From the newsrooms of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

This is inside politics.

I'm Jacqueline Maley.

This week it feels wrong, actually, to talk about politics in the wake of the horrific anti-Semitic massacre at Bondi Beach on Sunday.

Australians and Sydneysiders in particular are still trying to make sense of the senseless.

But the fact is that the response to the massacre has been deeply political and things got divisive very quickly.

So this week on Inside Politics, we are going to discuss the political response to the incident and how it might affect our national life in the months and the years to come.

My podcast partner, Paul Satchell is on leave this week, but happily, I am joined instead by political correspondent Natassia Chrysanthos.

Hello Tas, how are you?

Hey, Jack.

I'm all right.

How are you?

Yeah, I'm fine, thank you.

Tas, you.

As we record, you've just come out of the Prime Minister's press conference on Thursday afternoon.

He, of course, has been under sustained pressure and criticism all week, some of it extremely pointed and personal for not doing enough to prevent this tragedy or to tackle anti-Semitism in general.

What did he say in this press conference which was given in Parliament House in the prime ministerial courtyard?

So the full force of the authority of the office, if you like.

Mhm.

So he came out with the special envoy for anti-Semitism, Julian Segal, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, Education Minister Jason Clare and AFP Commissioner Krissy Barrett.

And they stepped out and announced a that that they'd be implementing Gillian Segal's full report into anti-Semitism, which was handed to the government in July this year.

The Australian government adopts and fully supports the plan to combat anti-Semitism.

We have already legislated for hate speech, hate crime.

As well as a suite of other law reform efforts to crack down on hate speech, and specifically hate preachers, as well as a new taskforce to look at the education system wholesale and how it's dealing with anti-Semitism and make recommendations to improve it.

Children aren't born antisemitic.

Children aren't born racist.

Children aren't born with hate in their hearts.

This is something that's taught.

This is something that's learnt.

There's lots of things that we need to do to tackle and weed out anti-Semitism.

But what we do in education is an important part of that in preventing it, in tackling it, in responding to it.

And that includes.

The noteworthy things about today is one, it does look like a kind of strong offering in terms of action that the government will move towards in the short to medium term and be a bit of a tone shift.

Now, this came more in the questions section of the press conference.

So it was in the second kind of improvised component, where the Prime Minister faced a bunch of questions around whether the action he was taking was too late, and then also questions around the degree of personal responsibility that he took or assumed for what happened on Sunday.

And for the first time, we heard him kind of, I guess, accept a degree of responsibility for his own role as prime minister.

So I, of course, acknowledged that more could have been done, and I accept my responsibility for the part in that as Prime Minister of Australia.

But what I also do is accept my responsibility to lead the nation and unite the nation.

It wasn't a full throated apology or admission of responsibility by any means, but I think he did move toward a bit more of a kind of conciliatory, humble tone around this, where I think earlier in the week and in the immediate aftermath, he spoke a lot more defensively about the action his government had taken and what it had done.

And it is true the government has done a bunch of things on anti-Semitism in the last couple of years, but crucially, the community has consistently been asking for more.

So it's that balance has not been totally blind to it, but nor has he.

He followed the path that it was, for example, set out for him by the antisemitism envoy, Jillian Segal.

She had a bunch of recommendations.

The government's kind of moved along with some of them without issuing a formal response to that report.

Now, there were elements in that report that were quite controversial and did raise alarm bells among people in academia, among people in the arts and cultural sector about how it rubbed up against free speech and the degree of intervention that was recommended there.

You know, there are there are recommendations around stripping funding from arts institutions, for For example.

Yeah, arts institutions and universities or indeed anyone who takes public funding that fails to stamp out anti-Semitism.

And that could be very broadly interpreted, I guess.

So, yeah, some of those recommendations in that report were controversial.

And one gets the feeling now that the controversial ones were the ones that the government were sort of happy to sit on and to sort of let idle.

And obviously now it's come to the fore because of this horrific attack, and they have to do something about it.

So it's forced their arm in a way.

But they do.

You know, I think Albanese probably has looked like his arm has been forced a little bit, as you say, the apology or the expression of regret that he gave was very much in the passive voice.

You know, there could have always been something more to be done.

It wasn't they weren't I statements.

I wonder if that will be enough to sort of hold off the criticism.

And it's been vociferous criticism, particularly from elements of, you know, I guess former treasurer Josh Frydenberg and the News Corp media has been really, really hard on him.

