Senator McKENZIE (Victoria—Leader of the Nationals in the Senate) (17:23): Yesterday on the lawns of Parliament House, I was talking to a Jewish grandmother who was nearly in tears as she was telling me about her grandson who is 10 years old and at an Australian primary school. His best friend had to tell him recently that he couldn't come to his birthday. When he asked why, this young boy was told that it was because he was Jewish. They've both decided, as two 10-year-old best friends, to stay best friends at school, despite one of them being Jewish and it being against parents' advice. They're not going to tell their mates' parents that they're going to stay friends. That is actually what's happening in our primary schools to Australian kids. This isn't Germany in the 1930s; these are Australian students in Australian primary schools who aren't able to stay friends because one of them is an Australian Jew. A year ago, on 7 October, when we heard what was actually coming out of Israel—we didn't know the extent of the horror that had been visited—we all stood and moved a joint motion here, and many senators spoke to that. A year on, I can barely recognise our country and what's been wrought here as a result of the devastation in Israel. It is becoming normalised in our children, in our schools, in our universities and on our streets. Antisemitism in Germany didn't start with gas chambers or Jews in cattle trucks; it started with protests. It started with hate speech. It started with antisemitism being normalised. That journey slowly progressed through the 1930s. By 1938, before World War II started, it had reached catastrophic proportions, and I don't need to regale this chamber with the horrors of the Holocaust. At the end of World War II, the world came together to say: 'Never again can this occur. Never again can we treat a group of humanity in this way.' We all pledged that that would not occur and the Jewish people were given a homeland. The Jews of Judea could actually return and begin to build the modern State of Israel. Here in Australia, we have had a bipartisan approach to the State of Israel, its success and the fact that it pursues peace in what is a very troubled space, with neighbours and terrorist organisations who would seek to wipe it from the face of the earth. When people chant, 'From the river to the sea,' be very clear about what's being said and the messages that are being sent: you don't have a right to exist. Both parties of government having a bipartisan approach to this question over many, many decades has been the way that this country has chosen to support a liberal democracy's growth and success in the Middle East. Indeed, it is how Australia has become home—the cherished home—for so many Jews who, fleeing a war-torn Europe, have made such a wonderful contribution to our young democracy in the decades since. But over the last 12 months, those very people—the academics, the Jewish students, the business owners, the supporters of the arts—have been subjected to horrific things. Businesses have been boycotted in this country because they're run by Australian Jews. Academics have had their offices pissed on. That's not in some Third World country; that is actually— The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT ( Senator Bilyk ): Senator McKenzie, please withdraw the language. Senator McKENZIE: I withdraw the colloquial language. I'll be more accurate—urinated on at university campuses. Australian Jewish students have been spat on at campuses in this country, and somehow that is okay because some other Australian student doesn't agree with their right to be mourning family and to be standing up for Israel's right to exist. And we've had Jewish members of parliament treated abhorrently. I had the great privilege of visiting Israel a few months ago to visit the site of the Nova music festival—the site of such atrocities. I want to know: where are the feminists, with the horrific rapes that occurred? I was able to visit Kibbutz Be'eri, where Danny Majzner showed us around from house to house. Yes, the blood had been wiped away and the bodies were no longer there, but the devastation that had been wrought was left there as a very powerful reminder to us of what actually occurred. Above every single house where this had occurred, for the people that had lived there that had lost their lives, their photos and a description of what happened were there. In that kibbutz, Galit Carbone, an Australian Israeli citizen, lost her life. We met with the families of hostages and heard of their sorrow. We went to the Galilee and, on the morning we were there, there had been 32 missiles—thank goodness for the Iron Dome—launched from southern Lebanon by Hezbollah into what is an Arab community of Druze, who also see themselves as Israeli. We all came together as a globe and said, 'Never again,' and to find ourselves here only a short few decades later is, I think, appalling. A conservative philosopher a long time ago said, 'The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men'—and, I believe, in the 21st century that should include 'good women'—'to do nothing.' For the sake of politeness, for the sake of not wanting to make a fuss, for the sake of not wanting to offend each other, we have allowed these atrocities to go unmarked, have not borne full witness to what actually happened, have not spoken honestly, have glossed over the gory and grotesque details. What happened a year ago was a group of people who didn't just want to start a war. When you go into the details—if I have time, I will be reading from the Testimonies Without Boundaries book, which does go to the horror of what actually occurred on that day. We gloss over that so we can just skip over the inhumanity and say this is just an ancient war and these are just two tribes fighting. No. One group of people wants to create a nation-state with safe and secure borders and get on with living life, and the other parties to this tragedy sought to destroy, denigrate and dehumanise their victims. I also, on that visit with many other of my colleagues—Dan Tehan, James Paterson, Garth Hamilton, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Bert van Manen—watched the horrific 45 minutes of footage, which wasn't some IDF scam. It was actually live footage taken from the cameras of the Hamas terrorists as they went on their rampage. There have been media reports about how horrific this footage was, and you cannot unsee Palestinians, as Janet Albrechtsen says, cheering the arrivals of trucks laden with human beings as carcasses of terrorism. It captured some of the horror of innocent people being murdered, some beheaded, hunted down, raped, kicked, bashed, burnt alive—adults, babies, children. That's what happened, and we shouldn't turn our eyes away from it. We should not turn our ears away from this horror. Yesterday was an opportunity to remember those victims, to actually pray for the families impacted and recognise the resilience of the Israeli people and the Jewish people. That is why so many of us gathered in community events around the country, in suburbs and in capital cities, to mourn, to respect, to remember, to pray and also, in some moments, experience great joy, as with those of us that gathered on the front lawns of Parliament House yesterday, dancing for the survival and the future of the Jewish people and Israel and their resilience. I just want to read a piece from the ambassador of Israel to Australia from last night's commemoration service: 'In the early morning hours of Saturday 7 October 2023, Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel and brutally murdered more than 1,200 people, including Australian Galit Carbone. They wounded almost 5,000 people and kidnapped 251 men, women, young children and the elderly. As of today, 101 people, including two children, remain in Hamas captivity. We will continue to do everything in our power to bring them home. 'Yesterday, we lit a candle in memory of the victims of October 7 and shared the testimonies of those who survived. October 7 saw the greatest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, and the depravity of that day will never be forgotten. May their memory be a blessing.' The reason why the world decided 'never again' was that it was so atrocious, so inhumane. Yet here we are again, and there are people who yesterday sought to celebrate those atrocities as if, somehow, it was justified and as if, somehow, Israel and the Jewish people deserved to be attacked, deserved to be dehumanised and deserved the attempt to destroy them. What we've seen is our government refuse to bear witness to this horror and spend 12 months making some moral equivalence between the antisemitism of what happened on 7 October, the antisemitism which is being normalised in this country and Islamophobia. They've chosen to somehow make moral equivalency. They've trashed decades of bipartisanship around the State of Israel, its status as an ally and our commitment to its ongoing survival and to a Jewish state here in the modern world. It's been absolutely appalling to see that equivocation, because it has allowed the celebration of those atrocities to occur in capital cities right across the country, including at sacred places like the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne in my home state. We stand with Israel. We stand with the Jewish people and with Jewish Australians. You will win.