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

Speaking about water, I think it's very naive of the federal government to be attempting to deal with the state government in Queensland—(a) because they have never been in favour of any development of an agricultural nature in their history and are not likely to be in the future; and (b) because they're not going to be the government in eight or nine months time. If they continue with their current leadership, they are going to be annihilated. They are going to be annihilated, because they hold all of the seats north of Bundaberg. The LNP in Queensland have been so totally incompetent that they've lost every seat bar one of the 16 seats north of Bundaberg. That's a pretty good achievement! With the only other one they had, they kicked the bloke out. So they have got one. They are going to all switch over. Have a look at the federal results and extrapolate them onto the state results and they will be annihilated at the forthcoming election.

This does not suit the interests of small parties such as the one I belong to, because we have a very real chance of getting the balance of power. We have absolutely no chance of getting the balance of power whilst those two ladies are leading the party. One is notorious for her hatred of coalmining. In my union, the CFMMEU, we've really had quite enough of the anti-coalmining rhetoric of the state government. Then, having antagonised North Queensland, the coalmining capital of the world, they proceeded to antagonise Brisbane by saying that they're for coalmining. So they've managed to antagonise both sides of the argument. The old saying that Bjelke-Petersen used to quote all the time was, 'If you don't believe in anything, you'll fall for everything.' There would be a classic example of it. But we would hope that some sanity prevails in the Labor Party in Queensland.

The Hells Gate project comes from Dr JC Bradfield. For those who know your Australian history, he provided the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the big bridge in Brisbane across the Brisbane River. The water supply for Sydney today is principally the water supply he provided for Sydney nearly 100 years ago. The underground railway system won the international prize for engineering in the year it was built in Sydney. This is a great builder of Australian history. But he's most famous for what he didn't build, which was the Bradfield Scheme. The Bradfield scheme says that we send water to Lake Eyre, there's giant evaporation, and three times the amount of water in the Murray-Darling will evaporate over the Murray-Darling and be blown up against the inside of the range and what is now the desert of Australia, and the 'dead heart', to quote Dr Bradfield, will be what he called 'Ghirraween', a land of flowers. Reading the reports, I don't doubt for a moment that that will occur.

The revised Bradfield Scheme was developed by an outstanding academic—maybe one of the leading academics in the country for his intelligence and intellectual capacity—and one of the smartest blokes I've ever known in my life. Sir Leo Hielscher was offered the World Bank position in the Reserve Bank three times and was the great architect of the economic success story in Queensland. Sir Leo Hielscher, even at the age of 92, is still ringing up the Prime Minister and people advocating that we get on with it. But the revised Bradfield Scheme said that we bring the water up from Spencer Gulf and fill Lake Eyre with seawater and get our freshwater that way over the Murray-Darling and we use the water from the high elevation, where it rains all the time.

In the electorate of Kennedy, my electorate, we have 200-inch rainfall in a lot of our towns and we take some of that water—we can only get a little tiny bit of it—and put it out onto the great inland plain. We've now turned what was a desolation, a bowl of weeds, into one of the most prolific farming areas in the world. That can be done. It's being undertaken by the current federal government. We had a very positive attitude from the Rudd-Swan government and a very positive attitude from the current leader of the Labor Party. So we have a very enlightened view coming from here.

Of course, I don't think we have to worry too much about the leadership in Queensland, because they aren't going to be there this time next year—that's for certain. We hope we get more enlightened leadership by both parties in Queensland to proceed with this wonderful scheme.