Slade Brockman (WA, Deputy-President) Share this | Hansard source

Things stick with you in this job, things that you see many years before. They come back to you. I remember very vividly going to the Carmel School in Perth, a Jewish school, many years before October 7, many years before 14 December. The thing that struck me about that visit, along with that most remarkable performance of the Righteous Among the Nations ceremony, where they honour a non-Jew for saving Jews during the Holocaust, was that out the front of that school there were security and police cars. I asked if they were there because of the event on that day and I was told, 'No; they were there as a matter of course to protect the children, to protect the staff.'

Over the last days, as we listened to the testimony at the royal commission into antisemitism, memory of that event came flooding back to me. We heard of the fears of children presented to that royal commission, fears that the events at Bondi on 14 December will happen again. We heard about the bullying in the schools, bullying that is not just verbal but that extends to physical violence—physical violence, for example, against a 13-year-old boy.