Speech - Pauline Hanson -
Launch of One Nation - 11th April 1997

“My friends,

my constituents of Oxley,

my fellow Australians,

Tonight there is cause for celebration.

We, all of us here tonight, and millions of people across Australia can celebrate, at last there is the chance for change.

The chance to finally rid ourselves of the inequity that has grown from years of political correctness, where we have not been able to speak our mind, or express our views without being called names intended to make us look backward, intolerant or extremist.

The chance to stand against those who have betrayed our country, and would destroy our identity by forcing upon us the cultures of others.

The chance to turn this country around, revitalise our industry, restore our ANZAC spirit and our national pride, and provide employment for all Australians who have given a fair break would seize the opportunity for a better way of life, for themselves, and for their families.

The chance to make sure the Australia we have known, loved and fought to preserve will be inherited intact, by our children, and the generations that follow them.

Ladies and Gentlemen, chances are fleeting, they must be held tightly, and so tonight more than celebration, is a time for resolve, for if we fail, all our fears will be realised, and we will lose our country forever, and be strangers in our own land.

As it stands, the future is one where the majority of Australians will become second class citizens in their own country, under a government who panders to minority interests and denies the majority their right of decision.

This is already happening.

The few politicians who care enough to recognise the situation will not speak out, because the politically correct multiculturalists, and sections of the media will call them names, their colleagues will distance themselves, and their party will destroy them.

In my own case, when I said what we all know to be the truth, the Liberal Party disendorsed me, and used me as an example to others of what will happen if you break ranks and speak the truth.

The truth is frightening, and must not be spoken, because the truth is:-

In 1961, unemployment stood at 2.6%, and yet in 1996, even after creative accounting it was 8.4%.

Today it is even higher, despite the promises of the current government.

There are at least 1.5 million Australians out of work.

But these real figures are hidden by the method used to calculate unemployment, because if you work one hour a week, you are considered to have a job.

In 1961 27.5% of Australians were employed in manufacturing, but by 1996 that figure had dropped to 12.9%, less than half, and yet even as we threaten what remains of our car industry and other manufacturing, we ask, where are the jobs going?

The jobs are going to countries like Indonesia, where the pay is 39 cents an hour.

The government’s enthusiastic removal of tariff protection has forced manufacturers overseas.

It’s no wonder Asia boasts of their “Tiger Economics”, they manufacture our goods, to their benefit, and at the cost of our jobs.

In the seventies Australia accounted for 4% of world trade, in the nineties it is down to 1% and still falling.

We are simply not keeping up with rest of the world.

In the financial year 1995/96, the Foreign Investment Review Board, which was set up to protect us, doubled its approvals to Au$57 billion.

Nearly Au$50 billion being spent to buy up existing Australian assets, with no new jobs created.

It isn’t enough that the government gives Australian jobs to foreign countries, each day they let more and more of our country be sold away from us, never to be recovered.

In Rural Australia, 30 families leave the land every week.

Without change, we will lose 24,000 farmers to the welfare queues.

Will the government then import even basic crops, perhaps rice, to get us more used to it.
Think of the difference some of the more than Au$30 Billion given to ATSIC would have made if used to help Australian farmers, rather than being unaccountably squandered, with no apparent improvement to the plight of indigenous Aborigines.

When we don’t have any farms, manufacturing, jobs, or land, whose citizens will we be then?

When the Liberal party sought to silence the truth by disendorsing me, they thought they would finish me.

They were wrong.

After my maiden speech when sections of the media, the muliculturalists, and the aboriginal industry tried to portray me as a simple fish and chip shop lady, and an uneducated, uniformed race bigot, they thought they would finish me.

Now they think I can’t do it, they think I don’t have your support, they rely on Australians remaining apathetic.

They think Australians will just lay down and see their country disappear before their eyes.

Are they right?

No they are wrong again.

Because if we let ourselves be stopped now, who will be left to take up the fight?

Some may believe it is almost too late, but we’ve come too far to be stopped, and we won’t be stopped.

We will reclaim our country, and the future of our children.

We have been pushed far enough.

Tonight we start to push back.

It’s a mammoth task that lies ahead, but we cannot step lightly, even though we tread where our enemies are waiting.

We must be resolute and unflinching.

We must not be slowed by the many obstacles that will be thrown in our path.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Who of you would not join this fight?

Who of you would not stand up for your country?

And yet there are so many people in Australia who do not think of themselves as Australians.

They have simply transplanted the problems of their way of life to our country.

Where will they stand in any future crisis, beside us, or behind us, or will they themselves be the crisis?

What will the face of Australia be if we continue to be the world’s immigration soft touch?

