George Christensen Delivers Heartfelt Farewell Speech in Parliament
In this special tribute, the Canberra Declaration thanks George Christensen for his friendship and his fearless stand for Christian values over many years. Read excerpts of George’s farewell speech, delivered this week in Canberra.
George Christensen, the LNP member for Dawson on the north Queensland coast, has marked the end of 12 years in parliament with a resolute and heartfelt valedictory speech.
Christensen has been a good friend of the Canberra Declaration and a fierce defender for Christian values and freedoms in the nation’s capital. We (Warwick and Kurt) are humbled to have been acknowledged in the long list of thankyous at the end of his speech.
During Christensen’s 30-minute farewell address, he explained the varied reasons for his departure. Among them are the unfortunate corruption of the political process in Australia, the growing alienation he feels within the Coalition government, and his desire to spend more time with his wife and young daughter.
He spoke too of the impact that Australia’s response to Covid-19 had on him both politically and personally; the growing threat of globalism; and how his faith in God has sustained him in a hostile and challenging public role.
Despite these somber topics, Christensen’s speech was passionate and clear-eyed about the path forward for conservatives, a path he will no doubt continue to tread in his life beyond politics.
Below are key excerpts from George Christensen’s valedictory speech.
On Being a ‘Political Mongrel’
When I came to this place, someone told me about two paths that lay ahead: the path of the poodle or the path of the mongrel.
The poodles in politics, they said, do what they’re told, get the accolades, and end up sniffing the ministerial leather… right up close.
But nothing changes if it’s left up to the political poodles.
That’s where the mongrels come in.
Political mongrels might be mangy, they might growl when they’re grumpy, they might soil the carpet every so often, but they bark when needed and aren’t afraid to nip issues in the bud when needed as well.
They keep the poodles in the ministerial leather they’re accustomed to, but are pretty much put in the never-to-be-promoted column.
It doesn’t need to be said that I took the path of the political mongrel.
George Bernard Shaw’s comparison of the reasonable man to the unreasonable man comes to mind when talking about political poodles and mongrels:
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
Political mongrels bring about change.
Political mongrels get things done.
For my electorate and my people, I’ve proudly been a political mongrel.
On Choosing Family Over Reelection
Now, many of you have asked the question: why am I leaving?
The answer is varied.
Firstly, there’s family.
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 wakes up mum every morning I’m down here asking “Daddy?” so April can video call 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 is the circumstances of her birth.
In early 2020, April was overseas and staying with family while I was off seeing Julian Assange in Belmarsh prison 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.
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 common sense 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 4am, the surgeon attending to my wife phoned me to say the situation was very serious and that if there were things 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 for 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 we worked on the process of reuniting (without me pulling rank) and thankfully we were reunited.
On Groupthink in Canberra
I actually don’t like coming to Canberra any more.
The parliamentary processes seem so stale and staged.
Question Time is 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 behaviour displayed during Question Time. I stand condemned as 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 be dialled in they’re that predictable.
We say something in favour of a government bill, the Opposition say something against and then we all for or against it depending on what the party says.
I mean in the Labor party you get expelled for doing anything else! On our side you 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.
On Covid, Digital ID, and the WEF
Then there’s COVID.
We have 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’s not the only thing that I’ve disagreed with the government on.
There’s the net zero policy which I vehemently disagree with on the basis it is going to ultimately cost jobs and probably jobs in my region.
There’s the digital identity bill which we are crafting that’s really being pushed by 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.
But Klaus Schwab and World Economic Forum have called for it.
Well 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.
So, I’m not sure whether I’ve departed from the values of my government, and my party or the other way around.
Perhaps it’s a bit of both.
On the Path Forward for Conservatives
And 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.
The Roman emperor-philosopher Marcus Aurelius wrote:
“At some point you have to recognise what world it is that you belong to; what power rules it and from what source you spring; that there is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don’t use it to free yourself it will be gone and will never return.”
So, I’m freeing myself, knowing that this is no longer the world I belong to.
But as I take my leave, I want to share with my colleagues a list of the things that matter to conservatives and patriots… according to me!
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, St Athanasius: “If the world is against the truth, then I am 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, it lies and it’s become a cheer squad for big government and wokeism. We should call it out but, where it’s privately-owned media, never seek to have government interfere with it. But taxpayers should not fund 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 job, losing payments or any other form of restriction, coercion or duress. We should have – as a federal government – 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 as to what laws we should have. Democracy in this country should be bottom up, not top down.
- Australian citizens should not be locked up in foreign jail cells for breaking politically-motivated laws in other countries that they didn’t even set foot in, no matter how powerful the country is. We should pull out all stops to bring home Australians who are political prisoners – like Julian Assange and Cheng Lei.
- We should ban Communist China, it’s state-owned enterprises and state-linked enterprises from owning anything of strategic value in this country: that includes ports, farms, agribusiness, power and water utilities, the telecommunications sector, the resources sector and defence and defence-related industries.
- We need a strong defence force and we should support our veterans who’ve served this nation.
- We should make it national policy to maintain and even subsidise a strong and resilient manufacturing sector and farming sector so that we are self-sufficient and economically sovereign.
- We should let kids be kids and not push woke trends and ideologies on to them.
- Parents who undertake their own childcare should be compensated to the same extent that those who utilise childcare services are.
- Parental alienation is a form of child abuse. It should be outlawed. Every child deserves a relationship with their mother and father and the family law system should recognise this.
- Domestic violence is reprehensible, but masculinity is not toxic, and most men are not violent.
- We don’t need to be welcomed to our own country and we shouldn’t maintain a system whereby public services are provided according to your race.
- Taxation is theft. The more money we allow working Australians to keep in their pockets, the better.
- And finally, corporate Australia has gone woke. By and large, they are no friend of conservatives and we owe them no favours.
On George’s Faith in Jesus in Christ
That points 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. It’s strong.
But I acknowledge I haven’t lived up to its standards.
That is the point of Christianity: none of us can live up to the standard set by the perfect man, Jesus Christ.
But we can aim to and aspire to… and when we fall, we seek forgiveness, get up and get on with it.
I am 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 glory of the past 11 years plus of federal parliamentary work, the six year plus of local government work, totalling less than a month shy of 18 years of service in elected office, all to my Lord God and Saviour, Jesus Christ.
In doing so, I am reminded of the verse from Saint Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians that has been emblazoned on the bronze paperweight that has sat on my desk in 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.”
And from knowing this, I know that the path I have taken – the path of the mongrel – has been worth it.
Robert Frost finished his poem “The Road Not Taken” with these words in which I finish my parliamentary contribution:
“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
Thank you, Mr Speaker.
Thank you, colleagues.
Take care and God bless.
Watch George Christensen’s valedictory speech in full below.
George, from everyone at the Canberra Declaration, we thank you for your courage, your stand for truth, and for your many costly sacrifices. We wish you all the best for what God calls you to next, and pray for his generous blessings over you, April and Margaret.
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The speech of a true statesman. If we had more MP’s of George’s ilk who represented God and their constituents to parliament instead of representing parliament to their electorate, our nation would be the much better for it. Thank you Lord, for George. Bless him and his family in his retirement from the LNP, and in the next assignment you have for him. 🛐✝️💟
Tears for a country that took the “other” path.
One of the truly great valedictory speeches in Parliament …Thanks George and blessings to family..Thanks Warwick and Karl for posting this