Australia’s complacency and the Bondi beach shooting

Australians like to believe that some places are beyond politics, beyond hatred, beyond violence. Bondi Beach – a sun-washed stretch of sand in Sydney and known globally as a symbol of openness and shared civic life – is one of them. That illusion was shattered on the first night of Hanukkah. 

On a warm summer afternoon, people were murdered while gathering to mark a Jewish festival celebrating survival against the odds. The attack did not occur in a dark alley or at the margins of society. It occurred in broad daylight, at one of Australia’s most iconic public spaces. This was not merely a crime. It was a national reckoning. 

For readers in the United States, Australia’s experience should not feel remote. Like the United States, Australia is a liberal democracy that prides itself on tolerance, pluralism, and public order. And like the United States, it has discovered since October 7 how quickly those assumptions can erode when antisemitism is minimized rather than confronted. 

For years, Australia has reassured itself that antisemitism is marginal – an imported pathology or an online nuisance safely removed from everyday life. That belief is no longer credible.  

Since the 7 October attacks in Israel, Jewish Australians have reported a sharp rise in harassment, intimidation, vandalism, and threats across schools, universities, workplaces, and public spaces. Antisemitic graffiti had already appeared in Bondi in the weeks before the attack. 

The violence at Bondi did not emerge from nowhere. It was the most extreme expression of a climate that has been allowed to fester. 

Investigations must determine motive, and speculation should be avoided. But context matters. Political violence does not erupt in a vacuum. It grows when hostility is normalized, when grievances are dismissed, and when those targeted are told – implicitly or explicitly – that their fear is exaggerated, inconvenient, or politically awkward. 

When that happens, the social guardrails fail. This follows a familiar democratic pattern: elites hesitate to name antisemitism clearly for fear of inflaming tensions, only to discover that ambiguity emboldens extremists rather than restraining them. The result is not social peace, but a slow erosion of the norms that make peaceful pluralism possible. 

Australia now faces a choice familiar to other liberal democracies: whether to confront antisemitism clearly and decisively, or to continue managing it as an embarrassment to be explained away. Too often, political leaders have preferred ritual condemnation over moral clarity, and bureaucratic language over responsibility. 

In the United States, that choice has already forced a reckoning – from Congressional hearings on campus antisemitism to the adoption of a national strategy to counter it. Australia’s hesitation stands in contrast, not because the threat is smaller, but because its political class has been slower to accept that antisemitism is not a peripheral problem, but a stress test for democratic institutions themselves. 

Antisemitism is not simply another form of prejudice. It is a distinct and historically lethal ideology – adaptive, conspiratorial, and corrosive of democratic trust. Treating it as just another entry in the catalogue of “hate” is not inclusiveness; it is evasion. 

Other democracies have understood this. The United States has adopted a national strategy to counter antisemitism. The European Union has established a decade-long framework, with more than twenty member states implementing formal action plans. Australia, by contrast, remains conspicuously behind – long on rhetoric, short on structure. 

What is required now is not symbolism but resolve. 

First, Australia needs a coherent national strategy on antisemitism – one that integrates law enforcement, education, and public institutions rather than dispersing responsibility across ad hoc taskforces and statements. 

Second, security agencies must be properly resourced to protect vulnerable communities and public religious events. Freedom of worship is meaningless if it can only be exercised under threat. No democratic society should expect one community to quietly accept elevated risk as the price of visibility. 

Third, political leaders must stop equivocating when antisemitism appears in activist movements, universities, or cultural institutions. Hatred does not become acceptable because it adopts the language of politics. Silence in these moments is not neutrality; it is permission. 

Fourth, education matters. Too many young Australians encounter antisemitism not through serious engagement with history, but through slogans, distortions, and conspiracies that go unchallenged. Schools and universities should be places where prejudice is confronted – not rationalized. 

The cost of inaction is not borne by Jewish Australians alone. When any group is made unsafe in public life, the promise of equal citizenship is weakened for everyone.  

Antisemitism corrodes the civic foundations on which plural societies depend. 

Bondi Beach should never have been the scene of terror. That it was – on Hanukkah, in daylight – is a warning. Australia can choose complacency, or it can choose courage. 

If its leaders fail to act decisively now, they should not be surprised when fear spreads, trust fractures, and the social fabric they claim to defend continues to unravel. 

Hanukkah is a festival of light held against darkness. Whether Australia responds to the murders at Bondi with clarity or caution will reveal not only how it confronts antisemitism, but how seriously it takes the obligations of liberal democracy itself.  

Peter Kurti is Director of the Culture, Prosperity & Civil Society program at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, and also Adjunct Associate Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame Australia