James Paterson (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Hansard source

Every Australian will remember where they were when they first heard about Bondi, just like every American can tell you where they were on 9/11, just like every Israeli can remember where they were on 7 October. I was on the way to the Melbourne Chanukah event when the news first started filtering in. I'd been invited to help light the Hanukkiah to mark the first night of Hanukkah, as I've done for many years since I was first elected to the Senate. It is a beautiful, joyous event. It's always had a security presence and particularly so in the last two years, but it's remained a friendly, welcoming celebration where non-Jews like me are embraced as friends of the community. There's a religious side to it, but it's also a time when families in the community get together to mark the end of year and beginning of the holidays with face painting, rides, food and lollies. For the first time in two years many in the Australian Jewish community were beginning to feel cautiously optimistic. Some felt that the worst was surely behind them, that life was slowly returning to normal. They were still apprehensive about their security and safety but, with the return of the hostages and a ceasefire in Gaza, they hoped that things would gradually get better.

That sense of safety and security was totally shattered at Bondi. It is our solemn task now to rebuild it. This was an attack on the Jewish community first and foremost. The terrorists did not choose their location, their targets or their timing by accident. They were motivated by an Islamist ideology that at its core is about the hatred of Jews. But it was also an attack on Australia, on our way of life and on our values, and unless we recognise this and respond to it as the national civilisational crisis that it is, it will change our country forever, because what starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews. As Jonathan Freedland has argued, Jews are society's canary in the coalmine. Attacks on the Jewish community are not just morally repugnant in their own right; they are also a warning to everyone, because the enemy of Jews is also the enemy of Western civilisation. If a society becomes unsafe for Jews, it will very soon become unsafe for all of us. I don't want to live in a country that is not safe for my Jewish friends, and I don't want to see what we become if we allow that to happen.

Today we are dangerously close to that point. This debate today in the Senate is an important opportunity for us to express our deepest condolences to the victims, to their families and to the Jewish community for what they have suffered; to recognise the heroes like Ahmed al-Ahmed, Reuven Morrison and Boris and Sofia Gurman, who put themselves in danger selflessly to protect others; and to mourn this national tragedy. But they all also deserve much more than that. They deserve honesty, they deserve the truth, and they deserve action.

Over the last two years, as antisemitism has exploded in this country, there have been many well-meaning but, frankly, hollow things said about it—like, for example, 'Antisemitism has no place in Australia,' or, 'This is not who we are,' or even, 'We won't let it find a foothold here.' I wish that were true, but, sadly, we know it is not. There has been a place for antisemitism in this country over the last two years. It is who some of us are, and it has been allowed to gain much more than just a foothold in Australia. Until we recognise that, we will be utterly hopeless in confronting and solving this problem.

Antisemitism is an ancient hatred. It is the oldest and deepest sickness of humanity, and it has been a feature at the margins of Australian life throughout our history. But it has been turbocharged and emboldened in this country over the last two years in a way we have never seen before. A murderous Islamist ideology and other dangerous forms of antisemitism, like Neo-Nazism, have been empowered and inspired by events overseas and a permissive environment at home to spread their toxic ideas.

Jews who can trace their ancestors back to the First Fleet and others who sought and achieved refuge here after the Holocaust say that they have never felt less safe or less welcome in this country than they do today. Shabbat dinner-table conversations about leaving Australia, which have been had in many Jewish families over the last two years, have resumed. Of the many tragedies of Bondi, one of the worst is that many in the Jewish community were not surprised. Shocked? Yes, but not surprised. It is the culmination of their worst fears over the last two years. It is what many had warned would happen if antisemitism continued to be allowed to fester.

In a perverse and terrible way, they feel vindicated—vindicated and outraged that their warnings weren't heeded, that greater action was not taken, that the cancer of antisemitism wasn't recognised as the emergency that it was from the very start. They are angry that other terrible events, like the firebombing of the Adass Israel synagogue in Melbourne, which we now know was an act of state sponsored terror by the Islamic Republic of Iran, weren't a sufficient wake-up call for our country to take this seriously. They are furious that their reasonable requests that the law should be enforced, that there should be consequences for actions, that the time for platitudes was over have been ignored. They are exhausted that, even after Bondi, while grieving our worst-ever terrorist atrocity, they had to fight so hard and so long to get the bare minimum that they and every Australian deserve: a proper national inquiry to get to the bottom of not just this tragedy but everything which has led us to this moment.

The debate about whether or not to have a royal commission into Bondi was unedifying. But one good thing did come out of it. The groundswell of non-Jewish Australians standing up and demanding action was heartening and, frankly, overdue, because, at many points over the last two years, whether at the opera house, the harbour bridge or in our cities on most weekends, where violence was incited against our fellow Jewish Australians and terrorism was glorified, many Jews felt alone and abandoned. After Bondi, Australians from all walks of life said, 'Enough is enough.' In their thousands, prominent Australians from the law, the business community, sport, medicine, religious leaders and many other professions rallied in support of the Jewish community. Now we must harness this goodwill into action—action from this parliament, action from the government and action from our businesses, our universities, our arts and cultural institutions, and our sporting codes.

All of us have a responsibility to stop tolerating the intolerable. We owe that to the victims and the families of Bondi, and we owe that to ourselves, because nothing less than our national character is at stake.