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 2 of 4.
“Every single person running the community was a whitefella, not a blackfella. What's going on here? In Cloncurry, my father was partner to a cattle grazier—a cattle owner, for the sake of a better word—on a big station outside Cloncurry. They were partners in three or four copper mines together. He was a First Australian and one of the more glamorous station owners in the Mount Isa area—a very famous First Australian family. It's normal in that area. At Doomadgee, Jason went out and got 2,000 head together. Two weeks before he was to get a Good Australian Award off the Prime Minister, sadly, he died. But, please God, his family are carrying on up there and a whole lot of them now have taken up blocks, saying: 'We don't care whether you whitefellas give us a piece of paper or not. It's our land. We're putting a fence up.”
“The result was, I don't know, about 32 million people dying in the Second World War, which was really more about Russia versus Germany than any other explanation. To revert back—why won't you whitefellas give us a piece of paper saying we own our own land, like every other person on the planet gets? I didn't know anything about the community areas. I was brought up in a town that was very much—everyone was dark in Cloncurry. 'You Murri from the Curry'—all of us are dark, and who knows what's in the family tree, not that anyone would care anyway. When I went to the community areas, which I'd never been to before, it struck me that—the first one I went to was Yarrabah, the biggest community in Australia, with about 4,000 people—every single bloke I talked to was a whitefella.”
“Having said that, I want to go back—I'm coming to the end of my run here—to two quotes. One is from Winston Churchill, and the other is from Carl von Clausewitz, who wrote what is always regarded as the best book on warfare in human history. Churchill said, 'Those that cannot learn the lessons of history are doomed to again suffer its miseries.' Carl von Clausewitz said, in On War , 'There is one truism of history: a people without land will look to a land without people.' Read Mein Kampf . On every third page, Hitler uses the word 'lebensraum'—living room. 'Well, we Germans have got the population; Russia's got the land.' We know what's going to happen here, because it's happened every other time in human history.”
“We're just taking it, the same as'—well, he didn't say this, but it's the same as what the Europeans did when they came to New South Wales. They just took it: 'You don't like it? Well, too bloody bad for you.' When I became minister, a bloke jumped out from behind an oleander bush, a journalist, and he said, 'What qualifications have you got for becoming a minister for Aboriginal affairs?' I just said the first thing that came into my head. I said: 'Playing rugby league. It's pretty hard to feel superior to someone when he's buried you upside down in the dirt eight or nine times in a football match.' This bloke laughed, and the comment got a lot of publicity. It was just a quick, off-the-cuff, honest answer. There is no doubt that rugby league has been a great equalising mechanism, and I pay my own sport a very great tribute in this area.”
“A whitefella came up, and he said he was solving all of our black drinking problems: he was going to ban alcohol in Doomadgee, he would preside over it, and he'd had a meeting with the representatives of the community. The five missionary ladies, who all hated the grog—that's who he had the meeting with, and everyone screamed out and yelled that at him. But Clarence didn't say anything until right at the end. He was mayor of the town. When it was his turn to talk—he doesn't look at you, Clarence; he speaks like this. He said: 'Don't you come here and say what's what and that's that. Dis mah lan.' That's how the book opened: 'Dis mah lan'—d-i-s-m-a-h-l-a-n. God bless you, Clarence. Jason Ned said: 'Well, you're not ever going to give it to us, so we're just taking it, right?”
“The point I want to make is that he could not get a pastoral lease. Every whitefella in Australia can get a pastoral lease, but a blackfella living on his own land can't get a pastoral lease. What's going on? So he did what the Europeans that came to New South Wales did. He just went out and squatted. He said, 'It's my land. Don't set foot on it or else.' I wrote a history of Australia. I agonised for 3½ years as to how I would start that book off, and I just couldn't get it right in my head. To get a history book published is a really big achievement. I'll be very proud of that till the day I die. But it suddenly occurred to me—I will mention his name: Clarence Waldron. He was mayor, off and on, of Doomadgee. Clarence had his shortcomings, but he could be really brilliant.”
