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

I wish I had 15 minutes on this. I had enough money to build 400 houses when I was a minister in the state government—400 houses! Thanks to Greg Wallace, Gerhardt Pearson, Lester Rosendale and Eric Laws—all First Australians—we built 2,000 houses with the same amount of money. Unfortunately, Minister, all you talked about was increasing demand. You're going to help them get deposits, so that'll increase demand. The member for Mayo quite rightly pointed out that this is not a demand problem; this is a supply problem. Heavens, you live in a country where the average price of land is $400 a hectare. Why are we paying $400,000 a hectare? I'll tell you why: it's because of the cancer of government intervention.

In Charters Towers—as with 700 major towns, Gympie being one of them—we were under the Mining Act, and under the Mining Act we walked in and said to a local bloke, 'Can I have that piece of land divided into three?' And he said, 'Yes.' We signed a form, walked out and sold the land the next day. That was the process of subdivision. In Queensland now, it will take you 3½ years and cost you on average about $25,000 to get through the barriers that have been put up by the government.

It's government that has created this problem. Not only that, they've restricted the provision of—let me use an example. If we dig a tunnel through the range at Cairns, which will cost $2,000 million, we'll open up 20,000 housing blocks within 20 minutes of Cairns, a city of arguably 300,000 people. It's as big as Canberra. We can do that. All you need to do is to give us $1,500 million to $2,000 million to build that tunnel through the range. So give us the infrastructure, and we'll give you the cheap land.

But you need to take away the restrictions not only on the land but on the housing. There's another $15,000 in environmental demands coming upon housing, which is already $25,000 in environmental demands, and the safety requirements are another $35,000 on top of that. You added, with your legislation, nearly $100,000 to the price of a house to deliver absolutely nothing. In fact, what you are demanding of housing architecture in Queensland is entirely inappropriate for the housing that is required.

Look no further than Malcolm Turnbull who did a report on this with an Oxford don, and he said the problem was supply not demand. If you increase the demand, the problem gets worse. You increase the supply. Supply is the chokehold of government on the subdivision of land. To have this situation in an empty country is just appalling, and it reflects upon the intelligence of this place.

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