Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Having said all of those things, I am staggered by the concept that says we should take boat people in this country. These boat people leave Middle Eastern hotspots to come here and we call them 'refugees'! A refugee flees for his life across the border into the neighbouring country. Would to heaven I had the decency and perspicacity to back what was originally a Liberal proposal which then became the ALP's proposal on the 'Malaysian Solution', because they were typical refugees. They were fleeing from Burma, or whatever the hell the name of the country is these days. They were fleeing across the border. Clearly, these people are refugees—there is a racial group and a religious group and they were both fleeing across the border from persecution.

Now, that is a refugee. A refugee is not a person who gets in a boat in Iraq and decides that he will go right around the globe—have a look at a globe—to a place called Australia. That is not a refugee! A refugee is fleeing for his life across the border. I might also add that a refugee is not a person who starts in Pakistan and wants to go to Germany. In both cases they are crossing a dozen or two dozen countries where they would feel at home in every way.

They are countries that have a totalitarian regime. You might say, 'Well, I don't like that.' Well, if every single country throughout that area has that form of government it is a bit hard for me to digest if you say that you do not like it. Whatever the case may be, clearly, a person who goes past 26 countries to get to where they are going across the other side of the world is surely not a refugee. That is not what he is. Call him something else, but he is not a refugee.

People say, 'Revoke their citizenship.' My only criticism of this legislation is that it does not go one tenth of the distance that it should go. If you feel your affiliation to and belief in the cause of this other country and its belief system so much that you are going to risk your life to fight for it and will attempt to kill other people, then clearly there is not a lot of room left for you to believe in the rights of Australians. These groups are called terrorists, and in our country the exact same terrorist groups—ISIS related groups—resulted in a person being shot in Parramatta. A totally innocent employee of the police force was shot. This was in only the last couple of months.

There was the attempt by a 15-year-old to get agreement to decapitate half a dozen or a dozen people, whatever it was, in the Anzac Day processions. This is all in the last few months. Do you think that it is desirable that people who are fighting side by side with these people and have such profound commitment to their belief system should be allowed back in this country? If they are allowed back in this country, I will tell you where I would put them, and it would be behind bars. That is the only way I would allow them back into this country.

Of course, we are allowing them back in this country. With some, we are revoking their citizenship. Well, there is no mechanism here to get them out of our country. In fact, if you revoke their citizenship and you have them here, I think you have really lit the fuse on a time bomb, to be perfectly honest with you. I think what you are doing is really lighting the fuse on the time bomb.

Let me change tack completely. In these countries, there are really decent people, and I have had an insight through working with the Indonesian authorities on the live cattle trade and my very rewarding efforts—probably the most rewarding thing I have ever done in my life—to get the live cattle industry reopened. I have had extensive dealings, and in that country, as in every other Muslim country, they have extremists. There are decent people there, desperately trying to control those extremists, to stay in power and to keep those people away from power. They know that they are extremely dangerous people. You play into their hands if you allow your country to be a breeding ground for ISIS type persons. You play right into their hands. So this country will not be a breeding ground for ISIS. I applaud the government for moving a little tiny way in this direction, and I hope it will not be counterproductive. KAP, our little party, will be strongly backing the government's efforts, and our criticism will lie in the fact that you are going nowhere near far enough.

I want to change tack completely again. We are selling out the moderate and decent leadership in these countries if we show any succour or comfort to the likes of ISIS. Moderate people, such as in Saudi Arabia, are being undermined on a daily basis by these people. When you say, 'This is terribly unfair,' I ask you: does Saudi Arabia take refugees from these areas or people who have been fighting in these areas? No way, Jose. Does Pakistan? No way, Jose. Does Kuwait? No way, Jose. Does the United Arab Emirates take these refugees and these returned fighters? No way, Jose. So, if they do not take them and we bring them out here and give them a nice little kindergarten where they can foment their trouble and send their people back to undermine the people of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates and our own brothers and neighbours in Indonesia, we are doing a great disservice to those heroic people who are trying to hold the line of civilised action against people who, quite frankly, are anything but civilised.

I might add that some of the things fomenting the ISIS crisis are the same things that make me angry in this country—people like the Shah of Iran, who sold his whole country out to big foreign corporations on a daily basis. Anyone that complained got thrown in jail. That is the sort of thing that has bred and played into the hands of these extremist elements.

Having said all those things, I am going to change tack completely now. I went along to hear a lecture by a very famous man who is head of the biggest and most outstanding economics faculty in Australia, with one Nobel Prize winner and one runner-up: the University of Queensland economics faculty. He is a very famous man, and he said we have had three shames in Australia—three terrible black marks on the soul of our country. One was the way that we treated the First Australians, the second was the way that we treated the men who came home from Vietnam—100,000 of them—and the third was what we did to the dairy farmers of Australia. I was sitting next to another person, and I said, 'He left out two.' One was our involvement in the Boer War, where 26,000 women and children were starved to death as a policy. I do not know any precedent for that in human history. Genghis Khan would kill a lot of people. The great conquering warriors would kill a lot of people, but they did not single out the women and children as a means of combat. I cannot find any precedent for that. Maybe it is there and I have not seen it. So I would include that, and I would include as No. 5 our refusal to take any Jewish people in the thirties.

Hitler announced that he wanted all the Jews to leave the parts of Europe under his control, and no country would take them. There was the famous case—with three movies made about it—of the ship of shame, which went to almost every port in the world, including in Australia. They applied to berth in Australia and were rejected. So there was nowhere for these poor people to go. No-one would take them or allow them to come in. We are being told we have to take boat people. It is a pity someone was not around in the thirties to tell our nation to have the guts, not have the anti-Semitism that was abroad, and take some of those poor Jewish people. After the war we said they could come in. There was no-one to come in. There was no-one left. Six million had been murdered. There were none left. We, of all the countries in the world, were best placed to take those people.

I do not want this shame upon my country again. At the present moment, the Jewish children going to schools in Sydney and Melbourne have armed guards to protect them. I had a meeting with a rabbi in a major city in Australia. I will not mention the name of the city without his permission; I tried to get it before I came today. They spend $20,000 a year trying to clean the graffiti and the smashed glass from the intimidation that is going on against the Jewish people in this country. When you come to this country, you respect the religions of other people. You do not carry your oppression of those poor people, of whom six million were lost in the Second World War under the likes of the Nazis and Fascists. We do not want that sort of rubbish in here, but that oppression is taking place here today against the Jewish people, and it is about time some people in this place had the courage to stand up. This place lacked the courage in the thirties. Let's try to find the courage in 2015.

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