Mr KATTER (Kennedy) (12:59): I applaud the last speaker. As I understand it, she and the other crossbenchers are moving to introduce legislation to ensure that all government vehicles in metropolitan areas will be electric. It's a very simple measure, and yet it will result in a massive reduction in CO2. All buses in metropolitan areas will be electric. Both the motor vehicles and the buses will be made in Australia by Australian owned companies, by law. So you people will not have the right to go and flog off every single asset in this nation to foreigners and to send all of our secondary industry jobs and our primary industry jobs overseas. The three great elements of the Australian primary industries are cattle, wool and grains. Grains have remained alright. Cattle numbers are down 25 per cent, and sheep numbers are down 72 per cent. Most of the station properties out there are simply empty. As the previous speaker said, if you expended some money in actually sending a little bit of water from the massive flooding of the Clarence River out west then there wouldn't be the massive flooding. In my area, which has massive flooding every year, 100-inch rainfall, a little tiny bit of that water going out west will stop your fires, your droughts and your floods out west, because there'll be dams out west, so we won't have the massive flooding out of there either. If you do that, you also overcome the massive problem of invasive weeds. In my electorate, some 12 million hectares—and that is an old figure; it's 10 years old—in fact, it's probably about 15 or 16 million hectares now, of invasive weed has destroyed all natural fauna and flora. But this is about cost of living. With all due respect, taking some money off people over here and giving it to people over there does not address the cost of living. Whether you're taking it off future generations of Australians through borrowing or taking it off existing taxpayers, it's got to come from somewhere. If you're subsidising various cost-of-living items and if you are cutting down the tax on petrol, clearly, some people are paying less, and some people are having more money taken off them. Let me be very specific, because I need an institute to cooperate with us here. We do not have the resources to do this properly, but we have discovered this. I will use 1990 as a take-off point because Paul Keating had seized control of Australia by the mid-1980s and had fired up his free market policies, which were brought to a flowering and fruition by Mr Costello. The hypocrisy of those two men in stating they were free marketeers, when both of them—and I praise them—allowed the dollar to float. When the dollar floated, it went from 90c to 100c and floated down to 49c or 50c. It dropped clean in half when it was allowed to free float. Both of them had a fit of terror and propped it back up to the 90c to 100c range, thus cheating the farmers out of half of their income, cheating the workers in the factories that produced our motor cars. They took away their jobs and sent their industry overseas. The clothing manufacturing of all underwear was done by Bonds in Australia. The whole of the industry just rolled a swag and left for overseas. Let me quote the head of Toyota in Australia: 'Unless Australia is prepared to join the free market systems of other countries in allowing the dollar to free float, then Toyota will have to leave Australia. We are the last car manufacturer, and when we leave there will no motor vehicle manufacturing in Australia,' and effectively no secondary industry in Australia. We can't produce a tyre, let alone a motor car. Let me return to food. The cost of food in 1990—by the way, that was the year in which the much-maligned but quite brilliant and extraordinary government of Bjelke-Petersen fell—was $92 per week. It is now $279 per week, a 300 per cent increase. The cost of housing $117,571. It is now $690,220, an increase of 600 per cent. The price of a motor vehicle went up 600 per cent. I haven't got the actual figures in front of me at the present moment, but the price of a motor vehicle went up some 600 per cent. The price of electricity in Queensland was $643, where it had been for 11 straight years, and it had been there because there was no justification for an increase in the costs. There was no justification for it. As my colleague and very good friend Shane Knuth in the state parliament—he's a member of the KAP, my political party that I belong to—says again and again and again, Mr Beattie said that when we sell off the electricity industry and corporatise it and free market it, there will be competition and the price of electricity will come down. Just the same as the Productivity Commission told us when tariffs and protection are removed, the price of a motor vehicle would come down in Australia. Well, it didn't. It went from $6,000 to $25,000 in that period of time. They said there would be a 25 per cent intrusion into the Australian market. Well, there was a 100 per cent intrusion into the Australian market because we don't produce motor vehicles anymore. This place listened to the Productivity Commission. Heaven only knows there is a very small gene pool in Canberra; a very, very small gene pool. If I am elected to the new