Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party, Shadow Minister for Trade and Tourism) Share this | Hansard source

Let me first start with what we do agree on in this chamber. I firstly want to acknowledge three members of this chamber: the member for Isaacs, the member for Macnamara and the member for Berowra. They are Jewish, or from Jewish descent, and this October 7 was obviously a very traumatic day for them, for the Jewish community and indeed for the wider community.

We have all seen the vision. We've all heard the stories and we've all read reports about what happened on that day, just over a year ago. I remember talking to someone not long after the event, and I think they described it very well. They said that evil walked the earth that day. These were human beings. We have had some nice platitudes in the sense that we're all human beings, but we have to remember there were human beings that day who thought it was okay to shoot an unarmed teenager in the face. There were human beings that day that thought it was okay to kill babies. There were human beings that day that were happy to do some of the most horrific, barbaric things that a human being can do to another.

We need to realise what we are dealing with here. If you speak to soldiers who have been engaged in armed conflict, defending their country, they will almost universally talk about the horror for them when they have killed a fellow human being. They did it in defence of their country. They did it because there was an armed conflict going on. What makes this worse is that not only were these people not armed, not only were these people women, children, teenagers at a music festival and normal civilians going about their work, and not only was the way they were killed the most barbaric, inhumane way you can kill people—but their killers celebrated it. That's what makes this all the more horrific. How do we know they celebrated it? They filmed it. They were jumping around excited. They were dragging young women out, who had been raped and brutalised, and they were running around excited about that. They were taking hostages back to their communities, and there were euphoric scenes about that. That's what we're dealing with.

As a country, Israel has suffered something on a barbaric level that very few countries see very often. We can all agree with that. I'm sure there is no person in this chamber who does not agree that what happened that day, and the celebration around it, was horrific, barbaric, and not okay. So, good, we all agree with that—as we should and we speak very strongly about that. Now, what we're talking about is what do we do as a country, and what do we do as a government, in response to that? That's where the disagreement is. As my colleague the member for Berowra said—I thought very eloquently—we've got to remember that Hamas and Hizballah are terrorist organisations. If you say to Israel, 'You need to negotiate a ceasefire,' you're talking about negotiating a ceasefire with people who killed babies, celebrated raping people and did very barbaric acts—that's who you're negotiating with. For them to put that pressure on Israel, saying, 'What you're doing is not okay and you should be signing up to a ceasefire,' when these people still hold hostages and have celebrated their barbaric acts—Israel doing this in a state of self-defence to make sure it doesn't happen again but also to try to get those hostages returned to their country is very understandable, I think. It's why I'm very supportive of Israel's response to this, and the fact is that, unfortunately, this motion went places I thought it shouldn't.

The other thing I want to touch on is my horror at what has happened in Australia since then. Let's not forget that there was a celebration of this event—that barbarianism—at the opera house within 24 hours. That's what we also have to acknowledge in this chamber and acknowledge as legislators, given that we as ministers, and state ministers, look after the police forces and whatever. There are many people, unfortunately—thousands of people, I think, in Australia now—who celebrate that. Sure, there is a wider conflict; there is a wider story here about Palestine and about the Middle East. It is a very complex situation, and I respect differences of opinion on that. But at the moment we are dealing with two barbaric terrorist organisations who did barbaric things, and there are people celebrating that in Australia. I think, both as Australian police forces and Australian governments, we need to do more in communicating that that is not okay at any level, and we have to support Israel defending themselves against these barbaric acts.

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