Hon Chris Bishop
Address on Holocaust Remembrance Day
27 January 2026
Acknowledgements
Can I start by acknowledging:
· My Ministerial and Parliamentary colleagues
· His Excellency Alon Roth-Snir, from the Embassy of Israel
· Her Excellency Nicole Menzenbach, Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany
· Deborah Hart, Chair of the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand and Carmel Levy
· His Worship Andrew Little
· Members of the Wellington Jewish community
· Survivors and their families
· Representatives of faith communities
Introduction
Thank you for the honour of allowing me to host this extremely important event at Parliament and to give the keynote address.
Today we remember the death of over six million Jews, including 1.5 million children, and the death of millions of Poles, Russians, Roma, the disabled, political opponents, and homosexuals by the despotic Nazi regime.
We remember who they were. Scientists. Authors. Lawyers. Doctors. Teachers. Artists. Mothers. Fathers. Sons. Daughters. Grandmothers and grandfathers. Brothers. Sisters.
We remember the barbarism and brutality of the Nazi regime and the sheer despicableness of the Shoah.
In preparing for this evening I went back and looked at my speech in 2018.
In 2018, I said that:
Sadly anti-Semitism is again on the march worldwide and New Zealand is not immune.
Anti-Semitism is like a virus – its form mutates and evolves from generation to generation but the core of it remains: the irrational, unbending, hatred of Jewish people for no other reason than they are Jewish.
And I noted some recent troubling incidents in New Zealand, including a Jewish singer who sings modern day versions of traditional Jewish fables who was lambasted publicly as a “representative of the Zionist regime” and told not to perform at a world music festival.
Today
Fast forward to today, and I do not think it is going too far to say that antisemitism is the worst it’s ever been since World War Two, both worldwide and in New Zealand.
October 7 was the single deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust with more than 1,200 men, women and children brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists. Women were raped, and children and seniors were butchered in an orgy of hate, including a 91 year old Holocaust survivor.
Perpetrators of war crimes often go to great lengths to hide what they do. The Nazis went to extraordinary lengths to cover up and minimise the Holocaust. Milosevic and Pol Pot did the same.
It says something about the sheer depravity of Hamas that they did the opposite. One commander was heard to say, “Document the scenes of horror, now, and broadcast them on TV channels to the whole world", and "Slaughter them. End the children of Israel".
I have found the response to October 7 almost unfathomable, both here in New Zealand and worldwide.
Rather than unequivocal condemnation of clear human rights violations, war crimes and mass brutality on an industrial scale, the response from many people has been the opposite.
The Jewish people know all too well that there is always a “but”
“October 7 was wrong, but…
“It’s bad that over 250 hostages were ripped from their homes and taken to Hamas tunnels, but…
“Rape and sexual violence is abhorrent, but…”
“Believe all women” – but not Jewish women
Rather than spark a global wave of condemnation, October 7 perversely sparked an outpouring of anti-Semitic hatred, including here in New Zealand.
Even the simple act of lighting up the Auckland War Memorial Museum with blue and white drew criticism.
There has been a sharp uptick in antisemitic abuse against Kiwi Jewish kids.
Last year in my own city of Wellington, graffiti saying “I hated Jews before it was cool” appeared on a concrete wall.
I have personally met with and talked to young Jewish university students who have been subject to abuse on campus.
And Jewish Kiwis have needed armed guards and had to take security measures in order to worship freely.
It is disgraceful, and it is wrong.
How have we got to this point?
On this day, the 81st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, it is worth pondering how we have got to this point.
Antisemitism is the world’s oldest hatred. History shows it can never be defeated but right now New Zealand sadly seems to oscillate between apathetic acquiescence and even aggressive adoption.
Western societies were so traumatised by the horrors of the Shoah that we vowed, post 1945, to never let it happen again. A new international order was built on a foundation of universal civil and political rights and the rule of law, the apotheosis being the United Nations.
In New Zealand we like to tell ourselves we were in the vanguard of these developments – and we were.
But antisemitism has always been present in New Zealand and sadly it always will be.
My great fear is that it is now too ingrained in the New Zealand psyche – that too many Kiwis are prepared to tolerate antisemitism rather than aggressively confront it and challenge it.
Every incidence of hate unchallenged makes the next one more likely.
We know where it leads. It’s not just about October 7, or Manchester, or Bondi.
I think of the parents in my office with their son’s school shirt covered in swastikas and mentions of gas chambers.
I think of the police officers standing guard outside a Jewish temple.
I think of my Jewish friends who feel unwelcome and unsafe in their own country, who have “Zionist” spat at them as if a belief in self-determination for the Jewish people is somehow immoral or illegal.
In my view we need a renewed national and international effort to tackle antisemitism. It’s time for us all to be “Upstanders”, not bystanders.
A trio of thoughts.
First, leadership matters.
This is a time for moral clarity and for a clear enunciation of right and wrong. People do rightly take their cues from people in positions of responsibility.
Too many people in positions of responsibility have been too willing to indulge the politics of hate.
So, please, let’s drop the “From the River to the Sea” chants. The Jewish community has made it very clear what they think this chant means. Political leaders in New Zealand involving themselves with this should know better. Can we make the “lived experience” of Jews matter too please?
Likewise, “long live the Intifada” and “globalise the Intifada” are not just simple protest slogans. They mean violence and plenty of it.
When Jewish people hear these chants, what they hear is not a call for liberation, but a call for the denial of their basic humanity.
Second, we need to reflect on how many people are too willing to single out Jews and hold them to standards they don’t hold others to.
Now is not the time or place for a long digression into how the language of human rights has been perverted by post-modernist critical race theory and settler/colonial theory, but like so often, Jews have been singled out with a weird, obscene obsession.
Third, Holocaust education is more important than it has ever been. It is shocking to hear that the number of schools marking Holocaust history in the UK has halved since October 7.
I am absolutely delighted that this government is expanding Holocaust education in schools. We plan for it to become mandatory in Years 0 to 10 in the social science curriculum from 2027 onwards.
The work of the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand has never been important.
There is a global industry in Holocaust denial. Often the people who support it happening again find themselves arguing it never happened in the first place.
There has never been a more important time to remember, educate and bear witness to the Holocaust.
While our generation has been touched by having heard, met and loved those who lived through the Holocaust, there is a danger for the coming generation without the survivors, the Holocaust will
seem as long ago as something like the Roman Empire.
It is our collective responsibility to pass the memories of the survivors onto the next generation. The memory of the survivors must become not their story, but our story, and the Holocaust must become not just a Jewish story or a Polish story or a Russian story or a Hungarian story but the story of all humanity.
Conclusion
It is easy to become depressed. But as the Jews in Lublin prison camp sang while facing death "Mir veln zey iberlebn.”
Ends