parliament, I am going to move that the minister and the head of the department and the deputy head of the department will sit in this place whilst we speak on this legislation. They will face the music, as they are forced to do in the Queensland parliament—or at least they were when I was there. They had to suffer the humiliation and face up to the reality of the lies that they had told us. Just remember that they told us that there would be a 25 per cent intrusion into the car market, and they told us that the price of a motor vehicle would go down. The price of a motor vehicle has gone up 600 per cent, and the intrusion is 100 per cent. So much for the Productivity Commission and the advice given and taken by excessive governments in this place by the ALP and the coalition. The price of electricity gives me great pain because I was the minister, and we had kept the prices down at $643 for 11 straight years. There is no justification for an increase in that price. We have built one small new power station. All the coal fired power stations are still there. The price of coal has risen a little bit. The price of wages is very, very small. The cost of electricity has risen a little bit, but there is no justification for $643 going to $3,300, except because the free market forces which were supposed to take it down have driven it straight up. Those of us who live in the real world, instead of the make-believe world of Adam Smith and the invisible hand, know that if you free up the market the big sharks will eat the little fishes. I've got news for my fellow countrymen, my fellow Australians: we don't have any big sharks. The big sharks are overseas, and they're going to eat the little fishes—which is us—very, very quickly indeed. Let me take a town in Australia, a town called Charters Towers, where we were under the wonderful mining act, put there by 'Red Ted' Theodore and the wonderful Labor governments which ruled Queensland for 50 years, God bless them. Then, under the wonderful Country Party governments of Bjelke-Petersen, we were under the mining act. If you wanted to buy a piece of land in Charters Towers, which is about an hour's drive of Townsville—look at it as if it was Ipswich from Brisbane, about an hour's drive—you could buy a piece of vacant land to build a house for $7,000, and it was kept at $7,000 for the 20 years I lived there, prior to the 1990s, when the Labor Party took over. They abolished the mining act, and we moved into the local government regime, which took the price of land from $7,000 a block to $142,000 a block. I must be honest with you: it's settled back to $75,000 for a block of land now. If you want the answers, look to the paper produced by Malcolm Turnbull, no less, and an Oxford professor, who was an Australian. They did a paper for the New South Wales government on why housing prices are skyrocketing, and they said, 'It's because of the regulatory impositions on the cost of subdivisions.' The biggest subdivision developer in North Queensland, Robert Norman, said, 'I am selling the farms in bulk; I am not subdividing them, because I do not have enough years left in my life to do another subdivision.' And there is no doubt, given the average time for processing a subdivision might be 3½ years, that the impositions they place upon you may make it impossible for you to subdivide. You might have put $1 million out to buy some rubbish land to subdivide it. You put out the million dollars, and they're earning you no money at all for 3½ to four years—you've got to be pretty good to be able to do that. So the subdivisions are not taking place. Whatever else Malcolm Turnbull's shortcomings might be, the report was spot on, and the proof of that was in Charters Towers. When there was a free and open market without regulatory oppression, we had a city full. There's really no industry in Charters Towers; people just wanted to go there to live. You could buy cheap housing and cheap land, have a very good lifestyle and only be an hour away from a very big city, Townsville, which is not all that much smaller than Canberra. It was wonderful, but, of course, that was abolished. Let us talk about housing. The cost of building a house hasn't actually moved all that much. It might have doubled, but then so have average weekly earnings. The price of a house hasn't really risen at all, but the price of land has gone from zero, if you like, to $250,000 a block. We have the wherewithal in a big and empty country—if you get 50 or 60 kilometres from the coast, there is no-one living there. All the way to the Indian Ocean, there is nobody living there. So the land is worthless, almost. You can run a few moo-cows on it, but that's about it. We can provide housing at one-tenth of the current cost if we remove the government regulatory systems. As far as food goes, if there was competition in the food-retailing industry, which there's not—there are two giants that command nearly 90 per cent of the sales. You can sell to Woolworths and Coles or you can not sell at all. The income for farmers hasn't moved much at all in the last 30 years, but the price of food has gone up 300 per cent. So whether it's food, whether it's housing or whether it's motor vehicles, your policies have failed abysmally.