Mike Freelander (Macarthur, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

DER () (): First of all, I congratulate the member for Macnamara for bringing this motion to the House. I thank all the other members for their very well-read and very well-understood discussion of this motion. I'm an Australian Jew of the eighth or ninth generation, but the Holocaust is very close to me and my family. Very recently, I saw the Sidney Nolan exhibition at the Sydney Jewish Museum, Shaken to His Core. I was shaken to my core when I heard about the antisemitic comments and statements that have occurred around Australia in the last 12 months.

Recently, I was contacted by a university student from the University of Adelaide commenting on antisemitic statements in the university magazine On Dit, which included phrases like 'death to Israel' and 'death to Jews', which is disgraceful. Sydney has recently been shaken by chat room messages between members of one of the most prestigious schools in Sydney, with repeated misogynistic and antisemitic messages by many of its students.

It is really important that we remember the Holocaust. In my own family, passed down from my grandfather to my father, and now to me, we have a book called the Black Book, which lists in detail the tragedy and the terrible deaths that occurred under the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945—six million Jews and millions of Roma. In fact, in my electorate of Macarthur we have some of the Roma who fled Nazi Germany to come to Australia. In the Macarthur area and down to the Illawarra, they made homes for themselves and travelled up and down the coast, having fled the Nazis. Many of their families perished in the Holocaust. As a paediatrician, I see many people with disabilities. The Nazis put them to death—people with physical and intellectual disabilities, people with mental illness, people who were homosexual or judged to be homosexual, people who were transgender, and people of different religions. I believe the Jehovah's Witnesses suffered a lot under the Nazi regime.

Like Sidney Nolan, I am shaken to my core to think that this can still happen in a society like Australia's. We must remember it. I think it was in 1961 that Sidney Nolan visited Auschwitz, and he painted, I think, over 200 works. When he saw what he had done, he wanted them locked away. He couldn't bear to see them. It changed the direction of his life, he felt. We should feel the same. What happened in the Holocaust should never happen again. We should always remember that a supposedly civilised society can vilify and attempt to destroy a minority for political reasons. It is a disgrace. Sidney Nolan remembered this, and certainly the survivors of the Holocaust remember this.

I remember my uncle, who married into my family, still carried the tattoo on his arm from, I think, Dachau. He would never remove it, because he said that it would be a reminder forever, while he was alive, to never forget what the Holocaust was. I am heartened by the response of the other members who've spoken of the previous Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, of the Gandel family and of the people who are making sure that we do not forget what happened in the Holocaust.

See this speech in context