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

I withdraw that remark, Mr Deputy Speaker. We're talking about drought. I mean, there's one answer to drought—only one answer to drought—and that is to get some water, put it on the ground and grow some grass. I'm going to emphasise here the grazing industry rather than the cropping industry. So, the only answer to drought, which scourged this country as we know for 200 years—and I suspect for 20,000 or 30,000 years—is to put some water on the ground to make grass grow.

The only place we have a reliable water supply is north of the line, and the Prime Minister of Australia said, 'Where is the line?' I said, 'From Tennant Creek through Mount Isa to Charters Towers and Mackay. North of that line your rivers and creeks run every year.' I speak with great authority because my own family has lived on the Cloncurry River, some 400 or 500 kilometres from the sea, for 130 years that I know of. Judging from my dark complexion, I suspect a hell of a lot longer—and I'm very proud of the fact too. It has run every single year in white man's history—400 kilometres—and our annual rainfall is 14 inches in Cloncurry. But, because it all comes within a month or two months, the river runs every year. Every year we get the monsoons. Every year our rivers and creeks run. Every single one of them runs. For a large proportion of my life, I owned 250,000 acres of North Queensland, and with a partner we owned 500,000 acres, and the rivers and creeks ran every single year. So all you have to do is just hold a little bit of that water back—because that's all you can hold back with the vast floods that we have every year—spread it out and grow grass.

For the first time in my life I see—sorry, I take that back because the much-maligned Malcolm Fraser government and the much-maligned Bjelke-Petersen government launched the great and visionary Bradfield Scheme to turn inland Australia into 'a garden of flowers'. That was the expression that John Crew Bradfield used to describe what was going to happen in Central Australia. Please, God, if Hells Gates is built the way it should be built, that's Bradfield stage 1. But today we stand up and say to the government: 'Hold a little bit of that water back.' We're not farmers; we're cattlemen. Cattle walk around on the grass and they eat the grass. That's what we're going to do. If you have a bad drought, it will pay us not to have the cattle walking around and eating the grass. We'll cut the grass and feed it in troughs and we can carry 20 times more cattle. If your cattle or your sheep are hungry, send them up to us in the bad times, because it will pay us to cut the grass and trough-feed the cattle. There is your answer to drought. When it rains back in New South Wales, you take them back home again. So we have the answers. If North Queensland were a separate country, it would be the wettest country on earth—wetter than Brazil or any other country. We have miles of water, but the trouble is we don't have rivers. We have a flood and then we have a series of waterholes. All we're saying is: harvest a little bit of the flood and hold it back.

On the reconstruction board on debt, my son, the member of parliament for North-West Queensland, in the state parliament, headed the committee that went all over the state. I went to four of those meetings. At every meeting, every farmer stood up and said, 'We want no more debt.' I speak with authority because I was the minister responsible for the state bank in Queensland. We borrowed about $700 million. We borrowed it at about two or three per cent and we loaned it to farmers at two or three per cent. It didn't cost anything. We just got the interest from them and paid it to the banks. We borrowed the money; we took the mortgages. This is the critical point: we took the mortgages. We were not prepared to risk the taxpayers' money. We took the mortgages. So, if they went broke, we foreclosed, and we did foreclose on about five per cent of them. We brought the entire sugar industry through. Not only did we not lose money but we made about $200 million profit because, three years later, the price went up, as it always does. It's cyclical as in other industries. We went back to 8½ per cent interest and we made about $200 million out of it. The government will not go to a reconstruction board approach, which puts no government money in jeopardy. The farmer, who might owe a million dollars and pays $80,000 a year in interest and repayments is suddenly paying $10,000, and he can get through. With a family assistance package, the good ones can get through. The bad ones should be out of the industry anyway. That's what happened.

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