Senator Anning


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Fraser's top priorities

The key issues that we are prioritising as matters of national importance are:

Australia’s indiscriminate immigration program has led to us importing large numbers of people from third world Muslim countries who do not wish to integrate or contribute but instead live off our welfare system. As even the pro-immigration ABC’s Fact Check grudgingly concedes, “The majority of working-age Muslims, that is more than half of Muslims aged 15-64, are not working.”

Worse, not only have Muslim immigrants failed to contribute, they have also in many cases been an actively destructive presence in Australia. 6 of the 8 countries of origin with disproportionately high crime rates are Muslim-majority and the Sudanese-born population has a crime rate more than 6 times that of the Australian-born population. Muslims make up a vastly disproportionate share of our prison population.

This is in stark contrast to people who came here in previous immigration waves from countries like Italy, Greece, and Vietnam. Not only have they worked hard and integrated well into Australian society, they have also committed crimes at a substantially lower rate than native-born Australians – let alone the Muslim immigrant population! We need an immigration program that gives us more people like Sisto Malaspina and fewer like the Muslim immigrant terrorist who murdered him.

The first priority for Senator Anning is to give the Australian people a say on what they want their immigration program to look like through a national plebiscite. We know that the community is crying out for change in this area, and that the legitimacy of a public vote will make make essential immigration reform easier to achieve and harder to undo.

Australia’s future prosperity and development hinges on our most basic and necessary resource – water. Periodic droughts exact terrible costs on farmers and communities, with water use frequently being rationed and animals dying miserable deaths in the paddock. And as our population increases and as we seek to increase the productivity of our land, the need for water becomes more and more acute.

But even though this is an increasingly pressing problem, it is not a new one. This has always been a dry continent. John Bradfield, the engineer responsible for the Sydney Harbour Bridge, was alert to this issue all the way back in 1938 – and he came up with an ingenious solution.

In tropical Far North Queensland rainfall is extremely high – but most of that water flows quickly back out to the sea. Bradfield’s idea was to dam those northern rivers and send the water over the Great Dividing Range, where it would naturally flow south through the nation’s interior.

Such a move would allow us to develop regional Queensland in a way that has not before been possible. Estimates are that we would be able to irrigate a million hectares of farmland as well as providing our farms and communities with water security and drought resilience.

The Bradfield Scheme would be a visionary nation-building project that would outstrip even the Snowy Mountains Scheme and be a source of wealth and pride for Australia for generations to come.

Many Australians – including Senator Anning himself – have been victims of unethical and illegal conduct by the banking industry. For a long time banks have used their immense financial power and political connections to avoid being held accountable. That is changing now as the voices of protest have become too numerous and too loud, but the fight is not yet over.

The current Financial Services Royal Commission, for all the wrongs it has exposed, is still a hamstrung operation deliberately designed by Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison to prevent thorough investigation. The one year time frame and limited terms of reference were always going to be insufficient to investigate the vast complexity and number of financial crimes that have been committed. Thousands of cases and many different patterns of misconduct have been left unexamined. A new Royal Commission is needed, with the resources and time allowance necessary to fully investigate the sector.

While the focus following the final report of the Royal Commission will inevitably and rightly be on improving oversight and regulation to prevent more abuses happening in the future, attention also needs to be given to the legacy cases. There are many people who have been financially destroyed for no fault of their own and have not had their stories heard or their cases examined.

We need to put a system in place to allow these people to have real justice. Senator Anning is proud that he and his staff have been able to achieve substantial concessions for many bank victims through direct intervention, but people should be able to get justice without a Federal Parliamentarian’s help. They can’t sue because they have been bankrupted and even with the strongest case they would be buried in costs before they ever saw a cent. A special tribunal needs to be established to deal with cases of bank misconduct more quickly and affordably than can happen through the formal court process.