Media Release

KAP Federal Member for Kennedy Bob Katter has slammed both sides of the Queensland Government for their water plans announced in recent weeks, labelling the incumbent’s “pristine rivers” policy as a campaign to ‘depopulate and destroy’ rural and remote Queensland.

Labor’s policy would make considerable changes to the Lake Eyre Basin Management Plan, which could decimate the workable land and shut down three rivers that have a connection to the Bradfield Scheme, while the LNP are focused on re-inventing the wheel for the umpteenth time.

Environment Minister Leeanne Enoch announced a review into the Basin’s management plan just before Christmas, saying the “proposed framework will increase protections for streams and floodplains in the Queensland section of the Lake Eyre Basin”.

Bob Katter said that the policy was completely “backwards” and “brainless” and goes against everything our forebears worked and died for on the land.
“Clearly Trad and Palaszczuk’s plan is not to have children and they want to depopulate inland Australia. We were brought up to revere the nation builders and the people that lived on our frontiers, with the great dangers and hardships that that entailed, and now we spit upon those values,” Mr Katter said.

“The most beautiful painting in Australian history, McCubbin’s triptych “the Pioneer” shows a young man chopping down a tree, boiling the billy to make a cup of tea, and his wife with their child in her arms. Fires in the open – now banned, making a cup of tea – now banned and now, the chances of you being able to turn a wasteland into farmland are negligible.”

“With the Plan, the State Government will list the Cooper Creek Basin under its Wild Rivers laws, including the Barcoo and Thomson rivers, which will then prohibit water use for broad acre, water storage and mining uses.”

Mr Katter said, “We don’t have rivers in North Queensland. We have a flood, and then a series of waterholes. All our water is compressed into a very tight three and a half month monsoonal period. So with projects like the Revised Bradfield Scheme and Hughenden Irrigation Scheme, we aren’t actually stopping the flow of a river, we are just lowering the flood line a little bit.

“If those rivers become protected, we are doomed as any river south of Winton can no longer be used.

“The Revised Bradfield Scheme will be affected even though it doesn’t send the water all the way to Lake Eyre. But some of that water will get into Torrens Creek which is in fact tributary to Lake Eyre in one of those rivers. So yes, there is a serious attack up on the great vision that we Australians have had of settling the inland.

“Our economic giants – coal, cattle, cane and aluminium – are all doomed if this proceeds.”

Mr Katter warned that if the campaign to depopulate Queensland succeeds, it could open up Australia to foreign military threats.

“Von Clausewitz in the most important book ever written on warfare he states one truism of history; that ‘a people without land will look for a land without people’.

“Read Adolph Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ or read the ‘Black Service Manual’ handed to every Japanese soldier in the southern army and you will just see how spot on Von Clausewitz was. Both of those wars were about that principle.

“The question is “what is the ALP thinking”? Well, they are not thinking! If anyone shows me the evidence of thought coming out of the Queensland Government I’d be very happy because my own feelings are that one of their many problems is that there is no thought process.”

—ENDS—