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

I speak with considerable authority in this area. I was the Minister for Mines and Energy in Queensland. We had the cheapest electricity in the world. The proof of that was that the announced aluminium processing plants for Canada—and Canada, arguably, before us, had the cheapest energy in the world—decided not to go to Canada to use their hydroelectric power but to come to Queensland to use our power. The reason we had the cheapest electricity in the world, and why we were always accused of being the biggest socialist government in Australian history—looking back on it, if you define that as government ownership, I suppose we were, but you most certainly wouldn't use that word to describe the ALP; they were the ones who sold everything off—was that we had a policy of delivering to the people and industries of Queensland the cheapest electricity in the world. I pay great tribute to Sir Leo Hielscher, as well as to the late Ron Camm and the late Joh Bjelke-Petersen. They negotiated that if you wanted to mine coal in Queensland then you gave one per cent to us. It is called reserve resource policy. It used to be the policy of the old Labor governments, but today the Labor Party represents the exact opposite point of view; they believe in screwing everyone to get the money off them. We believed in taking one per cent of the coal as a reserved resource. That's for the people of Queensland. Would to heaven that someone in this place had had the brains to do that with the gas industry—$36 billion coming into the Australian economy and boomeranging straight out again, because the collective wisdom and brains of this place sold it for 6c a unit; we Australians now have to buy it back at $16 a unit.

The cost of producing electricity is based upon three components. One is coal. We had the coal for free in Queensland. Two is labour costs. We built the biggest power station in the world, Gladstone: 1450 megawatts of power. It had exactly the same manning levels as tiny little Collinsville. Collinsville was producing 180 megawatts; Gladstone was producing 1450 megawatts. The labour costs were negligible. The repayment costs on the construction were very sizable indeed, but over a 17- or 18-year period we had paid off the debt on the power station, so there was no cost for debt servicing. There was no cost for the coal; under the reserve resource policy it was free. The only cost was the power station workers, who were on more money than a member of parliament. The workers were getting an extremely good deal under the much-maligned Bjelke-Petersen government.

But we delivered the cheapest electricity charges in the world, because we were not worried about this free market rubbish; we were out there to make a quid. Unlike in this place, we were all from business, farming and aspirational backgrounds. A lot of us were workers, but we were workers out there to make a quid and get ahead in life. That's the difference between our government and every government in Australia in the last 25 to 30 years. They don't comprise anyone who fits into that category. We had the cheapest electricity charges in the world.

Shane Knuth, state member for the KAP, the political party I belong to, constantly quotes Peter Beattie, who said, 'When we open the electricity industry up to competition, electricity prices will go down.' Australia has very accurate graphs for Victoria, Queensland and South Australia, and all of those graphs are flat lines up until 1999, then suddenly in the year 2003 the graphs are almost vertical. The price goes straight through the roof. The price in Queensland was $670 per household for 11 straight years from 1988 to 1999; after 2003 the price shoots through the roof and it's $2,400 per household. What happened here? Why did the price suddenly skyrocket? There are reasons why the figures are not available in New South Wales. In Victoria, South Australia and Queensland, it's a flat line. There's no increase in price. We couldn't justify an increase in price. We didn't have any increases. The price of coal didn't worry us because we got the coal for free. The price of labour was negligible, and we'd paid off the power stations, so we couldn't justify asking for anything more than $670.

But, when privatisation came on the scene, what did you expect to happen? Just how dumb and stupid are you in this place? What did you expect to happen? If you sold all of the electricity industry in Australia for $150 billion, because that's about what it was, then the people who bought it would have to show a return on their investment, and, not unnaturally, they asked for a nine per cent return. So, suddenly, the electricity consumers of Australia had to find an extra $15 billion a year. We're talking about 2½ per cent of the entire federal budget at $15 billion a year. Electricity prices had to show a return on invested capital. I mean, how could you not see that? Then you say, 'Oh, it's just a failure of market mechanisms. It's just oligopolistic pricing; it's monopoly type pricing.' No, it's not. It's a valid return on invested capital. We didn't have any capital to serve because we'd already paid it off. The previous speaker left out a little bit: them being involved in wanting to sell the rest of the assets in Queensland.

