Bob Katter is at the Kingo ordering a bag of chips to eat with his oysters. It’s the first sitting week after the parliamentary winter break and I’m in Canberra interviewing crossbenchers. When I go up to request an interview for the following day, Katter says he’s having dinner with “Monique and Allegra” in the other room, and invites me to join. So begins my evening with the Father of the House.
As it turns out, Allegra Spender is not there. He’s mixed her up with Kate Chaney, who is dining nearby. But Monique Ryan is there with her team, being regaled by Australian politics’ most colourful storyteller.
Between tales of Joh Bjelke-Petersen and egging The Beatles, Katter repeatedly asks Ryan why she and her fellow teals left high-paying jobs for politics. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that they might have done so on principle. But it speaks to a question I have for the 79-year-old, who will soon be honoured with a portrait marking 50 years in politics: Why is he still there?
When Ryan’s team leave the pub, I again try again to secure Katter’s number for an interview but he’s pounced upon by other pub-goers who want a photo, understandably. He sits down with them and starts ragging on Gough Whitlam. Eventually I stand to go, reiterating that I’d love 15 minutes of his time the following morning. He says now works and asks if I have transportation, which is how I end up with a lift home in a Comcar with Bob Katter.
He’s had a good run. First elected in 1974 to Queensland Parliament as a member of the National Party, Katter went federal in 1993, winning his father’s old seat of Kennedy. In 2001 he quit the Nats, in opposition to the Coalition’s neoliberal policies. He now runs under Katter’s Australian Party, which advocates agrarian socialism and social conservatism, and has three members in Queensland state Parliament, including his son Robbie.
Katter is most often written up these days for his unique anecdotes and bizarre digressions. But his split from the Nats remains a canary in the coalmine for our two-party system. There is no natural home in the majors for someone like Bob, a union man from a rural electorate with deeply conservative social views. He’s in a world of his own, as analysis of voting records show. And the people of “Katter Country” seem to like it.
I get in the back of Katter’s Comcar and give my address to the driver. Katter, who is sitting in the front, asks for my name three times, and I start to wonder if I have made a terrible mistake.
“I’m gonna write it on my hand,” he decides, pulling out a black pen and adding it to various scribbles on his hand. “If you write it down you remember it.”
The next half hour feels like being inside an extended Betoota Advocate headline. There are wild stories about his time in Queensland politics, to which his mind repeatedly returns. There is an anecdote about Anthony Albanese calling him to deliver “a string of obscenities” over a dispute involving the seamen’s union, on which he and Albanese disagreed. There are repeated claims that he is just an “ordinary Australian”, downplaying the significance of his upcoming portrait — an honour recently commissioned by Parliament’s little-known Historic Memorials Committee
There is vitriol for those who led the Nationals in the ’90s: “Anderson and that skinny, backstabbing, low-life, lying piece of bloody dog’s dropping, what was his name? Tim Fischer… What a bloody dog.” There’s also vitriol for former crossbenchers Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor, who Katter blames for derailing the independents movement by supporting the Gillard minority government in 2010.
“I’ve never in my entire life, 79 years on the planet, ever seen anyone change as much as Tony Windsor,” he says, alleging Windsor became a de facto member of the ALP. “And he took all the rest of us down with him.”
“We’re sort of on our way back now,” he adds. “There’s 17 people on the crossbench. I think that’ll grow with each election.”
With four Greens and seven teals, the 18-member house crossbench is very different to the one Katter joined in 2001, then occupied by one rural independent (Calere has form). He says he is closest with Andrew Wilkie, his pig stunt buddy, despite the fact they “disagree on everything politically”. Although he has little in common with the teals, he claims to get on well with them and thinks they send a message to the majors. “I’m not so sure that Peter Dutton’s got the message,” he says.
Katter rejects the idea of “left and right”. It fails to capture him as a socially conservative union man. The same could be said for the teals, who are generally assumed to be socially progressive and economically conservative.
“Monique and all those people … they’ll vote with the Liberals on industrial issues,” Katter says. (The Victorian teals usually vote with Labor on industrial relations, but he’s correct about the NSW teals.) “That’s where left and right just doesn’t work anymore. What am I, you know? I’m a bloody flag-waving bloody CFMEU member!”
I repeatedly try to steer Katter back to the question of why he’s still in Canberra, a place he professes to be “stuck” and only came to because his state allies needed someone federal.
He uses the word “fight” 13 times over the course of the trip: fighting for Blackfellas, fighting for those “at the rough end of the pineapple”, fighting the “wokies” who took over the Nats, and fighting those who tried to put Bjelke-Petersen in jail for perjury over his evidence to the Fitzgerald inquiry into police corruption It most often seems to be about combating the “slimy, self-opinionated, arrogant people” who “stabbed Joh in the back”.
“I sort of got trapped in there, you know, because I couldn’t just walk out on Bjelke-Petersen with the government going down,” he says. “I’m not a bloody runaway when they fire the first shots. You know, there’s a battle going on and I had shouldered my rifle. And I’m not just gonna abandon my mates and walk away from the fight.”
I point out that many of the people he’s referring to are long gone from politics — some from this world.
“That is a very good call, Rachel, actually,” he says pensively. “A very, very good call.”
“So what keeps you in?”
“Um, um, well, you know, um, we, um, I had to start a political party because the independents’ movement had failed Australia, thanks to Oakeshott and Windsor,” he begins, before performing one of his characteristic one-eighties. “But, no, I can see… remember, I’m a published historian, I lived out bush with the last of the Kalkadoons. [Katter occasionally identifies as Aboriginal himself, though he opposed the Voice to Parliament.] Les’ mother was one of the few ‘piccaninny’ survivors from the big battle of Battle Range. You know, I’m steeped in Australian history…”
It becomes increasingly apparent that I’m not going to get my answer. Perhaps Katter himself doesn’t know what he’s still doing in Canberra, other than “fighting”.
“It’s my job to stand up,” he adds at one point. “I had to fight the school bully at every school I was in.”
Who is the bully he’s fighting at this point?
“I think that the woke agenda is what I’m fighting now,” he says, arguing the “wokies” don’t actually want to help the Blackfellas, because “they want to cry and howl about the poor downtrodden”.
At this point, the Comcar has been idling in front of my accommodation for at least 15 minutes. It is time to go, if only for the driver’s sake. I ask Katter if he has any final points to make.
It appears he does — a three-minute point about tall poppy syndrome that traverses his school days, rugby league in inland North Queensland, someone named Charlsey, and a dispute over who was captain of the Cloncurry Tigers.
“It’s sort of funny saying that I’m just, you know, an ordinary Australian, but I lived in a world where, you know, nine out of the 10 in my class, except for me, everyone in my class at school, their fathers worked in the railway. And I suppose the story that epitomises this best is I’d formed all the rugby leagues in inland North Queensland, and I’d…”
The point runs to over 600 words. You can read the whole thing here.
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