Bob Katter on his 12th federal election, Anthony Albanese, Peter Dutton and Australian politics
Bob Katter turns 80 next month, but he’s fighting his 12th federal election with the same vigour a western brown snake brings to a goanna attack. Today, he takes us inside his world. WATCH THE VIDEO
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Bob Katter – ever the outlaw – is at it again.
He’s alleged to have contravened the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 by failing to stay six metres from the pre-polling booth in Ingham and the electoral officer, attempting to maintain a courteous and professional demeanour, is trying to explain the rules to an unrepentant Bob.
“You have to remain six metres behind the line Bob," the officer says evenly.
“We had this exact same argument three years ago.”
But Bob, who has always had problems with authority, starts contesting the point, clearly intent on escalating this confrontation until, to his evident satisfaction, angry threats are made to call the police.
And then, like an errant schoolboy, he painstakingly marks out six metres from the booth using his feet as measuring sticks, hitches his thumbs to his belt, thrusts out his chest and starts peacocking about the square in the front of the polling booth like a bantam rooster, taunting his now furious antagonist.
“There’s your six metres,’’ he declares.
“Where’s the Gestapo?”
A few moments later the “Gestapo’’ reappears in a conciliatory mood, notes Bob’s willingness to obey regulation and apologises for getting hot under the collar.
“We won’t have any more arguments Bob," he says.
“I very much doubt that,’’ Bob replies.
He’ll be 80 in a month. Thousands of men his age are languishing in an aged care facility yet here stands Bob – “father’’ of the nation’s House of Representatives resplendent in his Akubra hat, sunglasses, black shirt and sporting the snake hips of the political gunfighter he clearly believes himself to be.
He’s been in politics for nearly one half a century yet he’s fighting his 12th federal election with the same vigour a western brown snake brings to an attack on a goanna.
“I’ll strangle the bastard!’’ he yells suddenly on the floor of a supermarket in Forrest Beach outside Ingham in what might be his second criminal offence for the day.
The person he wants to asphyxiate is a Federal Minister of the Crown who, under the Federal Criminal Code Act 1995, is offered some protection from assassins.
But, in Bob’s view, that same minister appears to be frustrating this supermarket owner’s attempts to get government assistance in the wake of the recent Ingham floods, and that sparks one of those intense waves of fury which appear to storm through him at least three times a day.
It’s one of those horror moments which would immediately derail the wider campaign if he was connected to the major parties. Serious comment pieces would swiftly appear about the horrors of patriarchal violence invading safe community spaces but no one – not Josh the retailer nor Bob’s indefatigable chief-of-staff Elise Nucifora – misses a beat.
They calmly continue their discussions on how best to navigate government bureaucracy to achieve their aims, well aware that Bob’s role is to provide the political theatre.
And Bob’s theatre does work.
A few hours earlier, Dom and Bec Zaghini who run the Wild Local seafood shop in Ingham, loudly sang Bob’s praises, deeply grateful for his (or, at least his office’s) ability to shake the bureaucratic tree, and get government assistance help cover some costs after electricity outages during flooding destroyed their stock.
“It was Bob Katter’s office that just kept going, night and day, to get us a result,’’ says Bec.
Most people love him, many are dismissive of him, a handful hate him but everyone is going to miss him when he goes to Heaven which is a subject much on his mind lately given his advanced years.
He’ll discuss death much more cheerfully than he will discuss retirement. In recent consultations with an Anglican Bishop, the observant Catholic mused that, while he has done his best to follow the Christian doctrine on helping his fellow human beings, he’d been a bit tardy with “turning the other cheek’’ and was wondering if that might act as a barrier to his passage through the Pearly Gates.
That Heaven and Hell may not exist is a ridiculous proposition – as absurd to Bob as the notion that 15-year-old Australian school boys should be deprived of combat rifles and solid training in the martial arts.
It’s as foolish as allowing King Charles 111’s visage to appear on Australian coinage, as incomprehensible as allowing immigrants to pour into this country with no notion of our Christian traditions or labour laws.
To Bob, the man who abandoned the National Party more than a quarter of a century ago over its embrace of the free market, it’s still a mortal sin that multinationals are permitted to close down small town shops and pharmacies, that electricity prices can go through the roof in coal-rich Queensland, that this nation never turned northern rivers inland to irrigate the fertile black soil country of the north west to produce billions of tonnes of food.
