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

The number of people on welfare in Australia is such that, to quote Minister Porter, welfare will go from 25 per cent to 50 per cent of the budget over the next 10 years. It is all very well for our friends from the ALP on the left-hand side of the House to say, 'Horrific—we can't cut back on pensions.' That is something that I would agree with them on. But it would be nice if they pointed out where we are going to get the extra money from. Is there some sort of tree that money grows on that we can grab this money from? Not only are they shrinking the budget, but the government is quite rightly pointing out that they have contributed greatly to the cost of electricity in this country. That has risen from $700 12 years ago. Let us say $700 every decade, so it would have gone from $700 to nearly $3,000, say a rise of $2,000, so in the next 10 years they will be finding $5,000 for electricity.

This is really very simple. For 25 years in Queensland, and I suspect in Australia, we had a nice gentle growth in electricity charges. It was about three per cent for the 10 years before the marker point, which was deregulation and privatisation. Both sides of this parliament agree 100 per cent—every ALP government in Australia privatised the electricity industry and—I exaggerate slightly there—every LNP government Australia privatised and corporatised. All of them deregulated the industry completely and shifted ownership over to an arms-length corporation. So what we have now is a corporatised industry, no longer a government department charging the cost of electricity to the people. We now have a privatised entity, which some governments are milking and some owners of these corporations are using as a milking cow.

We knew exactly what was going to happen under privatisation and deregulation. The model is California. The central player in the Californian electricity industry was Enron. When it was privatised they kicked the charges up by some 600 to 700 per cent and did not deliver the electricity. Why? They do not have any responsibility to deliver electricity. They are just a person out there in the marketplace, saying, 'We sell electricity. We do not have to deliver a reliable service to the people. We do not have to do that.'

Exactly the same has happened in Australia. Quite frankly, what the Labor Party has said in this place about the government is 100 per cent true. They really have no solution to the current situation. But it could well be said that the government is 100 per cent right in attributing 30 per cent of the increase to the imposition of the environmental charges.

Let me go back. I speak with conviction, because when I handed over the electricity industry to the incoming Labor government in Queensland, we had the cheapest electricity charges in the world. That enabled us to get the aluminium industry going. We have one of the biggest aluminium industries in the world in Queensland and we got that because we had the cheapest electricity in the world. In sharp contrast to the so-called socialists in this place—I am beginning to think that the one thing that I do agree with Mr Keating on is that I am the last socialist left in this parliament! He always said that the member for Kennedy was the last socialist. Having spent most of my life using that as a term of abuse, I was rather fascinated. But if you define that as whether the people own the assets then surely the Country Party government of Queensland must have been one of the most socialist governments on the planet. We owned all the railways and all the electricity. If you said to Bjelke-Petersen, 'We should sell the electricity industry,' I think he would have had you certified and thrown into a lunatic asylum. And it would have been quite ridiculous for anyone to make that suggestion in the years that we were in office.

So what was the result for the people? The people enjoyed the cheapest electricity charges in the world, and that was true for 25 years. What happened at the end of that 25 years? A thing called the National Competition Policy was introduced. Electricity charges went from $600 a year for a household to $700 over a period of about 12 years. Let us say they went up $100, from $600 to $700, in 10 years. At this point, we introduced deregulation and privatisation and, in nine years, they went from $700 to $2,400. When the government says it is the fault of the environment, it sure would be nice if they did some homework and did not come into this place and be deceitful, because it is an entirely deceitful thing to say that electricity charges went up as a result of the environment. Yes, they did, and I think the ALP can take most of the blame for that—not all of it, but most of it—and I think that is valid. But that is 30 per cent! It is not 300 per cent. The 300 per cent is attributable to privatisation. And what did you expect?