“He's got about 2,000 of those wild mickeys together and branded behind wire—wild cattle—and he made maybe about $4 million over a period of three years.' He said, 'You know he ran all my camps?' I said, 'All of your camps?' He said, 'Yeah, all the camps.' So I rang up Jason. I said, 'Mate, did you run all the camps?' He said, 'Yeah, for 10 years.' I said, 'Do you realise you've mustered more cattle than any other person in human history?' The Americans have big runs. The Argentinians and Brazilians have big runs, but they're nowhere near as big as ours. He said, 'Well, I've never thought about that.' Anyway, the Prime Minister was coming up to Mount Isa to give him a Good Australian Award, a highly sought after honour, and he died a couple of weeks before the award went through.”
“He was the mayor of Normanton and Karumba. Both of them were ringers—stockmen—as young blokes, so they've done a very good job in running the biggest cattle station in Australia. I think we're running about 45,000 head there and have done now for about 60 or 70 years. My great mentor, Mickey Miller, bought the station originally, and they made a success of it right from the start. First Australian affairs are a tragedy. The Prime Minister was giving an award to the Mayor of Doomadgee, the biggest cattle owner in Australia and a bloke I've got a lot of time for. He said, 'Mate, how's Jason Ned going?' And I said, 'He's going good, mate.”
“Far from being ashamed of it—we Kalkadoons held the whitefellas at bay for nearly 25 years. That's not a bad effort. For guerrilla tactics, you'll find very little precedent anywhere in the world. Vietnam would be one of those examples. But it was a pretty good effort. People say, 'Oh, yeah? How'd it end up?' I'm pleased that they ask that question, because there are only about 2,000 of us. We own three million acres in an above-24-inch rainfall area, so I don't think we ended up too bad. In fact, we may be the most land-rich people on earth. Freddy Pascoe and Paulie Edwards own the biggest cattle station in Australia. The two families fight all the time, but they're both good blokes. He was also the mayor of Normanton, even though he was a First Australian in towns that can be pretty racist at times.”
“Everyone knows what's going on, and no-one is doing anything about it. I don't know that everyone does know. If they knew, then, surely, they could not continue. The figures show the highest crime rate in the world, the highest suicide rates in the world, the lowest life expectancy arguably anywhere in the world and the highest unemployment rates anywhere in the world. That's something to be proud of as a nation, isn't it! I'm related to people on Doomadgee. I always talk about my mob. 'Murri from the Curry', they call us. All of us that are dark and come from 'the Curry' are all a bit mixed up, and we always identify as 'Murri from the Curry'. My brother was called 'Boori' at school. It never worried him. He was a bad beggar when it came to a knuckle, but it never worried him. Obviously, if you're dark, you come from Cloncurry.”
“I make no secret of the fact that Kevin Rudd and I have been good friends since the days he and I were running in Queensland. In screaming frustration, I said to him, 'Mate, do you realise how bad it is?' And he said: 'Yes. Talk to the minister.' 'I did—three times. She burst out crying the last time, so I'm not going back to talk to the minister again.' 'Alright, well, talk to so and so in my office.' Well, two months later we'd had an election, he was gone and we were back to square one again. I'm going to release certain figures that should shock the nation. I have been reluctant to release these figures, because I think that, if the rest of the world finds out what is really going on, then we will become the pariah of this century—we'll be the South Africa of this century. There's no way you can ride around the figures.”
“I have no disrespect for the last speaker. But I've been here for 50 years, and every two or three years we get a new inquiry or body set up that's going to save us all. All we blackfellas are going to be saved by you whitefellas setting up a body. That's been going on for 55 years, and I've been following it. Every now and then we set up another body. The one that's always been interesting for me—I can't help but laugh when I think about it—was when Prime Minister Tony Abbott introduced the Closing the g ap report. It indicated in its first year that the gap had widened. That was not good. In the second year it indicated that it had widened again, and in the third year it indicated that it had widened again. He had to do something, so he abolished the annual report! That's what he did.”
“Let me be very specific. Bonds athletics—over 5,000 jobs went out of Sydney and Brisbane in one hit with that one company. The jobs are gone. They're sitting there in little ethnic enclaves—a lot of them hating Australians and having no intention of ever becoming Australians. An honourable member: You're a disgrace, mate. I want to know who that interjection came from. I want to find out who's interjecting, because your name's going to go public. I know the people of Australia have had an absolute—and I'll use a crude expression—gutful of this. We're not running around scared anymore of being called racist—”
“Some of those people that are coming in—and I make no apologies for stating this—are coming from the Middle East and from North Africa. I say that because it is not a religion thing. We have a tremendous interface with Indonesia, and you would not find a nicer or better people in the world—or more tolerant. The current ambassador, in fact, is a Christian from Indonesia. They're lovely people. So it is a geographic thing. I'm sorry because there might be some very good people that we're saying 'don't come in' to on those sorts of generalisations, but you'll never make a perfect law. That is for certain. Probably worse still, nearly 75 per cent of them are going to Sydney and Melbourne. There are no jobs and there's no accommodation, so why the hell are you bringing them into this country for? You've sent all the industry overseas.”
