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

Everyone in this country knows the problem is not the ghost universities. It goes much further than that. The government clearly, in trying to make it look like they're doing something about the problem, is dealing with two per cent of the problem instead of the 98 per cent of the problem they should be dealing with. It's not anecdotal, I don't think.

I was just with a family—lovely people. They'd just come to Australia two months before. I said, 'What visa did you come in on?' and the lady said: 'I came in on a student visa. It's really easy to get a student visa. You always get a student visa to get into the country.' They were setting up a business and obviously intended to stay here forever. God bless them; it was a good business they were setting up, too. And I said, 'But what about your family?' There were six in the family. She said, 'If you get a student visa, you can bring your family in as well.'

Ironically enough, three weeks later I was in a taxicab in a capital city and I asked the bloke, 'What unit are you doing at university?' I didn't say, 'Are you doing university studies?' I said, 'What unit are you doing?' He said, 'Hospitality.' He looked to me to be about 50, and I'm sure that he came to Australia 30 or 40 years ago doing hospitality and is still there doing hospitality!

Now, if you want your country taken off you, the vast bulk of those people coming to Australia are coming from countries with no democracy, no rule of law, no egalitarian traditions, no industrial awards, no Christianity—and I'm not talking about belief in god; I'm just saying Western civilisation is based on Christianity. You have a responsibility to look after your fellow man and you have a responsibility to make the world a better place. Well, these people are not coming from countries like that. I will be very specific: they are coming from the Middle East, from countries that do not march to a single one of those drums.

If you bring them in from the Philippines, tick every box. They can harmonise into our community extremely well. There are people that dress differently from us, but, if you come to a country, don't you become one with that country? I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad thing; I think the Sikhs are the greatest immigrants that ever came to this country. Nor am I saying that the Islamic religion is bad, because my experience with Indonesians is that they have been just wonderful neighbours to us and, from my experience, they're a lot more Christian than we are. That would be my take on them.

But that mob coming in from the Middle East? There are four or, arguably, five wars going on at the present moment, and that's always the way it is. From 750 AD to the present day, they have been either killing us or killing each other. There is something terribly, terribly wrong there. For 500 or 600 years they took 50,000 Christian slaves a year. If you doubt me—a lot of people here don't read history books, and that's very sad. There is Churchill's famous adage that those who do not understand and know history shall be doomed to once again suffer those lessons of history. Good call, Winston; good call. If you know your history, you know of the two greatest leaders of the Middle Ages, Suleiman the Magnificent, head of the Ottoman Empire, and Peter the Great of Russia—only seven rulers in human history have been called 'the Great', and Peter was one of them. These two great men dominated the Middle Ages, and both of their wives were Christian slaves. Now, alright, Suleiman had 430 wives, but he was very much in love with Roxelana. It was a great love affair. It was similar with Peter the Great. Both were Christian slaves. So let's not doubt for a moment. On the other side, we Christians abolished slavery. Yes, we were responsible for slavery as much as anyone on earth, but we abolished it.

I'm going sideways. To come back to the essence of this: there are the ghost universities. Twenty-odd years ago, I would say the most prominent person on the university councils of Australia, a very good friend of mine, said, 'Mate, if the student visas'—

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