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

In 50 years as a member of parliament, half a century, you see a lot of changes happen. Sometimes you can't actually grasp what is happening. Late last year I was asked to go down to a senior minister. I won't say what party, but he had been a senior minister off and on in various governments for some 20-odd years and is very highly respected. Before I could sit down in his office, he said: 'Bob, today politicians don't govern. They will not govern. They cannot govern. They don't govern.' I asked, 'When did you come to that conclusion?' He said, 'Three years ago.' I said, 'Well, you're one up on me, my friend, because I came to the same conclusion 3½ months ago. It's not because they're lily-pad lefties. It's not because they're ringbarking righties. It's not because of their other proclivities or ideologies that we see. They don't conform, or, if they conform to any of those, they just cannot make decisions. Let me be very specific.

The honourable Liberal member at the table, the member for Hume, is laughing. He was told to set up an emergency supply of fuel, and he put the emergency supplies in America. In all my time in parliament, I don't think I've felt more humour at a decision than that one.

Laura Tingle wrote a magnificent article—I think the best I've ever read of hers. George Megalogenis did a follow-up, another brilliant article. Laura Tingle said that the Public Service has been politicised. We saw that vividly in Queensland. As a minister, when I took the portfolio, I wanted to sack the head of the department, who I estimated probably had about a hundred First Australian children. You'll say that he must have been a monster. Well, other people and the good Lord can make judgement on whether he was or whether he wasn't. He was to be immediately sacked, but I couldn't sack him. We had a Public Service board, and I could not sack him. It was not quite as simple as that, but that's roughly the way it was. We had a Public Service board that protected him. As Laura Tingle said, the Public Service is now politicised. All the public servants that you have now will be changed with a change of government. When I say 'a change of government'—if Anthony Albanese is re-elected as the Prime Minister of Australia he will change the ministries. You have a new government with new ministers, or new portfolios, and the whole thing changes around.

In Queensland we had a very centralised, powerful government, and everyone is aware of that. The Bjelke-Petersen government was a centralised government—you'd have to go back to the days of Theodore in Queensland, but they were highly centralised. Bjelke-Petersen was a very powerful man, and Sir Leo Hielscher was the senior bureaucrat. No-one could get between that pair. If you were a minister, you did as you were told. A bloke like me—we had a difference of opinion. I felt my blackfella brother-cousins should own their own land and do whatever they wanted to do with it. There was a view that we should look after them and look after that land for them. That is a view that prevails today, of course. They have carbon credits, which is good for them—that's what we told them, that it's good for them. So we decided what's good for them. I think most of them wanted to put cattle on the land, but we decided what was good for them.

They said there is now a politicised Public Service. You might have a bloke who's never had anything do with a portfolio—agriculture or manufacturing, for example—in his entire life. But he'll suddenly be head of a department as an expert in this area, whereas in the Queensland Public Service, almost invariably, if you were an expert in agriculture then you stayed in agriculture. Overlaid on top of what has happened in Australia—this is how it pertains to the Prime Minister—the Prime Minister couldn't get anything to happen. He sat there and he could not get anything to happen, and eventually he got frustrated. Malcolm Turnbull told me that he believed in ministerial government and that the minister controlled the operation of their portfolio, not him. That was telling me that it was useless for me to go running off to him, because I had a bit of a balance of power situation. It was useless me running off to him, because every minister would be making decisions in their own portfolios. Well, (a) the ministers didn't make the decisions and (b) he was impotent. The people elected him to govern Australia, and he was telling me he was not governing Australia. When the Prime Minister we're discussing today tried to govern Australia, he wasn't allowed to; the ministers just did not do anything.

Let me be very specific. The then Prime Minister's mother was a Gilmore, and they had 12 to 15 cattle stations throughout my home country, North Queensland's mid-west, or inland North Queensland, if you like. I knew the Gilmore's very well. Dame Mary Gilmore was on the $10 note. She's buried in Cloncurry, in my hometown. So I knew the family extremely well. I knew that this man would absolutely love to develop his homeland. He would love to put a dam in Hughenden and in each of the mid-west towns, and a dam on the massive Flinders River, where they'd use no water out of it at all for irrigation. There are two farms on the Flinders River. It's the sixth biggest river in Australia, with seven million megalitres of water. To put that into perspective, the Murray-Darling has 20-odd million megalitres of water; the Flinders has seven million megalitres of water and two farms. The Murray-Darling has something like 200,000 farms.

