Hollie Hughes (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Mental Health and Suicide Prevention) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise today to stand in solidarity with the people of Israel in commemoration of one of the worst pogroms perpetuated against innocent civilians in a single day since the Holocaust. I honour the innocent civilians in Israel who daily live in fear in a hostile region full of hate-filled people who want to see them eradicated in their entirety. I weep for the hostages who were taken, beaten, tortured, raped and brutally murdered, never to see families again, simply because they were Jewish. I celebrate those who were liberated and released, and we will keep in our prayers the hostages who are yet to be released. My heart breaks for the great loss of life that war and conflict bring. Explosives do not discriminate between civilians and militants; that is the cost of war. But Hamas does discriminate and Hezbollah does discriminate, so let's not forget what led us here. And for all those who show bitter concern for the innocents caught up in the conflict, I can hear their deafening silence in the face of these barbaric acts committed on Israeli soil.

There is the hypocrisy of those in this country who dare to upset our civil system of tolerance and respect to bring hatred across the sea to our diverse landscape and, in doing so, threaten to upend our peace and security in the process. These are the people who protest so-called genocide in one breath and then cheer the firing of rockets in another because they now flow the other way. There are those who claim to be critical of the Zionist regime purely so they can veil their antisemitism. There are people who have fled to Australia for peace, prosperity and freedom who challenge this way of life by imposing their brand of hate speech and intimidation on anyone who dares to criticise them. How has this been allowed to continue in this country over the past 12 months? Simply, it has been a lack of leadership from this Prime Minister, a mealy-mouthed approach that even today has seen him speaking out of both sides of his mouth. It would have been nice if the government had stepped up and been decisive, if it had taken a zero-tolerance approach on this issue. It was not our fight but it is becoming our fight as a result of this unfettered vitriol that has been permitted to proliferate.

We cannot forget the damage that UNRWA has done. The United Nations organisation has used money from Western nations including our own to radicalise and propagandise impressionable children in the Middle East to grow up with a hatred and dislike of Jews. I have spoken about UNRWA and its disgraceful behaviour in the past in this place. This is an organisation that employed terrorist sympathisers. It employed someone who even went so far as to pray that Hitler would return because his job was not finished.

This is a history of tensions between neighbours going back thousands of years that we do not have time to go into today, but we need to remember we would not be standing here today one year and one day on from October 7 if Hamas and, by association, Hezbollah and Iran had not broken the ceasefire, if they had they not attacked innocent young people at a music festival, families living in a kibbutz near the Gazan border, not only torturing them, raping them. As we saw last night at a vigil held at the Israeli embassy, it was not just murder that occurred; it was something even more than that. There is silence from those who know that many of these innocent, unarmed civilians were beheaded, and their heads were placed on the freeway where people were trying to escape. People were having to zig-zag along the road to avoid hitting heads that had been placed there by terrorists. Terrorists wearing GoPros were posting this footage to their social media and proudly sharing with their families back home in Gaza how many Jews they had killed, how many women and children they had raped and tortured. It is beyond barbaric. It is not the behaviour of anyone with a drop of humanity in them.

Then there is the fact that those who sympathise with the plight of these murderers—and, unfortunately, some of them are in this place—could not restrain themselves to allow for one day of mourning. They could not allow the Jewish people, the Jewish community in Australia, and, in fact, all decent Australians, to commemorate, to remember what had occurred on October 7, when over 1,200 people were brutally murdered and when 240 hostages were taken. One hundred and one hostages are still being held, and they're not being held in military installations. They're not being held with access to the Red Cross. They're being held in tunnels that Hamas built under schools and hospitals as it cowardly hides amongst its civilians, using them as human shields.

The intolerable and disgraceful behaviour of these groups knows no bounds. Yet those that appear to support Hamas and Hezbollah and appear to support the actions of Iran and the eradication of Israel, who declare 'from the river to the sea'—and I would challenge most of them to know what river or sea they're talking about—the fact that they continue on this disgraceful campaign against Israel is just beyond words. It is just extraordinary to hear any Israeli or Jewish person being referred to as a coloniser.

