Look, the most generous reading of this situation is that Katter’s Australian Party senator Fraser Anning has never read a book in his life, but even if you make that very forgiving assumption, this fucker is just ~inadvertently~ using Nazi language to lament the end of the White Australia policy.
You might recall boiled gherkin Fraser Anning from when he quit One Nation immediately after being sworn in as a senator, opting to sit as an independent until he signed up with Katter in June this year. Proving that he definitely didn’t ditch One Nation because he found their anti-immigration, anti-Muslim position a bit much, Anning gave his maiden senatorial speech this afternoon primarily about how Australia should just be for white people.
Anning echoed talking points nearly universal with Australia‘s right-wing media figures, from actual Nazis like Blair Cottrell to convicted racists like Andrew Bolt to bowling ball Peter Dutton: that immigration is ruining Australia’s ‘identity’ and that Muslims don’t ‘assimilate’ and are responsible for all crime everywhere.
Anning specifically criticised Gough Whitlam and his “hard-left cronies” for adopting “Soviet-inspired” non-discrimination policies, which paved the way for the “cultural conquest” of Australia. Just a regular, normal guy, having and expressing regular, normal opinions.
Before we get into the worst part, it’s worth noting that since the speech, Anning’s office has said that it’s pure coincidence that Anning used a pair of words with an extremely strong association with the Holocaust that sound very jarring when used in casual speech, all while saying something with fundamentally racist underpinnings but, uh, I guess you can be the judge.
Anning dropped the “final solution” part while suggesting we needed a plebiscite to decide who should be able to come to Australia:
In the days of Menzies, immigrants arriving here were not allowed to apply for welfare and that attracted exactly the right sort of hardworking people this country needed. We should go back to that and ban all immigrants from receiving welfare for the first five years after they arrive. The final solution to the immigration problem, of course, is a popular vote.
Anning intimated the purpose of the plebiscite would be to stop “wholesale non-European immigration“, singling out “non-English speaking immigrants from the third world” and Muslims.
Sure, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. Let’s say Fraser Anning is the one person in the world who has never heard of World War II. He’s still a fucking guy giving a speech in the Senate about how he only wants white people to come here. This is where Australia’s at.
