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

We have a saying in the bush: when your neighbour starts preaching religion, reach for your branding iron, and when politicians start preaching religion, then God help us all! I've found that saying to be very true.

This is not a socialist government, but it's in the socialist tradition, this government. Their aspirations are always laudable. We admire aspirations for people who are in very lowly paid jobs. But the government's implementation is deplorable, and I suspect that that's the way this bill is going to turn out. Small business will be backing, very strongly, amendments that will be coming, and every single one of the crossbenchers, as I understand it, will be voting to exclude small business. I can't see why the government doesn't want to go down that pathway of excluding small business. If they want some overall catch-all base wage, I think everyone here would agree with that. But to turn small business into a jungle in which they're the little guys—I think that's what's going to happen here. As for farmers, we're particularly worried. They employ a small number of people but in some industries, like the banana industry, they employ 100 and, in some cases, 200 people.

Paul Keating said that we're going to be the freest economy on earth, all protection and support levels to be removed, and this country will no longer be an extended sheep run or some sort of extended coalmine. Well, if you take away the protection, your farmers are up against farmers throughout the world who get 48 per cent of their income from the government. Our farmers only get five per cent of their income from the government. So how can they possibly stay alive?

When Keating made that announcement, it was on the ABC one morning. I threw a shoe at the wall and said, 'Is the bloke mad?' Either we close down all industry in Australia or we go to slave labour wage levels. The architect of slave labour wage levels in this country was no other than Paul Keating. I was sort of wrong because I said it was an either/or. It wasn't; it was both. We lost the industries and we lost the pay scales. We lost both in what happened. Let me be very, very specific: our cattle numbers are down 23 per cent, our sheep herd is down 72 per cent, our dairy production is down 15 per cent and our sugar production is down 16 per cent. That's your big four. Absolutely disastrous.

Now, since we have to import everything from overseas—as I said, you either close down all the industry in Australia or you go to slave labour wage levels. So we closed down all the industry in Australia. Seventy-two per cent of the motorcars in the eighties were made in Australia. Now no cars are made in Australia. And the ALP can take the full blame for it.

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