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

I have better things to do with my time than attack other members, but I cannot help but comment. The member's electorate is based upon Bundaberg, which is a leading sugar producing area. Our sugar farmers get, on average, for the last 10 or 15 years, $340 a tonne. We do not have ethanol in this country. Our competitors, Brazil, get $420 a tonne. So, whilst there have been 300 sugar mills built in the world, we are actually closing our sugar mills in Australia.

That brings me to what I would like to talk about tonight. An infamous man in Australian history—and this is how history books will treat Paul Keating—said that we were going to have the freest economy on earth, and I think he went a long way to achieving that. What he did not achieve was achieved by Peter Costello. What does a free economy mean? When we are young, we get an inoculation to protect us from disease. A lot of our taxes pay for an army to protect us against invasion. We have locks on our doors and windows to protect us in our homes. So we have this thing called protection, and we had economic protection against people who will subsidise their product and will cheat and get advantages for their people over the free market system, but we removed all of our protection.

If you have a look at the protection registers in the world, there are only two countries that removed their protection: Australia and New Zealand. If you want to include a third country, the third country would be Canada. It is very hard to see that the pockmarks are flashing here; the colonial pockmarks are flashing in neon lights. We as a nation simply have not grown up. We wanted to be the teacher's pet, the good boys in the playground, whilst everyone else was playing Marquess of Queensberry rules. Let me be very specific. If you remove protection from manufacturing, you are competing against people who work for $4,000 a year. Our wage structures at the time were $60,000 a year. Their wage structures were $4,000 a year. Is it any surprise that we have closed down all of our manufacturing industries? You cannot buy a light bulb. You cannot buy a motor car tyre. Next year you will not be able to buy a car. You cannot buy a whitegood. The last whitegoods factory closed in Orange last year.

You can quantify these figures in agriculture. The OECD put out a report some years ago on agriculture and it said that a farmer on earth gets 41 per cent of his income from the government. If you are a farmer in Australia you only get 5.6 per cent of your income from the government. I just did a short ethanol tour and I would not be backing us against the Americans in beef, I can tell you, and I would not be backing us against the Brazilians in sugar, I can tell you. Even off a level playing field we would find it difficult. Giving our competitors a 36 per cent flying start and then thinking that we are going to have some agriculture? Within 10 or 15 years this country will be a net importer of food. Within 20 to 25 years, we will be a net importer in agriculture. The biggest export item that this country had for its entire history was wool, until 1990 when the world's cleverest Treasurer—and the rest of the world thought Mr Keating was bloody marvellous. He was the greatest gift that they ever had, outside of Mr Costello probably. But he deregulated the wool industry. The honourable government whip is sitting over here and her family are from the dairy industry. I represented the biggest dairy area probably in Australia; most certainly one of the biggest in Australia—past tense. We had over 240 dairy farms before the wonders of deregulation hit us. We now have 38 dairy farmers. That is all that is left.

As far as the wool industry goes, it was a bigger export item—and my party proudly, the Country Party, put that scheme together—than coal in 1990. It is not ancient history. In 1990 wool was our biggest export item. Sixty-two per cent of our sheep herd is gone. This is the industry that carried Australia for its entire history, for 200 years—gone; destroyed by the free marketeers in this place. The manufacturing industries were destroyed by the free marketeers in this place.

You can say it has not affected mining. Like hell it has not. I am from the mining industry. I am a mining man. All my life before I went into parliament was committed to mining, starting as a labourer and then working in my own mines. In the end I floated my own companies before the crash in mining came. We have to process our metals. We cannot sell them overseas unprocessed. You cannot sell copper, which is seven per cent, and send 93 per cent Australian earth over to Japan or to China or to America. You have to send the copper. You have to process it. What you need to process it is electricity. Ah, the free market. The free market came in in electricity. We had a 10 per cent increase through the 1980s. Through the 1990s we had 10 per cent. Through the 2000s we had 10 per cent. And then we hit the wonders of deregulation and it went up 300 per cent in nine years, which knocks us out of the ball game. We have the copper smelter half closed; we have the nickel plant closed; we have the zinc plant, which wanted to double in size but cannot because of the cost of electricity; we have the aluminium industry now under a cloud because of the cost of electricity. In Queensland, when I handed over to the socialists the electricity industry in Queensland, we had the cheapest power in the world, because we were no free marketeers. We had a reserve resource policy. We took the coal for free. If you turned your lights on in Queensland, the lights were turned on by free coal because of brilliance and aggression. There was no free marketeering here; we were out to win. We had the cheapest electricity in the world. That is how the aluminium industry in Queensland got to be the third biggest industry in the state and one of the biggest in the nation.

