By Mick Le Moignan
AS a rule, Australia goes into underdrive for a summer/Christmas/New Year holiday that stretches from around mid-December to the end of January. Australia Day is 26 January, but it takes a few days for everyone to get back to speed as the torpor dissipates.
Outside, the cicadas are deafening; inside, the drone of Test Match cricket commentary and later the Australian Open Tennis provides a comforting backdrop to a pace of life that rarely rises above languid.
This summer, the Bondi massacre on 14 December shattered our complacency. “The lucky country” didn’t feel quite so lucky, any more. We could no longer feel superior to the rising tide of fascism in the US, where masked “law enforcement officers”, the ICE Gestapo, bullied and molested innocent citizens and shot one dead, and where the autocratic President did what fascist leaders have always done, sending in troops, attacking and threatening to invade smaller nations. We had a home-grown outbreak of violence of our own to think about.
Bondi’s tragedy also fired the starting gun on a political campaign, largely orchestrated by the Murdoch media. The organisers traded shamelessly on popular grief and guilt to demand a Royal Commission into antisemitism.
For over three weeks, PM Anthony Albanese resisted the calls, arguing that a Royal Commission would deepen divisions in the community and take too long to report. He had already appointed Dennis Richardson, a former head of ASIO (comparable to MI5 or the FBI) to investigate and report back by April on possible breaches of security and intelligence-gathering. Both Albanese and the Premier of NSW, Chris Minns, had promised to recall their respective parliaments early to pass new legislation on hate speech and gun controls.
The writing was on the wall well before Christmas. Albanese was booed by the crowd when he attended a remembrance ceremony at Bondi. Open letters were signed by prominent businesspeople and sporting luminaries. Ageing ex-PM John Howard, who won acclaim for tightening gun laws in 1996, after a lone gunman killed 35 people at Port Arthur in Tasmania, tottered in to say this time, gun possession was not the problem: it was rising antisemitism.
A former Treasurer, Josh Frydenburg, once seen as a likely future PM but voted out at the 2022 election, emerged from obscurity to demand a Royal Commission, arguing that threats and attacks on Jewish Australians had increased sharply over recent years. He cited the need for added security at his children’s schools and family’s synagogue. Accused by an interviewer of politicising the tragedy, he affected indignation.
The root cause of increased hostility is not hard to find. Israeli PM Netanyahu, whose legitimacy depends on hardline Zionists, responded to the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 with a genocidal scorched earth policy in Gaza. Israel obliterated whole cities, killed over 70,000, most of them non-combatants, women and children. Tens of thousands more died from other war-related causes, such as inadequate food, sanitation and medical treatment. Hundreds of thousands were wounded and there are now more child amputees in Gaza than anywhere else in the world.
Of course, Australian Jews are not responsible for this suffering. Many have said they were appalled by Netanyahu’s opportunistic response; many support the International Criminal Court’s determination to try him for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including using starvation as a weapon of war.
After Bondi, conversations in pubs and clubs, bars and barbecues invariably saw Netanyahu’s brutality as fundamental – but politicians and other public figures treated the topic like the unmentionable elephant in the room, fearing a backlash from influential Jewish lobby groups.
On 7 January, the liberal/independent Sydney Morning Herald published a caricature by its star cartoonist, Cathy Wilcox, depicting “grass roots support”. The cartoon showed a large slab of lawn with prominent business, sporting and other campaigners on top of it, with recognisable opposition politicians beneath the turf, carrying it, all marching to a drum beaten by Netanyahu.
The next day, SMH carried an open letter to the PM signed by thousands of “concerned Australians from diverse backgrounds”, advocating a Royal Commission into antisemitism. Albanese caved in and called one, saying people wanted a PM who would listen, and he had listened to victims’ families and Jewish community leaders. He could hardly have avoided their views, if he read the Murdoch newspapers or tuned in to Sky News.
Last Monday, SMH took the almost unprecedented step of apologising for the “distress and… pain” caused by the Wilcox cartoon. Thursday saw another open letter in SMH, with thousands of signatures, this time from “Australians for Humanity”, urging that an invitation to the President of Israel to visit Australia should be withdrawn. The battle for hearts and minds continues – and has spread to other states.
Adelaide’s Writers’ Week announced that, advised by its board and South Australia’s Labor Premier, Peter Malinauskas, it had cancelled an invitation to a Palestinian-Australian writer, Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah, on the grounds that it “would not be culturally sensitive… so soon after Bondi”. This prompted the indignant withdrawal of 180 writers and speakers, including all the international celebrities, the resignation of three board members and the event’s organiser and ultimately its cancellation.
One might have hoped that the Bondi tragedy would unite the nation behind a determination to prevent any such event in future – but it seems to have created deeper divisions. Antisemitism is not the only cancerous hatred: attacks on Muslims are reported to have increased by 740% since Bondi.
Royal Commissions have a poor record of bringing about effective legislation or actual change. The 1991 one into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody made 339 recommendations, including that imprisonment should be a sanction of last resort. Few have been implemented. Incarceration rates have doubled and over 600 Indigenous Australians have died in custody since then.
The 2018 Royal Commission into Banking and Finance found widespread misconduct and malpractice and resulted in billion-dollar penalties for the major banks, but recent evidence suggests that similar corrupt practices continue.
The Royal Commission into Antisemitism promises to be a poor memorial for the Bondi victims. So far, their sacrifice has caused more petty political point-scoring than national unity.
