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

I would like to concentrate my remarks on a very famous person in Far North Queensland, John Gambino. The mango is one of the more popular fruits that we have available in supermarkets in Australia. I myself had an orchard of 400 mango trees. This is a backyard industry really; you have a few hundred trees as an adjunct to serious farming. That was how it was explained to me when I put in 400 trees. John Gambino and Robbie Vennard grow Bowen Special Mangoes. Please remember you buy Kensington Prides, which are Bowen Special Mangoes, the Australian mango. Don't buy the others—they're not as good. Having said that, there are various markets that do prefer other mangoes.

These two gentlemen, one in Bowen and one in Mareeba, 700 or 800 kilometres apart, put in 5,000 trees, so we went from a backyard industry to an industrial industry. They pioneered the modern mango industry. It was very seldom you saw mangoes on the shelf in a supermarket, but now they are always there, and that's a result of these two gentlemen. Both of them pioneered exports as well, but Robbie Vennard is out of the industry now, as I understand it.

I will come back to John Gambino. John stayed as an owner-operator when most others corporatised their operations. With corporate farming they go broke, and then they sell up at 50 cents in the dollar. The huge plantation in Townsville has gone broke three times. So, where the tree cost him $390 to plant and bring it through to production five years later, it would have cost them $450. But, because they went broke, it was sold up for 50 cents to the dollar. This has happened three times—their tree goes for $70. Whereas, the owner-operator, who hasn't played the corporate game, has to pay off a tree worth $369. Hence, the corporates win and the Australian people lose. Corporates will always end up being foreign owned.

To return to John Gambino, he pioneered the export market. He had contracts, which he had pioneered in Hong Kong. When Hong Kong became part of China, they still took his bananas—and I applaud Scott Morrison for speaking out against China on the issue of COVID—but, by the same token, the result was that China cut off $29,000 million worth of exports going into China. We'd never punished anyone ever, to our shame. If you want to play the game that the international market plays, you play it tough, but we are the little fairies in the garden when it comes to international trade. So John Gambino had his mango exports to China cut off, and China said: 'Oh, no, you have diseases. You don't fumigate, so we're not taking any.' It was obviously influenced by COVID as well. When I last visited John, his son Sam said he was down the paddock. I asked what he was doing down the paddock and he said, 'He's picking mangoes.' He's 83 years of age and he's down there with workers, some of them from overseas, picking mangoes! They're just fighting the banks, as all farmers do—I emphasise that.    He's no different to any other farmer in Australia, but at 83 he still has to go down there with the workers. When I went down, there was about 500 metres of mangoes piled this high, and I said, 'What's that?' He said: 'They were the mangos that were going to Hong Kong, and I've just got to get rid of them. That's my crop of E2s for the year, gone.'

When I was the Minister for Northern Development and Aboriginal and Islander Affairs a hundred years ago, we realised that we had to put a fumigation plant in Cairns, which is one of the centres of fruit and vegetable growing in Australia. About six or seven per cent of Australia's fruit and vegetables come out of that area; 95 to 97 per cent of Australia's bananas come out of that area, and that's the most-sold generic item in the supermarkets, to quote one example. There's also a massive production of avocados out of that area, and, of course, it's the mango capital of Australia.

Returning to Gambino, it's important to say that this is a very important man. He calls meetings at Mareeba and gets 600 and 700 people turning up to them. I don't know anyone in Australia these days who can call a meeting and get 600 or 700 people to turn up. He pioneers the mango industry for Australia, and if there is a more beautiful fruit on earth I haven't tasted it. So, we needed a fumigation plant, but the government went down before we got it in. We realised that we had to build it, but in the last two months we weren't able to do it. Thirty years later, we still haven't got a fumigation plant. It is quite justified for a country to say, 'If you want to send bananas, mangos or whatever to us, then we don't want any of your diseases; we want it fumigated before it leaves Australia.' Australia has no restrictions at all. Anyone can send anything to Australia. We have no restrictions at all.

As a net result of these free market policies—'We're not going to put a fumigation plant in; if people want a fumigation plant, they can put it in'—we lost the tobacco industry and the 2½ thousand to 3,000 jobs in Myrtleford, Victoria. We lost the peanut industry. We lost the flower industry—we had 12 very big flower exporters, and I'm not going to go into the details of how the government's free market policy has destroyed them. Both the pig industry and the grape industry went down because of free market policies. Believe it or not, it was the party that was formed by farmers that did all this! The once-great Country Party has become a fawning sycophantic addendum to the Liberal Party, but I don't think even the Liberal Party would have done this. The Labor Party didn't—they did it to wool, yes, but that was the only thing they deregulated. Some vestiges of Labor still understand arbitration, but a farmer needs arbitration just as much.

