Candidate sorry for camp comparison

A JEWISH Labor candidate in Sydney has apologised for offending the community by comparing detention centres to concentration camps.

Dr Michael Freelander, who told The AJN recently that he is not particularly religious, is the Labor candidate for the vital seat of Macarthur in Western Sydney.

Dr Freelander said that he believes the Manus Island detention centre should be closed down and asylum seekers should be processed in Australia.

“What we’re doing is cruel,” he said.

“I would hate to think we would be torturing children in a place like Manus Island in a concentration camp and I could never support that.”

When contacted by The AJN this week Dr Freelander apologised.

“I’m deeply aware that I chose poor words last week,” he said.

“I’m sorry for the offence I caused to the Jewish community.”

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said Dr Freelander’s comments were shocking.

“For a candidate to try and draw a parallel between any action of an Australian government and the Holocaust and Nazi Germany is, quite frankly, shocking,” she said.

Labor leader Bill Shorten said that he doesn’t accept the language used by Dr Freelander and on the wider issues of asylum seekers, said that the Labor Party has dealt with the issue.

Executive Council of Australian Jewry president Robert Goot said exaggerations detract from the standard political debate about the serious issue of asylum seekers.

“The words ‘concentration camp’ will be associated by many people with the horrors of the Nazi regime,” Goot said.

“It’s use as a descriptor of the refugee processing centre at Manus Island, is for that reason, inappropriate, unfortunate and regrettable.”

Freelander, 62, is a senior paediatrician at Campbell-town and Camden Hospitals with more than three decades of medical practice in the region.

He is a proud Zionist, had his bar mitzvah at the Emanuel Synagogue and then moved to Macarthur in 1984, where he established his own practice.

Macarthur has not been held by Labor since 1996 but sitting Liberal MP Russell Matheson’s margin has fallen from 11.4 per cent to just 2.8 per cent, ensuring a tight ­contest.

JOSHUA LEVI