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

Mate, if it was a corrupt government, let's have more of it, because we delivered to the people of Queensland the cheapest electricity in the world. We had a reserve resource policy and took one per cent of the coal to deliver to the people of Queensland the cheapest electricity in the world.

There is one view that I share with the honourable member from the Greens, and that is the electricity prices are not the fault of the Greens and the environmental chargers. I have a graph in front of me. It is the most extraordinary graph that you will probably ever see in Australian history. In 1990 you start off with the cheapest electricity prices in the world—and I have to say that the ALP government continued on with those policies—starting off with $600 and going to $700 15 years later. What happens at that point? In 2000 we went to national competition policy, and the graph then starts to ascend. In 2007, our socialist friends completely deregulated the market in Queensland, and from then on it shoots through the roof. Our LNP friends said, 'Thank you; our rich donors can now make even more,' and they increased it even more. So it went from $600 to $700 in 15 years and over the next 12 years it went from $700 to $2,300.

I will say a few words on solar. I won one of Australia's major science projects when we put in the first standalone system in the world, and I had to justify to a fairly conservative cabinet the idea of putting in a totally solar system in the Torres Straits. Our socialist friends, for all of their ranting and raving, put diesel generators throughout the Torres Straits—so much for their fair dinkumness!

I happen to love being in my house because we have 30 varieties of birds that come up to the back of our house, and I can sit there and watch all of these varieties of birds. They are beautiful. I am fighting against wind, because there will be a 20 kilometre barrier 100 metres high taking out about 50,000 birds a year. So I am not real keen on that.

An honourable member interjecting—

There is a lady over there laughing. I will find out her name, so I can tell the House her name.

We have a proposal in North Queensland for the Hell's Gate Dam, where we will have no CO2 emissions at all. They will go into ponds and be absorbed by— (Time expired)

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