ban alcohol. So the Queensland ALP government went out and banned alcohol. I was with the honourable member, who is now very prominent in the Northern Territory, and I said, 'You'd be very pleased with the ban on alcohol,' and he released a string of obscenities, because everyone knew what was going to happen: they were simply going to leave the communities where alcohol was banned. These people are alcoholics; you cannot take alcohol away from an alcoholic. So they all ended up in places like Mount Isa, Darwin, Alice Springs, Cairns and Mareeba. We simply moved the problem from over here to over here, where there were highly respectable people of First Australian descent, who now have a terrible name thanks to the people—the no-hoper crowd—that were forced out of their communities by the AMP plan. What a wonderful plan! It was not very long before resourceful people figured out a way to ferment alcohol. I was with certain people on Mornington Island, where alcohol is banned, two years after the ban and I said: 'Those two people are drunk. How can they be drunk when there is an alcohol ban here?' And they said, 'They make the brew.' I could argue that there are 11 cases of deaths from the brew. You have no quality controls over how much alcohol, which can poison you, goes into the brew, and there are certain other health problems related to it. What we are saying here is that we go in with a blanket that is not a solution to the problem but suppresses the symptoms. When I was minister, every day of my life I said: 'Do not see the problem. Just work out the solutions and work towards the solutions.'

I answered a telephone call from a young man who got off his backside in a First Australian community and got two trucks working for one of the local mines and did very well for himself. He asked if he could take up an area of land on the community with a view to getting cattle. He is in the local football team, and I knew him well. He came to see me when I was in town and said: 'I've got one of those blocks. I've got fences. I've got yards. I've got waters. I've even got a homestead. The only thing I haven't got is cattle.' I said, 'Have you been to the banks?' He said, 'Of course I've been to the banks,' because he had already borrowed money for his trucks and that. I said, 'What did they say?' He said, 'They won't loan me any money unless they've got the security of a mortgage.' I said: 'It's got nothing to do with your being First Australian—that applies to everybody. Banks want security; you can't have them loaning out money without security. Have you been to the lands department to see if you can get a lease?' He said, 'They said there is no such thing as a lease on any blackfella land.' I said, 'Sadly, that's true.' He said, 'I thought your legislation allowed that.' I said: 'Yes, that is my legislation, and we issued pretty close to 800 title deeds in Queensland. They say it can't be done, that it's very difficult and very complicated, but it wasn't too complicated for us. We got 800 out in the space of about 3½ years.'

Once you have got a title deed, it says that you own that piece of land. Then you can borrow money to buy cattle, to build a service station, to build a takeaway food place or to build a pharmacy. If your daughter is away studying pharmacy at university, when she comes home you can set her up in a pharmacy and we can have a business in our community called a pharmacy. But all these things cannot happen unless there is a golden item called a title deed.

If the Anglos got ahead of the rest of the world, it was because the Americans, in the 1600s, had private ownership. The English, in 1270, had issued freehold titles under an act called Quia Emptores, which followed not all that long after Magna Carta. We decided that individuals should own that land; that it should not be some sort of community ownership or feudal ownership or family ownership or any of those things, and that those who were prepared to work hard and live on that land and love it and look after it should own it, not some community ownership arrangement, which was tried in a place called Russia and in a place called China. The French threw the feudal system out, I think, in 1788 or around about then—1789. Why did the Americans and the British skip ahead of the rest of the world? I would say it was because they had an item called private ownership of land. The great ethno-anthropologist Robert Ardrey wrote some very good books—in fact, The Territorial Imperative is something that has worked its way into the English language from when he wrote about these things. If my constituent could get a title deed then we would have cattle there.

Once again I have let the parliament down. I meant to bring down a map of Australia that shows Cape York Peninsula in red and Victoria in red, and they are both the same size—almost identical in size—but there is a big difference between the two places. One place, the Cape York Peninsula, has a 70-inch rainfall.

Victoria has around a 30-inch rainfall. Cape York Peninsula, where the south-east trade winds meet the north-west monsoons, has a 70-inch rainfall. Cape York Peninsula has 154,000 head of cattle, and Victoria has 4½ million head of cattle. What is going on here? Why has one place got 4½ million head of cattle and the other place does not? You might say, 'Yes. Well, it only rains for one part of the year.' But hold on a minute. Half of Victoria is under grain and sheep, so it is not available, and you have got the little matter of the Snowy Mountains there too. You do not run many cattle up on the Snowy Mountains. So what is going on here?

What is going on here is no title deeds. I have spoken about this again and again in this place for the 21 years that I have been here. I have pleaded with state government after state government, and in 26 years probably a dozen or two dozen title deeds have been issued in the state of Queensland. Yet in the 3½ years before that Eric Laws, the head of department, and the late Lester Rosendale were able to get out nearly 800 title deeds. Let me also pay great tribute to Mal Brough in this place. As soon as Mal was appointed minister he went straight at it as fast as he could go to try to get title deeds issued to the people of the Northern Territory. He did not have control over the states, but he could at least do it in the Northern Territory. He might have made some mistakes and unfortunately his tenure was cut short by a loss of government, and that was a great tragedy for all of Australia.

If the top third of Australia were a separate continent, a separate country, it would be one of the wettest places on Earth—most certainly north Queensland would be one of the wettest countries on Earth. We are not short of water. You could allow us to use that water. This place and the Queensland parliament have not allowed us to use that water. There has hardly been a single water licence issued in 26 years. There has hardly been a title deed issued to the first Australians in 26 years.

When I was minister I would visit the Torres Strait probably once a fortnight, sometimes even a bit more than that. So a significant portion of my life was spent up there. I cannot remember having a meal in the Torres Strait that did not consist of Indigenous food—yam, taro, sweet potatoes, mangoes, bananas, coconut and, of course, fish, crayfish, crabs, dugong and turtle. All of the food was local Indigenous food. Some 12 years after we had lost government in Queensland I went up to the Torres Strait. We had eight meals up there with a government committee of inquiry, and I did not touch a single skerrick of Indigenous food. When we went to Joey Mosby's island—and Joey Mosby and I did not see eye to eye when I was minister—Joey screamed from the back, 'They're killing our people. They've closed down all our market gardens. They will not allow us to fish.' And proof of that was the fact that I was eating non-Indigenous food the whole time I was up there.

These people are reduced to having to pay out of their welfare payments to try to buy fresh fruit and vegetables in the Torres Strait or at Mornington Island and Doomadgee. I put on public record here once again that I asked every councillor at Doomadgee and every councillor at Mornington Island whether they had close relatives dying of diabetes, and every one of them said, 'Yes. Yes, Bobby. I have two or three relatives dying of diabetes.' The government must acknowledge that there is a failure out there and that something has got to be done about it. The first thing you do about it is use your title deeds and allow them to use that water for irrigation, and get off their backs in the Torres Strait and let them go back to the market gardens and let them have access to the seas, which they have had for 20,000 years until we came along and took it from them.

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