Media Release

Dick Smith is considering leading an informal alliance of the Federal Cross-Benchers consisting of independent members of the House of Representatives and Senate after being approach by Federal Member for Kennedy and KAP Leader Bob Katter this week.

“We need to be striving for a much closer working together so we can offer the Australian people a coherent and cohesive alternative,” Mr Katter said today.

“It would be very self-defeating if Nick Xenophon’s party and the KAP merged, it is vitally important that each of these groups maintains their individuality and their support base.

“But we’ve got to offer the Australian people a coherent alternative. We have two major parties with exactly the same policies, they are both free market obsessives and non-nationalistic.

“They have at their philosophical base competitive marketing, which means that the big sharks eat all of the fishes. Australian businesses are the fishes and the big sharks are the foreign corporates.”

Mr Katter said that Dick Smith was a national icon and the last of the great patriots, which made him ideal to lead the independent cross-bench members and senators.

“Dick is the alpha and omega of national love of country.

“He’s also completely non-political and that’s what makes him so appealing as a person that can be a lightning rod for bringing together the nationalism of Australia.

“We’re a race of people that want to go forward; as opposed to a bunch of sycophants who want to be owned by giant foreign corporations.

“I watch the staggering of agriculture towards a slow and painful death; the elimination of all manufacturing in the country and a minerals industry that is crippled by the second highest electricity prices in the world and the highest gas prices in the world.

“Fairness for ordinary Australians is just not the hallmark of the Labor party or the LNP, they are both free-market parties and the race is to the most powerful, the most powerful being the foreign corporations that they are beholden to. Coal seam gas is a classic example,” Mr Katter said.

Mr Smith is seriously considering the offer after meeting with Mr Katter in Sydney on Wednesday.