I warn the people in this place. I warn you. In Queensland, we've got a little more brains than you in other states, because, when that state government sold those assets, it suffered the biggest landslide in Queensland's history. Anna Bligh led the government of Queensland. The ALP were the government of Queensland. After the election, they had, I think, five seats. That was all they were left with: five seats. So two people voted for Annastacia Palaszczuk. She became the Premier of Queensland on two votes! Now, the Liberals were so stupid that they went to the next election saying they were going to sell the rest of the assets. So one party sold the electricity industry, corporatised it, and sold the railways and got annihilated by the people of Queensland, and the other party was so stupid that they proceeded down exactly the same pathway. Surprise, surprise: they got annihilated in the second biggest landslide recorded in Queensland's history.

So I warn you: you try and privatise the electricity industry in Queensland and the people of Queensland will 'kill you'. I am proud to be able to say that in this place and be able to back it up with two election results. You may be stupid enough to even think about proceeding down that pathway. The world exploded when this legislation came in. I and the ALP saw it as a sneaky plot to sell off the assets in Queensland—to force the sale of the assets in Queensland. The sneaky Queensland government corporatised the asset. They said, 'It's an asset of $30 billion. We've got to get some return on our investment, of course.' So Queensland fared no better than any other state under the corporatised model.

We now lie with the aluminium industry which came to Queensland. This was our third biggest industry in Queensland, because we had the cheapest electricity charges in the world. Do you know what's going to happen now that we have, arguably, the highest charges? The last graph I got had Australia with the highest electricity charges in world. Now that we've got the highest electricity charges in the world, what do you think is going to happen to the aluminium industry? Aluminium is just congealed electricity. The vast bulk of the cost of aluminium is the electricity element. So the Queensland government want to close down the coal industry. They want to close down the sugar cane industry. The third-biggest industry is aluminium and, as sure as the sun rises tomorrow, it's going to vanish because we have the highest electricity charges in the world. It's not as quite as simple as I'm making it out to be but it is a fair call to say what I have just said. When you go down a pathway and you make a terrible mistake and you say, 'Oh, no, I wasn't wrong; I'm going to continue to do it,' you make a bigger mistake and a bigger mistake and an even bigger mistake and eventually the history books write you up as the worst government in the entire history of Australia, and that judgement has to be passed at the present moment.

We have no economy left now. We only have two industries. We're not a mining country. Mining is when you dig it out of the ground and sell the metal. That's mining. We dig it out of the ground and sell the ground. That's called quarry, so we have two quarries. We have an iron ore quarry and a coal quarry. I think the coal issue will be about $70,000 million and I think the next item down may be aluminium or cattle, which is about $12,000 million, so this economy only rests upon two products now. If either of them falter, God help Australia.

There are people in this country who want the coal industry closed down. Forget about buying your biros from overseas, your clothing from overseas, your cars from overseas, your petrol from overseas, your white goods from overseas, your mobile telephones from overseas because you won't have any money to buy them. You've only got two sources of income now. I mean, the wool industry carried this country for 150 years and Mr Keating, the greatest Treasurer in the world, easily the most atrocious Treasurer in this nation's history, deregulated the wool industry. Well, surprise, surprise, wool dropped down to one-third of the price it had been before deregulation. Well, that was fairly predictable because when Doug Anthony introduced the scheme, the price went up 300 per cent. When the scheme was taken away, the price went down. Well, too late now. Some 70 per cent of your wool sheep have gone. There are some fat lambs left but that's only 62 per cent of the sheep herd.

So we come to the situation of today. I think we all like Josh, the Treasurer. Even his Liberal partners, if they were honest, would say he's a very likeable person, right? But he's locked into a conventional wisdom, the free market ideology, and he can't ever see outside of that. Now, if the free market philosophy, ideology, operated in this country, there would have been no wool industry, which carried the country for 150 years. There would have been no wool industry because farmers were given the land for free by the government. The government believed that it should back the farmers and gave the land to John Macarthur and all the rest of them for free. There would be no aluminium industry, there most certainly would be no coal industry but there may have been an iron ore industry, I'd have to say.

What would this country be left with if we had that free market ideology operating over the last century? There'd be nothing left of this country at all. I mean, even the tourism industry in Queensland was sparked off by us giving land free to resort developers, Keith Williams being the leading one. We all know that the biggest man-made tourist attraction in Australia by far is Sea World and that land was given to him for free on condition that he built it. So you can have no government intervention, you can have your free markets, but there is no other country on earth that is marching to that drum. (Time expired)

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