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

I've just come out of the election campaign in Queensland. If ever I've seen a red-hot issue which will turn the face of politics in Australia upside down, it is the issue of the boat people. Far be it from me to give praise to the Liberal Party—once a year I do it and it's at Christmas time—but they have done a good job here. There were thousands of boat people coming in; now there's not. They have to get the credit for it. The people on the other side get the condemnation for it. The position of the Australian people is quite clear. They don't want them here.

You can cry and howl and say, 'I'm so sorry for these people.' Well, I feel a little bit sorry for the Jewish people in Australia who are now sending their kids to school under armed guards. I asked one man, a rabbi, 'Have you ever been attacked personally?' He said, 'Yes, I was beaten up by three them.' He said, 'My family home'—they are a very prominent Jewish family in Sydney—'was firebombed.' I said, 'Well, I don't believe that,' and he said, 'I'd expect you to say that,' and held up a picture on his phone. There was a picture of them going to church—I think they call it synagogue—on Saturday or Sunday or whenever they go. This bloke of Middle Eastern appearance—I myself could claim to be of Middle Eastern or Aboriginal appearance—runs up and grabs him by the shirt and starts screaming out: 'You will pay homage to Allah. You will go down on your knees and you will get out of this country now.' Then he started face-butting this poor person who was just going to church on Saturday or Sunday or whenever it was. The man I was speaking to said, 'You can ring up the police and ask about that incident.'

So here are a family that send their kids to school under armed guard and have had their house firebombed. Their synagogue allocates $15,000 per year to clean the graffiti off the walls of the synagogue. Who was responsible for Australian people of Jewish descent being persecuted in this country? Who brought the persecutors in? I don't notice too many Sikhs coming into the country. Heaven only knows they have a claim to being refugees, with 84,000 murdered in one year. I don't notice them coming in. I don't notice Christians coming in. I don't notice the Jews coming in. So it seems quite okay for the people over here to bring in the persecutors but not to worry at all about the persecuted people in the Middle East. There's not a single person in this place, in all honesty, who could say that Christians are not being persecuted in the Middle East.

Now we have 2,000 dying at sea—well, with the policies that I ascribe to, those 2,000 people wouldn't have died. So let it be upon your conscience. The realities and practicalities of this situation are that, if they attempt to get here, many of them will die. To say they're refugees is quite fascinating to me because, if you get a globe out, you will see that the Middle East is on that side—at nine o'clock, if you like—and, on the other side of the globe, at three o'clock, is Australia. If you're a refugee, you flee across the border. There are 20 million refugees in Europe, all of them in nations surrounding either Russia or Germany. They were genuine refugees. There were 12 million refugees in Europe 20 years after the war; they were still there. But they didn't get in a boat and go right around to the other side of the world. That's not a refugee—that's not a person 'fleeing from'; that is a person 'going to'.

And you say, 'Why do they want to come here?' Well, I'm not going to put any conspiracy theories or nefarious interpretations upon why they want to come here. I just simply want to say that they are involved in fighting and upheavals over there. I think that, if I was a freedom fighter here in my country, if it was invaded, and if I then became a refugee, I wouldn't stop freedom fighting—no, not me! I'd continue freedom fighting from the country in which I lived. And if that country tried to stop me from freedom fighting, I suspect I wouldn't be too happy with the country stopping me from freedom fighting. I think there's over 200 supposedly-Australian people fighting in the Middle East at the present moment—not for this country but for some other country.

Why do they want to come here? Well, there are 72,000 reasons for that, aren't there? If you're a husband and wife with three kids then welfare, health and all the other things put together are worth about $72,000. These people are coming from countries with an average income of under $5,000. So I think it would be a very good idea to come here, and I'm not putting any nefarious or conspiracy-theory interpretations upon that.

There are two countries—and I just haven't written down one, but the big one is Saudi Arabia—that will not take Middle Eastern refugees. One is Saudi Arabia, and the other is another Middle Eastern country. Arguably the biggest country in the Middle East is Saudi Arabia—or one of the three biggest, anyway—and it won't take any refugees at all. I mean, it knows what's going on over there, and it says no. If you say no, and you force people to understand that, 'No, you will never enter the waters of Australia if you attempt to get here; we'll just keep turning you back,' then people will know not to come, and those like the 2,000 who died at sea will simply not die.

I love my fellow crossbench brother, but I think it's a little bit disingenuous when he says, 'We just want them to go to New Zealand,' because the minute they get to New Zealand, of course, they have access to Australia. So really what we're saying is, 'You can now come to Australia.'

It was with deep regret that people like me in this place did not support the ALP proposal, which was the Malaysian solution. Looking back on it—and mea culpa, mea culpa—I think I should have backed it, and I didn't look at the proposal on its merits. But that was a very acceptable proposal. They were going to a Muslim country, where, presumably, they would have been a lot more happy and content than they would have been in a fairly hostile atmosphere in Australia, as people from a different cultural milieu completely. And these people—whether you agree with their religion or not—are very, very religious people, and I don't know whether we could describe ourselves as very religious people. So the government, for once, can be totally proud of their record—that they stopped people from coming to this country and stopped 2,000 deaths at sea. And this is my final statement on the matter.

In the pub they said, 'It's all right going on in Sydney, but eventually it'll come up here.' I said, 'Listen, drongo, it's already here!' They said, 'What do you mean?' I said, 'There were three people in my electorate murdered, with a bloke shouting out, "Allahu akbar!" while he was murdering them with a knife. They were backpackers, working outside Dalby, and happened to be in the Kennedy electorate.' And he used a rather vulgar expression, as my mother would describe it, and I won't repeat that expression, but he was quite astounded, as were the other blokes in the pub, that it was right here in North Queensland. I don't think it's confined to down south.

There's a terrorist incident every three months now. To whom do we attribute those deaths—the murder of those three innocents outside of Dalby? Who was responsible for that? Well, if you're in this place and you make decisions, then you are responsible for those decisions. I want to see a very close parliament in the next election. So I would urge the people on the Labor side: do not continue to pursue these politics, because you might be up against the boneless bunch over here, but they might just get a bit smart with the terror of an election around the corner! It is not a matter of politics, though I would argue that it should be; it is a matter of protecting the integrity of our nation. That is not occurring, and will not occur, when proposals like this are agreed to.

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