MEDIA RELEASE

14 August 2017

ECAJ defends former High Court Justice Michael Kirby

 
The Executive Council of Aus­trali­an Jewry (ECAJ) has strongly defended former High Court judge Michael Kirby against cri­ti­cisms made by the head of another Jewish organ­isa­tion, the Anti-Defam­a­tion Com­mis­sion, alleging that Michael Kirby had made “inap­pro­pri­ate analogies” between the situation of LGBTIQ people in con­tem­por­ary Australia and Jews in Nazi Germany.

“Justice Kirby was not making factual analogies between these two situ­ations at all”, said Peter Wertheim, the ECAJ’s Executive Director. “He was attempt­ing to draw, in a measured and qualified way, moral lessons from the terrible events of the Holocaust and the Nazi era, not to liken other events to them”.

“The moral lesson that Justice Kirby was drawing is that minority com­munit­ies should not cooperate in any way with the impos­i­tion upon them by gov­ern­ments of dis­crim­in­at­ory laws and other measures”, Wertheim said. “Justice Kirby has also said that the fun­da­ment­al freedoms and rights of human beings should never be made subject to winning a pop­ular­ity contest. These are perfectly reas­on­able pro­pos­i­tions, which do not in any way involve likening any of the con­di­tions that prevailed in Nazi Germany to con­di­tions in con­tem­por­ary Australia. We were appalled by the public attack on Michael Kirby, whose life’s work has exem­pli­fied the kind of civic courage which is the nemesis of dic­tat­or­ships every­where, and which was so con­spicu­ously lacking in Europe in the 1930s”.

The ECAJ’s policy platform, as presented on its website, includes deploring “the inap­pro­pri­ate use of analogies to the Nazi genocide and Nazi tyranny in Aus­trali­an public debate”.

“No organ­isa­tion has been more forceful than the ECAJ in decrying attempts to liken the events of the Nazi era with events in Australia, but that is not what Michael Kirby was doing”, Wertheim said. “The Holocaust was uniquely evil in many ways, but the lessons to be learned from it are universal.”

Contact:
Peter Wertheim AM | Executive Director
phone: 02 8353 8500 | m: 0408 160 904 | fax 02 9361 5888
e: [email protected] | www.ecaj.org.au