"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 unequaled 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 (Bjelke-Petersen) 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 realising 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: · to
break the oligopoly power of the banks; to get a better deal for working
families and farmers, to achieve major infrastructure development in Far
North and Western Queensland; to reduce immigration levels and restrict
entry to those who will best assimilate; to restore personal freedom and
free speech; to make affordable homeownership a national priority; to
counter the growing threat of China both outside and within Australia; to
slash runaway government spending and, with it, taxes on productive enterprises; to
build coal-fired power stations to return us to the cheapest power in the
world; to slash the regulatory burden that is crippling the general
aviation industry; an to take back our culture from the left-wing
extremists.
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. However, this is
only the first step. I also want to see a permanent end to the scourge of usury
in rural lending. The banks' criminal treatment of so many farmers, which has
led to the loss of family farms—owned for generations—and waves of rural
suicides, must be ended once and for all. I believe that the solution is the
re-establishment of rural redevelopment state banks, along the lines of the
former Queensland Industry Development Corporation established by Sir Leo
Hielscher, the internationally respected former Queensland Treasury
undersecretary and the architect of Queensland's Joh-era prosperity. Like the
QIDC, a rural development and reconstruction state bank would not be subject to
APRA lending guidelines and would be able to make lending judgments based on
long-term rural property viability and not just short-term variations of
commodity prices or rainfall, just like old country bank managers used to do.
The RDRSB would also be empowered to buy up existing so-called 'distressed'
loans from banks, saving tens of thousands of farmers from hardship and ruin.
In this way, the scourge of usury in rural lending can be ended for all time.
In terms of rebuilding rural incomes, the abolition of statutory marketing
boards 20 years ago has generally not seen any meaningful reduction in prices
for consumers, just a net wealth transfer from farmers to middlemen and giant
supermarket chains. This has driven many farmers to ruin and even suicide. I
would like to see the reestablishment of orderly marketing of agricultural
products via grower co-ops to allow collective bargaining by farmers for the
sale of their produce. This would return to the farmers greater control of
their own industries and a greater share of the retail value of their products.
Collectively, these measures would go a long way to rebuild our crucial rural
industries.
My next biggest concern is rural infrastructure
development. First and foremost, my priority is water. Thanks to grossly
inadequate water capture and storage, less than one per cent of the rainwater
that falls on this continent is captured and used. Nowhere is this
infrastructure failure more acute than in the bush. I want to remedy this. My
first solution is to build the Bradfield scheme. In 1938, JJC Bradfield, the
same civil engineer who designed both the Sydney Harbour and Story bridges,
proposed a massive irrigation plan to turn the far northern rivers inland to
irrigate vast areas west of the dividing range. The scheme involved diverting
water from the upper reaches of the Johnson, Tully, Herbert and Burdekin
rivers, which, fed by the annual monsoon, currently flow out into the ocean.
Envisaged was the construction of a series of massive dams in north and western
Queensland. It would also include raising the wall of the existing Burdekin
Falls Dam by 14.6 metres, as intended in the original Joh-era plan, which would
increase its capacity by nearly five times and droughtproof Townsville for the
next century. Water accumulating was then proposed to be diverted through a
tunnel under the Great Dividing Range. When completed, the Bradfield scheme
would be the greatest nation-building project this country has ever seen,
totally dwarfing the Snowy scheme, and would, at a stroke, ensure the
prosperity of Australia for many generations to come. This would provide
employment for many tens of thousands of people and would not only ensure our
own food requirements are met but also provide food for many hundreds of
thousands in other countries as well. To imagine the benefits of the Bradfield
proposal, we only need to see what has been achieved in places like Israel and
California, both places in which virtual deserts have been transformed into
enormous food bowls which help drive their respective economies. My second
infrastructure priority is ports. A key issue in determining the profitability
of exports of mining and primary products is the distance they have to be
carried to reach a port. In the UK, there is a port every 65 kilometres. In the
most productive parts of India, its 57 kilometres. But in Queensland, it's
1,000 kilometres. Rather than taking the product to the port, the solution is
to take the port to the product. Microports constructed along the Queensland
coast every 60 to 80 kilometres would greatly increase the viability of
exports. And it goes without saying that I'm an enthusiastic supporter of
mining, including coalmine development in the Galilee Basin. I strongly support
government building the required railway to allow mining in this area to
proceed. It would be the salvation of Townsville. Of course, to more
effectively manage our resources with regard to proposals like the Bradfield
Scheme, multiple microport construction, Galilee Basin coalmines et cetera, we
have to have the political will to remove the obstacles put in the way of
progress by extreme left-wing Luddites. Only by following the example of true
nation-building leaders like Ben Chifley, Bob Menzies, John Curtin and Joh can
we hope to provide for the security and prosperity of generations to come.
