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

I move:

That this House:

(1) calls on the Government to urgently amend the Cyclone Reinsurance Pool to ensure that all Australian insurers provide residents in cyclone-prone areas with options for house insurance premiums that are comparable to those paid by the rest of the country;

(2) notes that:

(a) with the exception of Sure and Allianz, insurance premiums in Northern Australia are significantly higher than the national average, placing an unfair lack of choice and financial burden on northern Australian homeowners;

(b) the Cyclone Reinsurance Pool has failed and needs further and urgent negotiation; and

(c) 25 per cent of North Queensland is currently not insured; and

(3) calls on the Government to:

(a) fix the Cyclone Reinsurance Pool before another disaster strikes in the north; and

(b) ensure that:

(i) all insurers offer affordable and fair insurance coverage charges in line with the rest of Australia; and

(ii) specific insurers are not over-exposed.

It may be well be asked by the free marketeers, the moronic class here, who still seem to run this place: why should you get preferential treatment? It's nice and easy in free markets because you don't have to think, do you? That's a wonderful advantage when dealing with people who have great difficulty in thinking. Why should you be treated differently? Well, I would say to you: Why should we continue to run the cane industry and the cattle industry at margins that no other farmers on earth are asked to run their farming operations? Why should we be asked to do that? Why don't we just close down the industry?

In actual fact, thanks to you people, there is no wool industry in Australia. It was the biggest export-earning item in the entire nation's history, for 200 years, when the then incoming Labor Keating government abolished the wool scheme. Now about 10 per cent of our sheep herd is left, if that. So why should we keep them going?

That brings us to the subject of the cyclones. If we want to grow cane, it grows very favourably where there is a lot of rainfall. Where you have a lot of rainfall, that usually involves cyclones, and the United States of America would be a good case in point. So I would answer your question that way.

The greatest governments this nation has ever seen came out of Red Ted Theodore. I'm very proud to say my family is associated with the foundations of the Labor movement. Very sadly, today the ALP stands for the exact opposite principles for which the great Theodore Labor parties were formed. The Labor Party split in two, and half went to the Country Party. That's how I ended up in this place.

Let me return to the issues of the cyclone and the damage. I put on record my thanks to the member for Dawson, who showed immense courage as one of the very few people that have come through this place in the 30 years I've been here who, out of the courage of his convictions, again and again voted—and it had a very traumatic effect upon him—against his party for things that he believed were the right things to do. There is really little precedent for that in this place. Anyway, he was prepared to cross the floor, so out of his commitment we got the reinsurance pool. If he and I had started voting with the opposition, then the government would have been in trouble. The government—quite rightly, and I think they thought it was a good thing to do anyway—moved the reinsurance pool, and the incoming government has been very positive towards the reinsurance pool.

The reinsurance pool was founded to overcome terrorism. I hope I've got my facts right here. Thirty-five years ago there were a couple of terrorism scares in Australia, and they instituted this reinsurance pool. It had about $15 billion in it. It had never been touched for about 30 years, and we moved that the reinsurance pool cover extraordinary events in North Queensland. They don't occur very often. We have cyclones, yes, but most of them are fairly mild, and modern housing can deal with a cyclone—even a strong cyclone. The reinsurance pool was triggered for extraordinary events— (Time expired)

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