Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Dan Elkayam, Rabbi Eli Schlanger, Marika Pogany, Rabbi Yaakov Levitan, Alex Kleytman, Reuven Morrison, Peter Meagher, Tibor Weitzen, Boris Gurman, Sofia Gurman, Edith Brutman, Boris Tetleroyd, Adam Smyth, Tania Tretiak and 10-year-old Matilda. I stand in the parliament of our nation, the centre of democracy, and I grieve for you.

I associate myself with the remarks of my colleagues, who have sought to capture your lives of goodness in their contributions to this condolence motion today. I grieve for the days you had yet to live, for the plans you had made that will not come to pass and for the loss of your profoundly unique contributions to the lives of all those who knew you. I acknowledge the deep and abiding grief of all those who loved you and lost you on 14 December 2025—24 Kislev 5786, in the Hebrew calendar.

I mourn your loss. I'm mourn with you as a mother, as a sister, as a daughter and as a longstanding friend of the Jewish people. I mourn with you as a person blessed with my own Catholic faith, which I have practised publicly with little resistance or derision, and I see your suffering as a Jewish community that has already, for years and years, had to farewell your children at fortified school gates, watched over by guards with guns protecting you and your family as you attend faith based schools. I mourn with you as an Australian of goodwill, and I bring to you the many condolences of all who have shed tears for you, all who have prayed for you and all who, like me, continue to grieve with and for you. What happened in Bondi was a day that can never be undone, a day of shame forever now part of our nation's story, a day when the whole world saw our collective failure and a day that impels us to act in unison and move our country towards a more enduring and secure internal peace. But I fear we will fall short.

I have a long and strong association with the Jewish community. As Chair of the Parliamentary Friendship Group of Israel, I've worked closely with community leaders and attended countless events over many years. In 2023, I participated in a Chabad organised Hanukkah lighting in the city of Sydney, my home city. I've invited October 7 hostages and their loved ones to come to parliament and speak to leaders of our country. Just two weeks before 14 December, I attended an Executive Council of Australia Jewry event with leaders of the Jewish diaspora communities from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada and Argentina alongside Assistant Minister Matt Thistlethwaite and Ms Allegra Spender to discuss the rise in antisemitism.

In June 2024, I spoke in this parliament about how the atrocities of October 7 unleashed hatred across the world. Perversely, much of that was directed at Jews. In Australia, I said, we witnessed a change from a steady uptick to a significant surge in antisemitism. That surge has come from across the spectrum, with radical elements of society feeling emboldened. We've seen Nazis march in Spring Street in Melbourne and Macquarie Street in Sydney, carrying signs calling to abolish the Jewish lobby. Jewish businesses have been targeted with antisemitic graffiti, including red triangles. Synagogues have been set alight. Homes in Jewish neighbourhoods have been attacked by agents linked to the Iranian regime and the terrorist listed Iranian revolutionary guard corps. Hate preachers have espoused vile filth that may have ultimately contributed to the Islamic state radicalisation of the two gunmen responsible for this atrocity.

This requires antivilification legislation in Australia. I say to all in this place and those outside who baulked at taking seriously this historical moment to deliver responsible antivilification legislation: if not now, then when? When? When will it be time? The report of the antisemitism envoy, Jillian Segal, has been widely accepted. She called for antivilification laws. They have been widely accepted, at least in word. But that antivilification legislation element of what has been advanced by this Labor government has died in the days since the release of the draft legislation. But mark my words. It will be needed.

On Sunday 14 December in our beloved homeland, Australia, families were destroyed by political hate, by antisemitic hate and by hate engendered, fed and nurtured within our own society, sometimes by actions that were overt and sometimes, to our enduring shame, by silence. We will need antivilification laws because the reality that I have just described has not changed. We each in this place must consider what our role is in this when we knew our gun laws were failing, when were worried that our schools and universities were not modelling the democratic ideas of tolerance and acceptance, when our national conversations were distorted to allow foreign conflicts to be used to target our fellow Australians and when we saw increasing antisemitism but didn't do everything possible to stamp out that raging, hateful fire.

Senators in this place have spoken of moral courage. This was the week to show some of that. A child of 10 shed blood on our shores and is lost forever, a man who survived the Holocaust was gunned down at Bondi Beach, and 13 other decent Aussies—13 other fellow citizens of this nation—had their lives taken by two evil men with guns and bullets in their hands and a lifetime of hatred for Jewish people in their hearts. We saw what hate for a particular group of people can do and we can never turn away from the image from Sunday 14 December 2025 in Sydney. That river of hate, I am sad to say, is not yet stemmed. This is our task. Today, we are where we are and we know what we know, and now the question will be for how much longer will we fail to name and properly address vilification?

Will we continue to play politics as usual, full of smart and cynical gamesmanship and hollow platitudes? Will we excuse ourselves from action today and tomorrow and every day that follows until the antisemitic hate against our Jewish brothers and sisters is put to rest or will we turn away? Will we choose a false freedom-of-speech agenda that emboldens the angry and silences the good people of this nation? Freedom to speak cannot be allowed an unjustifiable victory over freedom to live. If we do that, my fellow senators and my fellow Australians, we will see hate continue to flow in our streets, and I'm pretty sure that's not what we really want. It's certainly not what we want to be responsible for.

Here in this chamber, my fellow senators, we have the fate of the nation in our hands. We have the lives of our fellow Jewish Australians in our hands as surely as those who held Jewish bodies in their arms that afternoon at Bondi did. I say to every Australian of goodwill do not offer performative grief, do not give shallow condolence, and do not offer platitudes to the families in this building today who are genuinely grieving. Do not dishonour their profound loss. It's time to move past the division and the cynicism. Today, in the shadow of the 15 deaths at Bondi, we cannot continue to posture for political advancement by pretending to wish for peace while fuelling unnecessary division for personal or professional gain. The nation needs more from this chamber than business as usual and its attendant performances. This, my fellow senators, is the moment to lift our sights and to lift our game. The coming days will reveal us utterly.

To us falls the task to legislate for the reality of our times and for the physical safety of our people. We must ensure that laws are firstly adequate and then that they're enforced. We're tasked in this place to ensure that agencies are properly resourced and we're tasked to ensure that extremist networks, both foreign and domestic, are disrupted before hate turns to murder. We must confront disinformation and radicalisation wherever it spreads, particularly online. And we—all of us, each and every one of us in this place and each and every Australian of goodwill—must recommit ourselves to education and life in the public place that teaches and hears history honestly and enlivens without qualification the core values that give life to our democracy.

Hanukkah is a story about how light pushed back against overwhelming darkness. On 14 December, darkness intruded violently into that story. But the Jewish people are showing us the way and the light. To the families who lost loved ones, to the wounded, to the Jewish community across Australia, I am so sorry that you've had to experience this awful tragedy. Your collective spirit means you truly feel every loss. And I thank every person who responded with courage and generosity to our fellow citizens on the beach that afternoon in Bondi and on the days that have followed.

I want to thank the Jewish community, particularly the Jewish women with whom I gathered one week on from that atrocity. Thank you for sharing your capacity to grieve. Thank you for creating liturgical moments for us to share that grief with you.

'Never again' is not a slogan; it is a duty, and we must prove through our actions that we are worthy of saying it. May the memory of the 15 lives taken in Bondi on 14 December 2025 be a blessing.