Bob Katter (Kennedy, Katter's Australian Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Religious Discrimination Bill 2021.

I really find this place extraordinary. I must have got an extremely good education, because I was taught in history a whole lot of things that, clearly, the previous speaker was not taught. I urge people in this place to read history books and to know what they're talking about. She said that people are being discriminated against in this bill and about discrimination. Discrimination? There's a bloke who quoted verbatim from a book called the New Testament; it's a book that has been sacred for 2,000 years. People have died because they believed that we should love our neighbours and do good even to people who hate them; we should do good to them. That's the essence of the Christian message.

He quoted from that book, but he's been vilified for it by people who are super aggressive and who are determined to impose their ideas upon the rest of us. I think we all know who I'm talking about: the head of one of the biggest corporations in Australia. To this government's shame, they haven't got rid of him for using his own personal beliefs to persecute an outstanding Australian in the form of Israel Folau.

As a Christian, I have no illusions that we're being persecuted—no illusions about it. If the previous member is talking about persecution than I know who's being persecuted and it sure isn't the LBQTABC or whatever they like to call themselves. It isn't that mob, it's the Christians. Let me be very specific, because we don't make statements without backing them up. The leader of the biggest Christian church in Australia was Peter Hollingworth, and he was hacked to death. The only reason they didn't go on to put him in jail, like they did to Pell, was because destroying him as the Governor-General of Australia and as the head of the Anglican Church was probably good enough.

Then they moved onto the second-biggest Christian denomination: Pell. Eighty-one people gave evidence that Pell was over here at point A and one person gave evidence that he was over here at point B, doing something bad: 81 to one. But the previous speaker was praising the government of Victoria! If ever we've seen an example of fascism in Australia, we've seen it in Victoria! And in Queensland. I'm checking up on where these people come from, because they're not Australians. No Australian would ever do those sorts of things. They persecuted a pretty naive young man because of his religious beliefs, when he was quoting from a book that's been around for 2,000 years and which a third of the world's population believes is their pathway to a better life—and which tells them they have to love even their enemies and do good to others. Is there something wrong with that principle? But for quoting from that book, whether you agree with the quote or whether you don't, this man was punished in the most terrible manner. His job was taken away from him and his future was taken away from him. The money he was looking forward to in retirement was taken away from him because he quoted from this book.

As a Christian, I'm just a little bit sick and tired of being pushed around by people who have as much knowledge of history as I have of water supply on Mars. I'll be very specific: we have the angelic tribes of Islamic extremists—nice people!

The statue of Tamerlane, in Tashkent, has him on a horse with his sword out, saying, 'The sword of Islam.' He killed one-fifth of the world's population—one-fifth of the world's population—in the name of God. It was the same god that Christians worship, that Jewish people worship and that other people worship as well. I quote the great leader in Russia who called off the Cold War, which is now, very sadly, being switched back on: Gorbachev. His first statement to the world was: 'The important thing for us all to remember is that, when we go on our knees at night to pray, we all pray to the same god.' I thought, 'This man is one of the greatest men of the last 200 or 300 years. This man is truly one of the great men.' Every kid in my 12th-grade matriculation class at school had their transistor on, listening to John F Kennedy, a great warrior and an outstanding soldier. Of course, Khrushchev was another great warrior and a great soldier. He was never going to back off—a tough little peasant, he was never going to back off. When you listened to Kennedy, he wasn't going to back off, either. We were terrified. The hair stood up on the back of my neck. I looked over at a bloke called Eddie Anderson; he was as white as a sheet. I looked over at another classmate; his face was red and he just kept shaking his head. We were terrified. Now we're back in that situation again.

Who brought down communism, the worst scourge the world has ever seen? We now know that Mao Zedong was responsible for the death of 48 million people—there's no question about that . There is no question that Stalin was responsible for the death of 28 million people. If you can't add up, that's—how much is that?—70-odd million people. These two monsters, and the monster of communism, caused the death of all these people. Well, who brought communism down? Was it Lech Walesa and his mentor, the Pope of Rome? Was it the Christian right-wingers under Huey Long, like in that wonderful movie about how that little group of American Christians brought the communist empire down? Who abolished slavery? We Christians abolished slavery. Nobody else; we Christians abolished slavery. We abolished communism. Who led the civil rights movement in America? Martin Luther King—Reverend Martin Luther King. If you want to look, in no matter which direction you look, the new age dawned with the Medici family. You might say, 'Oh, well, they tortured Galileo.' Galileo was on the Medici payroll. The Medicis were the popes for almost all of that century. He was on the Pope's family's payroll—he lived in their palace. The enemies of the Renaissance, of freedom and of thought weren't going to attack the Medicis, but they took on Galileo, obliquely.

