The Bondi murders
The “royal” commission: too narrow and divisive.
There is a case for thorough examination of factors leading to the Bondi murders, but a commission narrowly focussed on antisemitism ignores the broader context of bigotry and racism, and risks promoting Jewish exceptionalism.
There was strong but far from universal pressure for the Commonwealth to institute a “royal” commission into the Bondi murders, and there was a (generally unstated) assumption that that it should be focussed on antisemitism.
Former Labor Members of Parliament and prominent sportspeople became the latest groups calling for a “Commonwealth Royal Commission into Antisemitism and the events that led to and enabled the terrorist attack at Bondi beach” (former MPs) and a “Commonwealth royal commission into antisemitism, radicalisation and the events leading up to the Bondi massacre” (sportspeople). Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald Natassia Chrysanthos described how their call followed similar calls from businesspeople, from the Catholic Bishops Conference, and from judges and barristers.
A Resolve poll taken shortly after the murders found that 48 percent of Australians supported holding a royal commission into antisemitism, and News Corp papers report a later poll showing that 54 percent of respondents were in favour of a royal commission. It is not clear from these polls whether respondents wanted a Commonwealth commission as well as the already committed New South Wales commission, but the general (and unquestioned) assumptions were that it should be a Commonwelth commission and that it should be directed at antisemitism.
The Commonwealth government has yielded to this pressure, announcing a commission with terms of reference clearly directing the Commissioner, Virginia Bell, to focus on antisemitism. Three of the four terms of reference, which could have been drafted to refer to the general afflictions of religious bigotry and racism, are specifically confined to antisemitism. They refer to the “security, physical and mental health” of Jewish Australians rather than any groups who may also be living in fear because of their ethnicity or religion. They call for attention to security for Jewish “places of worship, major sites, educational and cultural facilities, public events and community leaders”.
Only the fourth term of reference gives the commissioner some leeway to broaden her scope to make recommendations “that would contribute to strengthening social cohesion in Australia and countering the spread of ideologically and religiously motivated extremism in Australia ”.
Fortunately the terms of reference do not try to define antisemitism. Commissioner Bell should be able to ensure that criticism of the Israeli government and support for Palestinians is not regarded as antisemitism.
Prime mninister Albanese has been variously accused of “backflippimg” and of procrastinating – the usual accusations when journalists have nothing useful to say. The real problem, which he is loath to admit, is that he had raised the expectation that he would implement the recommendations of the Special Envoy to combat Antisemitism (Jillian Segal), whose proposals carried serious implications for the independence of universities and freedom of political expression. Had he publicly rejected those recommendations before the Bondi murders he would have been in a stronger position to draft more inclusive terms of reference for the commission. Also, after the murders the Coalition opposition opportunistically endorsed the Envoy's recommendations as its own policy.
The government’s original mistake was to see racism and religious-based hatred in terms of specific groups – Jews, Muslims, and First Nations Australians – rather than as problems with common roots and common manifestations. This view was reinforced by the presence of strong faith-based lobbies.
So we now have a commission concerned specifically with antisemitism, which seems to exclude the resurgence of Nazism, and racism generally. Speaking on ABC Radio National PM Geoffrey Watson of the Centre for Public Integrity warned about rushing into a commission:
I think it’s too early. I would like to know more about the problem rather than conduct a royal commission on the basis of what we know now. I think if we look at it in terms of the attack which was obviously dreadful but it riles up emotions. We may be looking at this problem the wrong way. If you ask me the royal commission should be well thought through, deferred, and taken up when we can bring a cool solution to it, not now, not in rage.
He went on to state that a focus on antisemitism would be leaving out other key components of the attack:
I fear that because of Bondi we may be looking too narrowly and focussing on antisemitism, when obviously the bigger problem is radicalization, discrimination, racism, which are far larger issues and if we are going to conquer the problems and make this a more civilized society we should be looking more broadly at these three issues.
The Bondi murders were clearly directed at Jews, but they come only five years after a radicalized Australian murdered 51 Muslims in Christchurch. But there has been hardly a mention of this terrorism. There has been credible speculation that the killers were influenced by the ideology of Islamic State. If so, it should be noted that IS is murderously intolerant of any belief system apart from its own authoritarian, misogynistic, theocratic far right ideology. Most of its victims have been Muslims: it is not specifically antisemitic because to IS Jews are simply another category of infidels.
