International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Adjourned debate on motion of Hon. C. M. Scriven:

That this council—

1. Notes that 27 January was International Holocaust Remembrance Day; and

2. Rejects and condemns any form of racial discrimination and anti-Semitism.

(Continued from 27 February 2019.)

The Hon. I.K. HUNTER (17:11): Today, I rise to support the motion moved by the Hon. Clare Scriven and in doing so I would like to commend her for raising this important topic. In moving her motion, the Hon. Ms Scriven spoke eloquently, if you can do that, about the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany in the period known as the Holocaust. She spoke about the murder of millions of Jewish people and of the dehumanisation of that community by the Nazis. She spoke movingly, I think, about the need to honour the victims of the Holocaust and to reject and condemn the language of racial discrimination, anti-Semitism and to remain vigilant to prevent atrocities such as these ever occurring again.

The Hon. Ms Scriven's speech, I think, was an excellent one and I do not need to cover the same ground that she has already done so well. However, I would simply like to add my voice to the many condemning racial discrimination and anti-Semitism, and I would like to also reflect on the lessons that we can draw from this today.

The Holocaust is, of course, an extreme example of what can occur when discrimination creeps into our language or actions and into the instruments of the state. It is the terrible endpoint that begins with a concerted program of dehumanisation of a section of our community. International Holocaust Remembrance Day is an important opportunity for the global community to remember that and to redouble all of our efforts to stamp out all forms of racial discrimination, including anti-Semitism wherever they might occur.

The villainisation of groups of people is unfortunately a pattern that we have seen far too often in too many places in too many times of our history. Just to pick a few examples, it has occurred in Tsarist Russia and, of course, the pogroms in Nazi Germany, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Serbia, in Turkey, in Myanmar, in China, in Sri Lanka and even in India and now again in Russia and many other places and many other times.

When society takes the step of accepting discriminatory language or just not opposing its use, or takes steps to socially isolate a group of people because of a particular characteristic, a step is taken down that same road that led to the Holocaust, that most horrific atrocity saw the deaths of millions of people. They were murdered simply because they were Jewish or because they were Roma or they were ethnic Poles or they had a disability or had been captured as prisoners of war, or had different political or religious beliefs or because they were homosexual.

In the same way as International Holocaust Remembrance Day is an important reminder of the need to stamp out discrimination against Jewish people so too it is a reminder of the need to stamp out discrimination full stop. No person should be discriminated against simply for being who they are. Whether by word or by deed it must be known to be unacceptable to target people simply for being who they are, for their cultural or ethnic background, for their political views or religious beliefs, for their physical or mental differences, or for their gender identity or sexual orientation.

The sad reality is that people are being targeted because of their identity even now. I have spoken in this place many times, as other members have as well, about the discrimination experienced by LGBTI people in this country and around the world. For all of our advances that we like to congratulate ourselves on from time to time, there are many examples of physical attacks on gays, lesbians and trans people in the streets in Australia even now, and in New Zealand, the UK, USA and various other places around the world. Worse still, we see state-sponsored terrorism against lesbians, gay men and trans people in Russia and Iraq right now.

Remembering the Holocaust, we would be negligent if we failed to remember the thousands of people who were targeted and murdered during that tragedy simply for being gay—or 'same-sex attracted' is a term often used these days—because it seems that that lesson has not been taken on by everybody in our community. In 1935, the Nazis tightened the laws targeting homosexuality in the German criminal code, so locking up gay men in concentration camps was in fact legal. Heinrich Himmler created the Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion and the Nazis obtained police 'pink lists' of known gay men.

I use the term 'pink list' deliberately because it was not all that many years ago that our own police force in South Australia had its own 'pink list', which it denied it had, and I think the former police commissioner at the time also denied that it had, but it came out through the parliamentary process that indeed they did collate their own 'pink list' of homosexuals in our society.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that some 100,000 people were arrested for the so-called crime of homosexuality. The Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism stands today in Berlin, approved by the German Bundestag, to remember them. A noticeboard at that memorial remembers those victims in this way:

A kiss was enough reason to prosecute. There were more than 50,000 convictions. Under Section 175, the punishment was imprisonment; in some cases, convicted offenders were castrated. Thousands of men were sent to concentration camps for being gay; many of them died there. They died of hunger, disease and abuse or were the victims of targeted killings.

Most of those convicted were sentenced to time in prison but historians estimate that between 5,000 and 15,000 of those people were incarcerated in Nazi concentration camps; 15,000 people marched into places of the most unimaginable cruelty, horror and suffering simply for wanting to love and to be loved. Eventually, the Nazis found a way to easily identify the gay men, labelling them with a pink triangle to single them out in these concentration camps. Many were guinea pigs for medical attempts at so-called conversion therapy. Gay men were castrated or they had testosterone capsules surgically inserted into their bodies or were just beaten to death by camp guards.

As all of us in this place and this time now recognise, these men did not choose to be gay; they were being punished for a trait as natural as brown hair or blue eyes. Yet, even the other inmates would often treat them with cruelty and severity, and they were encouraged to do that by their guards. Political opponents of the Nazi regime would find themselves accused of homosexuality to discredit them. It worked and it still works. We saw it in recent years in Malaysia when the opposition leader, Anwar Ibraham, was arrested and imprisoned for the so-called crime of sodomy in 2015—in 2015.