Do you think it will?

Oh, and the federal opposition has also been, especially on Wednesday, really escalated its kind of political attack on the government.

And I think that has been noted in the community.

You know how in after previous tragedies or disasters, you know, you I think Australians generally expect a degree of bipartisanship in the approach.

And John Howard was really the first person out the door on Tuesday with a very scathing commentary on the Prime minister.

And there's little doubt that since October the 7th, 2023, not enough has been done by those who command authority and respect in our society to prevent, cauterize and denounce the spread of anti-Semitism.

And I hope that.

And then a day later, you had formal Liberal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, who is Jewish.

Go to the Bondi Pavilion and also deliver his his remarks, which took it up a notch again and said that the Prime Minister needed to accept personal responsibility for the deaths of 15 people.

Our Prime Minister, our government has allowed Australia to be radicalised on his watch.

It's time for him to accept personal responsibility for the death of 15 innocent people, including a ten year old child.

Just on that particular comment.

I mean, that is an extraordinary thing to say, isn't it?

It's it's horribly offensive.

I would have thought to the Prime Minister.

Um, it's quite an extraordinary ratcheting up of rhetoric that we see three days after a terrible, terrible attack when emotions are very, very high.

It's understandable that you would be feeling very, very upset.

But to me that was quite an extraordinary statement.

I just I don't think I've ever heard anything like that in our politics previously.

Mhm.

Mhm.

And he was, he was you know pointing to the site of the massacres as well.

Um it did not beat around the bush.

I think it's you know on the one hand there is an impression that perhaps people have expected more of Albanese.

You know, there hasn't been the image of him consoling the community or families or, you know, with people.

He's kind of painted a bit of a solitary figure that, you know, he went he went early on Monday, the morning after to lay flowers at Bondi.

But at that point he was kind of on his own.

He gave a speech at Saint Mary's Cathedral on Wednesday night at a multi-faith, you know, memorial, and he was held to account there as well.

There were rabbis there saying, you know, we expect the government to do more.

Um, so he was he was taking in that feedback in a very public place.

But again, it was a it was a very kind of controlled environment.

There is a real visceral fury directed at Anthony Albanese from, you know, elements of the Jewish community that predates this event.

So, you know, it would be an incredibly hostile reception for him.

There's a question as to whether he should have just gone and copped that anyway.

And I think that's the optics that people are picking up on.

But then on the other side, even if that is the case, do Australians expect, you know, the leader of the opposition and former leaders, former prime ministers, former treasurers to lead a very political response to this, or do they expect a version of leadership that lends itself more toward, you know, harmony and social cohesion, particularly in the immediate aftermath of such an event?

Not to be too sort of political about it, but where is Sussan Ley been in all of this because, as you say, we saw John Howard unexpectedly pop up and do a walk around and call a press conference.

I mean, John Howard's a private citizen these days.

Same with Josh Frydenberg.

He's no longer involved in politics, ostensibly.

And yet he he popped up, gave this sort of fiery, extremely sort of moving speech at the site down at Bondi.

Is Susan Lee being sort of crowded out a little bit by these former liberal figures?

I don't she obviously doesn't have the same kind of gravitas or clout as a, as an opposition and a relatively new opposition leader at that.

Um, but we I think we've seen her try and match them, particularly after Howard came out like straight after Sunday, she offered her bipartisan support to the government.

In essence, if it did want to make kind of immediate changes in the aftermath on Monday, I thought she kind of thread the needle quite delicately.

Um, she did say, but also in a more passive way.

You know, enough hasn't been done on anti-Semitism in the last two years.

The government has been warned about this and so forth.

But she wouldn't.

For example, she was asked whether she supported Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's comments, which accused Albanese of pouring fuel on the fire of anti-Semitism or something.

And Lee didn't buy in.

She kind of she kept those remarks removed enough from appearing overly political, I would say.

But then I think as as more information came to light about the context of the attack as the kind of white hot fury of people in the Jewish community was being delivered and expressed to Lee and her frontbench as John Howard went out and made these quite remarkable comments.

On Wednesday, you saw Susan Lee kind of step up to the plate and escalate her commentary about the government saying it had failed Jewish Australians and Albanese had failed Jewish Australians.

And if I was prime minister, you know, she stood at Bondi and said, If I'm Prime Minister, I will do this.