In the days since the Bondi murders – a period in which Coalition and One Nation politicians were stoking flames of ethnic division – there has been ugly behaviour directed against Muslim Australians, described by Bilal Rauf, special adviser to the Australian National Imans Council.
Dismembered pigs have been thrown onto graves in a Muslim cemetery, Muslim women have been spat on and had their head covering ripped off, and anti-Islam graffiti has been painted on the walls of an Islamic college. The National Imams Council has reported a 200 percent increase in anti-Muslim hate incidents since the Bondi murders, and they report that people are now sleeping in mosques to protect against vandalism. A flyer has been circulated calling on Australians to gather at Cronulla Beach for a “bashing day”, to reenact the anti-Muslim attacks of 2005, and a man identifying himself as a “Muslim hater” has appeared in court accused of using TikTok to call for “wog” and “Middle East” bashing.
Even before the Bondi murders Australian Nazis were becoming more brazen. Since the Bondi murders groups calling for a White Australia have made their presence felt, in the form of White Australia flyers distributed in Newcastle and overwriting of multicultural posters with White Australia messages.
These incidents, although they are repulsive, are not yet murderous, but they have much in common with the antisemitic incidents that preceded the Bondi murders. In fact we could imagine a scenario where a commission on antisemitism is in progress and there is a serious attack on a mosque. It would be a politically awkward situation for all concerned.
Presumably in an attempt to justify a commission focussed on antisemitism, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry produced evidence of a huge escalation of Anti-Jewish incidents in 2023 and 2024, described and analyzed in a Conversation contribution by Matteo Vergani of Deakin University. But because of a loose definition of “antisemitism”[1] it’s probable that this data is influenced by instances of legitimate criticism of the Israeli government, which could be incorrectly classified as “antisemitism”. Elsewhere in this roundup attention is drawn to Australains’ strong disapproval (around 75 percent) of the way the Netanyahu government has conducted its response to the October 7 terrorist attacks in Israel, and our sympathy for Palestinians subject to an all-out revenge that does not distinguish between terrorists and innocent civilians. These expressions of disapproval have nothing to do with antisemitism.
The general evidence is that there is growing aggression against Muslims and Jews – as well as a rise in racist movements such as “White Australia” – but the commission‘s terms of reference are based on ignoring these other sources of hate and aggression, and an over-estimation of the scale of hate and aggression directed against Jewish Australians.
A detached consideration of risk would be more balanced, taking into account the fact that there are 800 000 Muslims in Australia, as compared with 100 000 Jews, 80 000 of whom are concentrated in Melbourne and Sydney. Unsurprisingly therefore the reports of antisemitism are similarly concentrated in just two states. There are many more Muslim places of worship and congregation – targets for terrorists – than there are for Jews.
That concentration in large cities has helped give Australia’s Jews a strong public voice. They are well represented among well-educated professional occupations, including the law and public service. They are therefore prominent among the ranks of the politically well-connected. Many carry family memories of the Holocaust – Alexander Kleytman, one of those murdered at Bondi, was himself a Holocaust survivor. It is understandable that they should have a strong voice, and it has been to Australia’s benefit that they have used it to raise our awareness of the conditions that led to the Holocaust.
But it is the government’s responsibility to protect all Australians, including those whose voice is weakest.
It’s become evident that in deciding to call a commission the government has paid particular attention to one particular group, The Executive Council for Australian Jewry, which presents itself as a unified voice for Jews in Australia. That may or not be so, but it is certainly not representative of all Australians who suffer discrimination, harassment and threats of violence because of their religion or ethnicity.
It seems to be an established pattern in the Albanese government to pay most attention to the most strident voices, even if they are not the most representative voices. We have seen this way of doing politics in gambling policy, in superannuation policy, and now in community safety policy. It’s become a reactive rather than a representative government.
Australia is a secular democracy, which should have no place for religious exceptionalism, singling out one religious group for special consideration. Although our Constitution (Section 116) essentially rules out religious exceptionalism, until the mixing of the great postwar migration Australian society was divided de-facto on sectarian lines. There were Christians (subdivided into Catholics and Protestants, including Anglicans), and there were Jews. Catholics had to be accommodated – there were too many of them to leave out. But Jews were definitely outsiders, excluded from high office and membership of exclusive clubs. Disgusting stories about Jews’ habits and morality could be traced to the oldest of European prejudices. (When I was ten years old I was assured by an Irish Catholic priest that Jews would and should go to hell because they rejected Jesus.)
