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

I had the privilege of an excellent education at Christian Brothers College and—I think most people who went through Christian Brothers in the sixties would agree with me—we were taught that Big Brother is watching. We were taught about Aldous Huxley's, Brave New World, and the other Orwellian book that came out at the same time. They were horror stories. Movies were made out of them and, in these stories, you lived in a world where Big Brother watched every aspect of your lives and controlled every aspect of your lives. If we move to a cashless society, democracy does not rule our lives and we do not rule our lives: the banks rule our lives. We're moving into a society where the banks rule and control every aspect of our lives.

When I became the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs in Queensland, I went to Yarrabah. There were 2,000 to 3,000 people there, and there were 16 positions of power which were all held by whitefellas. They trotted out two little coconuts who looked down at the floor and gave the departmental approved answers to my questions, that everything was marvellously well. In actual fact, there were six brand new Logan Unit houses made of fibrolite that had been smashed to pieces. Every single panel was smashed before they were taken to lockup stage. There was rioting which resulted in three people being rushed to hospital and seven people were jailed. And here they are telling me that everything's going well at Yarrabah! Some three years later, the deaths-in-custody issue broke out at Yarrabah. That's how well everything was going at Yarrabah! Yet, if I didn't know and if I weren't so cynical, I would have accepted that this was paradise on earth.

How do you get that much control? Everyone was on a government cheque or a welfare cheque, and all the welfare cheques were cashed by the department. So the government department either paid the wages or cashed the cheques. Either way, the government had complete control. That department and that departmental head had complete control of the lives of those people, and it emasculated them to a point where they were simply shadows of human beings. Every single decision-making power had been taken from them by a cashless society controlled by 'Big Brother'.

The Liberals were really founded as a little-L liberal party. Menzies had a different approach. He did not see himself as a conservative in those years when he formed the Liberal Party. They of all people should be the ones with their guns out. But they're not. They are puppets of the banks. As with many, many things in our country—in any country, I suspect—there's a good reason for this. The bloke to alert Australia to this is a bloke who went to a blackfellas' school; he is a whitefella, but most of the school was blackfellas—that's the information I'm given. His name is Andrew Forrest, from a fairly prominent family in Western Australia. His great grandfather and his great uncle founded the state of Western Australia, in fact. He was horrified by what was happening with our First Australians. He has visited Roebourne on many occasions, and I visited on one occasion, and I counted 62 people lying prostrate in the street. I tried to talk to three of them, but they were unconscious. They were just lying around drunk in the street. It was the day after payday, and 62 human beings were lying in the street.

If you take from a person every single right that he has to control his life—and the socialists are the worst at this. They have to look after the poor, and their looking after the poor emasculates the poor. Percy Neal, the mayor of Yarrabah for many years and a person who can be very eloquent at times, said: 'Minister, you simply don't get it, do you? You have an addiction to the idea that we blackfellas can't look after ourselves. Well, we were doing pretty good for 40,000 years, before you mob arrived here.' He said: 'All we ask of you is to get the hell out of our lives. We don't want to be looked after. We want you gone. That's all we want.' One of the reasons the Neal family and I are so enormously close is that I got 'em gone.

The last time I visited Yarrabah, the 16 main positions held at Yarrabah were all held by black people, not white people, not like when I went there the first time. Far from being reticent, browbeaten and terrified, they were very aggressive towards me, and other people as well. They were rioting over the absolutely shameful COVID lock-up. They weren't locked down, like the rest of us; they were locked up, and Yarrabah was a very good example of the lock-up. Eventually people started demonstrating on a massive scale. It proved to the people of Queensland that, whatever the ALP was, it was not on their side. It was absolute proof. In the face of those demonstrations and rage from people like me, within seven days the lock-up restrictions were removed. When I say it was locked up, let me give one example. When I was at Checkpoint Charlie, three cars rolled up to take stores into Yarrabah, and some of it was food. One driver was a blackfella and the other two were whitefellas. They were all Cairns residents, not Yarrabah residents. The blackfella was told that he couldn't go into the community, but the two whitefella drivers could. I said: 'Hold on a minute, Sergeant. You just hold on a minute. What in hell's name has that got to do with anything?' He said: 'I've made my ruling and that's it. I've made my ruling and that's the end of it.'