We're talking about exports. Don't talk about it and say, 'I'm for it.' Build a fumigation plant in Cairns. It is desperately needed. Build a fumigation plant now if you're fair dinkum about exporting fruit and vegetables from this country. Maybe seven per cent of Australia's entire fruit and vegetable production comes from the Tully-Mareeba-Atherton axis, also Lakeland now—a quadrangle, if you like. That percentage will become greater and greater, because we have the dry season and we have ample water. Three-quarters of Australia's water is in Far North Queensland. So we have the water and we have the dry, because you don't want wet conditions for a lot of these crops.

In summary, I return to John Gambino. He calls a meeting, and they have, under Wayne Swan, a national summit on rural debt, which was at horrific levels and is higher now than then. But Wayne Swan did something about it. He called them all in, and the Mareeba Rural Action Council, of which Gambino was chairman, proposed that if their farmers' income did not meet welfare levels then the government would top it up with a family farm assistance grant. Now one in five farmers have got the family farm assistance grant. Their income has not met a welfare payment. That's how bad we are in farming in Australia.

Our cattle numbers are down 32 per cent, our sheep herd is down 72 per cent, our dairy herd is down 13 per cent and our sugar cane is down 15 per cent. I don't know about grain; we don't have grain in northern Australia. But they're the big boys, and that's only because of the intervention of the Prime Minister, overturning the National Party decision to allow bananas in from overseas, where people work for $5 a day. We've got to pay $20 an hour, and so we should. If you stand in the hot sun humping bunches of bananas which weigh almost as much as some of the young kids working in the banana fields, you deserve $20 an hour. But then you ask us to compete against people who are paid $5 an hour. Are you the promoters of slave-labour wage levels in these other countries? If you allow products produced by slave labour into this country, you are promoting and continuing slave-labour wages in Texas in the United States, with the wetback labour; in Africa, where people work for nothing; in China, where people are made to work for nothing; and in India, where people, because of poverty, work for nothing—all these countries.

Now, we don't want our workers working for nothing. The greatest pride that the Australian people have is that we have arbitration. But the arbitration was removed from the farmers. You wrecked and destroyed that. One part of my electorate, the dairy part of my electorate, had the highest suicide rates in Australia, which was as predictable as the sun rising. You deregulated the dairy industry and you knew exactly what was going to happen, and yet you proceeded to do it.

We had, I think, 2,000 dairy farmers in Queensland. We have now got about 300 to 400. In the Kennedy electorate, probably the biggest dairy-farming area in Australia, we had 260 very big farms. I said at a meeting the other day that we had 58, and I was corrected by the state member, who is a member of our party. He said, 'No, it's 48.' There was a lady there who said, 'No, you're wrong; it's 38.' So we had 250, and now we've got 38, and a lot of them exited in the most terrible way possible.

So, if you're fair dinkum or you're just making a noise—and that's all I ever hear in this place—I don't see any reality out there in the world. I don't see any factories being built. I don't see any new farms being opened. I don't see any dams being built. I don't see any mass high-rise condominiums for tourists being built in Queensland. Of course, we have the Gold Coast, but for the first time ever I can't see a single high-rise being built on the Gold Coast. That most certainly is the situation in the greater Cairns-Mackay-Whitsundays area. Nothing is happening out there.

I conclude by saying that John Gambino needs a fumigation plant. He can't possibly build one for himself. It's got to be built for the whole industry. It's got to be based in Cairns, where we take the fruit and vegetables out of the Cairns area. Actually, I'll rephrase that: it's got to be based in the Atherton Tablelands, where we have a direct route now—thanks to Anthony Albanese, no less. We've cut 2,000 kilometres off the round trip for our fruits and vegetables from Far North Queensland—tropical fruit and vegetables—to go to the markets in Victoria, and of course their temperate fruit and vegetables have had 2,000 kilometres cut off the trip to the million people in the North Queensland market. So we are poised to be able to do that, but we need the fumigation plant.

I will take advantage of the opportunity today to pay a very great tribute to a very great hero: John Gambino, who got welfare payments for Australian farmers for the first time in Australian history, with the rural action council. I have awarded a Good Australian Award to every member of that council, because they are good Australians.

See this speech in context