Federal Election 2019: Fraser Anning’s Conservative National Party

Summary

Policies & Commentary

Fraser Anning burst onto Australia’s political scene like an unpleasantly-plumed rooster from an extremely white egg in October 2017, after Pauline Hanson One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts turned out to be not quite Australian enough to serve in Parliament.  On his first day of Parliament, he managed to be endorsed by David Leyonhjelm and Cory Bernardi and disendorsed by Pauline Hanson,  but due to another political cock-up, Anning did start his life as a One Nation Senator, before resigning to join Bob Katter’s Australia Party.  Evidently, however, Anning preferred to be at the top of the pecking order, so he resigned from the KAP last year to sit as an independent, before deciding to start his own party.

Incidentally, you should be aware that I have not named Anning’s new political party entirely correctly.  It is actually reggistered with the AEC as FRASER ANNING’S CONSERVATIVE NATIONAL PARTY. Evidently, Anning likes to shout at people.

I will get on to the FACN Party (choose your own pronunciation, but I personally have some recommendations) shortly, but I do think it’s worth noting a couple of career highlights before we get going.  First, Anning’s maiden speech called for a plebiscite to reintroduce the White Australia policy, condemned Safe Schools and gender fluidity, and called for a ‘Final Solution’ to the ‘Muslim problem’.  If you are thinking this last phrase sounds familiar, it’s because this is the phrase that Hitler used with regard to the Jews while perpetrating the Holocaust.

This turned out to be too racist even for Pauline Hanson, which is almost awe-inspiring.  (It wasn’t too racist for Katter, who called the speech ‘solid gold’.  Evidently he and Anning are birds of a feather.)

Oh, and Anning likes firearms, too, because of course he does.

Another thing that I don’t think we should overlook is that in the wake of the recent murder of 50 Muslims who were at prayer in Christchurch, Anning tweeted “Does anyone still dispute the link between Muslim immigration and violence?”, and then doubled down with a statement that saying that while Muslims might have been victims this time around, they were usually the perpetrators.

So basically, he is a disgusting individual, a veritable rotten egg of a human being.

But I suppose we should look at his FACN Party, and see what it stands for.

Let’s start with the slogans.

The FACN Party is working for Real Australians.

Now, who might those real Australians be, do you think? Well, his page is full of Australian flags and very white people and images of the outback, so that’s one clue.

Here’s another clue, from the FACN Facebook page.

White Australia policy, anyone?

So that’s pretty fowl.

Speaking of the Facebook page, that’s where we find our second slogan: ‘One Nation Under God, United by the Crimson Threads of Kinship’.

The first part of that is straight from the US right-wing Christian playbook – when will our right wing politicians learn that Australia is not America? – and is a handy way of excluding Muslims, atheists, and any other non-Christians.  The second part sounded far too pompously poetic for a goose like Anning to have come up with on his own, so I googled it, and lo and behold, here’s what I found:

“In a speech to a Federation Conference banquet in 1890, Henry Parkes coined the term ‘crimson thread of kinship’ to describe the ties that bound the Australian colonies. The reference was to shared Anglo-Celtic bloodlines, to the exclusion of Indigenous, Asian and other contributors to nation-building and the nation’s gene pool. “

Anning is a big fan of Parkes, as we will shortly discover.

Back to that FACN website, where we find slogans like ‘Australia for Australians’, which I’m increasingly sure is not a category that includes me – that Jewish blood, you know – and are informed that:

Fraser Anning’s Conservative National Party is committed to a forward-thinking platform built around traditional values, and the economic and social prosperity of Australia and its people.

So forward thinking that they are using policies that were literally invented in the 19th century.  Wow.

Anning also wants us to be aware of his true blue credentials.  He grew up on a cattle station in outback Queensland, and is the great-grandson of colonial era settlers from Britain, he’s worked as a grazier, on a gas pipeline, as a bush pilot and served in the army.

Senator Anning came to international attention for two reasons. Firstly, his call for a return to a predominantly European immigration program and secondly, for advocating a ban on further Muslim immigration and a ban on violent black African migrants.

He is an uncompromising defender of traditional Christian values and strongly supports Australian ownership of agriculture and industry, radical banking reform, private gun ownership and major rural infrastructure development, in particular the visionary Bradfield scheme. Fraser is also a strident critic of the UN and the usurpation of Australian democratic government by UN treaties.

I had to look up the Bradfield Scheme.  Apparently it was a scheme to divert water from the Tully, Herbert and Burdekin rivers to irrigate western Queensland.  It was proposed in 1938 and abandoned in 1947.

Truly, Anning is a forward-thinking politician.  Why, already he has leaped ahead from 1890 to 1938!

(Actually, that would explain a lot about his Final Solution comments…)

Also, it’s nice to know that Anning is supportive of violent white African migrants.  And, presumably, violent black European migrants, violent Asian migrants from any geographical location whatsoever and… but I digress.

