Hansard debates

Paul HAMER (Box Hill) (11:42): I too rise to make a contribution on the Summary Offences Amendment (Nazi Salute Prohibition) Bill 2023, which seeks to amend the Summary Offences Act 1966 to make the public display or performance of the Nazi salute and other gestures used by the Nazi party an offence and to extend the application of the offence of public display of Nazi symbols and for other purposes. Can I at the outset first acknowledge the work of the Attorney-General to bring this really important bill to the Parliament and also acknowledge the contribution from the member for Malvern. I do appreciate that the opposition will not be opposing this bill, and I know that the words of the member for Malvern and his commitment to this issue are genuinely heartfelt and I appreciate that.

I do also just want to start by making my own reflections of museums as the member for Malvern alluded to. Can I also give a shout-out to the Melbourne Holocaust Museum. Melbourne is home to the largest Holocaust survivor community outside of Israel and it has a wonderful museum that still continues to this day to have survivor volunteers that take school groups and other visitors through the exhibits and explain some of the horrors that occurred during that period. I would urge all members and all those watching today to make the effort to visit the Holocaust museum in Melbourne.

I also want to just reflect briefly on the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem. For members who do have the opportunity to travel to Israel, I would strongly recommend that they visit the museum. One of the most moving exhibits in that museum is the wall of towns. There are the names of all of the towns in which Jews were exterminated. When I was there I found the name of the town that my grandmother’s family had come from, and that is Staszow in Poland. I have not been to Poland, but my sister recently had the opportunity to visit Poland for the first time and did visit Staszow. All evidence that there was ever a Jewish community in that town has been completely wiped off the map. There are no Jews there. There is no evidence that Jews ever lived there – hundreds and hundreds of years of history in that place and there is no evidence. I was really horrified and shocked at the reports that she came back with about the level of casual antisemitism that still occurs to this day in Poland and in those communities.

Previously I have talked about my family history in relation to the Holocaust, but I do really want to focus today on what it means in contemporary Victorian and Australian society. It is really shocking that we have to deal with a bill such as this. It was only 12 months ago or so that we dealt with the banning of the Nazi symbol and the Nazi flag. While the Legal and Social Issues Committee report – and I note that the chair of that committee, the Minister for Small Business, is at the table and also that the member for Caulfield was a contributor to and active member of that committee – did flag that there may be other possible infringements and enforcements that would need to take place to combat the rise of antisemitism and other forms of vilification, I do not think that we would have expected that this would have had to come up so quickly.

Obviously it was submitted as text, but the second-reading speech did go into quite a few examples of where Nazi gestures have been used in recent times. I do want to actually read that into Hansard again and have that publicly stated on the record so people can see and just appreciate how frequent this is becoming:

• In mid-January 2023, a group of 25 males gathered at Elwood’s Ormond Point lookout and performed the Nazi salute –

obviously that is an area with a high concentration of the Jewish community.

• On 26 January 2023, a group of people performed the Nazi salute at a Merri-bek First Nations mourning ceremony.

• On 18 March 2023, a group of about 30 people marched along Spring Street, repeatedly performing the Nazi salute after an event …

that has been very well publicised.

• On 10 April 2023, a group of six men performed the salute outside the Melbourne Knights soccer club.

• On 20 April 2023, a group of people performed the Nazi salute and posed for photographs at a Bavarian restaurant in the Knox City Shopping Centre …

20 April being the anniversary of the birth of Adolf Hitler.

On 13 May 2023, a group of about 25 people gathered outside parliament to stage an anti-immigration rally, repeatedly performing the Nazi salute.

• On 4 June 2023, two people performed the Nazi salute in front of police outside the State Library …

• On 15 July 2023, eight men stood at the steps of Geelong’s City Hall holding up a white supremist banner and performed the Nazi salute; and

• On 29 July 2023, a group of people held a ‘‘white powerlifting competition’’ at a boxing gym in Sunshine West and performed the Nazi salute …

Obviously, even in the time since this has been released we have seen another horrific incident just a couple of weeks ago as part of, I guess, an unofficial ‘no’ campaign event, where the neo-Nazis felt that there was an opportunity for them to get up and further spread their message of hate.

In recent months there has also been a study which has been published by the Zionist Federation of Australia and the Australasian Union of Jewish Students which talks about the campus experience for Jewish students. Not only the numbers and the percentages but just the specific incidents that were occurring are really horrifying. Of the students participating in the study, 64 per cent reported that they had experienced antisemitism, and of the types of antisemitism experienced 37 per cent of the experiences related to traditional antisemitic tropes, 30 per cent involved Holocaust denial or minimisation and 37 per cent involved comparing Israel to Nazis.

There was an ability for students to document specific examples in detail, and there were comments that were recorded, such as:

Nazis were good people …

and

A person in my class heiled Hitler to me and not a single professor/tutor or student did anything. The uni needs to step up.

This is happening across all facets of our society, unfortunately. I think the original ban on the flag stemmed from an incident in north-west Victoria, which is far away from metropolitan Melbourne, but having those incidents at a public rally on a weekend, on the steps of Parliament, is the most confronting and in-your-face way of trying to demonstrate this hatred and vilification. Some of these incidents have made me consider and think about why this is occurring. What are the circumstances that we have created that have allowed this to become more occurrent? I really wonder how we have been allowed to – it is not just about the Jewish community but about all vulnerable groups, and I think everybody has a responsibility to have a look at what they are saying and which other groups they are attracting with such speech.