The other thing it did was cut the capital base out from under us. When I had an insurance agency selling insurance, 60 per cent of all superannuation went into government securities. There were two reasons for this. One was that people in their retirement deserved security. They deserved the security of government securities. Now, of course, nothing goes into government securities. It is invested in real estate, in probably the most inflated real estate market in the world. The average price of a house in the greater Sydney area is $980,000. One-fifth of Australia's population lives in that area, where it is $980,000 for a house and the average income is $70,000. And we say we do not need an inquiry into the banks who have financed house prices up to $980,000 and forced average families out of their houses? How can they possibly afford to service a debt of $980,000?

That brings me to the unfairness of the tax system in Australia. When we were young, my wife and I had five children. We paid virtually no tax because of the deductions for children in those days. A family with three kids now pays, on average, $20,000 for accommodation, $25,000 for food—it is a bit low, but that is the figure for a family with three kids—and tax of $22,000. If you take that $67,000 away from the average income of $75,000, it leaves you with $8,000 of disposable income for five people—$2,000 each. Of course, if you are a DINK—dual income, no kids—accommodation is still $20,000, food is a bit less at around $15,000 and you are taxed a hell of a lot more, so you end up paying out $79,000 on an income of $150,000 because of the double income. If you divide $71,000 by two, you have a disposable income of $35,000. So the question is this: do you want a disposable income of $2,000 or a disposable income of $35,000? Needless to say, Australians are not having children, except down at the welfare end of the spectrum—God bless them for having children. But do we help them? Do we help the middle-income earners, the wage earners, to have children? No. The tax regime penalises them to a dramatic extent. It says that people on $150,000 should pay the same tax as people on $70,000 with five kids, dividing it five ways.

If the government are fair dinkum, then they are going to give us some capital expenditure to develop the resources of this nation. The country is going broke at 100 miles per hour. In the last three years, the trade deficit has gone from $10 billion to $29 billion—these are average figures; it looks a lot worse if I use the specific numbers for the three years—and the balance on the current account has gone from $54 billion to $85 billion. And while we did not hear much about foreign debt in the last election, the Liberals have taken it from $750 billion to $1,028 billion. How much longer do you think that can go on?

Well, the party is now over. We have only got two sources of income: iron ore and coal. These are hardly a staple diet for a country. Nearly half of our entire income in this nation is now down to two items: iron ore and coal. If you give us a railway line into the Galilee, a lousy little 320-kilometre line—as a government, for nearly 20 years we were laying 360 kilometres every year out of the public purse, but there has not been a single kilometre by the ALP, the workers' friend. They have not laid a single kilometre of railway line for most of the last 30 years in Queensland. And, of course, for the Liberals it is against their principles, their philosophy and their religion to expend public moneys on developmental infrastructure. They will spend it on hurdy-gurdies, merry-go-rounds, function centres in the big cities and football stadiums to win votes. But will they spend it on a railway line so that we can open up the Galilee coalfields? No! What is that worth to the Australian economy? It is worth $16 billion a year. That is the immediate income from the Galilee.

You build Hells Gate, you get $2 billion a year. You give us that little bit of on-farm irrigation that we need on each cattle station and give the First Australians title deeds, and we will give you $5 billion extra in cattle income. You give us a tiny little canal to get our phosphate fertiliser out, we will give you $4 billion. With these things, and with title deeds for our First Australians, we will give you $5 billion in silicone and $2 billion or $3 billion in prawn and fish production. But, no, the government of Australia thinks it is better to spend $25 billion a year to buy oil from the Middle East instead of producing that oil ourselves—oil called ethanol. And who is going to pay the piper as the country goes broke? The elderly will, with extra tax on superannuation and reductions in their benefits.

If we had stayed owning 83 per cent of our mineral resources, as we did 25 years ago—the six major mining companies were all Australian owned: BHP, MIM, Western Mining Corporation, Rio Tinto Australia and Robert de Crespigny's company—the $30 or $40 billion a year that is coming into the coal seam gas industry would be going into Australian pockets instead of into the pockets of foreigners. (Time expired)

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