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

No, I am putting forward that we will attempt to amend the bill so we can address the problem created that I am outlining here. This is a bill about improving services during disasters. I represent North Queensland, and we are cyclone prone and flood prone. Where I come from—which is an area of a thousand kilometres by a thousand kilometres: North Queensland's midwest—the soil seals over once we get two inches of rain, and we get massive flooding. We have characteristics in North Queensland that make us very, very prone to disasters of various types. Three of the towns in the electorate I represent get over 100 inches of annual rainfall. That is an average. That means that some years we get 300 inches of rain.

I want to name the people in this company, Qantas, that got $1.57 billion in handouts from the government because of COVID. In that same period of time, they paid out huge amounts of money to senior executives and paid bonuses and wages estimated at over $125 million, to quote but one example. On the board of Qantas is Richard Goyder, Maxine Brenner, Jacqueline Hey and Belinda Hutchinson. We are releasing their names to the media. This company—and God bless the Transport Workers Union who took the pictures—had employees sleeping on concrete with a blanket over them. They were baggage handlers. These people on the board did absolutely nothing about the man in charge, nor did this place do anything to call them to account. This place—the ALP and the LNP—sold Qantas. My forebears, like many other people who live in inland North Queensland, put in a lot of money to get a little airline going to service us and provide much-needed air services.

I'll quote two examples of that need. There were three Katter brothers. My father was one of them. He died because he would not jump the queue when we had the airline strike on. By the time he got to Brisbane, it was too late; the cancer had got away, and he died. If he had jumped the queue or been able to get on an aeroplane during that strike, he would have survived. So he died as a result of the tyranny of distance. His brother Norman was hurt. He had a rugby league injury. My family are very proud of their association with rugby league. By the time the Qantas plane got back from Longreach to Cloncurry and got to Brisbane, it was too late. If the plane had been in Cloncurry, he would have survived. So two of the three Katter brothers died on account of the tyranny of distance, which has been one of the greatest tyrants that this nation has ever had to confront. We put our hands in pockets and put up money that we could ill afford to get this company going. The government sold it so they could buy their way through an election. They sold the national passenger carrier.

I named the people on the Qantas board because I want it to be on the public record who they are. We don't want everyone running around just blaming the CEO. Who was the board that kept him there through this period of time? It was used to enable us—people subject to the tyranny of distance—to overcome that tyrant. The costs of going from Longreach, Mount Isa or Cloncurry to anywhere is absolutely prohibitive, and yet they're paying the CEO $20 million a year. If a tiny bit of that money came back to the people that founded Qantas, maybe we would be running this country a hell of a lot better than we're running it at the present moment.

As for the free marketeers and the ALP and the LNP, the founder of the ALP, 'Red Ted' Theodore, would turn in his grave and spit upon the people that call themselves ALP today because he believed in creating industries to provide work and a rich income for the people. He founded the great trade union movement in this country, as well as the great labour movement in this country. I'm very proud of the Country Party, which I belonged to. We were in the ALP, as was Kevin Rudd's family. The big split happened, and then we became members of the Country Party, but we took all of our principles with us.

I'll go back to the issue of disaster relief. That disaster relief passed out $1.57 billion to a company who is paying its CEO $20 million plus every year, when he's had baggage handlers that he has offshored sleeping on concrete, according to the aeronautical engineers union. They've told me that he has offshored thousands of jobs overseas in the vitally important aeronautical engineering industry. He has put fares up in regional Australia to a point where no-one can afford to fly, and this government hands him out $1.57 billion, with not one single codicil upon it, saying: 'Hold on, mate. If you were making big profits during the COVID period, which you did, we want the money back.' I'm not saying you pay it back straight away. I'm saying you pay it back over 10 or 20 years. The people of Australia have to bring to account Richard Goyder, Maxine Brenner, Jacqueline Hey and Belinda Hutchinson, who sat on their backsides and watched this man take $120 million out of this country. I'm not even talking about him utilising his power in this organisation to affirm his own proclivities. I will leave it at that.

