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

That was a most curious speech by the member for Gilmore, the last speaker. She represents Nowra, which I understand is the home of the ethanol industry in Australia. She is in the government. Quite interestingly, I have a map here of countries not using ethanol. There are hardly any countries on earth that are not using ethanol. I hold the map up for everyone to see. These countries are not using ethanol: Sahara, Ghana, Iceland, Myanmar, Greenland, Bolivia, Senegal and the Congo. She stood up here and said we're going to use renewables and yet she represents what tiny little ethanol industry we have. To quote the Labor Premier of New South Wales, I will not go another day with the death of hundreds, maybe thousands, of people on my conscience when they don't have to die. If you move from Forbes, Parkes or Nowra to Sydney, your chances of dying of lung cancer or heart disease double. That's one hell of a statistic. That's because of what is in the emissions.

I have actually got legislation drafted for electric cars, but you will never—not in a million years—be able to pack the power into a battery that you've got in one kilo of fuel. You can make that fuel renewable so you have no emissions, yet we're up there with Niger, the Congo and Iceland in doing nothing about it. My case rests. I go no further than ethanol. All you have to do tomorrow is pass legislation saying 10 per cent ethanol, and you might end up like Brazil with 49 per cent of fuel renewable. Sao Paulo is the cleanest city on earth and it has a bigger population than Australia. You might get your fuel for $1.29 like they do in Brazil, with 49 per cent of their fuel coming from ethanol, from renewables.

I hear all this grand ideology in this place. We have a saying in the bush: when you neighbour starts preaching religion, reach for your branding iron. When I hear politicians start talking ideology, I start reaching for my shooting iron, to be quite frank with you, Mr Speaker. We announced the nuclear submarines. It is terrible to have been in this place for some time, because you know that 28 years ago we announced the nuclear submarines we were going to build, and we're still announcing them. In fact, every two or three years we announce the building of nuclear submarines.

What are you doing? Don't talk about ideology or airy-fairy ideas about saving the planet. What are you doing specifically? The most obvious thing to do is ethanol. What are you doing? Nothing, absolutely nothing. There is an inability of the government today—as a person who has seen many years, I get very worried for democracy. Five of the last presidents of the United States spent most of that time trying to fight off going to jail. I don't believe that five of eight presidents were all criminals, but it's a failure of democracy and the triumph of the two-party system, which, quite frankly, has been abandoned by every country on earth, now, except the United States, and they have to live with their constitution.

I'll give you a classic example. Former prime minister Kevin Rudd is a person who did do something. He put in the NBN and he put in the NDIS. He will be remembered in the history books. I hate to say it, because I'm no fan of Malcolm Turnbull's, but he did put in Snowy 2.0, which is very, very important because we are moving more and more to intermittent power, which is extremely dangerous. To have something that we can fall back on is very important. Let me go to CopperString. Prime Minister Rudd announced the electrification of Australia, the connection of the outlying areas—the Ord iron ore industry, Olympic Dam and the North West Mineral Province, which I represent—to connect them to the national grid, which is an excellent thing to do. If you take cheap, competitively priced power in, later on you can take renewables—we hope cheaply priced—out. CopperString are in around their ninth year, now—the idea of building line from Townsville. Every single inch of line in Queensland was built by the government. Every single inch of railway line was built by the government. Now they build nothing. Here is a classic example. When I became minister for electricity in Queensland, I asked the head of the department whether Martin Tenni, my predecessor, had got that line into Normanton. He said, 'No.' I said I wanted it in the cabinet bag on Monday. You'd just do it. You'd say, 'Put it in the cabinet bag and call tenders.' For $274 million, I just said, 'We're going to call tenders for it,' and we did it. That's how hard it is. It took me 10 minutes of discussion with him and about two hours to review the cabinet submission and it was done, so we had a line from Cairns to Normanton. The line from Townsville to Mount Isa is not all that much longer, really. It's been nine years, and we've still made no progress on it. It's an area that is bringing $5,000 million dollars a year into the Australian economy, and we can't build a lifeline to it, let alone talk about renewable energy such as ethanol.

One of the longest serving senior cabinet ministers in the history of this place said to me that government in Australia no longer governs. He said that members of parliament cannot make a decision. They do not govern. It's a malaise of democracy. I never thought I'd see the day when China's growth would outstrip America's. We were brought up to believe the capitalist system and the free market—the competitive system—was vastly superior to centralised economies. That has been proved to be wrong, very badly wrong.

I think every person in Australia shakes their head whenever someone gets up and talks about building Australian made. All you had to do was give a contract for the government cars to Toyota, and you'd have an Australian car-building industry. But neither you nor you could do that. It wouldn't have cost the taxpayers a cent. That's how we got industry going in Queensland. If we wanted something to happen, we acted.

