US author Naomi Wolf has accused embattled Energy Minister Angus Taylor of making an "anti-semitic dogwhistle" and wrongly linking her to a plot to remove a Christmas tree from Oxford.
In his maiden speech to Parliament in 2013, Angus Taylor described his first encounter with "political correctness" when he was a student at Oxford University in England.
"It was 1991, and a young Naomi Wolf lived a couple of doors down the corridor.
"Several graduate students, mostly from the north-east of the US, decided we should abandon the Christmas tree in the common room because some people might be offended."
He banded together with some other students to "push back hard" and ensure the Christmas tree was put up in the common room.
The anecdote from his speech was circulated on social media over the past week as the minister faced calls to be dumped from the front bench over his role in a scandal involving an allegedly doctored document.
When it came to Wolf's attention on Monday, she pointed out that she had completed her study at Oxford long before Mr Taylor arrived.
Angus Taylor said Naomi Wolf lived "down the corridor" at Oxford in 1991, but she says she was back in the US by then. Source: AAP
"I was a Rhodes Scholar in Oxford 1985-88. Angus Taylor recalls me in a fever dream at Oxford in 1991 among those warring on Xmas," she tweeted on Monday.
She followed up with another tweet, accusing him of being anti-semitic in his description of "shrill elitist voices who insist they know what is best for people who are not remotely like them".
"Catch that anti-semitic dogwhistle... referring to Jews like me whom Angus Taylor imagined to be among the warriors against xmas in Oxford in 1991."
The feminist author and former advisor to Al Gore and Bill Clinton spent much of 1991 in New York City and travelling to promote her first book, The Beauty Myth.
Mr Taylor, whose grandmother is Jewish, has strongly rejected the accusation of anti-semitism.
"Mr Taylor did not say Naomi Wolf was one of the graduates, and was not referring to Naomi Wolf as one of the graduates," a spokesperson for the minister said.
Wolf completed her Rhodes scholarship in 1988, but continued her research, finally completing her doctorate in 2015.
NSW police launched an investigation last week into an altered version of a City of Sydney document used by Mr Taylor to attack Lord Mayor Clover Moore's travel spending and climate footprint.
In June, Wolf was forced to correct a section of her latest book, Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalisation of Love, admitting to at least two errors.