He wanted to put a dam at Hughenden. He wanted to put a little tiny dam in a little tiny town, which would take 300,000 megalitres out of a stream of seven million megalitres, and he couldn't get it to happen. I'm not here to denigrate people, but the minister in this place said, 'Oh, yeah, and I had the state government coming at me.' I said, 'Just call tenders; I mean, for heaven's sake, you want 48,000 reports!' We had to put a report in on the economic basis for this proposal. Then when we finished that, we had to do another report on cost-benefit analysis. Then we finished that we had to do a cultural assessment for the First Australians. Then when we finished that, we had to show the social effects on the area. Then we had to do an environmental report. We'd all be dead and gone long before anything happens!

In my day, in the state of Queensland, we decided whether we were going to build a dam or whether we weren't, and if you couldn't make a decision, then you shouldn't have been in parliament. Bjelke-Peterson set up a committee of inquiry. There was another colleague of mine—and we were all laughing in cabinet because we knew what was going to happen. In two months, he was sacked. Bjelke-Peterson quite rightly said, 'If this room is for people who can make a decision, if you can't make a decision and you have to run off and make a report, then get the hell out of this room.' And he ordered him out of the room, and the bloke burst out crying. That gives you some idea of the way you run a government. If you're running a government, you're running a government.

The most important thing I have to say is that the opinion to me of the most experienced person in the history of this place and, I would argue, probably one of the longest-serving cabinet ministers in the history of this place—and obviously I'm not in a political party, so I'm not in his party—is that they don't govern anymore. I used the example of the little tiny dam at Hughenden. There was a little tiny $28 million for a little tiny weir at Charters Towers, which is, again, in Gilmore country. The Prime Minister wanted to see it happen. He gave me $28 million—because that's how much it costs to build a dam—to build a dam. I saw the CEO last week. The local council's running it. He said, 'We've had to do three reports for the state government, and that took the whole $28 million.' It's gone on reports. So we keep spending money on reports. More than half of the cost of building a road now is spent on reports, and less than half of the cost is spent on actually building the road.

Democracy is faulting, and not just in Australia. Eight of the last presidents in America have spent most of their presidencies trying to stay out of jail. It is beyond the realm of possibility that eight people who were president of the United States were all criminals. No matter how cynical you might be about politics, that is not real. But, because they had to spend their time staying out of jail, there was no time to rule America. So we have a democracy that is malfunctioning very badly.

I have a friend who said: 'The mob get it right. In the end, in Australia, the mob get it right.' In this place stood three of the greatest Australians ever: 'Red Ted' Theodore, the creator of the Labor movement in Australia; Ben Chifley; and John Curtin. They all said that in a depression you must spend money. The newspapers ripped them to pieces. Sir Otto Niemeyer from the Bank of England ripped him to pieces. The establishment in Australia ripped them to pieces. Not only did they lose the election; the three of them lost their seats in parliament.

Now, the danger for you people in the big parties in this place is that the mob gets it right in the end. That's your problem. It's a big problem because we people over here got more than one in three votes in the last election. The government got less than one in three votes, and the opposition got less than one in three votes. So the mob are waking up, the same as they did with Curtin, Chifley and Theodore, who were not only returned to parliament—Theodore was too old, but the other two were—but made prime ministers of Australia. Chifley, of course, was the greatest Prime Minister that we've ever had in this country. So the mob will get it right.

Democracy is malfunctioning. China is leaping past the United States, with a 10 or 11 per cent annual growth rate versus maybe a faltering two per cent growth rate in the United States. Thirty or 40 years ago it was a joke to think that a communist country could rival a democracy. Quite frankly, the relationship between Japan and India is so close that you're looking at the greatest power equation on earth. They are democracies, so we have some hope for the future. But in Western democracies it would be hard to point to a single country that is operating successfully.

The three most sophisticated intellectual commentators in this country—and I don't mean to denigrate other people by saying that—Laura Tingle, George Megalogenis and Paul Bongiorno, all said that government today doesn't govern. And here was the most experienced and most highly respected person in this place for 30 years saying exactly the same thing, and being agreed with by one of the two people who have been the longest-serving members of parliament in Australian history: me and Billy Hughes—a terrible person to be associated with; a dreadful person; a dreadful creature. So there's no great kudos in being around a long time, and there's the proof! But you have seen a long period of parliamentary history, and you have seen enormously successful governments.

I was in a government that was fascist. They started throwing people in jail for having demonstrations. The party I belonged to got very, very angry, and the Premier was forced out of his fascism. It was a bad period, but it was a period that was overcome. It was a period in which every year we'd build a giant dam and create a new city in outback Australia! (Time expired)

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