TRANSCRIPT:
(This transcript is derived from an automated process. The video recording is authoritative.)
Deboo Chatterjee:
Thank you. So good evening everyone. Is it working? Can you hear me? Someone needs to help me. Hello? Is it this one? Oh yes. Okay, perfect. So good evening everyone. Let me start with how I started my speech the other day. The other night I said, "hi, I'm a brown man", which was obviously Australian humour and most people outside this country didn't get it. And so I'm just going to throw with another humour. I'm just giving a disclaimer now. It's a humour that I identify as a man. My pronouns are he and him. So I stand here tonight as an Australian of Indian origin and someone who has proudly made this country a home. So I have moved here around 2018. I used to live in Dubai. Obviously I come from India, but I lived in Dubai for a long time. And then we decided to move here.
So on 31st August, when I attended the rally in Brisbane, which was actually anti mass immigration, the mass word mix, it is very important, but obviously the media, they twisted it. They made it anti-immigrant. And many of them even say it's, so I was standing as an Indian guy against Indian. So imagine, yeah, that was ridiculously funny to me. For that I received a lot of backlash, especially from the Indian community and being called names Brown, Sao terrorist, what else? A lot of stupid ones. So it didn't hurt me.
I was rather laughing because they were totally going for the propaganda and most of the people around the world are victim of propagandas. And that gave me a very good test about the media, how the media works. So I've always believed in finding the positive side of every situation. So during that rally, all the black backlash that I received, it gave me two positive sides.
First, it amplified the message we were trying to give, that we do not need mass migration in this country at this moment. That was the first thing positive happened. And the second thing happened that I spoke about the culture in Australia that I want to preserve, I want to help preserving. And that's exactly what I saw, that most people are intolerant around the world. And I do not want this people here at this moment. I want to clear it. I'm being very, very careful this time around, obviously.
So I want to make very clear, the rally was not about racism. It wasn't about rejecting immigrants, it was about practical reality. Australia is facing a massive issue when it comes to housing. We have a massive issue with the cost of living, and it is putting a huge pressure on our Medicare. We need to understand this before we get more immigrants in this country.
So unless we have our own, I know there's a lot of friends who, kids whose kids are unable to move out of their home because they can't find a property for themselves. So that's the issue. We already have an issue which we need to address before we get new people. It is not racist, it is not that we want to stop the immigration. We are only asking to pause the migration at this moment.
And obviously before we fix all this, we have to make sure the Australians are happy and we are in a very comfortable space. So some people expect me to have, sorry, some people expect me to have unquestioned loyalty to this country and which I have. And some people ask me that I should have loyalty to the country that I came from. But I want to be very clear that I have massive love and respect for India, but my loyalty stays here in this country.
So to those who continue to insult me, thank you first of all. And it doesn't affect me, it doesn't bother me and certainly doesn't silence me. So because at the end of the day, my message is loud and clear, Australia comes first.
