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

I referred to my home town of Charters Towers, and we could not afford to build our humble little Logan unit. My wife cut our land in half, got a surveyor and went and applied to get a subdivision approved by the mines department. The town of Charters Towers was under the Mining Act; it was a mining town. The clerk to the mining warden's court made the decision about whether you got a subdivision or whether you didn't. He looked at the application put in by my wife and said: 'Yes, that'll be right, Suse. Just sign here. Have you got the survey plan there? Yes, thank you.' So he signed the document and he signed the survey plan, and then he stamped both of them. My wife said, 'When can I sell it?' and he said, 'Well, you can go down to the real estate agent and sell it right now.' The next day we completed the sale on the 10 acres, and we were able to complete our house and move into it. It was a very big thing to us as a young couple to get our own house and be able to build the sort of house that we wanted for ourselves—a very humble Logan unit, one of those prefabricated modular houses. But the process took about 15 minutes.

If you go in now and put in an application, the Mining Act has been abolished by the incoming Labor government—one of many things they wrecked in Queensland. So we went under the Local Government Act. If you go in to Charters Towers or any other city or town in Queensland and put your application in for a subdivision, the average time I'm told is now about four years. It was 15 minutes, and now it is four years. Normally it would take you $30,000 or $40,000 to get a report in from the local First Australians that were in a tribe or something some time ago there. Now you have to get a report to them and approved. Then you've got to get one from the environment department approved. Then you've got to get one from the engineering department approved. Then it has to be suitable land usage, and you've got to get that approved. Yes, it's about 4½ years and about $40,000 or $50,000.

I was a member of parliament for 20 years under the Mining Act in a town of about 13,000 people, and I never got one complaint about the Mining Act and its administration—not one single complaint in 20 years. So why did you fix up something that wasn't broken? In fact, why didn't you make all the other areas in Queensland the same as the mining areas? Anyway, you want to placate this group over here and you want to placate that group over there, so we've got to make sure all those things are right. Now, for the price of land, after it was transferred from the Mining Act—with no process at all—to the Local Government Act, there is an enormous process. It went from $7,000 for a vacant allotment to $142,000 in just eight months—and to achieve what? What did you achieve by putting those impositions upon those people?

When I look back on it, we were a freedom party. We had no restrictions on anything. For example, we had no restrictions on guns at all. I saw an AK-47 in a sports store, went over and bought it—with 350 rounds of ammunition—put it in the back of the car and drove all around the Gold Coast for the rest of the day. There were no gun laws at all, except for concealable firearms, and we had eight deaths with guns. Well, in the highly restrictive states: New South Wales had 38 deaths from guns in that year, and Victoria had 54 deaths from guns. We had hardly any deaths at all. We had eight deaths from guns.

Freedom: don't you put any price on freedom at all? How can you possibly say you live in a free country? My grandkids were coming up for a visit, and I said: 'Oh, beauty. We'll get out the air rifles.' My wife said: 'They're not allowed to use air rifles. They're under 16.' I said, 'What is it with my air rifles? They're 65 years old. They couldn't go through tissue paper.' She said, 'They're not allowed.' I said, 'Righto, I'll set up the flying fox'—you know, zoom, zoom, zoom and a splash in the pool. My wife said, 'No, you've got to take the panel off the swimming pool to do that. That's illegal,' she said. 'Yeah, but we don't get any inspectors out here.' We had an inspector out last week. Our fence is almost three centimetres below what it should be. He wants the whole fence renewed, which will cost $3,785. So that's $3,875 to renew the fence because it's three centimetres below where it should be. I said, 'Alright, we'll build the second stage of the tree house.' My wife said, 'No, a kid fell out of a tree house two months ago in Brisbane and tree houses are banned.' Free country? Free country?

I said, 'We'll just go down to the flat.' We've got 10 acres, and all of our neighbours got 10 acres. Why don't we just go down to the flat, boil a billy and make damper. You know, teach them how to make damper'—the most iconic pastime in Australian history. If you go to the National Gallery you'll see how many paintings there are based upon camp fires. She said, 'No, you must get a permit to light a fire in the open and it will take you two or three months to get the permit through, so you can forget about that.' Free country? There's a picture of myself boiling a billy—the most iconic of Australia. This is banned in Queensland! Boiling a billy is banned in Queensland!

If you indulge every imbecile that comes along with a complaint, and it might be a valid complaint, but if you indulge him by persecuting the rest of the bloody population and taking away their freedoms then you end up with what you've got in Queensland, which is one of the most unfree societies on earth. I get a lot of people who come in from communist countries and they say to me, 'We can't believe what it's like here. We come from a free country. In politics there is no freedom. We're not interested in politics. But here you can't do any bloody thing!' That's pretty right. You can't do any bloody thing. I'm sorry to be using the time in parliament to give individual examples, but I do this.

