Katter's country

HE'S eccentric and unpredictable - but there’s method in Bob Katter’s madness.

Unlike most politicians, Katter does not self-consciously manage his photo opportunities.

BOB Katter has stormed out. The man with the big hat and perhaps the biggest mouth in national politics is striding away from the kids of St Thomas of Villanova Parish School, the Bishop and the assembled great and good of Mareeba without a backward glance. Not a word, which turns out to be the issue.

He takes the steps from the parade ground two at a time and makes straight for the car. His chief of staff is tottering after him in knee-high boots, her boss’s mobile phone and another two from the office chirping like songbirds in her handbag. “He’s not happy,” she sighs.

Elise Nucifora has been with him for 20 months. That other arch Queenslander, Kevin Rudd, once said time on his staff could be measured in dog years - one equals seven - so spare a thought for the young woman, because Katter drives his people just as hard. It’s difficult to imagine two more different politicians than the self-styled “wild man” MP from the deep north and Australia’s aridly intellectual former PM. Yet they profess to be friends who share a bedrock faith in the Lord and thy self, and a reputation for imposing almost impossible demands on those who work for them. “Yes, it’s quite an experience,” says Nucifora, 35.

Since Katter became a kingmaker in Canberra, able to make or break legislation and potentially the government itself, his chief of staff has hardly paused for breath. The phones never let up, and as for keeping the boss to a schedule - well, that’s an experience, too, she says ruefully. Everyone wants a piece of him, from Julia Gillard to Tony Abbott and the big-name reporters who formerly wouldn’t have given him the time of day. He was an unlikely hit at the Australian Recording Industry Association awards, where he made a memorable cameo appearance in his three-piece suit and Akubra. Presenting the prize of best new independent artist was a neat take on his role in the tightrope federal parliament. There, Katter, 65, holds the balance of power with four other cross-benchers.

Journalists pursuing him through Sydney Airport shortly after last year’s federal election got the message, full blast. “Now that we’ve got a bit of power you’ll be listening to us my friend, not dictating to us,” Katter roared.

Not today, though. Somehow the new paradigm of politics has gone missing at the opening and blessing of St Thomas’s $4 million library, music and administration centre at Mareeba, in the eastern corner of his vast north Queensland seat of Kennedy. The sun is out. The storm clouds that will unleash flood and disaster on central and south Queensland are gathering on a distant horizon. The tempestuous MP is working himself up into a trademark tiz. Bad enough that the gleaming new facilities are mostly down to the government’s Building the Education Revolution (BER) fund. Worse when the kids sitting cross-legged in the heat are being addressed by state Labor MP Jason O’Brien, who is cheerily accepting the credit while Katter silently simmers in the second row of the official party.

His face reddens under the spotless cream hat (it’s the 59cm Akubra Arena, his favourite) as Bishop James Foley joins O’Brien to unveil the plaque. Katter is on his feet before the MC can blurt out an invitation to tea and scones. “An insult,” he fumes from the front seat of the car, as we speed off. Nucifora, struggling to keep a straight face behind the wheel, is placating Katter, while I’m sandwiched between a dusty tyre cover and the clothes he pulled out rummaging for yet another phone. Members of the board of the Dimbulah health service are drumming their fingers at the local Ford dealership; he should have been there 20 minutes ago. “Do you know where it is?” he asks Nucifora. “No, I thought you did,” she shoots back. We drive around Mareeba in a cacophony of ringing mobiles, with a man who was once described as having a head like an albino coconut and who now commands the ear of the PM, the Opposition Leader and just about anyone else he wants. And I’m wondering – as many do – how it all came to this.

All guns blazing
“Stop the car,” Katter barks. He has decided he wants to show me what he is all about and bugger the meeting with the health board; they can wait. We’ve pulled up in a cloud of dust next to a sun-baked park, on the outskirts of town. He’s pointing at an overgrown lot where the meatworks used to be: closed “by government action”, according to Katter. World Heritage listing of the wet tropics rainforests in north Queensland accounted for the closing of the timber mill further along the road, he says. The tobacco co-operative went the same way, and the people of Mareeba had to wear it. “What you are seeing here is continual persecution,” he complains, his voice suddenly high and tremulous. “People’s lives are being destroyed, and their jobs and businesses are being destroyed. When your right to make a living is taken away … then what you have is tyranny. They’ve even taken our guns, the gutless bastards. I’m telling you, these people here won’t cop it anymore.”

