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

There have been a number of speakers who have referred to the Bradfield Scheme. I, along with one of the youngest and most brilliant doctorates ever awarded in universities in Australian history—they're a professor who wishes to remain anonymous—and a gentleman called Roy Stankey, one of the biggest sheep farmers in Queensland and one of the two smartest blokes I've ever known, drew up the revised Bradfield Scheme. Bradfield made three proposals. The first one: you dig a big, long tunnel—forget about that one; no-one's going to take that one seriously these days. The second one: you go through a break in the Great Dividing Range. There's no Great Dividing Range at a place called the Desert Uplands. The third one: you dig a canal up from Spencer Gulf and fill Lake Eyre that way.

What is most relevant to the Murray-Darling question is that the prevailing winds blow 32 million megalitres across the top of the Murray-Darling Basin. The Murray-Darling Basin has 23 million megalitres of run-off. This would blow 32 million megalitres across on top of the Murray-Darling Basin. Now, the gentleman who was proposing this was not exactly a fool. He built a bridge which is still the cornerstone of the traffic movements in Sydney. They said, 'You're building six lanes'—or eight lanes, I think it is—'and we've only got 25,000 cars in Sydney.' He said, 'We are building for the future.' He built the underground railway system, which is still the main means of transportation in Sydney, and he won the world prize for engineering. So the water supply to Sydney is still mainly the water supply that he built and engineered. He also built, in your own home city, Deputy Speaker Vasta, the Story Bridge and the University of Queensland, which your daddy, you and your brother, as I understand it, went to, as I did also. He also built that.

The revised Bradfield Scheme says that you take the Bradfield Scheme and the waters where it rains all the time in the Kennedy electorate, which I represent. We get 200-inch rainfall at the Tullys, Babindas, Innisfails and Inghams, and you put a little tiny bit of that—because you only take the top of it right up in the mountains—and you put it back through to the other side of the Great Dividing Range, which we already do in Mareeba now. We take the Barron River and move it to the other side of the Great Dividing Range, and that's the Mareeba irrigation scheme. The Hells Gate Dam is stage 1. You take the water from the Burdekin, the third biggest river in Australia—the upper Burdekin—and you transfer it to that break in the Great Dividing Range. And then you go through onto the rolling, rich black soil plains, which used to have written across the map, 'The best natural grasslands in Australia.' It now grows 10 million hectares of prickly acacia trees, destroying all flora and fauna. When we die and go up to heaven, God will ask: 'What did you do? I gave you that beautiful asset. What did you do with it?' And we will say: 'We grew prickly trees on it.' We destroyed all of the possums, koala bears, kangaroos and dunnarts—the most endangered species in Australia. They were all destroyed by prickly trees because we sat on our backside and did nothing with the great asset that God had given us.

There were no bulldozers in the days of Bradfield. With bulldozers, it's quite attractive to build a giant canal and take and flood Lake Eyre with seawater. And the evaporation, as I said, is 32 million megalitres—the prevailing winds blow it up from the inside of the Great Dividing Range over the Murray-Darling Basin. Having read every report, there is no doubt in my mind that there will be a very, very significant increase in rainfall over the Murray-Darling Basin. But no-one in their right minds would take the waters from North Queensland and cross those magnificent, beautiful thousand-kilometre-wide and thousand-kilometre-broad rich black soil plains where you don't have to use fertiliser for eight years. We farm without using fertiliser, and there's the research farm there. Of course, we can then also use the waters of the Flinders River. We can't use that because there are just too many gaps to use it effectively. It's the sixth biggest river in Australia.

This magnificent scheme for the people of Australia, with the water going to Lake Eyre: how do you pay for it? If you take one per cent or two per cent of Lake Eyre—I can't remember which one it is—and you use it as a salt factory, it is the best salt factory in the world. It has nine metres of evaporation, and five per cent of salt water is salt, so you can work it out for yourself. That's a pretty big area, Lake Eyre. But that will virtually pay for the $5,000 million it costs. Wilson Tuckey used to be a great advocate for the scheme.

On the Indigenous side of it, it is very hard for me to contain my rage. In this place we apologised for the theft of the children, but we are thieving more children per capita today than we were doing then. And yet we had the enormous hypocrisy of this place—I had to fight to stop myself from walking out on the vote, or going public and calling a press conference. I claim to have a bit of Kalkatungu in the family tree. I'm dark and come from Cloncurry—you prove I'm not, but I most certainly identify, often and repeatedly. And under the law of course, legally, I am—that is, the law that was around a couple of hundred years ago.

I will quote Greg Wallace, speaking as a First Australian. Greg is very famous because of the first time 60 Minutes ever did a repeat program. He started Work for the Dole in Australia, an absolutely remarkable achievement. I was the minister and they all thought I had something to do with it. I didn't even know he'd done it until 60 Minutes went off! He then got a second 60 Minutes, the first time in the program's history. It was the most-watched program in Australia in those days, so he was a superstar. Gerhardt Pearson, Noel's brother, rang me up and said, 'Well, why don't we use the Work for the Dole money to build the houses?' Instead of building 400 houses, we built nearly 2,000 houses and we provided 720 jobs in the house-building program. These blokes were getting their dole money, but they were getting it topped up to a full wage as well by the state and federal government money that I was administering.

