My grandfather built Myer from nothing. The bile of this debate harms all of us

October 7, 2026 — 3:00pm

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A little over 125 years ago my grandfather Sidney Myer landed in Port Melbourne, penniless and with little English. Escaping the pogroms in Czarist Russia, he came in the hope that this country would offer him the safety, freedom and opportunity to begin a new life.

Typical of so many immigrants before him and since, he started out with nothing, carting a haberdasher’s trading box on his back and selling door to door until he was able to open his first store in Bendigo in 1900. From there he built the largest department store chain in the southern hemisphere by the time he died in 1934.

As the grandson of one of Australia’s most famous and most successful immigrants it feels like it’s my duty to make an intervention into the debate around the significance of immigration in the cultural, social and economic fabric of this country.

As we watch the rise of populism in this country in the form of the One Nation Party, and its leader, Pauline Hanson, what seems to be lost is........

© The Sydney Morning Herald