There is a dreadful outbreak of Leucaena, which is an absolutely dreadful thing. It is so thick on either side of the road driving into Townsville that you can't actually walk through it. Never mind seeing through it, you can't walk through it. It contributes absolutely nothing, it's an introduced species, but we had an outbreak at our neighbours—it's just up the hill from us. It's vacant crown land. I paid a bloke to cut it down and poison it all, but I can't burn it! I've got to wait for the fire brigade! By that time, the seed will have blown away and it'll have got away, but I'm not allowed to burn it. I emphasise the issue of freedoms.

We're talking about housing here. We can provide 5,000 blocks of land in Ingham and Charters Towers. They are an hour and a bit away from Townsville—a population centre of over 300,000 people—so you're not living out in the middle of nowhere. It's a city, a very big city by Australian standards. Everything you get in a big city is there. We've got 5,000 blocks and we believe—and we haven't finally established this, but we believe—we can provide the blocks of land for $36,000. We've got to be very careful here because we don't want to collapse land prices in Ingham and Charters Towers, so we're working our way through that problem. But there's no doubt that we can put on the market a house. If it's one hectare allotments, you don't need headworks charges, you don't need storm and floodwater drainage, you don't need kerbing and channelling, you don't need footpaths and you don't need wall-to-wall bitumen. You just have two lanes and a median strip, and that's all you need. You've just taken about $60,000 out of the price of a piece of land by going to one hectare. You can't do that in big cities like Sydney or Brisbane, but you can do that in towns surrounding a population centre like Townsville or Cairns.

We're starting with the Townsville area and we'll move on to Cairns. But we can provide 5,000 homes under $375,000. That's a decent, moderate—but it looks good—home. Some of them are modular constructions and some are different constructions, but they look good. Alright, they're two-bedroom—they're not big houses—but that's what we can provide for you.

For young people, it is a very sad country that we live in. We belong to a dying race. I think this year the figures will indicate that when 20 Australians die they're only replaced by 16 Australians. Have a good look around you, people here, because you won't be here in 100 years time. It will all be gone. Isn't that sad? Isn't that the most ultimate statement upon a race of people when they simply vanish from the gene pool? Isn't that sad? Cleo magazine, no less, did a series of articles on why Australian women don't have children. Only about 15 or 16 per cent said they didn't want children. The vast bulk of them, whilst they wanted children, were putting it off until they had a solid relationship and enough money to settle down and buy a house. There is an element of Christianity in here: you marry for life and you don't just walk out of a relationship when you feel like walking out of it. I'll put that aside for a moment and just say that these young people want to be able to buy a house and settle down before they have kids. They don't get there. Time runs out on them. The body clock runs out. That was the nature of the series of articles in Cleo magazine.

I can't look after the rest of Australia. I'm just saying to come to North Queensland. It is freezing cold here in Canberra, but it's not freezing cold where I come from. I don't even own a jacket in North Queensland! It gets hot sometimes, particularly in places on the coast, but it never gets really hot, because the conditions are overcast all the time. These are heavy rainfall areas. It is not hot and it never gets bitterly cold. It is a beautiful place to live. There's a population centred around Cairns of 300,000. The population centred around Townsville is 300,000. As the leader of our party, Robbie Katter, says continuously, we will get the balance of power sooner or later. Whether it is in this election or in 10 years time, we will get the balance of power. When we do, the Galilee Basin will be opened up. Coalmining will be opened up.

If anyone in this place thinks that a tiny, little country of 26 million Europeans living in the middle of Asia is going to tell India that they can't have electricity, you'll want to think again, I warn you. As Carl von Clausewitz wrote in his most famous book On War, the best book ever written on warfare, its causes and outcomes: 'A people without land will look for a land without people.' Another quote is: 'When goods don't cross borders, then guns will.' If you say to India they can't have coal, 600 million Indians will have no electricity. They don't have any room to put up solar panels in India, let me tell you. That is not an option for them. Nor are windfarms an option for them. They get coal or they go without. I'm one for cutting back a bit. There is the problem of a rising ocean. I won't go along with climate change, but there is the problem of a rising ocean. I've always been for pulling back a bit. At the present moment, they cook with burning grass, cow dung and wood. Is that a better alternative to having an electric stove? Yes, it burns up a bit of coal somewhere, but nothing like what they're doing at the present moment.

We are a vanishing race. We are a race that only exports three things: coal, iron ore and gas. We gave the gas away, so we get no money for the gas. It is gone. Both the Liberal Party and the Labor Party have decided the coal is remaining in place. We will not have any coal—unless you're lying hypocrites, of course; that's possible. But you have said net zero by 2050. The one thing that must mean is no coalmining. I might point out to you that I happen to be a little expert in this field. Silicon is produced by burning coal to smelt— (Time expired)

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