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

Mr Speaker, in rising to speak on the Farm Household Support Amendment (Relief Measures) Bill (No. 1) 2020, I am very intrigued by the federal government claiming credit for the financial household package. In fact, it was the party I belong to, the KAP, that initiated the drought summit down here, the roundtable. It was chaired by Rowell Walton, the president of our party. Out of it Wayne Swan, the ALP Treasurer, to the shame of the government, gave us these financial assistance grants. If you were not getting welfare payments, the government gave you a top-up to enable you to have at least a welfare income for your family.

All of the credit goes to the Rural Action Council of Far North Queensland: the president, Johnny Gambino; the secretary, Bernie O'Shea; and Makse Srhoj. I won't name all of them, but Johnny Mete and Scotty Dixon have to be named. Those people were determined to get a number of changes through, and that was one of those changes. They also secured from the LNP an agreement that, if they were elected, there would be a mandatory code of conduct to answer the power of Woolworths and Coles—a promise that was flagrantly breached and almost led to the sacking of one of the McGauran brothers as the minister because he just couldn't live with the shame of going to an election promising we would do something about Woolworths and Coles with a mandatory code of conduct, and all they were asking for was a sales dock. Is this a big thing to ask—that Woolworths and Coles gives a sales docket? There is a necessity for that if you are a mango farmer—and I was a tiny mango farmer. You send your mangoes in, if you've got an early season, and you get $25 a box. Next week, when all the other mango farmers come on, it will be $16 a box. The big supermarket chains returned the mangoes, saying: 'Oh well, there were some problems with the mangoes. If you don't like it, too bad'. Now the mangos have lost two weeks of their shelf life and you can't sell them. Of course, in the meantime the farmer has been bankrupted. He got $25 a box and now he can't get anything for a box that is over-ripe. Any of the fruit and vegetables would fall into that category. All they were asking for was a sales docket.

At Mareeba, the Deputy Prime Minister of Australia stood in front of a meeting of 800 people called by the Rural Action Council and promised them they would get a mandatory code of conduct, which was just a sales docket. Woolworths and Coles said, 'We didn't actually buy them off you; we just took them on consignment. Now we've looked at them and we're returning them to you.' But, if there was a sales docket, they couldn't do that; they couldn't pull that trick. Is this an unreasonable thing to ask for? Peter McGauran just couldn't do it. So they replaced him with a germ from the Liberal Party, who had no difficulty whatsoever in doing it. I won't mention his name.

You have been in power for 26 of the last 32 years, and how's agriculture faring? Our cattle numbers are down from 33 million to 22 million. Did the free markets help the cattle industry? Not bloody likely. We're down from 33 million head to 22 million head, one of the lowest figures ever in my lifetime. Did they help the wool industry? Well, alright: the ALP deregulated wool—they can take the full blame for that one—but did you put it back? No. You didn't put it back. So how's wool faring? It's the biggest industry this country has had since its inception as a country in the 1890s. Right through to 1980, it was bigger than coal. What did you do? The ALP deregulated; you blokes never reregulated.

So let's see how the wool industry is faring under your great free-market system. We had 172 million sheep; now we have 66 million. Oh, jeez, they've done really well under your free market system! Let's move on to the sugar industry. I'm not using grain as an example because grain really depends on seasons. Its income is very seasonal, so I'll leave that out. The other one of the big four is the sugar cane industry. Every town in Queensland north of Nambour, including Nambour, is a sugar cane town or a sugar cane city, such as Townsville and Cairns. Not Rockhampton, not Gladstone and not Bowen, but, outside of those three, the other 30 are all sugar towns. They've been created by the sugar industry; their industry is sugar. This is one of the biggest industries in Australia. How are they faring? They're down 15 per cent. The reality is that they're closing a mill every two or three years. Now there are only about 21 or 22 mills left in Australia, so they're on doomsday road. How's the dairy industry going—the other one of the big five? It's down 50 per cent. Here's your scorecard on wool: from 172 million sheep down to 66 million sheep. Here's your scorecard on cattle: from 33 million down to 22 million. Here's your scorecard on dairy: down 50 per cent. Here's your scorecard on sugar: down 15 per cent, and a sugar mill closes every three years. There are only 21 or 22 sugar mills left in Australia. There's your scorecard.

