Fraser Anning (Queensland, Katter's Australian Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr President. I am pleased to advise that this is finally my first speech.

On 6 February 1890, Sir Henry Parkes, the man who was to become the 'Father of our Federation', spoke to assembled delegates at the Federation Conference in Melbourne. He said:

And, in this country of Australia with such ample space, with such inviting varieties of soil and climate … and with a people occupying that soil unequalled in … nation-creating properties, what is there that should be impossible?

… … …

… we know the value of their British origin. We know that we represent a race … for the purposes of settling new colonies, which never had its equal on the face of the earth.

… … …

The crimson thread of kinship runs through us all.

The founding father of our Federation knew that it was not simply a bounteous land that makes a nation, but the common threads of inherited identity that unite its people. And what he was telling delegates and, through them, us today was that a great nation can only be the consequence of the people it comprises.

I come from the bush, born to a cattle-grazing family in far north-west Queensland. I went to school in Brisbane and then returned to the bush where I met and married the love of my life, Fiona, the girl next door—200 kilometres away! We subsequently had two beautiful daughters who, with their husbands and now our two grandchildren, live in the United States, and we miss them. Although my family had been graziers for over a 100 years, having settled in the Charters Towers area in the 1860s before there was a Charters Towers, in my early 20s, drought and predatory banks drove my wife and I off the land. Thereafter, Fiona and I spent our working lives as our children were growing up in and around regional towns over the years covering the length and breadth of the state. I've been a grazier, a builder's labourer, a pilot, a light aircraft manufacturer, a gas industry worker and a hotelier. Most recently, before entering the Senate late last year, my family and I ran a hotel in Gladstone.

Like most blokes from the bush 40 years ago, I was a committed National Party supporter. I was always a Joh man and, to this day, I regard the Joh era as Queensland's golden age. It was only the fact that the National Party abandoned Joh's legacy and moved to the left 25 years ago that led me to switch to One Nation. But that didn't work out so well. I am consequently very happy to have joined Katter's Australian Party, a genuinely democratic party in which senators and members get to vote first and foremost in accordance with their conscience and their constituents' wishes.

KAP to me represents a continuation of the conservative values, commitment to rural and regional development, opposition to migration without assimilation and a focus on economic nationalism of the Joh era Nationals, which strongly reflects my own beliefs. It is a party in which loyalty isn't a one-way street and where leadership is more than a cardboard cut-out.

As a conservative Christian, I strongly support traditional social values, but, as an Australian nationalist, I also believe in Australia and Australians first. I believe in low taxes and personal responsibility and in the virtues of hard work and thrift, reward for effort and the freedom to do and say what you think. I also believe in the right of people to raise their kids in accordance with their own values, without a bunch of nanny state meddlers and cultural Marxists trying to re-engineer them.

I believe that the key role of government is to provide laws for the enforcement of contracts, to provide physical security for businesses and individuals and to build infrastructure. I believe that the priority for government expenditure is not obligation-free handouts but nation building: providing the facilities and infrastructure which businesses and farmers need to develop and grow, which then provides for secure, well-paid jobs. I believe that ordinary working people have the right to expect a fair day's pay for a fair day's work, to keep what they have worked for, to get ahead and have a decent life, to be able to provide for themselves in old age, and to have enough to help their kids have an even better life than themselves. I believe that the unfettered ownership of private property and the right to own and use firearms, including for self-defence, are the God-given rights of free people everywhere. And I believe, as the American revolutionaries did, that government is usually the problem not the solution and that, in order for people to be free, the power of government needs to be constrained.

I remember Queensland as it was in the sixties, seventies and early eighties, when working blokes could get good, well-paying jobs actually making products for us to buy; when people could start small businesses and not be strangled by red tape; when car rego, stamp duty and rates were affordable; when electricity was the cheapest in the world; when, through statutory and orderly marketing, farmers were not bled white by rapacious corporations or forced to sell to Chinese carpetbaggers; when you could say what you thought without being charged with a crime; and when we could all enjoy our leisure time without all the nanny state restrictions and prohibitions.

