by
Paul Toohey
Those delegates from Labor and the Coalition who are hoping to win over Bob Katter ought to make sure they enter his personal space equipped not just with mouthguard and groin protection but a powerful sense of the past.
Katter talks of two photographs that hang in the Civic Club in his hometown of Charters Towers, in the Queensland hinterland. “One is of the mine managers in 1899 in Charters Towers,” he says. “They’re all there in their hats and three-piece suits and gold fob pocket watches. Those bastards drove us down in the mines and one in 31 of us never came back up again.” Us.
In 1999, Katter organised for another photo to be taken which could hang next to the historical shot. It is of the modern breed mine managers from the Charters Towers area. It shows that we have become, for the most part, a country of equals. “They just look like the workers in their work boots and khaki shirts. That’s what we’ve achieved in this country.
Says Katter: “My son in law has a t-shirt which says: ‘You say redneck as if it was bad.’”
People would like to know what role Katter is playing. Is he the Gimp, or is he Bruce Willis to the rescue?
Katter lives in a part of Australia which he considers the major parties have forgotten. His personal crusade in Kennedy, which takes in the huge geographical heart of Queensland, from Normanton and Mt Isa and Innisfail and Atherton, is to do better for miners and farmers.
When he sees a small town dying, he sees a failure by Australia to honour the pioneers who opened up the north. Katter mentions the names of two boys in his classroom at Cloncurry whose fathers died of what they then called “the miner’s titus”. The gravest sin he could commit would be to forget the contribution of men like these.
It is personal to Katter because his great-grandfather Richard Arida was a wealthy north Queensland draper of Lebanese heritage who had a strong hatred of the mistreatment of workers.
According to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, two brothers, Joseph and Richard Arida (originally Yusef and Rachid Lahoud), were from a prominent Maronite-Catholic family which left Lebanon (then Syria) and found their way to north Queensland, where they became successful drapers and bootmakers. From their base in Charters Towers they became very wealthy.
Says the dictionary: “The Aridas were deeply committed to the labour movement and Richard was a trustee of a branch of the Australian Workers’ Union. They saw no contradiction between their status as wealthy businessmen and their support for a movement which they regarded as fundamentally humanitarian and consistent with their involvement in the Catholic Church.”
Katter says a person’s power and wealth need not separate him or her from the workers. “I’m not working class, far from it,” he says. “My great-granddad (Richard Arida) put 3000 pounds behind the miner’s strike. He went into bat for the union movement and the Labor Party. In terms of today’s money that was about a million dollars. He supported workers’ rights.”
Why is it that Katter hates the Nationals for deregulating sugar and dairy, but not John Howard’s Liberals who, as the stronger Coalition force, had the deciding hand? That is Katter all over. He didn’t agree with the Liberals, but he respected their conviction. What he hated was what he saw as the weak-kneed acquiescence of his Nationals.
Katter will be using this moment not just to get a better deal for his electorate, but will also have an eye to how history will remember him at this moment 100 years from now. It should be taken as read that there are limits to how much personal compromise Katter can stand in the coming days.
The three-man independent bloc is just a temporary force, designed to get some explanatory notes on the thoughts of the two main parties. If Katter stayed with the bloc, or gave his seat to Labor, I would be very surprised. His electorate very clearly wants him to support the Coalition (the LNP came second in Kennedy, with Labor dragging their knuckles into a distant third place).
Katter’s not yet saying which way he’ll go - he’s enjoying this too much to bring it to a premature end. Presuming his allegiance is still needed after the final counts are in, it is Abbott who will most likely win Katter over. And he will need to give Katter something very substantial to pull out of his big hat and show to the people of Kennedy.
Katter’s heroes are those who tried to help farmers in times of depression or advocated high tarrifs on imports. They are long-gone men like Country Party leader Black Jack McEwen; Queensland premier and federal Labor treasurer, Ted Theodore; Louisiana politician Huey Long; and Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, under whom he served at state level and whom he thinks is grossly misunderstood.
