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

This is a grievance motion. My grievance is there's no action in the state of Queensland. The previous speaker talks about extra facilities and a better lifestyle. But we as a government—we were there for 40-odd years in Queensland—we saw government in terms of doing, making the cake bigger. There was plenty of money to spend on highways and everything else if you concentrated on making the economy bigger. When the Country Party came into government from the Labor Party, in the last 20 years of the Bjelke-Petersen government we laid 300 kilometres of railway line to open up mines every single year for 20 years. We laid down 1,000 kilometres of bitumen on dirt roads every single year. We built a new mining town every single year, and we built a billion-dollar tourist resort every year.

To my knowledge, in the 30 years since, under the lily pad leftie governments—and there are plenty of lily pad lefties in the Liberal Party, I can tell you; I can describe them in the same way, in all honesty—there has been not a single inch of railway track laid. There has not been a single thousand kilometres of dirt road converted to bitumen. There hasn't been a single mining town established and there hasn't been a billion-dollar tourist resort built. Every year we were doing that. But you stop completely at a dead wall.

I don't want to criticise the previous speaker. He's talking about spending government money. I'm talking about creating government money. I'm not talking about asking the government for money. I'm talking about convincing the government that this is money-creating investment for the government. If you built a railway line into the Galilee, half Australia's coal is in the Galilee. Coal is earning a quarter of our total income. In fact, with iron ore, more than half of our entire income from overseas comes from those two items. I'm talking about hard rock mining. I represent the biggest hard rock mining area in Australia, the north-west mineral province, Mt Isa and the fertiliser plant being prominent amongst those figures. But if you want to open up the Galilee, you've got to build a railway line and a port, and they've got to be multi-user.

Everyone is clapping and cheering on Adani, the Liberal Party being the major clappers and cheerers when they're with their constituency. When they're with the people, they believe by 2050 no coal. But we're singing a different tune here, and so did Mr Shorten in the last election. One of the reasons the Liberal Party failed so miserably in Queensland in the last election was because they told one story in Brisbane and another story in North Queensland where they needed to win the seats. So we're preaching an anti-coal agenda in Brisbane and a pro-coal agenda in North Queensland. Do you think we're all a bunch of mugs up there in North Queensland, that we don't see that? So they thought, you may as well keep voting for the dumb socialists, right.

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