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

The member for Corangamite can be excused, as she has not been here a long time. If she had been here she would have witnessed the complete destruction of the wool industry caused by the deregulation by Mr Keating. Since the Liberals are the great advocates of deregulation, they are probably upset because they were not there to do it. But these are the wonders of the free trade that you talk about, Member for Corangamite. We had 176 million head of sheep and we have seen all bar 30 per cent of them vanish after you deregulated the wool industry. You participated in it; you are up to your eyeballs in it. The next industry to be deregulated was the maize industry. We do not have a maize industry. In the centre of my electorate, the Atherton Tableland, the symbol for the shire council are the silos. Well, they are not there anymore. There is no maize industry anymore. If you go up the road, there is the Mareeba City Council, the second biggest city in my electorate. The symbol for their shire is the tobacco leaf. You deregulated the tobacco industry—nothing to do with people not smoking—and it is gone. You then deregulated the sugar industry and we are closing a sugar mill every two years. So these are your great free trade agreements.

I represent the great industries of Australia. I do not represent the grain industry, but I represent the others. I do not represent wool anymore, because there isn't any wool in the northern half of Queensland. The presidents of the wool council and the wool board in Australia both came from the Kennedy electorate. We were the heartland of the wool industry. I doubt whether there are 5,000 sheep left in the Kennedy electorate out of maybe one million at one stage—it may have been five million at one stage. You can sheet home the destruction of those industries to the deregulation policies of the Liberal and Australian Labor Party.

Is the member for Corangamite so naive as to believe that you are going to get a decent amount of money for your milk when there are only two buyers of milk in Australia—Woolworths and Coles. If you are right, I will sue the University of Queensland for what they taught me in economics when I was there—because, when you have two buyers, that is called oligopoly, and you are going to get screwed to death. That is exactly what happened to the dairy industry of Australia. It was destroyed by the deregulators, who left us to the tender mercies of the only two buyers of food in this country—Woolworths and Coles. And who can blame them? They are not there to be Santa Claus; they are there to maximise profits. If they can pay us 42c a litre, when the day before deregulation we were getting 59c a litre, where are all your laws? 'Oh, we have great laws protecting us in this country.' Well, where are they when we can be taken in one day from 59c a litre down to 42c a litre?

The member for Corangamite represents the dairy industry. Quite frankly, it is to the shame of the people of Victoria that they are still electing LNP members to this place. But they are not, of course, because one of the biggest electorates in Victoria now belongs to the centrist parties. One of the biggest electorates in Queensland now belongs to centrist parties. How many more are you going to lose before you wake up to yourself, I do not know. But you have lost three to the crossbenches now. We held four at one period of time and we hold three at the present moment. I do not doubt for a moment that, in three years time, we will hold six or seven seats on the crossbenches.

Why are they leaving you? Thirty per cent of the Australian population is saying, 'We hate you and we're not going to vote for you in the next election.' But neither side of this House has the slightest interest in changing direction. Are they going to stop Woolworths and Coles? Are they going to reintroduce arbitration for the wool industry, the sugar industry or any of these great giant Australian industries? No, of course they are not. They are wedded and in love with their ideology. They do not listen to the people in pain. They believe in their 'towering ideological purity'.

I failed my first exam ever in economics—it was the first exam I had ever failed in my life—and I said to Mr Gunton, 'I thought it was a good paper.' He said, 'It was, Katter,' and I said, 'Well, I would hate to see if I did a bad one.' I had got an F for it. He said, 'No, it was a brilliant paper. Supply and demand determine price, but only in the presence of the 23 factors that you need for supply and demand to determine price'—the first one being an infinite number of buyers and sellers and freedom of movement from the buyer to the seller. We have two buyers in the wool industry and we still have 6,000 or 7,000 sellers—and similarly in the dairy industry.

The president of our party is a dairy farmer—one of the biggest dairy farmers in Queensland—from the Gympie area. They had about 600 farmers and they now have about 60. I represent probably the most concentrated and biggest area in Australia, the Atherton Tablelands—where it is green all year round and has a temperate climate all year round. We had 240 farmers before they started the move towards deregulation and we now have 36 farmers. Would to heaven Mr Gunton had taught some of our lawyers in here, or if their mummies and daddies had had them play Monopoly, and then you would know that, when you have a monopoly in a certain industry you can charge six or seven times what you charged before. The problem is that they did law and not economics or they had numbskulls for lecturers and their mummies and their daddies never had them play monopoly.

