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

I second the motion. If we had the power in North Queensland, a rail line would have been built into the Galilee some seven or eight years ago. That would have brought $25,000 million into the Australian economy. Hells Gate would have been built 10 or15 years ago—that's $3 billion into the North Queensland economy. Bradfield was actually announced 30 years ago by both state and federal government—that's $6 billion a year. The northern canal—that's $7 billion. That's $50 billion the Australian people could be having every year. It's not that our voices are not heard; it's that we can't even communicate our voices with anyone.

At the present moment, the government of Queensland has proposed the shutdown of the coal industry. They've advocated that, and they've advocated the shutdown of the sugarcane industry. Well, Queensland only has two industries and they're both centred in North Queensland. The entire economy of North Queensland would simply shut down. There are also some very big question marks hanging over Mount Isa, the only other major employer. Our tourism is down over 30 per cent, probably down around 50 per cent now, and that was before this trauma came in.

This is a way to give us a little bit more power, a tiny bit more power. The great commentator on democracy Alexis de Tocqueville—he's famous for 'tyranny of the majority'. Democracy does not deliver a fair go. It doesn't deliver justice. It doesn't even deliver representation, but it does deliver the tyranny of the majority. Locke, in his book on freedom, uses the 'tyranny of majority' phrase again and again and again. In Queensland the main roads department was divided up into five divisions; each division got an equal amount of money. So once upon a time there were fair governments. Now, just to use the approach from the airport into the Brisbane CBD as an example: there's $5½ billion in overpasses, then we go into a $7 billion tunnel and there's another $5½ billion when you come out of the tunnel at Bowen Hills. So $18 billion has been spent just on one road leading into the CBD, and there are four roads leading into the CBD. There's nothing like that in North Queensland, nothing remotely like that in North Queensland.

So fairness in electricity—we have no baseload power in North Queensland. In fact the nearest baseload station is 1,000km away, so the cost of taking electricity from down there to up here is colossal. It works out to about $600 million a year. Now someone has to come up with that $600 million a year.

As far as dams and weirs go, we've got about 85 per cent of Australia's water in North Queensland. We have six dams and weirs. The south-eastern corner of the state would have over 100 dams and weirs. So while we've got all the water, we've got no dams or irrigation to hold it back. Their rivers run all the time; our rivers only run for a short period of the year. (Time expired)

Debate adjourned.

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