George Christensen is a champ who has served this nation well:
Australian political figure George Christensen is well-known and well-loved by many – although he is also hated by the left and demonised by the leftist media. I have known him for some time now, and we have shared various stages together over the years.
He has stood against political correctness, climate alarmism, political Islam, the draconian government responses to Covid, mandatory vaccinations, the woke agenda, the feminist agenda, and the radical homosexual and trans agendas. And he has also strongly stood up for pro-life and other causes that his own colleagues seldom did.
He was born and raised in Mackay, Queensland, and for a while was a seminarian preparing for the priesthood. He spent over 6 years in local government, and for nearly the past 12 years he served the Federal electorate of Dawson for the Liberals/Nationals. He served four terms there, since 2010. After a political life of 18 years all up, he has just given his final speech in Parliament.
For various reasons, including family matters and his dislike of what Parliament has become, he will not be contesting the next election. And he is just a young fella – only 43 years old. So he let things rip in that final speech of his, given on March 31.
If you want to listen to it, the 29-minute speech is found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIG3bn-vMRM
If you want to read it, you will find it here: https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;db=CHAMBER;id=chamber%2Fhansardr%2F25472%2F0010;query=Id%3A%22chamber%2Fhansardr%2F25472%2F0010%22
Let me offer some quotes from it. He offers this moving story of part of the reason he is leaving parliament:
Some of you know that my wife, April, and I now have a beautiful 20-month-old daughter by the name of Margaret Anne. Full of beans, she is, and she wakes up mum every morning that I’m down here asking ‘Daddy?’ so April can videocall me to talk to her. I’ve become a forced fan of CoComelon, Super Simple Songs and Frozen, because of my little Graget, as she calls herself. What you might not know, though, are the circumstances of her birth.
In early 2020, April was overseas, staying with family, while I was off seeing Julian Assange in Belmarsh prison, in London, and busy with about four weeks of parliamentary sittings, a couple of weeks of internal electorate travel and parliamentary committee work. We were supposed to meet up again in April, and then the borders slammed shut. Like many others, we became victims of pandemic policy, albeit policy that I supported at the time because it seemed like the commonsense thing to do. We thought the borders would only be shut a while, but it went on and on and on.
To cut a long story short, my daughter was born overseas in July 2020 without me there for it. Worse still, there were complications for my wife, who had to have a caesarean and then suffered severe internal bleeding. At about 4 am, the surgeon attending to my wife phoned me to say the situation was very serious, and, if there were things that I had to tell my wife, now was the time to do so. You don’t get a clearer, more sobering message from a doctor than that. She was then rushed into emergency surgery. That morning, I had to front a meeting of local farmers and then a press conference, all the while not knowing whether my wife was alive or not. Thankfully she was, and the surgeons there saved her life. On that note, I am thankful to Senator Marise Payne for what she did to get info via our embassy to the hospital and vice versa. In the proceeding months, as April was recuperating, without me pulling rank—it would have been in the papers if I’d tried to do so—thankfully, we were reunited. So there’s that.
He goes on to share his concerns about the way politics is now conducted in Australia:
Then—here comes the hard bit, guys—there’s this place. I actually don’t like coming to Canberra anymore. The parliamentary processes to me seem so stale and staged. Question time’s a farce, where government backbenchers ask pointless questions written by someone else, and opposition members ask pointless ‘gotcha’ questions that never get answers. And the public hate the vitriol and the behaviour displayed during question time. I’m guilty; I stand condemned for being part of that behaviour. The matter of public importance is nothing more than a sop to those who want to relive their high-school or university debating club years, and votes and proceedings could simply be dialled in, they’re that predictable. We say something in favour of a government bill, the opposition say something against it and we all vote for it or against it, depending on what the party says. In the Labor Party you get expelled for doing anything else. On our side, you just get ostracised.
What happened to individuality in this place? What happened to critical thinking? What happened to true representation? As a nation we bemoan the fact that most politicians are white-bread, cookie-cutter replicas of one another, but, on the other hand, we decry a spark of individuality as chaos, destabilisation and disunity—or at least the media does. We can’t have it both ways. There needs to be greater room in this place for backbenchers to say what they really think, publicly, in this chamber, and to vote accordingly. The notion of party discipline needs to give way to representation, just like it does in many other legislatures around the world; otherwise, we run the risk of Parliament House degenerating into a sheltered workshop for people who can’t think for themselves. So there’s that.
