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

As a longstanding minister in the Queensland government, I could point out to you 100,000 things we were doing wrong. When the government fell in 1990, I came in for an extremely rude shock because I saw what governments were like in Australia. Governments in the rest of Australia comprise what we now call 'wokes'—I call them 'double-degree done nothing in their lives'—and that group of people took over Queensland. I just want to speak from a point of view of my cousin brothers, my first Australian cousin brothers. I come from a town where we call ourselves 'Murri from the Curry' and we have great loyalty to each other. I identify very strongly with the Kalkadoon tribes that held European settlement at bay for 40 years—not a bad effort. I won't compare us to other people, but not a bad effort.

I went to a funeral on the weekend of one of the three great first Australian leaders. When I went to Yarrabah, the biggest community in Australia, of the public servants, there were 28 positions and 26 were held by whitefellas in a totally blackfella community of 4,000 people. As a result of this very great man, only three of them had the courage to stand up: Tommy Dyer, who died two weeks ago; Alfred Neal, who I am referring to here, who died last week; and the great George Mye in the Torres Strait. The rest of them were scared of the whitefellas and they were subservient to the whitefella public servants. They were very much a race under the control, direction and orders given by the whitefellas.

For those that want to argue that it's not as good now as then because we're getting pushed backwards again, when I came to this place, of the 28 public service positions that ran this community, 26 were whitefellas and two were blackfellas. Now it's the other way around, so don't tell me we haven't made progress. The Rosendale family are very famous. I think everyone in this place is heard of Noel Pearson. He's a Rosendale. The first First Australian, Aboriginal Australian, if you want to use that expression, to be elected to a parliament was a Rosendale from Hopevale. The deputy head of the department that I had was Lester Rosendale.

This is Greg Wallace, who was on 60 Minutes twice because he instituted Work for the Dole in Australia. We approached him to have run for us in the Senate, and I said, 'Look, we've got little chance of winning, but it will give you a platform.' This is what he said when he had the Australian press there at his press conference—we're talking about the Public Service here—'When I was CEO at Napranum, all the CEOs in Cape York were blackfellas. Now they're are all whitefellas. We had 36,000 head of cattle with blackfellas in the Cape York. Now we've got none. When I was CEO at Napranum, we could walk into the council chambers, fill out a form and get an inalienable freehold title.' I personally would walk in and I could get a two-acre allotment or a 10,000 acre allotment so long as no-one objected, and then there was a process. But I think there were a thousand leases that went out, and I get very embarrassed because they call them 'Katter leases'. I'm embarrassed because I had nothing to do with that. Not at any stage did I have anything to do with it.

This brings me back to the concept that we are going to have a Voice, and what are we talking about here? Obviously we're talking about a governmental type department based, presumably, in Canberra. If it's going to be a Voice in Canberra, presumably it will be based in Canberra. When I went out and asked people what they wanted, they wanted self-management. They didn't want anyone telling them what to do in Yarrabah. They wanted to have their own government there. The committee comprised people that had played rugby league, had mustered cattle or had cut cane, so I knew they'd all consider a blackfella the same as whitefella. They'd have no racial difference in their heads. They voted unanimously to give the people self-management. The duly elected community council in Yarrabah had the powers, really, to pass any laws they wanted to pass, because there were no regulatory provisions in the act. It just said, 'You've got a responsibility to deliver four services: roads and pathways; water; sewerage; and rubbish. That's it. You've got those responsibilities. What you do after that is up to you. If you want to pass a law saying people walk backwards in Yarrabah, go right ahead. That's what self-management is about.' We're not talking about a faraway group of people who, I just think, will be what we have here. I'm sorry to tell you. What we have here are a bunch of wokes—double-degree, done nothing in their lives.

