KATTER’S Australian Party member Shane Knuth believes the state government should have spent a billion dollars in giving primary producers “a leg up” instead of giving it to the development of an Indian-owned mine in the Galilee Basin.
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Mr Knuth, also the state member for Dalrymple, sat silently among the crowd attending the Rural Debt Crisis Summit while other KAP members were more visible.
“We all support mining but at the same time we’ve got to look after the interests of our primary producers,” Mr Knuth later told The North West Star.
“Because it was the primary industry that got us through the global economic crisis.”
“We’ve got the government spending a billion dollars on the development of a mine in the Bowen basin that doesn’t belong to us.
‘‘Why can’t they spend a billion dollars in helping the primary producers get out of a rut?”
The federal government had the perception they had already thrown in $100 million for concessional loans, Mr Knuth said.
But an immediate halt on bank foreclosures was what was needed.
“Not next year, not two years down the track, right now,’’ he said.
“Otherwise we’re going to see reductive land that had been built up for years by family wiped off the map, and sold to international interests.”
One property could create up to 50 jobs, Mr Knuth said.
State member for Mount Isa Robbie Katter believed pushing for an Australian Reconstruction Development Board at the summit was the National Party’s last chance “to shine”, judging from the party’s poor poll results at the weekend.
Mr Katter said a committee would be established to progress the resolutions passed at the meeting, and to potentially hold more crisis meetings throughout the North West.
“Rural debt is a huge structural problem, and we’re not giving up on it,” he said.
