Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

The terrorist attack at Bondi on 14 December 2025 changed our country. What should have been an evening of sunlight and laughter, of faith and community, became a moment of national trauma. We lost 15 of our own to acts of senseless violence, and we lost some of the confidence we had as a country in our safety, our freedom and our generous diversity. In this place today we honour those lost by saying their names, and we say them with love, with respect and with grief: rabbi Eli Schlanger, Boris Tetleroyd, Boris and Sofia Gurman, Reuven Morrison, Edith Brutman, Marika Pogany, rabbi Yaakov Levitan, Peter Meagher, Tibor Weitzen, Alexander Kleytman, Dan Elkayam, Adam Smyth, Tania Tretiak and Matilda, the 10-year-old girl who broke Australia's heart.

A central promise of our liberal democracy has always been that Australians should never have to live in fear of violence or intimidation because of who we are. In our most challenging hours as a nation Australians have drawn together. We've always been united against hate, against terror and against division. In moments as dark as these we are confronted by how much our society has changed in recent years. Antisemitism has accelerated. Racism and bigotry have become more virulent, their proponents more vocal and more violent. For many Jewish members of the Kooyong community the events of 14 December exacerbated their increasing fears that they're not safe here, they are not valued here and they do not belong here. I've heard from many of their devastation and their anger. Many are the children or grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. Their families crossed the world to find safety and security but now find themselves vilified in our streets, their schools defaced and their synagogues and cars torched.

I've also heard from dozens of constituents who are not Jewish but who want me to convey on their behalf in this place their profound grief at what happened at Bondi. They've asked me to acknowledge on their behalf the pain and tragedy of the lives lost, to express shame that this happened to our own on our own beach and on our own shores. They want their leaders to express their grief and sympathy without qualification and without partisanship, and they want us in this place to demonstrate sensitivity and respect for all as we seek to heal our communities and our country. Together we thank those who had the extraordinary courage to protect others, sometimes at their own cost—those who thought not of race or religion, not of themselves, but only of the humans around them. We thank the police officers, first responders, surf lifesavers and healthcare workers who saved lives while risking their own.

We know that no-one who was there at Bondi on 14 December will ever be quite the same again. If we are divided by these acts of terrorists, the terrorists have won. We can't let them close our hearts against each other. We have to stand together—arm in arm, hand in hand—to mark our loss, to express our grief and our desire to protect all Australians from acts of hate, and to support all members of our communities so that they will always know that they are respected, valuable and equal.

Acts of senseless destruction will never overcome our determination to defend the strength, beauty and generosity of Australia's democracy. Our unity as a country is our greatest strength. We mourn those lost at Bondi because they are our own, and we mourn the loss of innocence that we've all experienced because extremism and terrorists have brought hatred to our home. Let the memory of the 15 lives lost at Bondi be a blessing. Let our home again be the Australia that they chose to live in and to immigrate to, and let their light shine brightly in this hour of darkness.

See this speech in context