As I have said 100 times in this place, the real problem is that your mummies and daddies never had you playing Monopoly. If you had played Monopoly, you would know that when you own half the utilities you can charge four times more than if you only own one utility and, if you own all of the utilities, you can charge seven times more. So the real problem is that your mummies and daddies did not have you playing Monopoly. I did and I know that, when you privatise it, it ends up with Origin and AGL virtually owning, or at least controlling, the electricity industry of Australia. And what are they there for? Do you think they are there to be Santa Claus? Did you think Woolworths and Coles were there to be Santa Claus when you deregulated the dairy industry? How illogical and irresponsible is this parliament. When I say this parliament, I mean the parliament that I have been in for 25 years. Just how irresponsible are they? If you had said to the Queensland government that we were going to privatise it, we would have said: 'No. Eventually there will be a monopoly and they will be able to charge whatever they like.'

I am not going to go into the details of the DoRCR—a dork is an idiot, an imbecile. We call people dorks. Well, it is a very appropriate name for this. Depreciation on Real Cost Replacement—that is what DoRCR stands for. It is simply advice by which they jacked up the price from $700 a year to $2,400 a year. The graph in Queensland—I have not seen every state—and the graph in Victoria are almost identical and the graph in South Australia is almost identical. You just hit that point where you privatised and you corporatised, if you like, and deregulated—it went straight through the roof. And, for anyone who follows international affairs, even a little tiny bit like I do, that was exactly what happened in California. Read the federal government reports, the congressional reports in the United States. We just followed that model.

Look at a pensioner couple. They might be on $30,000 a year maybe. By the time they pay their housing—and one way or another the cost of housing even if you own your own house and have paid it off—the cost of maintenance, to be able to live in a house—in the climate in which I live, we need air conditioning; in the climate down south you need heating. So I do not think—no matter how you cut the cake—that you are going to come out of housing much under $15,000.

We live in a society that requires a motor car. Public transport even in our big cities is not very good. If you well on in years, you cannot walk down to the railway stop or the tram stop in any event. So a car is really an essential item in our society. So put down $6,000 for the car and $15,000 for the housing; that is $21,000. Now, if we toss in electricity rates and insurance, we have got another $10,000. That only leaves $10,000 for food, toiletries, clothing and a little bit of other things, like travelling to see your grandkids or something of that nature. If you can provide food and toiletries for two people for $10,000 a year, I wish you well. So I simply do not understand how our pensioners are surviving.

We have the people in the opposition saying: 'Oh, how dreadful that you are taking pensions away!' And we have the people on that side of the House saying: 'Your irresponsibility has resulted in a huge increase in charges for our poor pensioners!' Well, of course both of them, I am afraid, are deceiving the public. It was not the environmental charges that put the electricity up. Yes, it did by 30 per cent; it did not put it up 300 per cent as has occurred—from $700 to $2,400 for the average household, the last time I looked.

I come to this place and I say: for heaven's sake, if you want more money for pensioners, then go out and build a railway line into the Galilee, where we will produce $30 billion or $40 billion a year of revenue for the country of Australia, from nothing, and we will give you back $15 billion of that in taxation. Go out there and build a Hells Gate dam and the Herbert River dam, on the Herbert River just north of Hells Gate. Every place has probably heard of Hells Gate. It is the only serious water development scheme that is on the drawing board for Australia, except of course for the Ord, which we gave to the Chinese. I do not see how Australia is going to get very much out of that new project; they can bring their own people in to man that project; that is part of the free trade agreement we have with China.

If you simply decide that, instead of sending $25 billion a year to the Middle East to buy oil, you will send it into rural Australia to buy ethanol, you can hand yourself another $7 billion a year to give to pensioners. If you got off the back of the prawn farmers and had exactly the same rules as the rest of the world has that would give you another $10 billion! You could build a little tiny canal and extended waterway up in my homeland, from northern Mount Isa up to Burketown so we could get our phosphate and fertiliser out cheaply and that would give you another $10 billion!

I speak with authority, because that is exactly what we did in Queensland. We built railway lines to open up the mining. We built the infrastructure that permitted people to make the money to pay the pensioners the money that they should be getting, which in my opinion should be at least another $10,000 a year. (Time expired)

See this speech in context