It’s time for politicians to return Bondi Beach to the people

When the issue of gun control was raised soon after the attack, former prime minister John Howard, slavishly echoed by sections of the media, said any such talk was a distraction from the real issue, which was antisemitism.

Howard, with all his stature, gave the cue for the partisan politicking that followed, a lot of it taking place on the site of the massacre.

When the issue of gun control was raised soon after the attack, John Howard said any such talk was a distraction from the real issue, which was antisemitism.Credit: AP

Gun control is just about the most basic and commonsense issue to raise in the immediate aftermath of such an atrocity.

As the Herald and The Age reported on Thursday, in a story about ASIO’s contact with the younger alleged shooter: “all official sources across multiple agencies” said there was “consensus in the law enforcement community that Australia’s firearms monitoring systems are badly outdated and plagued by siloing and jurisdictional inconsistencies”.

Such a polarised reaction – if you are talking about X, then you are wilfully and maliciously ignoring Y – is a large part of the problem we are now faced with.

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We cannot allow the politics of the internet, the zero-sum reasoning of the anonymous troll-hordes, to filter into our civic life.

We can and should discuss all the causative factors of this event – and they include gun control, national security, immigration screening, intelligence sharing and of course, the most decisive one – antisemitism in all its forms.

And it does have many forms. There is a huge gap between the protests of university students and the murderous actions of ISIS-inspired radicals.

We have told ourselves a story about the pluralism and tolerance we like to think defines Australia.

But can we cling to the narrative that we are the world’s most successful multicultural nation when Jewish children go to school under armed guard?

John Howard gave the cue for the partisan politicking that followed – including a visit to the flower memorial by Barnaby Joyce and Pauline Hanson. Credit: Janie Barrett

Can we condemn Pauline Hanson for wearing the burqa in a horrible parliamentary stunt, while ignoring the fact that there are parts of Sydney where a man might feel unsafe wearing a yarmulke?

A lazy byproduct of Australia’s relative comfort – we are one of the richest, best-educated and most peaceful countries in the world – is our complacency in that comfort.

Bondi shattered that.

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Ever since the horror of October 7, we have debated the war in Gaza, and the public has become increasingly horrified by the death and suffering there.

But we have undoubtedly allowed antisemitism to slip into the edges of our discourse.

Certain communities and institutions (rightly) maintained the line that criticism of the Israeli government’s actions cannot be conflated with antisemitism.

But those same communities, the ones that pride themselves on their progressivism, have become increasingly illiberal over the issue of Israel.

Some have used their horror over the actions of the Israeli government as a pretext to attack Jewish people.

As a result, Jewish Australians have been doxxed and sidelined from cultural festivals. Jewish kids feel unwelcome at some of our best universities.

Pro-Palestine rally organisers have failed to condemn, let alone cast out, the antisemitism and extremism that exists in their movement.

Many Jewish Australians say they feel unsafe and unwelcome in the same quarters of cultural life that their forebears helped build, during the great wave of post-war middle-European migration.

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We can blame our government and the prime minister for all of it, but it is more pragmatic to focus on our own accountability where it applies.

Anthony Albanese is no Jacinda Ardern; the former Kiwi prime minister who was remarkable in her response to the Christchurch mosque massacre in 2019, and whose displays of empathy led to a global conversation about the nature of true leadership.

But perhaps the most tragic part of the eruption in anger over Bondi is that it fulfils the goals of terrorism.

Islamic terrorists, just like Nazis, hate Australian pluralism.

They hate the spirit of mutual tolerance that has most usually defined Australian society.

They want to rupture it.

They want to sow division and foment bitter arguments between citizens who were previously co-existing peacefully.

They don’t want a Bondi Beach replete with laughing children and loping surfers.

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They want Bondi Beach covered in blood, first, and next, a Bondi Beach populated by citizens and politicians blaming one another.

Causation is a tortured area of law, and of life, and the “but for” test is not considered an optimal tool for harms which have multiple causes.

That’s why jurists have overlaid it with something else, something that non-lawyers can understand just fine: the commonsense test.

Common sense is what is needed from our leaders now.

That includes a duty to absorb the wild emotion and raw rage of people affected by the tragedy.

And then, a duty to put aside bitter partisanship in moments of national crisis, and get to work, in Canberra.

Bondi Beach is for the swimmers and the surfers and the people, for all the ones who paddled out and held hands in the water off our famous beach on Friday.

Jacqueline Maley is a senior writer and columnist.