THE HON MARK DREYFUS QC MP
Attorney-General
Minister for Emergency Management
STATEMENT ON COMMENTS BY CHRISTOPHER PYNE
4 February 2013
Christopher Pyne’s callous non-apology today for his deeply offensive comments comparing the Australian Government with Hitler’s Third Reich must be condemned by Opposition Leader Tony Abbott.
Mr Pyne’s description this morning of my personal response to his remarks as “confected outrage” is grotesque.
The circumstances of my father and grandparents’ arrival in Australia are detailed in my first speech to Parliament and have been on the public record since 2008.
My father’s mother was born in Wuppertal in Germany.
…with the Nazis in power, she and my grandfather sent my father, then aged 11, and his older brother Richard to Australia. They arrived at Station Pier in Melbourne in 1939. They were cared for in a home for Jewish children and they did not know if they would see their parents again. Their parents, my grandmother and grandfather, managed to escape from Germany, arriving in Australia as stateless persons in 1939. They had failed to convince their parents to leave. Three of my German great-grandparents perished in the Holocaust.
– House of Representatives, 18 February 2008
Mr Pyne’s insensitive comments have no place in public debate in this country. They cause grave offence to Holocaust survivors and all right-thinking Australians.
