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

The member is obviously a member of the old Country Party, as I myself am. We've reconstituted that. It's called the KAP, and we invite him to join us.

This is one of the most extraordinary decisions I have ever witnessed in my life. It took me three weeks to actually believe that this had been agreed to by a Liberal-National government or by any government on earth. One-fifth of this nation is only occupied by human beings, kangaroos, wallaroos and birds because of an underground aquifer. There are maybe 30,000 windmills pulling that water up from under the ground and putting it in troughs so that areas that had never seen a kangaroo in 30 million years suddenly saw kangaroos and birds.

On the other side of the coin, I went to the anti-wind-farm rally at Chalumbin. They're putting a wind farm right beside the jungle. I'm in favour of wind farms. Hughenden is the peak spot in Australia. The professor who was giving an address to the 200 people at the rally said, 'What is happening here is that our beautiful nature wonderland is being replaced by an industrial wasteland.' There's only 20 years—there's 15 years in the windmills and 20 years in the glass. Is anyone going to go out there and replace that rotting disgrace and aberration in the environment? No. The answers are very clear. If you put that poison into the Great Artesian Basin—and the speaker before last spoke very well on the dangers of doing that—you will contaminate the artesian basin and one-fifth of Australia will be sterilised. Every single form of life will die. It's costing us $8,000 million to send some electricity out to Mount Isa. It will take a hell of a lot more than that if you want to pipe water out to any of these areas.

The cattle and sheep that have been removed by this imbecilic place that I have to come to, thanks to the people of Kennedy—God bless them. This place has removed three-quarters of the entire sheep population. For 200 years the nation's income came from wool, and in 1990 we got Keating. The Labor Party was formed to deliver arbitration, not just to the working class, or the employee class, but to the farmers. Keating came in and withdrew the arbitration. He undermined the arbitration for the employees, I might add, but he withdrew the arbitration for the 276,000 farmers. He only did one industry: wool. The rest of it was done by the National Party. They deregulated every single industry. The history books will condemn and spit upon that political party. And I was in that party when it was done, to my shame.

Let me go back to the artesian basin. Some 10 million tonnes of CO2 was being pulled out of the air by the cattle and sheep that were in these areas before deregulation. Due to a combination of various antifarming actions, the deregulation of free markets and all that sort of rubbish—ideology—10 million tonnes of CO2 is going into the atmosphere that was previously being absorbed by the cattle and sheep. A moo-cow might put on 100 or 200 kilograms a year, and that of course is carbon pulled out of the air. With the removal of trees by the industry—Queensland has removed more trees than any other state in recent memory to make way for glass. Trees have been replaced by glass—is this a lunatic asylum or what? Put the cattle and sheep back and that's 10 million tonnes. Put the trees back and that's another 10 million tonnes. That's 20 million tonnes a year, which is more than the combined efforts of both parties in this place over the last 10 years. And it also makes us wealthy. (Time expired)

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