Ah, yes, the guns. Early on in his federal political career, after he had traded a seat in Queensland parliament for one in the big house on the hill in Canberra, following in the bootmarks of his father, Bob Katter Sr, he made an impression by vocally opposing the ban on semi-automatic weapons brought in on the heels of the 1996 Port Arthur massacre. He styled himself as chief spokesman for the red-blooded gun owners of Australia, and if that meant sticking his neck out and having people say it looked a shade on the scarlet side, well, that was just fine, too.

Decrying the guns ban seemed to dovetail with his histrionics over gays (famously, he had said he would walk backwards from Bourke if there were homosexuals living in his electorate) and deregulation. Other Katter fixations are ¬tariffs (he wants them set higher to protect sugar and beef), banning bananas from the Philippines (they bring in disease), mandating the blending of ethanol into petrol and the long-discussed and largely dismissed Bradfield Scheme to tap northern Australia’s brimming rivers. He stitched these threads into a narrative that he presents as the untold story of the bush. For years he banged on about it, to appreciative nods in Katter country but general indifference beyond. Now, at last, his time has come. The big shots in Canberra are finally listening – like it or not.

After its Kevin ’07 majority was shredded at the election last August, Labor clung to power with the support of Katter’s fellow rural independents, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, Tasmanian MP Andrew Wilkie and the Greens’ Adam Bandt. In the tense post-election negotiations, Katter split with Windsor and Oakeshott to side with the Coalition, and the relationship between the “three amigos” never recovered. He sidestepped questions about backing the wrong team by pointing out he did not have to cast the vote he had promised Abbott. To underline that he was his own man, Katter later refused to support an Opposition push for an inquiry into the Building the Education Revolution scheme, sinking it. As the parliamentary sitting year drew to a close with a succession of crucial votes on the government’s National Broadband Network, he again voted with Labor to defeat the Coalition’s bid to have the Productivity Commission run the rule over the vast project.

Here in Mareeba, when he finally finds the Ford dealership, and Nucifora shoos him into the meeting with the Dimbulah health board, he demands that the chief of staff to federal Health Minister Nicola Roxon be put on the phone, “right now, Elise”. Sure enough, the implausibly busy Angela Pratt comes on the line, and he stomps out of the room, the mobile fixed to his ear. He returns nine minutes later. “Elise, she needs to speak to you to get the details,” he says, handing the phone over. The grin on his face says it all: that’s how you do it.

Katter maintains this is his paradigm, and he will make the most of it. “I am in a position of very great power,” he says, without a trace of smugness. He is the “lone ranger representing a certain point of view ... developmentalism” - and by his account he is the only person in the parliament who “gets it as an article of faith”.

Grand designs
Katter’s eyes are shining as he leans over the map of north Queensland, which is dotted with coins borrowed from Nucifora. Katter flew into Canberra at 10 the night before, balancing another Akubra (the back-up Burke and Wills) on his lap in Qantas economy. His office in Parliament House is surrounded by deserted committee rooms, the lime carpet faded and worn.

He doesn’t hold much with appearances. The chief of staff had to iron his crumpled tie when he finally made it into the office, having “gone missing” by her rueful account in the taxi on the way in. He drinks tea from a bushie’s pannikin – of course – and a dribble of condensed milk has worked up a stain on his cluttered desk. He professes to have more important things on his mind, as he drops a $2 piece on Hell’s Gate, 115km west of Townsville, atop the Burdekin River. “Bradfield stage one,” he says.

Of all his obsessions, this is the grandest – or, maybe, just the maddest. Who’s to say? The plan to divert floodwaters from north Queensland to open up the interior and turn Lake Eyre into a permanent inland sea was devised in 1938 by his hero, the engineer John Bradfield, who also designed the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The ongoing flood crisis in Queensland might, for now, make the vast irrigation scheme somewhat redundant, but that won’t stop Katter. The bush has always loved the idea, never mind the nitpicking about practicality and cost. The dam, hydroelectric station and irrigation works Katter wants at Hell’s Gate would get his version of the Bradfield Scheme rolling for $800 million or so – he’s not really sure, because, like much else, the details are in his head. This, in turn, would sit alongside solar and hybrid biofuel plants hooked up to a giant new electricity transmission line, the planned CopperString venture, running 700km inland from a site near Townsville to the mining centre of Mt Isa.

Delivering even part of the “clean energy corridor” through his electorate would be a fitting swansong from politics, and he has taken heart from the flurry of official and corporate interest in the plan. It’s no coincidence. Katter demanded commitments to a solar and bio-power station at Pentland, near his home town of Charters Towers, and the proposed Kennedy wind farm near Hughenden, to the west, as part of the 20-point wish list he issued during the post-election horse-trading. Ever the optimist, he says: “They are coming around. We’re all singing from the same hymn sheet.”

