Mr KATTER (Kennedy) (12:46): by leave—I will start my speech in the same way that I started An Incredible Race of People: A Passionate History of Australia, a book which I had published and which had moderate success in sales, if I may say so. I agonised on how to start it for nearly three years, and then it suddenly occurred to me how I should start it: I should start it with the history of my own homeland, where my family have lived for 130 years and probably more. All of my life I have been called a blackfella. I take great pride in being identified that way and have identified that way on numerous occasions. We Cloncurry people call ourselves the 'Curry mob', and there is a bit of everything in the family tree. None of us look too black and none of us look too white! I started my history of Australia with a quote from Clarence Waldron, who was a long-time elected chairman of the shire council at Doomadgee. The state officials were up there telling us that we were going to have no more grog: 'You have different laws than the rest of Australia.' We blackfellas have different laws. We are not allowed to drink. Only whitefellas can be trusted to drink. Clarence said: 'You don't come here and say what's what and that's that. This is my land. You don't come here and say what's what and that's that. This is my land.' Kalkadoon is probably a generic name. I think it referred to all the tribes in north-west Queensland. About 130 of us died defending our homeland against the settlers that were coming in. Ironically enough, we were not losers: we took out about 130 of them as well. It does not sound like a lot of people—260 dead people in this war—but that was half of the entire population of the Gulf Country. If you read my book, you will see each of the specific incidents quoted in the book. One of the biggest cattle-owning families in Australia have their main homestead in Davenport, and when I was a kid the gun ports were still there—where you pulled the shutters down, you had a hole to put the guns through. That was in the 1950s. The alcohol issue is an interesting issue. Has there been any single action by government to deal with the causes of alcoholism—anything at all, even just a donation to the local rugby league team? I would settle for that. No, I am not aware of any single act by government. I do not wish to denigrate, because I think both the leader of the Liberal Party and the Leader of the Opposition are very sincere in what they said today, but, as a blackfella, I do not need any more platitudes, fellas. I want some action. We pay great tribute to the Christian churches because most of the useful land that we have—we are supposed to own about 21 per cent of Australia; about seven per cent of it is either desert or national parks, but that still leaves us with 15 per cent. We fought and secured and maintained ownership of 15 per cent of the surface area of Australia, and almost all of that land gets more than 26 inches of rainfall. Most of it, I would argue, gets more than 40 inches of rainfall. So why, as the most land-rich people on earth, are we the poorest people on earth by way of income? I seek leave to table this document. Leave granted. Mr KATTER: This is a map of Australia. Cape York is in red and Victoria is in red. If you have a look at the map, they are both the same size. There are two differences between Cape York and Victoria. Victoria has less than 30 inches of rainfall, and Cape York, which is almost all owned by First Australians, has more than 60 inches of rainfall. So we have twice their rainfall. The other difference is that we have 147,000 head of cattle and they have 4½ million head of cattle. Now, remember, half of Victoria is sheep and wheat, so how come they have got 4½ million head of cattle and we have only got hundred and 47,000 head of cattle? Mr Robert: It's a conspiracy, Bob! Mr KATTER: There was an interjection from a gentleman over there. These are the official figures of the government. They are the ABS figures on cattle populations for Australia; they are not my figures. And as far as the rainfall goes, you can go and check the isohyets chart yourself, if you can figure it out, which you probably cannot, but I will help you out if you want me to. Let me return to my own homeland and the homeland of Clarence Waldron, whom I quoted previously, at Doomadgee. Tony Chong came in to see me, and Chongie said, 'Hey, Bobby, I got one of those blocks.' I said, 'one of those 40,000-acre blocks, Chongie?' He said, 'Yeah.' Chongie is a very handy inside centre in the local football team. I said, 'Have you gone to the bank to get money to buy cattle?' and he said, 'Yeah, and the bank won't give me any money.' I said, 'Why?' and he said, 'They want security.' I said, 'Have you been to the lands department to try to get a title deed to the land?' and he said, 'There's no such thing as a title deed on blackfella land.' I said, 'Well, there's not, Chong,' and he said, 'Well, what about your legislation?' I said, 'My legislation, which was not my legislation—it was your legislation, Chongie; you black blokes drew it up—was overturned in 1992, and there is no mechanism on the books to issue a land title in Queensland.' You