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

On the matter of foreign ownership of housing, I feel a great sense of frustration. In Charters Towers we were under a mining act that meant that, if you wanted to do a subdivision, it had to go to the clerk of the mining court, a local person who lived in Charters Towers deputised for the mining magistrate. My wife and I didn't have enough money to complete our house, so we had to do a subdivision. She went in, and he said, 'Fill out that form, Susie.' She filled out the form. It took her about 15 minutes. He said, 'Give me 25 bucks.' She gave him 25 bucks, and he signed it and stamped it. She said, 'When can I sell it?' and he said, 'Now.'

If you want to go through that process in Charters Towers now, you're looking at two years, about $50,000, getting an expert environmental opinion, getting an expert anthropological opinion and getting an engineering opinion. When the mining court was abolished in Charters Towers, the price of an undeveloped housing block was $7,000. Within one week under the new regime, it went to $142,000.

Now, you don't have to be Albert Einstein, and I am no fan of Malcolm Turnbull, I can assure you, but Malcolm Turnbull and an Oxford don who was an Australian but a professor at Oxford did a report on why housing prices are unattainable in Australia, an empty country. Two hundred kilometres from any city in Australia and you're in empty land. No matter which direction you travel, the land is empty—unless, I suppose, you're on the coast. When I say 'coast,' I'm talking about 50 kilometres of coastline. How can this be? How can an empty land with the cheapest land in the world have housing prices of $820,000 in Brisbane and $1.2 million in Sydney? Well, if you're a Liberal, look no further than your leader Malcolm Turnbull and his report. He simply said it is not a demand problem. Governments keep giving cheap loans, subsidised loans—giving people money—to buy houses. That increases the demand but, of course, it further, relatively, diminishes the supply. The problem is on the supply side.

Get rid of all the regulatory impositions and go back to the old mining act in Queensland. You say, 'Oh, you couldn't just let people build a house anywhere they like.' That's what we did in Charters Towers, a town of 16,000 people, a hundred years ago a bigger town than Brisbane. They've been doing it for 100 years there, and I, as the member of parliament there for 50 years, have never had one single complaint about that arrangement—well, for the 20 years while we were governing, until the socialists came in and, of course, went over to the Local Government Act and abolished the magnificent legislation of Red Ted Theodore, the founder of the Labor Party. It's a pity that some of you Labor blokes didn't go back to your roots.

We now have a situation where land prices are absolutely colossal. The biggest developer in North Queensland died recently, but I think he'd appreciate me quoting him in the house. Bobby Norman, Sir Robert Norman's son, the founder of the other airline in Australia, said: 'I've sold the 2,000 acres at the back of Cairns because I have not got enough years in my life to complete all the rigmarole that is required of the Australian governments, state, federal and local. I haven't got enough years left to subdivide that 2,000 acres which we desperately needed for housing in the greater Cairns region.' That's a region, I might add, of 300,000 people. It's not like we're small; we're anything but and rapidly growing. The answer is so simple. Surely you can see that, if you put 200 impositions upon a subdivision, you're going to set housing prices through the roof. I'm not going to go into the cost of housing. Similarly, they are applying all sorts of rules and regulations to house building, which adds, I am told by people who know, some $48,000 to the cost of a house. If you put together what government has done to land prices and what government has done to housing prices, we end up where we are.

As for foreign takeovers and acquisitions—I mean, if I were a member of the Labor Party, I'd go and hang myself, drown my head in a toilet or something. I withdraw that remark. I'm just trying to find an analogy for the shame that you must feel—and the Liberal Party probably more so. They say that Queensland is about the four Cs: coal, cattle, cane and copper. The copper industry was owned by an Australian company, Mount Isa Mines, proudly created by a wonderful Australian. It's now owned by a foreign corporation.

On the coal industry: I'll give you 200 bucks—and I'm a pretty stingy beggar—if you can find an Australian owned coalmining company. Coal is gone. On cattle: the two biggest cattle aggregations in Australia are both foreign corporations: the AA Company and Consolidated Pastoral Company. What the hell are we left owning in Australia? The entire cane industry, which has carried the Australian economy along with wool since the nation's inception, got Australia out of Great Depression. The Labor Party was founded in the cane fields of North Queensland.

God bless Red Ted Theodore and the great Theodore Labor movement. I say 'Theodore Labor movement' because it bears no relationship to the Labor Party here today. In fact, I'd say it represents the exact opposite position. They were free marketeers, and we are anything but free marketeers. When it went down, half of us went over to the Country Party and half to the Labor Party. Kevin Rudd's family and my own were classic examples of that phenomenon. They were the same policies and the same party and had the same people in the Country Party! We had a wonderful government for nearly 100 years in Queensland.

