BUZZFEED
LANE SAINTY
Two high profile Jewish groups have criticised embattled One Nation senator Rodney Culleton for remarks earlier this week comparing an Australian bank’s treatment of farmers to the mass killings of Jewish people during the Holocaust.
One Nation senators Rodney Culleton (left) and Pauline Hanson. Mick Tsikas / AAPIMAGE
At a press conference calling for a royal commission into banks on Tuesday, Culleton spoke after a number of farmers who said they had been led into financial and emotional ruin by Australia’s big banks.
Culleton brandished a heavy sheaf of files and said it was proof that ANZ misled a parliamentary inquiry earlier this year.
He then said “This will show that the ANZ bank came in and misled the farmers. In actual fact, said, ‘Come take a shower’, and gassed them.”
The allusion to the Nazi gas chambers has been heavily criticised by Jewish organisations, who say it trivialises the Holocaust.
The chairman of the Anti-Defamation Commission, Dvir Abramovich said the comments were “disgraceful and misguided”.
“Yes, we should have a debate [on] banking policy, and yes, Senator Culleton is of course free to voice his concerns,” Abramovich said. “However, to suggest that the way ANZ treated farmers in any way equates to the circumstances of the Nazi concentration camps where millions were exterminated, and where children were torn from their mothers’ arms and pushed into the gas chambers, diminishes the deaths and the enormous suffering experienced, and shows a gross lack of historical understanding about the crimes that Hitler and his evil regime committed.”
Mal Fairclough / AAPIMAGE
“In no way can the statements or actions by a bank be analogised to the Third Reich’s deliberate, systematic and mechanised annihilation of six million Jews and millions of others,” Abramovich added.
He urged Culleton to apologise, and to not invoke the Holocaust in the future.
Alex Ryvchin, Public Affairs Director at the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, told BuzzFeed News the organisation “deplored” the remarks.
“The history of the Holocaust is not a punch-line or a rhetorical tool to press home a point,” he said.
“Senator Culleton’s remarks trivialise the unparalleled horror of the gas chambers and will be deeply hurtful to members of the Jewish community and to all victims of Nazism and their descendants.”
The backlash tips off a trying week for Culleton, who attended the High Court on Monday for a hearing on the legitimacy of his election to the Senate.
He also spent Wednesday in something of a cat and mouse game with his own leader, Pauline Hanson, and bizarrely skipped out on Senate Question Time on Thursday to instead sit in the House of Representatives.