Bob Katter

BOB Katter, Member for Kennedy, has slammed the net zero target as destructive to the economy, wilderness and wildlife, arguing that instead the Government should be working toward a future where there are no restrictions on coal mining or coal exporting, and where all future power stations are green, built using zero-emission technology. 

“Power stations should be built in the north where there is unlimited water and constructed as High Efficiency, Low Emissions (HELE) coal-fired algae-tec power stations,” he said.

“This, together with the implementation of the Sovereign Fuel Security Bill, which has the support of the crossbench, will take Australia into emissions that would be comparable to pre-settlement.”

Mr Katter said farmers have been unfairly targeted in the climate debate and should be the last people to take the fall on achieving net zero.

“Net zero will cripple mineral processing and agriculture,” he said.

“This country has only two exports: minerals and agriculture and if you can’t process the minerals, you can’t export it. If you’ve got to send away 50 percent of Australian dirt, and only 50 percent Australian metal, you’re going to go broke.

“The French and the European Union have said, ‘if we remove the farmers, we have no one to look after the land’. I will take anyone who cares on a tour of the sugar cane farms that are now abandoned.

“One two-hundred-acre farm bought by the green-brigade in the hope of returning it to the pristine wilderness is completely covered in giant sensitive weed – there is no pristine wilderness, just invasive weeds.”

Mr Katter was also critical of the Treasurer’s views that the country has no choice but to meet net zero by 2050 given the reliance on foreign investment.

“Josh Frydenberg is a very good man, and very good Australian, but Josh has to get his head out of the free-market wombat hole. 20 percent of our entire superannuation monies is going into foreign stock markets when it could be put into development on Australian soil.

“Unless the Government comes to recognise that serious money has to be freed up for development, we are doomed to fail. 

“To open up the Cape York minerals fields behind Cairns will require thousands of millions of dollars, the Copperstring project between Townsville and Mount Isa, or the Yi Pi Pi canal to get fertilizer out between Mount Isa and the Gulf will cost thousands of millions of dollars. A multi-user rail line into the Galilee will cost billions of dollars as does the Revised Bradfield Scheme, but the return on these projects will be a hundred thousand billion a year!”

“We people that live outside the metropolitan areas get sick and tired of hearing from the pavement pansies who wouldn’t know whether their pants were on fire, in fact they have probably never lit a fire and wouldn’t know how and now they want to blow up our natural wonderland.

“They wouldn’t know that there are some 15 million wild pigs threatening our cassowaries, turtles and dunnarts, concentrated mostly in the northern part of Australia, or that there is 12 million hectares of heavy infestation of prickly acacia weed across the north.

“So while they are preoccupied with saving the planet by shutting down the minerals industry, shutting down the coal industry, the cattle industry and the cane industry, the entire source of revenue for the country, in the meantime, the bush and its native flora and fauna is being totally wiped out by foreign pests and weeds.

“The only “zero” they are going to see if they go down this path will be the complete wipeout of our native flora and fauna in the north. So where do the gang-greens stand on that I wonder?!”

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