Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Home Ownership) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Australia is a great country, but I fear that we are degrading our standards very heavily. In the past few weeks, I've been very concerned about the dropping of our standards and the dropping of our public debate on what we are expected to accept as Australians. In relation to antisemitism, this has been one of the great scourges of history, but it has reared its ugly head in a most disgusting way since 7 October.

The attempted mainstreaming of the saying 'from the river to the sea' is deeply antisemitic, and that is designed to erase Israel from the map. We hear a lot about this from the crossbench, and I've been disgusted with some of the things that I've heard in the past few months. I believe that Israel is held to a different standard. You hear a lot about Israel but not a lot about Ukraine, and I wonder why that is. The attempted mainstreaming of this extreme ideology is very dangerous for a nation like Australia.

The defacing of Josh Burns's electorate office in Melbourne and the drawing of red horns on his head are deeply antisemitic and outrageous; it is an outrageous drop in our standards. I was disappointed to read the statement from the Leader of the Greens, Mr Bandt, where he called out this poor behaviour but couldn't bring himself to mention the word 'antisemitism'—and that's what it was. We have to be upfront, with plain speaking, and call out the degradation of Australian standards. Our children expect us to hand over a high-quality country to them, not a country which is going to be subject to extreme ideology in the mainstream. That is dangerous for all of us, not just Jewish Australians.