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

and the terrorists that we are talking about are people of the Muslim faith in the Middle East. I make the point that it's 'Middle East', in inverted commas, because I really think all the people from Indonesia that I know are more Christian than the supposed Christians here in Australia. They are the complete opposite of what we're seeing from the Middle East. I feel sorry for the Middle Eastern people, but they have a constant paradigm in history.

Suleiman the Magnificent had a lot of wives, but he had one wife that he was really in love with. The wives of both these men were Christian slaves. They were very great love affairs. They were very great stories of romance. If you doubt that they were taking 50,000 a year, then how come both the two outstanding people of the Middle Ages were Christian slaves that the Muslims had taken? I emphasise that the Indonesians have been wonderful neighbours to us. They've exemplified far more Christianity than we Australians have.

We're not talking about a diaspora here. The Jews were very prominent throughout many countries in Europe, which led to the terrible pogroms, hatred and everything else that occurred under the Nazis and others. But that was a diaspora; they had been forced out and they spread out. Now, they were persecuted to a point. You say, 'They took this land off them!' What the hell would you have done if you were a Jew in Europe at the start of the 1940s? I'll tell you what: as an Australian I don't hold my head up very high here, because the ship of shame carrying 700 Jewish refugees landed in England and they said, 'We don't want you because you're Jews.' They landed in Brazil and they said, 'We don't want you because you're Jews.' They landed in America and they said, 'We don't want you because you're Jews.' They landed in the Caribbean and they said, 'We don't want you because you're Jews.' To the shame of this nation—an empty country—we said, 'We don't want you because you're Jews.' There were some fairly ugly comments by the prime ministers at the time.

Where were they to go? They went to their traditional historic homeland. They returned there. There were a lot of Jews in what we now call Israel, at the time. They weren't anywhere near the predominant group of people there but they had to go somewhere, and that's where they ended up. The British had to send their convicts somewhere. That's how we started.

I want to move on. Today we have the Middle East, and I use the term 'Middle East' because Muslims from other parts, like Indonesia, have been very wonderful people, in my opinion. I can give you a lot of evidence to that effect. From the Middle East—Tony Burke has been made immigration minister, in one of the most extraordinary decisions I have ever seen in 50 years in politics. To put a person in as immigration minister who has 25 per cent of his electorate Muslim—they're 25 per cent of his electorate and they put him as immigration minister. I can tell you, this country doesn't want any immigrants now—54,000 families can't find a home in this country, yet the government continues to bring in half a million people.

They keep emphasising migration. Migration is only a small part of the people coming into this country. The really big slice are the student visas. I ran into a family two years ago—they were very nice people. I said, 'Did you only recently come to Australia?' and they said, 'Yes, we've been here only three months.' I said, 'What was your visa?' They said, 'It was a student visa I came in on.' I said, 'How about your whole family?' They said, 'If you come in on a student visa, you can bring your family in.' Don't talk about migration and humanitarian people coming to Australia—let's have a look at the student visas. Do they go home? No, they don't. Get in a taxi in Brisbane, Sydney or Melbourne and ask the bloke what subject he's doing at university. The last time I asked, he was doing hospitality—one unit of hospitality. He looked to me to be about 50 years of age.

See this speech in context