Member for Kennedy, Bob Katter, eponymous fruitcake of Katter’s Australian Party, has overtly supported a relaxing of gun laws in Australia using the same sort of drivel put out by the US National Rifle Association (NRA). When interviewed by The Project some 8 months ago, he stated that Queensland is the “most restrictive society on Earth, and guns are only one aspect of this”. He reiterated with regard to guns: “There is no other state or nation on Earth that have the restrictive nature of the laws that exist in Queensland”. Meshel Laurie retorted: “I think the good people of North Korea would have something to say about that, Bob”1. While it is easy to take the piss out of idiots like Katter, it is the interminable lying of him and his ilk which sickens me. When asked by Laurie about the donations he received from the gun lobby, he lied again stating that if they don’t fight the anti-gun lobby “tooth and nail, then we’ll have no guns in this state and we’ll be a bunch of pansies”1. This is the first NRA lie, that ‘they’ want to take away all our guns.
When interviewed for Four Corners, Katter said he wanted more firearms sold because he wants “more people involved in protecting our country”2. Those people who want to protect our country should join the armed forces whose job that is. That is where they would have access to missiles, artillery, aircraft, warships and tanks, which is what you need to protect a nation in the 21stcentury. This is the second NRA lie, that more rifles and handguns are to ‘protect the nation’.
During the interview on Four Corners, Katter said that many of our 25 million people would owe “allegiance to other countries that may well be our enemies in any future confrontation”. He added, “not only have you got the threat from outside, but increasingly you’ve got a threat from inside. And it may not just be a threat, I mean, they may have a majority within this country within the next 25 years.”2 Who he means by ‘they’, he doesn’t say, but it is clear that he is referring to some group of immigrants, and presumably not Maronite Lebanese Christian immigrants, like his paternal grandfather3. This internal threat is a variant of the third NRA lie that guns are needed to ‘protect our families’. In Katter’s example, there is a little local blast on the dog-whistle thrown in. Idiots like Katter seem not able to realise that if anyone can get guns, those ‘internal threats’ will be able to get them just as easily as Katter and his cowboys. This either means that Katter is so incapable of logical thought that this has not occurred to him, or that he is being disingenuous and simply wants more guns sold.
To decide whether Katter is simply an idiot or has an ulterior motive, it is worth noting that Katter’s Australian Party has received $235,700 from NIOA, one of Australia’s largest firearm importing companies. The Managing Director of NIOA is Robert Nioa, who is Bob Katter’s son-in-law4,5. Enough said? The concept of a conflict of interest seems to be lost on Katter as in both interviews he boasts of supporting his son-in-law’s business1,2. The concept of a conflict of interest is something that most politicians seem to have forgotten these days. Maybe they need to be reminded by a federal anti-corruption body.
Katter’s attitude is symptomatic of the problem with Australian politics today. Not only can people like Katter lie through their teeth and not be pulled up by their interviewers, they are prone to use the dog-whistle whenever it suits them. Not only do they advocate policies which are not in the best interests of Australians, they advocate those policies because they are in the interests of the corporations who pay for their election campaigns. That should be regarded as a bribe, and anyone giving or receiving one should be imprisoned, just as they are in the police and the judiciary.
Sources
- https://www.facebook.com/TheProjectTV/videos/10155369098713441/
- https://www.abc.net.au/4corners/big-guns/10406306
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Katter
- https://twitter.com/AnodyneParadigm/status/1054289157755785216
- https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/mar/07/australian-gun-lobby-donations-rightwing-minor-parties-weaken-reforms-control
Obviously it hasn’t occurred to Katter that it’s the Indigenous who should be armed to defend their country & remove invaders like his family, first white settlers etc. Just imagine the apoplexy if an interviewer suggested that. If you follow the illegals coming by boat, pretty well all non-Indigenous migrants are economic refugees who should have been refouled.
Jane,
Logic is not the strong suit of the RWNJs.