Anti-Semitism / Bondi Beach and Australia’s failed multiculturalism |
I knew two of the people murdered at Bondi Beach. That beach has always felt like Australia distilled: sun-bleached, open, and unserious in the best way. It is where the country goes to exhale. You don’t brace yourself at Bondi Beach. You assume the day will end the way it began.
My late father once thought that too. A Holocaust survivor, he arrived in Australia after the war with just a suitcase in his hand and a number on his arm. Australia took him in without interrogation of his past loyalties or beliefs, expecting only that whatever horrors he had fled would not be imported here. He honoured that bargain, worked hard, enjoyed financial success, and gave plenty back. As did so many others who came in those post-second world war waves. That bargain has now frayed. Bondi Beach was the proof.
We have a saying: she’ll be right. It means don’t panic, don’t overreact, things will work themselves out. As a national temperament, it has served us well. As an immigration philosophy, it has become an excuse for intellectual laziness. Bondi Beach is what happens when a country shrugs.
Sadly Bondi Beach is not just an Australian story. It is a test case
Australia likes to think of itself as the world’s most successful multicultural society – and for decades, it was. A former British penal colony with no aristocracy to speak of, Australia developed a deeply egalitarian civic identity. This was expressed through another Australian phrase – that everyone should have a fair go – which demanded mutual respect, tolerance and equal opportunity. Jews fleeing Europe, Greeks and Italians rebuilding shattered lives, Vietnamese escaping communism, and later Chinese migrants chasing opportunity; all were absorbed into a shared public culture that was unmistakably Australian within a generation. What made this work was a clear and unspoken contract: keep your culture, embrace your new home, and leave your old-world hatreds at the door.
The philosopher Karl Popper – himself a Jewish refugee who lost 16 relatives in........