Coughing and spluttering as he talks, Bob Katter shrugs and chuckles as he dismisses the relevancy of LGBT rights in his Queensland electorate.

On Monday’s live episode of the ABC’s Q&A, a question about the recent measures by Queensland Premier Campbell Newman to water down the state’s civil union legislation seems to rattle the MP for Kennedy, who dismissed it as “not a big issue with, you know, either side of the fence getting married.”

Clearly uncomfortable, Katter quickly tries to divert the conversation to farmers or mining, and claims “there are important issues in this country, really important and these people – well, I mean I’ve just never seen it as an issue…

“We can’t get the heteros to marry. I don’t know [about] the other side getting married,” he laughs.

Bob’s train wreck starts at about 4:45” on the clip below.

The initial question came from Dan Seeds after Premier Newman fiddled with the civil union laws earlier this year in an effort to appease religious groups, ensuring the state would no longer sanction ceremonies from same-sex couples.

This essentially means that civil unions could still exist under state law, but the ceremony would be voluntary.

The Q&A episode wasn’t all bad tidings though. Singer Katie Noonan reacted “I’m ashamed of my state” and prisoner rights advocate Debbie Kilroy agreed. “I think it’s just terrible,” she said. “We have gone backwards by decades.”

Watch Bob Katter’s tantrum when confronted “for the first time in 39 years” with a gay-related question on Channel 10’s The Circle recently.