Bob Katter

Reading the entrails of the Labor carcass in Queensland will no doubt keep an army of commentators and party strategists occupied for some time. This was not a simple routing, or another “they’ve been there too long” swing. It was something new altogether.

It wasn’t merely a large number of swinging voters deciding they wanted a change of Government. The magnitude of the swing points to a desertion by Labor’s true believers.

While the fact they fled their party is interesting, more interesting perhaps is where those disenchanted dyed-in the-wool Labor folk went.

Continue reading "ALP evacuees have no love for The Greens" »

Bob Katter once stated with certainty that there were no homosexuals in Far North Queensland. He even promised to walk backwards from Bourke if there were.

By Katter’s logic (if only there were a handy guidebook) even if Campbell Newman’s top priority should he win the election was to rush gay marriage through the parliament, no one in Bob’s neck of the woods would feel compelled to take advantage of it.

Ipso facto - “family values” would remain unmolested and we can all just carry on as we were.

Continue reading "Why’s Bob Katter so worried?" »

Last week The Punch published this piece which is critical of Federal MP Bob Katter and his financial backers, who had been photographed posing with ‘extinct in the wild’ and exotic animals, including a giraffe. This is a response to that article.

My name is Keith Drain, I am a hunter and shooter, I run www.huntandshoot.com.au, a hunting and shooting news website. I am 27 years old, I have a beautiful wife and I work as a manager at a cinema. If you met me you’d think I was a regular guy - that’s because I am.

Like many others, I was introduced to shooting and fishing by my Dad. Hunting to me is an enjoyable and rewarding pastime. I get to go out and do what I love doing, I get to provide meat for my family and my dogs and I get to help the environment by ridding the land of feral and introduced species, which to me is very important.  I have no shame in owning firearms or hunting.

Continue reading "Hunting and killing exotic animals can help save them" »

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.

Continue reading "Hard men? My latte is harder than Bob Katter" »

Federal MP Bob Katter is a throw-back nutjob bunker-mentality troglodyte. Well, we’ve known that for a while. But this just in: His close associates and financial backers are gun-toting redneck heartless bastards with a slimy influence on politics.

Today’s Australian unravels the ties between Katter’s backers and the gun lobby.  Including trophy pics of the financial powers behind Katter’s Australian Party with the exotic animals they’ve shot. Including a rare scimitar-horned oryx – officially extinct in the wild – and there’s also the above picture of David Auger, another financial backer, posing with a dead giraffe which, according to The Oz, he has shot.

What kind of fuckwit shoots a giraffe? Or a hippo?

Continue reading "Crazy Bob Katter and his moronic gunfreak mates" »

If you’re like me, you’ve been wondering with trepidation what will happen when the Gaypocalypse finally strikes.

Are fudge-packers, nancy-boys, and pillow-biters all names for the same thing, or do they signify a hierarchy of types and sizes, like orcs? Which are most dangerous? And where do the Poohole Pirates come in? Are they like the Men of Harad?

What about elephants? Will there be elephants? Will they be pink? Will we be forced to toil in underground sequin mines while Freddy Mercury lashes us with moustachioed falsetto arpeggios? And dear God, why didn’t we listen to Fred Nile?

Continue reading "Logic eats the gay marriage scaremongers for breakfast" »

According to Bob Katter on ABC’s Q&A last Monday night, stopping the live export of cattle to Indonesia would add three million people to the 80 million Indonesians who currently go to bed hungry. According to Katter, stopping the trade was cutting off the protein food supply to three million people. Nobody disputed this.

Katter blamed Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA) for not fixing the cruelty problem. He asserted that the cattle producers who had phoned and abused him didn’t know their animals were being treated this way.

It’s a pity we don’t have the equivalent of a driving test for politicians. Something to verify that they have basic numeracy skills before they can stand for Parliament. I’m not too concerned about literasy, what harm duz a few misspelled wurds do anyway? But get the numbers wrong and all kinds of stupid decisions are made.

Continue reading "Katter can’t count, but there are meatier issues at stake" »

Q. What is the Australian Party? A. The Australian Party is a new Federal and Queensland State political party established by the Federal Member for Kennedy, Bob Katter.

