Australian party leader fans outrage over ‘final solution’ speech
AUSTRALIA - Australia is once again debating the nation’s attitudes toward immigrants amid an outcry over comments made by a littleknown senator who used his maiden speech in the country’s Parliament to call for a ‘final solution’ to immigration.
Fraser Anning, the sole senator representing Katter’s Australian Party, called for an overhaul of Australia’s immigration system during his speech to the Senate Tuesday, proposing a ban on Muslim migrants and those “from the third world.” As condemnation poured in from all political sides, the party’s leader Bob Katter inflamed matters further by describing the ‘magnificent’.
“Absolutely, 1000%, I support everything he said,” Katter told reporters during a news conference in the northern city of Cairns yesterday. “It was solid gold... It is everything that this country should be doing.”
In his speech, Anning referred to the infamous White Australia policy, which effectively banned non-European migrants in the mid-20th century, and invoked the term ‘the final solution’, which the Nazis used to describe their genocide of Jews in Europe. Anning’s speech was immediately condemned by MPs of all political stripes. In a statement on Wednesday,
speech
as Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull denounced Anning’s ‘racist remarks’, and praised the country’s multiculturalism.
“The reference in Senator Anning’s speech to the ‘final solution’ is a shocking, shocking insult to the memory of over 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust,” said Turnbull, adding that it was important “to call out racism.”
Even One Nation Party leader Pauline Hanson, who called for a ban on immigration in her maiden Senate speech in 2016, called Anning’s comments “straight from Goebbels’ handbook from Nazi Germany.”
Anning’s comments had “nothing to do with me,” Hanson said, distancing herself from the senator, who is a former member of the One Nation Party. Other political leaders spoke out, including Anne Aly, Australia’s first Muslim MP.
“I’m tired of fighting,” she said, breaking down in tears as she addressed the chamber yesterday. “I’m tired of having to stand up against hate, against vilification, time and time and time again.” “(Parliament) is united today in condemnation of those terrible words that were spoken in the other place.”
(CNN)