Why have your policies been so absolutely disastrous? It's because of the destruction of my party, the Country Party. Doug Anthony was a very young man and I wasn't in the parliament at the time. He got me aside. He's six foot six and he's of Sicilian descent, so you listen to him. You wouldn't do much else! He looked at me with his blue eyes and he said, 'Don't worry about subsidies or tariffs. Our party's never worried about subsidies or tariffs. This party dies in the ditches over the value of the dollar.' All we're asking, if you're fair dinkum about free markets, is: why don't you let the dollar free-float? Why don't you let that happen? 'Oh, no, that's different. We might lose some votes there.' So we have free markets while we drive our agriculture to extinction, but, when it comes to buying votes in the cities, 'Oh no, we're not free marketing then. Oh, no way.' Those of you who are much older than most here will remember Billy McMahon announcing a revaluation of the dollar. Doug Anthony, three months out from an election, took great delight in announcing a devaluation the next day. If you knew Doug Anthony, you knew what the outcome would be. Nine days later, we had a devaluation and a towering humiliation for the Prime Minister of Australia. He deserved it and he had it coming, and didn't I enjoy watching him cop it!

'Jack' McEwen talked about protection. I had dinner with the great man. Before I was a member of parliament, he had me to dinner. He said, 'There is no such thing as protection. There is only nursery protection to enable an industry to get going.' I think he was stretching things a little bit there—as much as I love the great man, and I sit under a picture of him in my office. Secondly, he said our rural industries must ride the roller-coaster of the world market prices, which are very, very cyclical. When prices go up, tax takes the top off the up curve. When the price goes down, the banks elongate the bottom curve. What we do with protection is try to even that out. The wool scheme was a classic case in point: when the price went through the roof we dumped wool on the market, and when the price went down we bought—a classic example of McEwenism. We moved onto the free market.

I never make assertions without backing them up. Keating, when he came in, did the right thing; he allowed the dollar to free float. If you're fair dinkum free market then you allow the dollar to float. The essence of free-market economics is probably the dollar. He allowed it to free float. He was a good guy—fancy me saying Keating was a good guy! But then he wet his pants, to put it crudely, and raced off and propped it back up over 96c. He did the right thing but then he went to water, became a dingo, dogged it and propped it back up at 96c. Then Costello came in and allowed it to free float. Good on you, Pete! Then he got terrified when it went down to 49c. I make the point that when it was allowed to free float I knew one bloke who went to 49c. I dare say there's no doubt that that's where it should have been, at 49c. He propped it up over 95c because he wet his pants and dogged it as well. Both of them dogged it. They said they were free market but, when they really had to wear the tough side of it, like Doug Anthony had to, they were dogs.

If you're a farmer in Australia, you enjoy six per cent of your income from the government—these are the OECD figures, not my figures. I always average it over the last three years, so these figures are averaged over three years. If you're an Australian farmer, you get under six per cent of your income from the government. If you're a farmer on earth, you get 41 per cent. Every farmer on earth gets 41 per cent of his income from the government, except if you live in Australia. The only other idiot nation is New Zealand—well, we understand about the Kiwis! Forty-one per cent versus six per cent. That's like running a 100-metre race and giving your opponent a 35-metre head start. How are you going to win a 100-metre race? I could beat Linford Christie over the 100 metres—I must admit, I was pretty fast in my day—by gaining that sort of start.

We get preached to about free markets. I did go to university and I did do economics—I did until I left, anyway! I was taught that when two people have 90 per cent of the market it is called an oligopoly, or some might even go so far as to say duopoly. When Coles and Woolworths had 50.1 per cent of the market, their mark-up that I recorded was 126 per cent. When they got over 80 per cent of the market—arguably over 90 per cent of the market—their mark-up went to 276 per cent. Nick Xenophon did the same, and he used a much bigger basket of goods than I did. For him, the mark-up was 326 per cent. The difference between what the poor old farmer gets and what the poor old consumer has to pay has gone from 126 per cent to somewhere between 276 and 326 per cent. Was it good for the consumers? No! It was no good for the farmers and it was no good for the consumers, yet you people persist. There is not a single person that I know on either side of the parliament who is game to get up and breathe a word against the free market ideology.

We have a saying in the bush, 'When your neighbour starts preaching religion, reach for your branding iron,' and I've found it to be pretty true, even though I'm a churchgoer myself. So when I hear politicians start talking ideology—as one of my old cow-cocky mates put it, he said, 'Mate, when I hear politicians start spruiking about ideology and their beliefs, I start reaching not for my branding iron, mate, but for my shooting iron,' and I think he had it right.

We're talking about how the government is dealing with the drought, but it's not really the drought; we all know that every farmer is going broke. I've given you the figures. How you can stand up in front of farmers and seriously say to them, 'I'm looking after you,' I do not know. I couldn't do it. I reached the stage where I couldn't do it and I got out. Mr Deputy Speaker McVeigh, you're from Queensland; you would be aware of my background. In surveys that were done in Queensland before the fall of the Bjelke-Petersen government, if you said 'National Party', what was the first word to come into your head? It was 'Bjelke-Petersen'. If you said 'National Party' again, what's the second word? The second word was 'Katter'. I had an identification rating the same as Prime Minister Bob Hawke. I was the National Party in Queensland, along with Bjelke-Petersen— (Time expired)

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