Bob Katter (Kennedy, Katter's Australian Party) | Hansard source

I'm just taking down how many times you've interrupted me, Madam Deputy Speaker. The Army is run by a person who I found to be a little bit effeminate. I'm not necessarily saying that's a bad thing. I'm not necessarily saying that's a bad thing, but it just seemed to me to be fairly unusual to have a person like that at the top of the Army. He paid himself and his wife $1.2 million a year. All of those things are forgivable. But, when you spend $40,000 million dollars of taxpayers' money to buy 15 machine guns—my platoon of 32 men had 15 machine guns. We did not cost the taxpayers $40,000 million. We spent it on patrol boats and drones. Each patrol boat has a machine gun. So he put out $40,000 million to buy 15 machine guns.

Ukraine has demonstrated that we clearly need artillery pieces and artillery shells. Everyone on earth believes that you need a missile fortress; we would need maybe 200,000 missiles. I doubt whether we've got 200 missiles. Yet this place, which has made those decisions, has the hide to pass judgement.

When the head of the armed forces pulled Roberts-Smith over the coals and took his medals off him and took them off the SAS as well, Jacqui Lambie immediately went before the cameras. As far as I know, she, one member of the ALP and I are the only three who have ever worn a uniform. She was there, and I tripped going down the stairs. I thought I'd broken my leg trying to get down to support her and Heston Russell in defending the people that were defending their country.

I pray that we do not get in a conflict. People say, 'It's very patriotic, and my dad went to war.' Well, my dad went to war too, but it isn't patriotism. When we were at war with Indonesia, I joined up because, when your country is at war, you join up. I don't mean to denigrate people that make the decision; I'm one of them. But it's not about that. When your country is at war, you join up. But, when you join up, you have to take the orders, and you're placed in the most dreadful situations.

To try to bring home to you what war is about, Deputy Speaker, we took bayonet drill. The idea was that you let out a bloodcurdling scream, charged at a dummy, shoved your bayonet right in to the hilt into the dummy and pulled it out again. Then you were on guard, and you would charge at the second dummy. It was 'in, out, on guard'. Obviously, we were not going to do bayonet charges in the year of our Lord 1962—or 1964 or whatever it was. That wasn't going to happen. So why were we doing that? Because we were training a person to kill without thinking. If he starts thinking in warfare, then the whole platoon could be dead. You can criticise us for that, and you probably will. You'll probably throw us in jail for that. But we had to defend our country, and that was the way that it was done. And this was done 20 years after the Second World War, but it gives you some idea of what it was like.

One of my relatives—and Heaven only knows I think 20 or 30 of my relatives fought in the Second World War—fought at Milne Bay. I said, 'So what was it like?' 'We're going over there, and it's going to be pretty bad. We're up against a country 20 times our size.' They have been wonderful neighbours to us, Indonesia. I wish I could say the same thing about us being wonderful neighbours to them. But there was an aberration, and we were on our way to fight in Indonesia, a country with a population 20 or 30 times the size of Australia's and backed up by the communists at that stage.

This was happening in the context of communism. Mao Zedong, it's quite clear now, was responsible for the death of 48 million people. When I was at university, 5,000 marched against us being in Vietnam. But the jury is in now on Vietnam. The communists never took another country after Vietnam; the cost was too great. So it was the turning point at which communism was turned back. Just how bad was communism? Mao Zedong, it's quite clear now, was responsible for the death of 48 million people. Stalin was responsible for the death of 28 million people. That's 76 million people, if you add it up. In all of human history, not even Tamerlane or Genghis Khan would be up there with these two blokes.

But we had to fight to stop them, and Vietnam was a tough call because overlaid on the issues there were national independence and the French. But you don't know whether the cause is right or wrong. Up till about 10 years ago I wouldn't have said that I knew whether the cause was right or wrong. Your country says, 'We're at war,' and you go off to war. Now, when you get there, there are people trying to kill you and kill your friends, and, if they succeed in doing that, then we have the Japanese and the Rape of Nanking. Do you want that to happen to your people?