This is what I want to say: look at the hypocrisy of this place in talking about putting a First Australian on the Murray-Darling Basin. I quote Greg Wallace: 'When I was CEO at Napranum, all of the CEOs in Cape York and the Gulf were blackfellas. Now they're all whitefellas. When I was CEO at Napranum, we had 36,000 head of cattle. Now we have none. When I was CEO at Napranum, we had 2,000 jobs—700 of them working in a highly-skilled area, building houses. Now we have none.' This government has cut off all housing money, but in any event there is no Work for the Dole scheme and the houses haven't been built by First Australians.

All housing built in those days was built exclusively by local Indigenous labour. I doubt whether seven per cent of the workforce building the houses over the last 10 years was Indigenous labour, let alone local Indigenous labour. Let me go on with Greg's quote, 'We had water rights, we had quarrying rights and we had timber rights.' God bless the ALP, the champions of the First Australians! They took away our water rights, they took away our quarrying rights and they took away our timber rights. And, not content with that, they took away our right to have a beer! Everyone on earth can have a beer except we First Australians. All you whitefellas, you can drink, but we blackfellas, oh no—we can't be trusted to drink.

We all drink. I know they had Prohibition in America, but it didn't stop anyone from drinking. In fact, the alcohol consumption actually went up, believe it or not! So we continue to drink. What has happened now is that we've all got criminal charges so we can't get a blue card, and the only jobs now, of course, are government jobs. There are no cattle, there is no house-building and there are no title deeds, so I can't take up a block of land and build a service station and own it myself, because there is no such thing as title deeds; they took them away from us as well. It's not really difficult; we issued 800 title deeds when I was minister. I pay respects to the very great Eric Laws, who just got an Order of Australia, and to the late Lester Rosendale, who is from what is probably the most prominent First Australian family in Cape York. His first cousins are Mattie Bowen, the famous rugby league player; Noel Pearson; and Greg Wallace.

Let's just go through this—oh, I haven't finished, I'm sorry! When Richard Mears was the chairman of the committee, we went up to the Torres Strait. We went to Masig Island and Showy Nona started screaming out, 'They're murdering us, Bobby!' He just kept shouting it out. And Richard Marles—I'm sorry; I got the name wrong, but I hope I got it right this time—said, 'What is he talking about?' I said: 'You banned by law all fruit and vegetable gardens in the backyards of every Torres Strait Islander family, just condemning them to death. They're going to die of malnutrition because they've got no fresh fruit and vegetables. By the time they get it up there, they've got no shelf life left, and they couldn't afford to buy it anyway. Not content with that, you banned dinghy fishing, which was the only commercial income which Torres Strait Islanders had.' They fought the battle, God bless the Torres Strait Islanders, and they got the rights back, but it's been 20 years since there's been a vegetable garden. They've forgotten how to put in a fruit and vegetable garden.

As for the dinghy fishing, all the freezers are gone from the 15 islands. You brought your catch in and sold it to the freezer, and that was your income. That was how we made a living in the Torres Strait, and that was taken away from us. We've got it back now, but the freezers are gone, so there's no use going fishing. There's no-one to sell it to, because there's no freezer to put the fish in. You go and put it in the fridge. We're talking about a huge amount of fish that you'll get from two or three blokes going out in a dinghy in a day.

So we sit here and talk about whether we should have representation on the Murray-Darling. We don't talk about 400 to 500 of us dying of malnutrition every year. That's not a figure plucked out of the air. That is the leading authority in university medical education in Australia—his figure, not mine. When I tried to get the figures on diabetes, the reaction of the Queensland government was: 'Oh, we love the black people. We're socialists; we love the black people.' Their reaction was not to fix the problem up but to hide the figures. For 2½ years they did a magnificent job of hiding the figures, but eventually I got them.

Our new Prime Minister has agreed to put market gardens in, but we've had no action and we must get action. Otherwise, people will think that we're just fibbers and noisemakers. We must put the market gardens back—and the much-maligned Christian churches.

I am a published historian. I wrote the bestselling non-fiction work in the year that it came out. It was launched—Murdoch press runs this, not me—by Kevin Rudd to over 1,000 people in Sydney. it was launched by Barrie Cassidy in Melbourne to over 1,000 people. I lived out bush with the last of the Kalkatungu. His mother was one of the few survivors of the battle, or the massacre, on battle range. We lived out bush together. We had mines together. I know I'm one of the very last vestiges of the knowledge of the old days. As a race of people, we must stand condemned, because that is how we're treating the First Australians.

We come in here and talk about whether they have representation. We don't talk about giving them a title deed. We don't talk about giving them jobs. We don't talk about giving them back their rights to timber and water and quarrying, which they've had since time immemorial. When I say quarrying, I mean a lot of our implements, of course, were stone implements. Quarrying was a very valuable and important issue to us economically. To get a feed we need a tomahawk. To make a fire we needed that tomahawk. We had it for forever until now, and now we don't have it.

Now, the first movement I've seen in the years I have been down here, in spite of screaming, yelling, losing my temper and doing all sorts of wild and crazy things, has been from the current Prime Minister, and I would hope that, if there's a change of government in two or three years' time, it's continued by the Labor Party. But, at the present moment, we have not had action, and we must have action on the market garden issue.

My time is up, but all of the fruit and vegetables go to Brisbane and then back up to North Queensland. They lose two weeks of shelf life and then, by the time they get to the Torres Strait or Cape York, they're out shelf life. We've got nothing to eat of fresh fruit and vegetables and we're dying of malnutrition.

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