Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Regional Health) Share this | Hansard source

Sunday 14 December 2025 will go down as a day of tragedy and infamy for our nation. It was a day when thousands of people who were peacefully and gracefully celebrating the festival of Hanukkah were attacked—attacked for being Jewish. Fifteen of them—not them, but fifteen of us—were killed. It's hard to find words to describe how despicable, cowardly and evil this act and the people who perpetrated it are. Aussies at a beach, embracing faith—epitomised by Matilda, a 10-year-old with so much good in her, so much potential and with so much to offer our community—were cut down by hatred and an ideology with nothing to offer. The Jewish community has got a proud history in my electorate, in Shepparton and in the Goulburn Valley. As refugees and migrants coming over many years, they've set up the fruit farms, the dairy farms and—most famously—the packing technologies that drove those industries forward. There was a synagogue; it's no longer there, but there's a memorial stone on Poplar Avenue in Shepparton where the synagogue was. After the terrible events in Bondi, the Shepparton Interfaith Network, a group of all faiths—Sikhs, Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Jewish people—all gathered for a candlelight vigil and to talk about the way that faiths have been able to exist together in the Goulburn Valley in a peaceful way. There was no radicalisation, just faith in a culture that says, 'We respect your right to your faith as long as you respect ours.' It's a culture that's eroding in parts of Australia.

So where to from here? What are the norms in our society, and what do we want them to be? Do we have the courage to call out the antisemitism in our nation—wherever it resides? Examples of where it resides were articulated so well earlier today by the Member for Berowra. A precious part of our Australian community was attacked in December, and we need to have their backs and give them the support they need. My heart goes out to those whose lives were cut short and the families who grieve. I also give thanks, from a grateful nation, to the amazing heroes who intervened and the first responders who went running towards those people who were injured and subsequently died, many of them, at Bondi that day. We saw the best of Australia in them.

Australia will never be the same. This is an absolute tragedy. It is critical for us, as a parliament and as a nation, to look inside ourselves and not just make legislative change—that we'll debate, as we do in this place—but embrace the more challenging question of cultural change. It is the cultural change that we need, to right the ship that is Australia at the moment. It's going to take difficult conversations, it's going to take honest conversations, and it's going to take us all looking inside ourselves to ask what this nation is, what we want it to be, and why we have drifted to a point where something like this can happen in such an iconic place in our nation. We owe that to the victims, to their families and to our beautiful country.

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