Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2025-2026
Mr KATTER (Kennedy) (13:24): As an Australian, I tell a very sad tale. Our national anthem says 'Advance Australia fair'. All I can say is: we've advanced Australia rear—backwards.
The greatest and most dramatic economic disaster outside of the Great Depression—and the mistake that was made there was not listening to Ted Theodore. If he'd been listened to, we'd have had no depression in Australia. Set that aside.
The greatest disaster ever in the nation's history was when Paul Keating, then a minister in the Labor government, said, 'We in the ALP never get rid of jobs. We'll never, ever do that.' The timber industry in North Queensland was closed down by Graham Richardson. The wool industry was closed down by Paul Keating.
Some 70,000 hardworking shearers, roustabouts and other people working in the wool industry lost their jobs. They were living in small towns in Australia, their houses were worth nothing, they were bankrupted and a lot of them ended their lives in the most terrible way. Who was that attributable to?
Totally the Labor Party and Paul Keating. There's the cattle industry. If you're in the Liberal Party or the National Party and you're saying, 'Yeah, the big bad ALP did that,' well, hold on a minute.
Your leader advocated a total ban on all live animal exports, and, in fairness to her, she still does. I saw her on television the other night, and she said, 'I don't resile from my principles, and I will not abandon my own personal principles. But that's not the party, and I'm the leader of the party, so I will be subject to that.' She's still in favour of banning all live exports.
Now, when live exports were banned by mistake—and I respect and I like Julia Gillard, the then prime minister, but she made a very bad mistake. She realised her mistake and, in fairness to her, two weeks later reversed the decision. Well, you don't go telling a country of nearly 300 million people, 'We'll give it to you now, we'll turn it off tomorrow and we'll turn it back on.' No, that does not happen.
They quite rightly said, 'No, you turned the tap off and it will be left off.' I could clearly see that there were only two votes in this parliament. If I made a move—that was one of the two votes—I could get rid of Julia Gillard, which I hated to do because she's a very nice person, and put Kevin Rudd in her place. So I called a press conference for 10 o'clock that morning, much to the screaming abuse of my staff because they said I was committing political suicide.
I didn't think that I was, but, as it turned out, yes, I went from 72 per cent two-party preferred down to 52 per cent for what I did. But, in this place, surely you've got to do the right thing. Ted Theodore's picture is on my wall.
He knew that he was destroying himself by saying, 'You have to spend money in a depression to work your way out of a depression.' He was torn to pieces and he was completely destroyed. He walked into his grave with his eyes open. That's probably why he's the greatest man in Australian history.
I didn't say that; Malcolm Fraser said that. I didn't say that; Paul Keating said that. I disagree with those two blokes on just about everything but not on that.
Let me move on. The Liberal leader wants live animal exports banned. When the cattle export industry was banned, the price dropped more than clean in half.
There were a thousand Wandilla cows that went for a dollar a head. They'd been $200 a head the year before. We got the cattle market reopened, and I must put on the public record my praise for the Prime Minister—and I'd played a role in putting him back in there.
Within nine days he was in Indonesia, because it wasn't just the live cattle decision; it was throwing dung beetles at our nearest neighbour, with one of the biggest populations on Earth— (Time expired)