True, the Queensland Government is conducting a review to determine how many of the projects, if any, should proceed. And in November, federal treasurer Wayne Swan voiced cautious support for the CopperString link, much to Katter’s delight. It hasn’t gone all the MP’s way, however. Katter has had to face uncomfortable questions over the role of his brother-in-law, John O’Brien, as owner of one of the companies involved in developing the project.

Katter did not disclose this until September, some way down the track from when he had ramped up his lobbying of the government for seed funding. There is no suggestion of any impropriety, and Nucifora, on his behalf, has been at pains to point out that neither Katter nor any member of his immediate family stood to benefit in any way from CopperString proceeding.

Still, it touches on one of the few subjects he is not entirely comfortable talking about: the dynasty. Power and politics run in the Katter blood. He is Lebanese by descent, and the family has been in north Queensland since the 1880s, when the brothers Joseph and Richard Arida arrived there, fresh off the boat. They set up a chain of general stores and immersed themselves in the local community; Richard, a “gutsy bloke’’, according to his great grand nephew, was Labor to his bootstraps, and became trustee to one of the first branches of the Australian Workers’ Union. Along the way, the family name was changed to Katter. His father, Big Bob, served with the army in World War II and followed the well-worn path into the ALP. Like many staunch Catholics, however, he parted company with Labor during its bitter bust-up in Queensland in 1957. He ended up in the then Country Party and gleefully took the seat of Kennedy off the ALP in 1966. Katter had just turned 21 and was half-heartedly studying law and commerce at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. He actually majored in playing rugby league and otherwise playing up – not at all to Big Bob’s approval. “I didn’t have much of a relationship with my father, that’s true,” he says.

He met his wife, Susie, and moved back north full time, dropping out after six years at university. As he explains it, all that time on campus was a lifestyle choice. “I would work in the mine in Mt Isa for three months and make enough to see me through,” he says. “I chose to go to university for the rest of the year; other blokes just went to Surfers Paradise.” Growing up in nearby Cloncurry, he always saw himself as one of the lucky ones. “We were rich kids … we could go to boarding school,” he remembers. “The vast majority of the town didn’t get a secondary education, which left scars on you, you know, you feel terribly self-conscious.”

He began a copper mine, of all things, and looked set to make a fortune until the 1971 minerals crash put paid to that. Three years later he became the second Katter to stamp the letters MP by his name as member for the state seat of Flinders, now defunct, which took in the west of what is today his federal electorate. People who knew him back then say he went into politics to prove a point to his father, either out of pique (the generally accepted view) or to appease the old fellow. Katter disputes this. He insists it was Gough Whitlam, not Big Bob, who fired his political ambition. “I was real sour on Whitlam and I wasn’t Robinson Crusoe, either.”

From the outset, his antics in politics belied genuine achievement. As a neophyte minister under Joh Bjelke-Petersen, he delivered a form of communal land rights to Aborigines – known as deed of grant in trust – that would stand the test of time. He was even a player in the leadership drama that overtook the Queensland Nationals after Joh was brought down by the corruption exposed at the Fitzgerald inquiry. Big Bob died around that time, in 1990, having held Kennedy for 24 years, and the seat went to the ALP. Katter took it back for the Nationals three years later, but proved to be an uncomfortable fit with the federal hierarchy. He quit the party in 2001, citing deregulation of the dairy industry as the last straw.

His 36-year-old daughter, Caroline, admits she still hasn’t figured him out. “You know, sometimes I just look at Dad and think, ‘Are you really that eccentric?’ … I honestly don’t know where the line is,” she says. Katter is certainly one of a kind. In private, the self-styled wild man is bookish and thoughtful. The guns he has racked on the living room of his family home speak to the public persona, but out of sight, in the study where he reads late into the night, the shelves are lined with history and science tomes. “The first book he gave me to read was The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” says Caroline, the middle of five children. “I think I was in grade four.” Small wonder his only son, Robbie, a 33-year-old valuer and local councillor in Mt Isa who is tipped to become the next Katter in parliament, once confided to his sister: “I think our Dad is really weird.”

Kid gloves
At first blush, Nucifora would seem to be a strange fit. A trained environmental scientist and lawyer, she held down a high-powered position in the NSW Department of Premier and Cabinet before signing on with Katter. Part of the reason was that she wanted to come home to north Queensland. But she has political ambitions, too. “If you want to be in politics in Queensland you have to know Bob, and how Bob does it,” she says.

She knows all the stories. The fights with check-in staff when, almost invariably, he turns up late to the airport; the encounters with flight attendants who want to separate him from the bag of documents he carries everywhere; the thing with his hats, which are always going missing, partly because people souvenir them but also because Bob is, well, Bob.