The next critical problem that we need to address
is immigration. Australia currently has the highest per capita immigration rate
in the world. Last Tuesday, Australia's population hit 25 million—22 years
ahead of previous government predictions. That means that since 1971 the
population of Australia has doubled, with immigrants now around one-third of
our population. The huge numbers of people allowed to flood into Australia in
recent years are unsustainable, with immigration quotas apparently set by
successive governments on a whim and without any regard for the necessary
infrastructure that these people would require or the ability of those that
came here to assimilate. Ethnocultural diversity, which is known to undermine
social cohesion, has been allowed to rise to dangerous levels in many suburbs.
In direct response, self-segregation, including white flight from poorer
inner-urban areas, has become the norm. I believe that immigration to our
country should be a privilege, not an obligation-free right provided to anyone
from the Third World who demands it. First, 457 visas, which simply steal jobs from
Australians, should be abolished unless expressly approved by the immigration
minister. This will create more jobs for Australians and end the massive
rorting of these for backdoor permanent immigration.Second, 'family reunion'
must be restricted to the husband or wife and/or dependent children within a
family. Third, student visas should be drastically reduced in number. This will
create more university places for Australians, whose parents have actually paid
for the universities with their taxes in the first place. Those studying here
who decide to apply to immigrate should be required to return to their country
of origin after their qualification and to apply as part of the general
migration program. Fourth, net immigration must be reduced to a level which can
be supported and, therefore, must be set following detailed modelling and
planning for the associated necessary accommodation, facilities and
infrastructure. Fifth, but most important of all, diversity should be managed
to remain compatible with social cohesion and national identity.
We as a nation are entitled to insist that those
who are allowed to come here predominantly reflect the historic European
Christian composition of Australian society and embrace our language, culture
and values as a people. In order for us to remain the nation that we are now,
those who come here need to assimilate and integrate. Those who are most
similar to the mainstream majority in terms of ethnicity, culture, language and
values most readily do so. Historically, however, the one immigrant group here
and in other Western nations that has consistently shown itself to be the least
able to assimilate and integrate is Muslims. The first terrorist act on
Australian soil was in 1915, when two Muslim immigrants opened fire on a picnic
train of innocent women and children in Broken Hill—and Muslim immigrants have
been a problem ever since. To paraphrase the words of Sir Winston Churchill:
The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his
absolute property—either as a child, a wife, or a concubine—must delay the
final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great
power.
The influence of the religion paralyses the social
development of those that follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the
world. I believe that the reasons for ending all further Muslim immigration are
both compelling and self-evident. The record of Muslims who have already come
to this country in rates of crime, welfare dependency and terrorism is the
worst of any migrants and vastly exceeds any other immigrant groups. A majority
of Muslims in Australia of working age do not work and live on welfare. Muslims
in New South Wales and Victoria are three times more likely than other groups
to be convicted of crimes. We have black African Muslim gangs terrorising
Melbourne. We have ISIS-sympathising Muslims trying to go overseas to fight for
ISIS and, while all Muslims are not terrorists, certainly all terrorists these
days are Muslims. So why would anyone want to bring more of them here?
Finally, it should go without saying that, as a
nation, we are entitled to require that those who come here not only have
useful work skills and qualifications but also the commitment to work and pay
taxes. In truth, it appears that many of those who claim to be asylum seekers
are actually just welfare seekers who only come to Australia to live on welfare
in public housing at the expense of working Australians. In the days of
Menzies, immigrants arriving here were not allowed to apply for welfare and
that attracted exactly the right sort of hard-working people this country
needed. We should go back to that and ban all immigrants receiving welfare for
the first five years after they arrive. The final solution to the immigration
problem is, of course, a popular vote. We don't need a plebiscite to cut
immigration numbers; we just need a government that is willing to institute a
sustainable population policy, end Australian-job-stealing 457 visas and make
student visas conditional on foreign students returning to the country they
came from. What we do need a plebiscite for is to decide who comes here.
Whitlam didn't ask the Australian people whether they wanted wholesale
non-European migration when he introduced it and neither has any subsequent
government. Who we allow to come here will determine what sort of nation we
will have in the future, so therefore this isn't the right of any one
government to decide. It's too important for that. Instead, we need a
plebiscite to allow the Australian people to decide whether they want wholesale
non-English speaking immigrants from the Third World and, in particular,
whether they want any Muslims or whether they want to return to the
predominantly European immigration policy of the pre-Whitlam consensus. I for
one will be very happy to abide by their decision.
My next political objective is affordable home
ownership. Home ownership is a vital social good. It not only steadily improves
the net wealth of Australians but provides for a comfortable and secure
retirement. It also provides an asset for us all to pass onto our children.
