Julian Leeser (Berowra, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians) Share this | Hansard source

I second the motion. The events on the streets of Melbourne at the weekend were offensive to all Australians. They are offensive to the memory of the one million Australians who served and the 39,600 Australians who made the supreme sacrifice in the Second World War. They are offensive to me as a Liberal, as a Jew and most importantly as an Australian.

This offence, this dishonouring of earlier generations of Australians and this abuse of our political discourse, deserves a comprehensive response today. What we witnessed in Melbourne on the weekend was the glorification and mimicking of an ideology whose fundamental tenet is the racial superiority of one group of people over another. We know the idea of racial superiority is a myth, but it's not a myth without consequences. Its consequences are real. Six million Jews were murdered, a figure that represents two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe, and millions of innocents, people of faith, homosexuals, political prisoners and people with disabilities. It was industrial-scale murder the likes of which the world has never seen.

Last Saturday we saw little men in Melbourne with steroided arms and stunted minds seeking to mimic and impersonate the evil that the greatest generation fought. These cowards, many of them with their faces covered by the cloths of shame, celebrated Nazism. Their actions sicken me to the core. To them I say, we say, 'Not in our country.' Not in the country that took in more Holocaust survivors per capita than anywhere else on earth.

The worst part of what we saw in Melbourne on Saturday is that it is part of a trend across our country. The Director-General of Security has spoken about the growth of grievance motivated violent extremism. He said, 'As a nation we need to reflect on why some teenagers are hanging Nazi flags and portraits of the Christchurch killer on their bedroom walls and others are sharing beheading videos. Just as importantly, we must reflect on what we can do about it.'

The Director-General of Security is right. There must be no place in Australia for Nazi-style flags, uniforms, salutes and boycotts, because they are the means by which this sickness seeks to perpetuate and promote itself. Such actions should be and must be a crime. I invite the government to put aside any partisan hesitation and support this motion initiated by the Leader of the Opposition. Yesterday he said in this place that we would support legislation that makes illegal the display of any aspect of Nazi glorification. The bill that we seek to have debated shows that we are true to our word.

Unfortunately yesterday the Attorney-General did something abominable. He attributed anti-Semitism to someone who is not anti-Semitic, to a whole party that is not anti-Semitic. That action was a mockery of the seriousness of anti-Semitism. The Attorney-General is the first law officer of the Crown and a lawyer of considerable distinction in his own right. He should be an example to so many in this country. The tragedy is that the Attorney-General all too often cannot rise above these appalling political misjudgements.

By contrast, today we approached Labor and the crossbench in a spirit of goodwill and good faith. I recognise the good work of people in this place such as the member for Wentworth and the member for Macnamara, who I work with so closely as co-chairs of the Parliamentary Friends of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

I want to say something of a personal nature. In seconding the motion today I am thinking of a person who demonstrated to me the courage we need during times such as this. Her name was Katie Popp. She was German, had olive skin and wore her grey hair in a bun. She lived in the Dorian Towers apartment building in Double Bay. When I knew her, she was an old lady. When I visited Katie, she would make my brother and I tasty German cakes. She was such a part of our family that she sewed our names on our school uniforms. She was so much from another time and place that she made her home here, like so many Europeans from that time.

I didn't know it as a boy, but I know now that Katie helped get my family out of Germany in 1936. Katie was Catholic. If you want to know why I have such a deep passion to protect the religious freedoms of other Australians such as my Catholic friends, it's because a Catholic woman saved a Jewish family—my family. Katie had been the family housekeeper, and as Germany went from bad to worse she took risks to help get my grandmother and her brother to Switzerland, then to England and finally to Australia in 1936. I come from a tradition which says 'whoever saves one life, it is as if they had saved the world'. Katie Popp was what we call Righteous Among the Nations. Her decision not to turn a blind eye and not to be a bystander because of the risk to herself, but the risk for all which is right, is an example that lives through time.

Katie is part of the moral barometer of my life, to know we must confront evil and oppose racial prejudice and do everything we can to keep it at bay. This is what the bill we seek to present is about, and this is why we seek support for the suspension of standing orders.

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