Bob Katter
Kennedy · Katter's Australian Party · Australia
“My question is to the Treasurer. Mr Treasurer, some 900,000 student visa holders are now living in Australia. The number of temporary visa holders is increasing at one million a year. Clearly, within 10 or 13 years, the people who are not born in Australia will outnumber the people born in Australia. Treasurer—the cost.”
“We have a redistribution going through in Queensland. I have seen some disgraceful performances in my life, but the Premier of Queensland has excelled himself. The member for Mount Isa is expected to look after Malanda and Millaa Millaa, which is the best part of three days drive in a car.”
“Now for anyone who is the Premier of Queensland and has nothing better to do with his time than run around trying to rub out a tiny little party with two or three members in the parliament, I mean, there's got to be something seriously wrong with that Premier of Queensland—but we'll deal with him in due course.”
“Health Minister, the Life-saving List campaigners have taken Australia's bone marrow donor registry from 168,000 to nearly 190,000. Three years ago, you said Australia had not moved fast enough to help blood cancer patients find donors and promised action to grow the registry.”
“I'm told that a pig mother has 12 babies a year. You can imagine what the population of Canberra would be if every woman here had 12 babies a year. I want to move away from the fascist-like arrogance and fairytale land of the greenies and the wokies, and the Liberals and Labor, that go down the same pathway.”
“So goodbye cassowaries. They've got nothing to eat except turtle eggs on the beach. So goodbye turtles. That's because of your criminal stupidity and ignorance. You've got shoes that have never set foot off a concrete pavement and you're telling people that have lived up there for 40,000 years what they can and can't do.”
The complete record
Every one of 161 lines we hold for Bob Katter, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 1 of 4.
“My question is to the Treasurer. Mr Treasurer, some 900,000 student visa holders are now living in Australia. The number of temporary visa holders is increasing at one million a year. Clearly, within 10 or 13 years, the people who are not born in Australia will outnumber the people born in Australia. Treasurer—the cost. When one considers that 92 per cent of these people are going to Sydney and Melbourne, where there are no jobs—all industry has fled those cities—could you explain how you're going to handle the financial situation arising from these appalling numbers?”
“Now for anyone who is the Premier of Queensland and has nothing better to do with his time than run around trying to rub out a tiny little party with two or three members in the parliament, I mean, there's got to be something seriously wrong with that Premier of Queensland—but we'll deal with him in due course. You shoot your mouth off and make promises; you want to be very careful— (Time expired)”
“We have a redistribution going through in Queensland. I have seen some disgraceful performances in my life, but the Premier of Queensland has excelled himself. The member for Mount Isa is expected to look after Malanda and Millaa Millaa, which is the best part of three days drive in a car. The member for that area has already crashed in an aeroplane twice in the last four years, and he has no money to use the aeroplanes anyway—what little money he has. How could you include two towns 1,500 kilometres away? They have a 100 inch rainfall, whereas Mount Isa and Cloncurry, have virtually no rainfall at all. One is cattle and mining; the other is farming. There is absolutely no commonality of interest. This is being done to get rid of our tiny little party.”
“Health Minister, the Life-saving List campaigners have taken Australia's bone marrow donor registry from 168,000 to nearly 190,000. Three years ago, you said Australia had not moved fast enough to help blood cancer patients find donors and promised action to grow the registry. In these three years, Australia has lost 18,000 lives, 20 people a day. For many, including my nephew Liam, it is too late. Minister, have you really done everything you can to reverse Australia's continuing failure to meet our international obligations in this area?”
“People tell me that the groper are gone, because the crocodiles are eating the gropers, and the gropers ate the crown-of-thorns starfish which are now exploding on the Barrier Reef and destroying the Barrier Reef. When you start messing around with nature, you don't know what you're doing. You brought in a beetle to solve some sort of disease that got into sugar cane, and the beetle exploded and caused enormous problems. Then you brought the toads in to get rid of the beetles. Now we have no dingoes and we have no goannas, because they've eaten the toads and they've died out. So the destruction that your ignorance and fascist arrogance has imposed upon us is appalling, and you will pay for it—if not in this life, then most certainly in the next. I'm a Christian.”
