Qld MP sorry for concentration camp comparison

QUEENSLAND Labor MP Jo-Ann Miller has apologised to Queensland Jewish Board of Deputies (QJBD) president Jason Steinberg for comparing mining accommodation in the state to concentration camps.

Miller’s comments to the Queensland Parliament last week and her initial refusal to apologise sparked uproar, with Campbell Newman’s Liberal National Party government moving a motion to condemn the remarks.

Steinberg revealed to The AJN this week that Miller personally called him to apologise. “She did phone and she did express her apologies to me directly to pass on to the community,” he said.

“Obviously we’d like to talk to her more and keep up dialogue with both Labor and the government about [the fact] that these sorts of comparisons aren’t appropriate.”

Describing the initial comments as “totally inappropriate”, he added, “To make any comparison between concentration camps and the conditions that people who work in the mines in Queensland face is completely wrong and it was not accepted well by the community,” he said.

B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission chair Dvir Abramovich welcomed Miller’s apology but expressed concern that the use of Holocaust comparisons is “becoming all too common” in today’s culture and political debate.

“Such inappropriate analogies only serve to trivialise and distort the memory of the Holocaust and the monstrous deeds of the Nazis,” he said.

Queensland Opposition Leader Annastacia Palaszczuk apologised on behalf of Miller in Parliament last Thursday. But she accused the Newman government of hypocrisy, citing Gympie MP David Gibson, who in a 2008 debate about dingo fences on Fraser Island, said “Queensland – beautiful one day, a concentration camp the next”.

Palaszczuk – whose grandfather spent seven years in a Polish work camp during World War II – cried as she recalled how a government staffer described Nazis as “very admirable people” while editing a Young Nationals newsletter in the 1990s. “These were the people who almost killed my grandfather,” she said.

GARETH NARUNSKY

Jo-Ann Miller.