Australian’s opposition leader launched a new antisemitism, extremism and counterterrorism task force in the wake of the Bondi Beach terror attack — as she accused the government of failing to heed the warnings of its own antisemitism report.
Sussan Ley is set to lead her Coalition party’s task force aimed at tackling rampant antisemitism in the country following Sunday’s terrorist attack that left 15 people dead and dozens wounded as they celebrated Hanukkah, Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported.
“For two years, Jewish Australians have been warning that antisemitism is rising and that their lives have been made harder, day after day,” Ley told reporters Tuesday. “Those warnings were not heeded.”
Ley joined many politicians who faulted Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for failing to implement the full recommendations put forward by his antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal over the summer.
Among some of the stricter recommendations was a call for the country to screen visa applicants for antisemitic views and for the government to pull funding from universities and institutions that failed to properly address antisemitism.
Those recommendations had been previously scrutinized for failing to detail what differentiated antisemitic views from criticisms of Israel’s war in Gaza.
Ley, however, has said that all the recommendations must be implemented “in full” to secure the safety of Australian citizens, calling antisemitism a “real and present danger” in the country.
“This is a national security issue,” she said. “It is not a debate about politics or slogans. It is about keeping Australians safe.”
Segal, whose report warned that antisemitism in Australia had reached a “tipping point that threatens social harmony,” agreed that the government needed to speed up its response.
“Of course, the report could have been acted on further and faster, but that doesn’t mean opportunity is lost,” she told Sky News.
“I think that now the community is sufficiently concerned and anxious about this, that there should be a formal statement about the implementation,” she added.
Since Sunday’s massacre, Albanese has come under fire for his government’s failure to stomp out antisemitism following a global rise in hate against Jewish communities over the war in Gaza.
When asked during an ABC Sydney interview on Tuesday if adopting the recommendations of Segal’s report earlier would have saved lives, Albanese got on the defensive.
“Antisemitism didn’t begin in 2022,” the PM said, referencing the year he came into power. “We are working as hard as we can. Antisemitism, tragically, has been around for a long period of time.”
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