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

I withdraw the colloquial language. I'll be more accurate—urinated on at university campuses. Australian Jewish students have been spat on at campuses in this country, and somehow that is okay because some other Australian student doesn't agree with their right to be mourning family and to be standing up for Israel's right to exist. And we've had Jewish members of parliament treated abhorrently.

I had the great privilege of visiting Israel a few months ago to visit the site of the Nova music festival—the site of such atrocities. I want to know: where are the feminists, with the horrific rapes that occurred? I was able to visit Kibbutz Be'eri, where Danny Majzner showed us around from house to house. Yes, the blood had been wiped away and the bodies were no longer there, but the devastation that had been wrought was left there as a very powerful reminder to us of what actually occurred. Above every single house where this had occurred, for the people that had lived there that had lost their lives, their photos and a description of what happened were there. In that kibbutz, Galit Carbone, an Australian Israeli citizen, lost her life.

We met with the families of hostages and heard of their sorrow. We went to the Galilee and, on the morning we were there, there had been 32 missiles—thank goodness for the Iron Dome—launched from southern Lebanon by Hezbollah into what is an Arab community of Druze, who also see themselves as Israeli. We all came together as a globe and said, 'Never again,' and to find ourselves here only a short few decades later is, I think, appalling. A conservative philosopher a long time ago said, 'The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men'—and, I believe, in the 21st century that should include 'good women'—'to do nothing.'

For the sake of politeness, for the sake of not wanting to make a fuss, for the sake of not wanting to offend each other, we have allowed these atrocities to go unmarked, have not borne full witness to what actually happened, have not spoken honestly, have glossed over the gory and grotesque details. What happened a year ago was a group of people who didn't just want to start a war. When you go into the details—if I have time, I will be reading from the Testimonies Without Boundaries book, which does go to the horror of what actually occurred on that day. We gloss over that so we can just skip over the inhumanity and say this is just an ancient war and these are just two tribes fighting. No. One group of people wants to create a nation-state with safe and secure borders and get on with living life, and the other parties to this tragedy sought to destroy, denigrate and dehumanise their victims.

I also, on that visit with many other of my colleagues—Dan Tehan, James Paterson, Garth Hamilton, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Bert van Manen—watched the horrific 45 minutes of footage, which wasn't some IDF scam. It was actually live footage taken from the cameras of the Hamas terrorists as they went on their rampage. There have been media reports about how horrific this footage was, and you cannot unsee Palestinians, as Janet Albrechtsen says, cheering the arrivals of trucks laden with human beings as carcasses of terrorism. It captured some of the horror of innocent people being murdered, some beheaded, hunted down, raped, kicked, bashed, burnt alive—adults, babies, children. That's what happened, and we shouldn't turn our eyes away from it. We should not turn our ears away from this horror.

Yesterday was an opportunity to remember those victims, to actually pray for the families impacted and recognise the resilience of the Israeli people and the Jewish people. That is why so many of us gathered in community events around the country, in suburbs and in capital cities, to mourn, to respect, to remember, to pray and also, in some moments, experience great joy, as with those of us that gathered on the front lawns of Parliament House yesterday, dancing for the survival and the future of the Jewish people and Israel and their resilience. I just want to read a piece from the ambassador of Israel to Australia from last night's commemoration service:

'In the early morning hours of Saturday 7 October 2023, Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel and brutally murdered more than 1,200 people, including Australian Galit Carbone. They wounded almost 5,000 people and kidnapped 251 men, women, young children and the elderly. As of today, 101 people, including two children, remain in Hamas captivity. We will continue to do everything in our power to bring them home.

'Yesterday, we lit a candle in memory of the victims of October 7 and shared the testimonies of those who survived. October 7 saw the greatest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, and the depravity of that day will never be forgotten. May their memory be a blessing.'

The reason why the world decided 'never again' was that it was so atrocious, so inhumane. Yet here we are again, and there are people who yesterday sought to celebrate those atrocities as if, somehow, it was justified and as if, somehow, Israel and the Jewish people deserved to be attacked, deserved to be dehumanised and deserved the attempt to destroy them.

What we've seen is our government refuse to bear witness to this horror and spend 12 months making some moral equivalence between the antisemitism of what happened on 7 October, the antisemitism which is being normalised in this country and Islamophobia. They've chosen to somehow make moral equivalency. They've trashed decades of bipartisanship around the State of Israel, its status as an ally and our commitment to its ongoing survival and to a Jewish state here in the modern world.

It's been absolutely appalling to see that equivocation, because it has allowed the celebration of those atrocities to occur in capital cities right across the country, including at sacred places like the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne in my home state. We stand with Israel. We stand with the Jewish people and with Jewish Australians. You will win.