As to this idea that the crusaders went over and murdered everybody—well, just hold on a moment. The Middle East was the cradle of Christianity. The whole of the Middle East was Christian, and I quote a famous historian and commentator, in 1363. He said: 'I was very surprised to realise that in Jerusalem the town was still predominantly Christian, as was all of Palestine'. Of course it was. That's where Christianity came from. Well, they were being persecuted and murdered out of existence, again and again and again. So the crusaders went there to protect them—and, quite frankly, the peace in that 200-year period was probably unprecedented in Middle Eastern history. Now, they weren't nice guys; they were tough guys. I'm not going to say that they were good Christians; I'm just going to say that Christians were being murdered and someone stood up to protect them. Those great heroes went over there to protect them and were outnumbered 100 to one almost continuously throughout that period.

The forces of expansionist Islam—there are a lot of good people in Islam; we all know that. Saladin is made out to be a goody-goody because he didn't murder everyone in Jerusalem, like the Crusaders did. Well, that's pretty historically true, actually. Why didn't he murder them all? Because he ransomed off all the rich ones and turned the rest into slaves. It was a pretty bad idea to kill them all. It was pretty dumb of the Crusaders, when they could have been smart.

Now, they were taking 50,000 Christian slaves a year. In the harem in Turkey, the Ottomans did not speech Turkish; they spoke Serbo-Croat. There were Christian women in the harem. If you disbelieve me—the two greatest figures of the middle ages, Suleiman the Magnificent and Peter the Great were very romantic. They had great love affairs. Each was very much in love with his wife—his beloved, for the sake of a better word—Suleiman the Magnificent with his, and Peter the Great with Catherine. Both those women were Christian slaves—freed in the case of Peter the Great's wife and captured in the case of Suleiman the Magnificent's. There was no doubt that both men were deeply in love with their wives, but both of them were Christian slaves. In what the Encyclopaedia Britannica says is arguably the most important battle in human history, the battle for Malta, Suleiman the Magnificent and 250,000 men tried to take Malta off the Knights Hospitaller of St. John. They stood their ground. Their leader was Jean Parisot de la Valette, and he'd been a galley slave. What may be the most important battle in human history, according to the encyclopedia, was fought by a man who'd been a galley slave!

So Peter the Great's wife was a slave, Suleiman the Magnificent's wife was a slave and Jean Parisot de la Valette was a slave. You can get a picture of what was taking place. We Christians were being persecuted on a massive scale. We're not new to persecution. Our blessed Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, was murdered in the most terrible manner humanly possible, so we're not new to persecution. But, when I see the leader of the biggest Christian church hacked to pieces in the public arena—we know by whom; we know who was doing it—and the leader of the second biggest Christian denomination thrown in jail—81 people said he was there; one person said he wasn't. And she's talking about the government of Victoria. They will go down in history as having maybe the least respect for human rights in the country's history. No wonder the Eureka Stockade took place in Victoria! That spirit is not dead in we Australians, I can tell you.

To pick on a very outstanding young Australian because he quoted from the gospels—shame, shame, shame! She's talking about a bill of rights. Well, there's an instrument called the Magna Carta, and it was written by Stephen Langton, the archbishop and chief primate of the Christian church of England, who showed great courage in risking his life in enforcing that document. At that point, the evils of monarchy were undermined, never ever to really recover. We saw the last throes of those evils in World War I, with a lot of inbred monarchs in Europe getting carried away with their own egos: 'Oh, Cousin Willy is a naughty boy' and 'We've got a bigger navy than they've got.' Well, Cousin Willy caused a fair amount of trouble. About 30 million people died because of Cousin Willy and his cousin, Nicky, over in Russia there. They had big egos, so we had to have a war. That had been going on for I don't know how long. If you go through human history and you start with the Roman Empire, it was Christianised. You move on to the period of the Vikings. They were Christianised. You move on to the period of the Muslim takeover of Europe—all of Portugal, all of Spain, most of Italy, all of the Balkans—all taken over by them. Not Genghis Khan but his descendants were Muslim, and they occupied Moscow. They were ruling—and, look, crusaders may not have been angels, but I can absolutely assure you, the rule of the Ottomans was no picnic, particularly if you were a Christian; that was for certain. But people stood up with great courage against oppression, and that's part of the Christian belief system. So when I hear people like the last speaker— (Time expired)

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