Percy Neal gave a speech and said, 'We don't want you looking after us; we want you out of here. You're addicted to this idea that we can't look after ourselves. You are addicted to it.' The first step to overcoming addiction is to admit to it. The minister said, 'I know exactly what you're saying, Percy. I know exactly what you're saying. I promise you that we will look after these houses for you, and in all other aspects we will look after you.' The big black bloke I was with laughed so much he fell on the floor. I was doubled over with laughter. She proved absolutely everything that Percy was saying. She couldn't even envisage a world in which we blackfellas looked after ourselves. She could not even get it into her head. She did not realise what a laughing-stock she had become—a very elegant woman, a very outspoken woman, a very impressive woman, yes, and a person that took away every single human right that we had and intended to continue to take them off us.

Andrew Forrest saw the horror of what is and he is trying to do something about it. I have backed him very strongly on numerous occasions in this place. Some people said, 'You're suddenly changing position.' Well, I think we are going a lot further than what Andrew was advocating; he was advocating that it be voluntary in areas where there were serious problems. If the government were fair dinkum about this and actually talked to people about it seriously, then the government would know that they can get people to agree to it. They realise that they have a serious problem and they will agree to it.

One of the greatest ladies I was most proud of—she was a contemporary of mine at school—had a terrible upbringing. The world had not been very kind to her as a kid. I'd like to name her: Jenny Dempsey is her name. She overcame all of her upbringing. Her father was a rip-roarious drunk, like a lot of the copper gougers and people who worked in the bush and came into town and were pretty riotous. He took an order out against himself. When the wife left he said, 'I'm responsible for my little daughter,' and he took an order out against himself. From my experience in Queensland, taking an order out against yourself is very, very successful, particularly in small towns because all the pubs know you. When you take an order out against yourself it becomes illegal to serve you in a bar unless you yourself go down to the police station and get the order removed. But he didn't get the order removed.

The point I'm trying to make is that the government underestimate that a lot of people realise they have a problem and will come into the cashless card. If it is done on a voluntary basis, as was advocated by Andrew Forrest in the first place, then I think we are talking about a different animal. But when you start imposing it, when you combine this with the fact that you can't spend any money over $10,000 and you can see Woolworths coming out and saying, 'We're not going to cash anymore,' you see where we're going. Woolworths and Coles and those people control the banks. Read Piketty's book. I think every person in this place should read Piketty's book, Capital. The CEO class rule the world. The CEO class run the banks. The CEO class run Woolworths and Coles. They have this place to deregulate every single rural industry. Within three years of dairy deregulation, to quote but one example, there was a farmer committing suicide every day in Australia and there was another farm worker or business supplier or contractor committing suicide as well. That is two every five days in Australia. Did anyone worry about that? No, no-one worried about that. It's only people killing themselves. We don't worry about that!

Our First Australians—I'm going to say this repeatedly and continuously. I'm going to get nastier and more vicious as time goes on, and pointed. It will get into the world press. We, as an identifiable race of people—and I'm not including people like myself who claim to have a blackfellow somewhere in the family tree. I'm talking about real, fair dinkum people that're living in communities and enclaves in the city. Those people have the highest incarceration rates in the world. Noel Pearson argued this and everyone eventually agreed he was right—the highest incarceration rates in the world. The lowest life expectancy in the world—after two years of trying to find where the state government had hidden the figures, I got the figures from one community in Cape York and the Gulf. Life expectancy for males was 43 and females was 51. That's something to be proud of as a nation, isn't it? That's something to be proud of as a nation! We have the highest stolen children rates in the world. We are double from when we made the apologies. The hypocrisy of this place, to get up and apologise when you knew you were taking the children at a higher rate than you were taking them then.

When I went into parliament politicians were ranked the fourth most respected profession in Australia. We are now continuously last or second last. Don't you realise that people hate you? You don't care how many of them die, how many farmers and farm workers suicide, how many First Australians live like this and continue to live like this. You are doing nothing about it. You say, 'Well, what can we do about it?' You race out there and try and suppress the symptoms. You ban grog in all the communities. What a farce. There is not a single person associated with communities that doesn't kill themselves laughing—as if they haven't already killed themselves—at the ban on alcohol. We have some of the best entrepreneurs in Australia running rogue in the communities. They make their own brew, as they call it. Some die on account of the brew, but we won't worry about that either!

If you are a First Australian living in a First Australian community there is no such thing as owning your own land. We are the only group of people that I know on earth that are not allowed to own our own land. If you doubt for a moment the implications of that then read Hernando de Soto's book The Mystery Of Capital and it will explain it to you, why poverty— (Time expired)

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