The intervention in the contract for Israel Folau is one of the recent disgraces of this country, where a man was persecuted for his Christian convictions. Whether you agree with them or whether you don't, when we move into an area where if you disagree with someone's convictions you start destroying them, we are living in a fascist state. I deeply regret that the people of Victoria have to live in a fascist state, but they put people in jail that disagree with them—on a fairly regular basis, actually. I speak with authority because my own Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen was inclined to some of these proclivities at times, and he had to be reined in. It was very difficult to rein him in at times, so I know what fascism is all about, I can tell you. I would say that, on every occasion, we were able to rein him in, but there is no-one reining in the fascists running Victoria. On the contrary, I stand behind him.

I'm moving off the point. The point here is that we are handing out money to corporations with no real control or oversight of that money—that a person can walk out of this country having been paid $120 million. During COVID, they got a $1.6 billion handout, and there's no redress. There's no answering to a government. Is there any government in Australia? A government is there to provide essential services, and, to move from point A to point B, water and electricity are essential services. They've corporatised the water, they've privatised the electricity and they've sold off the transport industry. You can be very proud of yourselves, Mr ALP and Mr LNP.

I have published a history book—a moderate bestseller, if I may say so myself. It was launched to over a thousand people by Kevin Rudd, no less, and Barrie Cassidy in Melbourne. As an historian, I know the verdict that will be passed on those who were the ALP and LNP members of parliament during this period of time, when this was done in Australia, when every single one of our essential services was privatised into a corporation whose duty was to maximise profits. It was not to provide an essential service to the people of Australia, but to make profits—huge profits, personally, for those involved!

We're coming back to address this issue again, and we'll provide details on how much money Richard Goyder, Maxine Brenner, Jacqueline Hey and Belinda Hutchinson received during this period, and whether they're going to give any of that money that they got, for COVID, back to the people of Australia.

Until this place realises that it has a responsibility to provide essential services, then we are associated with a parliament that does not govern Australia, but governs in the interests of the rich and powerful. The sharebrokers playing their little stock market games in Sydney are the ones who run this country, and they slither out of university with two degrees and then they slither into boardrooms and slither into this parliament!

In the Labor Party that I belonged to as a little kid, Paddy Behan was local president and he was a shearer. The deputy president worked on the railway. The secretary—that was my father—had a little business in Cloncurry. And that was who the ALP were. There are no ALP people left in these areas because the ALP sold off the railways. They sold off Qantas, but they also sold off the railways and sacked 7½ thousand men and women from the railways in Queensland.

I don't know how many were sacked with Qantas, but I know that Qantas received $1.7 billion in COVID payments. We are here today to speak about the Social Security Amendment (Australian Government Disaster Recovery Payment) Bill 2023, and what the government appears to be doing here is a good thing to do. Unfortunately, and sadly for them, it highlights the fact that that money was given. I'm using Qantas as an example, but I will bet that there were a hundred other companies that similarly profited. They didn't need the money—they didn't actually want the money—but they got the money. I've learnt from my 51 or 52 years in parliament that when there is something that I don't understand, something shonky is going down; and a lot of shonky stuff has gone down here.

Before I finish—we had a very big flood. It concerned a tiny little town called Burketown and the surrounding areas. It was a terrible flood. One of the Booth family—like me, with various antecedents such as First Australians in the family tree—lost all of his cattle. The compensation he got was ridiculous; it was a laugh. The Tirranna roadhouse—which is Burketown, to some degree, these days—had received nothing at all from the government when I last spoke to them, which, admittedly, was a fair few weeks ago now. When we had floods in Julia Creek, former prime minister Morrison went to Julia Creek, and there was $1.2 billion handed out in compensation to the people that had suffered great losses. That has not happened at Burketown. If the people had been white, it would have happened. If it was a— (Time expired)

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