Speaking to reporters in Sydney this morning, Federal Jewish MP Julian Leeser has delivered a scathing rebuke of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his government amid growing calls for a Commonwealth-led royal commission into the Bondi terror attack that killed 15 people last Sunday.
Here’s what Leeser said.
The so-called prime minister of this country, Anthony Albanese, never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
The Jewish community of this country cannot survive on the promises of this government and this appalling prime minister who is always late to the party and who wants the Jewish community of this country to live in his half-measures. For two years, we’ve been fighting his half-measures. For two years, we’ve put forth proposals in the parliament to improve the security of Australians, and he’s voted consistently against them. He’s dragged his feet.
We can’t have a situation for one more day in this country where the Jewish community, where any Australian is forced to live in the half-measures and the delayed action and the talking out of both sides of their mouths that this prime minister has given us repeatedly. [He has] done nothing about the antisemitism that is rampant on our campuses still, even now, does nothing about the Jew hatred that is everywhere in the arts and cultural sector, and rather than looking at the root causes of what caused those gunmen to pick up those weapons in the first place, that only a royal commission will get to, he calls for another departmental review.
This is the most shameful act in the history of our nation. Australia stands humiliated by the failure of leadership of this man, by the failure of leadership which has led to the extraordinary deaths in a terrorist act on the shores of Bondi in this great city of ours.
This departmental review, is just another attempt at deflecting and minimising the Jew hate that has been allowed to go on in this country. This departmental review can’t call witnesses. It can’t compel evidence in a public forum. It can’t allow the stories of the two years of antisemitic hate told and retold. It cannot root out antisemitism wherever it’s to be found.
We demand the prime minister bring the parliament back today to do what Chris Minns is doing, to listen to Sussan Ley, to extend the hand of bipartisanship, and for once in his life, take the real action that is needed to defeat the antisemitism that we are seeing, and we have seen this country for far too long.”
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