He says Long, who advocated strongly for farmers throughout his career, did “everything humanly possible to promote himself as a country hick and a buffoon. And same for Bjelke-Peterson. I don’t know whether he cultivated it, but he certainly looked like a hick. He was very unlike (Katter pauses, and introduces a sneer to his voice) the cosmopolitan and erudite Gough Whitlam, who called Bjelke-Petersen a troglodyte.
“Which, by the way, is a term I don’t mind for myself.”
He gets upset – actually upset – at the way Australian soldiers were sent underequipped to World War II. “They sent up us to stop the Japanese with .303 rifles and one Bren gun to stop the greatest military machine the world had ever seen. And we did. Just ordinary blokes who went up there, not rich or powerful.”
Katter judges everything by what has gone before. Of the value of the current war in Afghanistan, he says: “You would know that Alexander the Great said, ‘No I’m not going up there, I’m going home.’ Genghis Khan said, ‘No, I think I’ll take Europe instead.’ The British sent up a 55,000-man army and in every sense of the word none of them came back. The Russian communist empire collapsed in Afghanistan. I mean, just leave the Afghans alone to kill each other.”
You expect he’s about to advocate a withdrawal from Afghanistan. But Katter pulls up short. “But we don’t want to be trifling with the American alliance. If anyone has a go at us all we can do is throw rocks at them. We have no defence force. We have no ability to defend the nation whatsoever.”
This shows that Katter does permit himself an element of compromise, even in the face of history’s argument that Afghanistan cannot be won.
He’s proud of the great uncle who died at Gallipoli and Bert Henley, on his mother’s side, who died soon after returning from Changi. His dad, a Queensland state and then federal politician with the Country Party, died in office at the age of 72.
Katter Sr held Kennedy which, for a brief intermission after his death was held by the ALP. Katter Jr reclaimed it in the family name.
He says his dad was “easily the most brilliant man that Queensland will ever see”. Early on, Katter Sr was a Cloncurry councillor who taught his son about the grassroots. He used council money to build old people homes and says he got everyone in town, rich or poor, a fridge.
“So whilst all our cousins in Brisbane still had ice boxes, we had refrigerators in Cloncurry. You repaid the loan when you paid your rates. It was quite brilliant. When he went into federal politics he was in the same process of delivering an air-conditioner under the same scheme to every house. Now, maybe he didn’t do as much in federal parliament but he had leaders like Jack McEwen and Doug Anthony. There wasn’t as much to do.”
Katter adds with disgust: “I had the likes of John Anderson.”
Much has been made of the Mad Katter. Paul Sheehan said it well in a report for Fairfax on Monday: “It is widely reported that Katter is mad. He is mad, but there is method to his madness, and he is mad only by the sensibilities of inner urban Australia. In his own element, Katter is the Prime Minister of the Gulf country. He is what all politicians would like to be, unassailable and unmistakable.”
Katter demands of himself an absolute adherence to conviction, which is admirable, but he knows that he is not the prime minister or even the leader of a party. He’s just an independent.
I talked with some Innisfail cane farmers who support Katter for his courage and integrity. But they have thought things through carefully. As Katter enjoys a brief window of real power, it has perversely reminded them how his isolation in the federal parliament has not returned great benefits to them.
They point out that the Bruce Highway – part of National Highway No.1 – is still just a one-lane road. They desperately want better roads. They desperately believe their role is to grow food for Australia, without being undermined by cheap foreign imports.
Influential Innisfail cane farmer Joe Marano says that Katter has only been able to do so much: “We’ve just missed out on things having an independent. Neither leader came to Kennedy during the campaign, but they went to Leichhardt (the seat north of Cairns which was recaptured the Liberals’ Warren Entsch).”
And that is why the independents don’t want another election. People might love them on a personal level, but election 2010 has, in a bizarre way, despite the deadlock, no matter the Green vote, reinforced the relevance of the two fattest pigs guzzling from the trough.
Katter has written as as-yet unpublished history of Australia. It will no doubt be a searing, screaming, passionate account seen through the eyes of men who fought for the bush. Tony Abbott could do worse than ask Bob Katter if he could read the manuscript, and launch the book.