How long can Australia pay for other countries mistakes, by importing their problems to our shores?

How many more unemployed will there be if we continue to fill our country with people who have given us nothing in return?

We cannot continue with this lack of sense and fairness.

We must all be treated equally.

We must remove the divisiveness of ATSIC, the aboriginal industry, and multicultural affairs.

Government policies have given us different classifications for Australians.

We now have Aboriginal Australians, and Indonesian Australians and other ethnic minorities. We want everyone to think of themselves simply as Australians, and to be Australians.

If you came here for a better life then live that better life with us.

Be with us, be one of us, be a part of One Nation, not one of the many parts of a divided nation. There is no need to forget where you came from, but above all, remember where you are.

Surely most people who have come to Australia have come for a better life. Do they want our country to become like the place they left?

Do You?

What of your dream for Australia?
Do you want it to be like another place?

Indonesia perhaps?
Cambodia or Vietnam?
How about Iran or Iraq or maybe Lebanon?

Are there so many good things about these places that you would want Australia to be like them?

Do you want race riots, religious fanaticism, gang and drug wars?
Do you want civil war?

We have a chance for Australia to be the best place in the world, but we won’t achieve that by aspiring to be like so many places people want to leave.

We won’t achieve it with population policies that have no regard for the affect on our environment.

We won’t achieve it by giving our jobs to Asia, or selling off our assets to foreign ownership.

We won’t achieve it by crippling small business, making farmers extinct, or destroying what little remains of Australian manufacturing.

We won’t achieve it by throwing our money and our land at so called reconciliation, when in fact we have nothing to feel guilty about, and the cost of this guilt we have no reason to feel reduces what could be spent on our hospitals and schools and other areas where we could all benefit from the difference, rather than a few benefiting from the misappropriation.

We won’t achieve it by allowing heinous crimes previously unknown to us such as home invasions and the extortion of shop keepers to be imported along with so many cultures so alien to the Australian way of life.

And we most certainly will not achieve it by just giving away the most valuable commodity of all, Australian citizenship, the right to live free, and the right to honestly make of yourself, in what can still be the best place in the world.

We can win, we can make the difference, we can be the best place, but we must learn the lessons of the mistakes made by so many other countries.

We must stop our government repeating these mistakes, before we become like all the other places everyone wants to leave.

We cannot continue pursuing the failures of multiculturalism.

We cannot just give away what we all know to be so valuable.
If you want to live here permanently, you must want to be an Australian.

We must stand together to make these changes, or eventually be dragged down by the conspiracy of divisiveness that has been encouraged by our governments, and let loose upon the people of Australia without their permission.

Australians can no longer afford the luxury of apathy.

We must stand up.
We must all pull together.
We must win this battle, or lose the war.

Our immediate goals:-

To stop all immigration except that related to investment that will lead to employment, and for this to continue until Australia’s unemployment is solved.

To treat all Australians equally, and in so doing, abolish divisive and discriminatory policies such as those related to aboriginal and multicultural affairs.

To restrict foreign ownership of Australia, repeal the Native Titles Act, abolish ATSIC, and reverse WIK and MABO.

To restore tariff protection, revitalise Australian manufacturing, and help small business and the rural sector.

To take positive action on such matters as taxation reform, education, health, crime, and the discrimination created by political correctness.

The years of bandaid policies and questionable objectives have left us with a great deal to do.

The interests of the Australian people, and the future of our country must be determined by Australians themselves, not by the governments of other countries, and not by the United Nations, and not by trade agreements that benefit everybody except us.

We must recognise the truth, and no longer allow ourselves to be imperilled by governments whose sole objective is re-election, at any price, to stay in power, at any price, not for our benefit, but for their own.

From Graham Richardson’s admissions we understand that the lies are so deeply rooted in the Australian political culture that even the politicians cannot tell the difference any more.

We should be afraid of their lies, and the consequences of believing their lies.

All Australians must be told the truth.
We must not be afraid of the truth.

But we must be afraid of the lies, for it is the truth that will save Australia, not the lies. We must always remember the sacrifice of so many Australians who fought to save our country from outsiders who would have taken it.

We must not now allow our country to be taken from within.

Again I say, it is the truth that will save Australia, not the lies.

I am about the truth.
I am about us being Australians.
I am about us being one people.
Under one flag, and with one set of rules.

When next you hear them call me a racist and a bigot, remember it is not just me they speak of, but everyone who believes in these things of which I speak.

It is an insult shared by millions of decent patriotic Australians.

We have only one chance.

One chance, and that is to be, One Nation.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is with a great sense of Purpose, Pride and Patriotism, that I officially launch the voice of the people, the Party of Truth, Fairness and Equality for all Australians, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation."

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