Younger Australians have grown up in a post-sectarian country, and most older Australians who have lived through that transition don’t want to go back there, but do Antisemitism Envoy Segal and others demanding special consideration for Jews realize that they are advocating for a return to that era? Do they fully understand their own history – the history of the years leading up to the Holocaust, which was aided by a culture that set Jews aside from the rest of European society?
Simon Longstaff of the Ethics Centre suggested three processes that could be more effective than a royal commission. The first two processes – the New South Wales response and the Richardson Review, meeting specific and immediate needs – are already in train. He went on to suggest a third process:
The third need can be answered by a National Commission of Inquiry. Unlike a Royal Commission that has a defined legal form – and often seeks to find fault and punish wrongdoers – this Commission would be required to look at the deeper causes of which the Bondi Massacre is a treacherous and violent eruption. Those causes affect multiple communities – indeed, they are a cancer eating away at the soul of Australia. The Commission should have broad powers – but it should especially be enabled to convene individuals and groups from across the nation – to hear the stories of what is happening, the impact of hatred and what can be done to prevent this from metastasising into violence.
In my opinion, we should also put the lens on multiculturalism so that rather than merely celebrating the worthy characteristics of separate communities, we learn how to strengthen the bonds between them – and commit to doing so in practice.
Unfortunately Watson, Longstaff and others who tried to warn the government to take a cooler and more considered approach were ignored. The Albanese government is demonstrating once again how easily it buckles to noisy but unrepresentative media campaigns. Commissioner Bell has a challenging task in preventing Australia from turning back to an era of Jewish exceptionalism.
1. The Antisemitism Envoy Jillian Segal, and many who claim to speak for Australia’s 100 000 Jews (as if such a well-educated and diverse group would be bound to one view) use what is known as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. It is described, along with other definitions of antisemitism, in a website maintained by the Union for Reform Judaism. While the definition itself is specifically about hostility towards Jews, seven of the eleven examples used to support the definition relate to criticism of Israel. A similar analysis is provided by the Australian Palestine Advocacy Network. On ABC Breakfast Kenneth Stern, one of the lead drafters of the IHRA definition, warns against its use in the current situation, because it allows support for the Palestinian people and their claims for a Palestinian state to be classified as antisemitic. ↩
Who’s responsible? It’s natural that we should ask the question, but attempts to answer it are not enlightening.
Governments can try but there is no way they can ensure events such as the Bondi murders won’t happen.
Events like the Bondi murders elicit strong emotional responses, and one of the first is to ask “who is to blame?”
Writing in The Shot – Weaponising the Bondi tragedy is a betrayal of all our children – Ronni Salt answers that question:
The fault lies with the two gunmen: driven by toxic organised religion, online masculinity harvesters, ancient grievances and mental illness. Ugly and tangled. Stupid and confusing.
The question people want answered is “how could they have let this happen?”, where “they” refers to some authority figure who may have been careless, or even wilfully negligent. This idea of responsibility was present in calls for the Prime Minister and others to “apologise” for letting the Bondi murders happen.
Contrary to the impression carried by some headlines – even the SBS – no authority figure has apologised, nor should they have apologised. The Prime Minister acknowledged people’s grief and anger, and expressed his sorrow and sympathy, but did not apologise, when he said in a prepared statement:
Emotions were raw and a lot of people in the community are hurting and angry. And some of that anger was directed towards me, and I understand that. As Prime Minister, I feel the weight of responsibility for an atrocity that happened whilst I'm Prime Minister. And I'm sorry for what the Jewish community and our nation as a whole has experienced.
The closest we come to a specific claim of negligence is by an outfit known as the Community Security Group NSW, who said that they had warned the state police of the threat of Islamic extremism and lone-actor attacks on Chanukah by the Sea. We don’t know how specific that warning was, however: any half-aware observer knows that there is an ever-present threat from lone actors and that an open air gathering presents heightened risks.
Even though this warning was directed at the state police, the focus of accusations has been the Prime Minister, not the New South Wales Premier. It is also notable that some Jewish people, speaking to roving reporters, accused governments of neglecting their safety, while complaining about helicopters and armed police watching over schools and synagogues, as if governments have had nothing to do with their presence.
These are the understandable initial reactions of distressed people. We are not served well when journalists and politicians present these reactions as if they are considered arguments.
As pointed out elsewhere in this roundup, political opportunists have used the distress of the Bondi murders as an excuse to vent their hatred of the Albanese government.
