The meme shared on Greens MP Tamara Smith's Facebook.
The meme shared on Greens MP Tamara Smith's Facebook. Jasmine Burke

Ballina MP apologises for 'sickening' Facebook post

BALLINA Greens MP Tamara Smith has apologised after being accused of trivialising the Holocaust when she shared a meme on Facebook comparing the US to Nazi Germany.

The meme, which was posted to Ms Smith's official Green's Facebook page last week, juxtaposed the US under current president Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler's regime by showing a black and white image of a group of children standing behind a barbed wire fence labelled "Germany, 1944", and a colour photo of young children climbing metal bars inside a holding cell labelled "America 2018".

The Greens MP copped massive backlash from the post, but said the image was a metaphor to current situations in the US and she did not intend to offend Holocaust victims.

NSW Labor's Walt Secord, a patron of the Labor Israel Action Committee, said the post was "sickening and repulsive", The Daily Telegraph reported.

The article stated: "Using the death of six million Jewish people ... is one of the most repugnant and vile posts by a NSW parliamentarian I've seen in years."

The post also attracted angry comments from local residents, but the post has since been removed.

Ms Smith wrote on Facebook: "The post was directed at the atrocious and appalling behaviour of the Trump administration through its detention of children from undocumented immigrant parents."

"There was no intention to offend Holocaust victims and I apologise unreservedly."

A spokesman for Ms Smith said: "The reposting of this meme on Facebook was Tamara's human response to the distressing situation in the US, where children are being separated from their parents and incarcerated in camps.

"She was not seeking to make any political gain from it, and having understood that linking this to the Holocaust was inappropriate she promptly deleted the post and apologised unreservedly.

"Unfortunately, along with those people who were legitimately upset by the post came a number of trolls who used it as an opportunity to abuse Tamara personally and expand upon it to make a whole range of other hate-filled comments."