As I understand it, this debate on the Farm Household Support Amendment Bill 2017 is about the farm support scheme. It is a great tragedy that we have to have such a scheme. I want to single out the people that I believe were responsible for the scheme. Johnny Gambino is the president of the rural action council in Mareeba and a great man in every sense of the word. He was one of the three or four pioneers that went into large-scale mango farming. Until he and two or three others came along, it was just a backyard occupation where you would put a few hundred mango trees in and get a bit of pocket money for your kids at Christmas time. I most certainly did that; we had a small orchard. When John Gambino came along, they started putting in 1,000 to 3,000 trees, and he was one of the three, or maybe four, pioneers of that industry. He started rural action to fight off the free market coming in with water in the region, and they fought a terrific fight. They have been a great band of fighters and leaders of rural action throughout Australia, not just in their own area.

They developed what was called the Emerald Creek Declaration. One of the clauses in the Emerald Creek Declaration said that household sustenance payments must be made where a farmer's income does not meet welfare payment levels. I did not think we could ever get that, and I must single out Bernie O'Shea, the secretary of the committee. He said, 'We are determined to get it.' There were other changes that they wanted which I will not go into today, but the Emerald Creek Declaration is a very wonderful document. Bernie O'Shea built one of our major facilities in the city of Mareeba. We did not have any sophisticated dining places to go to and he and a few others built the Rugby League club in Mareeba. It set a standard, and there are a number of other places in town now. There are a number of very nice places where you can go out for dinner in Mareeba, and we have him to thank for that. More importantly, he organised the demonstrations in which John Howard very kindly came over to us demonstrators and said, 'Want do you want?' They said, 'If you're going to deregulate us, Mr Prime Minister, at the very least give us a package the same as the dairy farmers got.' He said, 'We can have a look at that.' To the shame of the National Party, their leader, Mark Vaile, came up to the same group and said, 'What do you want?' We said the same thing and he said to Bernie O'Shea, 'Oh, no, Bernie, we believe in free markets,' and he walked off. The once great National Party ran this country after the war. The great Jack McEwen, when asked, 'Is it true that the Country Party wagged the Liberal dog?' said, 'Yes'—that is all he said. That tells you an awful lot about that very great Australian.

I thank John Howard for the $90 million package that we secured that day, standing out there in the hot sun. Instead of taking an antagonistic attitude, it was an enlightened attitude by the Prime Minister. I wish he was enlightened enough—because I like the man and respect him—to see that, when you deregulate an industry, you place those people at the mercies of the market forces, and the market forces are controlled by very few people. In the wool industry, throughout most of my lifetime probably six traders have accounted for 70 or 80 per cent of the marketplace. So, if you want to sell on the open market, you will be taken to the cleaners on a magnificent scale. Wool had carried this country for 100 years. In the year when Mr Keating, that great genius, the world's greatest Treasurer—everyone laughs because it is a joke—decided to deregulate the wool industry, it was bigger than coal. It was the major export earning item for this country. How or why you would fool around with a success story of that magnitude and destroy your country's mainstay economic earner is beyond my comprehension. That anyone could ever say a favourable word about that man is, again, beyond my comprehension. He destroyed the mainstay of the economy of this nation. Seventy-two per cent of our sheep herd has gone. Within three years, the price had dropped 30 or 40 per cent. The industry was no longer viable. He completely destroyed it. For 20 years, under the wool scheme we had had a solid prosperity and a solid growth—not a spectacular growth. It was not a big growth; it was a very small growth of about 2½ per cent in sheep numbers each year.

That is what we want. We do not want ups and downs. We cannot ride the ups and downs because you sold all the banks—the reconstruction banks, the Commonwealth Development Bank, the ag bank, the AIDC, the primary industries bank. You sold them all to QIDC in Queensland. Between the LNP mainly, in this case, but the ALP as well, you sold all the banks, so we cannot ride the rollercoaster anymore. We got interest rates of 2½ per cent when we had to ride the down rollercoaster. When we rode the up rollercoaster, it did not go very high because tax took it off us. The up rollercoaster was always truncated; the down was increased by the banks putting penalty rates upon us. So the down cycle was always exaggerated and the up cycle was always truncated. Under the enlightened leadership for 100 years in this country, we had reconstruction banks. They served other purposes. The Commonwealth Development Bank served many other purposes, but one of its many purposes was as a reconstruction board. We see a number of dreadful calamities when people decide that they do not want to be in this world anymore, particularly in my own industry, the cattle industry of North Queensland, and decide to end it all. That would not have occurred if we had had a reconstruction board.

I name the people responsible for this: Wayne Swan, whom I pay very great tribute to; Johnny Gambino, the president; Bernie O'Shea, the secretary; Scotty Dixon, one of the greatest fighters I have ever run into; Makse Shroij, the solidest bloke that you would ever meet in a day's ride; Joe Moro, a great bloke; Vincie Mete; Ned Bruschetto; Evan McGrath; Emidio 'Horse' Nicolosi; Peter Henderson; and Johnny Myrteza. These are the blokes who put it up. They fought for us and we thank very much Wayne Swan for delivering it to us. When we go down, at least we can buy some food to feed our families with. We thank very much the people responsible.

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