Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—Arguably the most famous comment in the last century was that made by Mikhail Gorbachev when he was appointed First Secretary. He chose as his first statement to the rest of the world that the important thing for all of us to remember is that when we go on our knees at night to pray we all pray to the same God. I was brought up in a generation where we lived a hair trigger away from nuclear holocaust. I remember as a 12th grader in school, with the transistor radio in my ear, listening to the speech of John F Kennedy over the missile crisis and I could feel the hair on the back on my neck standing up because it was going to be on. There was no way that a tough guy like Nikita Khrushchev was going to back down and, if you listened to Kennedy, there was no way that he was going to back down. So it was going to be on and we were going to be the children of a nuclear war. Good things prevailed, but that situation continued up to the advent of the most wonderful man, Mikhail Gorbachev, whose family have preserved Christianity through 80 years of persecution where it was effectively illegal to practise religion.

I think it is reasonable to say that I have had my life saved twice by two wonderful doctors. Both, judging from their names, were of the Islamic faith and both great men tirelessly worked extremely hard to save my life. I would not be here without those wonderful people.

When the ethnic cleansing was taking place in central Europe, NATO stepped in. The Christian countries stepped in to protect those Islamic people who were being persecuted. The NATO countries have pursued the architects of that oppression fairly ruthlessly. It is very much to their credit. But if you are a Christian you are supposed to love your neighbours, turn the other cheek and do good to those that hate you. That is the very essence of our religious beliefs in this country. For some people they might be philosophical beliefs but, for the vast bulk of us, they are our religious beliefs.

It gives me no joy to recall recent history on our planet where over one million Armenians were murdered. In Spain, 55,000 Catholics were taken out into the streets and shot dead, including 6,000 priests and 13,000 nuns. I quote from Simon Beevor's book on the Spanish Civil War. It seems interesting that they always talk about Franco. Franco said, 'For everyone you kill, I will kill 10.' I do not think he got up to 10, but he did a fairly good job. But that was payback. The original decision was to murder people because of their Christian faith and 54,000 of them were just taken out onto the streets and shot dead. Read the book.

One of the great blemishes upon the soul of our nation was that we participated in the Boer War for Mr Rothschild, Mr Barney Barnato and Cecil Rhodes—it is a disgrace that there is such a thing as a Rhodes scholarship. They wiped out half the Matabele nation. They murdered them. Then they proceeded to murder 200,000 Boers, including 28,000 women and children in the concentration camps. Hitler was able to say, 'Don't worry about it because the Turks got away with it in Armenia and the British got away with it in South Africa; we can go ahead and murder six million Jews as well.'

This sort of thing has to stop. I very much praise the member for bringing it forward and the members of the Coptic Church, being from a related breakaway, the Western Christians. The original Christians are sitting up there today. In the little Christian group of Ross Cameron we had going here at Parliament House, of which Kevin Rudd was a prominent member, we had a person with a big silver cross who had served in Saddam Hussein's cabinet. I asked him, 'How long has your family been Christian?' He said, 'Since 72 AD.' We praise these people that have stood on the ramparts and kept the Christian faith for 2,000 years, 1,500 years of that being persecution. I think we should serve very clear notice in this place that we are not going to stand aside and see our fellow Christians and the fathers of Christianity continue to be murdered. That is not going to happen. Please God, our nation will grow over the next 20 or 30 years—as I think it must for its survival—to 60 million people and we will be a rich, prosperous and powerful nation. We will put up a defence if persecution takes place. If I can inject a personal note into my speech, the brother of my great grandfather was the patriarch of the Maronite Church. They were people very familiar with the sort of persecution that is taking place. He came to Australia in 1870, so I do not really have a great deal of memories of him!

All the same, I think that an awful lot of Australians will feel very great kinship with the Coptic Christians of Egypt. Even if we did not feel a great kinship, as fellow Christians we will not stand idly by and see fellow Christians murdered—just as we did not stand idly by and watch as fellow believers in the good Lord were murdered in those countries in central Europe. We hope that we will carry those principles forward into the future. I highly praise the member for Hughes for putting this motion forward and I highly praise those people who have kept the faith through millennia of prosecution.

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