“I went scuba diving in my youth, and it was one of the most enjoyable things that I've ever done. But now, for reasons I don't fully understand—we're working on that now—there has been an explosion in shark numbers. Then, in any event, I carried a spear gun with me, and, if a shark came near me, I could protect myself. Now, if I did that, I'd be breaking the law in Queensland. It is one of the very few places on earth where killing a shark is illegal. Those people who run Queensland live in Brisbane. So they're 3,000 kilometres away, effectively, from the heart of North Queensland, and they're running things for us. They're running things so dreadfully that we're going to lose the cassowaries. There's the explosion in crocodile numbers.”
“So, if it ever uses your $42 million bridge, then it will die. The law is done. It's guaranteed that the cassowary is going to get killed. It's a wonderful metaphor for what is taking place here. To live with nature, you really need to know what you are doing. The shark attack this week shows again that you don't know what you are doing. If you had fish and chips in your lifetime, chances are that part of that fish would be shark meat. You think it's a good idea that sharks can eat us, but you don't think it's a good idea that we can eat them? I mean, it's rather a quaint notion that you have. But I have loved my North Queensland. I love water skiing. I can't do that anymore because the crocodile danger now is such that no-one can water ski in our rivers in North Queensland. You've taken our fun away from us.”
“You, whose shoe leather has never set foot off a concrete pavement, are telling us how nature should operate in North Queensland! Now I sit in my office and have a picture facing me. Other people can't see it, but I can. It's a picture of the cassowary overpass—$42 million was spent building a cassowary overpass. The mountain and jungle come down here, and then there's the highway there, and then there's an 80-foot fall down the slope. The mountain doesn't just stop on the highway; it keeps going down. So they built the cassowary walkway on top of the highway, and it goes straight down. So if the cassowary walked on the cassowary highway, it would plunge 80 feet to its death, because no-one told them in Brisbane and Canberra, those fascist morons, that a cassowary has no wings. It can't fly!”
“Because we had an attitude, we didn't have to have an army, we didn't have to have a population, we didn't have to have development, we didn't have to interface with the rest of the world—yes, well, we nearly vanished off the face of the earth. God bless the Christian missionaries. They protected us. There is survival of the species. Obviously no-one in here has read Charles Darwin on survival of the species. But those countries that will operate and have sensible attitudes will survive, and the moronic fairytale land which is being imposed upon us by a fascist mentality—and I use that word with a forethought; as a published author, I am allowed to use that with a forethought—and the fascist arrogance and fairytale land of this place is going to take away our cassowaries. They're going to take away our North Queensland turtles.”
“We had 371 million sheep; we've now got three million sheep. The sheep are gone. Cattle numbers were 25 to 30 million back in the seventies and eighties—they're still 25! What's going on out there? Nothing! You have a responsibility to nobody! A thousand million people go to bed hungry every night and you have no responsibility to feed them. Well, I'll tell you what. We had that attitude—we Australians—250 years ago. It was such a bad attitude that, except for the Christian missionaries, we would have been annihilated. My mob, the black fellas of Australia, would have been annihilated—none of us would be here if it weren't for the Christian missionaries.”
“I'm told that a pig mother has 12 babies a year. You can imagine what the population of Canberra would be if every woman here had 12 babies a year. I want to move away from the fascist-like arrogance and fairytale land of the greenies and the wokies, and the Liberals and Labor, that go down the same pathway. I want to go sideways for a moment. There would not be a person in this House who hasn't eaten fish and chips, right? So you're responsible for the destruction of sea life. I'll tell you what: if you take the chooks away and the seafood away and the beef away, then you're going to starve to bloody death, like a lot of people on this planet. A thousand million people go to bed every night hungry. I'll tell you a way to cure that. It's to increase the amount of food coming out of Australia. Well, I've got news for you. It's decreasing.”
“So goodbye cassowaries. They've got nothing to eat except turtle eggs on the beach. So goodbye turtles. That's because of your criminal stupidity and ignorance. You've got shoes that have never set foot off a concrete pavement and you're telling people that have lived up there for 40,000 years what they can and can't do. I'll tell you what: they're pretty hostile towards you. I don't recommend that you go up there, because the hostility levels now are getting very, very bad. The cassowary is doomed. It's going to be on my watch. To my fury and rage, it'll be on my watch that that beautiful bird and part of our nature wonderland will vanish because of your criminal stupidity. Unless the boys are allowed in and licensed—I absolutely believe they should be licensed with their guns and their big dogs—you will never eradicate those pigs.”
