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

I have a map that I carry around everywhere. I hold it up and say, 'What's that?' They say, 'It's a map of Australia.' Yes, it most certainly looks like a map of Australia. But it's a map of Australia shorn of a narrow east coast, east of the Great Dividing Range. It has been taken off it. And we dropped off Victoria—but then who'd miss Victoria, seriously! I don't mean to be offensive. And there's a little dot around Perth. It looks like a map of Australia. It's 92 per cent of Australia. There are 1.2 million people living there. In an area the size of the United States, bigger than Europe, almost as big as Brazil or China, there's no-one living there. How much longer do you think that's going to go on for? We export iron ore, coal and gas. They come from the golden Australia, not where the people live. We export, if you like, on the next rung down, aluminium, gold, copper and beef. They all come from the golden Australia. In fact, 95 per cent of Australia's exports come from the golden Australia, which is empty. If you can't learn the lessons of history, then you are condemned to suffer them again, to quote Winston Churchill.

Now, 250 years ago, we Australians—I think I've got one of those original Australians in the family tree—said: 'We don't need to have a population. We don't need any sophisticated weaponry or machinery or anything like that. No, no, we don't need any of those things.' Well, I can't speak for the rest of Australia, but my part of Australia—North Queensland and western Northern Territory—would have been wiped out. As a people, we would have been wiped out. If it weren't for the Christian missionaries coming in at the last minute, we'd have been an annihilated.

It wasn't a good idea, and it's not a good idea now. It is a very, very bad idea indeed. Hughenden is a town right in the centre of Queensland. If you draw a demographic map of Queensland, right in the centre is Hughenden. The Prime Minister of Australia, Anthony Albanese, has been there twice. Why? Because it is the site for five giant windfarms. But, even more importantly—infinitely more important still—it is the site of where it turns around. There are six local people there who are great heroes of Australia, and they say, 'No, we're going to put population back. We are going to have 120 farms here. We're going to put a dam in and catch a bit of the flood water.' The greenies and people in this place are crying and howling all the time about the planet coming to an end. They don't understand. We don't have a river; we have a flood. We just want a little bit of water— (Time expired)