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

My family, my forebears, have lived in Charters Towers since the 1880s, or something like. When I moved there from my home town of Cloncurry, we didn't have enough money to finish our house. I had put a lot of money into buying cattle and developing a copper mine which we were producing copper from. My wife went in—we had 20 acres—and she said we had to subdivide it because we couldn't afford to finish building the house. All land in the greater Charters Towers area was under control of the mines department, and you went to see the mining clerk of the court, a gentleman called Michael Power, if you wanted a subdivision. He said yes, or he said no, and that was as simple as it was.

My wife said, 'Can we subdivide it?' He said, 'Have you got the survey done?' She said yes and handed him the survey plan. He said, 'Fill out that form, Suze.' So my wife filled it out. 'Give me 25 bucks. Thank you.' She said, 'When can I sell it?' He said, 'You can sell it now.' 'Right now?' 'Yes, go down to the real estate agent and sell it. Once I've stamped it and signed it, it's finished.'

Now, if we wanted to do that today—because the socialist ALP government, when they overthrew the much-maligned Bjelke-Petersen government, abolished the mining act—we'd have to go through the process like every other poor beggar in Queensland. You've got to put in an application to the local traditional owners, and that takes a long time and a lot of money to get over that hurdle. Then you've got to have a soil-testing and engineering report done on the house and the effect on an engineering basis. Then you have to get another report on the environmental impact of the proposal, and then you've got to get a social impact statement. All of these things take about three to 4½ years. So once it took five minutes and now it takes four years.

No less a person in this place than the Treasurer in his first budget speech said, 'The problem confronting this nation is affordability. That is being driven by housing prices, which are being pressured by restrictive impositions upon land.' Myself and my two colleagues here said, 'Hear, hear.' For each of his five propositions, we said, 'Hear, hear. Spot on.' And then he said, 'We're setting up an authority.' We said, 'No, no!' We've already got four processes we've got to go through, and we'll have five processes we've got to go through if that authority is brought into operation.

The culpability of the people in the state parliaments—not so much this parliament—is colossal. They have driven average housing prices in Brisbane up to over $820,000 and in Sydney to over $1.2 million. These are the highest housing costs anywhere in the world. I don't know whether I've got it, but I'll have a quick look. I carry around a map I call 'the golden Australia'. I hold it up and I say, 'What's that?' They say, 'It's a map of Australia.' And I say, 'No, it's not. It's a map of Australia shorn of a little narrow hundred-kilometre coastal belt.' We've dropped off Victoria, but who'd miss Victoria? And there's a little dot around Perth.

Ninety-two per cent of the surface area of Australia is occupied by a meagre 1.2 million people. That's all that lives there, and they are leaving. In fact, west of the Great Dividing Range in Queensland we can only have one member of parliament now. There are only about 150,000 to 170,000 people left there, and it's not much better in New South Wales. The population is leaving.

Two hundred and forty years ago we Australians said, 'We don't need a population. We've got very strong birth control operating. We want to keep population down. We don't want to put too much pressure on the environment, so we want to keep population down and we don't have to have population.'

What happened to us? We were nearly annihilated. If it wasn't for the much maligned Christian missionaries in North Queensland—I can't speak for other parts of Australia—I think my people, my brother cousins, would have been annihilated. They pull them back into areas and made them no-go areas for whitefellas and protected the people. If it wasn't for that, I think there would have been a terrible result and it would have been annihilation or pretty close to it. That was the result of us sitting on our hands as Australians and saying, 'We don't need population. We don't need to populate this country. We could just go on the way we're going on, and it'll all be wonderful.'

This country has only three sources of income now. They're iron ore, coal and gas. That's it. They're worth $120 billion. The next thing down, which might be beef, is about $12 billion or something like that. Gold is maybe $12 billion and aluminium might be about $12 billion, but the big three are iron ore, coal and gas.

Gas is gone because people in this place sold it for six cents a unit. And God bless my union, the CFMEU, for saying again and again, 'You morons in this place sold all the gas for 6 cents a unit, and Australians have to buy their own gas back at $16 a unit.' Qatar—little tiny Qatar—exports the same amount of gas as Australia. They get $29,000 million dollars a year for it. We get $600 million. Those figures are old—they're about 20 years old—so you can multiply those figures by about three or four. We gave it away.