cannot get a title deed, so you cannot borrow money from the bank, so you cannot get cattle together. Three days before Christmas I was up there, and I will not mention names in this case, but I said, 'We've got to get title deeds.' One councillor said, 'I don't need it. I've got a thousand head of cattle,' and I said, 'Well, because you're being so stupid as to shoot your mouth off here, I'd say by five o'clock this afternoon there will be action taken to take those cattle off you.' And he said, 'Gungalida man, this is my land. Those are my cattle.' Well, we went to lunch with two of the most prominent people in Doomadgee, and before I even sat down he said, 'We're going to fix that'—and he used a fairly obscene remark which I will not repeat in the chamber—'so-and-so because he said they're his cattle. They're not his cattle; they're Gungalida cattle. They belong to the tribe.' So we will have the usual story of two or three years of in and out with the lawyers all fighting each other as to who owns the cattle, because there is no title deed. There are blokes who get off their backsides and go out there and put a few head together, but no sooner do they do that than they are assailed by, quite frankly, bludgers who want to sit in the town and then say, 'Oh, they're our cattle because they're on our land'—which, in fact, legally, they probably are. For those who doubt what I am saying, I believe that Hernando de Soto Polar should have got the Nobel Prize. It was very controversial that Hernando de Soto Polar, an internationally renowned economist, did not get the Nobel Prize. He should have got that prize for a book called The Mystery of Capital. Piketty has written a very famous book called Capital in the Twenty-First Century, but Hernando de Soto Polar's book has not got anywhere near the publicity. Effectively, it was the study that he had done of Peru, his homeland, and of the Philippines and Egypt—three completely different countries on three different continents, tens of thousands of kilometres away from each other—and it asked: why are they the three poorest countries on earth? He said that the people who actually have a piece of land, which everyone considers to be theirs, cannot get a title deed to that land, so they cannot borrow any money on that land value. He said that in the three countries, unlike in Australia, it is possible to get a title deed, but the average time to get the title deed is seven years and you go through an average of 237 legal processes, for most of which you need a lawyer. I do not want to claim any credit for myself for the Bjelke-Petersen government, because we just said, 'Fellas, we're setting up local government and shire councils. When they're set up, we're going to ask you what you want with this land. At the present moment, officially the Queensland government owns it. We're the trustees, the legal owners, and you're the beneficial owners—sort of like little children. You know, it is like you have a trust and when you turn 21, when you are old and responsible, we will give it to you.' That was the arrangement that existed then and, well, that is the arrangement that exists now, because when those laws were overturned we went back to the bad old days where the government was the legal owner and we poor blackfellas were not really capable of owning our own land. We might be irresponsible with it, so we are not allowed to own our own land like everybody else on the planet. Whilst in Peru and the Philippines and Egypt it takes you nearly seven years and 237 processors to get a title deed issued, our program was developed by Eric Law, one of the most distinguished and greatest Australians still alive today, and Lester Rosendale, from probably the most famous first Australian family in Cape York. Eric Law was headmaster of a school, played Queensland country Rugby League and was effectively head of the department which I was responsible for. He was brought in as a young radical and took over as the head of the department. They probably were more responsible than others for our program, so I mention their names. You walked into the local council chambers in every community area in Queensland, of which there were about 30, asked for an application form, filled out the application form and submitted it to the council. They gave you a photostat copy of it, and the council had two months to deal with it. If they did not deal with it, it went to the local 'tribal elders', for the sake of better words, and a normal magistrate as a sort of court of appeal, if you like. So long as they did not say no then the title deed was issued by the state government. Now by the time we got boundaries sorted out and councils installed we had 3½ years. Mr Roozendaal produced nearly 800 title deeds. In the 26 years since, I would doubt that in Queensland there would have been a dozen title deeds issued. I would doubt whether there were a dozen title deeds issued in the next 27 years! So, in 3½ years there were nearly 800 title deeds and in the next 27 years there were about a dozen. My brother first Australians asked, 'Why?' I said, 'You must understand that every government—the same as the two leaders today—quite genuinely