Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Immigration) Share this | Hansard source

I'm very pleased to speak on behalf of my community in support of the motion moved by the member for Wentworth. In 2014, a group of primary school students from Mount Sinai College, in Maroubra, were racially abused with shocking antisemitic language whilst they were getting the bus home from school. Naturally there was outrage and concern from parents and the wider community. In the wake of that, I wanted to find a way to make it known that antisemitism and racism were abhorrent and did not represent what our community was about.

So I came up with the idea of painting a mural on the side wall of the Only About Children childcare centre on Anzac Parade in Maroubra. I got students of different faiths and backgrounds from local schools to come together. We had students of the Jewish faith from Emanuel School, Indigenous students from Matraville Sports High School, students of the Christian faith from Corpus Christi, and Randwick Girls' High School students. They came together to create and to paint a mural, and theme of that mural is harmony, respect and unity.

That mural still stands today, almost a decade later. Despite the firebombing of the Only About Children early childhood centre and the spray painting on 21 January of disgusting antisemitic words on the other side of that wall where the mural is, the mural has survived. That mural, designed and painted by students of different faiths and backgrounds, remains unharmed. The mural in itself is a symbol of the resilience and strength of our community and our resolve to fight antisemitism and racism in any form.

Over the last month, members of the Jewish community in our area and across Sydney have been subjected to some disgusting and terrifying antisemitic and racist attacks. I unequivocally condemn those attacks and their perpetrators for the shocking horror that they have brought to members of our Jewish community and I say to the Jewish community: I'm truly sorry that Jewish members of our community have had to endure these shameful actions. I've got many friends in the Jewish community. They are good people. They're law-abiding citizens who, like the rest of us, just want to go about their everyday lives. They deserve the right, like every Australian, to live in peace and to go about their lives in an ordinary manner.

In December last year, I established the local Operation Shelter taskforce, with elected representatives, local police and leaders of Jewish synagogues and schools. We come together on a regular basis to cooperate and to plan actions to keep the community safe. We've had several meetings and there've been actions, including additional police patrols, helicopter surveillance and community support. But the most important thing is that we come together to talk, we come together to cooperate and we come together to work together. We have seen the largest police operation in Sydney since the Sydney Olympics, which is being undertaken to protect the Jewish community. I want to congratulate and thank the police for the arrests that they've been making and the staff at the Only About Children childcare centre, who were subject to this shocking attack. Those mongrels, the perpetrators of these crimes, will be caught and prosecuted, and there've been arrests over the last couple of days.

In our community, our response to this shocking situation has been to work together, to choose unity over division, and to unite and come together to solve this challenge, rather than to take pot shots at each other in this place. We've chosen to adopt the approach represented by the mural that stands on that wall and the approach of those students who created it: harmony, respect and unity. If a bunch of high school students can set an example of how we should be approaching this issue and how we can solve it together, then surely we, as the leaders of this nation, can put politics aside and come together and work together to fight the scourge of antisemitism and racism in this country.

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