Yeah, I don't think there's any doubt that people like John Howard and Josh Frydenberg and perhaps Sussan Ley as well, are definitely channelling and speaking the anger of, you know, segments of the Jewish community.

There's no doubt about that.

And the emotion is real and the and the rage is real.

And I don't for any minute sort of diminish that rage.

But it has been quite notable, I think, how quickly this has escalated into what looks pretty heavily partisan at a time when, as you say, you would hope that everybody would come together.

I want to talk about gun control because that was something that was mentioned early on, it seems, seemed to me pretty uncontroversial that you would maybe ask a few questions about why someone who's living in outer suburban Sydney would be able to have six huge guns registered to their name, particularly when their son has been, has attracted the attention of intelligence Authorities, but John Howard quashed that very much on Tuesday when he sort of said that any talk of gun control was a distraction from the real issue, which is anti-Semitism.

We then saw that line very much taken up and run with by the News Corp opinion makers.

Like when I looked at the Australian, you know, pretty much all week that that exact line has been been run.

Albanese talked about gun control early on, and Chris Minns, the New South Wales premier, has talked about it too, and said that it can do with some tightening up.

But then he's kind of dropped it now hasn't he.

Like he didn't mention it at all on Thursday with this big press conference.

Mhm.

And I imagine that is a kind of reflection of that feedback and the political attack.

Like I think if he had gone up and spoken again all day about gun reform, when there are obvious questions that remain, for example, about the anti-Semitism envoy's response and, and how it approached hate speech legislation and all of that, it would have looked like he was missing on these difficult topics.

So it was, I think, a gear shift that responded to the situation that he's found himself in.

What about.

I mean, all of this is important, but it is not sort of the central cause, if you like, which is, you know, in previous times we would have probably would have treated this as a pure radicalization and extremism sort of problem.

And that has been part of the conversation.

This is a kind of different order of attack because it was so large, so bloody, so senseless and cruel, and it was very much targeting the Jewish community, but it was also an act of terror and extremism.

We've had those before in Australia.

What about the security agencies, the intelligence sharing, even the local policing, not to mention the immigration policing?

Has that been sort of enough of a part of the conversation, or what does the Prime Minister and the government said about that?

I think, well, particularly what they said on Thursday reflected the process that all these things go through, which is, you know, there was a lot of information that came out through leaks from law enforcement sources and forthright information from the government as well, about what we knew about these two men, where they'd been, what might have motivated them.

Now that one of the attackers is now facing criminal charges, there is a kind of legal limit to what will be said in terms of revealing more about what motivated them, their movements, and as a result, any kind of, you know, failures or shortcomings of of agencies or police.

But we did.

I think it's worth pointing out that in the first press conference, and admittedly, it was right after right after the event, the first press conference with with Chris Minns, the New South Wales Premier and the police commissioner in New South Wales, Mal Lanyon, they said that, um, you know, these people were not known to the New South Wales Police as any kind of security risk.

Well, we've seen a fair bit of reporting since that shows that actually they were flagged as a sort of security risk.

Or, you know, some people say that the sun was sort of looked over and and examined.

And then basically he was decided not to be a risk.

I think there will be questions that are asked about that.

And in one sense, the focus on anti-Semitism, which is right and necessary, shouldn't take away from whatever security and intelligence mistakes or missteps or misconnections have been made.

Yeah.

And I think, like, I think the focus on anti-Semitism, like obviously reacts the targeted nature of this attack and the fact that it it was directed at one section of the community and that is the the part of the community that is in, you know, the deepest grief.

I think that that conversation is is taking hold, particularly at a political level, because of the broader context of the last two years.

And so, in some ways, it's like, as people have spoken about it, like this attack is exactly what they had feared.

Yeah, it's the a combination.

But that kind of it's just it's also just, you know, woken up this conversation or this political kind of dilemma that's been dormant on and off over the last two years around just how unsafe people in the Jewish community feel and their frustration and impatience with the government on that.

And so I guess that that conversation is kind of and the tenor of it has existed without this event.

And so there are the kind of those two things happening at once at a certain level, but they've obviously been brought together in a very intense way.

Yeah, yeah.

And I think, I mean, apart from the extremism and the clear sort of what looks very much like radicalization that's occurred with the with the alleged perpetrators, as you say, there's the separate issue of probably the normalization of anti-Semitism, which has coincided with the rise of, you know, the pro-Palestinian movement or the anti-Israel movement, the protests.

