Australian senator slammed for calling for ‘White Australia’
SYDNEY: Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and all major political parties yesterday condemned a speech by a minor senator who used the term "final solution" in calling for a revival of a "White Australia" restrictive immigration policy.
In one of the most divisive speeches seen in parliament since 1996 when far-right politician Pauline Hanson declared incorrectly that Australia was being swamped by Asians, Senator Fraser Anning on Tuesday called for a national vote on whether to ban Muslim migration.
Mr Anning said Muslims were responsible for acts of terror and crime and were dependant on welfare. Muslims account for less than three per cent of Australia's population, census data shows.
Amid national outrage Mr Turnbull, who will head to the polls within nine months, condemned Mr Anning.
"We reject, we condemn racism in any form, and the remarks by Senator Anning are justly condemned and rejected by us all," Mr Turnbull told Australia's parliament.
Opposition Labor party leader Bill Shorten told parliament yesterday: "You have to be pretty outrageous to be condemned by everybody in the Australian parliament, but Senator Anning has managed to do just this."
"Turnbull can and must bat this away," said Mr Haydon Manning, a political science professor at Flinders University in South Australia.
Mr Anning, who has been in parliament for less than a year, has entered into a loose alliance with several conservative independent lawmakers that has boosted his otherwise inconsequential role in Australia's upper house.
Mr Anning split from Hanson's One Nation party shortly after being sworn in, though his speech had many of the hallmarks of his former leader who has called for cuts to Asian and Muslim immigration.
"The final solution to the immigration problem, of course, is a popular vote," he told parliament in his maiden speech.
The Final Solution, or the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, was a Nazi plan for the genocide or extermination of the Jews during World War II. Mr Anning has since said he did not know the history of the phrase. - REUTERS
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