Representative Bob Katter Contact information

Robert Katter is an Australian politician who has been a member of the House of Representatives since 1993. He was born in Cloncurry, Queensland, to a political family. His father, Bob Katter Sr., was a politician who served in the House of Representatives from 1966 to 1990, representing the National Party. Katter Jr. followed in his father’s footsteps and entered politics in 1974, when he was elected to the Queensland Legislative Assembly, representing the seat of Flinders. He was elevated to cabinet in 1983 and held various ministerial positions until the National Party’s defeat at the 1989 state election.

Katter left state politics in 1992 and ran as the National candidate in his father’s former seat of Kennedy at the 1993 federal election. Despite facing his father’s successor, Labor’s Rob Hulls, Katter was able to defeat Hulls by 4,000 votes. He was re-elected with a large swing in 1996 and 1998. However, Katter found himself increasingly at odds with the Liberal and National parties on economic and social issues, and in 2001 he resigned from the National Party to sit as an independent. He has since been re-elected four more times as an independent and twice for his own party, Katter’s Australian Party, which he founded in 2011.

Katter is known for his social conservatism and opposition to neoliberalism and social liberalism. As a university student, he pelted the Beatles with rotten eggs during their 1964 tour of Australia, declaring in a later meeting with the band that he undertook this as “an intellectual reaction against Beatlemania.” Katter’s son, Robbie Katter, is also a politician and a state MP in Queensland, making him the third generation of the family to serve in parliament.