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

I rise in the adjournment debate to speak of Ian Causley. He was a colleague of mine, and he got beaten by two votes for the deputy premiership of New South Wales. Ian started his adult life cutting cane in the heart of my electorate—in fact, where my office is at Innisfail. As a young man, he cut cane by hand. One of the great prides we had in our party in Queensland was that 13 of the cabinet had cut cane by hand as young men. We always loved using this against the Labor Party because none of them had ever worked with their hands.

I visited Ian at his house. He lived on the Clarence River, where his family had lived for, I'm told, 150 years, and I wouldn't doubt it. For a man of great wealth and great power, he just lived in a little fibrolite house—very humble—on the banks of the Clarence River, where his great-great-grandad lived. When I met Ian, I knew him by reputation of course. He was a third ranking minister in the New South Wales government, and I was a second ranking minister in the Queensland government, and we both came into this place around the same time.

Ian, I'm told, owned 600 acres of cane land in Western Australia in the Ord, and he was one of the biggest cane farmers in New South Wales. People think of Queensland for cane, but, if you drive from the Gold Coast to Murwillumbah—200 kilometres—most of the time you'll be driving through cane fields. Northern New South Wales is actually very big in sugar cane.

Ian was chairman of his mill. You've got to understand that farmers all fight and hate each other, so to become chairman of the cooperative mill, the farmers' mill, is a very, very big achievement—and to have been there as long as Ian had been, before he went into parliament. And, when he got out of the parliament, he went straight back into it again.

I don't wish to be negative and I shouldn't be negative, but all the same, my last real memory of Ian—we went out often to dinner of a night here. I should just say that before I met Ian, I checked out, and I was told that he had 600 acres, which is a very big cane farm, in Western Australia. He was one of the biggest cane growers in New South Wales. He owned two hotels. However you measure people, he was very, very successful and highly respected by his fellow cane farmers. He was made chairman of, I think, one of the two sugar mills in New South Wales—or it might have been two of the three.

Ian saw the world the same way that I did. We'd came out of the Country Party, we were much older than the average member here, and we were very much Country Party. The Country Party was founded by John McEwen. He called all the Victorian dairy farmers together for a huge meeting. There were hundreds and hundreds of people there. He was only 28 years of age, and he said: 'From now on all milk will be sold through the dairy cooperative'—Ian knew the story as well as I did; it was legend inside the Country Party—'it will be sold at this price and everyone will get a quota. That's the way it's going to be.' Three or four of them disagreed with him, so he said, 'We're going to halt the meeting, and I'm going to explain it properly to you out the back.' And he belt the living daylights out of all three of them. He came back in rubbing his fists, saying, 'Does anyone else want it explained to them?' From that day forward he was called 'Black Jack' McEwan, very deservedly.

When Black Jack retired from this place, every single rural industry had marketing arrangements which allowed us to have a very acceptable and, I might even say, prosperous living, whether it was the egg industry or the peanut industry or the maize industry or the fishing industry or the tobacco industry or the sugar industry or the wool industry—even the beef industry. Almost all of our experts at that stage went to the United Kingdom and Japan. America was a very important player. But both of those markets were done by an agreed upon price— (Extension of time granted)

I want, in conclusion, to say that Ian left this place soon after the deregulation of the dairy industry. In that infamous day, every single person in our party room screamed that we had to fight it and we had to die in the ditches over it. Well, nobody did. Ian left this place soon afterwards. He retired from parliament altogether. He had enormous difficulty living with it, and, of course, I resigned from the party of which I'd been the standard-bearer in Queensland for 20 years. If you said, 'National Party: say the first word that comes into your head,' they'd have said Joh Bjelke-Petersen. The second word they would have said would have been my name, and that was in poling et cetera. So the profound effect of moving away into a deregulated free marketplace was that. But Ian was a great warrior for us, and it was a great tragedy that he did not lead New South Wales as deputy premier, and a great tragedy that he did not lead here as our leader. I think history would have taken a much different turn if Ian had been there. He was a man who showed great judgement, was a very good Christian—very active in the Anglican Church was Ian—a very tough customer and a very funny bloke. He was great company, and I miss him greatly. He was one of my heroes.

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