Cory Bernardi (SA, Australian Conservatives) Share this | Hansard source

I concur, Mr Acting Deputy President. I was recently reading the Australian government's response to the report of the inquiry by the Senate Economics References Committee into the third-party certification of food. The response has been nearly two years in the making and basically says that the committee was an excellent committee, that it reached some very reasonable conclusions and that the government is still considering how to implement those conclusions. But I was drawn to one particular part of it, which said:

… the Government … will also consider amendments to the Export Control (Meat and Meat Products) Orders 2005 to strengthen oversight and monitoring of halal certification for export, which will also include an option for the Government to be the sole signatory on halal certificates for export—

in essence, a government-led halal certification system. This is because halal certification is ridded with scams and rorts. It is an additional tariff, if you will, to get access to particular markets.

People will have different views about that, but one of the things it reminded me of is perhaps one of the vilest and grubbiest individuals that I've ever had the fortune to have never met. This is a bloke named Mohamed El-Mouelhy. Mr El-Mouelhy boasts openly that he is one of Australia's multimillionaire halal certifiers. He taunts people regularly about how much money he makes and how he certifies water and everything else. In effect, this bloke is ripping off Australians. He is a scammer. I believe he is a crook, and I will tell you exactly why I'm saying that. I know he is a serial liar. I know he is a person who is of poor character, and he is a notorious bigot.

I say those things—I've said them on radio; I've said them out in the public sphere—because this is a man who has admitted to bribing people through his halal certification fees. He is a man who admits to supplying money to an Islamic charity which was demonstrated links to Hamas and Hezbollah, proscribed organisations. He proudly boasts about the quantum of money he gives them. He has admitted, in public, to effectively ripping off the Australian taxpayer through halal certification. He has blatantly lied, repeatedly, about me and many others. This is, perhaps, one of the worst examples of our immigration program in the history of this country, and I don't say that lightly. This is a bloke who came here in 1975, became an Australian citizen in 1981 and has been basically ripping us off ever since.

In recent times this scammer teamed up with a bunch of other colourful characters to launch a coup, as it was described in the media, to take over a crooked organisation called AFIC, Australian Federation of Islamic Councils. When they appeared before the halal certification inquiry they were unable to explain: their own books, how they were a not-for-profit making profit out of halal certification, where the money went and what happened to the hundreds of millions of dollars they took over. These are people that are in charge of those dodgy Malek Fahd schools, which the government has had to shut down multiple times, because these people are ripping stuff out of the system.

One bunch of crooks thought the other bunch of crooks weren't doing a bad enough job, so they went to take it over. The courts, having to decide between two crooked outfits, decided to put the first bunch of crooks back. Mr El-Mouelhy was out of another angle of a scam. But, because he didn't want to be dissuaded from being in the public eye, Mr El-Mouelhy decided to double-down on his stupidity. He thought that he would set a new standard in idiocy. I am basing this on his own standards. This is a new level of idiocy. This is a man who is not very bright, judging by his Facebook photos and judging by what he puts on Facebook, because he describes himself as a halal chief and boasts about billions of dollars' worth of exports that he has generated for Australia, but he also says that Australian women need Muslim men to fertilise them. Can you believe that? He wrote that on his Facebook page:

…Australian women need us—

Muslim men

…to fertilise them to keep them surrounded by Muslim babies—

while declaring

…the white race will be extinct in 40 years.

This is a self-proclaimed giant of the halal certification industry. He's a crook and he's an idiot, but what sort of a place is it when we have clowns like this setting themselves up as representatives of the Muslim community?

As I said, Mr El-Mouelhy is not very bright. He can't be very bright, but he knows how to run a good scam. His vision of Australia is:

It will be mandatory for all women to wear hijab or burka.

That's Mr El-Mouelhy vision for the future: where everything in Australia will be halal certified. But he doesn't stop there. He says:

When that happens everything in Australia will be Halal certified. Bigots and pigs will be declared Haram—

which is—Senator Dastyari, can you help me?