“You don't know what you're doing. There's incredible damage behind the fascist-like arrogance of the wokies and the various other greenie classes that come into this place. They don't know the damage that they are doing to my homeland. I will have on my conscience the vanishing of the cassowaries in North Queensland. That will be on my conscience. I love the cassowaries. They're part of our homeland. It is actually, according to most of the local authority, a question of arms. They will not be there because they banned the shooters from going into national parks. Half of the area of North Queensland has national parks, and they say that we can't go in there with rifles. Well, who is going to go in there and shoot the massive explosion of pigs in that area? They've got nothing to eat in the jungle except cassowary eggs.”
“We've had yet another tragedy—a shark taking a human being. I've said in this House before and I'm going to say again that there was a very nice, very popular young doctor with his wife and his two kids having a good time as tourists in North Queensland and the doctor's wife and his two children watched in horror as a crocodile chewed him in half. Every single person in this place who voted for the protection of crocodiles can take that on their conscience. Because I'm a Christian, you can explain it to Jesus Christ when you get up to heaven that you voted that that could happen again and again. Don't quote to me the figures of how many people are taken by crocodiles, because that's how many you see taken by crocodiles. They don't usually take them when other people are around. So you don't know what you're talking about.”
“The biggest income earner for this country for 200 years was the wool industry. And Paul Keating—a loud-mouthed know-all, dictatorial and arrogant—abolished the wool scheme and completely destroyed the biggest source of income— (Time expired)”
“It could bring in $40,000 million or $50,000 million a year and could provide a wonderful living for some five million people in Australia that will move onto a rich farm which will give them everything that no-one else on earth can enjoy—an income of $1½ million a year, for starters. So these things are available to us. But in this place we are so petty and so small-minded that all we talk about is whether that mob of people are getting more money than that mob of people. It's the same budget that I've heard in this place now for the last 20 years. That was not what happened in this place previously. Whether it was the ALP or the other mob, they talked about development. That's not a word we use anymore in Australia. Our national anthem says, 'Advance Australia fair'. 'Advance'? We've been in retreat!”
“All I can say is: you could give the green light to coalmining—and both sides of this parliament have continuously opposed coalmining, though they're making a few sounds now and changing a little bit; it's just a little bit late in the game to be talking about it now—and open up the Galilee coal basin. You could build the Bradfield Scheme. He was exactly a fool; he built the Sydney Harbour Bridge; he built the water supply for Sydney; he built the underground railways, which won the world prize for engineering; and he built the University of Queensland—not exactly a fool, this bloke. Build the Bradfield Scheme.”
“We're not rich people; we're ordinary people. But if you want to live in the Moranbahs, or the Charters Towers, or the Mount Isas, or the Yarakas, or wherever you want to live, you like a little bit of space around you. It's the one thing you can have that people in cities can't have. Well, now you're going to tax it. There's no tax on people owning $4 million houses in Brisbane or Sydney or Melbourne. But the ordinary poor people that live in rural Australia—you're taxing them. You just don't even realise that we exist. And you, members of parliament that represent country electorates, should stand in shame. But don't do it on the basis that the Liberal Party are the good guys. No way! No way, Jose.”
“Yes, sure, we've lost about two or three every 10 or 12 years, but there's still a bloody lot of people—excuse my language—living there at the present moment. And we can't get the money to build a house. The honourable member for Mayo talked about having no specialists in country areas. Well, alright, that might be something we have to live with, but give us some money to be able to go down and see specialists. No, that doesn't happen. You know that, if you drive into any city in Australia, there are high-rise cranes all over the place. Well, you won't even see a contractor in regional Australia. There's nothing being built there. You pass laws putting a tax upon people who own land, and all you could think of was the cities. In country Australia—which is like 20 per cent of the population still—we all have a bit of acreage.”
