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

At long last! In the outbreak of the last major war that we were involved in, Vietnam, the tank was probably the most important item of land warfare, and you would have an anti-tank weapon. Our anti-tank weapon was the Carl Gustaf rocket. They came from Sweden. Sweden said, 'We don't want you in Vietnam so we're not going to supply you.' So we had no anti-tank weapons in Vietnam in the First World War. We had 12 Beaufort fighters with which to defend Australia against an invading Japanese army that was turning out 1,000 planes a month. The Americans were turning out 25,000 planes a month. You would say, 'Well, there's no war on the horizon.' No! North Korea is making missiles and they now have a nuclear capacity to put on those missiles and they're flying them over Japan with gay abandon. Clearly, there is a person completely out of control. There was a bloke in Europe called Adolf Hitler who was completely out of control. He was a terrible man. Anthony Eden came back to Britain and said, 'Peace in our time,' but placating mad, crazy people is not going to create peace. As Winston Churchill said at the time: 'He who feeds the crocodile does nothing else except guarantee that, in the end, he will be eaten by the crocodile.' Those words apply today.

Let's compare the performance of the American government and the Australian government. We'll see who are the donkeys and who are the runners, and why they are the most powerful country on earth and we're going broke at the speed of 100 miles an hour. Every 11 years our national debt doubles. We've had a balance of payments and trade deficit for so long we've forgotten. We think 'current account deficit' is one word. America immediately moved—it's a fair while ago—when the threat from the Middle East was to cap their marginal oil wells. Something like 15 to 25 per cent of their capacity is capped oil wells. So, if they run into trouble, they can uncap them and put them into production. The United States already had ethanol—that was for health reasons—at around five per cent, on average. It was mainly concentrated in the big population centres, such as New York. 'Ozone non-attainment levels' was the technical term used. Then America switched to what is effectively 11 per cent ethanol content in their petrol.

Just how dumb a nation are we? So many people say to me, 'You can't have ethanol. Your car will break down.' All the cars are breaking down in America, are they? Are all the cars breaking down in Brazil? It has 500 million people—over a 10th of the world's population. One country has 60 per cent ethanol and the other one has 11 per cent ethanol. China has five per cent ethanol, Japan has five per cent, half of Indonesia has five per cent, and Europe has five per cent and is ramping up to 20 per cent.

To go back to America, they moved to get shale oil. Australia is one of the most shale-oil rich countries on earth. I represent the Julia Creek shale oil, which is the most lucrative and attractive shale oil in Australia. Almost by itself it could provide 10 per cent of Australia's oil requirements. But there are many other shale oil deposits in Australia not enriched by vanadium, as the Julia Creek shale oil is.

Let's just have a look at this. Julia Creek can produce 10 per cent. Hells Gate dam, which the government is looking at and the previous government initiated, can produce five per cent. STDS, the southern tablelands development scheme, is an irrigation scheme. There's one on the Herbert River and one on the Burdekin River. It can produce four per cent. Five per cent can come from existing ethanol plants. They can be ramped up to do five per cent. The plants are at Manildra and at Dalby in Queensland. The Bradfield scheme, using just some of the waters in the high-elevation rainfall areas which I represent plus the Mitchell River and Gilbert River—even if we only take five per cent of their water—can most certainly produce 15 per cent without any difficulty. The Mitchell River is the biggest river in Australia—it's bigger than the Murray-Darling and produces nothing at the present moment—and the Gilbert River is not all that much smaller than the Mitchell.

Let me make a side point. We are talking here about oil security but we are closing a sugar mill every two years in Australia. The fourth-biggest agricultural industry—or, arguably, the third-biggest agricultural industry—is slowly closing down because we can't compete against the Brazilians. Even they admitted in the hearings in the 1990s that they have a $1,000-million-a-year cross-subsidy into their sugar industry from the ethanol industry. That's their opinion. The Americans said it was nearly $3,000 million. So let's say a $2,000 million subsidy. We can't compete against a subsidy of that magnitude to Brazilian sugar.

In the grains industry, the Americans are getting a 16 per cent benefit because they have ethanol. Our grain producers don't get that. Once again, the grain producers are going down like ninepins. The biggest grain producer in Australia, Nicoletti, in Western Australia, has gone down. The third-biggest producer in the grains industry has gone down. The twentieth-biggest producer in the grains industry has gone down. So there is a 16 per cent benefit there and a 23 per cent benefit for the sugar industry.

