Fraser Anning (Queensland, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

This censure motion against me is a blatant attack on free speech. It is also an exercise in left-wing virtue signalling of the worst kind. Of course, this is exactly the kind of self-righteous left-wing intolerance of alternative views you would expect from an extremist party like the Greens. What is shocking is that it is a supposedly Liberal Prime Minister who is leading the charge, joining hands with Labor and the Greens. The specific reasons for moving a motion to censure me are barely coherent. The motion calls on the Senate to censure me for supposedly inflammatory and divisive comments seeking to attribute blame to the victims of a horrific crime. What inflammatory and divisive comments? What blame did I attribute to the victims? I said nothing of the sort.

Following this shocking attack on two mosques in Christchurch on 15 March, I issued a media statement condemning the shooting and the shooter in the strongest possible terms. However, after putting the immediate blame where it belonged, I looked for contributing causes. I identified that an immigration program that allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand was a key enabler of community violence. The claim that this somehow blames the victims is absurd. My real crime, of course, is that I simply told the truth at a time when the left-wing political and media elites least wanted to hear it.

In the three weeks before the shooting in Christchurch, 120 Christians in Nigeria were shot or hacked to death by Muslims. The tragedy was not reported in a single Australian news outlet that I am aware of. Much closer to home, in the Philippines, in January a cathedral was bombed by Muslims, and 20 innocents attending mass were killed with over 100 injured. Where was the statement from Morrison's government denouncing the killers? Where was the outrage from the others condemning me? Just three days after the Christchurch killings, a Muslim fanatic killed three and wounded five others in a tram in Holland. Again, there was silence from those seeking to censure me now. Since the attack in Christchurch on 15 May there have been 66 new terrorist attacks committed worldwide by Muslims, killing 342 people and injuring many hundreds of others. Since the Islamic attack on the Twin Towers in New York on 11 September 2001, there have been more than 34,000 terrorist attacks conducted in the name of Islam. This is a staggering number.

Once again, we hear the deafening silence on these figures from those moving this censure motion—because, of course, Muslims as perpetrators does not fit their current narrative. Where was the parliament's condolence motion for these victims of Muslim terrorism? Yesterday, the government expressed solidarity with Muslim victims of one New Zealand attack, but the growing list of thousands of civilian victims of Muslim terrorism is ignored. Has everyone forgotten the scores of heinous terrorist attacks committed by Muslim fanatics, here in Australia and in France, Germany, Britain, Spain and the United States and elsewhere? Australians and New Zealanders should be able to both condemn the attacks in Christchurch but also see them in perspective and discuss related factors without being shouted down or subject to parliamentary censure.

Following my comments on the Christchurch shooting, I was a victim of a physical attack in Melbourne. Even though this only involved a young adult with an egg, it was nevertheless an example of politically motivated violence. While those who don't like me may have been delighted to see me attacked, we might have expected a statesmanlike response from the Prime Minister deploring such action—not at all. Prime Minister Morrison said that I should be charged. He was reported as saying that—although I had been a victim of politically motivated violence—I should be subject to 'the full force of the law'.

Yesterday, I asked Minister Birmingham if the government backed the Prime Minister's shocking statement that I have no place in parliament, and his apparent lack of concern for politically motivated violence against me. The answer was a resounding yes. It may have only been an idiot with an egg this time, but there is a continuum which begins with this and ends with a fanatic with a gun or a bomb. But, apparently, according to Prime Minister Morrison, that's okay as long as the victims are conservatives.

The Prime Minister loves to recycle his predecessor's mantra that Australia is the most successful multicultural society in the world. What a ridiculous statement. By what criteria is this conclusion arrived at? It is an established fact that diversity undermines cohesion, increases alienation and is a key driver of increasing crime. It is also an established fact that if you import those who despise our values and beliefs and whose religion enjoins them to violence, then this sort of diversity leads to increasing violence and terrorism.

This censure motion against me is an attempt to deflect attention from the government's and the opposition's bipartisan commitment to reckless, indiscriminate immigration. They have a failed policy which is importing Muslims and Sudanese wholesale, despite the proven track records of both groups in causing crime and terrorism. In response to the Christchurch attack, the extreme Left, exemplified by the Greens, has seized on an opportunity to try to smear everyone right of centre as potentially violent racists. However, what is truly shocking is that the Prime Minister, Mr Morrison, seems to have bought into that as well.

Advocating politically or religiously motivated violence is an indicator of extremism, not the quiet, reasonable and peaceful advocacy for a change in our immigration program before European Australians become a minority in our own country. Now innocent conservatives and even the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation are being accused of guilt for mass murder on the flimsy basis that the killer's manifesto opposed Islamic immigration to Europe. To blame conservatives for Christchurch, as is now happening, is as irrational as blaming socialist democrats for communist mass murder.

Apparent government sanctions to this left-wing exploitation of the Christchurch killings has abruptly tilted the Australian political landscape to the far Left. It has created an atmosphere of fear and suspicion of anyone who dissents from politically correct, left-wing orthodoxy. The idea that anyone with right-wing views might somehow be likely to undertake an attack similar to the attack by the deranged psychopath in New Zealand is just absurd. It's sinister and Orwellian. That a supposedly Liberal Prime Minister would buy into this extreme, left-inspired witch-hunt is frankly shocking and just shows how far to the left the Liberal Party has gone.

However, what fair-minded Australians will find most offensive about Prime Minister Morrison's response to my comments and about his government's support of this censure motion is not simply the left-wing self-righteousness but the gross hypocrisy. This year, the Morrison government is giving $43 million in aid to the Palestinian territories and another $50 million in aid to Pakistan, despite the fact that the Muslim governments of both countries sponsor terrorist attacks on their neighbours. His government is giving nearly $100 million in Australian taxpayers' dollars to Muslim countries whose governments are killing innocent Israelis and Indians, and he has the nerve to condemn me.

This censure motion against me is actually a reflection of the creeping neosocialism that is gradually eliminating freedom of conscience in Australia. This government refused to replace section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act and refused to rein in the commissars of the Human Rights Commission. Now, along with Labor and the Greens, they seek to condemn someone for simply speaking the truth to power.

Saying that free speech is conditional on staying within the bounds that those in power stipulate, as Minister Birmingham said yesterday, is actually to say that there is no free speech at all. What is being censured here is not really me; it is the right of anyone to say something that those in power disagree with. If, as a senator, I am not allowed to express my views, what chance do everyday Australians have to say what they think? This left-wing, virtue-signalling censure motion is also a metaphor for everything that is wrong with this government. Sir Robert Menzies would be rolling in his grave.