An Australian's senator's use of the term "final solution" has gone over about as well as you'd expect, which is to say, very poorly. Fraser Anning floated what the New York Times calls the "Nazi euphemism for genocide" on Tuesday during his first speech to Parliament, during which he called for a halt to Muslim immigration. He suggested a national vote on who should be permitted to enter the country, calling it "the final solution to the immigration problem." It was a line so inflammatory that even Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull weighed in, calling it "a shocking insult to the memory" of those killed by the Nazis. The BBC reports that Anning, of the conservative Katter's Australian Party, denied he was citing the Holocaust and maintained "I am not going to apologize or regret anything that I say."
That didn't placate his critics, with parliamentary motions emerging in an aim to censure Anning over his "racist hate speech." The Sydney Morning Herald called it "the most inflammatory maiden speech to an Australian parliament" since a speech made 20 years ago that asserted Australia was "in danger of being swamped by Asians." The Morning Herald recounts more from Anning's speech on Muslim immigrants, which he claimed were behind Australia's first terrorist attack in 1915 and "have been a problem ever since. ... While all Muslims are not terrorists, certainly all terrorists these days are Muslims, so why would anyone want to bring more of them here?" Australia's ABC has more on the history of the term "final solution," whose first "significant" use was in July 1941. (More genocide stories.)
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