Then there’s COVID. You’ve heard it before. We’ve blown up freedoms, bodily autonomy, medical privacy, human rights, community cohesion and many businesses and jobs, all for a virus with a 0.27 per cent infection fatality rate. It should never have happened, and yet some of it is still happening. We here could have and should have at least stopped the discrimination from happening by putting rules around access to the Australian Immunisation Register data—rules that said, ‘You can’t use that data for the purposes of terminating someone’s employment or discriminating against them in supplying a service.’ We didn’t. It is not the only thing that I have disagreed with the government on. There is the net zero policy, which I vehemently disagree with on the basis that it is ultimately going to cost jobs, and probably jobs in my region.
There is a digital identity bill we are crafting that is being pushed by the elite globalist World Economic Forum. No-one has ever approached me as a member of parliament and said they want the nation to adopt a digital identity system. Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum has called for it but we don’t answer to them. Our democracy is one that should be from the ground up, the people up, not from the globalists down. I am not sure whether I’ve departed from the values of my party in government or the other way around—perhaps it’s a bit of both—so continuing on as the member for Dawson, for the LNP or otherwise, when my values more and more differed from the government I was part of, weighed heavily on me.
He continues:
But as I take my leave I want to share with my colleagues a list of things that matter to conservatives and patriots according to me—strap yourself in! Some of these may be unpopular, not in keeping with the times or the way of the world but, to quote one of my favourite saints, Saint Athanasius, ‘If the world is against the truth then I’m against the world.’
I begin with the most important matter of them all—life. The right to life is the most fundamental liberty of them all, and we should be acting to defend it. Freedom of speech is paramount for any democracy, including the speech we don’t like. Efforts to ban free speech with political buzzwords like ‘hate speech’, ‘vilification’, ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation’ are harmful to democracy. Likewise, foreign-owned big tech oligarchies should not be allowed to censor political and philosophical discourse in this country. The legacy media is biased and has become a cheer squad for big government and wokeism. We should call it out but, where it is privately owned, and never seek to have government interfere with it, but taxpayers should not be funding a biased fake news media outlet; the ABC must be reformed.
People should not be forced into any medical procedure under threat of losing their jobs, losing payments or any other form of restriction, coercion or duress. As I said, our federal government should have acted on this. We should never sacrifice people’s livelihoods, people’s jobs, people’s businesses and farms, our regions or our nation on the altar of the political religion that is man-made climate change. Net zero emissions will mean net zero jobs. The World Economic Forum, the United Nations and other globalist bodies should not dictate to Australia what laws we have. Democracy in this country is from the bottom up, not the top down.
And he concludes this way:
That point brings me to the one I want to thank the most: my God. A lot of people have verballed me about my faith. It’s there and it’s strong. But I acknowledge, always, that I have not lived up to its standards, and that is the point of Christianity. None of us can live up to the standard set by the perfect man, Jesus Christ. We can aim to and we can aspire to. When we fall, we seek forgiveness, we get up and we get on with it. I’m not a saint—far from it. I’m a miserable sinner. The prayer I have prayed the most, apart from the Lord’s Prayer, is what’s called the Prayer of the Heart or the Jesus Prayer: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’
Despite being a miserable sinner, I give all of the glory of the past 11-plus years of federal parliamentary work, the six-plus years of local government work, totalling less than a month shy of 18 years of service in elected office, to my Lord God and saviour Jesus Christ. In doing so I’m reminded of the verse from St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians that has been emblazoned on the bronze paperweight that has sat on my desk in my Parliament House office. ‘Stand firm’, it says, in bold letters, and underneath: ‘Be strong and immovable. Always work enthusiastically for the Lord, for you know that nothing you do for the Lord is ever useless.’
Well done George. And the good news is, he certainly is not going into hiding after politics. He has plenty of social media sites, and his own page is found here: https://www.georgechristensen.com.au/
You can also get on his mailing list for Nation First: https://nationfirst.substack.com/
If you cannot get enough of George (and me!), here are two more resources. Back in 2020 George interviewed me. The 35-minute Part 1 is found here: https://www.georgechristensen.com.au/podcast/episode5
The 39-minute Part 2 is found here: https://www.georgechristensen.com.au/podcast/episode6
You can see his newer interviews here: https://www.georgechristensen.com.au/podcast
And in mid-October of last year Andrew Smith and I interviewed George. The 15-minute interview can be listened to here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrRvUNoV3Sw
All the best George and may you continue to serve this nation and the Kingdom for many decades to come. God bless you.
[1922 words]