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

ER () (): The most extraordinary success story in housing was in Queensland. That story starts with Greg Wallace, a First Australian and one of the Rosendales from Hope Vale. He introduced Work for the Dole, and 60 Minutes, the first time they ever did a follow-up story in the history of the program, got a huge watching audience. Greg got Work for the Dole going. Gerhardt Pearson, Noely Pearson's brother, rang me up and said, 'Why don't we use the dole labour to build the houses?' I thought, 'I can't believe this.' I rang up Gerry Hand, who I think was the federal minister. He said, 'That didn't come from you, Katter. It's too smart for you.' Yes, all right, well, it didn't! The federal government agreed to it, and we cut the price of housing more than clean in half. We were flying in whitefella crews from Brisbane and from Cairns and Townsville. We had to pay for their accommodation, their flights in and out, living-away-from-home allowance—meals and accommodation was huge—and the cost of flying them in and out. We were doing that when we had people living there who could do the job. I doubted whether they could do the job, but I didn't have any power. The boys on the ground, First Australians, had the power, not me, so I had to go with it. Then Donnie Fraser rang me. His son, Troy Fraser, is an extraordinary, wonderful person. Troy is the CEO at Doomadgee these days and did a wonderful job running the rugby league up there. Donnie, rang me up and said, 'Why don't we make the concrete blocks? ' I think I used a rather crude phrase to him on the telephone, and we argued for a bit. I said, 'You can have one of these things—they're 80,000 bucks—and see how it goes. That's all you're getting.' Anyway, it was so successful we put eight in strategic locations. We cut the price of housing to about one-third of what it had been. Now, I shouldn't say 'we', because I had nothing to do with it. Each of those decisions was made by the people themselves. There's a wonderful book out, The Colonial Fantasythe whitefellas are never going to get it right. This was a classic case of it. When the whitefellas were running it, we were building 60 or 70 houses a year. When the blackfellas took it over, we were doing 300 a year!

So I make the point to you, Minister, that the way that you are building houses in remote Australia is costing the earth. If you'll just listen to the local people that live up there, whether they're blackfellas or whitefellas, you'll be able to cut very dramatically the cost of a house. We had enough money to build 400 houses in that six-year time frame. I think we built over 2,000 houses. So more power to the boys in the peninsula.

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