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| The Sydney Morning Herald, Fraser Anning |
William
Fraser Anning then a member of
Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party was declared elected to the Australian
Senate on 10 November 2017,
as a replacement
for the recently disqualified dual citizen Malcolm
Ieuan Roberts.
Less than
seven months later he had joined Katter’s Australian Party.
In the 2016
general election Anning had received a
grand total of 19 votes (59 if transferred votes are counted) out of a possible 2.72 million Queensland ballots cast. The Queensland electorate had firmly rejected him.
Hansard shows that at 17:06pm on Wednesday 14
August 2018, nine months after taking up his seat, Anning made his formal First Speech on the floor of the Senate.
This is how The
Sydney Morning Herald reported this speech on 14 August 2018:
Queensland senator
Fraser Anning has praised the White Australia Policy and called for a
plebiscite as "the final solution to the immigration problem" in the
most inflammatory maiden speech to an Australian Parliament since One Nation
leader Pauline Hanson's in 1996.
The Katter's Australian
Party senator, formerly of One Nation, used his first speech to the Senate on
Tuesday to lament the demise of "our predominantly European identity"
of the 1950s and '60s.
The
Guardian’s opinion
piece on 15 August 2018 pointed out the dangers before us:
Fraser Anning is in the
parliament by accident. Having fluked his way into the Senate chamber because
One Nation needed a replacement for Malcolm Roberts, he now wants your
attention, and judging by his
performance in the Senate on Tuesday night, he doesn’t care what lines he
crosses to get it.
What we are witnessing
in national politics is the latest manifestation of Australia’s cultural
cringe. Far right political operatives, and the media voices prepared to give
them succour, are importing the nationalist debates that have sprung up in the
shadow of the global
financial crisis – the biggest economic dislocation since the great
depression.
We are building our own
tinder box, bit by bit.
Debates about race, and
sovereignty, and immigration have caught fire elsewhere because of deep
resentments felt by the losers of globalisation. Australia
didn’t suffer the biting effects of the global financial crisis, and the
prolonged economic downturn that followed it. By comparison to the visceral
experiences elsewhere, in this country we experienced a chilly, stiff breeze.
Notwithstanding these
facts, we are importing the outrage consciousness that exists elsewhere,
validating it, willingly projecting an alternate reality onto our own domestic
circumstances as a grotesque form of entertainment.
We are building our own
tinder box, bit by bit.
This would be pathetic.
Almost laughable. Except in terms of race and politics, we are now in the most
explosive period we’ve been in since John Howard sailed into choppy waters with
his feelings on Asian immigration in the 1980s.
There is nothing to
laugh about. Right now, there are all the ingredients of a perfect storm.
The first ingredient is
a fractured bunch of far-right leaning political voices in mortal competition
with one another for votes. The last 24 hours has been a public competition
between Anning, and his new running mate Bob Katter, and One Nation, for
attention. Anning and Katter apparently want to establish a new beach
head, charting
territory where Pauline won’t follow. Just let that happy thought settle on
you for a minute or two.
The second ingredient is
a polity profoundly disaffected by the repeated failings and default narcissism
of Australia’s major party politics, frustrated by their congested cities and
low wages growth and by governments who spent more time fighting their
fractured internals than navigating the future. The third is a
disrupted media landscape where conflict – the louder and more notorious the
better – is hard currency.
Fraser Anning used his
first speech to parliament to spin his own obscurity into notoriety: to try on
a troll suit in full public view.
The
Monthly spoke of Anning as "unrepresentative", "accidental swill" on 15
August 2018:
Fraser Anning’s
execrable first speech in the Senate yesterday, proposing a “final solution” on
Muslim immigration, marks a new low for Australian politics, but assuredly not
for long. Things are likely to get worse before they get better, as a bunch of
illegitimate right-wing nobodies in the Senate compete for race-hate shock
value in the lead-up to the next election. The combination of a double
dissolution in 2016 and the citizenship crisis has burdened us with the least
representative Senate in living memory. The crossbench is populated by senators
who won on the donkey vote, defected, were elected on a countback or were hand-picked
mid-term and are yet to face the people. Most face electoral oblivion in 2019.
We are used to hearing of “unrepresentative swill” in the Senate, where one
vote, one value has never applied, but a record number of our current senators
literally don’t deserve to be there. Call them accidental swill.
Anning’s speech, in
which he called for a return to the White Australia policy, did not come out of
the blue. We have been building up to this steadily. From Pauline Hanson’s
return to parliament, to Tony Abbott’s dog-whistling on immigration policy, to
Peter Dutton’s attacks on “African gangs”, to Andrew Bolt’s comments
about Chinese, Cambodian, Indian and Jewish communities“changing
our culture”, to Sky News airing an interview with neo-Nazi Blair Cottrell, the
trend is clear: we are sliding ever-faster down a slippery slope towards an
ugly, divisive race-card election.
Although his
formal first speech was somewhat tardy, according to They
Vote For You Anning has been busy voting strongly in support of:
On 14 August 2018 lawyer Richard McGilvray, an adviser to Senator Anning, resigned his position in protest.
Posting on Linkedin that: "I do not condone SenatorAnning's speech. His reference to 'the Final Solution' was not something I had seen, heard of, or discussed prior to his remarks last night and as a consequence, within hours of Senator Anning's speech, I resigned my position effective immediately. I'd like to thank many of you for your messages of support and encouragement this morning."
As is to be expected Anning's speech has been fact checked and found to contain numerous errors.
To date, Senator Anning has not issued an apology for elements of that speech.
