Raoul Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat working in Nazi-occupied Hungary during World War II. He provided false Swedish identity documents and shelter for Hungarian Jews who we're targets for the Nazis for concentration camps. He was granted posthumous citizenship, as his action during the second world war, where he literally pulled Jews off trains bound for camps such as Auschwitz and produced fake Swedish documents to ward off SS guards, are said to be the kind of traits that our nation is built on.
"We're not just honouring the late Raoul Wallenberg as a man who was brave and who faced down incredible evil, I think we're also saying something about who we are as a nation... that the qualities of courage, compassion and basic human decency are the very qualities by which we define our own national character at its best," Peter Wertheim from the Executive Council of the Australian Jewry said.
If we all share traits possessed by Wallenberg, it is us who should feel privileged to share a nationality with him.
Professor Frank Vajda is a Melbourne neurologist who owes his life to Mr Wallenberg.
Professor Vajda and his mother were lined up with about 30 others to be shot by the Nazi-aligned Arrow Cross fascists for taking off their star of David that identified them as Jews.
He was nine years old at the time
"They all laughed at us..." Vadja recounts, "we were marched about 600 yards down the street to a military barracks, lined up in front of a machine gun in front of a wall.
"Suddenly civilians arrived and we were told it was Wallenberg.
"Then the atmosphere changed and we were taken back to a protected house. Everyone looked at us as though we had come back from the grave. It was really unbelievable."
Australia is following the US, Canada, Israel and Hungary in conferring honorary citizenship on Mr Wallenberg.
Circumstances surrounding Wallenberg's death remain a mystery. He disappeared in 1945 when the Soviet Union invaded Hungary, and is believed to have died in prison.
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