Opinion: Australian hearts are shattered – some would-be leaders break them further
The question isn’t “who are we letting into our country?”, it’s “why are we letting grasping politicians spread further hate and division?”, says Amy Remeikis.
There is no denying Australia’s sense of safety has been shattered. There is no denying antisemitism exists in Australia and that the fears of the Jewish community have been horrifically realised in a way that perhaps we will never recover from.
There is no denying that in the days and months to come we will learn more about what could, should and didn’t happen to prevent what was supposed to be an unimaginable tragedy in Australia.
Jewish fears of an attack have been very real, with schools, synagogues, sporting and religious events requiring additional security. There are few communities (Muslims an exception) that would ever understand the cultural and psychological impacts of that. For Jewish people, the recent massacre came on top of those effects.
But there is also no denying that rather than try to promote unity, healing and a national stand against all forms of hate, some have sought to exploit that tragedy amid a completely unprecedented moment in Australian political history.
Never before has there been an opposition that has blamed a government for an act of terror and mass murder. Before Sunday, the rule for both major political parties was to place national unity ahead of any political gain.
In modern political history, Labor has been in opposition when Australia has experienced these nation-shaking acts. It has, in response, held firm to whatever line the Coalition government of the day was promoting.
This included in 1996, when Labor immediately pledged support for the Howard government’s gun laws; 2002, when then-Labor leader Simon Crean travelled with John Howard to Indonesia after the Bali bombings that killed 202 people, including 88 Australians.
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In 2005, Kim Beazley followed Howard’s denial of reality and refused to label the Cronulla race riots as “racist”, as Howard had immediately responded by saying “I do not accept that there is underlying racism in this country. I have always taken a more optimistic view of the character of the Australian people”. The thinking at the time was that political unity was more important than sparking a political fight. Even if it meant denying an all-too-obvious reality.
After the 2014 Lindt Cafe siege, where two of the 18 hostages held by Man Haron Monis were killed after a 16-hour stand-off with police, Bill Shorten gave full support to Tony Abbott.
In 2019, when a right-wing Australian extremist murdered 51 Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand, Labor did not jump to question the government’s inaction on what had been growing security agency concerns about the right-wing threat in Australia.
Never has there been a time where politics has been played so blatantly, so openly at the expense of a terrified, traumatised community and the wider nation at large.
On social media, Aaron Smith has already comprehensively debunked some of the claims made by former Coalition Kooyong MP Josh Frydenberg, who announced his political comeback in the midst of a grief-stricken, but factually incorrect, speech in Bondi.
Sussan Ley immediately jumped to questioning what “values” migrants had brought to Australia, a continuation of a line she launched in November in the latest bid to save her political skin.
Andrew Hastie, now considered the most likely Liberal leadership contender, was more blunt in his interview on Sky News, declaring: “The real question is, who are we letting into our country?”
The hateful, radicalised man who led Sunday’s abhorrent terror attack, moved to Australia from India 27 years ago, when Howard was prime minister. His son, who has been charged with terror offences, was born in Australia.
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There were migrants who lost their lives on Bondi Beach on December 14, including a Holocaust survivor. Ahmed al-Ahmed is a migrant who risked his life disarming a gunman. Reuven Morrison, a migrant, lost his life saving others by throwing bricks at the gunman, giving people precious minutes and seconds to get away. Russian Jewish couple Boris and Sofia Gurman died trying to stop the attack before it started.
The question isn’t “who are we letting into our country?”, it’s “why are we letting grasping politicians spread further hate and division?”.
Howard has always accepted the plaudits of being the man who changed Australia’s gun laws, even as his stated plan was never fully implemented (like the national gun register). But he proved he was willing to burn that legacy by labelling a rational response to a deadly attack – the tightening of gun laws – a “distraction”.
Howard launched his attack despite admitting in the very same press conference he was “not aware” of what national cabinet had decided on gun laws, “apart from a brief dot-point presentation as I left an interview at the Sky studio”.
Ley has been cheered on in the media for equating the hundreds of thousands of Australians who marched against a genocide with the Bondi terror attack against the Jewish community.
No rational, compassionate person would argue that antisemitism isn’t an issue in Australia, or that there have not been people who have used the legitimate criticism of Israel’s actions against Palestinians as cover to target Jewish people for being Jewish.
But to claim that protesting a genocide (a finding supported by the United Nations, genocide scholars and experts and every major humanitarian organisation) is akin to bearing responsibility for the recent terror attack is to break with reality.
To claim that recognising the state of Palestine, in common with the majority of world nations, means the Albanese government has blood on its hands, is beyond rationality.
And no one, despite the breathless coverage, has been able to explain how a further crackdown on universities would have thwarted two disturbed men who had, at least from the reporting, no known contact with universities.
Accusations began flying before any information was known, with fingers immediately being pointed where it best served established interests.
Jewish voices urging for an end to the false equation and for unity have been largely ignored, as has another former prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, who has also urged unity.
There is no going back to where we were before December 14. Not only was Australia’s shaky sense of safety irrevocably shattered, the social contract Australians relied on their politicians to uphold, to place the nation’s needs above politics, has been destroyed by the Coalition.
How any of this helps Australia’s Jewish community, let alone the nation as a whole, is apparently not something they care to ask themselves.
Amy Remeikis is a contributing editor for The New Daily and chief political analyst for The Australia Institute
