In North Queensland I met local visionaries with commitment, competence and dedication to a better North. But that was matched, sadly, on the other side of the scale by the incompetence of state and federal governments.
The North is simply waiting for good governance, I hope they get it before it is too late.
Transcript
As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I want to relate my travels through the Flinders catchment area, which is the fourth biggest river flow in Queensland. There is rich soil, vast grassy plains with no trees and water: abundant water, regular water yet untapped. The potential is being wasted. I felt excited, supported, encouraged and inspired by the people I met in North Queensland, but I also felt worried and disappointed because of the atrocious state and federal governments that are cruelling that area. My needs in the people were met entirely: commitment, competence, dedication. But that was matched, sadly, on the other side of the scale by the inability of the state and federal governments to meet their needs for support and good governance.
We went to look firstly at the Bradfield Scheme, to do our due diligence. We’ve done it at the Murray-Darling Basin; now we’ve done it in the Flinders. The Bradfield Scheme is a visionary scheme to turn the waters that are flowing to the east and being wasted to the west and into the Thomson. We wanted to look at the Murray-Darling Basin catchment, which we have, and also at the Flinders, and this was a chance to see the Bradfield Scheme source and then to go across the Flinders. What we saw flying up the coast was naturally wet area in the tropics, the coast, Ingham and Tully. We then swung west over the Tully midstream and all the way down the Burdekin River to the Burdekin Falls Dam. We then turned west and went back across the Flinders catchment area, through Charters Towers, Hughenden, Richmond, Julia Creek, Cloncurry. We touched down in Cloncurry to fuel and then went north to Normanton, where there are huge vast plains, and then back south-west to Townsville where we started.
We then spent a week driving on the ground, listening to people, getting the lay of the land and the lay of the people. What impressed us were the locals with vision, real vision, complemented by their energy, their knowledge, their competence and their practicality. It was very inspiring, as I’ve already said. And there was plenty of water. They all said: ‘We don’t need the Bradfield Scheme water here. Let it go to the Thomson, as the original visionary plan from Bradfield suggested.’
In particular, I was impressed with the Richmond council; John Wharton, who is I think Queensland’s longest serving mayor—25 years if my memory is correct; and his very young but very competent CEO, Peter Bennett. They have a plan and a project that the locals are onboard with, called the Richmond agricultural project. It’s very simple: no dams, just divert water to 8,000 hectares of irrigable and rich, fertile soil. With agricultural production comes people and with people come services. Instead of Richmond bobbing around at 900 people, we can get it back up to 3,000, maybe even 8,000, people. It could be a really vibrant area in the north.
We also visited Hughenden, where the same recipe is being followed: water captured not in a dam but in weirs and diverted into storage areas or underground water. We saw Jane McNamara leading her team there; and Daryl Buckingham, who’s had experience in the Murray-Darling Basin and who’s transferring it to the north. We also visited HIPCo, Hughenden Irrigation Project Corporation, with Shane McCarthy. The council sponsored projects there, as I said, follow the same recipe.
We then went to Julia Creek on the ground, and we went to Etta Plains where we saw a very dynamic young Lucas Findley from Findley farms escaping the Murray-Darling Basin and the devastation of the regulations, the bureaucracy and the poor governance in the south. And we saw something fresh.
I could go on, but time will catch me here. What they’re all waiting for is good governance, which the state government and the federal government are not providing. The state government won’t allocate water allocations. They can’t do anything without that.
Ironically, the state government talks about capturing carbon dioxide, which the evidence shows is not necessary, but crops absorb carbon dioxide, and dams create crops that will absorb carbon dioxide. If they were fair dinkum, they’d do it. Ironically, the challenges up north are land tenure, water and energy. While they’re looking for it up north and have it in abundance, they can’t use it, because the same policies are destroying governance in the south.
https://img.youtube.com/vi/kOgk4q2TyKM/hqdefault.jpg360480Senator Malcolm Robertshttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSenator Malcolm Roberts2021-05-12 11:15:452021-05-12 11:15:53Northern Australia left behind by terrible government
Despite huge potential Northern Australia continues to suffer.
Senator Roberts states that it is ironic that the issues that need addressing to facilitate development in the north are systematically being dismantled in the south due to atrocious federal and state governance.
“While witnesses from all corners of Northern Australia were unanimous in the issues facing living in the north: prohibitively high electricity and water costs; land tenure; housing; high cost of living; provision of high-quality health and education services, insurance and livability, it is the underlying root cause of poor governance that is the focus of Senator Roberts’ dissenting report.
“The White Paper for Developing Northern Australia published in 2015 calls for stronger governance by 2035, yet since 2015 poor governance continues to prevail and is choking our nation,” added Senator Roberts.
