Katter talks about “forced crossdressing” and AIDS in bizarre parliament speech

Queensland MP Bob Katter gave a bizarre address in parliament last night, plugging his book and touching on topics from crossdressing to AIDS.

While largely avoiding the subject of the marriage equality bill in his rambling speech, Katter did seem to express concern that same-sex marriage would become compulsory.

“Whilst you people are all piously holding your hand over your hearts and saying, ‘This is the best thing since Burke invented freedom and democracy,’ down in the pub, in the real world, where I live and other people live, I walked into the pub and said, ‘Bobby, I’m going bush, mate, before they make it compulsory,’ and everyone roared laughing,” he said.

“But you don’t live in that world. You don’t live in that world where real people live. You live down here, where you listen to this incredible concoction of drivel.”

Katter then took an opportunity to promote his book—“only $29 at all best-selling bookshops”.

He suggested that the LGBTI community is a new phenomenon and that people are “genetically programmed” to be heterosexual.

“The people advocating this proposition tonight, the LGBTIs, have maybe 60 years on their side. I have 3.5 million years of genetic programming on my side,” he said.

He went on to claim that multiple parents have complained to him that their sons were forced to wear dresses at school under the LGBTI agenda.

“I listened in horror to the story of the two young mothers. The first one started off by saying, ‘My son told me that he had to go to school tomorrow in a dress, and I said my boys will never, ever go in public in a dress. I rang up the headmaster of the school, and he more or less told me, “It’s the orders of the education department, and you’ll send your kid to school in a dress,’” Katter said.

“Then the second lady got up and she said, ‘My son was told not only that he had to go to school in a dress’—that’s messing with young people’s heads on a major scale here—’but also that in his head he had to become a woman for the day.’”

Katter went on to cover a number of tangentially related topics, speaking at one point about AIDS and blaming gay people for transmissions to “poor little children” through historical blood donations.

Finally, he turned his attention to the “vanishing race” of Australians, claiming that the national population would be reduced to just 7,000 people in the next hundred years.

At that point, Liberal MP Christopher Pyne interjected, “Bobby, this is rubbish.”

Social media users were baffled and angered by the speech.

Director of the Sydney Mardi Gras, Jesse Matheson, called it “the most foul speech I’ve ever heard.”

Liberal National MP Warren Entsch this morning condemned Katter’s rant as “offensive, embarrassing and cringeworthy”.

Debate in the House of Representatives over the marriage equality bill is continuing.