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

I think the previous speaker was quite right in praising Paul Keating—the architect of free markets and free trade in Australia. To quote him: 'We will now remove all support levels.' Well, Mr Keating, no-one explained to you about sending your gladiator into the ring with no helmet and no shield when the other gladiator has a helmet and a shield. You know the story: 'Hey, I need a shield and a helmet.' 'No, if you fight without a shield and a helmet it will make you tough.' 'No, it won't; it'll make me dead—that's what it'll make me.' So why did Mr Keating taking away our shield, our protection and our support levels have this gentleman in the Liberal Party praising Paul Keating for a free market?

No motor cars are made in Australia, no electricity is going to come from Australia, and no clothing comes from Australia except for—God bless—Andrew 'Twiggy' Forrest and the Steel Blues of this world. Almost all of our seafood and pork comes from overseas. Almost all of our household appliances come from overseas. We made the absolutely incredible decision to buy our Army boots from overseas. I happen to represent part of the garrison city of Townsville, and in the annual Anzac Day march 2,000 soldiers had the soles of their boots fall out. There were big pictures of all of the soles. That same day, I raced back to Charters Towers for a catafalque party and said, 'Is it right that all the soles are falling off the shoes?' The sergeant major in charge of the catafalque party lifted up his foot and he had no sole on his shoe. He was doing it in his socks.

You've taken the free markets to the most extraordinary heights. In the field of agriculture our farmers—last time I looked—are on a five per cent support level from the government. The OECD figure is around 40 per cent support levels for all the farmers on earth; ours is five per cent. They are asking us to race a 100-metre race but giving our opponents a 35-metre start. Mate, I could beat Linford Christie if they gave me that sort of start, I assure you.

The government is making an endeavour to come back here. They want us to produce all this zero emissions stuff. Unlike everyone else in this place, I happen to be a little bit of an expert in this field because I put in the first standalone solar system in Australia in 1982-1983. Most of you weren't even born in 1982. Most of you weren't even born. I had to have a very detailed knowledge. Also, we have the best silicon deposits in the world, and I, unlike the people in this place, wanted all of our solar panels to be built from silicon that we got and upgraded here in Australia. I'll rephrase that: I didn't want the cells made, because they're a very small market, but I did want the high-tech silicon for the computers and silicon chips and for the terrestrial wire that carries electricity and information. We wanted it for that and other uses. We wanted high-tech silicon.

You've got to listen to me on this, right? To create high-tech silicon, you must first crush it up. This is very difficult. To process it, you've got to crush it. It is the second-hardest material, after diamonds, so crushing it is not a lot of fun and it costs you a lot of money. Then you put it under electromagnets to pick up the iron. It burns up enormous amounts of electricity. Most of all, we chose to process it by the carbon arc technology. You have two carbon rods with a huge amount of electricity going through. You pull them apart, and you've got this powerful flame. You hourglass the silicon flower—as it is now—past it, and that's smelts it. The other way of doing it is with coal. The electricity comes from coal anyway. You will never be able to pay for silica if you're going to get it out of solar panels.

I don't know about other people, but I used to fly over from Cairns across to Georgetown and there were beautiful trees and a nature wonderland everywhere. I fly now and I'm looking at glass everywhere. To quote the professor leading the action against Chalumbin, 'What's happening here?' I'll tell you what's happening here: our beautiful nature wonderland is being transformed into an industrial wasteland. Is there any person in this place that's going to tell me that we are going to reprocess 10,000 square kilometres of glass in 20 years time? That is not going to happen.

We have the technology—the honourable Minister Plibersek is well on top of the technology, by the way—for algae. You want as much carbon dioxide as you can possibly produce for your algae farms. So carbon dioxide is valuable. Coca-Cola is made with carbon dioxide. Trees grow on carbon dioxide. It's very valuable. We can make a lot of money and overcome our problems with CO2 from coal mines. And if there's a person who seems to be an expert in this field it's Tanya Plibersek, the relevant minister. Whether they give her the money to do it or not is another story.

This is the way it works at the present moment. We've got NAIF out there. We've got all sorts of special assistance from government and we're adding another one here. But I'll tell you how this works. Tom Long has to package it. Now, seven per cent of Australia's fruit and vegetables comes out of Far North Queensland, where Tom Long lives and where my electorate is. We have to box it and send it to the Woolworth and Coles in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane—everywhere. It has to be boxed. It's boxed in polystyrene. It takes a lot of carbon dioxide to produce polystyrene, and you can use it only once. Tom Long's product is used 28 times and then can be recycled again so it goes back into the marketplace. He applied for money and I'll tell you why he didn't get it: because he had a big house and a couple of acres of land, and he had the factory with his house. They just said, 'No, he's not a real producer of anything.'

