Labor MP Joel Fitz­gib­bon likened recent police raids on the offices of the Aus­trali­an Workers’ Union (AWU) to Nazi Germany in an interview on Sky News this week.
“When chal­lenged about the inap­pro­pri­ate­ness of the remarks he did not withdraw his remarks, and broadened the analogy to include North Korea and Stalinist Russia,” explains ECAJ President Anton Block.
“Mr Fitzgibbon’s remarks are unac­cept­able and should be withdrawn. There is a common tempta­tion to discredit political rivals by asso­ci­at­ing them with symbols of evil, the most striking and extreme of which is Nazism.”
“However, where the com­par­is­on is wholly without basis, it does nothing more than lower the discourse and diminish the speaker, in this case Mr Fitz­gib­bon.”
“We appre­ci­ate that the remarks were off the cuff and delivered in the heat of political debate, but the effect of making such false com­par­is­ons whether they be with Nazism or with other brutal total­it­ari­an regimes such as North Korea and Stalin’s Soviet Union, which Mr Fitz­gib­bon also evoked, is to trivi­al­ise the horrors of the darkest chapters in human history and anaes­thet­ise the public to the unique suffering of the victims.”
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