And the fact has been that Jewish Australians, particularly, I think, in Sydney and Melbourne, have felt unsafe.

They felt unwelcome in certain spaces like university campuses, perhaps even some cultural institutions.

So it's had this huge ripple effect, and now we're having a reckoning about it because we can't ignore it anymore and we can't sweep it under the carpet anymore.

So yeah, Jewish Australians are rightfully sort of angry about that.

I guess to some.

I just want to ask you quickly about the immigration debate, because that's also been in there, and I think there's probably a lot of people who are bracing a little bit for what might come in terms of will the immigration debate now get a bit ugly?

The coalition was already sort of was actually preparing to release its immigration policy, I think, this week.

And they've now said they'll put that off for obvious reasons.

Where do you think the immigration debate is going to go from now?

Because we were already talking about it and now this has happened.

It feels like a bit of a sort of match to match to a Tinder situation.

Yes, yes.

I think that the government has also tried to get on the front foot of that one with its announcement that it will kind of change the threshold or lower the threshold for canceling visas and refusing visas on the grounds of kind of incitement to violence and antisemitism.

You know, Tony Burke has already been proactive in saying for the last six months that he has cancelled more visas on character grounds than most other ministers.

Have refused and canceled visas on the grounds of anti-Semitism in a way that very few predecessors have.

I don't resile from that, and I've made clear on the balance of bigotry versus freedom of speech.

Uh, I, I think Australians share my view that people who come here to hate, uh, we just don't need them.

And he kicked a Nazi out of the country a few weeks ago.

So there have been these kind of big, you know, they feel kind of like a bit of a performance in terms of this very public standard setting.

And so you've got that kind of continuing.

I think the coalition's kind of been running.

It's, you know, doing its own thing on immigration.

That was put on pause this week.

I think we are seeing the conversation being stoked in the coalition, uh, moving from it's not just a conversation about how many people are coming to Australia, the conversation about who is coming to Australia.

Of course, of the two shooters, the father came in the late 90s under the Howard government on a student visa from India.

The son was born in Australia.

As many point out, Ahmed Al Ahmed, the person who tried to stop them, is the most recent recent migrant of the bunch.

A lot of the people there in the Jewish community that day were migrants from Russia and Eastern Europe.

I don't think this event has really given a clean let's blame the migrants narrative.

No, no, I mean, but but let's be real.

I mean, let's cut to the chase.

There will be some people who basically say that we shouldn't bring in Muslim migrants.

I mean, that's that's the only thing that people are going to say or that we should be we should be screening Muslim migrants for extreme views, anti-Semitism, you know, things that are.

It would be interesting to see how explicit I think it gets because the, the yeah, you know, even the in the Parliament, the, the furthest that people will go is to say people need to agree with Australian values and, you know, even Jacinta Price's comms material.

Last week she sent out an email about this to her subscribers and spoke about the character of people coming.

But, you know, there are good people from Asia, from Europe who are in our country, etc.

so there are just so many euphemisms in this conversation, I think.

But as we know, the problem is how that message is felt by people in migrant communities and multicultural communities who do kind of read between the lines with that one, and then what that does to the social fabric.

And that will be a real challenge for Susan Lee as well.

Because.

Because she has been trying to.

Yeah, absolutely.

Land the right tone in a way that doesn't push people away.

And that is still inclusive on this one.

And yes, like you said, there's a little bit of a tinderbox here.

Yeah.

And the Liberal Party obviously needs to to be careful with ethnic communities because they've lost support there as well as in other areas in recent times.

Um, thank you for joining us today to talk through these very heavy events.

We've tried to be as sensitive as possible to all sides, um, while maintaining our usual rigor of analysis.

I hope you'll join us next year in happier circumstances, I hope.

And, um, have a good summer break.

Thanks, Jack, and thanks, listeners.

I want to say farewell.

Merry Christmas and Happy holidays to our Inside Politics listeners, alongside deep, deep condolences from this podcast to the Australian Jewish community.

We do so enjoy putting this podcast together and we very much appreciate your support.

This is our last record of the year, but over summer, we will be putting out a reprise of the best episodes of 2025 before we return in late January.

Thank you very much and see you in 2026.

Today's episode was produced by Kai Wong with technical assistance from Debbie Harrington.

Our executive producer is Tammy Mills, and special thanks to Lisa Muxworthy and Tom McKendrick.

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I'm Jacqueline Maley, thanks for listening.