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

My uncle was killed in a football game, and for the next 50 years of his life no-one could ever say my Uncle Norman's name in of my grandfather, because he'd just go off and vanish, lock a door and cease to be with us. Right until the day he died, no-one could mention Uncle Norman's name in front of my grandfather. Now, how infinitely worse the pain must be if your child is just 10 years of age.

I have a rage in my soul, and it's very hard for me to talk nicely, because I just have this passionate rage. Some of these people were demonstrating outside of the Queensland parliament with their usual anti-Jewish hate. And two of our members of parliament from the party I belong to just couldn't bear it, and they ripped down their signs and got into a melee. Both our blokes look after themselves pretty good, and they really enjoyed the physical fracas before they were dragged off by the police. But there should be a rage in our souls if you hate any group in society. Obviously, I run into this sometimes with our First Australian people.

But going back to Matilda, 'Waltzing Matilda' is our national song, and I just wish more people knew the song 'Waltzing Matilda'. It was written in my hometown of Cloncurry. In my hometown, we created Qantas. We created the Royal Flying Doctor Service. Dame Mary Gilmore is buried in Cloncurry; she's on the $10 note. Matilda can't be a more Australian name. These people came to this country, they loved this country, and it gave them so much that they didn't have before, so they named their daughter Matilda. And her name is now one of the names of the people that were murdered on this day and in this tragedy.

A great tragedy should lead to a result that ensures, to the best of our ability, that it doesn't happen again, and we will be talking about that tomorrow. So I just wish for North Queensland—we don't have a lot of Jewish people in North Queensland, but two of them I know very well, the Kamslers. They and two other families created Cairns, which was a greasy little hot backwater. It became one of the tourist meccas and destinations of the world. So God bless the Kamsler family and what they did for Australia in North Queensland. They also fought extremely hard for First Australians—the only hotel in Cairns that employed First Australians—so they were people that fought not just for their own faith but for other people as well.

Professor Wronski got the first medical school built in Australia in 42 years—there were two other people involved; he was one of three—and some 18 medical schools have walked through the door that he opened. He made the medical school to cater to people and to the community. It was inculcated in their graduates that they were there to create good happiness for the people.

There are truly great people, and maybe there's something wonderful in that religion, the Jewish faith, which is, of course, our father religion, or our mother religion, for people that are Christians. We sometimes forget that Jesus Christ was a Jew—arguably, not just a Jew but a rabbi. It's the most illogical thing I could ever imagine—that people from supposedly Christian countries should be antisemetic.

But I cannot think about little Matilda dying so tragically without thinking of the worst people, maybe, the planet has ever seen, the Nazis—or the Russians, with their pogroms against the Jews. Most of Israel were actually Jewish people fleeing from Russia and the continuous persecution that has taken place there. Now, I don't know why people have this thing called 'antisemitism', but I know that, like Nazism and communism, it is a cancer. It is a cancer upon the soul of any country—wherever it is. As for me, I have a rage in my soul and it won't be quenched till we eradicate the basis upon which this attack occurred.

People will talk about the gun debate. I watched the murder—I was sick at the time—on the television of 3,000 people in the Twin Towers. My automatic reaction was to reach out with my right hand. I thought, 'What's going on here?' I was reaching for my rifle—sorry, it was Port Arthur. I was reaching for my rifle—'Hasn't anyone got the wherewithal to cut this dreadful creature down?'

I say here again that every single person—it's not just our feelings for Matilda, and that's what we're emphasising today. It also should touch off in us a rage in our soul against the people who are driven by hate and violence. We want them out of our community. Jesus Christ, the leader of the religion that I adhere to, said, 'Love even your enemies,' so we have to abide by that, but it is very, very hard when you have a little girl who was called Matilda because her parents loved Australia so much that they called her by the most Australian name they could conjure up. My heart goes out to those parents. I kept thinking of my grandfather. Till the day he died, no-one could ever say his son's name in his presence.

See this speech in context