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

My friend, I'll go into your electorate and debate it with you. In the meantime, shut up. In the cattle industry we had 32 million; now we've got 22 million. In the sugar industry we're down 15 per cent. In the grain industry, we're at a 16 per cent disadvantage against the Americans. So your sheep are down, like, 60 per cent, your cattle are down, like, 30 to 40 per cent, your sugar's down 15 per cent and your dairy production is down nearly 50 per cent—what a great success story!

But you've opened up all these markets. Well, in the state I come from, our biggest employer is, in fact, the sugarcane industry. 'Oh, the free market's got us into America.' No, it didn't. We don't send any sugar there at all. With the biggest economy in the world—Europe—no sugar is going there. With the third-biggest economy on earth, China, we have a little tiny bit going in. With India, there is no sugar going in there at all. With Brazil, the fifth-biggest economy, there is no sugar going in there at all. So where are your free markets? Here's the biggest industry in Queensland—where is your free market? Where did we get market access? Tell me.

Here's the outcome: we are now a net importer of pork, a net importer of seafood and, believe it or not, a net importer of fruit and vegetables. Our sheep numbers are down 60 per cent. Our cattle numbers are down 20 or 30 per cent. Our sugar's down 15 per cent. Where is this great benefit from the free market? There's no benefit there at all, and you are seriously standing up in this place and saying it's a good idea that we continue with a free market where the 10,000 dairy producers that are still left out there are going to sell to two buyers, and they expect the two buyers to be Father Christmas. Well, please excuse me for telling you that the directors of Woolworths and Coles have a duty to their owners to maximise profits. The wonderful achievement of deregulating the dairy industry was to take New South Wales and Queensland, overnight, from 58c and 59c a litre down to 40c a litre. That's what happened.

With the wool industry—I was a free marketeer at the time; I thought Doug Anthony was dead wrong on the wool—the price of wool increased 300 per cent and stayed up there for 20 years until Keating undermined the scheme and then abolished it. Surprise, surprise, the price fell 300 per cent in the three years afterwards. Well, what an extraordinary coincidence that when the minimum price scheme was introduced the price trebled and then, three years after the scheme was abolished, the price dropped to one-third of what it was. What an incredible coincidence! So, with the propositions that you're putting up here, I openly invite any of you to have me in your electorate arguing with your dairy farmers at a forum. (Time expired)

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