Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

It has been 36 days since the devastating antisemitic terrorist attack at Bondi Beach; 36 days since 15 innocent people had their lives so cruelly stolen from them; 36 days of unimaginable grief for families who will never again hold their loved ones, never hear their laughter, never share another moment together.

The Bondi terror attack was an act of pure hatred and cowardice. First and foremost, obviously, it was an act of mass murder targeted at Jewish Australians. But, by extension, it was a deliberate attempt to instil fear and to divide our community. It was an act of antisemitism. We must call it what it was. More than 150 years ago, my great-great-great-grandparents, Abraham and Sarah, migrated to Australia to join a growing Jewish community in vibrant 1870s Melbourne. Able to participate fully in civil and commercial life, and having built an extraordinary contributing livelihood, Abraham bragged at one stage that he had overseen the laying of more railway track than any other person in Victoria at the time. It was a community in Melbourne, attracted to the richness of the gold rush, that ultimately gave Australia its first locally-born governor-general, Sir Isaac Isaacs, and our greatest general ever, Sir John Monash, who led my great-grandfather onto Anzac Cove on 25 April 1915.

My mother and her mother—although that side of the family moved to Adelaide and strayed from the Jewish faith—always taught me and my family to be proud of our Jewish heritage and of a country that gave a safe space for our forebears to come to, free from the antisemitism that was so rife across the globe, and allowed them to build such a wonderful life for them and their family, now six generations ago. After World War II, Australia welcomed even more Jewish migrants and enthusiastically supported the creation of the State of Israel. Australia famously cast the first vote in favour of that motion at the United Nations, a decision I remain unshakably proud of. That environment that allowed Jewish Australians to lead full, contributing lives—largely unmolested by the antisemitism in other parts of the world—has been under serious threat since the massacre on 7 October 2023.

I had the privilege of representing the government at large gatherings of the Jewish community in the eastern suburbs of Sydney—first of all, only a matter of two or three days after the massacre, and then on the 12-month anniversary of the massacre. I remember the former deputy prime minister, the member for Riverina, being there. I was there speaking on behalf of the government with then leader of the opposition Peter Dutton and NSW Premier Chris Minns, and with thousands of members of those communities, on those two occasions. Talking to that community, the sense of terror—obviously for loved ones back in Israel, but also the sense of terror here in Australia—and the sense that something had changed in a step-change way was really quite profoundly moving to me and, I imagine, to others who were at those events.

It was a spike in antisemitism that's continued since 7 October 2023. It started in the hours of that massacre. It really came from an unholy collection of disparate groups coming together spewing hate: the open chanting of phrases on our streets that urged the destruction of the only Jewish state on the planet; the intimidation of Jewish students on campus; and so much more exclusion and discrimination right throughout civic, commercial, cultural and academic life, as well as in a sector I most deal with—the health sector.

Only Jewish parents, as we've heard through so many contributions, have to watch their children walk into childcare centres or walk into schools surrounded by twelve-foot fences with security guards. Only Jewish aged-care facilities—and this is not widely known—have had to hire security guards 24/7 on police advice because of the threats of violence directed towards aged-care facilities: violence directed towards older Jewish Australians, many of them Holocaust survivors, in a facility for the final months of their life. And now, of course, there is the Bondi terror attack, the most horrific and shocking manifestation of antisemitism our country has ever seen.

I acknowledge the deep pain and the fear this is causing Jewish Australians, and I acknowledge the trauma and anxiety gripping the Jewish community and the wider Bondi community—something that, in our health portfolio, we have been working on very closely with NSW Health. Our government, along with NSW Health, have moved quickly to deliver immediate mental health supports on the ground and across Jewish communities right across Australia because we know that the trauma is deep and we know from other traumatic events—some of them natural disasters or attacks like this—that the tail of mental distress is a long one that governments are going to need to provide support for.

Australia will never forget this awful day, the lives that were so cruelly taken or the heroism shown by so many first responders and people in the health sector. We stand with the Jewish community and with every family member and friend who has been touched by this tragedy. To those grieving, I offer my deepest condolences. Australia mourns with you.

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