By Margaret Maccoll
Noosaville resident Suzi Smeed initiated a protest against the recent pro-Palestinian sentiments voiced by former NSW Premier, Foreign Affairs Minister and Senator Bob Carr.
An editorial in The Australian by Peter Baldwin this month reported Mr Carr was “leading a push for the ALP to give Palestine immediate state recognition, and had also backed the Israeli opposition’s condemnation of a new law, allowing further property seizures as amounting to “war crimes” if families are forced off privately owned land”.
A Holocaust survivor, Suzi led a group of protestors on Sunday morning outside The J Theatre where Mr Carr appeared in conversation with prominent Australian journalist Kerry O’Brien.
Suzi, 75, was only two years of age and living in a small town in Hungary when she and her grandparents were rounded up and put into a ghetto ready for deportation to Auschwitz.
She was smuggled out and went into hiding with her parents in Budapest, but her grandparents went to the gas chamber, she said.
Suzi said her family returned to Hungary after the war, but in 1949 fled to Australia in the face of a Russian communist invasion.
Her family story is in museums in both Sydney and Washington, she said.
Mr Carr discussed many political issues during his conversation with Kerry O’Brien as part of Noosa Alive festival. On Israel, he said, he supported a two-state solution, but Israel was now opposed to a Palestinian state despite the suggestion being raised internationally.
Palestine has said, ‘give us a state and we will have unguarded borders allowing free entry from Israel’, but this had not been accepted, he said.
He said Israel would “lose friends” if it kept building settlements on the West Bank.
Mr Carr also raised questions during his discussion. He pointed at the rise of China’s power and the increasingly nationalistic and isolationist approach of America under Trump and asked what the challenges would mean for Australia.
By 2030, 70 per cent of the population of China will be middle class, he said. He questioned whether that shift in society would affect the totalitarian government that now exists in China.
Mr Carr also spoke of political leadership, and highlighted one leadership action that stood out for him as then premier which was the introduction of one medically controlled injecting room for drug use in Kings Cross. He said it was the backing of experts and the selling of the idea to the public of protecting lives that enabled it to happen. The centre still exists and while proven to have saved lives, it remains the only one of its kind in the country.
