Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

When the shooting started, Jessy knew exactly what it was. Jessy is a friend of mine and a dear friend of my wife's. Our kids are about the same age. She was there on that awful day with her little girl, Shemi. They were there to get sufganiyot—jam doughnuts—for Shemi and for her big brother, Lev. In that split second, Jessy did what any parent would do. She picked up her little girl and she ran. She hid, and she jumped on top of Shemi. She held her so tight she was worried that Shemi had stopped breathing. She remembers hearing the shots getting closer, the bullets hitting people near her and the spray of blood as it landed on her. And then it stopped. She ran again, this time until she found her husband, Nadav, and her son, Lev, who'd raced to the beach desperately looking for them. In Shemi's little hand was her big brother's doughnut—or what was left of it.

I want to believe that what happened that day in December wasn't Australia. But the truth is it was. In the most Australian of places, 15 Australians had everything taken from them, one of them a little girl with the most Australian name possible. All of them were victims of an unfathomable hate. They were hunted down and killed because they're Jewish—murdered because they're Jewish. In the short time that I have, I offer my deepest condolences to everyone who loved them and who must still be drowning in their own grief. I also thank everybody who ran towards the danger that day and whose actions that day and in the days after must have saved the lives of dozens more people—people like Jessy and Shemi.

I want the House today to hear their voices. In the week after, Shemi came to her mum and asked her, 'Can a kid die?' She'd found out about Matilda. As they walked home one night from the Bondi Pavilion, she said to her mum, 'So I could have been a photo, too, like Matilda, and you would have had to put a rock and a flower for me.' Jessy's helping her little girl to understand all of this.

I told Jessy that I was going to speak today and that I wanted to tell her story and Shemi's story. She's written something for all of us. This is it:

My name is Jessica Chapnik Kahn. My five-year-old daughter and I are survivors of the Hanukah Bondi Beach massacre.

On Sunday 14 December, 2025, my daughter and I ran, along with hundreds of children and adults. We threw ourselves to the ground. We covered our children with our bodies. And as the gunshots came closer and closer, as flying bits of flesh and bones sprayed over us, there was no mistaking it. This was a massacre.

I realised I was no longer preparing to survive. I was preparing for how I wanted my daughter and I to die. I leaned into her ear and spoke the only words that came to me.

"Go inside yourself, my darling. Go to your heart, where all the love is. Stay there, my baby; stay there."

I speak to you today as someone changed. I am still returning from that concrete deathbed, still learning how to walk familiar streets with unfamiliar fear. And I speak as someone who has experienced a place that no horror, no terror, no gunmen could steal from us.

As we return to our lives, our beliefs, our ambitions, I ask myself and I ask you: What would heart have us do? What would heart have you do with your position, your power, your politics, your laws? What would heart have us do with our anger?

Bondi has shown us what anger does when it is heartless. What would heart have us do at such a time as this?

Many brave things happened at Bondi that day. But right now, this moment feels like the very new brave part. Much of this work is entrusted to you. Let your actions be guided by conscience, care, and compassion.

Let your leadership honour life, safety, and belonging. Let your decisions reflect the value you place on the innocence of our children. Let your relationships with one another be rooted in respect, so that we too may treat others the same way. Let your leadership be rooted in humanity.

If heart and horror can coexist, heart can guide politics too.

It has come at a terrible, terrible cost, but may we now have the courage to carve a new path of heart.

May we create the country we've always dreamed of, a country where all people live and breathe in peace. It is not impossible. Heart can take us there. Lead us with heart. Stay there. Stay there. Stay there.

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