Asked if his family trauma contributed to his outburst, Katter suggested there was too much focus on his father’s side of the family.
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“I say to people, like, didn’t I have a mother? It was from my father’s side [the Lebanese heritage] – didn’t I have a mother?” he said.
Liberal senator Jane Hume, one of many to condemn Katter’s outburst, said last week that the new Independent Parliamentary Standards Commission would be “looking at [Katter’s actions] very seriously”. However, it is not clear if the commission can probe the incident because it did not occur on the grounds of parliament.
In the press conference where Katter was expressing support for the weekend’s anti-immigration marches, Bavas said, “You’ve got Lebanese heritage yourself” before Katter jumped in, shook his fist at Bavas, and said, “You’re a racist.”
Katter repeated those baseless claims against Bavas to this masthead on Monday.
“I say to all of my fellow Australians, they cannot say to you that you’re Sicilian or that you’re French or English. We’re Australian here,” he said.
“We’re a little country. Our national identity is a sacred thing and if we lose that, we’ve lost everything.”
Katter was one of only a handful of MPs to attend the weekend march, which was condemned as hateful by the government after neo-Nazis and anti-lockdown conspiracy theorists were spotted.
“You can’t have any demonstration where you don’t get extremists,” Katter said. “But if you identify good and evil, I identify evil as Nazism. It is the epitome of evil.
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“But don’t confuse that with condemning patriotism.”
Katter’s son, Queensland state MP Robbie Katter, defended his father’s actions, saying the family’s Lebanese heritage was a “deeply personal” topic.
“If someone offends you personally and really gets up your goat … I think we should be able to defend ourselves … you’re entitled to keep asking, but we’re entitled to react to sort of stop that from happening,” Robbie Katter said on Sky News last Friday.
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