how Australian politics descended into ugliness in attack’s aftermath

Thursday had been earmarked for Australians to mourn the victims of last month’s Bondi shootings.

Those who had lost loved ones in the antisemitic attacks wanted it to be a chance to remember the dead, and spread light and kindness in their honour.

Instead, it was a day dominated by a political row resulting in the collapse of the opposition coalition.

“I mean, you would have thought they could have put this off for 24 hours,” veteran political commentator Malcolm Farr told the BBC.

“It’s at the very least unfortunate timing and shows a certain amount of self-indulgence.”

The fight – which centred around reforms sparked by the tragedy – looks set to sink two leaders and trash their parties’ electoral chances, and caps off what many Australians say has been a disappointing month of politics.

When two gunmen opened fire on an event marking the Jewish festival of Hanukkah at Bondi Beach, killing 15 people – including a 10-year-old child – the recriminations began almost immediately.

“The turnaround was amazing in the way they [politicians] politicised it,” says Bondi local Kass Hill, 52. “The fingerpointing isn’t solving anything.”

While families were waiting to bury their loved ones, a conveyer belt of politicians – including the opposition leader – visited the scene to apportion blame. Populist leaders came to rail against immigration. Prominent businesspeople popped by to pose with flowers.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, accused by many Jewish Australians of ignoring their concerns ahead of the attack, spent the weeks after it dismissing calls from many in the community for a national inquiry into antisemitism.

He was repeatedly heckled in public, arriving at a memorial to a tidal wave of boos and cries of “You’re not welcome”. “You might as well go to a jihadist nation where you can fit in,” one person shouted. Looming over the crowd, a large screen read “a night of unity”.

Criticised as being overly defensive and slow to listen, Albanese has in turn rebuked his parliamentary rivals for “playing politics” with tragedy.

The 14 December Bondi attack was Australia’s worst mass shooting since the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, when 35 people were killed, but the responses to the tragedies couldn’t be more different.

Then Prime Minister John Howard visited the scene of the shooting in Tasmania to lay wreaths together with opposition leaders, who shortly afterwards united to help him pass firearms laws that made Australia a world leader on gun control.

“Australian society and politics is very different than it was 30 years ago and we’re just a far more divided society,” says John Warhurst, an emeritus professor of political science at the Australian National University.

There are a number of reasons why this attack has divided people in ways Port Arthur didn’t – including the already fraught debate raging in Australia over Israel, Gaza and antisemitism, according to Mark Kenny, a political columnist and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.

“Then this event lobs into that, [and] I think it led to it being immediately politicised,” he told the BBC.

Since the 7 October 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas and protests in Australia against Israel’s war on Gaza which followed, Albanese has consistently been accused of failing to do enough to stamp out antisemitism. The Executive Council of Australian Jewry says antisemitic incidents have increased from an average of 342 before the 7 October attacks in 2023 to 1,654 last year.

Likewise, he’s been accused of not doing enough to call out Israel’s actions in Gaza, which UN experts have called genocide and Israel denies.

Hours after the Bondi shooting, the antisemitism commissioner appointed by Albanese linked it to the pro-Palestinian protests that have regularly taken place in Sydney and which Jewish leaders have lobbied against.

“It began on 9 October 2023 at the Sydney Opera House,” Jillian Segal said in a statement. “Now death has reached Bondi Beach.”

Investigators have not said there is any link between the alleged gunmen and the pro-Palestinian movement, instead alleging the pair were inspired by the jihadist group Islamic State, with the younger of the father-son duo on intelligence agencies’ radars for a period in 2019.

As it was after Port Arthur, gun reform was the first thing on the legislative agenda after the Bondi attack.

“We know that one of these terrorists held a firearm licence and had six guns, in spite of living in the middle of Sydney’s suburbs… There’s no reason why someone in that situation needed that many guns,” Albanese said as he announced a suite of changes in the following days.

Unlike Port Arthur, when the measures were broadly popular, Albanese’s focus on gun laws was immediately attacked by the Liberal opposition and parts of the Jewish community as a distraction from what they view as the real cause of the attack – antisemitism. Even Howard, the architect of the 1996 reforms, came out to suggest they were an “attempted diversion”.

“That kind of ‘either or ism’ is a feature about politics these days probably everywhere in the West. Everything becomes supercharged and divisive,” says Kenny.