He cheerfully owns up to most of the reported indiscretions, including the signature one written up years ago by the journalist Frank Robson, who also made the unflattering comparison between a coconut and Katter’s white-capped dome. Katter had gone missing in Mackay airport, to the consternation of his staff. He reappeared, as only he could, on the baggage conveyor. “You know, if someone says to me, ‘I just saw your Dad on TV’ or somewhere else, I tense up,” his daughter Caroline says. “Honestly, I’m never sure what he’s going to do.”

Nucifora, as might be expected, has a different take on her boss’s uncanny ability to create chaos. Where others see confusion, she professes to discern method in the madness. “There is a perception that is really frustrating ... that Bob is not taken seriously,” she says. “Some people might criticise him for not working as effectively as he could, but you could not criticise him for not working hard. In a way, working for him is like playing a game of chess. It’s not just the next move you have to think about, it’s the one three or four steps down.”

Still, it’s an effort to keep up. One day he is railing against the Greens’ push for gay marriage, the next he is lining up with Adam Bandt to get stuck into the banks, or stencilling the logo of the hardline Electrical Trades Union on to an Akubra to announce he’s a union man through and through. He has no time for his old party, the Nationals, and detests federal leader Warren Truss with a vehemence that is noteworthy, even by the Katter standard. As for Rudd, he made it clear after the election that he thought the world of the former PM and by implication less so of both Gillard and Abbott.

If ever there were a political odd couple, this would have to be it. But the origin of what Katter says is genuine friendship between him and Rudd runs deeper than what may be apparent. As he tells it – Rudd was not available to be interviewed – they bonded at the parliamentary Christian group that meets each Monday of a sitting week. The two Queenslanders were the only “non-Liberals” there, and struck up a rapport. “I get on very well with Kevin, yeah, I’d say he’s a mate,” he says, uncharacteristically abashed.

With the year looming as decisive for both major parties, not to mention the Greens, who control the balance of power in the Senate from July, Katter’s life will not be getting any quieter. The punishing pace he sets worries his family. Getting around the electorate is a job in itself. Kennedy covers 596,000sq km, twice the area of Tasmania. The drive from his base in Charters Towers, west of Townsville, to Mareeba was five hours, and that barely rates on the mileage metre. Most weeks he’ll spend up to 40 hours on the road or in the air.

Then there are the meetings. Katter is a hands-on MP, no doubt about it. Though he rarely consumes alcohol – if pressed, he might order a rum and milk – he will seek people out in the bar and spend hours there, hearing problems and promising to follow them up. He must be doing something right because last August he romped home with nearly 70 per cent of the preference-weighted vote.

The talk is that this is his last term, and that he is positioning his son to take on the seat. Robbie insists he has enough on his plate with his job, young family and the council role in Mt Isa. But Kennedy is Katter country and the young man is a chip off the old block when he starts to talk about the lack of life-experience of “career politicians” in Canberra, and his desire to make a difference. “I wouldn’t rule anything out,” he says, airily. Yet in the next breath he is insisting that the talk about the dynasty is overblown. “I think Dad will be around for a fair while yet,” he says, though Katter will be past 68 if the parliament runs its full term to 2013, and he goes round again. Others are not so sure, including the man himself. He has heart problems that required quadruple coronary bypass surgery six years ago, and last year he underwent another trying operation for a back complaint. The oversized aviator sunglasses he wears in the office in Canberra are not for effect: the dry air in the national capital is murder on his eyes.

But as Katter sees it, he is at the centre of something bigger than any one man. He has set up a rural action group called Workers, Owners, Operators and Farmers – “otherwise known as WOOF” – and promises it will transfer some of the hurt from the bush with rallies planned for the capital cities. Asked the inevitable question, Nucifora says they won’t under any circumstances be known as Woofsters. Katter himself doesn’t see the joke. WOOF is serious business, he says, and with so many people counting on him, it wouldn’t be right to be talking about giving the game away just yet.

“I am not me, I am a big machine now,” he says, leaning back in his chair and propping a booted foot on the desk. “That machine will decide … you know, there are thousands of people out there. They can raise the money and … you know, spread their wings. And clearly, the Independents movement in Australia has failed, failed miserably. Well, this one won’t.”

For her part, Caroline can’t help but think back to when he was so ill in 2004. They were talking, father and daughter, and she was saying, “Dad, you’ve got to look after yourself,” and he was saying, “Yes, yes, but what about that last sugar mill closure? What are we going to do about that?” And then something unusual happened. Katter opened up in a way he never had. He told Caroline he was glad he’d had the heart attack. Glad because just for a while “this huge weight” had lifted off his shoulders. Glad because it would be someone else’s turn to worry. “My God,” she thought, “how do you do it?”