Media Release

“The ‘greenie monster’ has been the most destructive force in Australian history and must be killed off completely”, KAP Federal Member for Kennedy Bob Katter today told fishing industry workers from across Australia who travelled to Canberra to rally against the Federal Government’s creation of the world’s largest marine reserve.

An industry accounting for the world’s lowest seafood harvest rate was being unjustifiably killed off just so that successive governments can lairise and make heroes of themselves to ratbag greens and super-rich, said Mr Katter.

He told the passionate group of protesters that 2000 fishing jobs in North Qld had been lost in the previous LNP government’s Barrier Reef fishing bans and now the Labor Government was on target to wipe out the industry completely.

“And those rich people in the cities of Sydney and Melbourne who know nothing else except how to blood-suck off the rest of us who work, they cry: ‘Oh gee, we’ve got to look after the fishers’, and then go off to the most expensive restaurants in Australia that night – they’re the people who tell us we’re not allowed the right to make a living,” he said.

Mr Katter dubbed as “a selfish mongrel act” the closing down of arguably the greatest food production resource in the world that had an estimated 2000 million people who went to bed hungry every night.

“They will be saying, ‘these whitefella Australians will not fish the waters themselves and they are so damn selfish they will not let anyone else fish their waters’. Well, they’ll be fishing our waters – you can absolutely count on it,” Mr Katter warned.

“This is all about the green monster, which has to be fed every six months.”

Mr Katter likened the protesters’ fight for survival to that depicted in Russell Crowe’s film Robin Hood – which inspired the Magna Carta.

“In 1215 in a little town in England called Runnymede, they forced down the throat of the king the Magna Carta: the right to sustenance from the land and seas and rivers of England. And we’re doing the same battle here,” he said.

“So we thank you very much for coming from the far parts of Australia all the way to Canberra to make your statement today. It’s inspired me – I will be walking there in the Parliament today to ask a question about this in Question Time.”

PHOTOS: Jen Eliot