Bob Katter (Kennedy, Katter's Australian Party) Share this | Hansard source

I don't want my remarks to be construed as being positive about the other side of the parliament, who have been there for most of the last 12 years.

Our diabetes is at epidemic levels. In fact, I would hope that other nations do not find out what the level of diabetes is in Australia. A lot of people say diabetes is just malnutrition, because the people can't get a decent diet. Most of them are on welfare in the community areas in the Gulf of Carpentaria and Cape York, where most First Australians live, not in the Northern Territory. In one community of about 300 people, two people died of diabetes the fortnight before I was visiting, and the matron in charge of the hospital there said another one would die that month—three people from a community of 300. That would not be atypical of the community areas in Queensland, where some 40,000 or 50,000 people live. They can't afford to get fresh fruit and vegetables into these areas.

There are a number of people in this parliament still that went on a fact-finding mission to the Torres Strait. I never wanted to go back to the Torres Strait, because, as minister for six, seven, eight years—I don't know; whatever it was—in Queensland, I'd seen paradise. I never wanted to go back there again, because it would never be as good as when I saw it as minister. I have some emotional difficulties in expressing this to the House, actually. When we went to the island of Joey Mosby, who was no fan of mine when I was minister—he fell into a category of people that were not keen on self-management and other areas—he stood up at the back of a meeting and yelled out, 'Bobby, they're murdering my people.' The chairman of the committee, who is now a frontbencher on the Labor side said, 'What's all that about?' I said, 'You people and the Liberals banned market gardens.'

Every house, every family up in the Torres Strait had a market garden. They had yams, taros, sweet potatoes, bananas, mangoes and numerous other things all growing in the backyard. I cannot remember having a meal in the Torres Strait, in my six, eight years—whatever it was—as minister, where all of the food, not just some of the food, was not Indigenous. Turtle, dugong, fish, crayfish, crab and all of the things I mentioned before, fruit and vegetables, all came from the Torres Strait. This time when I went up there to that same island, Joey Mosby's island, I actually paced out the shelf space. One-seventh of the entire shelf was taken up with rice. This is a really grindingly poor Third World country, and you created that—you people in this parliament. It's on your consciences.

Who do we blame? Who banned the market gardens? That sounds horrific and it sounds unbelievable. Why did you ban the market gardens of the Torres Strait? Because you said disease could come down from New Guinea. AQIS couldn't be bothered putting any AQIS officers at the Torres Strait's Horn Island Airport. The only way of getting into Australia is through the airport. They couldn't even be bothered putting a quarantine officer there, and yet they could go and ban every single market garden in the Torres Strait. They couldn't be bothered putting a single AQIS officer at the Jardine River, which is the only other real way of entering Australia with anything from the Torres Strait. You can either land and come by road transport or cross the Jardine River and go on the Jardine River ferry, so all you've got to do is pay someone there to check out the food coming in from the Torres Strait or New Guinea, and similarly at the airport. But they didn't have officers at either place. Over a long period of time, I've kicked up such a hell of a stink, and I proudly say that I think I was the only voice that did, and we do have officers now inspecting at both those places. But that didn't help the Torres Strait Island people, who are now dying in massive numbers as a result of decisions by this place.

No-one seems to feel ashamed. No-one has any sense of shame. What do they do? The Labor government of Queensland went out and brought in Mr Fitzgerald, who had destroyed our government, to tell us what was wrong in the community areas and what to do about it. This absolutely brilliant person came up with the fact that it was alcohol that was the problem. Oh, what a searching finding! Oh, what a brilliant intellectual insight! It was alcohol that caused it. Alcohol was the cause—not the effect but the cause. Therefore, he said, 'Let's ban alcohol.' So he advocated that we have racial laws in Australia: whitefellas can drink but we blackfellas can't. There's no way that you can say anything else except that that is a racist law. It applies to blackfellas; it does not apply to whitefellas.

If you doubt what I'm saying, have a look at the diabetes figures, because they're the highest in the world. I just picked diabetes. There are a dozen other diseases, but I haven't got time to go through all those. On the unemployment figures, every community area in Queensland has a higher unemployment rate than any whitefella community in Australia, by a long way—the highest unemployment rates, probably, in the world. The crime rate is higher than any whitefella community in the country.

When this brilliant ban on alcohol occurred, what happened was that all the alcoholics moved into Townsville, Mount Isa, Alice Springs, Darwin, Cairns or Mareeba—all the no-hoper crowd. So what happened in Townsville is that Townsville now has the highest crime rate in Australia and the highest unemployment rate in Australia. That was imposed by the brainless B-A-S-T-A-R-Ds who imposed the ban on alcohol. I'll be very specific about Townsville. We have 110 cars being thieved every month in Townsville, which means that, over a 15-year period, every single family in Townsville will have their car thieved. That's the result of this decision. The suicide rates in these communities, once again, are the highest in the world. You measure a nation by the way it treats its poorest people and its most downtrodden people. If we're being judged by that then we are judged abominably and we must stand as a pariah amongst nations.

If I speak with passion, it's because these are persons that I know. I was speaking about this to Barry Waldron, the brother of the famous Clarence Waldron—I put Clarence in my book An Incredible Race of People: A Passionate History of Australia because I thought his comments were important enough to go into the book. When they banned alcohol, they said to me, 'We discussed it. We've appointed representatives from your community and'—surprise, surprise!—'they've all voted to ban alcohol.' Three people yelled out, 'Yeah, the missionary ladies.' I'm a practising Christian and I greatly revere the missionary ladies. They set a very good example in the community. But it was a fair call to say that they appointed the missionary ladies to decide whether they should not have alcohol at Doomadgee. Clarence Waldron said—and I've quoted this a million times: 'You don't come here and say what's what, and that's that. This is my land! This is my land! You don't come here and say what's what, and that's that. This is my land!' And, yes, as a person that identifies as a blackfella in my homeland, I proudly say that we held British occupation at bay for nearly 70 years at Kalkadoon. Not a bad effort. Because of that, Clarence Waldron can proudly stand up and say, 'This is my land.' But it's not his land if we go in there and tell him he's not allowed to drink alcohol. The only group of people on earth banned from drinking alcohol are the First Australians in Australia. And why are you doing it? You're doing it to suppress the symptoms, to hide the horror that is out there. You want to hide it so no-one can see it.

Noely Pearson disagrees with me on this. Noel said, 'I don't argue with you that it is an effect, not a cause.' But he said, 'It has now become a causal effect and we must address it.' He has probably changed his position a bit on this. I said to Noely, and most certainly to his brother Gerhardt, that, if it was going to achieve anything, surely it would have achieved something after 10 years.

Now I'm going to switch subjects completely. When poker machines were introduced, under the much-maligned Bjelke-Petersen government, they were banned in Queensland and I was his right-hand man in banning them. As soon as we were thrown out the socialists came in and immediately introduced pokies. They are big bankrollers of the Labor Party—we all know that—and the Liberal Party too. But the Labor Party was in power and they introduced them.

At the Buffalo Club in Mount Isa, where I spend a lot of my time, Bobby Jacobson said: 'I should never tell this story, you should be the last person I tell this to, but $3.2 million a year is sailing out of Mount Isa down the throats of the poker machines and into the hands of the government of Queensland.' That is for a town of 20,000 people. That's coming out of the pockets of the poorest people in that community. Bobby Leong, the prominent First Australian leader and long-term president of one of our best rugby league clubs there—I had the dishonour of sitting on the sideline when his brother scored against 11 tries against Cloncurry!—said— (Time expired)

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