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

You people are laughing. A lot of you come from New South Wales. We are angels—absolute angels—compared with you people! Let me return. This is probably not a subject of humour. I share the Prime Minister's view in the sense that you cannot control—and I say this seriously to the House—a royal commission. I will have to live, until the day that I die, that four of my cabinet colleagues—

Honourable members interjecting—

Stay with it—there is a message for every person in this House. Of 17 who have left this place, two went to jail because they had acted improperly with their benefits. Let me go specifically to the four people that went to jail in Queensland. The leading case was Brian Austin's case. Brian Austin's leading crime that he had committed was—listen to it—that he had used a government car to drive from Brisbane to Armidale to see his kids in boarding school that weekend. That was the leading example used to put him in jail—caged like an animal for two years. For the other four it was similar. There was no government corruption involved. There was misuse of your private assets that the government gives you.

You can all start thinking about your conscience. You can all start shivering, because you should. If you have a look at those cases, you should. But let me come to the point, and this is the point where I disagree with the Prime Minister, even though I can see the great dangers, the terrible things that happen in a royal commission, innocent people that get terribly hurt. Whatever Kerry Packer's misdemeanours may have been, I do not think he was the goanna running the drug syndicates of Australia. They are the things that happen in a royal commission.

I can see the Prime Minister's viewpoint clearly and I respect it, but I have to say that, if you want to stop police corruption, as in our case, that is what you have to do. We did not get the source of that police corruption; he was living with two top-of-the-range Mercedes-Benzes in a mansion at probably the most expensive address in Australia when he was the sergeant of police. We did not get him but we got the man that was protecting him. We took his protection away. So the royal commission achieved the purpose for which it was put there: to stop the police corruption. There were 45 murders that we knew of coming out of the police corruption.

Prime Minister, I ask you to think again on this issue, because, whilst I share your views of these things and every royal commission that I have seen has done terrible damage to totally innocent people, the royal commission that I was involved with stopped what we were trying to stop. Let me just go through: when everyone was congratulating themselves in Australia about how wonderful our banks were and how wonderful APRA was— (Time expired)

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