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

As a student of Australian history I can just feel Ben Chifley, John Curtin and Edward Theodore turning in their graves: 'Is this the Labor Party we produced?' In the most extraordinary statement, the previous speaker in this debate on the Treasury Laws Amendment (GST Low Value Goods) Bill 2017 said that this will force businesses to go offshore. What businesses? Perhaps I could ask the chair for an answer: what businesses will go offshore? I will tell you what businesses have already gone offshore. There is a clear-cut situation here. A foreign seller, a company selling clothing out of America, gets an order and sends the order via the internet to Australia. It gets an order for a hair dryer, or whatever, and it sends the product to Australia.

Previously, before the enlightened free marketeers of the Labor Party, the Labor Party was formed on the major reason it came into existence: to protect the workers' jobs, not to export the jobs overseas. But the member for Parramatta is talking about some people sitting in an office with a computer in front of them—and oh, there are thousands of them! There are not thousands of them. There might be hundreds of them, but whole industries—the whole white goods industry of Australia—closed down. And whose fault was it? The Labor Party's. They removed all the protection the Australian businesses had and exposed us to competition from people who work for $5 a day.

If you walk into this place you will walk past a magnificent portrait of the first member for Kennedy. That member for Kennedy ranted and raved against cheap labour being brought into Australia, because we had fought and died—quite literally—in the strike at the station property where Waltzing Matilda was written two months later. That strike and occupation of the woolshed led to three people being shot dead. That was not fun. The entire executive of the AWU was jailed for three years with hard labour for holding a strike. And when we got those hard-won decent conditions and decent pay, the plantation owners in the sugar industry brought in the Kanaks. And the mining magnates—corporates—brought in the Ceylonese from overseas to work the mines, and the coolies; it was mainly coolies.

And we had the great Charlie McDonald, the second or third Speaker in this place and one of the founders of the labour movement, ranting and raving. But here we have a lady getting up and pleading the cause of the importers. She represents the importers to Australia, the people she represents—the exporting of Australian jobs and the importing of foreign products. Now, I am not one of those who comes in here and praises the rich and powerful. But I am one who acknowledges people such as Gerry Harvey. Gerry said, 'I will have to close businesses everywhere and put, quite literally, thousands of people out of work if this is allowed to go on.' He estimated—and he produced the figures publicly—that the real cost difference was 30 or 40 per cent. If he was to provide what they call in the car industry a floor plan, if he was to provide a shop with all of these goods that you could go in and look at and evaluate, then that would cost a lot of money. If people were all going to buy on the internet from overseas, there was not much purpose in him having the shops anymore. He fought like a tiger to try to keep this at bay, and when he got attacked—'Oh, the poor people; they can get these things really cheaply from overseas'—he thought, 'Well, if you can't beat them, you have to join them.' So he just went ahead and joined them. So, thousands of jobs vanished.

I do not know where the shop assistants union is in all of this. I mean, shop assistants pay their dues to the shop assistants union. Where is the union defending the jobs here? We are all a bit sick and tired of unions going on holidays when the fighting needs to be done. They are like a lot of other peak bodies that I have had dealings with in the agricultural industry.

This place is characterised by nobody ever having battled for a quid for themselves. I seem to be one of the last of the Mohicans who actually comes from a business background. Joh Bjelke-Petersen had a saying: 'If you haven't backed your judgement with your own money, you shouldn't be making decisions with other people's money.' The last speaker is a classic example of that! No wonder that in a recent poll in Townsville we 'others' were on 35 per cent, the Liberal Party was pretty close to 30 per cent and the Labor Party was on 25 per cent. If the people in Townsville heard that speech Labor just gave, Labor would be down under 20 per cent. People are desperate for their jobs, and all we have heard from the Labor Party is constant and continuous attacks upon the coal industry.

One-quarter of Australia's income comes from coal. Without a coal industry you will not be able to buy anything because everything is now foreign produced. We have no whitegoods industry in Australia. We have very little textile, footwear and clothing manufacturing in Australia. So we have to import all these things. That is all very well. If you want to import watches, biros, mobile telephones and pads from overseas, that is fine; but you have got to sell something to be able to import things, and we do not sell anything anymore. We do not mine. Mining is when you dig it out of the ground and sell a product, a metal; when you dig out the ground and sell the ground, that is called quarrying. So we have just two sources of income—a coal quarry and an iron ore quarry. There are people in the Liberal Party who are against coalmining. Certainly, the overwhelming bulk of the Labor Party are against coal. All right, where are you going to get the money to buy all these things from overseas? You are not going to get it! The country is going to go bankrupt at 100 miles an hour—which, of course, it is.

