My Oma and Opa fled the Holocaust, so I live. Let’s stop the rise of Australia’s neo-Nazis

My Oma and Opa, my paternal grandparents, fled the Holocaust as German Jewish teenagers only two generations ago. I live to tell their stories because they were able to escape white supremacy and persecution to build a life together in a country that felt safe. Other members of our family were not so lucky. My Opa’s mother, brother, sister-in-law and their child died at Auschwitz. My Oma’s father died at Theresienstadt concentration camp and her mother at Auschwitz.

The Neo-Nazi demonstration last Saturday at the front of the NSW Parliament was horrific.

For me, both as a descendent of Holocaust survivors and as a queer woman, the most frightening aspect of that demonstration was not that it was outside my workplace and an important symbol of democracy, where I am a member of the upper house, but that we are at a moment in Australian history where neo-Nazis have the confidence to bare their faces in public in broad daylight.

The first time I reported threats from neo-Nazis in my community was to Albury police in 2018, in my capacity as a local councillor. They threatened me after I condemned their activities, including recruiting new members. Last year, I was at the Albury pride film night that was threatened and crashed by 30 masked neo-Nazis. They have since demonstrated, as they did at parliament on Saturday, at the war memorials in Corowa and Albury. They mock veterans of the world wars in which Australian soldiers fought against fascism.

The slogan displayed on Saturday was brazenly antisemitic, but the Nazis did not just come for the Jews. The Nazis came for people with a disability, people with opposing political views, LGBTQ people and other minority groups.

Protest is a regular and healthy occurrence outside parliament and in other civic spaces. Protests typically call for a particular policy or law to be enacted or repealed. A particularly nasty one might aim for a politician to lose their seat. But this is different; neo-Nazis want me and people like me not to exist.

I don’t always agree with my political colleagues in the upper house, but there are rare and inspired occasions when we can come together on an issue. This week I moved a motion to acknowledge the significant threat posed by neo-Nazism and white supremacy to a broad range of communities across NSW, including Jewish communities, people of colour, First Nations people, people with disabilities, women and LGBTQ communities. This was resoundingly supported across party lines.

We recognised that rising racism and inequality amid the housing and cost-of-living crisis have enabled far-right extremist groups to grow by scapegoating marginalised people. And we called on the government to urgently tackle racism and inequality, and to implement the Australian Human Rights Commission’s National Anti-Racism Framework as a practical step towards doing so.

According to ASIO, far-right extremism is proliferating. These movements thrive when people are disenfranchised and disconnected. When people know they’ve been hard done by, they look for explanations. When communities are disconnected, marginalised groups become distant “others”. It’s easier to lay blame with “others” than the complex systems enabled by successive governments that drive inequity.

The 2022 Inquiry into Extremism in Victoria identified social isolation, economic insecurity and inequality as risk factors that can increase people’s vulnerability to extremist narratives.

Threats to any marginalised group of people make us all less safe. But these are not problems that can be resolved by policing and law enforcement. Lessening the appeal of extremist ideologies requires fixing inequality. The most recent statistics out of the NSW Council of Social Service are distressing: more than a million people in NSW live in poverty and more than one in seven children live below the poverty line. Access to safe housing, fair wages, and opportunities for connection and recreation would help prevent the growth of far-right extremist organisations.

Our collective response to the rise of fascist ideology and neo-Nazism should be a simple and unifying one. We fought a world war in opposition to fascism and Nazism. The organisers of Saturday’s demonstration are now talking about forming a political party that includes in its policy platform deporting Jewish people from Australia. The wrong response from governments may improve their chances.

Elected representatives and community leaders must address the systems that enable extremism to prosper. Anything less is a failure to recognise the lessons of history, and a disservice to the memory of my Oma and Opa.

Dr Amanda Cohn is a Greens MP in the NSW Legislative Council, based in Albury-Wodonga.