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

There's no point having a voice because you won't listen to it. If you go to a community area and ask them what they want—and I took a television crew in there and, of course, they went sideways on the Voice—every single mayor will answer that by saying: 'The Voice is good, but we can't afford to buy food here. Affordability is terrible for us.' They'll say, 'We've got 12 or 15 people to a house.'

You guys are in power. I'm sorry to tell you, but for most of the last 30 years you didn't go out there and listen to them. You didn't do anything. You blokes in power for the rest of the time, you didn't listen to them. You didn't do anything. You didn't listen to them and ask them what they want. You didn't go out there and shut your month and listen to what they want—affordability and housing.

I had ownership of 3½ million or five million acres in Queensland which were the missions. The much maligned Christian missionaries pulled these people in and protected them, and there were terrible things happening. My family went to Cloncurry when the Kalkadoon Wars were still on. My partner in mining and I camped out bush for weeks together with swags. His mother was one of the few piccaninny survivors of the Battle Range. So I've got a memory that stretches back right to when it all happened.

Let me quote Rose Collis in fairness to what the opposition was doing here. Rose was a great leader, with Mickey Miller as well, in Cairns when it was very brave to be a leader. It's very fashionable now, but it was very brave. Mickey Miller's best mate at boarding school didn't speak to him for 30 years; it was a black power thing. Rose called me into a meeting, and I'm not going to name the community, obviously, but 25 per cent of the kids under 12 had sexually transmitted diseases. They were being molested. There was the death—I'd better not mention his name—of the mayor, and from the Anglican bishop I have never seen a more outraged speech in my life. 'Everyone knows the evil that is here. If there's any good to come out of the death of this great man—and we know why he drank himself to death: because he just couldn't get anything to happen. If anything good should come out of this, it is that we get rid of this filthy sin that prevails here in this place.' Well, it's still there because no-one has really attacked the real causes.

You go in there and you suppress the symptoms. What successive Queensland governments did was ban grog, but that's suppressing the symptoms. Did you ask yourself why they are drinking? You don't have to be Albert Einstein here. Go down to the demonstration when the people of Yarrabah were locked up. (Time expired)

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