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

There comes a time when fundamental change, revolution if you like, comes along. In America, the two people who were leading the last time I looked were Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. They are saying that all of this free market rubbish has resulted in Americans ending up being cut back and cut down. Their jobs have been transferred overseas and their economy is languishing, and we are playing the game by certain rules which place us at an enormous disadvantage. The only people who are making those remarks in this place are the people who have been elected by this system. We had outrage from the previous speaker that the people should have a say. These people are there because a majority of people in that last sixth of the voting wanted this person to be there, and you say, 'Well, they didn't really know or understand any of it.' The net result of the democratic system is that they are the only people in the Senate who have voted against the free market policy.

Adam Smith put forward and illustrated magnificently an economic mechanism, not a policy for government. He put forward an economic mechanism that should be understood by government and used intelligently as a tool of understanding the economy. This is so relevant because the only people who are voting against the sell-out of Australia to foreign corporations are those people. Do the major parties reflect the will of the Australian people? In every single opinion poll that I have seen, 80 per cent of the people oppose tenaciously the selling off of the country and 80 per cent of the people oppose tenaciously the removal of tariffs and subsidies and the other protections. These enable our workers and farmers in Australia to get a decent income. They enable our industrialists to get a fair go. We can have a fair go, and Mr Keating proposed this—if we go down to slave labour wage levels which prevail in Africa and Asia and South America, we can compete. We can have our people working for nothing, but if we are not going to have our people working for nothing then we need protection. No protection, then no industry. So we now live in a country with no manufacturing base.

The only people voting that we should have a manufacturing base are the people who are going to be eliminated by this 'there will only be two parties' project. As for the Greens and Senator Xenophon—I am deeply disappointed in his behaviour here. To me, and for those of us who have read the terrible George Orwell, the pigs on the Orwellian farm are starting to walk on two legs. From where I sit, it is the Greens and the Xenophons. From where I sit, the pigs on the Orwellian farm are starting to walk on two legs. The only people who have spoken for that 80 per cent of Australia, through the machinations of the democratic system drawn up by our forebears, are those people, and they are being eliminated here today.

Everybody knows what this is. It is a sneaky little trick to make sure that the majors have all of the say and the rest of us have none of the say. The majors are controlled by their party machines. Their party machines are answerable to the people who pay them: the giant corporations. Robert Hogg, the federal secretary of the ALP, upon resigning from that position—he did not say it before he resigned—said the majority of money coming into the ALP comes from big corporations, big corporate donors. There is the man himself saying it. Is there anyone in Australia who would not believe that that is infinitely more true of the Liberal Party and their lapdogs the National Party?

We watch today the muzzling of the people, the taking away of the power of the people, the taking away of their right to be able to vote the way in which they want to vote. We will vote now in the way which the major parties want us to vote. I have to single out the ALP in this case. Whether they are acting out of self-interest or whatever their interest is, they are most certainly on the side of the angels in this debate. History will pass a very harsh judgement upon the Greens and upon the Xenophons on the decision that they have made here. They have got themselves a little bit bigger than the rest of us, and that little bit bigger has resulted in them making this decision.

If Australia is placed under the control of the two major parties, members of the two major parties—every member in this parliament on both sides of the parliament—depend for their place in this parliament upon their endorsement by their political party. In fact, before I went as an Independent, I researched and found out that not a single Independent from any state in Australia had ever got re-elected in Australian history. Not a single person had ever got re-elected. So, when I made the decision to walk and become an Independent, I was walking into my open grave. But I felt I owed that to the people that I represented and the money that they paid us—

See this speech in context