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

We have the extraordinary phenomenon of the federal government going into the third election—this will be their third election—in which they have promised water development in North Queensland. They quote the Rookwood Weir. The Rookwood Weir is 60 kilometre south of Rockhampton. I don't think anyone in Queensland considers 60 kilometres south of Rockhampton as North Queensland. It's going to cost $352 million and will make 76,000 megalitres available.

The Hughenden project, which is shovel-ready and can be started tomorrow, is mooted to cost $165 million. For that, we will get 360,000 megalitres, diverted from the river and captured behind an off-stream dam, and 90,000 megalitres of water available for irrigation—creating, at the very least, $24 million of income each year for the cattle industry. If we get a quartering works, which I think would be inevitable, to go with it and a small biodiesel plant, then we're talking about 600 to 1,000 jobs and a doubling, if not a trebling, of the population of Hughenden—thereby rescuing a little town which, at the present moment, it could be argued, is dying. If we give every cattleman 300 hectares of irrigation on their 60,000 hectare properties and we create Hughenden, Cloncurry, Richmond, Normanton and Georgetown we can— (Time expired)