He's also been part of the music scene on at least two non-consecutive occasions.
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But there the similarities between cosmopolitan music industry personality Molly Meldrum and socially-backward Federal MP Bob Katter end.
But there the similarities between cosmopolitan music industry personality Molly Meldrum and socially-backward Federal MP Bob Katter end.
Now that he's managed to wedge himself a disproportionately influential slot in Federal Parliament, Bob Katter seems to be sniffing around on the periphery of just about everything.
Last week, for example, he decided to weigh in on the Queensland State Election by running a smear campaign against conservative candidate Campbell Newman, accusing him of the heinous crime of supporting gay marriage.
Hot topic right now, of course, mainly because the majority of Australians support it. But, much to the chagrin of the entire nation, the whole thing has resulted in Bob Katter being fucking everywhere again... and his seat isn't even up for grabs.
To be clear though, the Federal MP's new novelty political party does actually have candidates running in the Queensland election, so it wasn't totally out of line that he be involved; but Australia could surely have done without the nauseating effort Katter puts into avoiding the shit out of every single bloody interview question he's asked, and the affected indecipherable lunacy that accompanies it.
Bob Katter's rise to national influence - from a belligerent backwater irrelevance to a sought-after Federal chess piece - has revealed his archaic social conservative agenda to the nation. And naturally it's totally out of touch with the nuances of urban life. That's a fact he will happily admit.
The rest of us could probably do without it, but apparently shit flows only one way, and Bob Katter keeps turning up for work regardless.
Son of another bloody politician who had the same name as him and also appears to have also been keen on Rome's Jesus, Bob "The Mad Hatter" Katter has spent his life-long political career operating in the middle of Queensland's Gulf Country. His electorate is nearly 600,000 km² big with ~0.15 voters per km².
Hanging out with his other constituents
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In other words: almost no other cunts live there, and those that do are hardly likely to be authorities on matters of social intercourse. It's a distant land that, even today, remains frontier country.
The rest of the Western world have totally agreed to do that, and of that 'rest', the majority of us are all like 'hey dudes, we should let gay dudes and lesbians etc marry as well cause, if that's what they want to do, who gives a fuck anyway!?'
As has been pointed out a million times by the entire fucking Internet, marriage equality offers only opportunities for people - no disadvantages.
With the whole equality thing, NO ONE IS OPPRESSED AT ALL and nobody would take anything away from anybody else. Not rights, not money, not any of the things people care about.
Unless they're a bigot with too much pride and zero empathy.
On this issue, Bob Katter is being a total fucking bigot, seemingly just for the sake of it, and he is happy to publicly fall out with his own brother over it, but still have "family values" as a core policy and justification for his opinion. Right.
It is almost certain that the more Katter acts like a total wanker, the more votes his novelty party will get from the other socially-retarded bigots on the electoral roll in Queensland. Ultimately they pay his salary. The system works!
And indeed, history has proven the sheer number of redneck voters available and ready to go to the polls in that state to be nothing short of astounding. There is a booming market for baffling idiocy in Queensland.
Irony: Do you speak it?!
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It's all a bit of a drag, really, especially for those of us left-leaning legends who were initially piqued by some of Bob Katter's other policies in the wake of last year's election - in particular, his economic outlook almost seemed progressive. What the fuck?
Initially there were suggestions that it might be amusing, even handy, to have a boorish good-ol'-uncle from the Gulf Country in the headlines, diggin' out old socialist economic ideas that nobody had the balls to talk about lest Rupert Murdoch's vicious reactionary machinery launched a relentless McCarthiest assault in their general direction. (It wouldn't be the first time!)
It is, for example, increasingly becoming apparent that the Australian community would have done better to hold onto particular sovereign assets, rather than relinquishing them all willy-nilly in a full-pelt rush to compete on global markets.
Katter's old school. He is all for standing up to privatisation, he wants a moratorium on coal seam gas (but hates the 'greenies' of course), and he's a fan of collective bargaining. He seemed to be a baffling mix of economic justice [protectionism actually] and social disruption. With a big fucking hat.
Sadly though, the novelty of Bob Katter: Flamboyant Über Hick evaporated pretty quickly once the cold reality of the man's old school settler colonist outlook became clear. It's all the wrong kinds of Jesus - and it's easy to forget that the early Australian Labor Party, with whom both Katter and his old man had links - could certainly devolve into a pack of racist cunts when they wanted to.
It's a little-known fact that the whole 'bourgeois' thing was actually an international conspiracy orchestrated from Peking by a small group of interstellar reptiles, cunningly disguised as 19th Century Chinese smack fiends
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With this in mind, it's entirely possible to suggest that Bob Katter's seemingly 'progressive' return to community-based economic policy is in fact not a 'return' at all. He has all the hallmarks of a massively conservative Stubborn Fuck mentality whose ideas haven't changed since the 1940s.
Perhaps the banks, while they were swindling the rest of the world with neoliberalism, just didn't really bother going all the way out to Cloncurry to argue with people who hung out all day in 50°C heat with nothing but their cattle, their guns and their seemingly infinite hectares of infertile soil.
Or... maybe they figured they could just go out there a couple of decades later and start extracting natural gas from right underneath the farmers' noses, on their own lands, without even having to ask their freakin' permission.
But look, if we're being honest with ourselves, the economy, in whatever form, is nothing without quality of life - and that is what Katter is vigorously striving to deny others through his relentless opposition to marriage equality.
And, of course, Bob is more than happy to bandy around his electorate's truly epic suicide problems as his pet local sob-story whenever it suits him.
By which I mean, 'pro-' the actual meanings of life. Like being happy and fulfilled and all that.
Take that shit away and the desire to live decreases. It's a fucking no-brainer. These 19th Century social mores that Katter is spruiking are inherently intolerant, therefore they decrease the value of life all round.
And, really, who gives a fuck about the economy, or anything else, if you're not gonna be happy either way?
ANYWAY folks reward yourself with this:
PS: just in case you missed it at the beginning.... BOB KATTER EGGED THE FUCKING BEATLES. And he brags about it. What a douche.
