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

I represent most of North Queensland. If North Queensland were a separate country we would be the wettest continent on earth. Australia is not short of water, but the water is in the north-east quadrant of Australia. Easily the most important person in Australian history is Edward Theodore. Most people in this room would not even know who he was. If you think I am exaggerating, Paul Keating was asked who his heroes were and without hesitation he said JT Lang and Ted Theodore. Malcolm Fraser was asked who his heroes were and without any hesitation he said the American Franklin Roosevelt and the Australian Edward Theodore. And a humble, humble person like me—I have on my walls, naturally, the great Jack McEwen and Edward Theodore. When Jamie Packer came into my office he looked up and said, 'My grandfather's closest friend'.

So, why did he go into federal politics? He was the youngest ever Australian state treasurer, the youngest ever Australian premier, the youngest ever federal Treasurer, the youngest ever acting Prime Minister. Why did he go into federal politics? It was because he could see that he did not have the money or the resources to develop the water resources of his homeland, which was North Queensland—my homeland. We have these magnificent water resources. When we all die and go up to heaven and the good Lord says, 'Well, I gave you all this water, what were you doing with it?' we will say, 'Oh, we didn't want to use it, because we didn't know what could happen—it could cause ecological disasters'. Well, I think there is a story in there somewhere about a bloke who had six talents and a bloke who had three talents and a bloke who had one talent, who said, 'I hid the one talent under a rock, because I thought someone might thieve it.'

So, this is what we are doing with it. There are 300 million megalitres in Australia. Just remember that figure: 300 million megalitres. Of those, 220 million megalitres are in north-east Queensland. For reasons best known to themselves, the government decided that Fitzroy in Western Australia is not going to be developed. The Ord, for reasons best known to the government, has been given—it was not bought—to the Chinese, along with the Port of Darwin, which was sold; we got something out of that, but nothing out of the Ord. The only river in that other quadrant is the Daly, and yes, it should be developed. The Alligator Rivers run into a national park, so forget about the rest of Western Australia. That brings us back to North Queensland. The only place you can develop water resources in Australia is North Queensland. A fifth of Australia is in the Murray-Darling. The honourable member from South Australia represents one of the most productive areas of the Murray-Darling in South Australia. And we are told that some 60 per cent of Australia's agricultural production comes off the Murray-Darling, almost all of it from agriculture.

If they can produce, from 6 million megalitres of water, $50 million worth of agricultural production, what can they produce from 222 million megalitres? If we take only 10 per cent of that—22 million—it is three times the Murray-Darling production. It is a staggering figure of well over $100 million, even if we took only 10 per cent of North Queensland's water. We are now taking 0.6 per cent. Out of 222 million, about 1.2 million is being used. The rest of it rips and tears its way out to the sea. There are two great quotes when talking about water in Australia. We must remember that the greatest figure in water in modern Australia was Ernie Bridge, a very good friend of mine. Like me, he decided that the party system was never going to deliver to the north of Western Australia and got out of it. But before he got out, like me, he was a long-serving state minister. Ernie Bridge said: 'All we are asking is that the great rivers of Australia, on their pathway to the sea, pay a small tribute to those people living along their banks', a beautiful statement from one of the great Australians—a First Australian, by the way, and the first First Australian to become a minister, and he was a very prominent and successful minister, for the best part of a decade. The 'Bridging Scheme', as I call it, is a sort of Bradfield Scheme in Western Australia which has been cut off because the water has been given to the Chinese, so we Australians cannot ever use it now. Another quote from Ernie is very relevant to what the last speaker, the member for Barker, was saying. Ernie Bridge never gave a speech where I did not hear him quote the Bankers Trust report to their shareholders. He said that Bankers Trust, in their report to their shareholders, said, as always: 'Our greatest asset is our water entitlements. The wonderful thing about water entitlements is that they grow in value every year and you do not have to use them.' What a dreadful statement; what an appalling statement!

But the previous speaker was quite right in what he was saying. This is all about turning the water resources of Australia into a roulette wheel, like our stock market—a roulette wheel that does not actually produce any good for anyone on the planet and most certainly does not produce any wealth for Australians, except for those playing the roulette wheel, of course, or the stock market. In Queensland, after 26 years, since the demise of the Bjelke-Petersen government in 1990—the much maligned government that was building a major dam every single year for some 15 years in Queensland—there has not been a single dam built in Queensland, not even a weir. There are town water supplies, but that is all.

