Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has revealed for the first time that his mother did not lose her Hungarian citizenship until 1948 – after the end of World War II – despite claims she was stripped of it by the Nazis when she was born in a Budapest ghetto.
The new information is contained in an updated filing that Mr Frydenberg has prepared to answer questions over his eligibility to sit in Parliament under Section 44 of the Constitution.
Mr Frydenberg is facing new questions over his citizenship following revelations of a push to ask the High Court to consider the matter under a Court of Disputed Returns filing.
The Treasurer has consistently stated that his mother, Erica Strausz, who arrived in Australia as a 7-year old child, had papers that were marked “stateless”.
Her family had reportedly been interned in a Budapest ghetto by the Hungarian fascists, before finally making her way to Australia after time in a displaced persons camp.
In a fiery denunciation of questions over Mr Frydenberg’s citizenship last year, former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull said Ms Strausz was never a Hungarian citizen.
“Josh Frydenberg’s mother Erica Strausz was born in 1943 in the Budapest ghetto. That is where the fascists had pushed all the Jews in together, as a prelude to sending them to the gas chamber,” Mr Turnbull told The Guardian in 2017.
Read the article by Samantha Maiden in The New Daily.