Because of the evident scramble to get his party registered ahead of the election being announced, the FACN Party (choose your own pronunciation) doesn’t have a lot of policies up yet, but the ones that are there are predictably eggregious.

They start with Sir Henry Parke’s vision of Australia as an English speaking, European Christian Commonwealth, and immigration should ‘give preference to those best able to integrate and assimilate’.

Which, presumably, would be more white people.

(Incidentally, I wonder where the Aboriginal Australians are in Anning’s vision?

Never mind, I think we can guess.)

Anning also supports ‘traditional family values’, and is thus against both same sex marriage and abortion.

He thinks that ‘private property is an unviolable natural right’.  I’m not sure what, eggsactly, that means, but I’m guessing he doesn’t like tax, and probably favours shooting people who try to steal things, since another of his policies is the right to own firearms and use them for self-defence.  It might also be about not acknowledging Aboriginal sovereignty, however, since he doesn’t seem to view them as Real Australians.  (If they aren’t, then who are? Please eggsplain?)

The FACN Party wants welfare as a safety net ‘but restricted to citizens’.  I’ve got news for Anning – it already is.  He also wants voluntary voting, presumably because that’s a great way to increase the voting share of eggstremists (compulsory voting means that people who don’t care quite so much still turn out to votes – take it away, and suddenly the only people voting are people who care a little bit too much. Like me. Or worse.).  He is pro-military, and wants ‘the restoration of Australia’s national sovereignty through repudiation of coercive international treaties and a foreign policy that puts Australia first.’

I think this is code for not trusting the UN.

And he wants ‘decentralisation of power and competitive federalism’.

He really is trying to turn us into America – right down to states’ rights.

OK, he does have three or four policies that are not entirely evil.

Anning wants universal home ownership to be a universal objeggtive, and he believes in Australian ownership of our infrastructure.  He is in favour of collective bargaining in agriculture and industry, and wants more infrastructure for rural Australia.  He wants a not-for profit government bank.

These are all reasonable policies, but you can get them by voting for parties that are far less loathesome than the FACN Party.

Oh, and it turns out that Fraser Anning also believes in ‘individual freedom, including unrestricted freedom of speech, association and belief’.

Now that’s an invitation if ever I saw one.

You might have noticed that I have been engaging an unsubtle verbal egging of Anning throughout this post.  This is not because I am particularly in favour of egging politicians (though I have to say, given his comments after Christchurch, I’m inclined to view an egg as a proportional response).

It’s because it has been taking all my willpower not to write a post that basically consists of me repeatedly screaming ‘Aaaaaagh Fraser Anning is a gigantic, racist, fascist, homophobic bag of diseased dicks!  What the f*ck is wrong him? How the hell is he even in our Parliament?  How the hell did he even find 19 people to vote for him?  What the f*ck is wrong with us?’

But I felt like that wouldn’t be very illuminating.  Or very polite.  And while freedom of speech is important, I tend to feel that abusive speech is at best unhelpful and at worst dangerous and cruel.

So I’ve been keeping my blood pressure to acceptable levels by indulging in every egg or bird-related pun that I could plausibly include, just for some light relief.

But I want to be very clear that Fraser Anning is, in my opinion, dangerous and cruel.  His speeches aim to encourage, if not incite, violence against people who aren’t like him, and his policies are *intended* to hurt people.  He is a terrible person, and the people he encourages are also terrible people.

And if they are allowed to gain political power, these people will do terrible things to our country in the name of patriotism, and that makes me very angry, and also very sad.

I do not talk about patriotism very often on this blog, and I think it’s pretty clear that I don’t subscribe to the sort of patriotism that declaims ‘my country, right or wrong’.  My patriotism is the kind that expresses itself in reading and writing hundreds of thousands of words about the political parties that are seeking to change the direction of our country, so that others can be informed and vote wisely.

I love Australia enough that I want it to be the best country it can be.  And I love my fellow Australians enough that I want them to have the same opportunities that I have, the same freedoms that I have – including the freedom to practice my religion peacefully, or to walk down the street without people making horrible assumptions about me based on the colour of my skin or who I am holding hands with.

Anning, and those like him, want an Australia which grants these freedoms only to people like them.  That’s not patriotism – it’s the exact opposite.

The only good thing about the FACN party is that it’s clearly hoping to poach votes from Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party, and perhaps also Bob Katter’s Australia Party.  (And who knows, maybe the Australian Liberty Alliance, and Australia First, and, seriously, who on earth decided that Australia needed that many right-wing xenophobic political parties?)

With any luck, they will split the racist vote between them and get nothing.

Which would be eggcellent.

Eurovision Theme Song as determined by me, very objectively

Who better to represent the FACN party than a turkey who is yelling vaguely abusive things about other countries, while being booed by the audience?  There really was only one possible choice.

Sorry, Dustin.  But look on the bright side – at least you’re less of a turkey than Fraser Anning.