Do you want what the Germans did to the Russians, and then what the Russians did to the Germans in Berlin? You're passing judgement on people that have watched their families be wiped out. You can say the Russians were dreadful for what they did in Berlin. Yes, well, half of them had their families wiped out. There would hardly have been a single soldier that didn't have a relative murdered by the Germans. So it was payback time. You're going to pass judgement on these people, are you? You're going to pass judgement on them?

All I can say to you is Jacqui Lambie did wear a uniform as a full-time soldier. Heston Russell was a full-time soldier. I was not a full-time soldier, but we were on a 24-hour call-up to fight. The country was on a war footing. So I near enough was a full-time soldier. So that's three people that really had to face up to war as soldiers in this place. We united in absolute rage at the treatment of Ben Roberts-Smith and others, and the standing down of the whole SAS battalion. Now, the head of the Army said, 'You're guilty until innocent.' He immediately punished all these people, without finding out whether they were innocent or guilty. They were just hung, drawn and quartered by him in the public arena, and there's me nearly breaking my leg trying to get down to back up Jacqui Lambie and Heston Russell.

At Milne Bay—I asked this relative, who was a sergeant who was at Milne Bay. He said, 'So you want to know about the butchers of Milne Bay?' He said, 'Our commander said, "Out there's the sharks, in there's the cannibals and there's the airstrip. We take the airstrip or we die." When we came to find the first evidence of battle, the Japanese had used our soldiers, Australians, as bayonet practice. They'd been tied to trees, tortured and then killed. Our blokes went crazy.' He said, 'We cut the heads off the Japanese in the first line of trenches we took and then threw the heads into the next line of trenches. That was really successful because they jumped out of the trenches and we could kill them easily.' Obviously, the story is wildly exaggerated, but it'll give you some idea of the savagery of warfare.

Don't you people, sitting here in your nice, air-conditioned, comfortable, protected place, with a big fence around you and security guards everywhere, pass judgement on people that have put their lives on the line for this country. Don't you pass judgement on them.

Wellington, the hero of Waterloo, voted for the independence of Ireland. He was a highly conservative flag-waving colonialist, and everyone was quite staggered that he voted for the independence of Ireland. But he had fought with the guerrillas in the Spanish campaign, and he said, 'I will never, ever see that happen to any English person ever again,' because he could see what was going to happen in Ireland. There would be a guerrilla warfare.

So here is one of the great warriors of human history. He defeated Napoleon, the greatest commander in human history. He won 32 major battles. And Wellington beat him. But here he is voting for the independence of Ireland rather than facing up to another war. So, if you're out there and you've seen these things happen, then you have the right to pass judgement. If you haven't, quite frankly, I don't believe you have a shred of right to pass judgement upon these people. Their own soldiers can pass judgement upon them, but you people in this place and the broader legal fraternity—I didn't see too many of them going off to war—don't.

I want to pay tribute to the men that have defended this country. I was in the 49th Battalion when we were at war with Indonesia. I was on 24-hour call-up to go over there. We had to list two of our next of kin, and we all know why that was. I was the unit historian. I went and saw the colonel. I said: 'Colonel, in the Second World War, it was pretty negative. We fell back, we failed to hold ground, we wilted under fire—it was all pretty negative.' He said, 'What do you want to do, Katter?' There were about a thousand men in a battalion. As I said, I was the unit historian. I said, 'Well, we might have been a fall-back battalion, but then again we might not.' This was only 19 years after the Second World War had ended. 'I'm going to go down to the local RSL and just ask. Maybe we were a fall-back, but maybe we weren't.' So I went down there and I yelled out, 'Does anyone here know anything about the 49th Battalion?' They were one of the three battalions that were sent to New Guinea to stop the invasion of Australia. They were one of the three battalions that were sent up to stop the Japanese invasion. We had to hold them up so that the divisions in the desert could come back. (Time expired)

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