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

I like that word 'corrupt'! There have been only two people in parliament in Australian history since the war who refused to take their superannuation, and, in the case of Bjelke-Petersen, he walked away technically bankrupt. So take that! And consider it, my friend. We were the only government in Australia that had the guts to take on police corruption. Have they taken it on in your state? No! Have you ever had an inquiry into police corruption in your state? Well, we did—and it cost us dearly. But we weeded it out. So we can stand in the history books and say, 'We, as one government, weeded out the corruption in the police force in Queensland.' And there was no-one ever found guilty of government corruption in Queensland, so you want to be careful what you say outside this place. You might cop a big defamation action for telling lies, because your ignorance of the facts is towering. I don't listen to you anymore. You don't deserve to be listened to.

Your governments allowed fly-in mining, which took us from $200,000 a year down to $100,000 a year in mining, and those unions have just about had a gutful of the Labor Party. There is no secret as to the divisions in Queensland, and they're going to widen and widen because you people represent the lily-pad left, not the hard left—the men fighting for decent wages and conditions. Under free trade agreements, you put us in there competing against countries that have no arbitration system at all—countries like China. I mean, people work there for nothing, and we've got to compete against them. So our workers have to increasingly work for nothing.

Worse still, the Labor Party was responsible for bringing 640,000 people who were eligible for work into this country every year, in an economy with only 200,000 jobs. So hang your heads in shame! Why were they bringing them in? I'll tell you the effect it has had: it undermines our pay and conditions and takes our jobs off us. The current head of the ACTU said: 'One out of every two jobs created from 2013 has gone to a temporary worker.' That's a good situation, isn't it!

God bless the unions that are standing up and fighting for their people, and God bless those people in farming areas that are standing up and fighting for their people—

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