In an interview on Murdoch media Penny Wong acknowledged that more could be done to combat hate speech and antisemitism, but that’s not a concession: it’s simply a statement made with the clarity of hindsight. By now we have learned that one of the shooters came to the attention of ASIO, that the New South Wales firearm licensing regime was concerned with the owner of firearms rather than the composition of households with firearms, and that the killers made a visit to Mindanao. When it’s all laid out so clearly it seems so obvious that police and security agencies have failed, but as former National Security Legislation Monitor Brett Walker points out, those pieces of evidence don’t easily come together. It is not possible for governments to provide complete protection against terrorism – or other criminal acts.
Walker can state that, but we can imagine the outcry, prompted by politicians with partisan agendas, if Albanese were to make such a statement.
The hard reality is that police and security agencies operate within a world of constrained resources, and they have to adopt a risk-management approach within those resources. They can (and do) push governments for more funding, but there are diminishing returns in allocating them more resources. In terms of saving lives, it may be more effective for governments to spend more on vaccination than on policing for example. Even within policing, we might wonder how many of those 3000 police assigned to manage crowds on Sydney’s New Year’s Eve were not attending domestic violence matters. Frank Chung, of news.com.au, has an article explaining ASIO’s difficulty in assigning priorities to dealing with various categories of risk – foreign governments, extremist religious movements, lone actors, political zealots. Every person added to attend to one category of risk means one less person assigned to some different category.
But as social psychologists know, we don’t take a rational approach to risk. Even people with comparatively libertarian dispositions expect that in certain aspects of their lives governments can offer 100 percent safety. We might expect governments to offer 100 percent safety against asbestos exposure, radioactive contamination – and terrorist attack – and to direct disproportionate resources to these risks, while leaving us exposed to higher risk of automobile accidents and infection in hospitals, even though there could be a net saving of lives through re-allocating resources.
Rather than taking the politically costly path of shattering the illusion that we can be given 100 percent protection, governments simply hope that when terrible events do occur they do so well clear of elections.
That’s why a sensible approach to Bondi is to attend to areas where public safety can be improved – refining firearms law and extending police use of rifles are good places to start, as are mechanisms that allow for more inter-agency cooperation.
Governments could go further, of course. East Germany’s Stasi provides a historical model in keeping files on 40 percent of its population. Such have been advances in computing that a 2025 Stasi could keep active profiles on 100 percent of the population. Is this the sort of Australia we want to live in? Perhaps that’s a question we can address in the “royal” commission – do we want to live in a surveillance state, with every citizen profiled and continuously tracked, or do we want to continue with our present framework, with agencies focussed on specific aspects of risk to the public?
Partisan politics: Coalition hotheads are legitimizing extremists.
The behaviour of the Netanyahu government and of Coalition politicians in the wake of the Bondi murders has been disgraceful.
In September last year Australia was one of 10 countries that voted in the United Nations to recognize Palestine as a sovereign nation, bringing the total number of UN countries recognizing Palestine to 157 out of 193. The other 9 countries newly recognizing Palestine at the time included France, the United Kingdom and Canada and six smaller European democracies. Other democracies that already recognized Palestine include Sweden, Norway, Ireland, Spain, Poland and India. Among the 38 countries that do not recognize Palestine are Germany, Finland, Denmark, Japan, New Zealand, Greece, Italy and Austria. And most notably the USA, which has used its membership of the Security Council to prevent Palestine from gaining full UN membership.
The issue does not follow established “left/right”, “democratic/authoritarian” or other common ideological divisions.
Whether people, or their governments, recognize Palestine, whether they sympathize with Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, whether they disapprove of the way the Israel government has reacted to the terrorist attacks of October 7, 2023, should have nothing to do with antisemitism in Australia or in any other country.
Unsurprisingly many Australians have views on the way Israel’s government has responded to the October 7 terrorism. Polls taken in 2025 show that a third of Australians support the government’s recognition of Palestine, while just under a third are opposed, and that there is little support for Israel’s continuing action in Gaza.
To put the issue into a less emotionally-charged context, is anyone arguing that those Australians who show disgust towards Putin’s behaviour, and at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, are prejudiced against Russians or against Eastern Orthodox Christians?
Those familiar with European politics would realize that some far-right political movements such as the Alternative für Deutschland and Hungary’s Orbán government, which show strong support for Netanyahu, are tapping into deep wells of European antisemitism in their domestic platforms and behaviour. A survey by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights finds that antisemitism incidents are traced to right-wing extremists and to people with “Christian extremist views”.
