Criminal Code Amendment (Hate Crimes) Bill 2024

Dr ANANDA-RAJAH (Higgins) (18:09): I rise to speak in support of Criminal Code Amendment (Hate Crimes) Bill 2024. I speak—I am putting on my hat—as someone who came to this country as a 12-year-old child in 1984. I grew up here as an 'other'—a child of migrants.

During my childhood and my adolescence, from time to time, I did encounter racism. There's no question about that. It sort of comes with the territory, if you like.

Initially, it was overt, and then, as I grew older and became an adult and started seeking job opportunities, it was probably more covert. However, at no time did I have to encounter the kind of systemic and degrading hate that my Jewish community are now experiencing. I didn't wake up to street corners being defaced.

I didn't wake up to schools turning into battlegrounds. I didn't wake up to entire communities feeling like they were under threat. In fact, my experience was quite the opposite; there were intermittent episodes of racism but, because it was not systemic, I still felt and was able to build a sense of belonging in this country.

It was not robbed from me in the way my Jewish community are currently experiencing. At no time did I feel like I was an alien in my own country. In fact, it was quite the contrary; I grew up and I thrived, thanks to the welcoming nature of my fellow Australians.

It was a nation that changed with me and became far more diverse as I grew. I'm now standing here as a parliamentarian in a country that I don't recognise. I don't understand what is going on in this country that is making it acceptable for some people—and they are a minority—to walk around spreading hate against a community of fellow Australians.

I just don't understand it. My Jewish community, for context, is large. I have around 6,500 Australians who have a Jewish heritage.

This community are highly active. They are contributors. Many of them have been here for multiple generations.

They are overwhelmingly descendants of Holocaust survivors. In fact, the largest community of Jews who are descended from those who survived the Holocaust live in Melbourne. This is baked into their DNA, and it is spread from one generation to another.

They're acutely attuned to the vibrations that can tear at our social fabric and can lead to the Shoah, the Holocaust. My community are active in every single domain right across the economy, from business to professionals to creatives. They are also philanthropists—some of the most generous people who have decided that they want to give back to our country.

They have prospered through their work ethic, and they have contributed back to every domain, whether it be in the arts community, business, health or research—particularly in medical research. These people are contributors to our country, yet they now feel like they are aliens in their own land, vilified and made to feel 'other'—isolated. To be honest, they are frightened.

Their livelihoods and their lives feel like they are under threat. I call out special thanks and tribute to my Chabad centre in Malvern. I spoke of people who contribute.

These are people who contribute. They run an early childhood education and care centre which employs non-Jewish childcare workers who choose to work there because of the culture of the place. It is so welcoming and warm and it is a proud institution that champions the Jewish faith and inculcates it in small children.

I want to also pay special thanks to Rabbi Velly from Chabad Malvern who, of his own accord and with minimal training, set up a mental health group for men. As you all know, I am chair of the Parliamentary Friends of Men's Health. He did this because he found that there was a need for men in the shadows, not just in the Jewish community but also outside that community, to speak about their lived experience, particularly with respect to addiction: a taboo within a taboo.

He runs, on a regular basis, a small community group of men who come together to talk about addiction. He links this program of care with the spiritual journey of what it is to be a Jew, because that is how he expresses his Jewish faith—as service unto others. The group is attended by Jewish men as well as non-Jewish men.

That tells you something about the sense of giving that the Jewish community has towards the wider community. In my own community, I also want to call out and pay tribute to King David School. This a truly wonderful school that sits on the more progressive end of the Jewish spectrum.

It is a heterogenous group of people, like everyone else in Australia; you can't just dump us all into buckets. There is a mosaic within communities and within minorities. This school links antiquity to modernity.

It bakes in at every level—from the early learning centre all the way to year 12—the importance of the Jewish faith, Judaism and linkages to Israel. I had the honour of opening one of the rooms in their early childhood education centre which is named after a particular type of wheat that is regarded as a staple in the Jewish faith and has sustained the people of Israel.