“I spent 20 years of my life in a government that believed it was our duty to make work for our people, to grow the economic cake. So, every year, we built a giant irrigation scheme; every year we opened a giant mine of some description; and we had to provide towns, and all that infrastructure, and railway lines, to make those things happen. But here, we argue that this group of people should get more money or that that group of people shouldn't have got more money. It is not about how you cut up the cake. Surely you should emphasise making the cake bigger. Now, we can't even borrow money to build a house in regional Australia. The banks have redlined all of regional Australia—they will not lend money to build a home. There still happen to be about 20 electorates based in regional Australia.”
“Prime Minister, you cannot have agriculture without fertiliser. Diammonium phosphate is the most common fertiliser. The only plant in Australia is in Mount Isa, supplying almost half of Australia's needs. It is being choked to death by a monopolistic Woolworths-and-Coles-type gas supply. Prime Minister, congratulations on the reserve resource policy, but it has no teeth. Without price controls, we will still be left in a monopolistic situation. Prime Minister, will you save Australia's phosphate plant and 17,000 jobs, or will your government continue with this free-market, teacher's-pet mentality and import 100 per cent of our fertiliser?”
“There are two million hectares in above-24-inch-rainfall areas supposedly owned by the First Australians, but you mob over there and you mob over here have said that it has to be owned by the tribe. Well, why don't we put that on you? Why don't we say, 'Oh, no, you can't own land here; you're Scottish, go back to Scotland'? (Time expired)”
“I have been agonising over whether or not to raise this issue on the national agenda. I just can't put it off any longer. The life expectancy of First Australians has slipped from 54 to 49, whilst the rest of us have a life expectancy of 82. I hope no-one will call this genocide, but you know this is going on and you do nothing about it. I have repeatedly raised this issue—not just myself but other people as well—and you do absolutely nothing about it. They can't grow their own fruit and vegetables, because you abolished their right to have backyard fruit and vegetable gardens in the Torres Strait, and they are not allowed to own land anywhere in the Aboriginal communities in northern Australia. I can't speak for the rest of Australia, but it's probably the same.”
“When the Einasleigh bridge went in, the figure was $20 million a year, and this'll be just about the same as the Einasleigh River Bridge. The wonderful governments of the old Country Party built the Australian beef roads scheme. Now it's no use—a mate of mine and I bought 500,000 acres for $25,000. Why? Because you couldn't get in or out of the place. There's no road. If you put a road in, now it's producing $6 million a year— (Time expired)”
“A magnificent example of that is Georgetown, which is inland. The gulf country is completely cut off every year by the fourth-biggest river system in Australia, the Gilbert River, and it's an ideal site for a bridged dam—almost right where the road is now. But little, tiny Georgetown would grow to a town of 25,000 people. That's what happened in Griffith when irrigation went in. That's what happened in Mareeba when irrigation went in, and that's what happened to numerous other towns I could quote. So wouldn't it be wonderful if this government put a city out there in the middle of nowhere and developed the beautiful opportunities for tourism? The current failure to have that bridge is costing the Australian people about $15 million a year in lost tourism.”
“Heaven only knows they know about it, because not only I but numerous other people have screamed about it. Doomadgee is cut off every year for about three months, and I can't help but think—'they're blackfellas; don't worry about them.' I don't have any other explanation as to why Doomadgee gets cut off every single year for three months. I don't know any other town in Australia that fits into that category. There probably are some that do, but I'm not aware of them. Also if you put a higher level—I make this point to the Parliament of Australia. If we're going to build a bridge, don't build a bridge. In South-East Queensland, they build bridged dams. So they build a dam and they have a roadway across the top of the dam. It serves a double purpose, and, if you like, halves the cost of the dam and halves the cost of the bridge.”
“There's water from mountain to mountain.' At some stage, the whole of the coastal plain went 30 foot underwater. If you have simultaneous floods in the upper and lower Herbert, goodbye, Ingham. The death toll that's mooted would be about 300 or 400 people. Nothing's been done about the Gairloch or Seymour River areas. There's nothing being done about the Herbert River diversion, which Dr Bradfield spoke about back in the 1920s. The Bridle Track tunnel, to some degree, caused those six deaths in the last flooding. We can't get off the coastal plain. We're trapped, because the Great Dividing Range is there and there's about 30 kilometres before you hit the sea, and at Cairns the Great Dividing Range hits the sea. So we're trapped in that area every year.”
