Port Arthur cop-out exposes PM’s lack of courage
Like all Western countries, we are increasingly atomised, divided and distrustful of one another, and it is beyond doubt that the Bondi terrorist attack reveals a serious escalation of our fraying national fabric.
Inadequate and misguided leadership from Anthony Albanese and his senior ministers has contributed to the rapid rise in anti-Semitism that we’ve witnessed, especially since October 7, 2023. Now we see the results of the permission structure that has allowed for, even facilitated, the dreadful rise in anti-Semitism in a country that has rapidly changed from one of the safest democracies for Jews to one of the least safe.
Yet it’s increasingly evident that, just as the truly bitter fruit of these failures crystallises, the Prime Minister will fail the test of leadership again and in so doing hand further opportunity to those in our midst who hate our way of life. For that is what the pivot to gun laws as the primary response to the Bondi atrocity will do. The fact is that the higher priorities must be to address both anti-Semitism and its chief driver in this country, radical political Islam.
As a senior minister in government at the time of the introduction of the national gun laws in 1996, I acknowledge there is always a need to keep a watching brief on how “fit for purpose” any laws are, and it beggars belief that the perpetrators of the latest outrage were licensed to possess guns – many of them.
However, there are several significant differences between the actions we took in response to horrors such as the Hoddle Street and Port Arthur massacres. We were addressing an emerging gun culture in parts of Australia that was, typically, making it to easy for lone-wolf operators, almost invariably disturbed young men from dysfunctional home backgrounds, to obtain firearms and engage in the indiscriminate slaughter of other Australians regardless of their ethnicity, religion or skin colour. It was also facilitating those who in moments of despair were intent upon taking their own lives.
What we now see is something else. We have people in our midst who are not suffering so much from mental health or tendencies to self-harm, but rather people deeply committed to the persecution, the murder, the very elimination of a whole race in particular – the Jews.
We are confronted with the truly perverted logic that Jews are accused of attempting genocide in the Middle East, while in truth it is Jews who face well-organised, well-resourced and deeply ideologically driven individuals, organisations and, in the case of Iran, nation-states that are quite open about their desire to obliterate their race.
Guns may occasionally be the means by which evil ends are achieved, but the problem now – the one the PM and too many others do not want to address – is that we have people in this country who simply reject our way of life and have evil objectives in mind.
This is widely recognised in the broader community, and I can reliably report that in the rural communities I move in, there is a palpable anger at the denial by our leaders of the need to discuss the real problems. That frustration is mounting rapidly as good citizens who live with and need firearms sense that the shadows of suspicion and distrust will fall on them rather than on those who really should be exposed.
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It is entirely possible, given the current government’s ineptness and lack of a moral compass, that it will manage to encourage an unhealthy gun culture whereby people will argue that if the real “bad guys” are not going to be restrained, they need to be able to protect themselves. That would encourage the very attitudes progressives say they hate about Americans – guns are needed for self-defence, and citizens retain the right to take the law into their own hands.
Our reluctance to stand up for our “Aussie values” is troubling at two very important levels. The first is that conviction will win over doubt and vacillation every time. We see raw, horrible conviction on the part of Jew-haters every day. Does the nation’s current leadership possess any real convictions of its own – apart perhaps from wanting (at any price) to establish the Labor Party as the natural party of government in Australia?
The second arises out of that lack of conviction. We lack conviction because we don’t understand what we have or how it came to us. Perhaps American economist Thomas Sowell put it best when he reminded us: “Civilisation doesn’t sustain itself. It has to be built, maintained, defended and, most importantly, understood. When that understanding is lost, decline is not just unlikely, it becomes inevitable. And that’s the illusion we’re living under today – that civilisation is permanent – but it isn’t.”
As a nation, we need – and the PM especially needs – to understand the wellsprings of our own culture and that of radical Islam, because the two are not compatible; and to pretend they are is to paper over the differences by the naive insistence that multiculturalism must never be examined, let alone questioned.
For centuries we have been building our cherished way of life on the ideal that every citizen enjoys equality, as Robert Menzies put it, and that all souls are equal in the eyes of heaven. We have lost sight of that great and critical key to our relative success as a land of fairness, freedom and opportunity, and so have been blinded to the reality that we have in our midst people who not only reject the ideal but seek to destroy it.
Put simply, we are confronted by people in our country who are wilfully and determinedly committed to the notion that some Australians – namely Jews – are nothing less than subhuman, and it is a good thing to kill them simply because they are Jewish. As Albanese’s predecessor, Bob Hawke, understood, when the bell tolls for Israel, it tolls for all mankind.
Australia now – right now – needs a PM who understands, has deep conviction and is possessed of great courage.