Bondi: Australians Must Choose Each Other - Not Hate and Guns

Bondi has been attacked, and people are dead because of hatred enabled with guns. This wasn't random violence; it was a targeted assault on Jewish Aussies gathered to celebrate Hanukkah.

Grief and anger are natural responses. But we should be clear-eyed about what this moment demands of us: solidarity with the Jewish community, of course. But also an unflinching refusal to let anyone turn tragedy into a fresh excuse for division, denigration of others or access to more guns.

Two things are colliding in Australia, and we can't pretend they are unrelated. The first is the normalisation of hate - the steady drumbeat of “us versus them”, the dog-whistlers, the online radicalisation, the casual dehumanising of people because of who they are, what they look like, or how they worship. The second is guns: the quiet growth in availability and stockpiles, and the complacency that assumes that our laws will always hold simply because we once led the world after Port Arthur.

These aren't abstract trends. When hatred grows and lethal means are easier to access, the risk to people grows - in shopping centres, on beaches, in places we should feel safe.

And we should name something else: the deliberate weaponisation of hate for political power. When leaders - at home or abroad - turn identity, faith, and grief into a political tool, they're not “responding” to events; they're intentionally inflaming them. We’ve seen it plainly with Benjamin Netanyahu trying to pin blame on Prime Minister Albanese for “supporting Palestine”, and with Pauline Hanson stoking Islamophobia by wearing a burqa into Parliament. This isn't leadership. It is opportunism. It deepens fear, invites retaliation, and makes all of us less safe. We must refuse it - without flinching and without becoming what we oppose.

Refusal can't mean replacing one scapegoat with another. This was an antisemitic terrorist attack. That truth must be faced. And it must be faced without collapsing into collective blame. Blaming Muslim Australians for an atrocity they didn't commit is not “strength”; it is the next step in the same cycle of racialised hatred. The same goes for blaming Jewish people for the genocide in Gaza. It's wrong.

If you want a single, living example of what Australia is at its best, look at the man who crash-tackled and disarmed one of the shooters. He has been identified as Ahmed Al Ahmed - a fruit shop owner and Muslim Australian - and his courage saved lives. That's multiculturalism in action: not slogans, but instinctive decency. A willingness to protect other Aussies because they're human beings.

What we must treasure fiercely is Australia’s multiculturalism. This country used to be defined by exclusion. Well into the 1970s, we were shaped by policies and attitudes that sorted people by skin colour, origin, and belonging. That's not the Australia we want to live in now. Modern Australia is defined by the everyday fact of living together - neighbours, schools, workplaces, friendships, and families that cross every old line.

But multiculturalism isn’t self-sustaining. It requires practice. Each of us has a responsibility to practise non-violence - not only physical non-violence, but social and structural non-violence: the refusal to scapegoat; the courage to challenge racist or dehumanising talk; the discipline not to spread inflammatory rumours; the insistence that safety and dignity belong to everyone, including those who are grieving after the Bondi attacks.

And yes - we also need to talk plainly about guns. Australia’s post–Port Arthur reforms mattered. But we have drifted into a new normal where the number of civilian firearms has climbed into the millions, and where ownership has become more concentrated among fewer people who own more guns each. This attack will inevitably sharpen that national reckoning - and it should. There are more guns per capita in Australia now than there were the day before the Port Arthur shooting.

If we want to honour the victims and stand with Jewish Aussies who were targeted for their faith, we should do it by confronting hate wherever it appears, tightening what needs tightening on guns, refusing opportunists who trade in division, and protecting the best thing we’ve built together: a country where difference is ordinary, not a target.

Gregory Andrews on the choice Australia faces after Bondi.