I am not an important person. But Paul Keating most certainly was—whether I like to admit it or not. John Howard and Paul Keating between them were either Prime Minister or Treasurer of Australia for a period of over 30 years. Between the pair of them, they controlled the Australian economy for 30 years. The people of Australia voted for both of them, so it was the people's choice to put them there. When the current account deficit hit $15 billion, Paul Keating said we were in danger of becoming a banana republic. When the current account deficit hit $23 billion, John Howard reminded him of that. John Howard said the continuing current account deficit was the overwhelming problem above all else. Those were the statements of the two people who ran the Australian government, if not the Australian economy, for over 30 years: we were going to become a banana republic and the continuing current account deficit was the overwhelming problem above all else.

But the budgerigars on this side of the House do not think there is any problem at all. They say, 'What's the problem?' There is an old joke about input and output: the electrician says 'overload' and the politician says, 'What problem?' This is a classic example of it. 'What problem?'

Already our purchasing power, in spite of being propped up by outrageous interest rates, completely out of step with the rest of the world—our interest rates have been a thousand per cent higher than the rest of the world—

Mr Littleproud interjecting—

There is a gentleman laughing over here. I will have to give him a little economics lesson, because he obviously did not spend much time at school! The average interest rate throughout the world for 10 years was under 0.3 per cent, and the average in Australia was over three per cent. If you do not believe me, go and check it, but do not keep opening your mouth here. We know you are a galah, but you do not have to keep opening your mouth and proving it.

The gentleman over here has questioned that our interest rates were out of step with the rest of the world. I cannot ask the question of him, but I would like to ask him what the interest rates were, and he can tell us what they were: what were the prevailing interest rates in the rest of the world for the last 15 years and what were they in Australia for the same 15 years? If he had been in this place, he would have heard some people commenting upon it. If you hold interest rates up, people are going to put their money here, not overseas, so the dollar is going to rise. So we had a policy of a high dollar.

I do not know what his name is, but I think he is a bloke that represents a rural electorate. A rural electorate is dependent upon exports. Let me be very specific, because I do a lot of research on this. When Keating free floated the dollar, the dollar went down to 49c. Shame on me, I heaped great praise on him for allowing the dollar to free float. Doug Anthony got me aside as a very young man—I had the great honour of knowing and having spoken to and met with Jack McEwen and Doug Anthony—and he said, 'Don't worry about the substance of tariffs. That's not what we die in the ditches over. What we die in the ditches over is the value of the dollar.'

Those who have little bit of age on them—not like this little fledgling galah over here—and who have bit of experience will remember Bill McMahon, the Prime Minister, announcing a revaluation of the dollar, and the next day Doug Anthony announcing a devaluation of the dollar. Of course nine days later it was devalued, because no-one was going to fool around with the Country Party of those days. They had walked out of office three times and brought the government down, and they left Menzies out in the cold for eight years. Menzies was elected Prime Minister, and he announced a revaluation of the dollar. Again, two days later, Jack McEwen announced that it was going to come down, not up, and nine days later it went down. Those were the great days of a great party called the Country Party.

Now we have a gentleman over here that thinks it is good to have a high dollar. Every time I say that it is bad he starts laughing and thinks it is funny. Well, he cheated his people out of 50 per cent of their income, because when Keating allowed the dollar to free float it went to 49c. Then he propped it up. I am ashamed that I praised him. In comes Costello, and he does the same thing. He free floats the dollar, so the dollar goes down to 51c. So I would submit to the House that that is obviously where it should have been—at 50c. When it was allowed to free float on both occasions that is where it went. Then Costello, for reasons best known to himself, propped it up. We have been propping it up ever since.

For the last two or three years, at long last, we have put our interest rates—because other nations have put theirs up a bit—down a tiny little bit. The margin is not so great, so the free market has started to take over, and the dollar has come down. But this is no thanks to the budgerigar that is squawking over here. It is no thanks to the likes of him. He, in fact, is the architect of the dollar being at 90c instead of where it should have been at 50c. (Time expired)

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