Fraser Anning (Queensland, Katter's Australian Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In 1975 the Whitlam government signed the United Nations Industrial Development Organization's Lima declaration. The intent of this was to develop Third World countries by transferring industry from advanced nations to them and then buying back the products they produced. This declaration reads like a statement of intent to wreck Western manufacturing, because that is exactly what it was. Thanks to this declaration and the subsequent trade agreements based on principles it espoused, manufacturing in Australia has been effectively destroyed. Even agriculture has been seriously undermined. When Whitlam came to power, around a quarter of the Australian workforce was employed in traditional manufacturing. Today it is only just over seven per cent. Most of these are in food processing.

In 1970, with a population of around 12 million, Australia had around 300,000 farmers. Today, with a population of 25 million, we are down to fewer than 125,000. Our population has doubled while our number of farmers has halved. Formerly we made our own televisions, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, kitchen appliances, cars and trucks. We made steel and aluminium and all the products made from them. We had a large chemical industry and we refined our own petroleum. We grew and harvested all the food we needed, and exported enough to feed several additional countries.

Now we make almost nothing ourselves, and even much of the food we eat is needlessly sourced from overseas and simply packaged in Australia. As a result of deliberate government trade policy post Lima, successive Liberal and Labor governments sold out Australian industries and workers by specifically agreeing to transfer all our manufacturing to Third World countries. Almost every move to liberalise trade since that date has led to a net transfer of jobs and industry away from Australia, and the current TPP is just the final nail in the coffin.

But socialists weren't alone in supporting the jobs and industry transfer away from Australia. Giant transnational corporations supported this too, since taking jobs away from decently paid Aussie workers and employing Third World semi-slaves instead made them a fortune. Maybe that is why both Labor and Liberals agree on these kinds of Aussie-job-destroying trade deals, because both international socialists and transnational capitalists benefit from them.

Like all other Lima inspired trade deals, the TPP agreement currently being spruiked by the Morrison government will allow foreign multinationals the right to dictate terms to our government regarding rules and regulations. The TPP will see Australia's sovereignty further eroded. This agreement will allow cheap foreign goods from countries with historically bad safety regulations to flood the Australian market. In return for generous concessions, like the promise that Mexico may cut tariffs on Australian milk by one per cent in 15 years time, the TPP will steal thousands of jobs from hardworking Australians and hand them to foreigners happy to work 12-hour days for a handful of cold rice and a little rat meat.

Ever since the Whitlam era we have seen a Liberal-Labor consensus in favour of globalism, foreign ownership, the export of jobs and the import of cheap foreign labour. However, anyone who tries to convince you that Australia can continue as a sovereign nation without manufacturing, construction and agriculture is delusional.

US President Donald Trump had the foresight and courage to remove the United States from this agreement, declaring that he is putting America first. President Trump said:

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is another disaster done and pushed by special interests who want to rape our country.

The fact is that whatever extra profits and taxes big corporations and big government can glean from agreements such as the TPP, the big losers are Australian workers and farmers. I say it's time politicians started putting Australia first. As the great Sir Robert Menzies stated in his famous 'The forgotten people' speech:

Individual enterprise must drive us forward. That does not mean we are to return to the old and selfish notions—

which include putting foreign corporate profits before the jobs of Australian workers.

Just as I outlined in my maiden speech, Katter's Australian Party and I are the only political movement that offer a coherent and comprehensive alternative to the prevailing antinationalist consensus of the Liberal and Labor Parties. Instead of transnational corporate exploitation and international socialist sovereignty transfer, KAP offers a rejection of globalism and a return to putting Australia first. The KAP alternative is focused on redeveloping Australia, returning manufacturing work to Australia and restoring the importance of agriculture to an honoured profession and way of life.

That the Liberal Party has strayed so far from Menzies' vision that they are prepared to abandon Aussie workers and farmers is a profound indictment. That the Labor Party—the once-great party of the nation's working class—should support another attack on the jobs and conditions of Aussie workers is shameful. It shows just how far Whitlam's bourgeois internationalist socialist agenda has carried Labor away from its nationalist roots. My party, KAP, and I represent primarily nationalist workers and farmers—the hard hats the hard hands. The KAP team embraces the heritage and legacy of the Menzies era and that of Curtin and Chifley. We represent the pre-Whitlam consensus supporting traditional Judeo-Christian values, orderly marketing in agriculture, rebuilding of Australian manufacturing, regional infrastructure development and restoration of social cohesion by asserting our European ethnic identity. In contrast to the Third World folks of the international socialists and transnational global capitalists, our vision is a comprehensive and well-developed national alternative—a genuine third way.

It's time for us to reject job-stealing international agreements like the TPP, to repudiate leftist UN treaties that undermine our democratic government, like the Lima Declaration, and put Australia first. It's time we had a government that had the courage and strength to unapologetically defend Australia's interests as a sovereign European nation. Thank you.