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On Josh Frydenberg's Mum

Mr Turnbull - I want to talk to you about Josh Frydenberg.

Your speech about Frydenberg's mother and the suffering of stateless Jewish refugees during the Nazi era would have been inspiring and statesmanlike, had it been in any fucking way genuine and heartfelt. Instead it was another of your pathetic attempts to save your pathetic government.

About the only thing that did appear genuine during your whole embarrassing lecture was the fact that you appeared close to tears. That's perfectly understandable. I'd be close to tears if I'd donated $1.7 million to my own political party to (just) win an election, only to see it pissed away because of your MPs' incompetence and flagrant disregard for the Australian constitution.

Which brings us to the heart of your speech about Frydenberg's mum.

One of your first acts as PM was to significantly increase the powers of a psychopathic, vindictive, ex-walloper by the name of Peter Dutton, as minister for immigration. Here is a man who likes nothing better than sending stateless refugees back to the atrocities from which they have fled, in fact as far as we can tell, it's the only thing he's put any effort into in his entire fucking career.

My point being that Josh Frydenberg wouldn't even fucking exist, let alone be the beneficiary of your faux indignation, had your government been calling the shots back then.

Your speech told me nothing about Josh Frydenberg's mother, or the millions of other victims of Nazism, that I didn't already know. Because I've studied the Holocaust. I've seen what remains of the camps. I've been to the memorials of Jews who were all but wiped out in places like Germany, Hungary, Czech Republic and Poland.

I've been to the Pinkas synagogue in Prague, where the names of around 78,000 Jews from Bohemia and Moravia that the Nazis exterminated (which is by no means all of them) are written on the walls. You can read the names of entire families that don't exist anymore, generations of surnames from hundred year old grandparents to day old babies.

And I've been to the Auschwitz camps. There I met an old man who worked as a tour guide. He had been an inmate at Auschwitz as a boy, and once had to spent 24 hours in a cell that was too low to stand up in and too narrow to sit down because a guard saw him pick up a cigarette butt. When I asked him how he could work in a place where he had experienced so much horror, he said that he had a duty to make sure that people never repeated what happened at Auschwitz. It would have broken his heart to hear your speech.

You are an intelligent and articulate man who, unlike the last two Liberal PMs, has demonstrated an ability to tell the difference between right and wrong. Yet you preside over our own Pacific-based atrocity placed in the hands of....[and this has been approved by Mike Godwin]...a fucking Nazi.

That's bad enough, but for you to deliberately ignore the lessons that old man at Auschwitz spent his life teaching, only to invoke them in a flimsy defence of your government, is even more mercenary than I would have expected from your predecessors.

As I've already said, your speech told us nothing about stateless refugees under the Nazis that we didn't already know, but it told us everything about the sort of person you are. In fact I think it will be the speech that defines your Prime Ministership: self-serving, callous and unprincipled.