want to issue title deeds. They say, 'Oh, well, we'll develop legislation, Not like the last mob that were in here,' like the ALP or the LNP, or the Bjelke-Petersen government, which is hated by both of them, 'we'll do it properly this time.' I do not know how you can do it properly. We issued a freehold title that was inalienable, and that was what they asked for: inalienable freehold title. It is yours forever, the same as every other person on earth enjoys freehold title—with one small difference: you cannot sell it to outsiders. So if a bloke owes money on his car and he tries to put up his market garden, or his station property or his house at Doomadgee, he is not allowed to do that. So it will not be alienated to outsiders. It will belong to the people of that area forever. Having said those things, I pay tribute to the rich and powerful people of the big cities who have always gone out of their way to help us. Recently, Michael Crouch, Jamie Packer, Andrew Forrest and Dick Smith have tried to deliver. And they have been frustrated by the people in this place. And if you cared, you would be determined to get those title deeds out! A person who was very improperly removed from this place, in my opinion, was Mal Brough. Broughie was only there for six or eight months, whatever it was, and he ran at 100 miles an hour, trying to get title deeds out in the Northern Territory. Whether he did it right or whether he did it wrong, he knew that whether we live or die, we First Australians, depends upon whether we can actually own our own land. And we actually own our own land—all we have, like little children, is that we are beneficiaries of a trust that is controlled by the government. I conclude by saying that we appreciate the candour of the Prime Minister in saying that in most of these areas we are not meeting our targets of closing the gap. Dick Smith and Macca, from Macca on Sundays, went up because Dick had donated $50,000, I think, to put a market garden in on Mornington Island. We have diabetes in epidemic proportions—and diabetes is just another name for malnutrition. The hospital there advised me that two people had died of diabetes in the two weeks before we went up and that there was another person going to die in the next month from diabetes. So that was three deaths in a population of about 300 or 400 people in the space of about six or eight weeks. People like Dick Smith and Macca on Sundays are so concerned that they fly all the way up from Canberra at their own expense to give some money out to try to get market gardens going there. When I was minister, every single community had market gardens which the government inherited from the Christian churches—almost all these centres were missionary stations. They were kept going by almost every community. But to the shame of the Australian people, there is another stain on our soul—like the stain on our soul from the Boer War and the 28,000 women and children murdered in the concentration camps; like us not taking any Jews to this country before the Second World War, when six million of them perished in Europe; or like what we did to the men from Vietnam or to the dairy farmers of Australia—we have closed down by law the market gardens in the Torres Strait. By law! We have told them they cannot have market gardens because disease might come into Australia through the Torres Strait. I do not know what numbskulls run Australia; I fail totally to comprehend the mentality of the people who run, or who purport to run, this country. The boats have been coming down from New Guinea through the Torres Strait to the mainland of Australia for 10,000 years, since the land bridge vanished 10,000 years ago. In fact, on most Torres Strait islands, quite frankly, you can find a few New Guinean people. They call them the 'nonpeople'. They change their names and get social welfare payments et cetera. When I was on a delegation—because I had seen paradise and I never wanted to go back again, but I did—and we went to Yam Island, a person who was not an admirer of mine, Joey Mosby, leapt up and said, 'Bobby, they are murdering us! They are murdering our people. They are murderers! The government of Australia are murderers!' The rest of the delegation asked, 'What's all that about?' I said, 'You've taken their fishing rights from them. They have to get commercial licences to fish properly—commercially—which they cannot get. And you have closed down the market gardens. In fact, you're paying 60 people to go all over the islands to make sure there are no market gardens there.' In conclusion: I just ask, on behalf of my people, just allow us to own our own land. We won the Mabo case. Let me also serve notice that we are going to issue our own title deeds, because the whitefellas are never going to do it. After 27 years with nothing happening, with the brief exception of Mal Brough, nothing has been given to us at all in the way of title deeds. We cannot get the mechanism that Hernando do Soto said we need to be able to progress. We can create $20,000 million worth of value tomorrow if you give us the title deeds. Mr Deputy Speaker Mitchell, thank you very much for the time to make a contribution today.