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

It is my misfortune to be born when I was born, because I ended up wearing a uniform for half of my life. Thank goodness, the war blew over in Indonesia before my battalion was up there.

But if you start a war then you take the blame for what happens afterwards. I have never heard anything as disgusting and terrible as I have just heard here, after 50 years in parliament! These people crossed the border and murdered babies—they cut their throats and put it on film. They raped little, young women and put it on film, advertising it to the world. They invaded somebody else's country and started killing people. When you do that, you sow the wind and so you will reap the whirlwind. I am just absolutely disgusted that I'm in a parliament with people who would come and justify, protect and advocate for them!

I don't hesitate to remind people that six million of these poor people were murdered in Europe, and not a single country on the earth would take the 'Ship of Shame'. There were 250,000 refugees, and Australia knocked them back, America knocked them back, Brazil knocked them back and France knocked them back. No-one would take them; they were just left there to be murdered in the ghettos. Who can blame these people for taking a slice of someone's land somewhere for themselves? Who could blame them for doing that? Tell me what you would have done if you were a Jew being persecuted like that? You tell me what you would have done. There is no doubt in my mind where I would have been.

These people are saying, 'Oh, the land was taken off us.' I have some forebears who were Celts. The Romans came and took the land off them. Then, when the Romans left, the Angles came and took the land off them. And when the Angles left, or settled down, the Saxons came and took the land off them. And when they left, the Norman-French came in and took the land off them. If you're complaining about someone taking the land off you then find a country on earth that wasn't taken off somebody somewhere.

In these countries there is just continuous warfare. There's something terrible about these countries in the Middle East. That's because there's just continuous warfare going on forever. I don't know that it's a good idea to read history books, but the southern half of Europe was under the Ottomans. They took 50,000 slaves a year and the young men were sent as janissaries. They were taken from their parents under the age of 12 and turned into what we would today call suicide bombers. They were the janissaries and they led the warfare conducted by the Ottomans through Portugal, Spain, all of Northern Africa and southern Europe. The southern half of Italy was under the Ottomans and this continued for century after century. They attacked the capital of Europe, Vienna, putting it under siege in the 1700s. That's not ancient history here, it's relatively localised history.

Once that was over they then started doing it to each other. There's a continuous pattern of behaviour here, and you can't just ignore history or turn a blind eye to what's going on. But that's what we've heard from people in the parliament of Australia, a place I would like to think advocates for freedom, rights, liberties and those wonderful words that start the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man: 'All men are born free and equal, and their creator endows them with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.' Would there be a single country in the Middle East that would subscribe to those principles? We put on our flag a Christian cross, a bloke who died nailed to a cross. That's who we put on our flag.

Debate interrupted.

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