Bob Katter gave a press conference today, to announce that he may or may not form a new party. In the end, that was hardly the point.
If the independent member for Kennedy was sketchy on the details of his immediate political future, he was as forthright as a charging bull on his concern for the future of the Australian economy, a concern the nation’s leaders appear to have forgotten.
As usual this week, our leaders are banging on about big picture crap. Gillard is flogging her dead horse of a carbon tax, Abbott’s busy telling us the sky is falling under the weight of asylum seekers, while Bob Brown continues to rail against everything except the destruction of the trees he was originally elected to protect.
Amid all the grandstanding and symbolism, the only man who actually talked about the state of the nation was the member for the north Queensland seat of Kennedy. Those quaint rural folk are so naïve, aren’t they?
Katter’s press conference yesterday was quite the show. You could almost hear the 1812 overture in the background.
Looking as though he may burst into tears, or a fit of rage, or both, the hatless Katter unleashed a tirade on the state of the Australian economy, with a particular focus on mining, agriculture and the automotive industries, the latter two of which have experienced staggering declines in recent years and decades.
With a bombastic mix of militaristic language, which included lines like “we have tanks and artillery and ammo ready to go”, Katter did his level best to drag the national dialogue to the place it should be – namely, our collective economic future.
“The future for your kids is to drive dump trucks,” Katter thundered at one point, and while that would currently seem a decent option for the likes of my four year old son who is obsessed with big yellow diggers, it’s fair to say he and his generation might feel differently in years to come.
But they may not have a choice.
As Katter pointed out yesterday, the state of Australia’s primary industries is nowhere near as strong as the majority of us in our comfortably numb suburban torpor would assume.
Katter undermined, excuse the pun, the very foundation of our mining economy. The guts of his argument is that we mine ore and ship it overseas, rather than reaping the profits of mineral processing, which is much more lucrative.
The impending closure of the Xstrata copper smelter in Mt Isa, in the heart of Katter’s electorate, is a case in point.
Katter’s ruddy cheeks grew ruddier, and his righteous sneer yet more righteous, when he talked of the decline of Australia’s automotive industry, which has seen 4,500 workers lose their jobs, as the proportion of home made cars dropped from 86 per cent to 14 per cent in the last two decades.
As for the nation that once rode on the sheep’s back, well now. Didn’t Katter have an eye-opener for us all yesterday.
“In Agriculture, cattle numbers are down 20 per cent; sheep numbers are down 60 per cent, he said.
“We’re closing a sugar mill every two years. The dairy industry – we’ve gone from $3,000 million in exports down to $600 million and soon there won’t be any at all.”
Katter even claimed that in five years, Australia will be a net importer of food, a stat which some say has already happened, even if industry groups say otherwise.
Details are Katter’s stumbling block. His weapon of choice is bluster, not minutiae. On this level, it has to be said he occasionally strays into Pauline Hanson EasyTax territory.
But give the bloke credit for at least talking about some real issues. He may not have a quick fix, but at least he’s trying. Imagine what the other nongs in Canberra might achieve if they got a bit of dirt under their shoes occasionally.
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