“There’s just this fundamental lack of trust that’s almost like we’re in the grip of a toxic cynicism that means that motives of political leaders… the first instinct is to question them, to regard them as disingenuous.”

The recent decision by a festival in Adelaide to disinvite a Palestinian-Australian author – leading ultimately to the collapse of the entire writers’ week portion of the event – due to “sensitivities” after Bondi and her “past statements” is also a sign of how tense the current circumstances are, adds Kenny.

Demands for immediate action on antisemitism were loud in the days after the attack, and Albanese did soon announce a crackdown on hate speech, backed by the antisemitism commissioner.

But some critics said the measures would impinge on free speech, including the right to criticise Israel, and on protest, while others argued they did not go far enough in protecting other minorities.

“[It’s] a can of worms,” says Warhurst, noting that there has never been “an easy agreement on finding where that balance lies” between free speech and hate speech.

“Now is the worst time, I think, to be trying to resolve those sorts of issues because you are doing it fairly quickly and you’re doing it in a heated environment.”

The hate speech laws had the backing of the Jewish community, but many felt it was not enough – with several of the victims’ families pushing Albanese to call a royal commission, Australia’s most powerful form of independent inquiry.

For weeks, Albanese argued the measures already announced were enough and that a royal commission would be the wrong tool to unpick what had happened. It could give a platform to antisemites, he said.

Royal commissions had not been launched into previous tragedies like Port Arthur, Albanese pointed out, comments which were widely dismissed. Promised reviews of intelligence agencies and law enforcement similarly did nothing to dissuade those calling for the inquiry.

Their pleas were mirrored by a coordinated campaign of letter writing that featured on the front pages of right-wing newspapers. ”I don’t think it’s controversial to say that the News Limited and other parts of the media were certainly stirring the pot,” says Warhurst.

Albanese’s arguments against a royal commission were “really hard to make in these circumstances”, says Kenny, and it backfired on him when he was ultimately forced to reverse course on the issue.

Analysts have also suggested his reluctance may have been down to fears it could become complex, controversial and divisive. It could invite discussion of the war in Gaza, while potentially excluding examination of Islamophobia – which exploded after Bondi, with The Islamophobia Register Australia recording a 740% rise in incidents by early January – when many Labor MPs have large Muslim electorates.

There was likely also a “reluctance to cave to the opposition”, Farr believes: opposition leader Sussan Ley had vociferously demanded the royal commission, asking what Albanese was “hiding”, and revelled in his backflip.

It is fair to say that, before December’s attack, Ley had been struggling to land a punch on the government and assert authority over her own party. In the weeks before the shooting, some pundits were even predicting her imminent ousting.

“The Bondi attacks offered her an opportunity to prosecute a very strong case against the government,” says Kenny.

But any momentum she gained over the royal commission collapsed this week when she failed to rally her Coalition behind the very hate speech laws she had so loudly demanded Albanese quickly implement.

By Thursday – the national day of mourning for the Bondi attacks – things had fallen apart.

The National Party announced they were leaving the coalition, having refused to vote for the legislation despite a shadow cabinet agreement. They, despite earlier calls for haste, said they had not been given enough time to examine the proposals which they said could threaten free speech.

On his way out the door, Nationals leader David Littleproud suggested the only way his party would consider returning to the fold was if Ley was dumped, leaving her already shaky leadership hanging by a thread.

“I’m quite sure there are people… who are polishing their shoes and tightening the knot on their ties to step forward should that vacancy occur or be forced,” says Farr.

However, Littleproud’s bold ultimatum could be an overstep which costs him his own job, with mutterings that Liberals wouldn’t accept him as a leader in any future coalition either.

But then, it seems all of Australia’s politicians may be on shakier ground.

The posturing of the main parties over the past month has left a bitter taste in the mouths of many Australians. In a poll released earlier this week, Albanese’s net approval rating had plunged to minus 11 from his previous score of zero in November, while Ley’s approval rating – never high – barely budged at minus 28.

The repeated calls for unity by politicians who simultaneously fail to heed their own statements will not have gone unnoticed, and Thursday’s display of political infighting is unlikely to improve the fortunes of any party, says Farr.

“It will reinforce the view of so many Australians who already are cynical about what politicians, no matter their party, actually represent and will reinforce the belief that politicians, MPs, just stand for themselves rather than the national good.”