But following the Bondi murders, Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu jumped into the fray to associate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. To quote George Browning, writing in Pearls and Irritations:
Netanyahu has insisted that any criticism of Israel is antisemitic. In his rant against Australian leadership he included reference to the fact that Australia has sanctioned Ben Gvir and Smotrich, both of whom have declared the killing of Palestinians a patriotic duty for an Israeli citizen. This sanctioning he claims has contributed to the “disease’ of Australian antisemitism. He of course also included Australia’s recognition of statehood for Palestinians as a major cause.
To her credit, Sussan Ley’s initial statement, on the Sunday night after the murders was statesmanlike and fitting for such an occasion, concluding with the sentence:
I offer the Prime Minister and all Commonwealth and State agencies the Coalition’s full and unconditional support as both governments respond to this situation.
That was before right-wing thugs in that factious gathering known as “the Coalition” and their friends in One Nation saw the occasion as an opportunity to strike a blow at Labor, particularly federal Labor. Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce – “two of the most egregious opportunists ever to be elected to the Australian parliament” – to quote Julianne Schultz writing in The Guardian: Pauline and Barnaby turned tragedy into opportunism. They shattered the solemn dignity of the gathering at Bondi with their cry “Albo must go”, turning it into a hate session.
Not to be outdone by the Coalition's mates in One Nation, Former Prime Minister John Howard led the charge for the Coalition. In his article Howard has gone too far. His comments about Albanese tear us apart the Sydney Morning Herald’s Sean Carney wrote “The effect of his intervention was to give his assent to the Coalition to go full bore on politicising Bondi”.
That let loose the simple narrative, soon adopted by Ley, that because the murders occurred on Labor’s watch, Labor, particularly Federal Labor, is responsible for the murders. As Carney summarises the Coalition’s argument, Albanese “managed to spur it on by recognising the state of Palestine in a moment of heightened self-satisfaction”.
Don’t waste time trying to find the logic in this argument: there isn’t one. If, just three days after the murders, the Coalition is so certain about who’s to blame, why bother calling for a “royal” commission? In what way does the government’s recognition of Palestine increase the probability of an attack of this nature: surely it diminishes that risk? Was it not on John Howard’s watch, in 1998, when Sajid Akram arrived in Australia? The Coalition’s narrative, like so much that it tries to call “policy”, is based on raw emotion.
Had Sajid Akram lived he would surely be gaining satisfaction from knowing that while brave Australians, including Ahmed al Ahmed, cut short his murderous venture, there have been people all too ready to use the occasion as an opportunity to foment polarisation and division, providing the bonus dividend of political polarisation as the outcome of a terrorist attack.
It’s grubby politics. In an interview on Radio National Breakfast pollster Kos Samaras warns that politicians don’t like Australians using a crisis to engage in partisan politics. People seek some level of calmness and unity, rather than political points scoring. William Bowe’s Poll Bludger reports on a Resolve Strategic poll taken after the murders, that suggests that there has been a small (one percent) fall in two-party support for Labor, with its lead cut back to 54-46. and a rise in support for One Nation. It also shows that personal support for both Albanese and Ley has fallen sharply, confirming Samaras’s view.
The Coalition’s attack on Labor over the Bondi murders may not pay immediate political dividends, but it fits neatly with plans within its ranks, and among its One Nation allies, to make migration a major political issue. Many Australians believe that our high rate of taking in migrants is putting pressure on infrastructure and is inflating housing prices. In fact, when we look through the Covid effect, our rate of immigration is at about the level it was established by the previous Coalition government, and migration’s effect on housing prices is minor.
But there is a more sinister movement concerned with the composition of migration, represented by resurgent groups warning about “displacement” (“people of color” outnumbering “whites”) and calling for a restoration of White Australia. Understandably Liberal politicians, smarting from their loss of inner-urban electorates with high immigrant populations, don’t want to be directly associated with these movements. National Party and One National politicians, however, do not feel so constrained.
Within the Liberal Party Andrew Hastie has gone further than the usual dog whistle in an interview after the Bondi murders, where he stated, in relation to migration:
Numbers are one thing but I think who we bring into our country is really important. They have to sign up to Australian values, which are fundamentally Judeo-Christian values: equality, the rule of law, consent, democratic traditions – all those things are fundamentally Judeo-Christian.
