Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme) Share this | Hansard source

():  There has been a dark and heavy cloud over Sydney this summer, as our city tries make sense of an act of hate. The Jewish community is in mourning. Families have spent what should be a time of rest and communion with an empty chair at the table. The whole of Australia grieves with them and for them. Many Sydneysiders will carry the physical and the mental scars of that evening for a lifetime.

On 14 December, a father and son left an Islamic State flag on the windshield of their car and spent the next seven minutes committing a terrible and hateful act of violence. This crime ripped 15 people away from their families and their community—15 people peacefully gathered to celebrate their community and to observe their faith.

The events at Bondi were unimaginable for most Australians, but sadly for our Jewish community they were not. Bondi was the realisation of some of their worst fears. A community that has a long history of persecution understood exactly what this was: Jewish families targeted with violence for being Jewish and for practising their faith.

I was invited to Chabad of Bondi on the evening of 15 December for the lighting of the second candle. Many of the wounded were still in the hospital and we were still counting the dead. It was humbling and heartbreaking to be with the Jewish community in the depths of fresh grief, another tragedy for a people who have become wearily familiar with them, many so resilient and so generous. Rebecca Solnit wrote this: 'Disaster lays bare the foundations of a society, what matters, what holds and what breaks. It is also an extraordinary moment when we glimpse who else we might be and what else our society could be, when the ordinary order of things break down and people rise to the occasion in unanticipated, beautiful and profoundly social ways.'

Today it is worth remembering what held in Bondi during that attack. Ordinary people risked themselves to challenge the shooters and help those around them. Lifeguards and bystanders shepherded people to safety and treated the wounded. Police and emergency services personnel rushed toward danger. In the days after, a spontaneous memorial at the pavilion offered kindness and love. There were record queues outside blood banks as people rolled up their sleeves to do what they could. The broader community without hesitation wrapped their arms around Jewish Australia, and we heard a full-throated affirmation of important ideas that serve us well as a people and as a democracy that an attack on a peaceful religious gathering offends every value we possess, that an attack against our Jewish community is an attack against all Australians, that everyone deserves to feel safe and to be safe and that antisemitism is unacceptable to any of us.

In the days and weeks after the event, the beach reopened. The overflowing memorial of flowers was cleared away so that the tributes offered by ordinary Australians could be properly preserved. But it is easier to restore a physical space than it is to restore and repair a community. This violence casts a long shadow. What does it mean for an antisemitic attack to happen in Australia? We have serious questions to reckon with. The inquiries over the course of this year will help us grapple with them and there will be important conversations along the way. As leaders in this place, we all have a responsibility to conduct these conversations with the gravity and with the seriousness that they deserve.

We have an obligation to seek out the opportunities to confront hard truths, but we also have an obligation to seek out the opportunities to help our communities heal. I found my thoughts returning to the volunteers at the Sydney Jewish Museum, many of whom are Holocaust survivors. They have chosen to dedicate so much of themselves to educating generations about the Shoah and to the message, 'Never again'. There is much to learn from a community that time and time again has chosen to combat prejudice and violence through compassion and connection and to embody the idea of mitzvah. I join with every Australian in offering love to those families who are grieving and whose loss will endure. I offer my most sincere condolences.