By Joan Lockwood
Here are some ideas, expressed by two different people, from two different hemispheres, 70 years apart.
Pauline Hanson in her inaugural speech to parliament, September 10, 1996: "I am fed up to the back teeth, with inequalities that are being promoted by the government."
Program of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSGWP), 1920, co-written by Adolf Hitler: "All citizens must possess equal rights and duties". (Hitler didn't believe in special benefits for special circumstances either.)
Hanson: "I and most Australians want ... multiculturalism abolished."
Hitler, writing about multicultural Vienna in 1913, in Mein Kampf: "I was repelled by the conglomeration of races, repelled by this whole mixture of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Ruthenians, Serbs, Croats."
Hanson: "Between 1984 and 1995, 40% of all migrants were of Asian origin. They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate."
Hitler in The Danger Jewry Constitutes to our People Today, (1919): "Amongst us a non-German, alien race lives, not willing, and also not able to sacrifice its racial peculiarities, to deny its own way of feeling, thinking and striving, and which nevertheless possess all the political rights we do ourselves."
Hanson: "I am going to find out how many treaties we have signed with the UN, have them exposed and then call for their repudiation. The government should cease all foreign aid immediately, and employ the savings to generate employment here at home."
Mein Kampf: "No consideration of foreign policy can proceed from any other criterion than this: Does it benefit our nationality now or in the future, or will it be injurious to it? ... partisan, religious, humanitarian and all other criteria in general are irrelevant."
Hanson: "Immigration must be halted in the short term."
NSGWP Program: "Any further immigration by non-Germans must be prevented."
Hanson: "I call for the introduction of national service, compulsory for 12 months, for young people finishing year 12 or reaching age 18."
Mein Kampf : "Later he [the young German finishing school] must perform the supplementary physical exercises prescribed by the state, and finally enters the army: the training in the army must embrace every individual."
Hanson: "I come here not as a polished politician, but as a woman who has had her fair share of life's knocks."
Hitler: "They underestimate me because I have risen from below."