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

In my home town of Charters Towers, it once took my wife 15 minutes and cost her $14 to do a subdivision. You could buy a piece of land in Charters Towers for $7,000. We were in a town of 16,000 people and were under the mining act. The only process was to walk in to the clerk of the court and ask, and for him to say: 'Yes, I agree to the subdivision,' or, 'No, I don't,' and that was the end of it. The net result of this was that you could buy a piece of land in Charters Towers for $7,000. Then the incoming Labor government said: 'We can't have this sort of irresponsibility!' So, in 1992, two years after the much-maligned Bjelke-Petersen government fell—was wiped out—the gruesome regime of processing was imposed upon us.

It was referred to, I might add, by no less than the Treasurer of the Parliament of Australia in his budget speech, where he said: 'Affordability is the major issue confronting this nation. Housing is the major element that is occasioning this problem, and the problem is caused by regulatory impositions,' and I and my honourable colleague from Tasmania were both sitting here saying, 'Hear, hear!' and we said that continuously throughout his speech, which was pretty rare for either of us. Then he reached his penultimate comment, saying that he was going to deal with this problem by putting an authority in, and we both burst out laughing. Our honourable colleague from the Adelaide area asked, 'Why are you laughing?' and we said: 'Because you've just put another tier in! You've got five tiers and processes you've got to go through now. Well, there's just been another process put in there!'

It is my land! There was the Magna Carta. No less a person than Archbishop Langton, under William, his colleague, the Regent, who said: 'It is your land; the government has no right to interfere.' So, if I want to cut my land up into tiny little parcels, that's my business. It's nothing to do with the government.

The government has every right to say: 'Well, you can't get any services to it,' but that isn't going to upset people a lot, because most of the people in North Queensland have a big tank and can supply their own water, and they can put solar panels on their roof and put batteries in, and say: 'Too bad! We don't need your electricity anymore. We don't need your water anymore.' And of course any enlightened regime would allow for septic tanks in backyards. Everyone in Cloncurry—and everyone in every town in North Queensland—had those, up until about 50 years ago, and I can't ever remember a complaint along those lines.

So the answer is there. The answer is simple. It is to give back to the people the powers that you have taken off them. Those powers were given to us in no less a document than the Magna Carta itself, in the homeland of it. And if there is a reason why the Anglos and the Europeans have skipped 100 years ahead of the rest of the world—they're not ahead now, but, for well over 200 years, they were ahead of the rest of the world—it was because they had a concept called property: privately owned, freehold property.

I would refer everybody in this House to the works of Hernando de Soto, the World Bank economist, who should have got the Nobel Prize but didn't. He said, 'Why are Egypt, the Philippines and Peru the three poorest countries on earth?' This is not a bloke to be taken lightly. His cousin heads up Rio, the second-biggest mining company on earth and amongst the top 20 biggest companies on earth. He himself is a senior economist with the World Bank. We don't exactly laugh at people like this. He said that it was because of the simple fact that you can't get a freehold title in any of those countries. It will take you 6½ years and 237 processes, many of which will require a lawyer, so effectively you can't get a freehold title.

I am very familiar with this concept because, when I went out and asked my blackfella mates, my brother cousins, what they wanted—3½ million acres of 30-inch rainfall land, not much of that in Australia—surprise, surprise, they wanted freehold title, inalienable freehold title, the same as everyone else on earth. And, 33 years since that legislation was abolished by the ALP government—I repeat: by the ALP government—there has not been a scintilla of effort to restore their rights to a freehold title. The net result of that is that the death rate has nearly trebled in all of those communities, because they took away market gardens as well. Not only did the socialists take away your source of fruit and vegetables, but also they took away your right to be able to put a fruit and vegetable farm in.

