In the hours after the massacre at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney last week, it seemed that Australia’s leaders had come together to offer a bipartisan response, as they had done for many past catastrophes.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese urged unity, describing the assault on the Jewish community as an attack on every Australian. Sussan Ley, the leader of the conservative opposition, offered the government her party’s “full and unconditional” support.
That unity quickly broke down.
Opposition leaders seized on mounting anger in the Jewish community, where many say that Albanese’s centre-left government had not acted enough on their warnings of a dangerous rise in antisemitism over the past two years. Days after the shooting, some of Albanese’s political opponents blamed him and his government for the mass shooting. Others attacked members of his government for not attending funerals for the 15 people killed and dismissed his move to tighten Australia’s gun laws as a distraction from the issue of antisemitism.
Albanese fired back, saying that his government had appointed Australia’s first antisemitism envoy and passed legislation to criminalise hate speech. And, he noted that he had condemned the apparent antisemitic motivations behind the attack.
Scenes like this would not be out of place in the charged political landscape of the United States. But the speed at which a horrific event has turned into bitter partisanship has been unusual in Australia, where politics gravitates toward the centre, lawmakers typically have little incentive to fan the flames of emotion, and the political class tends toward consensus in moments of crisis.
“I’ve not seen a moment of national tragedy so quickly turned to partisan political advantage as has happened here,” said Mark Kenny, the director of the Australian Studies Institute at the Australian National University.
The massacre and its aftermath fell along existing political fault lines in Australia.
Even before the Bondi shooting, Albanese’s government had faced criticism for not quickly addressing a series of recommendations from his antisemitism envoy — which included setting up a national database for antisemitic incidents and allowing the government to withhold funding from universities that fail to act against antisemitism — though some rights groups had described them as overreaching.
Hours after the December 14 attack, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel directly linked it to that decision. “You let the disease spread and the result is the horrific attacks on Jews we saw today,” he said.
Although Ley has not gone as far as Netanyahu, the opposition leader has accused Albanese and his government of letting antisemitism fester. On Monday, Ley accused the government of not engaging enough with those in mourning, and launched a scathing tirade against one minister, who she said she had not seen “shed a single tear.”
The anger directed at Albanese has been such that he has not attended the funerals of those killed in the attack, even while other leaders, including Ley, have. On Sunday, when thousands gathered at a memorial at Bondi Beach to mark one week since the attack, some in the crowd booed Albanese, who did not speak.
It is the biggest political challenge Albanese has faced since he won re-election in a landslide victory in May. And it has galvanised the conservative side, which has in recent months been wracked by infighting.
The bloodshed at Bondi Beach was the deadliest mass shooting in Australia since 1996, when a gunman killed 35 people in the state of Tasmania. The prime minister at the time, John Howard, a conservative, enjoyed bipartisan support as he quickly enacted strict gun control laws that are celebrated to this day. — The New York Times
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