Australians were murdered on Sunday night because they were Jewish.
At a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach, gunmen opened fire into a crowd, killing 16 people and injuring 42, in what authorities and the PM have described as a targeted antisemitic terrorist attack.
This is the moment for grief, of course.
But it is also the moment for deep anger. Not the performative kind that politicians will suddenly discover when cameras are on.
The warning signs have been obvious for two years now, and our political class has treated antisemitism as a communications problem instead of a national security problem.
What happened on Sunday was not just a tragedy.
It was a failure of the state. It was a failure of leadership.
And it was a failure that has been made more likely by years of equivocation, appeasement and moral cowardice from people who are paid to keep Australians safe rather than worry about the demographic electoral calculations of appeasing religious hate.
The warning signs have been obvious for two years now, and our political class has treated antisemitism as a communications problem instead of a national security problem
What happened on Sunday was not just a tragedy. It was a failure of leadership, writes PVO
The details emerging from the attack are chilling.
One of the gunmen was fatally shot, while his son, the other shooter, was critically injured and taken into custody.
Bomb squads were deployed after concerns about improvised explosive devices, which were discovered in the shooters’ van.
Yet the most important part of this story is not the horror of the act. It is the environment that has been allowed to foment around it.
The relentless attempt to reframe antisemitism as ‘complex’, and treat it as an unfortunate byproduct of geopolitical passion. Insistence that naming it bluntly is somehow provocative. That is how societies lose their footing: by telling themselves that the obvious is too impolite to say.
Australia has been running this dangerous experiment since October 2023.
The night after the October 7 massacre in Israel, there were rallies in Sydney where the slaughter was celebrated. Outrageously unAustralian behaviour.
At Lakemba, Sheikh Ibrahim Dadoun told a crowd he was ‘elated’, describing the horror of what happened on October 7 as ‘a day of courage… a day of pride… a day of victory’.
The most important part of this story is not the horror of the act. It is the environment that has been allowed to foment around it
Even the Sydney Opera House protest, which became its own national controversy, was handled in a way that told extremists they could play games with intimidation and still be indulged.
Against that backdrop, what did the Prime Minister do?
He made speeches about cohesion, and he made speeches about values, and he made statements that tried to soothe everybody at once.
This is what leadership looks like when it is more afraid of being called divisive than the consequences of not being decisive.
On October 9, 2023, Anthony Albanese addressed a gathering at Lakemba Mosque. The official transcript is publicly available.
It contains no reference to Israel, Hamas, the October 7 massacre, or to antisemitism – even though the country was already reeling and the streets had already shown what was brewing.
Extremists are not stupid. They probe for what they can get away with.
When public celebrations of mass murder are met with platitudes, when intimidation is treated as protest, and when antisemitism is constantly diluted into a general sermon about ‘all hate’, the message received is that the boundaries are soft and malleable.
This is where the PM’s habit of false equivalence has been so corrosive. Islamophobia is real. It should be confronted when it happens.
One of the hardest questions we now face is: what did intelligence agencies know about the threat level around Jewish community events? (Pictured: one of the gunmen, 24-year-old Naveed Akram, from Bonnyrigg in Sydney’s south-west)
But invoking it whenever antisemitism is raised has often functioned as a rhetorical escape hatch for Albo and many who treat the plight of Palestine as a political opportunity, rather than a crisis on the other side of the world.
It turns moral leadership into a balancing act, as if the main task is to keep everyone equally comfortable, rather than to confront a threat that is actually escalating and delivering a hate we see on distant shores coming much closer to home.
In September this year, the Albanese government formally recognised the State of Palestine. That decision was defended as a contribution to peace and a two-state outcome.
But in the real world – the world where intimidation had already been normalised and Jewish Australians were already being targeted – it looked like something else as well.
It told the loudest and most aggressive parts of the activist ecosystem that Australia can be moved by intimidation.
This is not about opposing Palestinian aspirations or denying the suffering in Gaza.
It is about the basic political reality that gestures made in the name of peace can still be read as capitulation by extremists who look for what comes next.
Governments are not entitled to pretend they do not understand how their actions will be interpreted by those who thrive on grievance and menace.
When public celebrations of mass murder are met with platitudes, when intimidation is treated as protest, and when antisemitism is constantly diluted into a general sermon about ‘all hate’, the message received is that the boundaries are soft and malleable
Of course, in response to rising antisemitism, the government appointed a Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, and in July the envoy’s plan was released.
There have also been official efforts to address broader social cohesion, including a Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia.
But appointing envoys is not the same as enforcing boundaries.
Sunday night is the proof.
The hard questions now are unavoidable and Australia has been changed forever.
What did intelligence agencies know about the threat level around Jewish community events?
What protective security settings were in place?
Were warnings properly acted on?
How has online incitement been policed and prosecuted?
Why has Australia spent two years living with public antisemitism that would have been unthinkable in previous decades?
Leaders cannot spend years downplaying a threat, then show up after the bodies are counted to announce their horror.
Condemnation after the fact is compulsory. Prevention before it happens is their job.
I am not interested in politicians draping themselves in grief. The country has had enough of that theatre.
What matters is whether the government finally treats antisemitism as a primary threat in its own right, not as a subsection of ‘community tension’ using carefully curated language.
We are dealing with radicalisation and violence that requires relentless, unapologetic pushback.
There is no equivalence with Islamophobia here, which is why this antisemitism that leads to terrorism must be treated completely differently.
When governments send signals that they are more worried about managing the optics of social conflict than confronting its causes, extremists do not interpret that as compassion.
They see their opportunity.
Today also happens to mark 11 years since the Lindt Cafe siege. Another Sydney horror.
If the lesson is simply that we are resilient, we have learned nothing. Resilience is what citizens are forced to show when leaders fail us.
I live near Bondi.
I know the community it struck and I know what many Australians are thinking right now: this was foreseeable in the broadest of senses, not because any one person can predict the timing or method of an attack, but because the escalation has been visible for years.
Most of what happens in Australian politics is a superficial charade, meaningless Canberra-bubble politicking dictated by spin.
But what happens next after last night’s terrorism matters. Albo will say the right words now. He will promise unity and pledge action.
The test, however, is whether he stops treating antisemitism as something to be managed with careful phrasing, and starts treating it as something to be crushed with the full weight of the law and the authority of the state.
If that does not happen after Bondi, it will never happen, and the Australia I have lived my entire life in will keep changing for the worse.