At an Ingham meeting he declares the devastating Ingham floods of earlier this year would never have happened if all that water pouring down from the Atherton Tablelands had been channelled westward under his beloved “Bradfield Scheme’’ – the century old idea of turning northern waters westward pioneered by Dr John Bradfield who designed the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Bob endured decades of ridicule for his faith in Bradfield yet, six years ago, the scheme was suddenly warmly embraced by both Queensland Labor and the LNP, getting front page coverage in the Courier Mail as experts lined up to promote the project before it fizzled away once again, leaving Bob shaking his head at an Australia which he believes has lost its mojo – it nation-building sense of wonder and adventure.
He’s an Australian from the era of the Snowy Mountain Scheme, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Overland Telegraph, the 1917 Trans Australian Railway – a time when the natural world was shaped by pickaxe and shovel to better serve humanity rather than locked away under biodiversity acts.
Listen to him talking in an Ingham deli with locals Vicki Turner and Peter Griffin and Katter’s Australian Party Senate candidate Robert Lyon and you’ll hear precisely the same conversations going on at thousands of kitchen tables right across regional Australia.
Criminals are protected rather the punished, welfare pouring out from numerous streams is turning people into a flaccid state of government dependency, global warming obsessions are robbing us of reliable and abundant electricity supplies and no one seems to want to work at an ordinary job anymore – not in shops, farms factories or mills.
Robert, a sugar cane farmer and agricultural industry advocate whose family were North Queensland pioneers, echoes the “fed up’’ mentality of those he wants to represent.
He doesn’t really want to make himself a target by entering public life. He’s wealthy enough to retire comfortably and he knows he probably won’t get into the Senate anyway.
But he’s just “had enough.’’
He wants to nail his colours to the mast and declare that millions of Australians like himself have a vision for this nation vastly removed from the one being communicated by the Labor/Green left and its various other incarnations such as a Teals.
With Anzac Day approaching, Australia’s military impotence astounds him: “China could take us with a 303 rifle and a Tiger Month.’’
In this alternate Katter’s Australian Party world of north and northwest Queensland, (which has blanket KAP representation at both a state and federal level) Donald Trump’s tariffs are no harbinger of a global economic cataclysm.
They make good horse sense.
“A gladiator does not go into the arena without his shield and his helmet,’’ says Bob, in one of his more obscure uses of analogy to flesh out a complex point.
Australia once had a vibrant car industry because it had tariffs which acted as the shield and helmet against foreign competitors who could make a similar vehicle far more cheaply because of lower input costs.
Now it doesn’t have a car industry and to Bob, it’s not just the loss of the Holden and Ford that depresses him.
It’s the loss of that massive skills set nurtured by an automotive industry which once burrowed its way deep into our nation’s work force and has now disappeared in a puff of smoke.
Those who wish he would take his mid-20th century mentality with him and disappear will be disappointed, but perhaps only in the short term.
He’ll win this election not merely on his personality and campaigning skills but on the extraordinary reach provided by social media which he readily acknowledges has little to do with him, given he doesn’t have much time for computers.
It’s provided by his staff including Elise, a lawyer whose marketing genius was instrumental in last year’s stunt which put Bob and Independent Andrew Wilkie into piggie costumes wandering the halls of federal parliament to highlight supermarket greed.
This year Bob’s Easter Message went viral. It had Coles and Woollies as the money changes in the Temple, receiving a well deserved flogging from the Son of God himself.
That little offering alone had received 576 000 views on Facebook by the end of the Easter weekend and many more (and still counting) on Instagram.
The balance of power issue which now arises every election appears to bore him. In the event of a hung parliament he'll simply leverage his position to the max, getting everything he can for his electors – the people of North West Queensland – before deciding which way to go.
Bob has a lot of political heroes, One is Huey Long, “The Kingfisher’’ who was Louisiana governor from 1928 to 1932 and a self proclaimed “hick’’ who proudly represented hicks while building billions of dollars of infrastructure across his state before being shot dead in 1935.
No one is going to shoot Bob, but he probably won’t run again in 2028.
There’s no law to stop him, but a hint of world weariness may be creeping in with the advancing years.
Thirteen years ago, he wrote an optimistic book – “An Incredible Race of People’’.
It’s still available on Amazon and suggests Australia’s extraordinary success over two and a half centuries can be built upon in the decades ahead if we make the right decisions.
Today he is not so sure Australia has a bright future and, looking at the plunging birthrate and the lack of a united vision on the worth of the entire Australian experiment, he suspects that the “incredible race’’ he once wrote about might have an expiry date.
“We are a vanishing race.’’
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