“In the last wet season, as usual, North Queensland lost people due to flooding on the highways—six people. At the Gairloch and Seymour River areas, just north of Ingham, the national highway was cut—I emphasise 'national highway'. Nearly half a million people live north of Ingham, in Australia. The greater Cairns region, the greater Innisfail region and greater Mareeba-Atherton region are big population centres by any standard in Australia, and they're cut off every year by rivers. No-one's doing anything about it. They are also cut off by the Herbert River. I am well aware as an historian that, very tragically, the Aboriginal story for that area—including the town of Ingham, a town of about 20,000 people just north of Townsville—which is Quinkan area, is: 'Don't go there.”
“My question is to the Minister for Health and Ageing. Recent data shows 72 deaths in the cape straits and gulf in four years attributable to diabetes. Diabetes, inter alia, results from poor nutrition. Post Country Party, subsequent Labor and Liberal governments abolished the missionary market gardens, banned the islanders' ubiquitous backyard fruit and vegetable gardens and, in an initiative the Nazis would be proud of, took away the islanders' staple diet: seafood. Will you act immediately to stop what some people describe as tantamount to genocide?”
“Treasurer, 30 per cent of Australia's fuel can be supplied from existing indigenous reserves, even without tapping oil shales. Why does government refuse to ban exports, which earn a measly $8 thousand million, whilst importing fuel, costing us $62 thousand million? Australia is one of the big four in grain and sugar production. Both are feedstock of ethanol. Why no action? Ethanol can, right now, supply three per cent of Australia's demand. Additionally, four of the recently closed refineries can easily be recommissioned. Why, on these three obvious initiatives, has the government done nothing?”
“If you put aromatics in your petrol, as we are doing, it's carcinogenic—the small particles are carcinogenic. If you put ethanol in, instead of the aromatics, you get rid of the small particles and you get rid of the carcinogens. Has this country done it? No.”
“(): We export our oil production for $8,000 million a year and we import our petrol and diesel for $62,000 million a year. Someone could infer from this that we are run by morons, but, then again, I don't hear any answers coming from the opposition. Well, in our little bailiwick, we'll give you the answers—we'll talk about ethanol. There's a country called Brazil. It makes jetliners. I flew with Qantas the other day, and the plane was an Embraer jet made in Brazil, one of the most advanced industrial countries on earth—60 per cent of its fuel needs are met from ethanol. When Iemma introduced ethanol in New South Wales, he said, 'I can't go another day with people dying that don't have to die,' and there is no doubt that, every year in Sydney, somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 people die that don't have to die.”
“Of course, people live adjacent to the national parks. But why do you have a national park? It's to keep it as it is, or as it was for 100,000 years or whatever! We want to keep a little bit of Australia the way it was, and I think every Australian would agree with that concept. Well, now you are doing the exact opposite. You're putting wind farms in there. The cost of electricity generated by wind is about three or four times the cost— (Time expired) A division having been called and the bells having been rung—”
“When people proceeded to take legal action on it, the company had vanished. It didn't exist anymore. There was no-one you could sue or take action against. So here we are desecrating paradise. This is some of the last remnant jungle on earth. They just dumped the stuff in the middle of the jungle. Again, it attracted national publicity, but this House and the state house in Queensland have taken no action upon this. So I commend the member for bringing forward this matter of very great importance to the people of Australia. Why they go to put it in national parks is because you can't be far away from the grid. So you've got to find somewhere near the grid, and a lot of people live near a national electricity grid. National parks are a place where people don't live, so we'll put it in the national parks.”
“I put in the first standalone solar system in Australia in 1982 or 1983. Before most people in this House were actually born, it was put in. But I had to do my homework on the alternative proposal for wind farms. Would you believe that, for the solar proposal that we implemented on Coconut Island, the incoming Labor government put in wind farms—I mean, a wind farm on a tiny little island of about 10 acres! You go to bed every night with 'whoomp, whoomp, whoomp', desecrating and polluting paradise. A wind farm only lasts for about 20 years. The wind farm at Ravenshoe has to be dismantled by law when it comes to its end of life. They just dumped all of the fan blades on the ground, on properties owned by the Kidners, a very prominent, well-loved and popular local family. They just dumped them on the ground and walked away.”
