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

On the issue of Adani, it is quite extraordinary in this place that the Labor Party has been anti-coal. The whole Labor movement in Queensland has been founded around the coal industry. I have been involved in discussions with the state government, and I know my union, the CFMEU, has been involved in discussions with the state government. As a result of those discussions, some fortnight later, the state government announced they were in favour of it. Whilst everyone is saying that it is going to go ahead, we do not notice any dozers out there, and it seems to me that there are not going to be any dozers out there.

It is extraordinary. It is like coming into a lunatic asylum here. There do not seem to be many people here aware that one-half of Australia's entire export earnings come from coal and iron ore—a quarter from iron ore and a quarter from coal. To put that in perspective, there is $130 billion in revenue coming in from those two streams, and the next one down is gold at $11 billion. But do not worry about gas, because it is all foreign owned and there is no labour content, so $23 billion just comes in and just boomerangs back out again. So do not worry about gas; that does not figure. So what are you going to do: bankrupt your country; undermine the economy of Queensland, which depends upon coal?

I do not know where the ALP is going. They have five marginal seats in the northern half of Queensland—north of Bundaberg. If you think you are not going to get punished for being anti coal, you believe in the tooth fairy. People may be dumb at times, but they ain't that dumb. And they are not dumb all the time, so do not count on people being stupid, particularly the workers, who are much more sophisticated people now than they were in days past. If you live in Townsville, which I think is the second most marginal Labor Party seat in Australia, you are in an area that has 14 per cent unemployment and the highest crime rate in Australia. And Mackay may well be worse, except more people have got up and left Mackay. The member for Dawson has said that there are 2½ thousand houses empty in Mackay. There are a thousand houses empty between Moranbah and Charters Towers. I will personally ensure that all of the newspapers through the coal belt and in all the mining cities hear what was said by the ALP members in this place against the coal industry.

There would not be a single member of parliament here who would not have heard the expression that poor people have to decide whether to turn the lights on or have food for the night because the cost of electricity has risen by such dramatic proportions—to $2,300 per household in Queensland, and that would probably be a fair figure for the rest of Australia. It has risen by 250 per cent in the last 11 years, and it ain't stopping. Now, I am not going to stand here and be a hypocrite. The major component of that is monopoly rent. Now that the electricity industry has been corporatised, those four or five corporations have a monopoly however you want to argue it. When I went to university they taught me that this was an oligopoly and that they could charge what they liked—they do not tend to compete against each other; they compete with each other. So no-one can explain the price going up by 300 per cent. It ain't what the Liberals say, which is that the greenies have put it up by 300 per cent. They have made their contribution; they have put it up by 30 per cent that it did not need to go up by. But I am one of the very few people here— (Time expired)

See this speech in context