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

In speaking to this bill, I personally of course have been on the receiving end. In one election, quite literally every newspaper that came out in the Kennedy electorate had a picture of Senator Boswell handing out cheques during the election campaign. John Anderson stood down soon after the inquiry into the fact that most of the development moneys had been spent in the two electorates targeted by the National Party, which were the electorate of New England and the electorate of Kennedy. Mr Beazley was then the Leader of the Opposition, and he led the attack, and I suppose the member for New England and I enjoyed the game. But it was the third case, and no-one blew the whistle on him, and he was told to fix up the account. I told him bluntly that he either fixed up the account or there would be another investigation and he'd be leaving this place.

It gives me no joy to say—because I spent most of my life in the National Party—that, in that last case, it was a National Party leader; in the case before that, it was the National Party leader; and, in the case before that, it was the National Party leader. The last case did not politically involve Kennedy, but it concerned dairying, and I had probably the biggest dairying area in Australia. The dairy RAP money had gone to the minister's electorate and not to anyone else. So that was not politically motivated, just in his own personal interest. He thought it would be nice if he pork-barrelled for himself. But it is a very sorry record.

Now, I live in the real world. I'm a realist. If you're working with people, and they're your friends, then you are more inclined to do things for them because you just know what they're doing. You're working with them. They're people that you trust. In Queensland the relationship between the Thiess brothers and Bjelke-Petersen enabled that state to create the tourism industry, to create the coal industry and also to create the minerals-processing industry, which came out of my own electorate. They were all created out of that extremely tight relationship. We don't want pork-barrelling to cover things that are good for the nation, where you're going to spit on them just because they happen to be friends or they happen to be political supporters.

I want to make it perfectly clear that, whilst every one of us on the crossbench—and I'm not speaking for the crossbench, of course—want to go where Helen Haines is taking us in this debate and in this initiative, we must also understand that it can't punish people just because they happen to be friends and supporters of the Labor Party or the Liberal Party. I was at the CFMEU dinner last night. If there's a big construction job on and there's site coverage by the CFMEU, we're not going to allege—I hope that no-one in this place would allege—that therefore it's wrong because there's an association between the CFMEU and the ALP, which, of course, there is. They support them very substantially financially.

I just want to make the point that, whilst we're trying to attack an evil, an endemic evil in our system—and I've pointed out where it has occurred again and again and again. There was Ros Kelly, going back before the National Party's transgressions. It was unbelievable what she did there. But a similar thing had been done by one of the National Party leaders, only much worse, actually. So it's been going on and on and on, and it will continue to go on. We just hope this legislation will stop it. But we don't want the legislation to become a killing ground for things that are good for the government of Australia.

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