What a shame that the Bondi attack on the Jewish festival gathering has been so politicised.
The Opposition ,led by Susan Ley, has seized upon this national tragedy to blame Albanese and his government for its occurrence.And has-been politicians ,John Howard and Josh Frydenberg ,have been quick to join the howling pack.
But it is difficult to imagine how the federal government could have prevented that awful loss of innocent lives without having previously banned all such gatherings.What an outcry that would have caused in the’ land of the free’!
And,all the time in the post-event recriminations against the Albanese government by the Opposition and others, the elephant in the room has been Benjamin Netanyahu and his campaign of genocide in Gaza.
No one dares mention the cause of the escalation of anti-Jewish sentiment that has arisen in Australia and ,indeed ,around the world in the past two years.That is how long our television screens have daily exposed the indiscriminate slaughter and starvation of thousands of innocent men, women and children by the Israeli military.
This doesn’t justify what happened to those innocent people celebrating a special religious event at our most iconic beach. But it is a significant omission from the general context. .
Josh Frydenberg claimed that Albanese ‘has divided Australia on racist lines.’Nothing could be further from the truth. Racism in Australia has a long history and an extensive lexicon.It goes right back to 1788 and includes documented incidents of extreme violence towards and, indeed , massacres of Aboriginal people.
Frydenberg must be familiar with some of that history and the demeaning labels that are recognisable to mature -age Australians. The Australian lexicon of racism is replete with handy insults,eg.boongs chinks,I-ties, wogs, wops and dagoes.You can probably easily extend the list.
And of course there was the relatively recent emphatic defeat of the Voice to Parliament proposal brought forward by the Albanese government.
As a matter of significant interest in the Bondi tragedy, the gunman father came to Australia in 1998 under the watch of Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton and the son came to the notice of ASIO because of his ties to Isis in 2019 when Dutton was Minister for Home Affairs.
Not that either ex-politician is in any way culpable in relation to last Sunday’s tragedy, but given the Opposition’s pious outrage and full frontal attack on the Albanese government, it is a reminder of that ancient wisdom ‘People who live in glass houses…’
– Merv Welch, The Palms.
