Media Release

Statement from Mr Katter:

30 April 2018: SUCCESSIVE federal governments with an increasing timidness have reduced themselves to impotence. To fail to secure an office in Charters Towers, a town with 23 empty buildings in the CBD after two and a half years defines the hopeless state of affairs in Australia. This is a tiny, small issue.

The Government’s level of hopelessness is defined by Peta Credlin on the Alan Jones Sky News program: She said, “$5000M to own North Australia Infrastructure Fund (NAIF) to develop northern Australia, not one dollar has gone out of that fund in the five and a half years since the money was put in.”

If the Government authority, NAIF, use this money to build the rail line into the Galilee, joining onto the existing Abbot Point line, $1500m only would be required. Initially $6000m a year for export coal ($2000m in taxes).

Hells Gates will now be completed at a cost of $870m; by 2020 it will be producing nearly $3000m ($1000m in taxes).

These two actions should have been delivered five years ago, but there is still not the slightest sign of either happening, or incompetence on a grand scale.

On a micro-scale, two and half years ago I announced the opening of my office in Charters Towers. Two people came from Townsville to inspect three premises, their negotiations and list of requirements stalled the contract and three other subsequent offers vanished.

Without going in to the nauseating details of the last two and half years, this has been repeated again and again. Chewing up over 100 hours of my staff’s time and over 60 hours of my time. The latest problems started with no wheelchair access. There was a two inch rise which they called a ‘step’. I rang them up an hour later, “alright, a ramp to be built by a local carpenter supplying wheel chair access as required”.

The current list of requirements and inspections I think for our 15th site will take another six months at least. So here is the measure of the “competence” of the Government. In spite of some 200 phone calls from our office plus meetings, we’ve been unable to achieve a little tiny office in Charters Towers where – a town where there are approximately 23 empty buildings.

They have burnt up on our tally, over $36,000 worth Government money, two people coming up from Townsville to do inspections again, and again, and again. On one occasion they stayed overnight. There has been at least one trip – we are informed – from Brisbane to Townsville and back. There is no politics involved. Just an utter inability to make a decision.

The current office is a building that has been used by the public for around 100 years. The people that shopped in the building, including myself, were not worried, the people that worked there were not worried. But it is irrelevant to talk about what problems they allege, they are a Government of due process, action therefore is not possible.

I’m afraid that pensions are being snipped away, vital health services cut, free hospital systems vanishing, are all clear indications that the Government is in collapse (know the ALP is include in Government).

Today I’m walking into this office and starting work. I’ll be putting a sign up at my own expense and every day that I am in town I will be using that office, and the public will be using that building the same as they have for the last 100 years, right up until it was vacated a couple of months ago.

I apologise to the people of Charters Towers, but let the public servants and Government be warned: I claim personal responsibility for destroying a Premier and a Prime Minister inter alia. I have more notches on my gun than Wyatt Earp. Whilst loaded for bear, not mosquitos, I am going make an exception in this case. If they have the police remove me, I’ll make sure I have the cameras there and the damage to the Government will be magnificent. And I might get a holiday for a week at her Majesty’s expense.

Written below the flag at Eureka Stockade: “When oppression becomes law, resistance becomes duty.” I would say “When competence becomes oppressive, then action becomes duty.”

The miners, the diggers, the little owner/operator businessmen; the same men that made Charters Towers. My family’s homes for over 140 years.

God bless the men of Eureka, they were great Australians. I will deal with the Lilliputians and Pigmy’s.

##ENDS##