Controversial Liberal candidate Katherine Deves has accepted an offer to visit the Sydney Jewish Museum following comments she made comparing her anti-transgender lobbying to opponents of the Holocaust.
Ms Deves, hand-picked by Prime Minister Scott Morrison to contest the northern Sydney seat of Warringah, has been criticised for her remarks about transgender people playing sport.
Ms Deves compared her organisation, which aims to exclude trans people from sport, to French resistance groups during the Nazi occupation.
Jewish community leaders dismissed her subsequent apology, saying she had a history of making inappropriate and ill-considered statements comparing modern-day events to the “horrors” of the Nazi era.
Ms Deves accepted an invitation from NSW Jewish Board of Deputies CEO Darren Bark and Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-CEO Peter Wertheim to visit the museum.
“I appreciate your kind offer to visit the Sydney Jewish Museum, to learn more about the tragedy of Holocaust and its aftermath,” she said in an email.
Ms Deves will meet a survivor and tour the exhibits before the May 21 election.
Mr Bark and Mr Wertheim said they were pleased Ms Deves listened to their concerns and had agreed to visit the museum to learn more about the “uniquely abhorrent” actions of the Nazis during World War II.
“We hope the visit will be a turning point for Ms Deves, that she will realise how insensitive and inappropriate her analogies were, and that she refrains from making such hurtful comparisons in the future.”
