Hansard debates

David SOUTHWICK (Caulfield) (11:52): I want to commend the member for Box Hill for his contribution, and the member for Malvern. I have spoken about this particular issue a number of times in this Parliament. I acknowledge the fact that there have been many times where I have had the opportunity to visit Holocaust centres both here and in other parts of the world, including Yad Vashem in Israel. The first time that I visited Yad Vashem in Israel with my then soon-to-be wife Hayley, it was very confronting to go through and see the imagery, to see the photos and to see the home movies that the Nazis made documenting the extermination of some 6 million Jews and many millions of others. But the thing that ultimately tore me apart was the children’s memorial, which is a cave-like area. You go downstairs to a room that is dark, pitch-black, with candles signifying the many children that were murdered by the Nazis – the 1.5 million children that were murdered by the Nazis – the reflection of those lights never ending. And in the background there are the names of the children that were murdered, where they had come from and their ages. That brought me to tears then, and I still recall and will never forget the fact that these horrible individuals sought to exterminate a race – exterminate people – just because they did not like who they were and the way they meticulously went about what they did.

If you think about where we are now, the fact that we are still in this Parliament talking about banning symbols and talking about banning Nazi salutes and that we have certain individuals – as few as they may be but as extreme as they may be, hateful and hurtful as they are – demonstrates that we have more work to do. The work is about having laws, and the work is also about having the education that goes with that. So I commend the work that is being done in this Parliament in a bipartisan way to ensure that we have the laws to protect those who are vulnerable. This is not just about Jews, and it was not about Jews back then. I want to quote someone, a Holocaust survivor that tomorrow turns 99, Abe Goldberg. He says:

If we will dismiss it, so who will remember? Never let people forget …

and:

… when you will survive, wherever you will find yourself, you should tell people what actually happened.

These are quotes from Abe Goldberg, and when I spoke to his son only moments ago, as he is preparing for a celebration of his life, he said that it all starts with words. It all starts with symbols. He is flabbergasted, at 99, that it is still happening today. Abe is a survivor, who made a promise to his mother that he would spend the rest of his life, should he survive, educating others. At the time when the Lódź ghetto was liquidated, he literally gathered together whatever materials that he could get, decrees from the Nazis, information, buried it in two boxes and said, ‘I’m going to come back. I’m going to survive, and I’m going to make sure the rest of the world knows what the Nazis did’. He survived, and his mother did not. His mother was gassed literally the day she arrived in Auschwitz. He fought and he survived, and tomorrow he turns 99.

To Abe and to the 19 other Holocaust survivors that are museum guides at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum, thank you, because you are doing what Abe is doing – you are ensuring that those stories survive. We will ensure that this atrocity never happens again, but there is work to do. And so I say to those 19 Holocaust survivors – many of whom are absolutely ageing, and I wanted to briefly mention them if I could – including Abe Goldberg OAM, Lusia Haberfeld, Szaja John Chaskiel, Viv Spiegel, Joe Szwarcberg, Henri Korn, John Lamovie, Sarah Saaroni OAM, Paul Grinwald, Andy Factor OAM, Irma Hanner OAM, Guta Goldstein, Dr Henry Ekert OAM, Professor Gilah Leder AM, Dr Jack Leder, Garry Fabian, Charles German, Peter Gaspar and Bep Gomperts: thank you.

To think that we had to have a Holocaust survivor that left Melbourne, that left Caulfield, that wanted to spend his retiring days in Beulah – 312 people in that town – who woke up one morning to a Nazi flag being flown effectively in his backyard. I found out about this, and I rang him. At that time we spoke about bans, and we were talking about it, but this never really kind of got the traction until we saw something that was taken into rural Victoria, a place you would never expect something like this to happen. And what did Peter say? Peter said, ‘It’s okay because I will make sure I won’t leave my home to have to see that symbol, to see that flag.’ The fact that the small community of non-Jews banded together – the local police and the local council worked together to ensure that flag was taken down without the laws, worked with bluff and bluster to get that flag taken down – shows the fact that we can rally together, but we do need the laws. We do need the protection. Peter is unwell. We wish him all the best at the moment. I checked in just this morning to see how he was going, but this is a tribute to him because Peter is a Holocaust survivor. It took that to talk about what we are talking about today, to get the action for us to do the work that we see today.

As the member for Box Hill rightly said and others, it was the committees and all the work that we did, it was Peter, it was the Holocaust survivors and it was the broader community. I want to say the targets in the past were not just about the Jews, they were about anybody that was different to the Nazis. There were the symbols that they used to identify different people – not just the Star of David on the Jews’ lapel but the other symbols, whether you were gay, whether you were from different backgrounds, the Gypsies, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, all of those – but today we have the same thing. On the steps of Parliament, the fact that you have got people Nazi-saluting not once, not twice and not to Jews but to people from LGBTI backgrounds, people from different backgrounds, is atrocious, it is appalling, it has got to stop and we got to have the laws to protect those individuals. That is why this is so important. Unfortunately, it is disgraceful that these people would seek to hurt people, but we do need those laws and the police do need those powers and we have got to work in whatever way we possibly can to support them.

I want to finish by thanking a few people, including Dr Dvir Abramovich from the Anti-Defamation Commission, who has spent a lifelong campaign fighting hate and antisemitism; the Holocaust survivors and the Holocaust museum, which I have mentioned; and Joe Szwarcberg. I took John Pesutto down to the Holocaust museum the day after these haters were on the steps of Parliament to meet Joe Szwarcberg, a Holocaust survivor, who shook John Pesutto’s hand, looked him in the eye and said, ‘John, please make sure this never happens again’. That is what that Holocaust survivor said, and that is our obligation in this Parliament – to make sure this does not happen again. Thank you to the Australasian Union of Jewish Students, who are tackling antisemitism on campus each and every day, and we need to ensure they have support and powers; to the Brighton Secondary College students that fought a campaign against antisemitism; and to the Jewish Community Council of Victoria and the many others that have stood up in their fight against antisemitism. We have work to do as a Parliament. We have work to do as a community. But this is a very, very important step in the process.