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

I had a history of Australia published, which I consider to be a very great honour. That was done. In writing that history of Australia, you can't write the history of Australia without writing the history of the Labor Party, of which my family were foundation members. They were very wealthy people who put a lot of money behind the Labor movement. We believed in it. We stuck to it. The Labor Party split in two in the 1950s. Unions were controlled by communist elements and the Labor Party split in two. Half the Labor Party ended up in a bit of a bushwhacker's turnout—I don't know if a lot of them could read or write too good—called the Country Party.

The Labor Party was founded by shearers. I'll repeat that slowly. The Labor Party was founded by shearers. If there's a second element, they were the cane cutters. I'll talk about the Labor Party being founded by shearers. If ever there was a group of people that have betrayed their roots and their foundations, it is the Labor Party. In Queensland, we had 22,000 people employed in the railways in 1979. When the government went down in 1989, we had 20,000 people employed in the railways. In other words, there'd been a cutback of 2,000 people over 10 years. In five years under the Labor Party, the railways lost 12,000 jobs—12,000 sacked.

One of the good unions out there decided they'd had enough of Jackie Trad. And here is a warning for you Labor politicians: you, as a party, think you can get away with it. You, as an individual, be careful, because Jackie Trad was no more. She sacked all those railway workers and thought she could walk away from the table. She thought she could shoot her mouth off against coalminers and walk away from the table. She thought she could sack 2,000 electricity workers and walk away from the table. It doesn't work like that.

Julia Gillard thought she could get away with it. I hate to criticise Julia Gillard. I really liked her as a person and I still do, and I have great respect for Julia. But she thought she could stop the export of live cattle and she thought she could get away with it. Within three weeks, she was out on her head. Just remember, it is not the size of the dog in the fight; it's the size of the fight in the dog. So this dog bit her and she was gone. I mean, how many messages do you need to get to have a little bit of political brains—not doing the right thing by the country, just political brains? The last speaker—the honourable once leader of the National Party—was quite right in pointing out that people will starve as a result of your decision. You just can't take that much food away and not have people die of starvation. You don't die of starvation; you have malnutrition and you're unable to fight off diseases. You die, really, as a result of malnutrition breaking down your ability to survive diseases. So people will die as a result of your decision.

But you're not Christians. You don't believe in that sort of thing, like that you have a duty to other people in the world. You don't have those ideas. You have an ideology. I thought this was a beautiful phrase: 'This is reckless and criminally irresponsible ideology.' There's no rationale. There's no reason involved here. It's just reckless, criminally irresponsible ideology. We have a saying in the bush: 'When your neighbour starts preaching religion, reach for your branding iron.' Once people start talking about ideology or their beliefs, or say, 'We care about these poor animals'—no-one's going to believe that; I most certainly don't believe that. You people have never had an animal in your life. Most of you have never even had a dog, and yet you love animals. How can you love animals if you've never had one? I've seen cattlemen leave their dinner to go out at night because a cow was calving, and they will preserve that calf. You say, 'You're going to kill them in the end.' Yes, they're going to die in the end; that's the truth of the matter. If you continue on the pathway that you have carved out, the cattle industry will collapse.

The mid-west, where I come from—which is almost all of inland North Queensland, about one-fifth of the surface area of Australia—is covered with troughs. Out of those water troughs comes birdlife. Out of those water troughs comes kangaroo life, and various other marsupials. When you take those troughs away, they will all die—over a million square kilometres, and they're all going to die. You don't know what you're doing. You don't care about animals. You don't care about human beings. History is a very, very angry person, and it tells people what you did.

I always hold this up, and I say, 'What's that?' They say, 'It's a map of Australia.' I say, 'No, it's not, actually. It's a map of Australia, shorn of the east coast'—shorn of Victoria, but who'd miss Victoria, truly? So Victoria's gone. But it's substantially a map of Australia; 93 per cent of the surface area of Australia is in that map. It's occupied by less than a million people. How much longer do you think that is going to go on for? That golden Australia, where there's no-one living, produces all of our iron ore, aluminium, gas, gold, copper, silver, lead, zinc, uranium, oil and fertilisers. It produces almost all of Australia's coal and cattle and most of Australia's wool and wheat—what's left of the wool industry, anyway. And there's no-one living there. It's shown in gold because it's a goldmine. That area is literally a goldmine.