If I go through the Queensland cabinet, Bjelke-Petersen was the biggest contractor. He was as big as Theiss before he went into parliament. He built the third peanut thresher in Queensland. He created the town of Hopevale. Pastor George Rosendale and the Bjelke-Petersen were missionaries in the Lutheran Church, and, of course, they'd all been rounded up and put in jail during the war, so when they got out, they wanted a home. So they went to Hopevale, which was created by him. So I thought, 'This bloke. Wait on. He's as big a contractor as Theiss. He's a pioneer in peanut processing in Australia. He pioneered the clearing of timber to make way for food production and profitability. He pioneered a dozen areas and, when he was on the council there, he performed.'

Bill Gunn started with nothing and ended up with three small holdings and two butcher shops. He was a very successful man. His daughter was married to one of the Bowies up in the Torres Strait. If ever there was a good fighter for the Torres Strait it was my deputy premier, Bill Gunn.

I could go through the whole cabinet, but 13 of them had cut cane by hand as young men—13 of the 30! How many people in here have ever done a day's work with their hands? How many of you have ever done that? It was a different group of people altogether. Those people gave to Queensland, and probably the towering figure, outside of Bjelke-Peterson—maybe as good as Bjelke-Peterson—was Sir Leo Hielscher, the head of the Public Service. We come in here talking about public servants, but this was a man who, along with the Premier, created the coal industry of Australia. This country only has two sources of income now: coal and iron ore. They're worth $120 billion. The next thing down is probably aluminium, cattle or gold, at about $15 billion. Our country has staggered to a point where we are so lacking in 'Australianism', in patriotism, in self-reliance and self-belief, that we can't even see which way we should be travelling. To give all of your gas away for 6c a unit and then buy it back for $49 a unit—a $120 billion-a-year industry and you gave it away! You people in this place gave it away—you people, the Queensland parliament and the New South Wales parliament. I tell you what: you wouldn't have got it from the chief public servant of Queensland, Leo Hielscher. They went to him because they wanted to export bauxite, and Leo was said to kill himself laughing at the concept that they would mine bauxite. He informed them: 'We don't export or mine bauxite; we produce aluminium. And if you're not going to process it here in Queensland, well, you won't dig it out of the ground in Queensland.'

This was the Public Service—an honourable group of people led by a very great leader, Sir Leo Hielscher. They created the tourism industry, and I'm not going to go into the detail of how they did it. They created the coal industry. They doubled and trebled the size of the cattle industry. They doubled the size of the cane industry. If you love your environment and trees and all of that sort of thing, well, we did some truly wonderful things there. One of them was that we created the prawn and fish farming industry of Australia. Joe Baker, at the Australian Institute of Marine Science—some would describe him as a raving greenie, but he was a very close friend of mine and a very great rugby league player. Joe wanted us to cut back on fishing in the sea, so he instituted the prawn and fish farming industry. Yes, alright, there may have been benefits to the ocean—I disagreed with him on that, but maybe there were. In any event, we instituted the industry. There wasn't a single farm in Australia and now there's $2,000 million a year coming in from prawn and fish farming. The point I'm making is that it wasn't just the members of parliament; the Public Service reflected the same attitudes and values as the members of parliament.

I'll return to the First Australians, as I start to conclude. Greg Wallace said: 'When I was CEO at Napranum, all of the CEOs were blackfellas. Now, under the Labor Party'—he didn't say that, but of course that's what he meant; he's running for us in parliament!—'the CEOs are whitefellas again. We're back where we started from.' Every single community had a market garden so we could combat malnutrition. The much-maligned Christians—a lot of people in this place hate the word 'Christianity': 'Oh, terrible! Love your neighbour and do good to other people—isn't it shocking!' A profound idea, that one! It's unfortunately true—and as a published historian I can say this, and as a person who lived out in the bush with my partner, whose mother was one of the few piccaninny survivors from the battle on Battle Camp Range. Some may call it a massacre. I know what I'm talking about here.

The First Australians would have been all but annihilated if it hadn't been for Christian missionaries coming in—

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