“So now we have no ground cover—because you have to clear the grass away, too, because of fires—on top of the Great Dividing Range, with what the World Heritage declared, quite rightly, some of the last remnant jungle on earth. That was the proposal for Chalumbin! It was spectacularly fought in the national media—on the front page of the S pectator magazine, to quote but one example—and among numerous national media outlets. Eventually, Minister Plibersek quite rightly put the mocker on it. She took a risk because the greenies think this is the answer to all of their prayers—a wind farm. The ridiculous nature of the costs alone would prohibit any sane person from proceeding down this pathway. And I speak with authority, because I was the minister for electricity in Queensland.”
“I second the motion. I've had practical experience in the outcomes that the honourable member is referring to. The Chalumbin Wind Farm was on the front page of the Spectator magazine. It was a national issue, and the outrage of the people in the heartland of the electorate I represent concerned the last remnant jungles on earth. There's a little bit in Africa, there's a little bit in South America and there's a little bit in Australia—and that's about it. There are hardly any jungles left in the world. They were putting Chalumbin Wind Farm right alongside a remnant jungle on earth. So when the myriads of flying foxes and birds flew out—chop, chop, chop. But the suggestion is outrageous because it's on top of the Great Dividing Range, and you have to clear a 100-metre-wide path where you're going to put these wind farms.”
“Maybe you like little children being torn to pieces by crocodiles, I don't know, but for your stupidity—the crocodile lays 60 eggs—”
“The reason they're vanishing is that there's an estimated three million pigs in national parks in North Queensland—which I think is exaggerated, but there's no doubt that you can't go into the national parks without seeing wild pigs—and the pigs have nothing to eat except the cassowary eggs. The pig numbers are exploding because there are no natural predators for the pigs in the jungles of North Queensland. I'm sitting here watching the cassowaries being wiped out because of the stupidity of so-called greenies in this place. That's the cassowaries. The pigs also eat the turtle eggs, so the North Queensland turtle is also doomed. You protected the crocodiles. Well, there were little children of Bamaga—one was seen to be torn to pieces by a crocodile, and another little children two vanished at exactly the same spot.”
“The last thing in the world we want in this country is for people in Sydney to be telling us what we should and shouldn't do on the land where we live. We live there because we love the land. That's why we live there, right? People who are living in Sydney obviously don't love the natural wonderland of Australia. I can't see how that is compatible with you living in Sydney. Your stupidity and irresponsibility means it will be on my watch that the cassowaries of Australia vanish. I will be remembered in history as the member of parliament for the area where the cassowaries vanished.”
“Treasurer, one 10th of our entire export earnings, $62,000 million, boomerangs offshore to buy fuel. Since our question to the Prime Minister last week, truckies, tourism operators, farmers and families are now paying 25c a litre more at the bowser. Since 2005, we've repeatedly moved that 32 per cent of our fuel requirements be met from our own offshore oil reserves. This is without even tapping our oil shale. Brazil, America and Europe all have ethanol, whilst China and India have announced ethanol. Will the budget continue to say no to ethanol for another 30 years?”
“Australia is 30 per cent self-sufficient in oil, yet only three per cent in petrol. As a big five in grain and sugar—ethanol feedstocks—we're uniquely placed for self-sufficiency, yet we live at the mercy of the Middle East. Prime Minister, will you, like China, India, Europe, America, Indonesia and Brazil, mandate ethanol, providing $12,000 a year to every Australian family and, quoting Morris Iemma, saving over a thousand lives a year? Most importantly, my horse has died and it'll save me four kilometres a walk to buy food.”
“Our wages then were $18 an hour. As the voice of North Queensland on drivetime 4KZ, he became the loud voice of opposition to Warren Truss's decision. He whipped up a rage, did a magnificent job and then led 3,000 marchers in a giant protest rally in Cairns. He was working on the megaphone, and he was so committed to his task that he hadn't realised what was happening to himself. He collapsed with heat stroke and was rushed to hospital. He was lucky to have survived the heat stroke, but he was a man so passionately committed to the people of Far North Queensland and his people and his homeland that he fought the fight. And I might add that we won and Warren Truss didn't.”