On the cane industry: every single sugar mill was Australian owned, and all bar three of them were owned by the farmers themselves, the local people. There were 23 mills owned by the people and three mills owned by an Australian company. Now all 23 mills—because that's all that's left—are foreign owned. Who's responsible for that? Who deregulated and destroy that industry? The people in this room destroyed that industry and handed it over to foreign corporations. You abolished the right of the farmers to what the employees call arbitration. The farmers had arbitration. The Theodore family were cane farmers as well as being miners and as well as being workers and employees. They understood arbitration. They fought for it, and they created arbitration in Australia. Not surprisingly, they extended it to the farmers. Farmers all had the protection of arbitration whether it was the wool industry, the cane industry, the grain industry or whatever it was. They had arbitration until it was removed.

Let's have a look at their dirty work. Every single sugar mill now is foreign owned. Three have closed down, and the rest are foreign owned.

An honourable member: Except Rocky Point.

Well, we'll leave that up in the air. You and I both know there's a huge question mark there. But I take your point. It's a 'rocky point', but I'll take it anyway. Let me just say that we are now at the mercy of foreign corporations. Every single cane farmer just has to take what the mill feels like paying. Unlike any other industry, we have only 12 hours to get that cane into the mill before it starts losing its sugar content. So we are at the mercy of the mills. Who put us at the mercy of the mills and foreign corporations? People in this House did. People on both sides of this House did. Let's talk about copper. Mount Isa Mines is arguably the second-biggest mining company in the world. Jim Foots bought it off the Americans and turned it into arguably the second-biggest mining company in the world. It's now foreign owned. It's now Glencore.

If you want to put the ownership of your country in the hands of foreigners, have a look at Mount Isa. They have a working mine which has copper in it. But, of course, if you're an international commodities trader, you don't want to have all the worry of working a mine. You just want to trade the asset: the copper in the ground. So surprise, surprise! They closed the mine. It puts in jeopardy the whole copper industry in north-west Queensland, which doesn't matter a great deal, because the incoming Labor Party took away the 'use it or lose it' clause in the legislation that the Theodore governments had put there. Now you can be a foreign corporation, own the mining lease and do nothing with it except trade it on the stock market. That's all you have to do. There's no necessity for you to create a job here in Australia. In fact, Glencore has just announced the sacking of 2,000 Australians in Mount Isa. Twelve hundred direct and 800 indirect jobs will vanish. Does the government do anything about it?

We carried on, by the traditions of the Country Party in Queensland—the much-maligned Bjelke-Peterson governments—the wonderful Theodore government's policy. We continued on exactly the same policy: you use it or you lose it. As the mines minister in Queensland, the town of Emerald is the size that it is today because I said to the coalmining company, 'You open up your operations to that line, or I am taking it off you and giving it to somebody who will work it.; That is a matter of public record. I got attacked at the time for doing it. The ALP removed the Theodore legislation: use it or lose it. So now our great mining wealth is just a plaything for the stock markets of the world and the share market sharks in Sydney—and I apologise to all sharks for saying that. Can it be worse? There's coal, cattle, cane and copper. We're talking about a few houses being owned by foreigners when you're whole economy is owned by foreigners! They can pay you whatever they like to pay you, and the profits don't go here. I'm a mining man; I'm not a cattleman. I've had cattle all my life, but I'm not a cattleman. I'm a mining man. Minerals have doubled in price. No matter what it is, they've doubled in price over the last 10 years. Boy, oh boy, that's wonderful for Australia. No, it means absolutely nothing to us. We don't own the minerals! The foreign corporations do. In actual fact, our mining wages have been driven down, and I won't say anything about the coalmining leadership. I won't say anything about that; I might get a defamation action. But we have been forced down from 185,000—and I addressed the workers at the workers club at Moranbah, and I said, 'Hey, fellers, we were on 185,000'—and everyone nodded their head—'and now we're on 135,000,' and everyone nodded their head. And I said, 'Well, soon we'll be down, down, down.' Now, this has been in a time period when coal has arguably doubled in price. So coal has doubled in price and the workers have had their wages cut! That will be a good indication of some of the unionism in Australia.

I am very proud of my union, the CFMEU, and I want to make the point that the coalminers are not part of the CFMEU. I am very proud of my association with my union and very proud of our performance. If we were in charge in Mount Isa Mines, if we had coverage—and I fought, as a young bloke of 19 years of age, to get coverage for the CFMEU in Mount Isa Mines—then I can assure you that that mine would be reopened. Now, I'm good friends with three people who ran Mount Isa, and they all said that that mine should never be closed. (Time expired)

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