Q. Is it a personality cult?

A. No. A cult would require more than one member.

Continue reading "FAQs: Bob Katter’s Australian Party" »

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.

Continue reading "If this hatter’s mad then invite me to the party" »

There was a moment in last night’s brilliant episode of 4 Corners that might have undermined Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott’s argument the whole filming exercise was about posterity.

As the deliberations over the hung parliament arrived at absolute crunch time Bob Katter got uncomfortable with the ABC camera and said he would rather the crew left the office where he was meeting with his fellow regional independents.

But Windsor and Oakeshott had other ideas. You can watch the whole episode here.

Continue reading "Recording a moment in history or self indulgence?" »

After a bruising election campaign and an outbreak of acrimony over forming government and the Speaker and Deputy Speaker, MPs and Senators combined yesterday for what looked like a cross between high colonial ceremony and a day of awkward team-building exercises.

“Parliament: the day in pictures” isn’t always a theme for the most compelling set of images, which underlines just how hard the political photographers have to work to get something interesting to illustrate the news. But the pictures from yesterday’s opening of the 43rd Parliament merit it. Just take the first shot above of the new member for Bennelong, John Alexander, being sworn in with his mascot the youngest MP ever elected, the new member for Longman, Wyatt Roy.

Below are some of the other choice shots from News Ltd photographers Ray Strange, Gary Ramage and Kym Smith from around Parliament House yesterday. They’re numbered for easy reference so you can add your captions and quote suggestions in the comments below.

Continue reading "Parliament opening day photos: your commentary" »

MONDAY 06/09/10

6:00am

Mobile rings. Gravelly voice says “It’s the devil”. Ask Bill Heffernan why he is calling at such an ungodly hour? Bill shocked I guessed it was him. Remind Bill he’s called me before and that picture of the devil comes up when he calls.

Ask Bill why he still does this?

Heffernan says he can’t help being a prankster. AND has had a lot of time on his hands since the Kirby ‘prank’.

Bill has never been funny.

Lunchtime

Joyce charges into office, demands $1 billion for veterinary hospital in his electorate. Slams signed declaration on desk that states he will not support Coalition if demand isn’t met. Ask Joyce who he will support.

Continue reading "Diary of a Liberal Frontbencher: End game" »

While Tony Abbott managed to resurrect the Coalition from its electoral death bed, to come so close and not seal the deal leads to questions of how the Coalition ultimately failed.

Here’s five things that they stuffed up in their bid to form Government:

1. Broadband:

Tony Windsor said this was critical in his decision to back Labor. The Coalition’s decision to spike the National Broadband Network policy in its entirety is questionable, but it was compounded by Abbott’s almost wilful ignorance of the issue during the campaign.

Continue reading "5 reasons Abbott didn’t seal the deal" »

Just when it looked like the prospect of a hung Parliament had taken us to a new paradigm of political discourse, where nice trumps nasty and diversity of opinion is respected, the public has sent a clear message: enough already!

After railing against stage-managed elections, two weeks of introspection and pandering to the wishes of non-aligned members has the public calling for a recommencement of hostilities.

According to this week’s Essential Report, a majority of voters want a new election – and even more (70 per cent) believe a new poll is inevitable.

Continue reading "10 reasons we want to go back to the polls" »

A hung parliament is a golden opportunity for serious reform. The independents should not waste their extraordinary power on ephemeral trivia such as the black holes issue. (This is essentially about whether Treasury’s long term predictions are reliable. They are not.)

They should do something for which they will be immortalised in the nation’s pantheon. They should propose fundamental reform to our system of government, making it more democratic.

Why do the people have to wait three or four years to pass judgement on a failed government?  Why shouldn’t they block a law they do not like?

Continue reading "Trivial independents miss chance at making history" »

There are many of us who happily whiled away our youth reading those terrific Choose Your Own Adventure books where by thumbing through to different pages, you could select from a variety of endings.

They were swashbuckling tales involving shady figures, sinister conspiracies, acts of trickery, magic and deceit - pretty much like the 2010 federal election.

Now entering its third week, this campaign has been even more fantastic than anything the authors of those adolescent adventures could have dreamed up. It’s often been just as juvenile.

