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

Government has a limited amount of money. If you wish to take the number of environmentalists working full-time in the Far North Queensland area from three to 147, obviously you're going to burn up an awful lot of money. If you want to build a $10 billion tunnel in Brisbane—which is not needed and has never been asked for by the public—you're going to burn up a lot of money. If you want to spend $15 billion on roadworks and flyovers over flyovers over flyovers between the airport and the CBD in Brisbane, you're going to burn up a lot of money. If you want to build a billion dollar pleasure dome for yourselves, as the Queensland government did—it was a Liberal government; most of the rest of this is ALP—and billions of dollars on the Olympics, then it ends up with the head of the health department in Queensland saying to me on the telephone, 'It's no use. You're kicking up about Mareeba Hospital not having an outpatients. Outpatients in Queensland have ceased to exist.'

The greatest pride of the Queensland people was that, of all the places in the world, you could walk in 24 hours a day, every day of the year, including Christmas, and get free health services. Now, at the coalface, at Charters Towers, my home town, where my family's lived since the late 1870s, there was an outpatients. It's closed. It's a huge building in front of the hospital. It is closed. It has across it 'Closed'. The only entrance to the hospital has 'Inpatients' written across it. I had a spider bite, from a white spider. They're very, very deadly. This one turned out not to be, but my hand swelled up, so I went there. You sit on a chair outside the hospital, waiting, if it's an emergency case. If it's not an emergency case, go home. So we only have healthcare in Queensland for 40 hours a week now. That's all. That's what's happened. The latest figures that I've received via a back door is that the Queensland Health budget is $600 million in deficit, and there'll have to be massive cutbacks on what we've got—on what we're down to now. Don't people in this place understand that you will go broke if you keep spending money on multistorey pleasure domes for yourselves or buying votes by flyovers over flyovers over flyovers? You can't do it and deliver a health service. What are your priorities? What are your priorities?

It is the shame of this nation—and I've brought it up again and again and I have some difficulty in living with the fact that I'm not going very well on it. When I am not going very well on a serious issue, I get very, very nasty. And I'm about to turn extremely nasty over the issue of our First Australians, my brother-cousins, because life expectancy—on the only figures I could get, because they're hiding the figures—in the gulf Cape York community is 41 for males and 53 for females. In the Torres Strait, it's 20 years less than for the rest of Australia.

Both the ALP government and the National-Liberal party government closed down the market gardens in every single community. The much-maligned missionaries took the people in, protected them from being shot at and burnt out and starved and poisoned. They protected them. They protected them also with their diet. Because they couldn't go out and forage for food on the open plains anymore, they had market gardens.

When we inherited the market gardens, we kept them going till the fall of the government in 1990. Worse than that, the federal government banned the backyard vegetable gardens. Why would you do that in the Torres Strait? 'Diseases could get in.' The war and trading canoes, the raiding canoes, have been coming down from New Guinea for 40,000 years, and if disease was going to get in, it would have long since arrived. Every backyard had a fruit and vegetable garden. I cannot remember having a single meal—and I probably had about 300 when I was a minister in the Torres Strait—where I ate any non-Indigenous food at all. By that, I mean I ate Torres Strait Island food. It was fish, it was turtle, it was dugong, it was prawns, it was crayfish and of course there were mangoes, bananas, sweet potato, yam and taro—all of those things. It was a very, very healthy diet. That was up until 1990. What is going on is the shame of the governments of Australia. (Time expired)

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