Australia is a censorious and increasingly secretive nation. In such an environment, clarity matters, especially in moments of public trauma. Yet following the murders of Jewish Australians at Bondi, clarity has been conspicuously absent.

What has been most striking is not public confusion, but official evasiveness.

Our leaders have bent over backwards to avoid naming the ideological character of the violence, as though precision itself were a provocation. In doing so, they have insulted the public’s intelligence.

If Australians were truly naive, we might be speculating wildly.

Was this the work of obscure foreign groups? A random spasm of hatred detached from context?

Australians are neither naive nor docile. We have lived through enough in recent years to recognise patterns when they present themselves.

The attack did not occur in a vacuum.

Since October 9, 2023, Australians have witnessed open celebration of the slaughter of Jews, including public demonstrations where antisemitic slogans were excused, debated, or minimised rather than condemned. As if it matters whether they said ‘Gas the Jews!’ or ‘Where’s the Jews?’

When chants of genocidal intent were met not with enforcement but with semantic hair-splitting, something fundamental shifted. The argument became not whether hatred was being expressed, but whether the exact wording crossed a technical threshold.

That distinction was morally meaningless. The rupture had already occurred.

In the months that followed, antisemitism was allowed to acquire a strange cultural legitimacy. Attendance at rolling anti-Jewish protests became a form of rebellious chic. Calls to ‘globalise the intifada’ were tolerated, contextualised, or quietly ignored.

This was not restraint. It was abdication.

Worse, elements of leadership appeared to feed the atmosphere rather than arrest it.

During her visit to the region, Australia’s Foreign Minister declined to attend the site of the October 7 massacre. Later, amid a documented rise in antisemitic incidents at home, the government moved to signal a potential future recognition of a Palestinian state that does not yet exist in any coherent or agreed form.

Whatever the intent, the timing was reckless.

The message received was unmistakable.

Jewish Australians were expected to absorb hostility quietly, while the political class performed moral gestures abroad and semantic caution at home.

This occurred alongside an immigration program of unprecedented scale.

From June 2022 to December 2024, net permanent and long-term arrivals totalled more than one million people. No serious attempt was made to assess the social consequences of that pace, or to explain how cohesion would be maintained while moral and cultural tensions were already rising.

What happened at Bondi should shock us. That it does not entirely surprise many Australians is the real indictment. A society that refuses to name hatred when it appears should not be startled when that hatred eventually acts.

Violence does not emerge from silence alone. It emerges when silence is enforced, when reality is managed rather than confronted, and when moral language is used to obscure rather than illuminate.

Australia cannot be governed indefinitely by evasion. A nation led by men who whisper rather than speak, who manage rather than judge, and who fear naming reality more than confronting it, will eventually discover that reality does not remain quiet in return.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!