Alex Hawke (Mitchell, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Industry and Innovation) Share this | Hansard source

The most important responsibility of any nation state and its government is the safety and protection of its own citizens. In a rights-respecting democracy in a Western country like Australia, the whole purpose of government is to administer the law and to have the exclusive monopoly on the right to use force to protect law-abiding citizens. And yet, in the Australia of 2026, we now know that the government and all its agencies have been unable to provide some of our most vulnerable citizens—Jewish Australians—with their birthrights of essential safety, life, liberty and their pursuit of happiness, and we must be open about this. Fifteen of our bright, law-abiding, peaceful and rights-respecting citizens lie dead, shot on our beach at Bondi, and we the parliament, we the government and we the people, owe their memory and our Jewish Australian community everything we can do to restore their basic safety. This irrational, ancient prejudice of antisemitism has made its way to our shores. This enemy is not external now. This ancient prejudice, this enemy, walks amongst us, and we must do something about it.

Today we can also remember the 10 Australians who died in the 9/11 attacks, the 88 Australians murdered in the Bali bombings, the two people killed at the Lindt Cafe, the police civilian officer gunned down in my home town on the steps at Parramatta, more incidents than I can remember on our streets, and now 15 beautiful and peaceful Australians slaughtered at Bondi Beach while practising their own culture, traditions and religion—citizens that should have been able to do so in safety. Australia and its people have been under attack by a radicalised and perverted form of Islam since 9/11, a threat that affects all of us and, again, must be taken most seriously. When a 10-year-old girl—Matilda, named after one of our most iconic Australian cultural odes—is gunned down weeks after receiving an award for her excellent citizenship to others, every Australian parent does and should feel in their bones that something is inherently wrong and dangerous in our midst.

Jewish Australians have done so much for this nation—names like Monash, Isaacs, Lowy, Gonski, Finkel, Solomon Lew, Triguboff, Pratt, Geraldine Brooks, Harry Seidler, Jessica Fox, Torah Bright and Jemima Montag, so many proud men and women who've made an indelible contribution to our Australian way of life. These are Australians like any other, and they deserve their basic rights.

The Islamic State, and its ideology, is an enemy of humanity. It kills Muslims. It kills Jews. It kills Christians. It kills Yazidis. Indeed, more Muslims have been killed by the Islamic State than any other group. Can we truly comprehend the evil that could overcome a person to look down the sights of a high-powered rifle and fire it at a 10-year-old child? What can we do against such reckless hate? We can fight it and work to eradicate it from our society and to not be reticent with those that reject our rights-respecting society. We cannot be naive about this ancient hatred and prejudice. We must understand and believe people that, when they say things on the steps of our own opera house, this is what they mean. We must take the necessary steps to apply the law to them, to protect the law-abiding from this criminal behaviour.

As Josh Frydenberg said at Bondi on 17 December last year:

This massacre at Bondi is the greatest stain on this nation. Has brought the greatest shame to our nation.

The greatest stain on our nation must occasion the greatest effort by us, by our parliament and by our governments to right the wrongs of the past by taking the action that we must to eliminate the scourge of antisemitism. There are Nazis parading on the streets of Sydney and Melbourne openly.

When I was a young man, I was returning to my home in Parramatta. I'd grown up there, and I'd been to public schools there, but I had never known that there was a synagogue just down the road, on Victoria Road, from where I lived. On that night, I witnessed two figures throw a lit object into a nondescript building, and I rang the police, as any law-abiding citizen would, as I watched the fire start and the perpetrators run away. The police didn't know, as I didn't know, that this was the Parramatta synagogue. That was my introduction to antisemitism as a young person in Australia.

For most of us in Australia, security and safety is our birthright. Today, for Jewish Australians, it is not. When I returned to that same Parramatta synagogue, 25 years after that incident but a few weeks ago, their community was only there because of the armed guards, because of the fences and because of the cameras. They do not enjoy the birthright that we do as Australians. We should be ashamed, and we must be ashamed, but we must act on this shame so that the tragedy of Bondi never happens to any Australian again and so that every Australian enjoys their birthright of freedom, safety and security.

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