Acting Deputy President McGrath, you and I were in Israel together. We walked along one of the roads, which they are currently excavating around, that they think is the path along which Jesus most likely carried the cross. To see where thousands of years ago Jesus, himself a Jew, was supposed to have walked, to read in the Bible the story of the Israelites, going back thousands of years—there are those who so misunderstand history, whether ancient or modern, who refer to Israel as colonisers and who deny their right to exist. It is, in fact, very much their homeland. That is no better illustrated than by the location of Al Aqsa, which was built on top of the Temple Mount, on top of former Jewish temples. It is not the Jews that were the late arrivals in this land.

I also want to acknowledge—and it breaks my heart every time I think about them—the two Bibas children, Kfir and Ariel. Kfir recently marked his first birthday in captivity. Nobody knows if he is still alive, but this baby has now spent more time in captivity than at home on the kibbutz where he had been living and from where he had been so violently taken. The fact that this morning we saw in the other place the inability to have a bipartisan motion and acknowledgement of 7 October is a sad indictment on this country's Prime Minister and a divergence from the position of all Labor prime ministers that stood strongly with Israel and that understood the importance of our partnership and friendship with Israel. Yet this Prime Minister, with his cheap political pointscoring, perhaps because he's worried about seats in south-west Sydney, is prepared to undermine decades of bipartisanship, during which everyone, as parties of government, has recognised the importance of our relationship with Israel and the fact that, in an area of great volatility, it is a friend who best reflects our own democratic way of life.

The fact is that the Prime Minister is more interested in playing political games than standing up for the Jewish community, and the Jewish community know it. Really, Prime Minister, just stop pretending, because you are actually unable to stand up for not only Israel but, in particular, the Jewish Australian community. We know that they don't feel safe, and that breaks my heart. That is unacceptable.

It is unacceptable that people who came to this country looking for peace and stability—many of them now second and third generation; their grandparents were Holocaust survivors—feel unsafe and would prefer to return to Israel, which is under a barrage of missile attacks. They feel more safe there than they do here, with the antisemitism that is currently running through our community and is on full display in south-west Sydney and, more importantly and, I think, more despairingly, is on full display at so many of our universities—which are supposed to be places of higher learning, yet are now just hotbeds of antisemitism. It is absolutely disgraceful.

The Holocaust didn't start with the gas chambers. I would implore all of you who did not study modern history—or those of you who did and it has somehow slipped out of your minds—to remember that, because what is happening now is in so many ways almost repeating what happened in the lead-up to World War II, such as Kristallnacht. You can look at the way that things have been and the attacks that have occurred on Jewish communities, Jewish businesses and Jewish schools and the fact that aged-care homes have to have armed guards securing them. We know schools do. It is absolutely appalling.

I do want to commend those Australians who have stood up and been counted and stood alongside our Jewish fellow citizens. There are people, and a lot of us, who support you here in this country. Yesterday, at the Never Again is Now rally down on the Parliament House lawn, it was interesting to hear—I think that this is an important message for people to hear, and I've been guilty of saying it as well—that the silent majority of Australians stand strong with the Jewish community and support the Jewish community and are not antisemitic. But the time for being the silent majority is over. The time for silence is over. It is time to speak up and say that this is not acceptable, that this is not the country we live in and that this is not behaviour that is appropriate for Australia. But it is not appropriate behaviour towards any group of fellow citizens, whoever they are.

We know what happens up the end of the chamber, with their undergraduate stunts and lack of understanding or ability to recognise what has actually occurred and how this started. But I do want to say that I stand with the Australian Jewish community. I honour them. How they have been treated is appalling. They deserved the right to mark a day of mourning unimpeded by protest. For myself—maybe not for many or all of us in this place—I apologise that there wasn't leadership from the government. Neither on 7 October last year nor onwards has there been leadership that has stopped the appalling behaviour of these protesters, who have been intimidating you on what should have been a very, very solemn day or remembrance.