Parliament has been recalled, we’re told, in the name of safety. Tough new laws. Anti-Semitic hate speech. Guns. Order restored by decree.
But listen closely and you can hear something else rattling under the floorboards: fear. And behind it, cowardice.
The Prime Minister is under pressure to “respond appropriately” to the Bondi shooting. So legislation is rushed forward that blurs, conveniently, into something else entirely. Criticism of Israel edges toward hate speech. Silence, meanwhile, is treated as virtue. Which makes me wonder: if hate speech deserves punishment, what about hate silence?
If I know that a nation—or a person—is committing heinous crimes and I look the other way, am I not complicit? If children are murdered, used as target practice by snipers, and I avert my gaze because it’s politically inconvenient, what does that make me?
I think of the American soldier from Collateral Murder. The footage we all saw but were encouraged to forget. He runs from a Bradley fighting vehicle to a van riddled with bullets and comes back carrying a wounded child. Blood everywhere. “Don’t die,” he pleads, again and again.
Later, in an interview, he explains why he enlisted. After 9/11, he hated Muslims. Wanted to kill them. Especially terrorists. Then he pauses. There were no terrorists in Iraq, he says—until we started killing their children.
That is how extremism is manufactured. Not by words. By actions.
The arguments used to justify these new laws are worn thin. They protect a rogue state from scrutiny and our politicians from electoral risk. Nothing more. In security studies, a government that governs by punishment rather than consent is defined plainly: weak.
A strong government does not need to threaten its citizens into silence. It enjoys legitimacy. Social cohesion follows naturally. A weak government reaches for laws, penalties, surveillance. The knock on the door replaces moral authority.
There is also wilful ignorance baked into the response—outsourced, tellingly, to an appointed “special envoy to combat anti-Semitism.” She is a committed Zionist, which makes her the last person you would appoint if cohesion, balance, or trust were the actual goal. One of her recommendations is that the Holocaust be taught in schools.
Good. It should be.
But teach it fully.
A cousin of my father died in a concentration camp. I don’t know why he was marked for death. He may not have been Jewish at all—perhaps he was homosexual. When I searched the archives, many non-Jewish victims were simply absent.
So let the lessons include them. The homosexuals. The Roma. The Soviet prisoners of war. The disabled. Let students learn that Auschwitz did not discriminate in its cruelty.
And let them also learn the broader historical truth that is so often airbrushed away. The Holocaust became the moral justification for the creation of Israel—but it was not the beginning of the story.
During the First World War, the British promised the Arabs sovereignty over their lands, including Palestine, if they rose up against the Ottomans. They did. With extraordinary courage. Led by T.E. Lawrence, they took Aqaba from the desert side—an impossible victory.
Lawrence later wrote of his shame, knowing all along that the promise would be broken. Because while Arab fighters bled, Britain and France had already signed the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, carving the Middle East into colonial protectorates. Palestine fell under British control.
After the Second World War, exhausted and uninterested—no oil, too much resistance—the British washed their hands of it and agreed to the creation of Israel.
In 1948 came the Nakba. Seven hundred thousand Palestinians expelled. Villages erased. A process that has never stopped, only modernised. And now, protesting this ongoing dispossession, this industrial-scale killing in Gaza and the West Bank, is labelled anti-Semitic hate speech.
Words are policed. Bombs are excused.
So I ask: dear Australia, who will come to your defence when a superpower lands troops on your shores?
I remember starting school in Brussels at ten years old, fresh from a dirt-road town south of Melbourne, unable to speak a word of French. I was bullied relentlessly. Then one day, an elderly woman entered the classroom. She spoke to the teacher, who pointed at me.
She sat beside me. “I hear you’re Australian,” she said. I nodded. She told me she had been a nurse in the Great War. That the Australians were the bravest of the brave. She put her arm around my shoulders. “Be proud of who you are.”
The next day—or the one after—I was cornered again, boys laughing as they stomped on my feet. But something had shifted. I picked the ringleader and went for him. All elbows and fury. A teacher eventually dragged me off, told the other boy to bugger off, then gave me a quiet thumbs-up.
No one touched the Aussie kid after that.
Thinking about that now—about the reputation earned in the trenches of the First World War—it enrages me that it was South Africa, not Australia, who first went to the International Court of Justice to challenge the slaughter in Gaza. We could have done the same. We didn’t.
Instead, we are told to accept lectures about morality from a state that murders civilians with impunity—and laws at home designed to make sure we don’t object too loudly.
That isn’t strength.
It’s fear, dressed up as order.