The controversial author who prepared a legal case for the Section 44 High Court challenge against Josh Frydenberg claims politicians who have accused him of being anti-Semitic are motivated by a Morrison government “war plan” to save the Treasurer’s eastern Melbourne seat.
Lawyer Trevor Poulton, who this week resigned from the Labor Party, said the federal Coalition “has begun implementing plans to save the seat of Kooyong for the Liberal Party” amid two Court of Disputed Returns challenges to Mr Frydenberg’s eligibility to sit in parliament.
The author of the 2012 novel, The Holocaust Denier, which is based on a police officer who “begins to question the nature and extent of the Jewish Holocaust”, accused Housing Minister Michael Sukkar and Victorian Liberal frontbencher Tim Smith of “falsely claiming racism as a motive” and “trying to smash the reputations” of their opponents in their public defences of Mr Frydenberg.
“Before we know it Tim Smith will be planting swastikas in people’s gardens to create more alarm,” Mr Poulton claimed.
Mr Poulton said he was not a Holocaust denier, but in a 2014 submission to the Abbott government’s inquiry into changes to section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, he said amendments “could liberate the debate on the Holocaust in the public domain”.
He was critical of the term “Holocaust denier”, which he labelled a “derogatory slur to politically demonise historical revisionists who were discovering many falsehoods in post-WWII propaganda, including much that related to the Holocaust narrative”.
Climate activist Michael Staindl last month launched a challenge under section 44 of the Constitution aimed at establishing whether Mr Frydenberg inherited Hungarian citizenship through his mother, Erica, who fled the Holocaust.
Read the article by Rachel Baxendale in The Australian.