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.”
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“Now (a) there's really no money for Aboriginal housing at all; (b) there's no provision for First Australians to build their own houses; and (c) they can't get any land because they've got to go through a process run by whitefellas in Brisbane, and we all know what that means when you're trying to get hold of some land. I could go on. But let me say this. A cavity-block-construction home is so simple. You just stack the blocks and you pour concrete down the cavity. Anyone can do that. You can buy a window frame that goes from the ceiling to the floor off the prison in Mareeba; they make them for about $300 a panel, which is very, very cheap. There you go. There's your wall; there are your windows.”
“The labour costs were cut almost in half because they were getting the dole money, and we topped it up to award wages. We had enough money to build about 200 houses, and we ended up building 900 houses. They were concrete-block constructions. Donnie Fraser at Doomadgee decided that we should have our own block-making machines, so two factories were set up. They cost us $100,000 each. We produced our own concrete blocks, and they had to meet besser specifications—so blocks exactly the same as besser blocks. That enabled us to build the best part of a thousand houses over a period of about four or five years.”
“I had the great honour of being the state minister for community services, and that gave me the community areas in Queensland, the First Australians areas—my brother-cousins out there—and we had about $25 million a year for housing. I'd like to put on the record the names of the people that I put in to run the department. Eric Law and the late Lester Rosendale, a cousin of Noel Pearson's, were put in charge of the department. In their wisdom they decided that all houses would be built exclusively by blackfella labour—no outsider whitefellas at all. I thought that they'd gone a bit far and I wasn't particularly happy about the decision, particularly since I wasn't consulted about it, but it turned out to be a roaring success.”
“To him we all owe a great debt of gratitude. Vale, Shane. May you rest in peace. Thank you for being a good Australian and a good bloke.”
“I once walked with giants. Few could even come close to Shane Paulger, a quiet, considered man of great intellect but also a tenacious fighter. Shane single-handedly organised one of Australia's greatest fights—the fight against dairy deregulation and for a fair price for dairy farmers, some of the hardest-working people in our country. Like many great leaders and fighters, Shane and his family took a significant emotional and financial hit for leading this fight. What would deter others fuelled Shane Paulger. As national president and founder of the KAP, he led the KAP to 21 per cent of the Queensland vote outside the south-east corner. KAP now has four MPs and a strong base representing rural and regional Australia, agriculture, mining and developmentalism. Australia is a greater nation because of his advocacy.”
“Milton may disagree, but he played a major part, maybe the major part, in the ALP holding onto office in Queensland from Joh Bjelke-Petersen's day until the government fell in 1990. Milton fought tenaciously for the workers. Mount Isa workers are living under the looming threat of closure of its copper smelter right at this very moment. Milton has fought this closure once before and won. I pay him a very fine tribute for achieving what very few in this place will ever achieve. He is strong, determined, tenacious, intelligent and fair. With him, I again will walk with giants. I take very great pleasure in supporting Milton and his work into the future.”
“His great-grandmother's family, the Goughs, built the Excelsior Hotel and the theatre in Charters Towers, which was one of the major town centres in those days. Both those buildings are still standing today. At the time, the businesspeople in Charters Towers—remember, Charters Towers was bigger than Brisbane at this stage—and his family threw all their weight behind the fledgling labour movement. Remember they were rich businesspeople, and they threw their whole weight behind the labour movement, as did my own family. It was a wonderful thing when the businesspeople stood up for miners and those injured and killed in mining accidents. Milton has carried on that tradition. There are many others.”
“The member said she was speaking for young people; I'm speaking for the old people, obviously. I once walked with giants, incredible Australians who proudly and doggedly achieved many great things for our nation. They built roads and dams, created towns and cities and developed our education and healthcare systems. They weren't driven by ego or the ability to make statues of themselves. They were driven by the innate desire to make Australia a great and prosperous nation and for all Australians to benefit from that prosperity. Milton Dick is one of those people. Like many old families in Queensland, his great-great-grandmother, a widow, arrived in Charters Towers in gold-rush times, around 1880. Only a year later, my forebears arrived from places still unknown.”
“Prime Minister, your completion of the Great Inland Way cuts 1,800 kilometres off the round trip to Melbourne, but there are only intermittent connections to Cairns's paradise coast tourism and its 13 per cent of Australia's farm produce. A tunnel would have rescued 400,000 people trapped last month, resulting in four deaths. Brisbane's population is 1.2 million. Its Olympics gets $62 billion. Brisbane tunnel is $36 billion. North Queensland gets nothing. Prime Minister, please give North Queensland diversion of the upper Herbert, the Seymour-Gairloch bridge, the one-kilometre Bridle tunnel and Queensland governments past and present a kick in the head.”
“We crave the indulgence of the people of Australia and the parliament of Australia. We need a tunnel to get out of that captured situation. Infinitely more importantly, we need an upgrading of the roads system from Tully back to Townsville so we can get out that way. Infinitely more importantly, the Prime Minister gave the first monies for the Great Inland Way. That got it started, and there's been $2 billion spent on it since his $28 million. It just needs 10.8 kilometres to get completion so we've got an alternative way out. We need to be able to get back to Townsville, but we need a tunnel at the other end so we can get onto this highway. We've got 500,000 Australians who've had their lives placed in very grave jeopardy. We've lost two—arguably three—lives that we know of already.”
“We have had the worst flooding—maybe in the nation's history—in North Queensland. There are 500,000 people trapped; they have no way of getting out. Helicopters can't get in, planes can't get in and boats can't get in. There is no way you can get off the coastal plain. On one side is the Great Dividing Range—5,000-feet-high mountains—and 30 kilometres away is the Pacific Ocean. There are three roads that are utterly impassable even in good times, and they are utterly impassable now, and we can't get back to Townsville. There is great urgency, and we should haven't to go into a calamity of this nature. We should be prepared for it. Any civilised nation would have looked after the half-a-million people that are there and have been in great jeopardy for the last two weeks.”