Australia has not been immune from what the historian Robert Wistrich has described as “the longest hatred”, with open antisemitism starting to become prevalent in the 1880s.
Loyalty is built from the ground up, not demanded from the top down. When members are not heard, they disengage – and when that happens at scale, parties hollow out.
Bondi Beach exposed that illusion for what it is. The men who opened fire were not responding to a policy or a border. They were acting on an older hatred and
any framework that cannot begin with that fact is not merely incomplete – it is complicit.