STATEMENTS BY SENATORS
Senator HANSON (Queensland—Leader of One Nation) (13:16): Well, I really haven't got time to address the garbage and the lies that just came out of the socialist Labor government. But anyway, I've got more important things to say. You'd be forgiven for thinking I had slaughtered a sacred cow at the National Press Club last week.
Monoculturalism is virtually all you've been able to talk about since that day. It's exactly what I intended. We must never be afraid to debate any issue.
We must never be afraid to challenge long-held assumptions. I've been doing it for the past 30 years. I'm still here and I'm still doing it.
I'm delighted this issue is being publicly examined and debated. It's a debate many Australians have been itching to have, so I make no apology for raising it. Australians are already making their opinion known.
A poll of more than 11,000 people in the Daily Telegraph showed 66 per cent of people want Australia to be monocultural, with only 21 per cent wanting Australia to be multicultural. It seems some sacred cows are not so sacred after all. I'm not the only public figure who has rejected multiculturalism.
John Howard said he always had trouble with it. Former UK Prime Minister David Cameron said state multiculturalism had failed. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel said attempts to build a multicultural society in her country had utterly failed.
It looks like I was way ahead of the political curve when I spoke about these issues in 1996. More than 40 years ago, prominent Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey criticised multiculturalism for tending to emphasise the rights of ethnic minorities at the expense of the majority of Australians. In the past week, the far-left have naturally taken my comments into the realm of utter fantasy.
I was going to ban foreign food, and the Socceroos wouldn't have beaten Turkiye under my policy. What rubbish—predictable and pathetic. The Socceroos, in fact, represent my vision of a monocultural Australia—people from different backgrounds and cultures and nations all wearing green and gold, and representing one nation under one flag and succeeding under the same set of rules.
Australian monoculture is not exclusive; it is welcoming. It's an umbrella which covers all manner of difference. It's not a dirty word.
Oh, now let me remember. Didn't we change our national anthem from 'young and free' to 'one and free'? That's right.
Australia doesn't drag people kicking and screaming to its shores; people from other places choose to come here. Actually, they're lining up. They choose to be Australian.
That was the case with the parents of Carlos Quaremba MLC, a member of One Nation's parliamentary team in South Australia. When he was a baby, they escaped military junta in Argentina and sought refuge in Australia. They chose to be Australian but they didn't discard their cultural traditions.
Carlos, who is quintessentially—well, he's a bloody Aussie but he still loves his Argentinian barbecues and wouldn't give them up for anything. I love them too. Increasingly, however, there are people choosing to come to Australia with no intention of becoming Australian or accepting Australian values, customs, traditions and laws.
Remember what sparked the riots in Cronulla: Muslims attacking Australian women for wearing bikinis at the beach in a hot Australian summer. If we're going to accept you, you must accept us too. That's not too much to ask.
It's the bare minimum we should be demanding. It's where we should be drawing the line on things incompatible with our culture, like sharia law, child marriages, roaming armed gangs, female circumcision, sex-selective abortion and the burqa. Burqas are about confining and controlling women, which is un-Australian.
Under a One Nation government, they will be banned. Accepting Australia means accepting our culture and the values, customs and traditions which define it: a fair go, tolerance, secular democracy, freedom of speech, religion and the rule of law. It means accepting our irreverence and larrikinism.
Bring back Paul Hogan and Norman Gunston. These are the essential features of Australian monoculture, and there's nothing remotely exclusionary about them. These values are not even especially unique.
They are accepted widely in the democratic world because they're values which are blind to race, gender or religion. But they're not accepted by many who are allowed to come here, and that's what must be addressed. Come here with your Greek salad, your Italian pasta, your Chinese stir fry, your Indian curry and your— (Time expired)