A man wearing a swastika hate at a train station in Melbourne, Australia. Photo: courtesy of the Anti-Defamation Commission.

One of Australia’s top Jewish organizations expressed shock and anger on Sunday after a man was spotted wearing a hat emblazoned with the Nazi swastika symbol in Melbourne.

The man was photographed by a 23-year-old Jewish man who is a descendant of Holocaust victims.

It is believed that the man wearing the hat may have been heading home from an Australian football game that had finished that evening.

A three-year campaign has been underway in Australia to ban the swastika by law, with the support of the Anti-Defamation Commission (ADC), a leading Jewish-Australian group. A parliamentary committee from the state of Victoria issued a report this month recommending such a ban, and the government appears to be leaning toward enacting one.

ADC Chairman Dvir Abramovich, said of the incident in Melbourne, “If the Victorian state government does not put an end to this sickening and escalating crisis right now, Victoria may become known as the Swastika state instead of the Garden State.”

“From the special spot in hell reserved for such monsters, Hitler must be smiling, knowing that his followers are continuing his destructive legacy,” he asserted.

“We should not have to wait until white supremacists organize a rally and march down Swanston street waving Nazi flags before acting,” he said. “Our city is being invaded by these agents of hate, by these ‘Final Solutionists’ who are spitting in our faces and who have no fear of proudly exhibiting this evil emblem, which represents the extermination of millions, knowing full well that the law is on their side. Our diggers who sacrificed their lives to defeat the Third Reich must be turning in their graves.”

“No one can feel safe when such terrifying episodes are allowed to happen,” Abramovich said. “Imagine the sheer terror a Holocaust survivor would have felt seeing this unrepentant bigot. I repeat my call for the state government to draft a bill that bans the public displays of Nazism and to pass the law immediately. Enough is enough.”