I want to talk about the Liberals now. It's very hard not to look at that terrible, evil word that we use to describe the annihilation of people on earth. We've had many examples of that: Adolf Hitler, the Turks against the Armenians, the British against the South Africans. But, in the Torres Strait, the Liberal government banned fruit and vegetable gardens. Well, I just don't know what word you'd used to describe it if you don't use that ugly word. How would you describe it? Those people have no way of getting fresh fruit and vegetables from Cairns up to every island—there are 28 islands in the Torres Strait—on a fortnightly basis. Since our fruit and vegetables in the Far North go to Brisbane and back again, and take another two weeks to get to the islands, there are no fresh fruit and vegetables. But that didn't worry them because they all had their own fruit and vegetable gardens in the backyard. I had 300 meals up there, and I can't remember ever touching a skerrick of food from the mainland or from anywhere else. It was all locally grown food. You took that right away from them. And you took their right to commercial dinghy fishing away from them. Maybe there's some other name that's not as bad as 'genocide', and I'd like you to suggest that I use it, because I don't want to use the word 'genocide', and yet I can't think of any other word to describe what was done there. It was exactly the same as what the British did in the concentration camps to the women and children in South Africa: 'Oh, we'll just deprive them of food. Don't do anything else. Just deprive them of food and medical treatment. She'll be right. They'll be gone.'

In North Queensland, in Charters Towers, we were doing a block of land for $7,000. It's an hour's drive from Townsville. I dare say, if you live in Sydney, you won't get anywhere in an hour, so you might as well live in Charters Towers. Townsville is a city, effectively, of 300,000 people—as big as Canberra. There are all mod cons there. Everything you want is there. It's an hour away. And we can provide land for $7,000. That was what we were doing until, as the Treasurer rightly pointed out, the government regime of requirements was imposed upon those people.

If you say there were some problems in that administration, I was a member of parliament there for 20 years and I never got a single complaint. We were selling land for $7,000 a block. Our right to do that was taken away from us so we could get in line with the rest of Australia, and the price of land in Charters Towers went from $7,000 to $142,000. Congratulations, Mr ALP Government of Queensland! What a fantastic success story. Your add-ons, making all your consultants in Brisbane super rich, which had never been needed in the 200-year history of the town and had never been called for, were imposed on them by you. They shot the price up from $7,000 to $142,000. I'm not one for exaggeration, I hope. The market has settled back down to about $45,000 a block, which is where it sits today. It should be $7,000 a block. Why isn't it?

A teacher rang up yesterday. He is sleeping on a verandah. They gave him an umbrella. So he sleeps on a verandah with an umbrella in one of the coldest parts of Australia, the Atherton Tableland, and he pays $300 a week for the privilege of sitting on a verandah with an umbrella. This is in a land where from Atherton across to the Indian Ocean there's nobody living. You could drop a line of atomic bombs from Atherton all the way across to Robe River, if you like, or wherever you want to point out on the west coast of Western Australia, and you wouldn't kill anyone, because there's no-one living there. So why are we paying this extraordinary price? The biggest land developer in North Queensland, Sir Robert Norman, said: 'Mate, I'm out of it. I haven't got enough years in my life to do the next subdivision.' So where we desperately need housing we can't get it. There is a second, small, element. We need high-speed, dual-lane, spoke roads and the speed raised to 125 kilometres an hour.

Outside of Cairns is Mission Beach. For two years in a row it has been voted one of the four most beautiful places on Earth. It has crystal clear waterfalls, no crocodiles, beaches 100 metres wide, coral at low tide, jungle right down to the beach. This truly is paradise. Why aren't there people living there? Go back to the restrictions placed on subdivisions by the government. That's why people aren't living there. Unless, somewhere, we can find an Alexander the Great to cut the Gordian knot, this situation in Australia will continue.

My daughter had a cubicle. I measured it. It was roughly the size of our toilet room in our home, and she was paying $300 a week for it. There's a bloke paying $300 a week for a verandah space with an umbrella in a country that's empty, in a country where, if you move more than a hundred kilometres from the coast, there is virtually no-one living. There are 1.2 million people living on a continent the size of Brazil or the United States. It is bigger than Europe and almost as big as China. It is bigger than India. There are only 1.2 million people living there, and yet you're charging people. You will not let them buy a piece of land under $140,000 anywhere in this country, and it's your fault.

Don't tell me you're going to have an authority. Walk into this place and pass laws saying that if it's my piece of land I can cut it into whatever I bloody well like, because it's my land, and Archbishop Langton and William, the regent of England, put that on paper and made it law that it's my land.

The great jurist Coke—as you pronounce his name—in 1676, I think it was, said 'An Englishman's home is his castle'. His house, ever so humble, may the wind blow through it, the winds flap in the breeze, the door open and shut in a gust, be it ever so humble. Even the King of England himself shall not set foot upon the portals without the permission of the law—meaning an Englishman's home is his castle.

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