We will never know how many of those gay men were killed in the concentration camps with absolute certainty but we know from survivors that they were killed in their thousands. Persecution did not end with the defeat of the Nazis, the death of Hitler and the victory of the Allied nations; the Allies chose not to undo the tightening of the German criminal law which provided the legal basis for this imprisonment. Homosexual prisoners were not recognised as victims of the Nazis, nor did the German successive nations, and many were forced to continue their sentences under those regimes. They were not released when the camps were liberated. They were still held captive and required to remain in prison.

It was supposed to be a liberation but, for gay men and lesbians and transgender people, it was not at all. It was anything but liberation. We are still learning about some aspects of this history because those who lived through it were too afraid to talk about it, even in recent decades. The onus is on us, those who were born long after this awful event of the Holocaust, to seek out that history, to understand it, to speak of it, to remember it and to ensure that persecution never happens again.

However, as we all know, LGBTI people are still being persecuted in too many parts of the world right now. There is no greater example of this today than the disgusting persecution currently occurring in Russia, in Chechnya, where LGBTI people are being rounded up and assaulted, tortured and murdered by police or, indeed, their own families. In 2017, reports emerged of hundreds of LGBTI people being imprisoned by police. There were reports of secret prisons being used to house them in appalling conditions and of these innocent people being subjected to electric shock treatment, beatings and other abhorrent violence.

The strongest proponent of the so-called gay purge is the head of the Chechen republic, Mr Ramzan Kadyrov. He, of course, has denied these events ever took place, yet he had no hesitation in telling the Chechen media that gay people should be removed to 'cleanse our blood'. The echoes of the Nazi rhetoric towards Jewish people are chilling in President Kadyrov's words and his actions. Some brave victims have spoken out, and LGBTI groups around the world have organised to condemn what is occurring and help LGBTI people flee from Chechnya. The issue has never attracted the same international attention that other events have, and I think that is an oversight on behalf of the international media.

This year, there are reports of LGBTI groups in Russia, reported as recently as December last year, that the purge has started up once more, with gay men and women being detained because of their identity. In January, The Guardian reported that some 40 LGBTI people had been detained and two had been killed. What is even more revolting is the unconfirmed reports that the deaths were caused either by police torture or the victim's own families, who were threatened that, if they did not kill their children, the police would do it in front of them.

Targeting any group because of who they are, because of their identity, is plainly wrong, but it is wrong on so many levels that we need to remain cognisant of them because down this path is the sort of action that led to the Holocaust and leads to actions that we saw just recently in New Zealand. It is a denial of fundamental human rights. It is a crime of the worst order, but it continues to happen to innocent people because of who they love, their gender identity or the mere fact that they have the audacity to express themselves.

What is taking place in Chechnya is a reminder of where discriminatory language, schoolyard bullying or the normalisation of hatred can lead. It is the lesson the world ought to have learnt from the Holocaust. The actions we should have been guarding more vigilantly against have been creeping into the world's community once more. The price of failure of our leaders, of the community, of the media, to recognise this discrimination, to recognise what is happening, is clearly the persecution and death of innocent people. These failures have tragic consequences.

In Orlando, Florida, in 2016, there was a mass murder of 49 people at the Pulse nightclub, a fixture amongst Florida's LGBTI community at the time. In that nightclub, a place of celebration and pride and determination to live openly and honestly, hatred cut short 49 lives in one evening. Survivor Angel Santiago said after the attack:

…going to a club like Pulse, it's kind of like a safe haven…you can't go to [a normal] bar and be who you are, because there is hate everywhere…

The hatred that filled the gunman on that night and society's failure to build tolerance and respect for diversity violated that safe haven and ended 49 innocent lives. As I said, we have seen these tragedies occur even closer to home in recent times.

It was a strong statement by our parliament only yesterday, when both chambers passed motions condemning the terrorist attacks in Christchurch and expressed solidarity with the South Australian Muslim community, the Australian Muslim community and with our sister city of Christchurch and New Zealand.

It was a horrendous attack. Innocent and peaceful worship was interrupted by a pure act of hatred. It was the murder of innocent people and the devastation of a community. Yet again, it is a needless and tragic reminder of where the normalisation of hate and the proliferation of discriminatory language can lead us to. Innocent people paid the price for society's failure to stamp out discrimination. This did not occur on the other side of the world, as we have come to expect, for example, in the USA. It happened in our own neighbourhood—to our neighbour, a nation that could not be more similar to our own.

I call on all members of this place to consider the events that have happened around the world in recent years. They are not isolated events. There is a pattern to them, and that pattern often comes from unwise, ill-chosen words from the very top of leadership in those countries. We must take the opportunity of International Holocaust Remembrance Day to consider what happens when we excuse discrimination, when we look past discrimination and when we look past the words that seek out sections of our community to dehumanise them and treat them as the other, as different from us. We have to speak out when we hear these hateful words or when we see communities being discriminated against.

I believe it is our duty as parliamentarians to stamp this out wherever we see it, because the cost of failure has been made painfully and tragically clear in recent years and indeed in recent days. We continue to mourn the loss of those victims of the holocaust in their huge, unknowable numbers. We mourn the loss of those being killed in Chechnya. We mourn the loss of those who lost their lives in Christchurch. I hope that we can collectively renew our commitment to stamping out all forms of discrimination wherever we find it, because that suffering simply has to stop.

Debate adjourned on motion of Hon. T.J. Stephens.