The term “Judeo-Christian” is what linguists and philosophers call a “floating signifier”, because it’s a vague term meaning almost anything. The term “Judeo-Christian-Muslim” or simply “Abrahamic” may make more sense (but still be discriminatory against Hindus, Buddhists and others adhering to strong secular moralities), but the key message in the term “Judeo-Christian” is to exclude Muslims. It is as blatantly discriminatory as Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric.
As pointed out in a roundup last October – Andrew Hastie’s little corner of the world – Hastie repeatedly claims that migrants make us feel like “strangers in our own home”, possibly because he represents an electorate, Canning in Western Australia, that looks more like Australia of the 1960s than a rich multicultural Australia.
Does the Liberal Party want to follow Hastie into that territory? It’s territory already claimed by Australian Nazis, who just a month before the Bondi murders marched on New South Wales Parliament House, draping themselves in the Australian flag – a colonial-era symbol – resembling the similarly clad Coalition-aligned anti-immigration protesters.
There isn’t much ideological distance between the far right of Australia’s main parties and the Nazis – which is presumably why the Coalition, in all its talk about antisemitism, has refrained from mentioning Nazis chanting Hitler Youth slogans outside our nation’s oldest Parliament and displaying a banner “Abolish the Jewish Lobby”.
The other embarrassment for the Coalition’s far right is Ahmed al Ahmed’s intervention. Extraordinary behaviour was on display: Bondi’s surf lifesavers put themselves in the firing line while they attended to the injured, Boris and Sofia Borman paid with their lives when they tried to stop the attackers, and Ahmed al Ahmed survived with serious injuries. But some commentators have suggested that it was extraordinary that a Muslim should have intervened to save Jewish lives: that violates the far-right’s perverted Weltanschauung. Israeli journalists aligned with the Netanyahu government gave al Ahmed an Anglo name, and the Murdoch media reported claims that he was some outcast from the Muslim community.
In a post on the ABC website – What moral clarity looks like – Eli Alderman writes about this perception:
The coverage assumes that a Muslim risking his life to save Jews defies expectation. It treats decency as anomalous when it comes from a Muslim man. When goodness from Muslims becomes newsworthy because of who they are, not what they do, the media confesses how low its baseline expectations have fallen.
Muddled symbols and signals: no wonder we’re confused.
Pro-Palestinian protestors, the Albanese government, and some who claim to speak for the Australian Jewish community share responsibility for confusing support for Palestinians with antisemitism.
As noted in this post, in the public’s mind there has been inadequate distinction between antisemitism on the one hand and political opposition to the Netanyahu government and sympathy for the Palestine people on the other.
Some of this confusion has been deliberate, from supporters of the Netanyahu government and from Coalition politicians seeking to discredit Labor.
But there is another source of this confusion, the assumption that there is a common “left” or “progressive” agenda, which does not distinguish between antisemitism and support for Palestinians. It’s an assumption reinforced by poor communication.
Logically the assumption is rubbish. No-one claiming to be “left”, or “progressive” could possibly align themselves with movements such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and IS, or with the government of Iran. All are theocratic, authoritarian, brutal and misogynistic: they lie on the far right of the political spectrum. Discrimination against people for their religious views violates basic liberal principles.
At the same time it is quite understandable that people should be disgusted by the behaviour of the Israeli government. Most people would agree that Israel’s government should have reacted with lethal force to the October 7 atrocities. But the indiscriminate manner of that reaction has provoked understandable outrage, and whatever people want to call it, it has ghastly echoes of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto.
A survey by the Pew Research Center, taken in mid-2025, found that most Australians have negative views of Israel and of Netanyahu. The survey covering a mix of “developed” and other countries revealed that 74 percent of Australians have a negative view towards Israel and 72 percent of Australians have no or little confidence in Netanyahu. These results are generally in line with those from European countries, except for Hungary. The USA also stands out as showing more support for Israel and Netanyahu, but even their net support is negative. Older people and those who identify as on the “right ” stand out as showing support for Israel and Netanyahu. We can imagine how those with little respect for the truth could represent these findings as “Pew poll finds three-quarters of Australians are antisemitic”.
Mass protests are a natural way in which people express their views, particularly when their elected representatives fail to speak out, and Australians have turned out on the streets to show their support for the Palestinian people, with support from organizations such as the Jewish Council of Australia.