“I was quite appalled and shocked to find out that 340,000 student visas are being issued—that's the average for the last five years—and only 40,000 of them are going home. So there are 300,000 people coming in on student visas. One lovely young lady came in on a student visa, and I said, 'How'd you get in?' and she said: 'You just get a student visa. Anyone can get that at any time at all. It's easy, and you can bring your whole family in.' Only 40,000 of the 340,000 leave Australia, so there are 300,000 coming in there and then another 400,000 coming in as migrants. That's 700,000 people coming here to stay—not to go home—each year. Well, you don't have to be Albert Einstein to figure out, within 15 years, we will be a minority in our own country—we Australians. If you're happy with that—I'm telling you I'm not.”
“It's sort of like the Snowy Mountains Scheme, only bigger and much more effective. The Clarence River diversion would double the original project on the Murray-Darling. It'll double that production. Similarly, the Bradfield Scheme will double that production again. It diverts a little tiny bit of the waters where it rains all the time. In the heart of my electorate, we're getting 100 inches of rainfall. A little tiny bit of that water is sent out to where I come from, the mid-west plains, where there is beautiful, rich, flat, rolling black soil. Now when we die and we go up to meet Jesus, he's going to say: 'What did you do with this wonderful asset I gave you? You're growing prickly trees on it—”
“With a few well-placed dams and a few other ameliorative measures, we just won't have to suffer this. Why haven't you built a dam in Australia in 30 years? I represent land that receives half of every drop of rainfall that falls on Australia, and I will have the invidious fate of having to leave politics—even if it's in six years time or 10 years time—without having seen a single gully with a block of concrete across it. You could say, 'Well, you're a pretty incompetent beggar.' You could say that, except that I was told by my tribal leadership in the mid-west of North Queensland that I had to get the Bradfield Scheme. I had to find out what it was. It took me about two months to find out what it was. Well, I got it! The federal government announced the building of the Bradfield Scheme.”
“Having said that, we've just had yet another flood, and a very prominent, wonderful young family, with four or five kids, just watched 3,000 head of cattle worth about $6 million flow out to the Gulf of Carpentaria. I don't know whether they're going to be able to recover from that, and they weren't Robinson Crusoe. We keep saying: 'Oh, this is terrible. The government must give us some money because we've had this terrible thing happen to us.' It is dead right that we really do need the government to come in, but what would be infinitely better? I can't talk about fires in Victoria, but I can talk about floods in the mid-west of North Queensland, my homeland. My family went out there in the 1890s in a Cobb & Co stagecoach, so I can speak with authority about there.”
“The banks have sold me up. I'll walk off this property penniless.' The journalist said, 'So what are you doing now?' He rubbed his eyes and said, 'I've just got to shoot some more sheep.' As the sun went down—bang, bang. That is what it's like to live in the mid-west of North Queensland, and I think Victoria, with your fires, probably appreciates our situation. But we also have terrible floods, and we're in the midst of one now. A division having been called in the House of Representatives— Sitting suspended from 18:05 to 18:25 I was telling the story of a man at Julia Creek, watching four generations of contribution by his family vanishing in front of him, which was somewhat better than his father being incinerated to death along with his brother and one of the stockmen on the station.”
“We're talking about catastrophes, and there's a terrible story concerning a family. Like my own family, they were original settlers in north-west Queensland. A TV crew from the ABC had come out with me to visit this person. His entire property had been burnt out and he was loading a 243 rifle—bolt action. The interviewer said, 'What's the situation?' He said: 'Well, you know what happened to my father and the two stockmen.' The interviewer said, 'Yes, I know that story.' One of the stockmen got tangled up in the barbed wire fence, and his father and the other stockman went back to rescue him. The fire rolled over all three and incinerated them to death. Anyway, this was the son of that father, and he was loading his rifle. The interviewer said, 'So what are you doing now?' He said: 'Well, I've lost all my sheep. I'm gone.”
