Dr EMERSON (4:30 PM) —On this weekend Australians commemorate the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War and I want to use this occasion to pay tribute to a man who describes the early part of his life in these terms:

That man was Ernest Victor Emerson, my father, who, later in 1939, joined the war effort, fighting in Europe. He was one of the first members of the armed forces to go to Europe and while fighting in Larissa in Greece in 1941 he was shot through the leg. That certainly slowed him down and he was captured by the Italians. After several months of what I would have to say was torture and starvation behind iron bars in a Greek prison, my father, Private Ernest Victor Emerson, was shipped to a concentration camp in Italy. Following the capitulation of Italy in the Second World War, he then thought that they would be released and would perhaps return to Australia or continue to fight. But he was wrong about that because they were put on trains and taken to a prisoner of war camp in Germany.

During that time my father kept a diary, which my brother still has, and I have a copy of the diary here. I want to mention a couple of points that he made. He talks about the deprivation and the very harsh treatment, not so much of the Australians but of the Russians in particular, and the brutality that was displayed towards those in German prisoner of war camps. He then goes forward through the diary to 23 August 1944 and he reflects on three years of captivity in a prisoner of war camp. He says:

My dad died in 1978 of a heart attack and it was pretty clear that at the rate at which others, his mates, were dying they too had suffered life-shortening trauma through the Second World War. Many of them died very young. I do know, though, that dad would be amazed and very proud of the fact that his son is a member of parliament. He would not have been able to imagine that I could stand here on the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War and pay him this tribute. He was my great dad.