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

I have risen in this place on a number of occasions now to bring to the attention of the Australian people—I have long ago given up on trying to influence the people in this place—to the fact that the term visas, for people who come here and tend to stay here, now number over 620,000 a year. There are over 200,000 migrants coming to Australia. There are near enough to 300,000 student visas, which are normally for about four years, and an average of about 150,000 section 457 visas. Our migrant intake has been at around 250,000, but there has been an extraordinary bulge in student visas. Obviously I cannot use his name, but one of the three most influential and powerful senior-ranking people in tertiary education in Australia intimated to me some 10 or 12 years ago that if we stopped the universities from being visa shops we would close half of the universities in Australia.

I went to university. After a few years they found out I was there and they threw me out, of course! But prior to that we could reflect upon the fact that there was only one university in Queensland. So, in the space of the past 30 or 40 years, and most certainly in the past 20 or 30 years, we have reached the point where we now have I think seven universities in Queensland. Of the graduates they are turning out, obviously a hell of a lot of them are these people who are coming from overseas. If you tell me that you have to come to Australia from India—a country of 1,000 million people—to get an education, then I am not going to take you very seriously. And if someone were to say to me that they were coming from China to Australia to get a good education in Australia, that would really be laughable—a country of nearly 1½ thousand million people, and they cannot get a university education there but have to come to Australia? That is not likely; that does not happen.

The people who are coming here are coming because they are buying the right to stay in Australia. There are people on the government side of the parliament—but not many of them now—who in days past would say, 'Oh, they're going home.' Well, Mr Abbott attempted to send them home. He started checking on people in Melbourne. But the reaction was so violent that he had to abandon that within two days and disown the initiative. He was removed from the prime ministership of Australia some four weeks later. I am not saying it was on account of that occurrence, but you would have to be naive to think that it was not a contributing factor.

Say you are bringing nearly 650,000 people a year into an economy that only generates 200,000 jobs. I am fascinated by the market fundamentalists that run this place, on both sides of the parliament, but the Liberals are probably sprouting the free market philosophy. We have an advertisement that comes on our television about 20 times a night, and that is clearly because they are not selling it to anyone. When I saw the former Prime Minister get up in this place and clap for Minister Robb because of the free trade deal with China, I thought: 'Is this getting you any votes? I'm going to work from here to Bourke backwards, or paddle to Magnetic Island in a barbed wire canoe, if this is going to get you any votes.' Well, four weeks later he was out on his head. Again, I am not saying that it was on account of that. But, if anyone thinks that this free trade business is going down well with the Australian public and that this mass migration policy of the ALP and now the LNP is going down well with the Australian people, then again I would say you believe in my chances of getting to Magnetic Island in a barbed wire canoe.

It is just simple mathematics, if you are bringing 650,000 people into the country every year and the economy is only generating 200,000 jobs, and if you have over 200,000 school leavers and young people joining the workforce each year, then there are 800,000 people chasing 200,000 jobs. Somewhere, someone must go on the dole here, and it is not the people that are coming in. They are coming in from countries where the average wage levels are $5,000 a year, and that is about the average wage level throughout all of the Asian countries and the Middle Eastern countries. So they come here where they are entitled to nearly $30,000 worth of income and benefits, even if they do not work. Well, you would be a mug not to come here, wouldn't you?

I think anyone that goes down to a grocery store or gets a taxi or whatever—any after-hours jobs—they are all taken now by people from overseas. People say, 'Well, Australians won't work,' and I am getting very truculent about that because I, as an Australian, do not particularly like being called a 'bludger'. My forebears, the people of Queensland—we happened to have been cane cutters, where we were paid on tonnage; we happened to have been miners, where we were paid on yardage; and we happened to have been people that worked in meat works, where we were paid on tally rates—we only got paid for what we did. We were the hardest working people that ever there were. There was no air conditioning in those days either.

Let me come back to the bill. If you are bringing nearly 650,000 people a year into this country and a very large number of them are coming from countries that are on fire, where there are mass killings, upheavals, revolutions or whatever word you want to use, where terrorists are running amok and the government's democracy and rule of law are not things that any of these people understand. But, if you are bringing in people from these countries, then you simply must, as sure as the sun rises, recognise that some of them will escape through the net and they will be terrorists—and if they use our country to promote the terrorism from the country from which they came.