“Let me remind this country it was only two years ago that we found out China has control of Yam Island—which is halfway between New Guinea and the tip of Cape York, Australia—and the mouth of the Fly River and was then in the process of purchasing Pajinka, at the tip of Cape York. So we've given it three key control points. (Time expired)”
“Ask the First Australians how they fared, or ask the Red Indians, the Aztecs or the Zulus. When you don't have Australians on the water, someone else will fill the void. Illegal fishing boats, people smugglers, foreign interests testing how far they can push—they're not stupid. We need our trawlers and our netters back doing the job our Border Force is clearly not resourced to do. Every Australian fishing vessel is a moving surveillance platform. Every skipper is a sentry. Every crew is a deterrent. And where is Border Force? Where is our biosecurity? We have 14 patrol boats with no armaments on them to cover the longest coastline on Earth. It's a joke; nobody is there. There's no meaningful presence, no real defence, no boats, no boots and no eyes.”
“If something moved that shouldn't have been there, they knew about it. But they've been pushed off the waters. We strangled them with paperwork, bans and city based ideology, we shut down gillnets, we sidelined trawlers, and we told the very people that protected our coastline for free to stay at home. Now, Australian seas are empty—no, they're not empty. They're filled with people who are not Australians. Karumba had over 240 boats licensed to operate and probably another 240 boats on North Queensland's east coast. Now, I doubt whether there are 200 licences in the gulf and the east coast. Carl von Clausewitz's chilling aphorism is that 'a people without land will seek a land without people'. Similarly, people without seas will seek seas without people.”
“Excuse me for reading this document out, but it's one of the rare occasions that I'm going to do it. What's happening in our northern waters right now should worry every single person in this country. Illegal boats are coming into our northern waters in numbers we have never seen before. They're coming quietly, they're coming regularly, and they're coming because nobody is watching the gate anymore. And why aren't we watching? Because governments have regulated our fishing industry out of existence. Australia has the longest coastline of any country on Earth, yet it has the lowest per kilometre fishing effort of any coastline on Earth. For generations, our commercial fishermen were the eyes and ears of the north. They knew every tide channel and every strange light on the horizon.”
“Treasurer, young mothers today must have a paying job and be a wife, cook, family bookkeeper, kid chauffeur, house cleaner, laundry lady and go to church on Sunday. Not surprisingly, when 20 Australians die, only 15 will be born. Advance Australia Fair is Hughenden's irrigation scheme. Fifteen Hughendens would create 3,000 farms, 10,000 owner-operator businesses and 100,000 homes with backyards. Hughenden has had $170 million allocated now for eight years. Queensland dithers. Will you create a water authority and call tenders? Treasurer, you won't get a portrait; you'll get a statue!”
“There are very few examples in human history where the people just went out, dug skeletal remains out of the ground and tore them to pieces in the street. But their hatred of those people that stopped them from having fun, stopping them having a good time, stopping them talking to each other and maybe coming up with an improvement in society—that was the reaction of the English people, our forebears that came from England. There's terrible and very sad irony here that the party that was founded in the pubs is the party that now is closing down the pubs. Shame upon them. Shame.”
“But, for people who are more traumatised by reality than, probably, I am, it really is a matter of life and death in many cases, and that's not an exaggeration. So I want to say: 'Hey, you people. Your party was born in the pubs, and the first thing you do is close them down.' The first thing that leaps to my mind is the Puritans, a very ugly group of people in Britain. The first thing they did, of course, was to ban people from celebrating Christmas, having a few beers and any other type of fun that they might have. Well, the people dug up the body of Pym and the other leader and they tore their bodies to pieces in the streets, such was their hatred of those two men, those two Puritans.”
“When I went to university, on the reading list in the schools and in the university was 'Big Brother is watching'— Nineteen eighty-four , a very scary book. That Big Brother is now watching us all the time in hotels. What sort of people would demand that you have the government watching you in a hotel when you're trying to have a bit of fun, a bit of good time, to let down your hair and get away from the stresses of the world? It's interesting to watch the graph of suicides amongst males in Australia. It parallels the graph of the decline of the hotels and people going into the pubs. I know that, if I myself am really down, I just go down to the pub, have a lot of good fun with my mates and go home a lot happier and more relaxed than before.”