But we're not here today to talk about that. We're here today to talk about a million people that have to get to work every day in the greater Brisbane area on petrol-fuelled, oil-fuelled and diesel-fuelled transportation systems. They simply can't go to work if there's nothing there. Infinitely more serious for North Queensland is: how the hell do we get our goods up to North Queensland? If you're on heart medication, as I am, and you don't get the medication, you die. I'm probably pretty well off, but there are maybe 20,000 people in North Queensland that are in a serious position: if they don't get that medication they die. How are you going to get the medication? Are we going to take it on horseback?

We have the same irresponsible governments that sent my battalion up to Kokoda with one machine gun—there was no artillery because we couldn't produce artillery pieces—and with 12 Beaufort fighters to defend Australia. People in this place were responsible for that treason. Infinitely more terrible is the situation that, if you blow up a couple of dozen tankers coming into Australia, you cripple this whole nation. We can't take a single weapon a single yard without some form of transportation—unless we're going to walk, of course.

We have an existing five per cent now from ethanol and some other alternative fuel sources. With the Bradfield, even if you only take five per cent of the waters of the Mitchell and Gilbert rivers it will give you another 15 per cent of your petrol requirements in Australia. The grains industry, without even noticing it and by fixing themselves up, can provide 12 per cent. Why is this not happening? Ethanol is cheaper. The last time I looked it was 84 cents a litre in Brazil, 94 cents a litre in the United States and 154 cents a litre in Australia. One country has 60 per cent ethanol and the other has 10 per cent ethanol; yet they are so much cheaper than we are here in Australia. I won't go into the issue of taxation but I wish someone would do a public debate because I will really smash you up if you use that argument. That is really stupid.

With the Julia Creek shale oil we have the ability to provide 10 per cent, and I'm sure that there's another 10 per cent locked up elsewhere in other shale oil deposits that we can produce from—the same as they do in America. From the Hells Gate irrigation proposal, near Townsville, we can provide five per cent of Australia's fuel needs. From the same scheme on the Herbert River, near Cairns, they can produce four per cent. So there's 30 per cent of your requirements. You already have five per cent from existing ethanol plants that can be ramped up. So there's 35 per cent. With Bradfield, on the Mitchell and Gilbert, if you start doing water schemes there, you get another five per cent. That's 50 per cent. With 12 per cent from the grains industry, you're on 62 per cent. America, at present, are on 75 per cent self-sufficiency. They were on 40 per cent when things got a little bit touchy with the Middle East and they immediately moved with great aggression to 75 per cent supply from their own resources of shale oil and ethanol. And, if necessary—and I'm not including this in the 75 per cent—they can bring onstream at any moment the capped oil wells.

Australia, until this moment, has done absolutely nothing. What do we people in here get paid for? What do you do to get paid a $200,000-a-year salary package? Surely, the most elementary thing is to provide safe transportation in this country. It is not as though each of you don't know. Each of you got the NRMA report, done by a retired admiral. But you should not have to get that report to know that this country is dependent upon tankers coming through Singapore, which is Chinese racially, and on both sides are countries of Muslim persuasion. There's a lot of friction in that situation. So those tankers have to come through Singapore, which is Chinese; an area where the people are committed to the Islamic faith. I'm not knocking that; I'm just saying that there has been a lot of sensitivity and abrasiveness there—and that's where our tankers come through. The South China Sea is reachable by missiles, and, as we speak, there are huge bases being built there by the Chinese.

What are we doing about it? Absolutely nothing. The port of Darwin, the only port we have in Australia that is in South-East Asia, was handed over and the bloke got himself $880,000 a year—and the government has done absolutely nothing about what can only be described, and will one day be described, as treason to this country. The Americans have 2,000 marines in Darwin to protect a port that is not now theirs. The minister at the dispatch box is grinning. He thinks this is funny. He thinks it's funny that his nation has no oil and no defence capability. He thinks it's funny that someone is getting upset about him being on his $250,000 or $300,000—or whatever ministers are on. Well, your days are coming to an end, my friend. Have a look at the polls. You're on 30 per cent.

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