At least 16 people, including one suspected gunman, were killed in the Bondi Beach mass shooting. Photo by Audrey Richardson/Getty Images
Australians regard their country as one of the most successful and tolerant nations on the planet. Since European settlement in 1788, it has managed to draw people from all corners of the Earth and unite them under a common set of liberal democratic values based on the Judeo-Christian heritage bequeathed to us by the British.
It is this Australia that my parents, like hundreds of thousands of migrants in various waves, came to in search of a better life for themselves and for their children. Because this Australia gave them a home, in spite of hardships, they dedicated themselves and their deeds to their new country.
There are many such stories. Dai Le, a Vietnamese refugee who escaped Saigon with her family in 1975, now sits as a member of the Federal Parliament in Canberra. In her maiden speech to Parliament in 2022, Ms Le stated, emotionally: “I remember the moment when we were accepted to be resettled as refugees in Australia […] the feeling of acceptance and gratitude. We were filled with hope as we looked out onto the horizon of endless possibilities. Australia, you welcomed my mother, my family with open arms. You gave us comfort, food, and a warm bed to sleep in.”
How is it, then, that in successful, tolerant Australia, on a balmy summer’s eve on one of the country’s most famous beaches, 15 people (at the time of writing), including a 10-year-old girl, were slaughtered, and scores more critically injured, because of their religion?
This was once a proud, egalitarian nation, with a “fair go” for all. It was a country in which, in the words of former prime minister Bob Hawke, there was “no hierarchy of descent… no privilege of origin”. But that country is gone, its demise overseen by a government, led by Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, which has done nothing but increase division.
As a result, since October 7, 2023, with antisemitism rising, the likelihood of a terrorist attack taking place on Australian soil has been intolerably high. The warning signs could hardly have been clearer. On 9 October, 2023, there was a gathering of thousands at the Sydney Opera House which rejoiced at the atrocities a couple of days earlier, with one Islamic preacher calling it “a day of celebration”, egging on the mob who shouted, repeatedly, “Where’s the Jews?”. This vile episode, along with other Islamic preachers who called for “death to the infidels”, or the pro-Hamas protestors who have called for “global intifada” and aggressively disrupted cities by closing down key intersections, have been met with lukewarm condemnation from Albanese or his ministers. Figures from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) show that, since the October 7 attacks, antisemitic incidents in Australia have increased threefold. The ECAJ report documented more than 2,000 such incidents — ranging from verbal abuse to arson, vandalism and physical assaults — in 2024.
Yet, while equivocating over condemning such hatred, Albanese consistently decries “Islamophobia”, even though no mosques have been attacked in Australia since 2016, even though a Christian bishop was stabbed in his own church by a Muslim fanatic, even though a synagogue was bombed in Melbourne by extremists linked to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
Meanwhile, Albanese’s Home Affairs Minister, Tony Burke, has displayed a consistent recklessness in his immigration policy, settling 3,000 Gazans without security checks and overseeing the repatriation of the so-called ISIS brides. One of the shooters at Bondi, Sajid Akram, who was shot dead by police, first arrived on a student visa and then on a partner visa, and it seems he travelled several times to Pakistan. His son, Naveed Akram, who was born in Australia, was on an Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) watchlist in 2019, but it “found no indication of any ongoing threat” as far as he was concerned. Rather than address the risks of immigration and consider the threat of rising radicalism, politicians here seem keener to talk up the advantages of “multiculturalism”.
The plight of the Jews is deemed secondary by Foreign Minister Penny Wong, who refused to visit the site of the October 7 atrocities and supported a UN motion for a permanent Palestinian state. It’s hard not to detect a moral relativism at work here.
In their press conference today, Albanese and Burke did not announce they were cancelling the visas of hate preachers, nor that they intended to charge them with incitement to violence. They did not announce stricter immigration controls, in particular from countries where jihadist Islamic ideology is rife. Instead, they announced increased firearm controls for Australians.
In the coming weeks and months, we can expect announcements of new “hate speech” laws, new police powers, new surveillance mechanisms, new ways to monitor what ordinary Australians say and share. We can expect politicians to line up for cameras, pay lip service to unity, and then go back to the same failed settings that have splintered Australia.
And in the meantime, successful, tolerant Australia will have to come to terms with the fact that the most deadly attacks on Jews since October 7 happened here, on a Sunday afternoon, at the beach.
As the great Australian writer Xavier Herbert put it: Poor fellow, my country.