Thank you very much for that introduction.
And thank you for the opportunity of being able to speak to your group and being able to say something that I have wanted to say for quite a while…
I wanted to say to Dr Moshe that our organisation, which was … one of the sponsors of the meeting that he was asked to attend, which was … called the Frontline Mental Health Conference in the Gold Coast, which is close to where I live.
What happened was that he was asked not to participate or not to give his paper.
Now this was wrong. We made a big mistake. And it was not done with any malice. It was not done to disrespect him or the Jewish community in Australia or overseas.
It was a decision made by people who felt that this was the right thing to do when they’d been basically given a whole lot of attacking material from people who are very pro the Palestine cause and were trying to, in a sense, make the conference a very difficult place for anybody to come to unless Dr Moshe had not been uninvited.
Now, a mistake was made. We apologise for that.
And I personally apologise to Dr Moshe for what happened.
And I apologise to the Jewish community in Australia and overseas because it’s caused great hurt.
And the reality is that we should not be taking people away from conferences for any reason, when others try to sort of force their opinions on us and force the conferences to do things that they shouldn’t be doing.
So we certainly apologise for that. I apologise for that.
We’re trying to make good on this. We’re giving, of course, Dr Moshe all his expenses in terms of airfares and accommodation back so he’s not out of pocket. And we’re trying now to see whether he can give us the talk that everybody was coming along to listen to, which is of course the talk that I think he’s probably going to give a bit tonight on what he’s doing and the wonderful things that he’s doing to help people in frontline mental health situations, both in terms of police, ambulance, firefighters and in the military.
And so we’re hoping that we’ll be able to get him to speak, probably by video, to the people that would have otherwise heard him had he not been asked not to participate in the conference.
So, I thought I would like to say this so that everybody’s very clear about the fact that we very much regret what happened and we regret what happened, in the sense, as a consequence to the Jewish community in Australia and overseas. That’s what I wanted to say, and it was said with great humility and also, very genuinely.
So, thank you very much for the opportunity to do that.
