STATEMENTS BY SENATORS
Senator DEAN SMITH (Western Australia) (12:34): I rise today to recognise an important milestone for Western Australia's Jewish community—the official opening of the new Holocaust Institute of WA education centre. I was privileged to attend and speak at the opening alongside the new Maccabi Community Centre and to recognise the years of hard work, determination and generosity that have brought this vision to life.
I particularly acknowledge the stewardship of Sol Majteles, Justine Sharbanee, Judith Lawrence, Talya Mossenson and Jonathon Silbert and everyone who has contributed to this remarkable achievement. The new education centre will preserve memory, strengthen community and, most importantly, educate future generations. In honouring this significant community achievement, there is an opportunity to remind us of a remarkable tale of courage and conviction over discrimination.
As they walk through the doors of the Maccabi Community Centre, visitors encounter the portrait of a remarkable Australian: William Cooper. William Cooper was one of Australia's most important Aboriginal leaders and the founder of the Australian Aborigines' League. He spent much of his life fighting injustice against his own people, yet, in 1938, in his late seventies and in declining health, his attention turned to an injustice occurring thousands of kilometres away against people he had never met.
On 9 and 10 November that year, Nazi mobs attacked Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues across Germany and Austria in what became known as Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. Synagogues were burned. Jewish homes, schools and businesses were vandalised and destroyed.
Almost 100 Jewish people were killed, and, in the aftermath, around 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. The shattered glass that covered the streets gave Kristallnacht its name, but the significance of those events went far beyond broken windows. Kristallnacht represented a terrifying escalation in the Nazi persecution of Europe's Jewish population.
The discrimination, intimidation and violence that had been growing for years was becoming systemic and increasingly brutal. Ultimately, that persecution would culminate in the Holocaust and the murder of over six million Jews. William Cooper read about what had happened, and he decided he could not remain silent.
On 6 December 1938, less than a month after Kristallnacht, a small group gathered early in the morning at Cooper's home in Footscray, Melbourne. Dressed in suits and hats, Cooper and members of the Australian Aborigines' League set out for the German consulate in Melbourne. They carried with them a resolution made in their words on behalf of the Aboriginal inhabitants of Australia.
It protested wholeheartedly against the cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi government in Germany and pleaded for that persecution to end. They walked from Footscray to the German consulate on Collins Street, around 11 kilometres. For a 77-year-old man in declining health, it was no small undertaking, but William Cooper was determined to make his voice heard.
When they reached the consulate, they were refused entry. They could have been forgiven for thinking their effort had all been in vain, but history tells us otherwise. What makes Cooper's actions so extraordinary is the position of Aboriginal Australians themselves at that time.
They were denied fundamental rights and subjected to entrenched discrimination. Cooper himself had spent years campaigning for justice, representation and dignity for his own people. He therefore had every reason to devote all of his energy to the injustices immediately before him.
Instead, he recognised injustice against another people thousands of kilometres away and made it his concern too. His grandson Alf Turner later reflected that his grandfather recognised in the Jewish people the same fear, desperation, bewilderment and hopelessness experienced by his own people in Australia, and, when much of the world failed to act, William Cooper did act.
There is something profoundly human in that story of William Cooper. Too often we assume people will care only about causes that directly affect them, that our background, religion, ethnicity or personal experience determines which injustices we are prepared to confront. William Cooper showed us something better: You do not have to share someone's background to share their concern, you do not have to have suffered the same injustice to recognise it, and you do not have to belong to a community to stand beside it when it is threatened.
Some of the strongest acts of solidarity in our history have come from people who shared little except an understanding of right and wrong. Cooper understood discrimination through his own experience, but, rather than narrowing his compassion, it enlarged it. His story also reminds us that standing against injustice matters most when doing so is unpopular, inconvenient or lonely.
It is easy to condemn injustice once history has delivered its verdict; it is much harder to recognise it as it is happening and to find the courage to speak when too few others will. That is why institutions such as the Holocaust Institute of Western Australia's education centre matter. The Holocaust did not begin with concentration camps and gas chambers; it was preceded by years of antisemitism, exclusion, dehumanisation, intimidation and violence.
Understanding that history is essential if the words 'never again' are to have meaning. As the number of Holocaust survivors able to share their experiences personally declines, the responsibility for preserving their testimony and teaching future generations becomes greater. That responsibility increasingly passes to institutions, educators, families and communities.
The new education centre will help carry it. It will give Western Australians, particularly young Western Australians, the opportunity to learn not only what happened during the Holocaust but how it happened and why its lessons remain relevant. Remembrance must be about more than looking backwards; it must inform how we behave today.
William Cooper understood that more than 85 years ago. He understood that an attack upon the dignity of another human being should matter even when that person worships differently, looks different or lives on the other side of the world. Today, William Cooper is rightly honoured by Jewish communities in Australia and internationally.
In 2012, his grandson retraced his grandfather's journey and delivered a copy of the protest letter that Cooper had attempted to present all those decades earlier. Today, buildings, scholarships and other memorials carry William Cooper's name. But perhaps his greatest memorial is the example he left us—an Aboriginal Australian who, when his own people faced profound injustice, nevertheless found room in his heart to speak for another persecuted people.
His example reminds us that injustice against one community should concern us all; that solidarity can cross every boundary of faith, culture and background; that silence is a choice, and so is speaking out; and that sometimes the most powerful thing any of us can say is very simple: this may not be happening to me, but it matters to me. That is a worthy message for us all to remember.