Water in Queensland is under the Water Resources Commission. What touched off the debacle on the Murray-Darling was the allocation by Queensland of a massive resource which became Cubbie Station. Some 200,000 megalitres of Murray-Darling water was allocated to just one person. It was the water resources officer who handled the proposal that went to the government. That water resources person then left the department and became part of the Murray-Darling set-up and was speaking for Cubbie Station from then on. This is not a very happy event. I am not using the word 'impropriety'; good luck to them, if they can get away with it. But a water resources officer proposes to the government an absolutely outrageous proposal that one single person gets 24,000 hectares of irrigated land. It was sold to the Chinese for $125 million and the station property was bought for $3 million. It cost about $20 million to do the development on it and it was sold for $125 million.

What I am saying, the same as the last speaker to this debate, is that water entitlements are solid gold. You do not give them out to foreign corporations. You do not give them out to big absentee landlords. You give them out to the people. In Queensland, the water resources department and minister had a choice: they could give the waters of the Flinders River to two giant absentee corporations or they could give them to the people of the area. Humble little Hughenden put up a proposal for some 60 farms—60 families making a living in a town which had almost 4,000 people in it before I became the local member. Because of the removal of the railways by the government and the removal of the wool industry by the deregulation in this place of the industry, the population has dropped to about 1,000 people. It is a little town that is dying. They asked for an allocation of water so that they could have 60 farms, create 100 jobs and have a quartering works with another 100 jobs. What a wonderful thing to happen. Did the government give them the water? No. The minute the application went into the government, the department or the minister—or somebody—immediately allocated the water to two big corporations down the bottom of the river that already have entitlements and are not using them.

As the previous speaker so rightly said, these people want the entitlements. They do not want to do the work to produce anything of value from the entitlements to overcome the annual protein drought problem that we have every year in northern Australia because it does not rain for nine months of the year. They do not want to overcome the problem that we are at only half our carrying capacity in northern Queensland—we should have nine million head of cattle; we only have five million head. We only turn off one in six instead of what we should be turning off, like the rest of Australia: one in three. They do not care about any of those things. They could not care less about the prickly acacia tree, which has taken over nearly one-tenth of the surface area of North Queensland. Are they looking after their rich cronies? Of course they are. The water is allocated to two corporations. The shareholders are amongst the richest people in this country.

The minister's name will be remembered in ignominy for the rest of his days. The minute he got the application from Hughenden, he immediately gave the land out to exactly the sorts of people that the previous speaker was referring to—people who want to own water entitlements. These people have got a $150 million golden handshake. This bill is saying that we should have a register. I do not say we should have a register. I say this place should stand on its own two feet.

Let me go back to the wool industry for a moment. A very great Australian in all the history books, an Australian called Doug Anthony, led a wonderful party call the Country Party, which has now become a disgrace. Thank goodness it has changed its name, because I would be ashamed to be associated with it. Doug Anthony introduced the wool scheme and it drove the price of wool up 300 per cent. Every single year for the next 20 years, we had a nice little growth in wool production. We had a hiccup, but Paul Keating saw his opportunity—the great deregulator saw his opportunity to swoop and to prove to Australia that he was 'Mr Tough Guy', removing all this featherbedding of the farmers. And he did. Within three years of deregulation, the price of wool had dropped to one-third of what it was. We know that phenomenon. I was told by a bloke that the electorate of the honourable member at the table, Mallee, which takes in Swan Hill, had 600 dairy farmers and now it has six. It is thanks to your party that it has however many it has. I can assure you it will be one-tenth of what it had before your deregulation of that industry.

Let me return to wool. When Doug Anthony introduced that scheme, the price of wool shot up 300 per cent. It was our biggest export item, bigger than coal, and therefore all Australians were rich and prosperous, as they were in 1990. We were amongst the 10 wealthiest nations on earth. I got a bit curious because I thought there must have been some other nations that got a benefit out of this too. If the world price of wool was pushed up by us, other nations should have got a benefit. The next biggest producer was Uruguay—and surprise, surprise! Uruguay, with this tiny little population, had a huge production of wool, so they should have been the richest people on earth. But they are not; they are amongst the 15 poorest nations on earth. How could this be? The price of wool went up 300 per cent and they were the second biggest wool-producing nation on earth—how could this be? I got curious and I found out that 72 per cent of Uruguay was not owned by Uruguayans. It was owned by Americans, and that was the productive part. So they did not own their country. They did not get any benefit from the land because they did not own it.

If we do not own the water, we will get no benefit. Let me go back to the Ord for a moment, because what you are now looking at is a situation where they will transfer price for product overseas. Under the free trade agreement, they can bring their workers in to work the Ord. So what benefit is there for Australia? We do not just need— (Time expired)

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