“But I'm well aware of the foundations of the Labor movement, in which my own family was a very important little cog in the machine, and I can tell you that it is ironic that people are coming in here to abolish hotels when their very movement was founded in the hotels—including the bush hotels—of Australia. There's a little town called Maxwelton, and I love pulling up there because of all the cockies in the area and all the contractors and various other people that are employed in the cattle and sheep industry. You find out what's going on. You could have a good time at the Maxwelton pub. Well, it doesn't exist anymore, because of the impositions that you placed upon it. In a pub in Queensland, you are watched by Big Brother. There's a camera there.”
“If you buy the government motor vehicles in Australia instead of importing them from overseas, there's a $40 billion or $50 billion benefit there for Australia. The Bradfield was $42,000 million. If you stop the importation of petrol and go back to the way the country was run in 1990, then it's $62,000 million. There's you go. There's all the money you could ever want to replace the little pittance that you're getting. The honourable member for New England is dead right. Australia's identity very much comes out of the bush pub, and you are eroding the identity of Australians if you take that away. You are also eroding our ability to talk to each other. As a member of parliament, I like to find out what people are thinking—what their attitude is towards the government's policies—and the best way to do that is to go down to the local hotel.”
“In Brazil they're on about 60 per cent ethanol and other things, and they supply the other 30 per cent from indigenous crude. We have 30 per cent indigenous crude. Just one thing alone: if you buy the petrol here in Australia instead of importing it, the same as we did in 1990, then you give a gift to the Australian people of $62,000 million a year—a gift to the Australian people. What if you built the Bradfield Scheme? He wasn't exactly an idiot, Bradfield. He built the Sydney Harbour Bridge, built the underground railway system, won the world prize for engineering and built the University of Queensland. But, if you build that great water transfer scheme, that's 40,000—it was a hundred thousand million in two hits. That's $25 billion in tax revenue for the government. Deputy Speaker Freelander, I'm sorry. Let me just repeat that.”
“I always thought this was very funny, but it was probably not so funny when the revolution took over. The revolution had been made in the coffee houses in France, and the minute the revolutionaries took over, the first thing they did was close down the coffee houses, because nobody else was going to make a revolution there. The minute the Labor Party gets in, they start banning pubs. The same story really is being repeated again. Now, I don't want to get too dramatic here, but the good lord Jesus turned water into wine. There can't be anything much wrong with alcohol if the good lord turned water into wine. Deputy Speaker Freelander, if you're looking for money, you are importing, now, $62,000 million a year of petrol. In 1990 you imported no petrol at all, virtually. There's no reason why we can't move back to that immediately.”
“It would have saved you a lot of trouble,' and Tommy says, 'Oh, well, you didn't go to the trouble of explaining it to me properly, like Bill did.' He was bashing the hell out of him. I tell that story to indicate that the labour movement—and both sides of the house would agree—has made a magnificent contribution to the people of Australia. One in 30 of us that went into cane fields never came back out alive. One in 30 of us that went down into the mines never came back up alive, until the Labor movement came along. I'm very proud to say that my family were very well off and threw their full weight behind the labour movement in its early years. But the point of the story is that the labour movement was founded in the hotels just the same as the democracy movement was founded in the coffee houses in France.”
“He goes into the pub and says to one of the blokes drinking there, 'Tommy, you haven't taken out a ticket'. It's a union ticket. He just starts writing him out the ticket, and Tommy says, 'Stick it up'—well, we know the rest of 'stick it up'. 'Big Bill' McCormack comes up and says, 'Did you say to Ted that he should so-and-so and so-and-so?' and he says, 'Yes, I'll say it to you too.' So McCormack grabs him by the hair and punches him in the mouth. He goes down. He kicks him all around the floor, then lifts him up by the belt and says, 'Now take the bloody ticket out,' so he takes the ticket out. He says, 'Well, why didn't you take it out in the first place, Tommy?”
“I could tell a thousand stories, but I have just a quick one. I was in the pub at a little place called Garradunga in North Queensland, and I was going to a Lions Club meeting. I had my Lions badge on. Someone said, 'I didn't know you were a Lion.' The bloke across the bar said, 'Mate, he's been a lion all of his life,' and everyone roared laughing at my expense. It's fun, but it's also ironic that the ALP is moving this, because the ALP was founded in the pubs in North Queensland—you know, Barcaldine, Cloncurry and also western New South Wales. But I would say 'Red Ted' Theodore was the real founder of the labour movement in Australia. The story is told about him and 'Big Bill' McCormack—about 'Red Ted' Theodore and 'Big Bill' McCormack.”
