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

I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

There have been 15 inquiries in this place, so it's not as if I'm standing up about something that this place is not conscious of. There have been 15 inquiries in 30 years. There were two inquiries going at the same time two months ago! Every time the issue is raised, we have an inquiry. To quote the great Winston Churchill, if you simply must do it and you cannot do it, then of course you must have an inquiry. The wider the terms of the inquiry, the less likely it is to hit a target, he also said. So we have inquiry after inquiry because you haven't got the courage to do what needs to be done. It may embarrass a lot of people in this place to say that Kevin Rudd left this place with three vitally important things done: the NDIS, the NBN and the national energy grid. He did it. He had a huge fight with the mining companies, but he didn't back off. I disagreed with him on that, but he didn't back off.

We haven't seen that moral courage in this place very much at all. We're giving you the opportunity here, with this bill, to do something about—you come in here and you talk about affordability. Here are two companies—they had 50.1 percent of the market in 1991. It grew to 68 or 72 per cent, depending on which series you want to refer to—let's just say 70 per cent—in the space of 10 years. It has grown 20 per cent, two per cent a year. We can assume from that that we're at over 80 per cent now—over 85 per cent now. Have we done anything about it? No. We just keep having inquiries.

We are moving a bill here, and I'll bet everyone on the crossbench votes for it. But the people that are on the gravy train getting the handouts from Woolworths and Coles—they won't be voting for it. We know that the shoppies union is why these blokes are dogging it, and we know you blokes are dogging it, but I haven't got time to go into that at this point in time.

Let us take the humble potato. It's the most elementary of foods. Here we go. The price paid to the famer was—

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