“Vale, Greg Vuleta, a great Australian and to me a close mate. Greg is one of the three amigos that ran Innisfail. Nobody made a move in Innisfail without first speaking to John Moyle, Bruce Gillan and Greg Vuleta, three very close friends. They were big-timers. Every year, they worked as labourers at the Innisfail show—these three really big-time blokes doing menial clean-up jobs at the show. Playing another prominent role, Greg was an extremely good actor, invariably the lead in shows at the local theatre, popularly run by Alison Moyle, the mother of Innisfail. Theatre was very big in Innisfail. Two hundred people seemed to pack out every theatre session. Greg reached superstar status when the National Party leader and ag minister Warren Truss issued an import permit for bananas from a country where people work for $5 a day.”
“We're amongst the three biggest grain-exporting countries. We are 32 per cent self-sufficient in oil anyway. When the CopperString is built, the vanadium oil deposits will open up right across the top of North Queensland. Massive oil— (Time expired)”
“This place reminds me of the comment, 'Nero fiddled while Rome burned.' We are now importing $62,000 million worth of fuel every year. There's a fight going on right at the heart of the supply line and the supply of oil. Why has our country chosen to import $62,000 million of fuel—that's $12,000 for every family in Australia every year—when we have 32 per cent self-sufficiency in oil, we are arguably the biggest exporter of sugar and we are amongst the three or four biggest exporters of grain in the world? Guess where you get ethanol from? Grain and sugar. That's where you get it from. Brazil is on 68 per cent ethanol and is totally self-sufficient in oil. But here we are in the most precarious situation, and nothing is being done. We're amongst the four biggest sugar-exporting countries.”
“I think it was 3½ million acres in North Queensland, and it's all above 26-inch rainfall—most cattlemen in Australia would cry to get 26-inch rainfall—and they can get the cattle in at Pormpuraaw. I went there. Jackson Shortjoe and Eddie Holroyd said, 'We want to have a go at the cleanskins.' I said: 'Alright. Have a go,' and they got 6,000 head together. On that note, I'll sit down.”
“My grandparents went out there in a Cobb & Co stagecoach in the 1890s and the Kalkadoon Wars were still pottering along at that stage. My partner in mining was always referred to as the 'last of the Kalkadoons'. His mother had been one of the few 'piccaninny' survivors of the big battle on Battle range. So, if anyone knows about it, I do. But I can tell you, absolutely, if it weren't for the Christian missionaries, my mob would've been annihilated. There's no question about it. I don't want to go into who picked the fight first or anything like that. The fact was that there was a huge fight, and we knew who was going to win it. One had Martini-Henry rifles and the other one had spears and woomeras. We knew who were going to win. But the Christian missionaries roped these people in and secured huge areas of land.”
“Cocky Calwell, the leader of the Labor Party for about 15 years—everyone laughed at it, but I didn't really think it was all that funny—said that 'two Wongs don't make a white', referring to the White Australia policy. Well, the people that weren't white in Australia copped it as well. When it comes to the lesson for Australia, as Churchill said, 'those who cannot learn from history'—we had an empty land, and there were people that were looking for an empty land. People that didn't have land were looking for an empty land, so they came out here and took it off us. We had no standing armies. We had no ability to resist. We had no rifles. So we got nearly annihilated. I can't talk about the rest of Australia, but I can most certainly talk about my homeland—where I come from.”
“Don't you set foot across that fence.' Earlier today, I was thrown out of the chamber. I'm pretty proud of that, really, because I just can't help but get angry. I think people that have been brought up in a very strong Christian tradition and also people that have been brought up in a very strong Australian tradition don't like watching underdogs get picked on, and their natural reaction is to fight anyone that does that. When I was trying to defend today, a bloke from the ALP kept screaming abuse and I said, 'Mate, on the subject of race, you don't know your history books.' The great John Curtin was easily our best prime minister. But, all the same, he said, 'All we want coming into Australia are Europeans, but not Poles, and no-one from Asia.' I was sad that a great man would say something like that, but that's what he said.”