Senator Fraser Anning’s position on immigration on a race basis has seen him booted out of Katter’s Australian Party.
The announcement on Thursday afternoon comes after weeks of tension following the Queensland senator’s maiden speech to federal parliament in early August, in which he called for a plebiscite to reintroduce racial and religious discrimination in immigration policy, especially with regard to excluding Muslims.
Mr Anning’s loss of KAP endorsement was announced by KAP president, Shane Paulger.
“The party cannot and will not have any representative from our executive, members of parliament, senators or candidates dividing Australia along racial ‘Europeans’ and ‘non-Europeans’ divides, which in fact destroys the message which was carried initially, so extremely well and laudably by senator Fraser Anning,” Mr Paulger said.
“In spite of the most severe and clear warnings, Senator Anning has continued down this pathway and consequently we announce the termination of his endorsement by the KAP.
“Clearly Fraser wants the freedom to pursue his crusade. And we think it is best for he and the party to give him this freedom.”
Mr Anning entered parliament last November, replacing Malcolm Roberts as a One Nation senator but splitting from the party and its leader, Pauline Hanson immediately.
He sat as an independent until early June, when it was announced that he’d joined KAP and become the party’s first senator.
At the time he was welcomed by Mr Katter, who said the Anning and Katter families “were from Charters Towers before there was a Charters Towers”.
On a subsequent trip around northern and western Queensland, Mr Anning spent time championing the Bradfield Scheme, and told Fairfax Agricultural Media he hadn’t changed his immigration politics from the views that originally attracted him to One Nation.
Saying he was anti-immigration and calling for a moratorium until infrastructure had been built to “catch up with the number of people coming into the place”, he said he was in favour of white South African farmers because it was “the right sort of immigration”.
Mr Paulger said on Thursday that 99pc of what Senator Anning had been saying was solid gold but 1pc was totally unacceptable.
“I, as party president made it perfectly clear, as did the federal leader, that inter alia there was to be no more use of words like ‘Europeans’ and ‘non-Europeans’. Clearly that is racist; clearly our policies are anti-racist.”
He said the position was reiterated following a bill that Mr Anning had drafted.
“He was unequivocally informed when the party learnt of this bill, that there would be extreme hostility if the bill went forward using racial identification terminology, and that the party would not accept future use of such language or such policies.
“Clearly his divide of ‘European’ and ‘non-European’ would prevent for example Sikhs and Filipinos coming to this country.
“The party considers it a great tragedy that the wonderful work Fraser has done to cut back the mass influx of people to this country has been damaged.”