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

The Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement was touted as a wonderful thing in this place and in both the Financial Review and The Australian. The whole agreement was about the beef, sugar and dairy trades with America. I happen to be the representative of the electorate in Australia with arguably the biggest cattle numbers, the second-biggest sugar-producing area and certainly the most concentrated dairy area, so I watched the free trade agreement with great interest. I was intrigued and looked on with curiosity because in all of my adult life, nearly 50 years both as a member of parliament representing the heartland of the cattle industry and having had cattle on a quarter-of-a-million acres up in the Gulf Country for a while, I've never heard a single person complain to me about our access to the American market. In fact in many years we've had difficulty getting enough beef to fulfil our quota, and the Americans have been very fair as far as free trade goes. Their industry gets subsidised, but as far as access goes I've never had any complaints.

The second thing I will say is that Tony Abbott stood up in this place when the China-Australia Free-Trade Agreement was announced and led a spontaneous standing ovation for the minister who later on gave the green light to the sale of the Port of Darwin to the Chinese and then went on to earn nearly $900,000, according to the newspapers, in income from the Chinese company to which he had given the green light. So, the Americans' only deepwater port in the South Pacific was handed over to what may be—and we hope is never—their potential enemy, the Chinese. I'm sure they were very pleased about that. And President Obama expressed that he was not happy about that.

But when Tony Abbott stood that applause, I said—and I don't know whether it went into Hansard'Tony, you just signed your own death warrant.' The people in Australia have had it up to here with this. They know it's lies. They know it's rubbish. And to do that—well, a few months later he was gone. I'm not saying it was on account of that, and I say it with regret, because I like Tony personally, and I respected him as Prime Minister.

In question time last week I said to the Treasurer, 'After three years of deregulation and privatisation, electricity prices have risen from $670 a year for 11 straight years.' Once we deregulated and privatised, it went straight through the roof, up to $2,400. Well, what a magnificent success story! Privatisation and deregulation—a 300 per cent increase. I said, 'Similarly, housing has skyrocketed, from $5,600 a year to $15,000 a year', and that is a result of a free trade approach to visa entrants coming into this country—namely, section 457 workers—amongst other issues. Free market policy in food resulted in only two people buying and selling food in Australia, when this rubbish started. Those two had 50.5 per cent— (Time expired)

See this speech in context