I want to talk about gas. The trade union that I belong to, the CFMMEU, God bless them, had a big sign up. We sold the gas for 6c a unit. You can buy it now for about $45 a unit. What country gives away one of its only three resources, one of its only three sources of income? Qatar, a little tiny country in the Middle East, produces the same amount of gas we do and exports the same amount of gas as we do, and Qatar get 29,000 million a year for their gas. We get 600 million for ours. That's wages—not that there is much wages involved. What sort of government do we have here in this country?

When I went into parliament, our stove was made in Australia, our fridge was made in Australia, our air conditioner was made in Australia. Every single household appliance was made in Australia. Now none of them are made in Australia. If you want to buy things from overseas, you've got to sell something. People in this place have never been in business, so they don't understand that concept. You've got have money coming in as well as money going out. We allowed five of our six great mining companies to be foreign owned. When the much-maligned Bjelke-Petersen government fell in Queensland—outside of the Theodore Labor governments in Queensland, easily the greatest government in Australian history—we owned BHP, we owned Mount Isa Mines, we owned Western Mining Corporation, we owned North and we owned Woodside. We didn't own Rio. Now foreigners own BHP, foreigners own Mount Isa Mines, foreigners own Rio, foreigners own Chevron, foreigners don't own Fortescue—God bless Twiggy—and they own Adani. So five of the six are foreign owned. What sort of a country lets its entire resources be foreign owned?

I can tell you people in this place—I have to say it to you and I say it bluntly: you are not Australians. No-one in Australia would have agreed to any of those things. No person who had any decency and considered himself a true Australian would have gone to any of those solutions. I could take you into a hotel or a shopping centre at any time of the day or night and ask people, 'What are the three things you'd most like to happen in this country if you were the boss of this country?' and, you know what, amongst the three every single time would be that we buy back and own our own country. That's what they'd say. But you don't listen to them because you've got all this grand ideology and you want to preach to them and tell them how you're wonderful and you're saving the planet. Well, excuse me for saying that they're not listening to you. That's why more than a third of Australia voted against you people and against you people in the last election. Wake up to yourselves and become Australians.

Please God—and I pray every night to the good Jesus—we will get the balance of power in Queensland. We dipped out by two seats in the last election. We dipped out by 690 votes at the election before. We're holding our seats by 70 per cent, the four seats that we control in Queensland. When we get there, you will immediately see the launching of a rail line to the Galilee, to open up the Galilee. You can all preach and howl and cry, but are you going to tell 600 million people in India that they can't have power? According to Scientific American, 600 million people in India don't have power. Are you, as a little European country, a little tiny pinprick country in the middle of Asia, going to tell India that they can't have any electricity? Are you going to put solar panels on their roofs? Well, most of them don't have roofs! It would be ridiculous to even consider that. As von Clausewitz said in his book, 'If goods don't cross borders then guns will.' If ever there was a truism in history it's that. Another truism in history is, 'People without land will look for a land without people.' You can whistle and point, in both cases, what country I'm thinking of in that context.

If we open up the Galilee coal—I think it should be done on the basis that they put HELE plants in India. There's no reason why they shouldn't. They cut commissions clean in half, similarly with China. I also believe we should build a plant—and I pay great tribute to Mike Kelly, who was a senior minister in the Labor government in this place. When he came back from Israel he said, 'Algae is everywhere. Algae lives on CO2, water and sunlight.' I love the CO2 bit. But if you build a power station and feed that CO2 to algae, you'll make more money out of the algae then you'll make out of the electricity.

If we open up the Galilee, that will be part of the deal: 'We'll give you 2,000 megawatts of electricity. You're losing 8,000 and you're only putting 4,000 on, so I don't know what's going to happen in seven or eight years time. But we'll give you 2,000 megawatts and we'll give you zero emissions. We'll give you the cheapest electricity in the world, because we're making more money out of algae.' I must pay tribute to Minister Plibersek, because she knows the algae—she's one step ahead of me. I very seldomly admit that.

Build the Bradfield Scheme. There's 23 million hectares of land covered by a prickly tree that is destroying all flora and fauna and will continue to grow, year by year. If you want to arrest that, you'd better start getting off your backside and building the Bradfield Scheme. He wasn't exactly an idiot, Bradfield. He built the Sydney Harbour Bridge. He built the water supply for Sydney. He built the underground railway system that got the international prize for engineering that year.

Hells Gates—silicon. You make solar panels out of silicon. We were negotiating to build the silicon here in Australia when our government fell. I haven't noticed anyone else negotiating to use the purest, cheapest silicon in the world, at Shelburne Bay, to competitively produce silicon. (Time expired)

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