A bloke called Henry Ford started building motorcars in the garage in his backyard. But these morons that live here—fifth-generation public servants, inbred as all hell—make these decisions: 'Oh, Tommy Long couldn't possibly produce anything of value, because he's doing it in his backyard like Henry Ford did.' To this very day, Ford's Model T is the car most sold anywhere in the world.

You may not have noticed, but the number of us over here on the crossbench is growing really big. The ALP and LNP governments—they're one and the same—that govern Australia bought their army boots from China. Our electricity comes from China. You have to turn on a light at the discretion of the Chinese people who make the solar panels. Because you want to have all EVs, the fuel in your motorcar will be coming from solar panels from China. So the fuel in your motorcar is going to come from China. But they're very reliable people—a very decent government over there! They're people to look up to, aren't they? We can trust them, of course!

The serious economies on earth, the BRIC economies—Brazil, Russia, India, China and I would add the United States—are spitting on this idea of going all solar and all that rubbish. That's the old world. That's Europe. The new world has absolutely no interest in it. Have a look at who's up on the Galilee Basin, where half of our coal is. Who's up there? I'll tell you: the Indians and the Chinese. You have some sort of idea that those poor people in India, 600 million of them without electricity, are going to let you stop them from having power stations. Who the hell do you think you are? You are a little bunch of 26 million overwhelmingly European people sitting here in Asia, and you're going to tell China and India that they can't have any electricity? You're walking on very dangerous ground; that's all I can say.

Of all the things we want to make in Australia—and this sounds a bit off course—No. 1 is Australians. Sadly, in our country, when 20 Australians die, they will only be replaced by 17 Australians. We are a vanishing race. With our tax regime, DINKs, double income no kids, who make $100,000 each will have a disposable income of $75,000 per person after tax. If it's a husband, wife and three kids, and the mum stays home to look after the kids and bring them up properly—a single income and a number of kids, or SINKs—they have an income of $100,000, but it's divided amongst five people, so they get $15,000 after tax. How is it fair that the DINKs have an income of $75,000 and the SINKs have $15,000? There are not a lot of people in Australia having kids—surprise, surprise! When I was a young man—and a little bit of skiting—we had five kids. I paid virtually no tax because the concessions for having children were real. They cost you this amount of money, so you were taxed on your real incomes per person instead of this vicious discriminatory tax system which is watching us vanish as a race of people. So, most of all, we want to make kids.

There is something else I want to mention. The army boots didn't work. I have a brass-handled knife made in China for $9. The brass in that knife cost more than $9. The steel in that knife cost more than $9. And yet the whole knife was $9.

Unlike other countries, we provide no money or capital for investment development. We have QPM making all of the products that need to go into new generation batteries throughout the world for EVs and hybrids. Why wouldn't a government move to a hybrid flexi-fuel motor car running on ethanol? Brazil is 49.2 per cent ethanol, and it's $1.09 a litre. Last time I looked, we were $2.01 a litre here in Australia. Why wouldn't you do that? Because you're under the influence of and actually controlled, directly or indirectly, by the big corporations. The only people in this place who are not are sitting in this crossbench. We may not get it right on many things, but we're not controlled by the big corporations like you people, who are just a bunch of puppets controlled by the big corporations. That's all you are.

How can you explain condemning your country to all of its electricity coming from China? How can you condemn your country to getting all of its electricity from China and, since you want to move to EVs, all of your fuel for your motor cars from China and all of your motor cars from China. Let me just home in on fuel. In 1990, all of your fuel came from Australia; 98 per cent came from Australia. Now, we import $50 billion a year of fuel from overseas. Our entire exports are only $500 billion, and one-tenth of those are being eaten up by us buying the fuel from overseas. Introduce a flexi motor car for all government cars, and you can forget about sending the $50 billion overseas. Ethanol and electricity are produced in Australia, but a hybrid doesn't use a lot of electricity—hardly any at all, actually.

So the answers are there, and you must ask yourself: 'Why won't they go to the answers? Why?' There's just no rational explanation as to why you wouldn't do that. If you say, 'Australia couldn't produce a motorcar,' that's exactly what was said to Laurence Hartnett again and again and again and to the Prime Minister of Australia, Ben Chifley, again and again and again. (Time expired)

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