Julian Leeser (Berowra, Liberal Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

Yesterday I stood here and said that the Bondi terrorist attack represented a moment of choice—a choice about the type of country we are and the type of people we want to be, a choice about whether we stay in the political cul-de-sac that we've been in for over 800 days or, instead, tackle the sources and causes of antisemitism in this country, a choice about whether to continue to treat antisemitism as just another political issue or to treat it as the moral and cultural problem it is, a choice made by people in this place about whether to drag heels or to deal with the issue with priority, alacrity and zealous determination, a choice by each member of this place about whether to change. The sad reality is that if we don't change then Bondi won't have changed anything.

Until recently Australia had an exceptional and unique story to tell about its Jewish community. Jews have been part of the story of Australia since the First Fleet. Australia came to be seen as a unique place good to the Jews. In turn, Jewish Australians have contributed to their country—famous names, like Monash, Isaacs, Lowy and Jessica Fox, and everyday people, with acts of service and gratitude that come from people living lives of peace and security. The grief from Bondi is twofold: it's not just the innocence lost, the families broken and the children scared and afraid; it's also the loss of the precious truth that Australia is good to Jews and the bitter sense that Bondi was predictable—we were warned.

There were 800 days of warning signs between October 7 and 14 December, starting on 8 October in Sydney with the public rally where the day of kidnapping, murder, rape and torture of Jews was called 'a day of pride' and 'a day of victory', and exemplified in the occupation of the opera house the next day with chants of 'gas the Jews'; in the incidents where people drove around Melbourne looking for Jews to kill; in the countless acts of graffiti in our capital cities calling for Jews to be gassed and murdered; in the encampments at our universities where Jewish students and staff were harassed; in the endless week-after-week protests in our cities calling for the destruction of Israel and occupying our landmarks; in the sophistry and lies of the academic and intellectual class, who justified abuse by saying that it wasn't antisemitism but anti-Zionism and that they weren't enabling antisemitism but just arguing for peace; in the doxxing and deplatforming of Jewish artists and creatives; in the smashing of Jewish shops and businesses; in the physical assaults on identifiably Jewish people; in the firebombing of cars; in the attacks on the synagogues at East Melbourne, Caulfield, Perth, Hobart, Newtown and Allawah; and, of course, in the firebombing of the Adass Israel synagogue. The Jewish community has seen this movie before, and we know how it ends. It ends in murder at Bondi after 800 days of failure.

Antisemitism is an old hatred that wears different masks. First it was about religion. Then it was about race. Now it is about the Jewish state. But the hatred is always the same, and the result is always the same. And now that hatred has come here, to our country.

The government has been warned about these things by its own antisemitism envoy, whose report was untouched for six months. We know that antisemitism is found in three groups—among Neo-Nazis who revel in the atrocities of the Holocaust, in the radical Islamists who take pride in October 7, and in the cultural left who foster and enable breeding grounds for hatred in our writers festivals, in artistic circles, on university campuses and in the so-called progressive organisations usually pretending to be about Zionism but mixed in with platitudes about human rights.

As I said, Bondi represents a moment of choice, and the choice the Liberal Party makes this morning, as we have always done, is to stand with the Jewish community and law-abiding Australians. It's the choice to be constructive, to pass this legislation as a step in the right direction. That's the choice the Liberal Party has made. But the choice for the government of the day does not end today. The choice for the Albanese government is in the implementation. The test for the government is how it uses these new laws. It must expel or jail hate preachers. It must list Hizb ut-Tahrir and its prayer halls. It must protect our borders from radical Islamists and the insidious propagandists who use Jews as a way of attacking Australia. It's a choice that doesn't end with these laws. The government must root out antisemitism from our schools, from academia and the universities, from the arts, from the trade union movement and from its own political base. Unless we do that, Bondi will not be the end of the story; it will be the midpoint of a story that gets so much worse.

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