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

I hold up this map. I carry them around with me and hand them out. I say, 'What's that?' and they say, 'It's a map of Australia.' Everyone says it's a map of Australia.

A government member: Where's Tassie?

It's a map of Australia shorn of the eastern seaboard—a little 100 kilometre strip there—and shorn of Victoria, but who'd miss Victoria!

Andrew Hastie (Canning, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Defence) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You dropped Perth out.

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

Yes, we dropped Perth out, but everyone in Western Australia hates Perth, so I don't think anyone in Western Australia would object to Perth being taken out. If you take Perth, Victoria and that little narrow coast out, it's basically still a map of Australia. It has 92 per cent of Australia. There are 1.2 million people living there. Do you think that 250 years ago we Australians, with 250,000 people, had the right to hold onto a country bigger than Europe, the same size as America or Brazil and almost as big as China? Do you think we had a right to do that? I don't think we did, and I don't think we do now.

There is a chilling aphorism at the bottom of this map: 'A people without land will look for a land without people.' That was von Clausewitz's On War, the greatest book ever written on the history of warfare. A people without land will look for a land without people. Have a look at the First World War, the Second World War and any bloody war you want to have a look at—and the Boer War before that. My family lost a son in every one of those wars. In that golden Australia, all of Australia's iron ore, aluminium, gas, gold, copper, silver, lead, zinc, uranium, oil and fertiliser and almost all of Australia's coal and cattle come from that area. There's no-one living there. Do you seriously think that that is going to continue? The history of the world says you're kidding yourself.

I pay credit to Scott Morrison, but, then again, his family, the Gilmores—Dame Mary Gilmore is on the $10 note; his mother's a Gilmore—come from my homeland, the mid-west. If you want to draw a map of Queensland, and you want to pick the demographic centre, the exact centre, of the landmass of Queensland, you'll come to Hughenden, where the Gilmores come from. Anthony Albanese has visited Hughenden not once but twice. It's a tiny little town, and he's visited it twice, because, to give the Prime Minister his due, it sits right in the centre of the landmass of Queensland. It is on a key road which he put the first federal government moneys into. He can claim the credit for cutting costs in the giant fruit and vegetable producing area that I represent in Far North Queensland and the giant food producing area of Victoria. That road has cut 2,000 kilometres off the round-trip. He will have the honour of giving the first federal moneys to that road. It is also the home of the biggest wind farm initiative in the country. It is the best site in Australia by a fair distance. Twiggy Forrest has a proposal for two 1,000 megawatt wind farms at Hughenden.

What I want to talk about is a group of people who said, 'We're not going to let our town die.' Why did it die? Because the ALP federal government, Mr Keating, deregulated the wool industry. The industry had carried this country for 200 years, and he destroyed it. Within three years it was gone: 78 per cent of the sheep herd was gone. You deregulated the industry and you destroyed this nation's greatest asset. Anyway, that's past tense now.

The incoming Labor government—representing the workers—wiped out 12,000 jobs on the railways. Hughenden was a railway town. They took 1,500 jobs out of the town. The railways union didn't have one single stoppage, because they're controlled by the ALP. The Liberals keep saying, 'The unions control the Labor Party.' No, it's the other way around. The ALP controls the unions, and here was a classic example of it. (Time expired)