I have a lot of dealings with people from Indonesia and I have really found them excellent people to deal with. The people and the governments of Indonesia have returned good for evil, they have been good neighbours to us, in spite of insult and offence after insult and offence. Yet they have continued to show the sort of Christianity which should, of course, be the hallmark of our society, not their society.

The previous speaker beholds us to reflect upon the education system in Australia. I cannot speak for the state education system; I cannot speak for the modern Catholic education system. I went through a system where I had nuns and Christian brothers teach me, and one of the great advantages that I have had in life and much of everything that I owe in life will be sheeted back to those people. The nun was the principal of my little convent primary school in Cloncurry; her name was Sister Thomas. I cannot find a decent book on Mother Mary MacKillop; they seem to be preoccupied with a fight she had with a bishop or something. No-one is interested in that. She was one of the great spiritual leaders of this nation, one of the great creators of this nation, and all they can talk about is somebody fighting with the bishop. But I suspect that she was very much like Sister Thomas. There were eight years of primary school, and every single morning of our lives Sister Thomas stood us in front of the Australian flag and we said these words, which I remember to this very day:

God Bless our lovely morning land, Australia

God keep her with his enfolding hand, Australia.

On Earth there is no other land, like our enchanting Southern land,

Our own dear home, our Mother land, Australia.

And if you stand in front of the flag and you sing that every morning of your life for eight years, it has to leave an impression behind.

A lot of people are coming to Australia and they do not have that cultural background. They do not have that cultural bent. They do not have those aspirations. And, before everyone starts getting a little bit Islamic here, I think we should take a cold shower, because in outback Australia, and particularly outback Australia where I come from, the Afghan cameleers were very much part of the building of this nation. The only form of transportation we had was camels, and the only people who knew how to work that form of transportation—it was a highly specialised field—were in fact the Afghan people who came to Australia.

I could tell a lot of funny stories, I could tell a lot of outrageous stories from my own family who mixed with these people and worked with them. They aspired to become patriotic and were accepted as patriotic, good Australians. They wanted to become Australians, and that was one of the reasons and motivations that they came here. Clearly there are an awful lot of people coming here now that simply do not have that aspiration. In fact, it could be said that they have aspirations that we become like their country. Have a look at their countries, from Morocco across to Pakistan, they are on fire. I saw a newspaper report the other day that said that no prime minister in Pakistan history has completed a term in office. That is in sharp contrast to the nation next door, India, where, with one exception, I think almost every prime minister has completed their term in office. There is something very different there and it is naive to pretend that there is not.

Those people of the Islamic faith who have come to Australia—and I know many of them from Indonesia—set a very good example of small-C Christianity, where you love your neighbour and you have a responsibility to your neighbour. They set a very good example for Australians. Also, on two occasions, specialist surgeons have had to battle to save my life, and in both cases, judging by their names—I would not know what religion they are and I would not be the slightest bit interested—I would say they had Islamic backgrounds. One of them fought for 20 hours straight, trying to save my life. Obviously, I owe those men a very great debt of gratitude. I am trying to raise money to have a bust put up for one of them, Dr Modica; he is one of the leading heart surgeons in Australia. Anyone else who has had the great privilege of being a patient of Modica's would say exactly what I am saying. A number of people have rung me up about that. We pay great tribute to him.

It also needs to be said that I want my country to love everyone who is here. There are very few pure merinos in Australia—very, very few pure merinos! I was on an aeroplane recently with a Scotsman and I had to listen for two hours to his diatribe of hatred against the English. My own towns, where I come from, are very much Cornish and Welsh mining towns, where people were treated like slaves by their English masters out of London. There is no love for London among those people, I can assure you.

So we can be very proud of what we have achieved in Australia on the basis of being a very egalitarian society.

In my electorate I have people from Albania who are very prominent in the Atherton Tableland. In fact, there are 11 major organisations there (tobacco, the maize board, the major Rotary Club up there and various others) and, when this terrorist business started in the Middle East, I was very surprised to find that the people prominent in eight of those 11 were in fact of the Islamic faith—surprised in the sense that I could not see any difference between us, and I was really a bit put out that other people even considered telling me that they were different. (Time expired)

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