For those that read history books, there is a very chilling aphorism that comes to us from Carl von Clausewitz, the greatest commentator on warfare in human history. In his landmark work On War, Carl von Clausewitz says, 'A people without land will look for a land without people.' Read Mein Kampf, and you'll see on every third page he uses the word 'lebensraum'—living room. 'We have a population, but we don't have the land. Russia has the land, but they don't have the population. We'll fix that up with a little war that'll cost the lives of 49 million people,' because the idiot politicians didn't understand the lessons of history. I will quote Winston Churchill: 'Those that do not understand the lessons of history will be doomed to suffer again those lessons.' He's dead right. We are in a land without people. I'm not going to go any further than that. You can look around for where there's people without land.

To insult and offend those people—I talk here of people of the Islamic faith—to pick a fight with them and take away their food source? You want to get a picture of this. You're a tiny little European country of 26 million people, living in Asia—with two-thirds of the world's population—and you're going to tell them what to do. You're going to tell India that they can't have coal, are you? Who the hell do you think you are?

As far as a sense of responsibility goes, we have to have an income. We want to buy everything from overseas. We've closed down all our own industries, so we have to buy everything from overseas. To buy something from overseas, you've got to sell something. It just so happens that we've only got three things that we sell now. That's coal, iron ore and gas. Well, you people gave the gas away, and I don't mean the ALP. I mean the Liberal Party and the Labor Party and the National Party. You gave the gas away. You sold it for 6c a unit. We have to buy our own gas back at $16.50, which means we can't produce fertilisers in this country. They have to be imported from overseas, as many other products have to be because we can't afford to buy our own gas. Everyone else on Earth has reserve resource policies, as does Western Australia, God bless them. We had a reserve resource policy in Queensland. But with the enlightenment in this place? No reserve resource policy. So the gas went for 6c a unit. You let all your gas go. To put that in perspective, Qatar, a tiny country, produces as much gas as Australia and exports as much gas as we do. Last time I looked, they were getting $29,000 million a year for their gas and we were getting $600 million for ours.

Who's running this place? I'll tell you who's running this place. It's the people who sit on that front bench and the people who sit on that front bench. Who's responsible for that decision that cheated our country out of $29,000 million a year? Who's responsible for that? When you go to bed at night, you'd better start thinking about this because one day you will die and you'll have to go to meet your maker, and he will say: 'I gave you arguably the richest country on Earth. What did you do with it?'

Let me return to the Labor Party. It was founded by the shearers. The shearers needed a wool industry. So Keating came in, and one of his first acts was to deregulate the wool industry. He might hate wool farmers, but he sure doesn't like the shearers, that's for certain. So 80 per cent of the product which has carried the Australian economy—and in 1990 was still carrying the Australian economy; we exported $6,000 million worth of wool that year. We now export $5,900 million of coal. Wool in 1990 was still bigger than coal. Now it's nothing. It's absolutely nothing. It's not in the top 25 export items. The thing that carried us for 200 years, the industry that created the labour movement—a very proud and great movement in this nation's history—was completely destroyed by those people sitting over there. That's who destroyed it, and they will go down in the history books as the people who destroyed it.

I represented, in my state seat, 3½ million sheep. The president of the Wool Council of Australia came from Hughenden, the heartland of my home country, in the mid-west. We had 3½ million sheep. I doubt we would have 100,000 sheep now in that area, and the shearers have gone. If you argue that these animals are poorly treated in travelling on these ships—we had a lady in the electorate I represent who said, 'The disgraceful way that you torture cattle, carrying them in the back of cattle trucks, where there's dust and noise and wind—that's just absolutely deplorable.' I said, 'Lady, you just happen to be knocking on the wrong door,' because all of our rugby league teams travelled in the back of cattle trucks. I was one of the people who put up with that—with the dust and everything else. Where I come from, that's normal for human beings, let alone for animals.

I just get back to that phrase, 'reckless and criminally irresponsible ideology'. When ideology starts running policy, big trouble follows. I would refer to the Nazi party, where ideology controlled Germany. We all know how that ended up. Ideology controlled Russia and China, and communism in those two countries cost 78 million lives under Stalin and Mao Zedong.

Finally, I'd just like to say that it's a matter of values. Do you put no value at all upon human life? There are people that need that food to stay alive. To go hungry is something that we as Australians have never encountered. But in other countries it drives, to a large degree, their politics. For those, again, who study history—during the French Revolution, the people of Paris were starving and the queen made a very ugly reference, and that was all it needed to set the tinderbox alight.

As I said, I have great respect for Julia Gillard—I like her very much—but she was no more. You carry this out—this stupid irresponsibility—don't worry about the size of the dog in the fight; worry about the size of the fight in the dog.

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