Fifty years ago Australia was a cohesive, predominantly Anglo-Celtic nation. Most people thought of themselves as Christian of some sort, although most of us didn't go to church all that often. Everyone, from the cleaners to the captains of industry, had a shared vision of who we were as a people and our place in the world. Until the late 1960s, prior to the rise of Whitlam in the Labor Party, there was a broad consensus between the Liberal and Labor parties on the kind of society we were and what we should be in the future.

In the 1960s, both Liberal and Labor parties reflected a common framework of Judeo-Christian values, supporting the family as the basic unit of society. They both supported the principle that marriage was a union between a man and woman, and both parties recognised the sanctity of the lives of the unborn. Both major parties agreed that people should be free to live their own lives and say what they thought without fear of state sanction. Both sides of politics recognised the importance of our manufacturing industries as well as our farming and mining. Both parties recognised the importance of our predominantly European identity.

A key part of this great pre-Whitlam consensus was bipartisan support from both Liberal and Labor for a European based immigration program. The great Labor statesmen Ben Chifley, John Curtin and Arthur Calwell all strongly supported an immigration program that actively discriminated in favour of Europeans. Australia's greatest conservative, Sir Robert Menzies himself, said:

I don't want to see reproduced in Australia the kind of problem they have in South Africa or in America or increasingly in Great Britain. I think—

a European based immigration program has—

… been a very good policy and it's been of great value to us …

This continued until 1973 when Whitlam and his hard Left cronies adopted Soviet inspired UN treaties on discrimination and banned preferential selection of migrants based on their ethnicity.

Yet the end of the pre-Whitlam consensus between the Labor and Liberal Parties has been much more than a political sea change. It has allowed the cultural conquest of our nation. A tectonic shift has occurred in which the previously agreed social and political order has been overthrown in an insidious silent revolution.

To understand fully what has happened to our country, I believe that we must look to the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci's insight was to see revolution in cultural rather than economic terms, with 'cultural hegemony' as the key to supposed class dominance. The Marxist state, Gramsci argued, could be achieved by gradual cultural revolution—subverting society via a long march through the institutions. The tactics of latter-day Gramsci-inspired radicals were to disguise degeneracy as liberation and tyranny as compassion. Free speech could be eliminated by appeal to not 'offending' or 'saying things that were hurtful'. This, of course, subtly creates a subjective test by which all criticism of the cultural Marxist agenda can be silenced.

It is my understanding that Gramsci himself coined the term 'political correctness' to describe obedience to the will of the Communist Party. However he made clear that its final purpose was to force concurrence with those things which individuals knew to be false. If an individual could be induced to agree and state to others something they knew to be utterly false such as black being white, then the party had achieved total moral and ethical surrender in the subject. Thus, to describe the so-called 'safe schools' and 'gender fluidity' garbage being peddled in schools as 'cultural Marxism' is not a throwaway line but a literal truth.

Given that everyone knows there are only two genders, if you can be persuaded to agree to and advocate in support of the false claim that there are 'an infinite number of genders', then, without realizing it, you have surrendered your political soul. Today, with so many unwittingly in lock-step, marching to the cultural revolutionaries' tune, options to oppose them politically are increasingly limited. So that's why I joined Katter's Australian Party, the only political force that seeks a return to the pre-Whitlam consensus. I want to see the defeat of the cultural Marxists and their ilk and a rolling back of the subversion of Australian culture and values that they have wrought.

In terms of specifics, my political goals are:

My most immediate concern is saving agriculture in this country. Only this morning, we heard the appalling personal stories of 40 farmers and others whose family businesses were stolen and who were ruined by the criminal behavior of the major banks. This is the reason that I fought, along with my colleague Barry O'Sullivan, for a royal commission into banking. However, it has quickly become clear that the terms of reference are far too narrow and the ability of the commission to hear evidence far too limited. That is the reason that I moved earlier today to increase the time and resources of the royal commission, extend the terms of reference and consider dispute resolution processes. Those lenders and particular liquidators, receivers and administrators who have behaved contrary to any acceptable moral standard must be exposed and made to pay for their crimes. I'm happy to report that that motion got up.

An incident having occurred in the gallery—