WHEN THE LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION IS A BLOCKHEAD.

My father worked with a man who entered Belsen after it was liberated and was so enraged by what he saw that he opened fire on a smirking guard and almost tore him in half. He was also a guard for Adolf Eichmann after he was first arrested, and his one bitter regret was that he didn’t shoot him when he had the chance.

I remember doing an assignment on anti-Germanism in Australia during the First World War, and I knew a man who was a child during the Second World War who had to Anglicize his surname, even though his only connection to Germany was ancestral. That demonstrated the immaturity of Australia, a country which, at the time of the First World War, was at war because of Great Britain, and on September 3, 1939, then Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, despite the Balfour Declaration of 1926 and the Statute of Westminster of 1931, addressed the nation to say that Britain was at war, “And as a result, Australia is also at war.”

Fast forward 84 years, and we have a Leader of the Opposition, from the party that Bob Menzies formed in 1944, who is deliberately conflating the turning of public sympathy away from Israel with anti-Semitism. Yes, there has been a tiny minority of pro-Palestinian demonstrators who have yelled anti-Semitic statements, but any anti-Semitic vandalism has been broad in nature. We have not had armed police stationed outside Jewish businesses preventing people from entering, I have not heard of patients in hospitals refusing to see a doctor because that doctor was Jewish, I have not heard of instances of gangs of thugs walking around smashing up Jewish businesses, like what occurred on the Night Of the Broken Glass.

What has been most unusual, however, has been the fact that the Leader of the Opposition was silent when a group of neo-Nazis, clad in black, stood on the steps of the Victorian State Parliament and gave Nazi salutes, while Posie Parker was conducting a transphobic tour. And another right-wing extremist, hanson, supported Posie Parker! And the Leader of the Opposition did not denounce a transphobe who was elected to Victorian Parliament as a Liberal, and if the former leader of the Liberal Party did one good thing, he said that she would not be sitting in the Parliamentary Party Room, and the current leader suspended her from the party.

The Federal Opposition Leader is only concerned about what suits him, just like his old factional buddy! And he is an appalling excuse for a leader.