“People, their talents and resources are being suffocated under a stifling morass of bureaucracy inherent in the interference, overlap and duplication of government agencies.
“Australia’s aboriginal communities have for decades suffered under misguided patronising policies that have removed all control, self-determination and responsibility to help their communities flourish.
“While I do not support racially-based policies, I do support policies that reflect the needs of communities, whether they be black or white,” he said.
The Northern Australia Agenda committee travelled widely and listened to an exceptional array of witness statements and it is vital that the government listen to them.
“Instead of the hollow lip service of let’s grow northern Australia with a pot of money out of reach of those who need it, politicians need to get serious about addressing the underlying root cause of poor governance across our nation.
“Development in the north is painfully slow and at this rate is going nowhere fast,” he said.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/image/4859458-3x2-940x627.jpg627940Senator Malcolm Robertshttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSenator Malcolm Roberts2021-05-11 18:09:032021-05-11 18:11:29PRESS RELEASE: Northern Australia development is going nowhere fast
[Marcus] Malcolm Roberts, good morning to you, Malcolm?
[Malcolm] Good morning, Marcus, how are you doing?
[Marcus] I’m okay. First thing first. I wanna play you something back from a couple of weeks ago when you and I had a discussion on this radio programme, are you ready?
[Malcolm] Yes, I am.
[Marcus] Okay.
[Malcolm] Trump is in the box seat, he knows what he’s doing.
[Marcus] All right, you wanna bet me a bottle of wine on this? Australian wine.
[Malcolm] I definitely do but not yet, I’m very happy to send you a bottle of Stanthorpe wine if you win, but Trump is still in the box seat, mate.
[Marcus] Oh, Malcolm.
[Malcolm] Trump is coming home.
[Marcus] Hang on, Malcolm, Malcolm, Malcolm. No he’s not in the box seat.
[Malcolm] Yes, I haven’t seen the other, any headlines tonight, but he has got a process in play that’s been done before in the United States, it’s been upholding the constitution, it’s all proven and that’s underway and it will be unfolding in the next few weeks.
[Malcolm] I’m serious, Marcus.
[Marcus] I know you are, that’s the worry.
[Malcolm] I love the bet but I’m serious.
[Marcus] All right, let’s get on to some other issues. The Northern Australian agenda, the Torres Straits, Horn Island, Thursday Islands, Senate Select Committees on the Government’s agenda for Northern Australia in a nutshell, not going anywhere and deeply disappointing. What are the issues preventing development in Northern Australia, Malcolm?
[Malcolm] Have a listen to these, energy prices, property rights and land tenures, infrastructure, water, transport, telecommunications, a hopeless jumble of government services, all three layers of the government that’s state, federal, and local are not working together, there’s massive duplication, massive waste, huge gaps in service delivery. Now those things are occurring right throughout Australia.
And so how can we expect a development of productive capacity here in the North where there’s low population and lack of infrastructure, when the Southern areas of New South Wales, the rest of our country are being gutted by the same things, the destruction of productive capacity. And so what we’re really seeing up here, I mean, you, you’ve got problems in New South Wales I understand with ferries and trains that are built overseas and we have the same.
In Brisbane Queensland, we’ve had trains built overseas by both the liberal and labour governments in the past, they’ve come here with faults in them that had to be fixed. We have the ability, we just have lost the productive capacity because our governments, state and federal have destroyed that productive capacity.
[Marcus] I heard something, yeah, sorry, Malcolm, I heard something really interesting yesterday. In Victoria, and I know that Dan Andrews has copped a fair bit this year, trying to keep his constituents safe, but in Victoria to their credit, they have public transports, whether it’s buses, various trams, whatever, running around saying, “Proudly manufactured in Victoria.” Why is it that in Victoria, they can make their trams and their trains and their public transport infrastructure there but in New South Wales, in Queensland, we cannot.
[Malcolm] Well, I wonder how old those trams are because you know, our productive capacity is being destroyed over the last few decades, Marcus and I just wonder how long, how old those trams are. They still got the ability to make those trams? I don’t know. And you know, Victoria lost the Ford production facilities for cars, they’ve lost the Toyota production facility for cars, had lost various General Motors facilities, we haven’t got that productive capacity anymore. And so Victoria has done a very bad job.
Victoria has shut down it’s large power stations, which now make it vulnerable and dependent on New South Wales. I mean, this is a mess, our whole country and it’s a security issue, and it is a dead set security issue.
[Marcus] JobSeeker, my understanding from some stories floating around this morning, again, JobSeeker is blown out. In relation to costs, it’s gonna cost our economy billions of dollars more. I don’t know who’s doing the maths or the accounting treasury, but again, we see that job seekers, JobSeeker, the federal government’s plans through COVID 19 will end up costing more in the longer term.