“In The Mystery of Capital , he said that the thing that enabled the West to get ahead of the rest of the world is that they had property rights. If you got property rights, you can borrow money from the bank. I and one of my best mates, I'm ashamed to say, were a little bit under the weather. We bought half a million acres one night for $25,000 in a 24-inch rainfall area. That's good rainfall area. (Time expired)”
“You don't even give them a provision to own their own house in the land that they've been living on for 30,000 or 40,000 years. They're not allowed to own a house. There's no process in Queensland by which you can own your own house. Why haven't you got off your backside instead of crying about them in the Queensland parliament or the federal parliament? Why don't you go out and listen to them about what they want? If you do, you might be surprised at how much they appreciate what you do out there. So I plead with people here to read T he Mystery of Capital . De Soto was a World Bank economist, not a lightweight. A cousin of his was the head of Rio Tinto, the second-biggest mining company in the world. These are heavyweight people.”
“They owned three or four mining undertakings together, and I was in a couple of those mining undertakings. My partner was Les Prosser, who was regarded as the 'last of the Kalkadoons'. His mother was one of the few 'piccaninny' survivors of the big battle on Battle range—which wasn't a battle, really. It was a massacre. That's a story for another day. When they were doing guerrilla warfare, we Kalkadoons did real good with guerrilla warfare. But, when we stupidly took them on in open combat, that was not a good idea at all. That's a story for another day. They don't want to be regarded as different. You don't want different laws. All they want is the same laws that every other Australian has, which enables them to own their own house.”
“We're not using any of that water—we are; we're using 0.2 per cent of that water—we're not using it. What right have we got to do that when a thousand million people are going to bed hungry every night? Do you think the rest of the world is going to continue to accept this? When we stand up today and talk about racism in this country, it takes many forms. I don't want to be disrespectful to my colleagues, but, when you start looking after us because we're blackfellas, we start to get a little bit toey, we blackfellas, because we don't want to be different. The whole idea is we just want to be ordinary Australians. Where I come from, my father was in partnership with a bloke who owned a very big cattle station. He was a First Australian.”
“There is a message here for everyone in this parliament, and that message comes from von Clausewitz, the greatest commentator on warfare in human history. He wrote in his book On War , 'There is one truism of history: a people without land will look for a land without people.' Go and talk to my blackfellas—you can talk to me; I'm a blackfella too—and ask how we got on with a policy that we didn't have to have a population here, how that went. Well, it went real bad for us—real, real bad for us. So what are we doing now? If you take out a little, tiny strip around the coastline, about 120 kilometres wide, and a little dot around Perth, there's no-one living here. I represent half of Australia's water run-off. I get all the great rivers of Australia in the Kennedy electorate except the Murray-Darling.”
“The Prime Minister of Australia was going to Mount Isa to give Jason Ned a Good Australian Award—there were two other people getting that award that day; they were equally distinguished—but he died before he got the award. The point of the story is, if we want people to have a decent income and a decent way of life and some opportunity for their kids, then the First Australians are left with no alternative but to simply defy the people in this place and those in the Queensland parliament and take the land and squat on it. God bless the people that came from Europe and did that in New South Wales. Where I come from, we probably had maybe a thousand people living in north-west Queensland, or maybe 1,500—I don't know. It's an empty land.”
“So what does that entail?' She said, 'I'm preserving nature for them.' Well, you're not preserving it for them, because you're not allowing them to do anything there. They've been taking kangaroos for the last 40,000 years, and you've said they're not allowed to take kangaroos anymore. God bless Murrandoo Yanner. He had many shortcomings, did Murrandoo, but good on him for taking them to court: 'No, I've got a right to take that kangaroo, and I've had that right for 20,000 years. You whitefellas that came here have got no right to take that off me.' Good on him. That's what he did. You've taken away their right to take game. You've taken away their right to use the water. You've taken away their right to use the land. God bless Jason Ned.”