However, thanks to foreign property speculators and spiraling demand from
excessive immigration, housing prices have been absurdly inflated and, as a
result, Australian home ownership levels are starting to fall. Today, first
homebuyers see the dream of home ownership receding like a mirage. This
disastrous state of affairs must be reversed. I would like to see a return to
the policy of earlier decades in which those who were not permanent residents
or Australian citizens were barred from buying residential property. In
addition to a drastic immigration cut, I want to see a statutory cap on state
government fees and charges, which currently make up 50 per cent of land cost,
reducing them to no more than 25 per cent. In industry, I would like to see the
re-establishment of Australian manufacturing via a collaborative relationship
between pro-business unions and business leaders, as occurred in Germany in the
aftermath of World War II. Konrad Adenauer's postwar German economic miracle,
which ultimately led to both high wages and high profits for companies, is a
model for the re-industrialisation of Australia and a means to return to
widespread employment in secondary industry. While Australian wages mean that
we cannot compete on price with Third World slave labour manufacturers, we
should not need to. First, products of high quality and value can already be
produced and sold successfully despite paying reasonable wages. A classic
example of this is RM Williams. Second, to help re-establish Australian
manufacturing, import restrictions on certain classes of goods should also be
considered, following the example of Taiwan, which successfully transitioned
from a rural tea-growing province to a manufacturing dynamo with high wage
levels. As Australian icon Dick Smith has asked: are Australians prepared to
pay a bit more for manufactured goods if it means that their kids will have a
job? I think so. That is what I'm asking the Australian people to do so that we
can rebuild our manufacturing industries and create hundreds of thousands of
jobs in manufacturing. I also have fiscal objectives. I'd like to see a drastic
cut in government spending and borrowing, but, with around 50 per cent of the
budget now consumed by welfare, no spending reform is possible without welfare
reform. The age pension should be quarantined from any cuts, however. Instead,
reform needs to begin with working-class income replacement welfare. We
constantly hear that Australia has less than six per cent unemployment when, in
fact, this is simply false. If we count the legions of professional freeloaders
who are of working age and have settled into a life without work, on pensions,
we actually have around 20 per cent paid unemployment in this country. Welfare
needs to be a safety net for those of us who are temporarily in need of income
support. If people of working age receive a pension from the state, then they
have opted out of the workforce permanently and expect everyone else to carry
them for life. I believe this is unsustainable and totally un-Australian.
Unless we are going to follow the path of Greece, we need to stop finding new
ways to give handouts and start increasing workforce participation.
The best form of welfare is a job, and massive
investment in nation-building infrastructure is the first step to helping to
create jobs. Finally, and perhaps most importantly of all, I want to see a
cultural counter-revolution to restore a central role for traditional values,
to redefine our national identity and to create a new social contract between
the governing and the governed. So many of the anti-democratic controls on our
liberty, on the restriction of free speech, on our ability to decide who comes
to this country and on the outpouring of foreign aid have been driven by the
gross abuse of the external affairs powers in section 51 of the Constitution.
Since Whitlam—and clearly contrary to the intent of our founding fathers—the
external affairs powers given to the Commonwealth to sign treaties with other
nations has been abused to overrule other provisions of the Constitution and
override other laws made by our own democratically elected representatives. I
do not only want to withdraw from these UN treaties but want to counter the
dictatorial intent of the successors of Whitlam with an amendment to section 51
of the Constitution. This needs to specifically prohibit the signing of any
treaty contrary to any other provision of the Constitution or existing
Australian laws.
More broadly, however, what we need is a cultural
reconquest of our own country to take back Australia from Gramsci-inspired
left-wing elites that have subverted the very basis of our society, for in the
end what is Australia? What makes Australia a nation is not the happenstance of
shared geography but what unites us: our common history, values, language and
ethnicity, our common culture and our shared vision of our future as a people.
Ethnicity is not just skin-deep. More than anything else, it is our
ethnoreligious identity that defines us and shapes our national identity. Few
nations are fortunate enough to have so condensed their national character in
so short a space of time that, 60 years after Federation, all who lived here,
from children to old men, from paupers to Prime Ministers, could have a shared
understanding of who we were that crossed the political divide. But today all
that is rapidly unraveling, and we stand now at the turn of the tide. The great
cohesive vision of our nation's founding fathers, all that those who came
before us struggled to build, all that our fathers and grandfathers fought wars
to defend, stands at hazard as the stranglehold of the Gramsci-ite elites on
our institutions, political organisations and the media continues to tighten.
Now, on the brink of irreversible change, it is time for us to decide whether
we as a people will rise up against this, hold fast to the crimson threads of
kinship that define and unite us and strive once more for the light on the hill
or concede the field to enemies of Western civilization and see all that we
were and all that we might yet have become fall away to ruin.