It is strange, however, that in spite of similarities between Russia’s campaign against Ukraine and Israel’s attacks on Palestinians – indiscriminate killing of civilians, illegal land claims, and Putin’s and Netanyahu’s shared contempt for the truth or the law – there have been few protests directed against Russia. There needs to be some explanation for this asymmetry in response. Is it that we think our government is already being tough enough on Russia? Is it that we don’t have a vocal pro-Putin local lobby in Australia, prompting us to react in response?
It is also strange that just two days after the October 7 atrocities there was a small but vocal pro-Palestinian rally on the steps of the Opera House. At that stage there was no evidence that the Israeli government would embark on a brutal and indiscriminate campaign against people living in the Gaza Strip. What was the demonstrators’ cause, and why did the gathering include people chanting “fuck the Jews”?
Mass protests are unsubtle forms of communication. Among the 100 000 who marched at the peak of the pro-Palestinian movements were those displaying symbols belonging to terrorists. Maybe some were sympathisers, but it is also possible that ill-informed enthusiasts operate on the Manichean moral principle that if Israel is in the wrong Israel’s enemies must be on the right.
That misconception is not only among some pro-Palestinian protestors. In the first responses to the Bondi murders many Jewish people and their sympathisers, were carrying Israeli flags, conveying the impression that the Australian Jewish community was lined up in support for the Netanyahu government.
The Albanese government got off to a terrible start in its second term of office when it dropped Mark Dreyfus and Ed Husic from the ministry, sending offensive messages to Jewish and Muslim Australians alike. Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald Chip Le Grand has an article Labor has an antisemitism problem. If this wasn’t clear before Bondi, it is now, describing Labor’s shortcomings. It’s not about specific instances of antisemitism; rather it’s about the impression that Labor has been dithering about the problem. It’s unfortunate, because historically there has been a good relationship between Labor and Jewish Australians.
In part it’s about the administrative style of the Albanese government, which is terrified of being seen to take strong and decisive action on any issue, preferring to be working quietly behind the scenes. In the case of antisemitism it put itself in a bind by allowing itself to be overly influenced by those voices among Jewish Australians who seek to conflate antisemitism with criticism of the Israeli government and support for Palestinians. In a post on Pearls and Irritations – A better symbol [a reference to Australians’ use of the Israeli flag] – Sarah Dowse writes:
It was inevitable that after the tragedy in Bondi calls for fighting antisemitism would escalate, too often for crass political aims. Aside from Netanyahu’s calumny, Albanese has been criticised for not implementing the recommendations of his special envoy for combatting antisemitism. Albanese’s mistake, however, was appointing Jillian Segal in the first place. A past president of the ECAJ {Executive Council of Australian Jewry] and ardent Israel supporter, her report recommends an even wider adoption of the contested IHRA definition of antisemitism, and a role for herself in a wholesale program of monitoring institutions and individuals for their compliance. Owing to Israeli propaganda, a wave of McCarthyism these past two and half years has swept people from their jobs, artists from their livelihoods and seen dissidents dragged into courts. It has succeeded in cowing our governments, media and institutions of learning, yet has done nothing to bring about genuine peace in the Middle East, or safety for Jews.
Firearms, hate speech and other initiatives: they’ll work if we go about them calmly.
The Bondi murders have prompted a raft of useful reforms, and more are foreshadowed.
As Jordan Baker puts it in the Sydney Morning Herald, Jihad Jack trained with terrorists. Then NSW gave him a gun permit.
Serious gaps in New South Wales firearms regulation soon became obvious, leading the Commonwealth to call a national cabinet meeting on these and other weaknesses in our firearms laws. Writing in The Conversation Suzanna Fry of the University of Queensland describes existing and foreshadowed firearms laws: Why can someone in suburban Sydney own 6 guns legally? New laws might change that.
True to form the National Party responded with the US National Rifle Association line – guns don’t kill people, people kill people – accusing the Commonwealth of using action on firearms as a means to distract the community from its (unspecified) neglect of growing antisemitism. Limiting farmers to 10 firearms and lesser mortals to 4 firearms brought forth the usual squeals, including from a farmer who claimed he needed more than 10 firearms because he needed a special purpose rifle for each animal he wanted to kill!
A Resolve poll taken soon after the Bondi murders, reported by Shane Wright in the Sydney Morning Herald, found that 76 percent of Australians supported tougher firearm laws. In fact 78 percent of Coalition voters were in favour of tougher laws. This seems to have dampened down the libertarian idiocy around firearm control.
