Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development) Share this | Hansard source

Yesterday on the lawns of Parliament House, I was talking to a Jewish grandmother who was nearly in tears as she was telling me about her grandson who is 10 years old and at an Australian primary school. His best friend had to tell him recently that he couldn't come to his birthday. When he asked why, this young boy was told that it was because he was Jewish. They've both decided, as two 10-year-old best friends, to stay best friends at school, despite one of them being Jewish and it being against parents' advice. They're not going to tell their mates' parents that they're going to stay friends. That is actually what's happening in our primary schools to Australian kids. This isn't Germany in the 1930s; these are Australian students in Australian primary schools who aren't able to stay friends because one of them is an Australian Jew.

A year ago, on 7 October, when we heard what was actually coming out of Israel—we didn't know the extent of the horror that had been visited—we all stood and moved a joint motion here, and many senators spoke to that. A year on, I can barely recognise our country and what's been wrought here as a result of the devastation in Israel. It is becoming normalised in our children, in our schools, in our universities and on our streets.

Antisemitism in Germany didn't start with gas chambers or Jews in cattle trucks; it started with protests. It started with hate speech. It started with antisemitism being normalised. That journey slowly progressed through the 1930s. By 1938, before World War II started, it had reached catastrophic proportions, and I don't need to regale this chamber with the horrors of the Holocaust. At the end of World War II, the world came together to say: 'Never again can this occur. Never again can we treat a group of humanity in this way.' We all pledged that that would not occur and the Jewish people were given a homeland. The Jews of Judea could actually return and begin to build the modern State of Israel.

Here in Australia, we have had a bipartisan approach to the State of Israel, its success and the fact that it pursues peace in what is a very troubled space, with neighbours and terrorist organisations who would seek to wipe it from the face of the earth. When people chant, 'From the river to the sea,' be very clear about what's being said and the messages that are being sent: you don't have a right to exist.

Both parties of government having a bipartisan approach to this question over many, many decades has been the way that this country has chosen to support a liberal democracy's growth and success in the Middle East. Indeed, it is how Australia has become home—the cherished home—for so many Jews who, fleeing a war-torn Europe, have made such a wonderful contribution to our young democracy in the decades since.

But over the last 12 months, those very people—the academics, the Jewish students, the business owners, the supporters of the arts—have been subjected to horrific things. Businesses have been boycotted in this country because they're run by Australian Jews. Academics have had their offices pissed on. That's not in some Third World country; that is actually—