Bob Katter, the veteran Queensland political maverick, has lauded an inflammatory speech by his Senate representative, Fraser Anning, declaring the contribution “absolutely magnificent” and “everything that this country should be doing”.

As political leaders moved in lock-step to condemn Anning’s speech – which praised the White Australia policy, called for an end to Muslim migration, and invoked the term “final solution” – Katter, the leader of Katter’s Australia party, struck a starkly different note, declaring the speech had his “1,000% support”.

In a bizarre press conference where he upbraided journalists as “racists” for referring to his father’s Lebanese heritage, Katter backed Anning’s call for a ban on Muslim immigration, and declared current non-discriminatory immigration policies were “bringing in the persecutors”.

Straight from Goebbels’s handbook from Nazi Germany.

Katter, who surprised many people in politics by doubling down on Anning’s comments, said he was “sick and tired of the lily pad left” and migration programs that brought people “from overseas, from countries with no democracy, no rule of law, no egalitarian traditions, no Judeo-Christian background”.

“You don’t have to be Albert Einstein to figure out that we as a race of people, we Australians, are being buried by a mass migration program to line the pockets of the rich and powerful in Sydney – who take our pay and undermine our pay and conditions.”

The aftershocks from Anning’s contribution, delivered in the Australian Senate on Tuesday night, dominated national politics on Wednesday. The low-profile senator, who entered parliament replacing a representative from the far-right One Nation party, refused to apologise for his comments, which were provocative enough to be condemned by the One Nation leader, Pauline Hanson.

Hanson told the Senate on Wednesday she was “appalled” by Anning’s comments, adding that the speech was “straight from Goebbels’s handbook from Nazi Germany”.

Senator Fraser Anning makes his maiden speech in the Senate chamber at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia. During his speech, Anning suggested a majority of Australians may want to return to the discarded ‘White Australia’ immigration policy, and that the ‘final solution’ for Australia’s immigration policy is a referendum. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/EPA

The prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, and the leader of the opposition, Bill Shorten, made a point of uniting in the federal parliament to decry Anning’s speech.

The contribution was also condemned in the Senate by the major party leadership, by the Greens, who moved a censure motion against Anning, and a number of cross benchers, some of whom expressed regret for shaking Anning’s hand after the speech was delivered.

Turnbull told parliament Australia was the most successful multicultural society in the world, and was “a migration nation”.

He noted that Australia was continuing to maintain its multicultural identity “in a world where there is so much disharmony, where, in many places in the world, where people of different faiths and different races have lived side-by-side reasonably harmoniously for hundreds of years and now seem unable to do so”.

“Despite all of that, here in Australia, in the midst of our diversity, we live in great harmony,” Turnbull said.

The prime minister said the reference to the final solution in Anning’s speech on Tuesday night was a “shocking, shocking insult to the memory of over six million Jews who died in the Holocaust”.

“We condemn that and the insult it offered to the memory of those Jewish martyrs, just as we condemn the racism, a shocking rejection of the Australian values that have made us the successful multicultural nation that we are today.”

Turnbull said people who sought to demonise Muslims for the actions of a few “are helping the terrorists”.

The Labor leader Bill Shorten said in the “corrosive and fragmented climate of public debate, it’s become unfortunately common for some to seek out attention by picking on minorities, the less powerful, by attacking in the most vile terms, normally someone who can’t defend themselves”.

“Around the world, right-wing extremists are turning this into a political art form,” Shorten said.

“They say something hateful or homophobic or sexist or racist, something designed to humiliate and denigrate and hurt, and then when their comments are condemned they complain about political correctness gone mad or the thought police stifling their free speech – all the while basking in the media attention.

“I understand that in one sense there might be a reason to simply ignore it, to starve the stupidity of oxygen, to treat it as beneath contempt, but as leaders, as representatives of the Australian people, as servants of diverse communities in a great multicultural nation, we cannot stay silent in the face of racism.

“We cannot ignore the kind of prejudice and hate that the senator sought to unleash last night.”

The prime minister and the opposition leader reached across the dispatch boxes in the parliament to shake hands after making their contributions.

Many MPs were emotional during a debate that played out in both the House and the Senate. Government frontbencher Josh Frydenberg, who is Jewish, embraced his Labor friend, opposition frontbencher Ed Husic, a Muslim with Bosnian heritage, after Husic spoke in the chamber about the importance of finding common ground.

Labor MP Anne Aly, the first Muslim woman to serve in the Australian parliament, said she was tired of trying to hold the line against vilification. “I’m tired of having to stand up against hate, against vilification, time and time and time again.”

Aly said she was gratified by the response in the chambers. “This morning, I see hope. I see possibilities. I see opportunity. I see leaders on both sides who are willing to stand up and I see that I don’t have to fight alone anymore.

“Thank you for that, thank you. It means a lot.”