A thorough history of firearms law, and data on firearms ownership, and on deaths from firearms, going back to 1987, is on Martyn Goddard’s Policy Post: Too many guns. It’s the familiar story of a pattern of tough controls following a tragedy – particularly the Port Arthur massacre in 1996 – followed by incremental slackening of controls. Even had the Bondi murders not occurred there should have been a tightening of firearms laws.
The Commonwealth’s main initiative straight after the murdershas been to establish a review into federal law enforcement and intelligence agenciesto be led by former Director-General of Security Dennis Richardson. This is to report to government by the end of April.
Albanese also announced a set of legislative measures to be considered:
… creating an aggravated offence for hate preaching advocating violence against protected groups; increasing penalties for existing offences for hate speech, advocating violence or property destruction against protected groups; making hate motivation a factor in sentencing for Commonwealth crimes, with options to limit this to online threats and harassment crimes as announced to expand to all Commonwealth crimes if required. We want to list prohibited hate organisations to make it a criminal offence to join, recruit or support an organisation listed by the Home Affairs Minister and the Attorney-General. Racial vilification and promoting racial supremacy [should be an] offence, so we're considering drafting options there. We want the power to cancel visas where the Home Affairs Minister suspects a person has engaged in vilification, hate speech promoting violence, displaying hate symbols, or associating with a terrorist organisation or prohibited hate group. We're looking at changes to hate symbols offences as well, and also looking at changes to the Customs Act to ban importing extremist material or hate symbols.
Note the mention of speech involving “racial vilification” and “racial supremacy”. It shouldn’t be necessary for the government of a civilized country to make such specific mention. But it is necessary, because in an extraordinary message to religious bigots and racists, Sussan Ley has said that hate speech legislation must focus solely on Islamic extremism and antisemitism. All other forms of extremism – the “Christian” extremism of the Biloela killers, the Nazi chants of white supremacists, the taunts of “poofter bashers” – deserve the protection of free speech, just so long as their bigotry is not Islamic.
It would be a dereliction of the government’s duty to legislate for all Australians if it were to do some “bipartisan” deal to accommodate the Coalition’s prejudices. There are enough decent people in both houses of Parliament who can write legislation to deal with hate speech in all its venomous forms, without conceding to the racists and religious bigots driving the Coalition’s agenda.
We don’t know, however, whether under pressure from sections of the Jewish lobby, the government will confine its consideration of hate speech to antisemitism, as is laid out in the terms of reference of the “royal” commission. Throughout the world Jews have provided strong voices in support of the oppressed and victimised: they remember that the Holocaust had many victims other than Jews. Hopefully those liberal voices within the Australian Jewish community will not be suppressed by those with other agendas, such as supporting the Netanyahu government, or currying support from the Coalition opposition.
In the same vein measures to shut down those who use places of worship to spread racism and hatred of those of other faiths are welcome. But their vile messages go way beyond antisemitism: they are aimed at undoing the work that has created Australia as a model of successful multiculturalism.
The most controversial action so far has been New South Wales legislation to allow the police to restrict public assembly in specific areas after a suspected terrorist incident. Constitutional expert Anne Twomey has a Guardian article describing the legislation, and challenges to them mounted by activist groups: The NSW parliament is once again rushing through anti-protest laws. Will they survive a court challenge? For those who care to go further into the issue Twomey has a post on her Constitutional Clarion podcast about further proposals by the New South Wales Government to outlaw certain slogans so far used in pro-Palestinian marches.
Based on Twomey’s cautious explanations, it’s hard to see all of the present and proposed New South Wales legislation surviving a High Court challenge. A political realist may say that is of no concern to the government, because even if its legislation fails, the government can say in response to illiberal voices that they have tried, and shift the blame on to Edmund Barton and Samuel Griffith for having drafted a constitution allowing for freedom of political expression.
Another state government initiative, by South Australia, is to fund education programs on the Holocaust and antisemitism. Research in the United States finds that young people who understand the Holocaust are less likely to harbor antisemitic sentiments than those who lack such exposure.
Such education should obviously include the horrors of the murders of 6 million Jews by the Einsatzgruppen and in the gas chambers of the Todeslager. It should also cover the social culture and the political path that led to the Holocaust. The long history of Jewish exceptionalism in these countries, the idea of separate “races” of humans, and the way Hitler’s regime established political legitimacy through small steps each of which weakened Germany’s democratic institutions. There are many on the political “right” who don’t want us to go there.