[Malcolm] One of the things we have to start facing is the reality that state and federal governments have made a mess of the coronavirus, real mess of the way they’ve handled it. And I’ll give you some examples about JobSeeker in a minute up here in Queensland and especially in the North. But you know, Taiwan, Marcus have done by far the best job in the world, they’ve had no decrease in their economy, they’re bubbling along at the same rate as normal.
Our economy has been smashed and same with most economies. Taiwan, what they’ve done is they’ve tested people rigorously, they’ve traced people and they’ve quarantined people. They have isolated the sick and the vulnerable. We have shut down everyone. I mean, that is not the way you handle a pandemic. Now, initially, because it looks so bad because remember the people dying in Italy, we had to do something like that.
So we said to the government, “There is your open cheque, “just go for it, “do whatever you want.” That’s what we need to do when under such a crisis. When we realised, and we, but we said to them, “We’ll come looking for you “and holding you accountable,” when we realised that it wasn’t as bad as thought and then the total number of deaths in many countries around the world has not increased, the age deaths in Australia is lower than in the past years, so the total deaths have not increased, it’s not been what we’ve, what we were afraid of and that’s welcome news, the government hasn’t changed the tact.
And we’re still locked where we were until very recently locking down people. And we’re now, the coronavirus is still out there, we haven’t got a plan for managing the damn thing, and we’re still being managed by the Coronavirus. Victoria is still doing that. So what we have to do is actually look at what’s going on and come up with the plan. Never has the state or any federal government come up with the plan, never.
[Marcus] All right, the UK Climate Ambition Summit, we know that Scott Morrison was refused, well, basically, our nation is in the cold and all of these summits, you and I will disagree on the reasons why we’ve been cheating our way through our Kyoto agreements now for all- God, probably the best part of the last decade. But you and I differ on this, but just your thoughts on it.
[Malcolm] Well, it’s just another gabfest. The fortunate thing is that unlike all the other gabfests, there isn’t a huge transport demand pushing all these leaders together and producing carbon dioxide, which I know is got no problem, but they’re producing a hell of a lot of carbon dioxide to get to where they’re going and nothing comes out of it of any good.
And what we see is the United Nations pressuring nations to increase their carbon dioxide cast, which is insane, there’s no data to drive that, and Scott Morrison is now being pushed, and I think he’s relented and he is no longer going to use the Kyoto credits, that John Howard, stole, John Howard’s government, stole these credits, stole farmers’ property rights to get those credits, now we’re not even gonna use them. So we’ve got farmers owed somewhere between a hundred and $200 billion worth of compensation, or we need a restoration of their property rights right around the country.
[Marcus] Yeah.
[Malcolm] And so what we’re seeing is that the UN drove that stupidity from John Howard’s government, drove the state government in New South Wales and Queensland in particular to decimate their farmers, no compensation paid, and now we can’t even use them?
I mean, this is insane. And China’s commitment under these UN agreements is zero. They will continue in not only at their current levels of carbon dioxide output, they will continue increasing them. And so what they’ve got is their productive capacity continuing to grow by using our coals for their steel in the construction
[Marcus] Well I don’t know whether they’re gonna use, they’re going to use our coal considering what we’ve heard in the last week, Malcolm?
[Malcolm] Well, I think they will have to get back to it because they use coal for power generation, which is thermal coal exports. They’re about half of Japan’s intake of coal from Australia. Japan buys about almost $10 billion worth of coal from Australia, thermal coal for power stations, and China only buys 4 billion, but the key is in the metallurgical coal exports from Australia.
India has, buys $10 billion worth of coal, China just a fraction under that 9.7, Japan $7.4 billion worth. China needs our coal because our metallurgical coal for steel-making markets is the best in the world.
[Marcus] All right, I just want to move on to trade with China. It’s not getting any better, you know, we know that we’ve got a number of tariffs and a number of blockades if you like placed or put in place by Beijing, we’ve got Barley exports, we’ve got tariffs on other major exports including now, as I mentioned just before, the possibility that our coal will sit idle off the coast of China and not be allowed into the country. When is it gonna stop and what can we do about it, it’s not getting any better?
The reason China is picking on us I believe is that we have been very, very weak to ourselves. I’m not talking about standing up to China anyway, I’m talking about the Chinese are a totalitarian dictatorship, they are bullies. They’re being very subtle in the way they’re bringing people into the fold around the countries, through their belts and roads initiative, which Victoria has signed up to.
But what they can’t see, a bully always picks on the weakest first and the most vulnerable. Now China sees Australia as being allied with the United States. But China also sees Australia wrecking our own productive capacity. They see Australia kowtowing to UN agreements, ceding our sovereignty, giving up the control of our resources, the control of our productive capacity in this country.
