Heather du Plessis-Allan: The Bondi attack was a race relations problem

This business of Australia tightening up its gun laws feels like it runs the risk of distracting from the bigger problems over there. 

I don’t think guns were the problem on Sunday. Australia already has some of the tightest gun laws in the world. 

This is a race relations problem. 

This attack was predictable. There was no shortage of warnings. 

Jewish businesses have been set alight in recent years, synagogues have been attacked, obviously Jewish people have been hassled, Israeli people have been denied customer service in Melbourne, cars have been set alight in an anti-Semitic attack and two nurses in Sydney lost their jobs for bragging on TikTok that they would kill Jewish patients. 

There is a timeline on Time magazine’s website of all the events leading up to Sunday that is confronting. 

The Albanese Government knew there was a problem brewing. They asked the special envoy on anti-Semitism to give them a set of recommendations. 

For the last six months they’ve had those recommendations and done nothing. 

So, tightening up gun laws is never a bad thing. Checking in on a licence holder every few years rather than never must be a good thing. 

But if the Aussies think that’s the fix for what just happened, they are misguided and allowing themselves to be distracted. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
On the business of Australia tightening up its gun laws.
It does feel a little bit like this runs the
risk of distracting from the bigger problem that they've actually
got over there. I mean, I think guns were not
the biggest problem on Sunday. Australia already has some of
the tightest gun laws in the world. This is actually
a race relations and religious problem over there. This attack
was predictable. There was no shortage of warnings that this

(00:21):
might happen. Jewish synagogues in the last few years have
been set alight. You've had the synagogues attacked, the businesses attacked,
obviously Jewish people of people who look obviously Jewish have
been hassled. Israeli people have been denied customer service. In Melbourne,
cars have been set alight in an anti Semitic attack.
Two nurses, you might recall, in Sydney lost their jobs

(00:41):
for bragging on TikTok that they would kill Jewish patients.
Now there is a timeline that Time magazine has printed
on its website of all of the events in the
last few years leading up to Sunday, and it is
actually confronting how much has been going on the Albanesi
government knew there was a problem brewing. They asked the
Special Envoy on Anti Semitism to give them a set
of recommendations. For the last six months that they've had

(01:04):
those recommendations, they've done basically nothing about it. So tightening
up the gun laws is what they're doing as a
knee jerk thing. Now, that is not a bad thing.
Checking up a license holder every few years rather than
never has got to be a good thing. But if
the Aussies think that what's just been announced is the
fix for what has just happened on Sunday, they are
misguided and they are allowing themselves to be distracted from

(01:26):
what is a very very big problem in their country.
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