Fraser Anning: Australia MPs condemn 'final solution' speech

An Australian politician was widely condemned on Wednesday after demanding "a final solution" to immigration and calling for a return to the White Australia policy which favoured "European Christians".

Anning, who represents Queensland for Katter's Australian Party, called for immigrant numbers to be slashed, and for a ban on Muslims, justifying his call by saying they had "consistently shown to be the least able to assimilate and integrate".

In a post on the Katter's Australian Party page, the party said Anning was "under attack for speaking the truth" and that he needed support so he could "fulfil his promise to reduce immigration levels and take back Australia from the extremists".

His choice of the phrase "final solution" - used by Nazi high command during the Holocaust as a euphemism for the mass extermination of Jews - provoked instant and widespread condemnation, reports The Sydney Morning Herald.

"I'm a Muslim migrant, I'm about to be a Senator and there's not a damn thing Fraser Anning can do about it", she wrote in a piece for website Junkee.

"Those of us that are already here are responsible for behaving in a manner that encourages people to make the same journey as us, no matter where they come from, their economic capacity, social standing, the colour of their skin, their religion, sexuality or gender identity".

Cabinet minister Mitch Fifield said the speech was deeply regrettable, telling Nine Network: "I thought we had moved beyond this in the parliament".

Hanson acknowledged that Anning was elected under the One Nation banner but said he had "never held a seat in this parliament under Pauline Hanson's One Nation, from day one when he was sworn in he was an independent". He called for the government to ban all welfare payments to migrants in the first five years of living in Australia, labelling many asylum seekers as "welfare seekers". "This will create more university places for Australians, whose parents have actually paid for the universities with their taxes in the first place", Anning said.

"Absolutely one thousand per cent", Mr Katter said when asked if he backed Senator Anning on Wednesday.

Around 1942, the Nazi leadership established a plan called "The Final Solution to the Jewish Question", which led to the genocide of more than six million Jewish people in occupied Europe.

"The Islamist terrorists" argument to other Muslims is: "Australia is not your country".

He said he followed protocol "and shook this unworthy man's hand I then went home and washed my own". And nor will he spend any time finding out. "We should condemn, as we have, racism and discrimination of the kind so regrettably, so shamefully expressed by senator Anning".

There has been a hugely negative response to his speech in the hours since it was made.

The Katter's Australia Party upper house MP called for an end to Muslim immigration and a program that favours "European Christian" values.

"If people want to take it out of context that's entirely up to them", he told Nine Network.