How can our elected representatives commemorate a genocide in Europe, while nearly a million Aboriginal people in Australia live each day without a single official memorial to the same experience suffered by our own families, a UTAS professor asks.
IT is difficult to imagine a more extreme form of bigotry than the desire to obliterate an entire population based on their race or religion.
The Holocaust was a terrifying and cruel campaign by Nazi Germany against the Jews of Europe. It is our defining example of genocide.
We understand that the trauma of genocide endures as intergenerational suffering. And we can all utter the sobering words “never again”.
It is right for state and federal governments to acknowledge this by supporting the establishment of Holocaust museums around Australia.
However, the members of parliament associating themselves with this cause should not be surprised that for Aboriginal people, especially in Tasmania, this is a deep and profound insult.
In their Talking Point column last week, Josh Frydenberg and Josh Burns reminded us of the need to “speak the unspeakable” so that such horrifying events are never forgotten.
Do they not realise the irony while Australians persist with a collective amnesia about equally abhorrent events that occurred in our own backyard?
Read the article by Greg Lehman in the Mercury.