Josh Frydenberg poll rival Oliver Yates a ‘nasty liar’

Andrews government minister says Tim Smith’s condemnation of attempts to undermine Treasurer “important’’.

Oliver Yates peers out around a corner during his Kooyong Independent group dinner in Camberwell last week. Picture: Aaron Francis

Victorian Planning Minister Richard Wynne has backed his Liberal counterpart Tim Smith’s condemnation of alleged anti-Semitic attempts to undermine Treasurer Josh Frydenberg.

Mr Smith last night accused Frydenberg challenger Oliver Yates of being a “nasty liar” who is behind an “anti-Semitic” citizenship challenge to the Treasurer’s ability to sit in federal parliament.

The Member for Kew, whose seat overlaps with Mr Frydenberg’s eastern suburbs seat of Kooyong, used an adjournment speech in state parliament to call for Premier Daniel Andrews to fund greater public awareness campaigns around the evils of anti-Semitism and publicly denounce “the anti-Semites who are attempting to remove Josh Frydenberg from the federal parliament”.

Responding on behalf of the Andrews government, Mr Wynne said Mr Smith had raised an important matter in relation to the question of anti-Semitic motivations by some people seeking to undermine the federal Treasurer.”.

“I say to the Member for Kew that we as a parliament absolutely repudiate any suggestion of anti-Semitism, as he knows,” Mr Wynne said.

“Indeed all of us have been deeply troubled, particularly by appalling activities surrounding Mr Frydenberg vis-a-vis graffitiing of his campaign billboards and so forth with swastikas.

“This is not the Victoria we know, and we as a parliament have always stood up in an absolutely bipartisan way and said that there is no tolerance whatsoever across this parliament for anti-Semitism.

“I will make sure that the sentiments of the member for Kew are advised to the Premier accordingly.”

Victorian Liberal MP Tim Smith. Picture: Stuart McEvoy

Climate activist Michael Staindl last month launched a challenge under section 44 of the Constitution aimed at establishing whether the Treasurer inherited Hungarian citizenship through his mother, Erica, who fled the Holocaust.

Mr Yates has attempted to publicly distance himself from the push, however, The Australian revealed last week that Mr Yates had tried to enlist supporters within his Kooyong Independents Group to investigate electoral issues such as parliamentary ineligibility.

Mr Smith used his adjournment speech to highlight the role of lawyer Trevor Poulton, who has previously told The Australian he was working with Mr Yates’s “Kooyong Independents” to test the Treasurer’s citizenship status.

Mr Poulton has been accused of anti-Semitism over his 2012 book, The Holocaust Denier.

“While it is well known that the author of The Holocaust Denier and renowned anti-Semite, Trevor Poulton, has been seeking out a Kooyong resident to take Frydenberg to the court, it has only recently been revealed that Poulton was in contact with Yates’ Kooyong Independents Group, and that Yates himself sent out an email seeking to, and I quote ‘recommend candidates for referral to the High Court’,” Mr Smith told parliament.

Mr Smith quoted Mr Staindl telling The Australian he knows Mr Staindl “through his community work”.

“So despite Yates proclaiming that he is not behind the citizenship challenge to Frydenberg, the facts tell us a different story,” Mr Smith said.

“Yates has been exposed as a nasty liar.”

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg. Picture: Kym Smith

“As New South Wales shadow treasurer Labor’s Walt Secord told the New South Wales parliament in a powerful speech the other week, the ‘vicious, scurrilous and deeply offensive’ case against Frydenberg was quite deeply rooted in anti-Semitism”.

Mr Smith said Mr Yates’s late father, former British Conservative and Australian Liberal politician William Yates, was on the public record as having made anti-Semitic comments.

“Yates’s father has denigrated Zionism as ‘an international terrorist organisation’ and has likened Australian soldiers as ‘Israeli Zionist agents’,” he said.

“(It’s) fair to ask whether this vicious, nasty, anti-Semitic paranoia has passed down the family line.

“Yates, Staindl (and) Poulton … should be called out and condemned for digging up the great evils of the Holocaust and cloaking their anti-Semitism in constitutional opportunism and environmental radicalism.

“Josh Frydenberg is, after all, is being singled out as the only member of the federal parliament being challenged over his citizenship.

“As Treasurer of the Commonwealth he is the most senior Jewish politician in Australia’s history.

“The Jews have made a massive contribution to this state and nation, from Sir John Monash, Isaac Isaacs, Sir Zelman Cowen and our current governor Linda Dessau.

“Yates and his fellow travellers should be ashamed of themselves.”

Mr Yates said claims made in Mr Smith’s speech were factually incorrect statements and innuendo “as I don’t control the (section) 44 case.”

The Australian does not suggest Smith’s comments are true, only that they have been made.

Mr Yates last week accused federal Assistant Treasurer Michael Sukkar of “a total abuse of parliamentary privilege” after he told parliament Mr Yates and others challenging Mr Frydenberg’s eligibility were “disgusting, disgruntled, debauched” and anti-Semitic.

In an email sent weeks after the May federal election, Mr Yates ­invited supporters to join one of three subcommittees — including an eligibility review — with the purpose of specifically invest­igating section 44 disclosures.

Mr Yates, who won just 8.98 per cent of the primary vote in his attempt to unseat Mr Frydenberg, is running a separate legal challenge through the Court of Disputed Returns against the Liberal Party’s use of Chinese-language signs, which he claims were deliberately misleading.

The former chief executive of the Clean Energy ­Finance Corp­oration last week denied that former MP Cathy McGowan and independent Warringah MP Zali Steggall’s decision to pull out of his inaugural Kooyong Independents Group dinner was related to the section 44 push.