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

I asked a lady called Alannah Tomlinson why she would run for us for a seat in the Queensland parliament. She said: 'Affordable living. I can't afford to live. I've got two kids and oftentimes the two stepkids as well. My husband has a good job, and I'm working every single night from half past five to 11 o'clock at night, managing a restaurant, and twice a day during the week as well, and I simply can't make ends meet.'

And why would she be able to? The average cost of a house in Australia is $670,000. The enlightened policies of government, in this place and the state parliaments, have taken that from $62,000 in 1990, which was the start of the wonderful free market policies, to $670,000 now. There's no great secret about what the problem is. I am sorry, Minister; when you say that the solution is to provide more money so people can buy houses, you simply increase the demand.

Far be it from me to quote Malcolm Turnbull, but Malcolm Turnbull and an Oxford don—he's an Australian, but he's a professor at Oxford—put out a paper and they said that the problem is not with increasing the demand. Giving everybody $7,000 to help them buy a new house will just increase demand, but the problem is supply. It is nigh on impossible to do a subdivision in this country, to jump through the environmental hoops and the economic hoops and to navigate the council charges, the state government demands, the headworks charges and every other cost that everyone wants to put on it by the time you've finished—if you can get it done in one lifetime. I'll quote the leading developer in North Queensland. He died recently. The biggest developer said, 'I have not got enough years in my life to do the subdivision at Tolga,' and he just sold the farm to somebody else, so we didn't have 200 housing blocks coming on the market to damp down the spectacular rising costs.

The best case I can use is Charters Towers. It was under the Mining Act, so a clerk, a local boy, made the decisions if you wanted to do a subdivision. My wife went in and applied for a subdivision. She completed paperwork within half an hour and got the subdivision entitlement the next day. Cost? Twenty bucks. Now, if she attempts to do it today, the cost will be $20,000 and it will take her two or three or four years to get the process completed. So you've made the cost of government. I know it's a cliche, but it is a very accurate cliche.

The great case is Port Hedland. When I went there, land was $12 an acre. If you wanted to buy a station, a property or a farm, it was $12 an acre. The cost for a housing block in Port Hedland was $72,000 for a quarter-acre, so the cost has been created by governments. And in Charters Towers, at the time when we last had the power and control over our own affairs in Charters Towers, the price for a block of land was $6,000. Within three years, it had gone to $70,000. It's come to rest at a bit under $100,000, as I quoted before.

As for housing, when I was the minister for what they called 'Aboriginal affairs'—I don't like that word, so I will say 'First Australian affairs'—I had enough money to build 400 houses over a period of about 3½ years. Greg Wallace, a First Australian, said, 'We will introduce Work for the Dole.' People were sitting around doing nothing, and he got them working for the dole. Gerhardt Pearson, the brother of the famous Noely Pearson, said, 'Why don't we utilise Work for the Dole labour to build the houses?' Then Eric Law and Lester Rosendale said, 'All houses will be built exclusively by local Indigenous labour—no more flying in whitefellas costing us a fortune.' Instead of building 400 houses, we built over 2,000 houses, with all done, every decision done, by a First Australian. There lie your answers. Don't keep throwing money at the program and increasing demand. Start increasing supply. This is an empty country. (Time expired)

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