China has said to the UN, “To hell with you lot, “we are going to continue our industrialization, we are ceding our jobs. we’re actually sending our jobs to China as we destroy our productive capacity. The Chinese also see us exporting coal and burning coal at very high cost in this country because of artificially inflated regulations that have destroyed the price of coal in this country, coal fired power.
And so what China is saying is we’re destroying ourselves. We’re subsidising the Chinese to build expensive renewable energy, solar, and wind in this country, which is destroying our electricity network even more, and then we’re seeing, they’re seeing us see that and they’re saying, “These people are contradicting “their own sovereignty, “they’re destroying their own values. “These people don’t know “what the hell they’re doing. “They have weakened their right.” And that’s what they’re doing. They’re sending us a very strong signal, “Get your house in order.”
[Marcus] And the human face of this, of course, 66 ships, 500 million to a billion dollars worth of coal currently sitting idle. We’ve got a thousand seafarers stuck out there. I mean, they’ve got families but hopefully, there’ll be some sort of a breakthrough. We need cool heads to prevail and I mean, I see, I tend to agree with you Malcolm, I can see, I can’t see China holding out for much longer.
[Malcolm] You know, it’s a very good point you’ve raised though the human face of it, but it’s true, but they’re not players in the trade dispute, the victims. Many haven’t been allowed to disembark apparently for about 20 months due to COVID, Marcus I think and the maximum time legally for seamen to be at sea is 11 months. The situation is deteriorating apparently for physically and mentally for these people.
There’s a limited supply of food and medicines and so, yeah, good on you for bringing up the human aspect. These people are caught in the middle and they’ve done nothing wrong.
[Marcus] All right, just wanna finish with lobster seafood. I mean, that’s how I plan on, well, look, to be honest, I plan on washing down a bit of lobster and a couple of prawns and some crab over Christmas with the wine you’re going to send me, but tell me, how can we help out our rock lobster industry?
[Malcolm] Marcus, the election date will be settled when the vice president, Mike Pence selects the candidate, selects the votes in
[Marcus] All right, so
[Malcolm] On January 6th
[Marcus] I’ll be having
[Malcolm] That will be A new year celebration
[Marcus] A new year one I like it, fair enough. All right, but let’s talk lobsters, mate.
[Malcolm] Yes, it was predicted that customers would eat more than 35 tonnes of lobster this year compared to just six and a half tonnes in the previous year. But now apparently, you need to get in early, there’s a limit of four per person I’ve been told. They’re now a bargain at $20 each because the Chinese are not taking our lobsters, so what we’re saying is get into the lobsters and go for it. Now I’m not a lobster fan, I prefer the Queensland mud crab, best seafood you can get,
[Marcus] Fair enough.
[Malcolm] But that’s my deal, but yeah, grab, go for the lobsters and wash it down with some Hunter Valley wine or some Stanthorpe wine from Queensland and enjoy your Christmas.
[Marcus] And shop Australian over Christmas too. And that’s something that Pauline and I talked about on the programme on Tuesday, we need to ensure that we buy up as much Australian wine as much Australian seafood and beef and support Australian industries during this time.
[Malcolm] So right, thank you very much for, for reminding us of that, Marcus. And I’d like to wish you and your family a very Merry Christmas and happy new year
[Marcus] Thank you.
[Malcolm] And the same to all your team, Justin and everyone, and all your listeners, a very happy new year and a very Merry Christmas.
[Marcus] You too, mate. We’ll talk again in 2021, we’ll finally settle the issue of Trump V Biden and I look forward to, I dunno a case or a bottle of something from you Malcolm.
[Malcolm] If Mike Pence goes away, I think he will and the constitutional precedence then I think you’ll be sending me a bottle of the wine, mate but if I’m wrong, I’ll be very happy to send it to you.
[Marcus] All right, mate, great to chat to you. Thank you so much for your time this year, we’ll catch up again in 2021.
[Malcolm] Look forward to it, thanks very much, Marcus and Merry Christmas.
[Marcus] All right, you too, mate. There he is, Malcolm Roberts, One Nation Senator, and look obviously, you know, me and a number of my listeners don’t always agree with everything Malcolm comes up with. But he does talk sense on, I think when it comes to things like industrial relations, reform, our trade issue with China and all these sort of stuff. I think he’s a little more moderate on that than say Scomo and his mob are, and I just enjoy Malcolm, my chats with him. We, we’re not always gonna agree. But gee that wine, will taste nice.
http://i3.ytimg.com/vi/zivEECI4_IU/maxresdefault.jpg7201280Senator Malcolm Robertshttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSenator Malcolm Roberts2020-12-18 11:49:422020-12-18 11:49:50North Australia Gutted by Government Mess