“He's been waiting 200 years for you whitefellas to do something for him, except for a brief period when a bloke who is referred to as a blackfella—me—said, 'What do you want?' They said, 'We want private property rights.' So I gave them property rights. I'm just an ordinary, knockabout bloke, and I think most people that know me would say that. They named the lease after me because they were so appreciative that someone listened to them—to what they wanted. I ran into a lovely young lady and I said, 'What do you do?' She said, 'I'm in economic development.' 'Righto.' This was in Cairns. I said, 'I'm not too sure what economic development is taking place.' And she said, 'Oh, no, I do it in the'—she used these words—'Aboriginal areas.' I said: 'Righto.”
“He became the mayor of Doomadgee when he returned home from running all the cattle station camps, and he got a thousand head together. He could not own land where his family had lived for 30,000 years. There was no process by which he could own land. So he did the same as the Australians from overseas did when we came to New South Wales. We just took up the bloody land and squatted on it. That's where the word 'squatter' comes from, because all the land in New South Wales was taken up by squatters. And that's exactly what he did: 'Righto, I'm taking up this 10,000 acres'—or 20,000 acres—'It's my land. Don't set foot on it.' That's squatters rights. He's sick of waiting for you whitefellas to do anything.”
“You're going to protect nature so that it'll be kept the way it was. Well, it may have passed your knowledge that these people are starving to death. Their life expectancy in this country has slipped from 54 to 49 years of age, when the rest of us enjoy 82 years of age. If you want to know why, it's because you won't let them own property the same way everyone else on Earth owns property. The Mystery o f Capital was one of the most important books written in the last half-century. The World Bank economist Hernando de Soto has said, 'The creation of capital comes from the ownership of property.' Now, let me be very specific. There was a very great Australian. He was getting a great Australian award from the Prime Minister because he'd mustered more cattle than any other person in human history.”
“We put up all the alternatives on a big board: you can have tribal ownership; you can have community ownership; you can have local government ownership; you can have private ownership, the same as all the other places in Australia—whatever you want. Over 3,000 people voted. Three voted against private ownership, and the other 3,000 voted for private ownership. They did not vote for tribal ownership. What does this place do? It moves for tribal ownership. Well, I don't know about you, but I'd be flat-out naming all the people in my bloody family tree. They come from everywhere. I'm dark and I come from Cloncurry, so I identify as a Murri pretty often, and no-one would object to that—'Murri from the Curry'. You said that you were going to look after the land for them, right?”
“I've remained incredibly silent about these issues. I was the minister in Queensland for six years. The First Nations people, as they are referred to here in this place, were kind enough to name the freehold titles issued under my administration the 'Katter leases'. My son, in a meeting, said: 'Cattle leases? There are no cattle on any of these places.' I said, 'Not cattle—it's Katter, your name!' Now, that was because I simply went out to the 24 community areas in Queensland that are blackfella areas—they're not whitefella areas; they're blackfella areas—and I said, 'What do you want us to do with the land?' Do you know what they said?”
“I represent half of Australia's water. Half of the water that falls on Australia falls in the Kennedy electorate. We were building dams, and now we've stopped building dams. The water just runs down the street, taking millions of tonnes of topsoil— (Time expired)”
“Every year in Queensland under the old Country Party government, we built a major dam. I will quote but three examples. There were 800 people living in a little town called Griffith in New South Wales. They built a dam. Now there are 28,000 people living and making a very good living in Griffith. There were, ironically, 831 people living in a town called Mareeba. They built a dam, and now there are 26,000 people living in Mareeba, all on very, very high incomes. God bless them. There was a third town in Queensland—a little railway siding, Emerald—that had 1,100 people and it now has 17,000 people. There has not been a dam built in Queensland in 33 years—or whatever it is since the Bjelke-Petersen government fell. Bjelke-Petersen was stabbed in the back by his own mob. Not one single dam has been built.”
“I thought, 'What's going on here?' I was reaching for my rifle—sorry, it was Port Arthur. I was reaching for my rifle—'Hasn't anyone got the wherewithal to cut this dreadful creature down?' I say here again that every single person—it's not just our feelings for Matilda, and that's what we're emphasising today. It also should touch off in us a rage in our soul against the people who are driven by hate and violence. We want them out of our community. Jesus Christ, the leader of the religion that I adhere to, said, 'Love even your enemies,' so we have to abide by that, but it is very, very hard when you have a little girl who was called Matilda because her parents loved Australia so much that they called her by the most Australian name they could conjure up. My heart goes out to those parents. I kept thinking of my grandfather.”