Continue reading "Choose your own election: come with me to Acapulco" »

Those delegates from Labor and the Coalition who are hoping to win over Bob Katter ought to make sure they enter his personal space equipped not just with mouthguard and groin protection but a powerful sense of the past.

Nothing matters more to Katter than history. It is the key to his heart. He speaks of events that happened more than a century ago as though they occurred only yesterday – and as if he himself was there.

Katter talks of two photographs that hang in the Civic Club in his hometown of Charters Towers, in the Queensland hinterland. “One is of the mine managers in 1899 in Charters Towers,” he says. “They’re all there in their hats and three-piece suits and gold fob pocket watches. Those bastards drove us down in the mines and one in 31 of us never came back up again.” Us.

Continue reading "Troglodyte is not an insult: inside the mind of Bob Katter" »

This afternoon The Punch has obtained a new list of demands from the three men that hold the nation’s government in their hands:

Dear Ms Gillard and Mr Abbott,

We three independents, Rob Oakeshott, Bob Katter and Tony Windsor, who are now officially acting on behalf of every Australian voter have been impressed with the progress made in negotiations to form a Government thus far, but have decided our initial seven point plan was lacking some flair. In that spirit we demand the following in for the sake of Australian democracy: 

1. Bob Katter wants a new pony and a lone ranger outfit

Continue reading "10 new demands from the three independents" »

In yet another extraordinary exclusive, Joe Hildebrand has obtained tapes of Julia Gillard’s meetings with a key independent MP whose support she needs to form Government…

PA: Prime Minister, Mr Katter here to see you.

JULIA: Oh hello Bob, come in. Do you mind if I ask you to remove your hat?

BOB: What hat?

Continue reading "Revealed! The secret Bob and Julia tapes" »

A new election will cost the taxpayers about $170 million. It’s a small price to pay for stability, which is something neither side will be able to deliver as a result of the seemingly insurmountable impasse created by Saturday’s mad result.

Governments are meant to operate in the national interest. The biggest worry about the current deadlock is that any balanced sense of national priorities will be compromised, as the party which forms government evaluates every major policy on the basis of what’s in it for Tamworth, Port Macquarie and whichever part of the planet Bob Katter hails from.

The last time we saw this distortion of public policy was in the late 1990s when Independent Senator Brian Harradine held the balance of power, and his home state of Tasmania was showered with extravagant telecommunications riches by the Coalition to buy his support for the Telstra sale.

Continue reading "We don’t need new politics, we just need a new election" »

Meet Jackie Healy Rae. If Irish politics has a Bob Katter, it’s him. Like the member for Kennedy, he’s a rural independent and disaffected former member of an established party, who trades on his commitment to fighting for the peculiar concerns of his local constituents.

The parallels between Katter now and Healy Rae when he was first elected are as striking as their respective signature hats. The 1997 Irish general election produced a hung parliament in which the conservative coalition fell just short of a majority. Healy Rae was one of three independents who agreed to put old enmities aside and support the government in parliament. In return he extracted concessions for his constituents.

On the surface it’s all standard horse-trading, but there’s a murkier side that would be unwelcome in the Australian context. It has never been precisely clear what Healy Rae was promised in return for his support. And since 2007 Healy Rae has been propping up his old party again, under a deal which he openly says is none of the public’s business, thank you very much.

Continue reading "Heard the one about the Irish MP who promised stability?" »

Someone forgot to tell Julia Gillard yesterday that the ballot boxes have closed.

The Prime Minister gave a long press conference in which she made a pitch to the three men who could decide who forms government, Independents Bob Katter, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott. The problem is, it sounded a lot like the pitch she’s been making to voters every day for the past five weeks.

What both she and Tony Abbott need to realise is that the slogans they repeated with mind-numbing intensity during the campaign are part of the reason we’ve ended up with with a hung parliament.

Continue reading "Cut the crap, independents tell Gillard and Abbott" »

Independent Bob Katter, the Member for Kennedy, has saved us from advertising mediocrity with this US-style campaign for re-election.

(Thanks to Chris Uhlmann for pointing it out just now on ABC News24).

Katter has thrown down the gauntlet. The rest of them have two and a half weeks to take up the challenge.