You really have to wonder how spectacularly insecure or under-endowed a bloke must be if he chooses to demonstrate his masculinity by shooting a majestic animal such as a giraffe or a hippo.
Yet these are the very people which the self-styled hard man from North Queensland, Bob “No Poofters” Katter, has surrounded himself with as he builds a support base for his fledgling Australia Party.
It is tempting to write Katter off as a harmless nut or an amusing novelty on the political landscape who will never exert any influence over policy. The polls suggest however that his party may poll strongly in his home state at a federal election.
As past election results have shown – the Keating Government being hampered by Western Australian Greens, the Howard Government being reliant on Independent Brian Harradine, the Gillard Government juggling the demands of rural and green independents – the prospect of a tiny number of MPs holding the national agenda to ransom is in no way without precedent.
Katter likes to describe himself as a “frontiersman”. He has affected a strange, Alabama-inspired manner of speech where he says that he is living out on the edges of our vast and daunting continent in the same way that his “pappy and grandpappy” did. He memorably declared some months ago that he would “walk backwards to Bourke” if more than 0.001 per cent of his electorate were, as he likes to put it, poofters. It’s not clear why he was proposing to walk backwards. Perhaps it was to make sure that the poofters didn’t creep up on him and fondle his behind.
For a man oddly fixated on such questions of male identity Katter’s choice of political chums suggests he is something of an enigma, as the blokes he is knocking around with in Queensland have very seriously bent themselves out of shape as they desperately try to prove how macho they are.
Photographs emerged this week of two of Katter’s chief financial and strategic backers posing with the carcasses of African animals they had shot. Katter’s son-in-law, gun dealer Robert Noia, was seen pictured with a scimitar-horned oryx, which is extinct in the wild. Noia has donated $100,000 and office space to the Australia Party, and is also its vice-president.
The oryx which Robert Noia shot was bred in Queensland by a man who wanted to raise a collection of endangered animals to help save the species. Former millionaire Warren Anderson was unable to gain council approval for his plans so he on-sold the animals to a safari park in the Northern Territory which, to his horror, is now giving ponses such as Robert Noia the chance to pay between $50 and $5000 to shoot an oryx in what is laughably described as a “trophy hunt”. And what a hunt it is. As a devastated Warren Anderson told The Australian: “They are shooting my beloved animals. It’s disgusting. These things are in a paddock. You could throw hay out and they would come up to eat it.”
One of Katter’s other big backers is, you guessed it, also a gun dealer. His name is David Auger and he’s the tough guy who was photographed with a giraffe he had just shot dead. As a kindly gesture the Australia Party is sending out free bullets to gun clubs to win their political support.
Katter’s predictable default position is to deride any and all criticism as the whingeing of city-based latte sippers. No amount of latte in the world is as pathetic as the need to prove your toughness by blasting away at an animal that can be hand-fed straw.
Indeed Katter’s entire narrative deserves real scrutiny as he is in a policy sense a galaxy away from the genuine American frontiersmen he so admires, and on whom he likes to model himself. The blokes who opened up America’s west, the libertarian hardliners who today thrive in a state such as Texas, which has no state corporate income tax, are actually at the other end of the ideological spectrum from the likes of Katter.
The former National Party MP is probably the nation’s pre-eminent can-rattler, the definitive agrarian socialist who walked out on the Coalition because it wasn’t handing enough unscrutinised public money to the bush. People such as Katter are the rural equivalent of dole bludgers, who hide their Rolls Royces in the shed when they have a bumper season or when produce prices are high, and demand a special emergency meeting of Federal Cabinet when it rains too much, not enough, or when produce prices fall.
The mythology of Bob Katter is that he just wants government to get out of our lives. The reality is that he yearns for a day when government did everything, when the bush was propped up or unnecessarily lavished by protectionist regimes which made everybody pay more than they needed to for essentials. He is still banging on about the deprivation in the sugar industry which itself was the subject of a very generous $444 million aid package when the Howard Government was in power. That package, framed around a $100 million sugar levy which taxed all of us to the tune of 3 cents a kilogram on sugar, was actually abolished earlier than expected because the price of sugar was so strong during its operation that the suffering forecast by the likes of Katter did not actually materialise.
Hard men? Yeah right. These blokes make us latte-sippers look tough.
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