Media Release

7 September 2015: KAP Leader and Federal Member for Kennedy Bob Katter said today there was no doubt that the reports about youth crime in Mount Isa were dead accurate and that there is a big problem facing the community, but that a return to old methods is needed to address the problem.

Mr Katter said that he had spoken with Mount Isa City Councillor Kim Coghlan and that there was a strong opinion in town that there was fortune going into various instrumentalities, but they were not achieving the desired outcomes.

“The money is not effective in addressing the problem. People are entitled to be very angry, seeing their tax payer dollars being burnt up in large wads when they’re not getting an acceptable outcome,” Mr Katter said.

“The young kids themselves have horrific problems and I’m not going to go into all those problems but they are in health and in other areas.

“Government Departments and other instrumentalities need to be judged on their outcomes but as the great Wayne Bennett said, “if you keep doing things the same way, you’ll keep getting the same outcomes”.

“So we’ve got to do things differently and some of this money will have to be shifted into different approaches.

“In North-West Queensland 200 years ago, if you played up you were booted out of the camp and you stayed out living by yourself in the bush until you were prepared to behave yourself.

“When you were prepared to behave like a civilised human being you were allowed back, and that’s effectively what we need to do here.

“When I had Ministerial responsibilities, First Australian leaders got agreement that all houses would be built by exclusively indigenous local labour.

“So instead of getting themselves bored and then into trouble, they were building themselves their own houses. That’s also a model that can be replicated.

“But if they’re sent up to detention centre they cost us $200 thousand dollars a year and as one leading authority says “I send away an amateur criminal and get back a professional criminal”.

“So we need to get these kids off their backsides, to do a day’s work and try to re-join the human race. The same as the laws that were there 200 years ago,” Mr Katter said.