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

I represent four of the six biggest rivers in Australia. The Mitchell River, which is bigger than the Murray-Darling, is one of those rivers. The Murray-Darling feeds 60 million people. Therefore, these four rivers could feed some 600 million people. Two billion people go to bed hungry every night. We celebrate the birth of our lord and saviour Jesus Christ in a few weeks time, and he came down here and told us that we have responsibility to our fellow man. We have a responsibility to other people. He made it pretty specific that 'other people' didn't mean the bloke next door; it meant the bloke over on the other side of the planet, possibly. So you can see the immorality—apart from any other consideration, just the immorality of that.

For those who love nature and have a great interest in it—people like me—my wife has planted over a thousand native trees on a block of 10 acres that had two giant gullies and 400 chinee bush and rubber vine—they're terrible introduced species—and a little bit of wire grass, about that high. It was a barren, degraded, degrading block of land. Now it has over a thousand trees. It has buffel grass and Urochloa so dense you can hardly walk through it. Three or four kangaroos have taken up residence. About 23 birds come and go. You can see them from the back porch. We have a responsibility to make nature and the planet better. It is not good enough for us just to stand aside. You know, the greenie element always amazes me. They somehow think that if you leave it alone it'll all be wonderful. Well, that's not how the world works. I'm sorry. Birds fly in from Asia. They bring seeds with them. They drop the seeds.

The natural erosive cycle in northern Australia is that we have three or four months of what we call the wet season, and the sky falls on us for four or five weeks of those three months. We don't have rivers; we have a flood plain, and then we have nothing. We have an empty riverbed—an empty flood plain. But when that massive flood occurs, as it does every year, the wet, normally driven by a cyclonic depression, rips and tears and rushes on its journey to the sea, taking massive amounts of topsoil with it. In other words, we have a natural cycle of erosion. God has gifted us this wonderful, beautiful place, and he would hold us responsible, as does the rest of the world. Even if you don't believe in God or hereafters or anything, surely you feel that you have a responsibility to the planet.

The great Ernie Bridge was the first First Australian in Australian history to become a cabinet minister. He had his wonderful 'Bridging scheme', similar to the Bradfield scheme in the east coast states. The 'Bridging scheme' was to take a little bit of the water from where we have this massive rainfall in northern Australia. Ernie Bridge had a wonderful quote. He said, 'All we are saying is that our giant rivers, on their rush and roaring and ripping to the sea, pay a small tribute to those people that live along their banks'—and, I might add, a small tribute to improving our natural wonderland. That requires dams and weirs. I'm most certainly not a fan of Cubbie Station, I can assure you, but, if you go there, they get 10,000 hectares of water and there are kangaroos and birdlife everywhere. If you put water in a barren wilderness, you create a wonderland of nature.

I must comment as I go past on this that we are now having increasingly angry confrontations with developers—sharks and spivs—that are up there selling windmills. Well, windmills are a wonderful thing at a place like Hughenden with fantastic wind and no nature to disrupt, but you do not put a chain of windmills right alongside some of the last remnant jungle on earth, and yet that is what is happening. So here's me attending greenie meetings, objecting. To quote the professor that gave the leading address at the first demonstration against the windmills, he said, 'What is actually happening here is that our beautiful nature wonderland is being turned into an industrial wasteland,' and that's a good call.

With a few thousand million dollars, we can give you something like $30 billion a year in revenue. And that's not a figure plucked out of the air. Sixty per cent of Australia's agriculture comes from one river, just from one river—the Murray-Darling river. It brings in $60 billion a year! Well, I've got six times that amount of water in just four rivers in the Kennedy electorate, and there's not a single farm anywhere in sight. Yes, there is—there are five farms producing about $2 million, I suppose, or maybe $3 million a year.

The rivers are fenced off. The stock are not allowed near them because they're alive with crocodiles, so they're not even used for that purpose. If animals go there, because of what we humans have done, there is now a proliferation of crocodiles. They weren't there before. They are there now. That is the fault of humans—that's just one example—because we're talking about nature here. If you start fooling around with nature, you can get yourself in a lot of trouble. Now, the dingoes, the goannas and, most of all, the human beings hit the crocodile eggs. I have seen First Australians raid the crocodile egg nests. We human beings came in: 'Oh, we know everything about everything. Oh, we're going to protect the crocodiles.' Well, we did. Now what has happened is you've knocked nature completely out of balance. You removed the three natural predators, and the crocodile numbers are now exploding. All the natural predators were removed by us foolish humans interfering. See, you don't want to interfere.

Let me return to the possibilities. There is barrenness, erosion and 20 million hectares of invasive, prickly acacia trees—20 million hectares of beautiful natural wonderland that has been destroyed by just one invasive species. We can replace that with a beautiful nature wonderland, and that's what we're asking for here—that and a great wealth for our people and the feeding of a couple of billion people on the planet that go to bed hungry every night.