Mr KATTER (7:20 PM) —Recently, I was invited to address the Young Liberals (Australia) conference. I think the blokes who invited me were consequently sacked. The president there said I should be Prime Minister of Australia. I naturally agreed with him and felt he was a very wise and perspicacious person. He struck me as a bloke who was not a fool—although this seemed to be the indication of a fool. He said: ‘In Australia we don’t have conservatives who espouse conservative values. We have a lot of people who call themselves conservatives, who run around trying to explain that they are not really conservatives at all.’ That is what I have watched tonight—people on this side of the House who claim to be conservatives. I said, ‘Be specific.’ He said, ‘Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.’ I do not think I would agree with any of Margaret Thatcher’s policies—none at all—but there is no doubt that what he was saying was correct. These people were enormously successful politicians.

I served under a bloke called Bjelke-Petersen. We were described as troglodytes and rednecks and everything else. We moved legislation to make abortion illegal in Queensland—there was vagueness in the law. The verdict of the people was 72 per cent against what we were trying to do, but there was no doubt that the then Premier believed it was the right thing to do. It was not a matter of whether or not we got votes out of it—that was the right thing to do and he was doing it. In the subsequent election, at the expense of the Liberal and Labor parties, our vote went up about eight per cent.

Whilst they disagreed with what we were doing, it was clear that we were acting out of moral beliefs. That is the thing that people will respect and follow. They will not respect you people on this side of the House getting up one after the other and making all sorts of arguments why this is not quite right but you vote for it anyway. Let me state unequivocally that the bill is a bill of approbation for homosexual relationships. Either you believe that that is a good thing for society or you do not.

Many of you know my background. I spent many, many years in the bush with people of Aboriginal descent, and they have what they call ‘Quinkan’ beliefs. This is devil-devil country. Devil-devil country at the back of Cooktown was Black Mountain, which was alive with taipan snakes. The Quinkan lore, if you like, for Mount Fox—there were no trees on it—said that devil-devils come out and stick spears in you. That almost certainly indicates—for people with geology backgrounds such as I have—sulphur emissions which are alive volcanically. In fact, it was a live volcanic area about 10,000 years ago. The Quinkan for the Ingham area is ‘water from mountain to mountain’. If we have a double flood, the entire coastal plain will go 25 feet under water and probably result in thousands of lost lives. The point I am making here is their belief system—Madam Deputy Speaker, you shake your head and laugh—

The DEPUTY SPEAKER (Ms AE Burke)—No.

Mr KATTER —I do not think the people of Aboriginal descent in my electorate would particularly appreciate your shaking your head and laughing.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER (Ms AE Burke)—No. Member for Kennedy, I am trying to ascertain its relevance to the bill before the House and I would draw your attention back to it.

Mr KATTER —You will have it in one sentence, Madam Deputy Speaker, and that sentence is the survival of the race, the survival of the tribe. People have belief systems because they are important for the survival of the race and the survival of the tribe. If homosexuality is a fashion statement, it is a very dangerous fashion statement and it is at the present moment in Australia.

I refer to Bob Birrell’s article in the Australian newspaper some years ago where he said that in 100 years the population of Australia would be seven million. I thought the man must be mad. I went down to the demography boss at the Parliamentary Library here and I said, ‘This could not possibly be right.’ He said: ‘Well, you can work it out for yourself. If every time 20 people die in Australia they are replaced by 17 people, then over five or six generations you will end up with that figure. So I sat down and worked out the mathematics and I was quite horrified at what I found. There may be people in Australia, but they will not be the race of people that are here today. We have chosen a values system that says that we do not have children, and other races have chosen a value system that says that they do.

Patrick J Buchanan, in his book Death of the West said that Europe in 15 years time will need 23 million people just to keep their essential services going, and those people can only be supplied from the Muslim countries because they are the only countries that have a positive birthrate. I might be a little intemperate in my remarks about protecting the state of Israel, which I am a very strong supporter of, and critical of some of the people that would take away their right to exist, but one has to say, though, that they have a belief system that will ensure that they will be around while we have a belief system that guarantees we will not be around—unless we change that belief system.

People come in here with the hypocrisy of crying about this. I saw that in the abortion debate. The people who thought it was quite all right to kill an unborn child are the same people who go and cry about a stranded whale. Their value systems are skewed. I am not going to be intimidated by moral fashion to adopt policies which I do not think are correct for our children or our future. What you are doing here is talking about a bill of approbation for this sort of behaviour.

When I spoke on this in this place the last time the issue of AIDS was a very real issue in Australia. There was not a single person in this place that related it to homosexuality. Anyone could go down and get the figures. There were about 75 AIDS cases in Australia. I have not checked the figures, but you can go back to my speech at the time—the figures then were dead accurate. There were about 75 AIDS cases in Australia. Of those, all of them were people that had indulged in homosexual behaviour or were intravenous drug users, with the exception of six people—and there is a third category I will refer to in a moment—who claimed they were not in either of those categories. But the bloke taking the figures pointed out that four of them were living with an ‘at-risk’ partner—which is code for homosexual. So, in actual fact, there was no AIDS phenomenon in Australia outside homosexuality and intravenous drug use. These are not my figures; these are medical figures.

The third category is a very, very sad category of people. Homosexuals said, ‘We are being discriminated against.’ That is what is being said tonight—‘We are being discriminated against.’ They said, ‘We’ve got a right to give blood transfusions the same as everybody else.’ The New South Wales government—moral relativists—decided, ‘Oh yes, that’s terrible, we are discriminating against them.’ So they allowed them to give blood, and some 60 or 70 people—mostly little children—contracted AIDS as a result of that decision. This is all a matter of public record.

When I look back to the days of very great upheaval in the world, there are two people that leap out to me—Martin Luther and St Thomas More. The fashion of their day should have led them both to certain death. By some miracle, Luther escaped but Thomas More did not. But they were both men that did not hesitate to place themselves in danger of death for their beliefs—what they profoundly believed to be the true and right thing to do. So, though it is not very fashionable and though it will bring great opprobrium upon anyone speaking in the manner in which I am speaking, I think that it is everyone’s duty to reflect upon the fact that the sort of viewpoint that I have must win in the end because the other viewpoint leads to the nonsurvival of the race.

I go back to a lot of my old blackfella mates. They had survival laws there that were very valuable and very important for their survival and the preservation of their tribe and their race. But let the last words lie with the great Jim Killen. Writing a letter to the Australian, he said: ‘If the definition of marriage is a love relationship, I for many years of my life was a ringer up in the Gulf Country, and I loved my horse.’

Debate interrupted; adjournment proposed and negatived.