Coal—62 per cent of this country. Almost every single person in this parliament wants coal abolished. You're on record as wanting coal abolished. So what have you got for an income? You've got iron ore. You're just a quarry; you're not a mining country. Mining is when you dig it out of the earth and you sell metals. We don't dig it out of the ground and sell metals; we dig it out of the ground and sell the ground. That's called quarrying. We can't even process a metal in this country.

Returning to the subject of land, Australians are almost certainly a vanishing race. When the statistics for this year come out—when 20 Australians die they'll be replaced by 16 people. I love the zero-population-growth mob, all the wokies and the people that denigrate women for having children. They should all be career women, careering off into oblivion, extinction. As a race of people, at 100 miles an hour, we're becoming extinct. That's the price you pay for criminal stupidity. When you get old, as they have in China, there's no-one to look after you. It's going to be tough. I won't be around, but a lot of people in this place will be, when there's no-one to look after them in their old age. We're a dying race. Why are we a dying race? Cleo magazine did a wonderful series of articles on this: why do women in Australia not have children? They all want to have children, but they say, 'We're just waiting around until we've got enough money to get a house and settle down, find a more stable relationship.' But it doesn't happen and they run out of time. The biological clock runs out. We're a dying race.

In that golden Australia is all of your gold, all of your iron ore, all of your aluminium—no, bauxite, because we don't export aluminium anymore; we export bauxite. Fancy letting them export bauxite! When they went to Leo Hielscher, in the much maligned Queensland government, and said they wanted an export licence for bauxite, he burst out laughing. The idea that anyone was going to send bauxite overseas was laughable: 'We don't export bauxite; we export aluminium.' They said, 'We can't afford your high electricity charges.' Well, we're taking the coal for free, so there's no coal charge. We built the biggest power station in the world, so labour costs are negligible. All we've got to do is pay off the power station, which will pay itself off in about four or five years, so we'll have the cheapest electricity in the world. So, alright, we got an aluminium industry.

Going back to golden Australia, almost every single item this country exports comes out of golden Australia, where no-one is living, and those that are living there are leaving at 100 miles an hour. In inland North Queensland, Mount Isa, at 31,000 people, is now down to 19,000, and the mining company Xstrata—a foreign corporation—just decides to close its huge copper mine. They're a trading company. If you take copper off the market, the price of copper goes up, and this is a very big mine. Whether they did it for that purpose or whether they're just callous or incompetent, 2,000 Australians were sacked, and a Labor government did absolutely nothing. The 'use it or lose it' clause of the great Theodore—they were Labor governments, but they were labour governments, not what you've got now: ALP governments. They put in 'use it or lose it'. The great Bjelke-Petersen governments followed them. They were much the same people—half the Labor Party went over and joined the Country Party, so it was the same people. Rudd's family and my family fall into that category, by the way. Use it or lose it. These people have got it, but they don't have to use it; they can just sit on it. It's our resource, and they can just sit on it, trade it and make themselves wealthy while we, the people of Australia, get nothing out of it at all.

I hope that the two major parties are saying their prayers, because there's every likelihood that our party will get the balance of power in the forthcoming election. If you're Glencore, say your prayers because you're going to get what you justly deserve. You're a big, ruthless, international mining company and you treat the people like dirt. You can get away with it because the ALP allows you to and you can get away with it because the Liberal and National parties allow you to. But, I tell you what, you won't get away with it if the people's party is back in power. It'll be a different outcome, I can assure you.

Going back to the issue of housing, the cost of a house, for land, was $7,000 in Charters Towers. When the mines department was abolished, it went—hear me—from $7,000 to $142,000. That's what you did with all your regulatory impositions. You put that price on the poor young people trying to have kids, trying to propagate Australia. You put a burden on them of $142,000. Now, alright, it's come back to $82,000. There are a number of towns within 100 kilometres of a population centre of 300,000. It's not as if we're living in the middle of nowhere. We can give you a house and land package for $300,000, because, really, there's no justification for land costing any more than $20,000. If you're trying to get a block of land in Brisbane under $300,000, I wish you well.

Come and live in Charters Towers, Ingham or Ayr and you can get a block of land if the government plays ball and the authority allows us to go back to square one, where there's one person living in the town, working for the local council presumably, who decides whether you get the subdivision or you don't. Buyer beware. The block we sold had no water, no electricity and no sewerage on it. They bought it. They got the water connected. There was no necessity for a bitumen road, but eventually we did get a bitumen road. We didn't ask for it. The point of the story is that we could produce land for housing in any of those three towns within an hour of Townsville for under— (Time expired)

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