Election 2022: ‘Contrite’ Katherine Deves set to visit Jewish Museum

Katherine Deves has accepted an invitation from Jewish leaders to visit the Sydney Jewish Museum and speak to a Holocaust survivor.

Warringah Liberal candidate Katherine Deves. Picture: Facebook

The Liberal candidate for Warringah, Katherine Deves, will visit the Sydney Jewish Museum in May in an act of contrition for comments she made comparing the fight to exclude transgender athletes from women’s sports to resistance to the Holocaust.

Ms Deves accepted an invitation from NSW Jewish Board of Deputies chief executive Darren Bark and Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Peter Wertheim.

“Thank you for the important work you do in the community and I appreciate your kind offer to visit the Sydney Jewish Museum, to learn more about the tragedy of Holocaust and its aftermath,” Ms Deves said in an email.

She will tour the exhibits and meet with a Holocaust survivor before the May election.

Since being hand-picked by Scott Morrison to contest the seat of Warringah, Ms Deves has come under fire for her remarks about transgender people playing sport.

She has compared her lobbying organisation, Save Women’s Sport, to French resistance groups during the Nazi occupation. Since-deleted social media posts also revealed Ms Deves once described a gay newspaper as “the Rainbow Reich”.

Mr Bark and Mr Wertheim said they were pleased Ms Deves listened to their concerns – after her minders initially rejected their first invitation to visit the museum – and will talk 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.”

The Jewish community initially dismissed Ms Deves’ apology and were further angered when she rejected their invitation to tour the museum.

“All of these Nazi analogies are historically inaccurate and fundamentally misconceived,” Mr Bark and Mr Wertheim said in a joint statement on April 18.