The King David School, while embedding the Jewish faith and pride in their students, very much promotes a perspective that is outward looking in their students. The students are not sheltered and are not taught to become insular—quite the opposite. In year 9, they send these students out to engage with the rest of the community.

Right now, it's pretty hard for those kids. Do they feel safe entering the wider, mainstream community as young Jewish kids? Do they even wear their uniforms?

Occasionally, they don't. Do they wear their jewellery that declares that they are Jewish? They often conceal it, because right now things are not safe.

This is a country I do not recognise. Because of this Jewish community that I got to know and learned so much from, I went to Israel twice. I'm the only parliamentarian who visited Israel twice last year.

The first visit was in July, by invitation from the speaker of the parliament, to visit the Knesset. It was extraordinary. I went with a multipartisan group of other parliament members.

We had the honour of visiting many, many sights in Israel—Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Be'er Sheva where the ANZACs fought. We also had the opportunity to visit the Palestinian Authority and engage with the then Palestinian leadership in Ramallah. It was an eye-opener.

At the time, Israel was gripped by protests over the proposed changes to the judicial system. It was really hot, and in the heat—40-degree days—you could see thousands of people, sometimes young families with children strapped to their backs, holding the Israeli flag and marching. Thousands and thousands of people would do that.

You could not miss these protests. It showed me how passionate Israelis are about their country, their system of government and their democracy. My second visit was in December in the aftermath of October 7.

I was offered this trip to go on. It was sponsored by AIJAC. My colleague Josh Burns, the member for Macnamara, and other members from the coalition attended.

I didn't hesitate when given the opportunity. Why? Because I wanted to see for myself what had happened.

Until then I had read about it in the media, but I wanted to remove that filter of the media and those biases; there always are biases when you read or consume media. I wanted to see it for myself, and I wanted to go in support of, and show my support in a very tangible way to, my Jewish community. There are things I saw which I cannot unsee.

There are smells that I smelt which I cannot forget. I remember there was a moment when I stood at a site in Sderot, a town that had its police station demolished. It took a bulldozer, and it took gunships dropping bombs for about 17 hours to demolish this police station, with terrorists, policemen and service personnel inside because the walls were fortified.

I stood on that site, which was basically levelled, with a few bits of concrete and debris, and gave a TV interview. I could smell death rising up from the earth. I'm a doctor; I've smelt death before.

It's not something that I will ever forget. What I did not expect, though, was to see the level of antisemitism unleashed against Jewish Australians here when I returned. My community warned me from the very beginning that this would escalate, and that if you give antisemitism a foothold, give it an inch, it will accelerate.

That is exactly what has happened. That is exactly what has played out, because the Jews are the canaries in the coalmine. We have absolutely seen that happen in 2025, where this has become a daily occurrence in this country.

It's completely unacceptable. But I knew this, because I'd also had the opportunity in July last year to visit Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial. For those of you who cannot get there in person, I suggest you educate yourselves by jumping online and having a look at the Yad Vashem website or visiting one of your local Holocaust museums in your major cities.

Soon there will be a national museum built here in Canberra with funding we have provided. But it shows how antisemitism, once it takes hold, can lead to the worst possible outcome: mass murder on a scale humanity has never seen—systematised, calculating and highly effective. It happened because of dehumanisation of the Jews.

It happened because of centralisation of power. It happened because of propaganda. It happened because of demagoguery.

My fellow Australians, those elements are universal; they can happen again and again. So to think this will never happen again is a delusion. It can absolutely happen again if the circumstances are right and if those ingredients are allowed to take a foothold and thrive.

It starts with dehumanising the 'other'. In some cases it's racism against people like me or people who look like me or people who are First Nations Australians. In other cases it's antisemitism.

It starts with microaggressions. It starts with hate. It starts with language that makes the other feel like they don't belong there, and it robs them of their identity.

Hence, I support this bill, which builds upon all the other measures this Albanese government has delivered, from outlawing the Nazi salute to the trade of Nazi symbols to anti-doxxing laws—which, unfortunately, happened again in the aftermath of Jewish creatives being doxxed but will also benefit others, particularly women, because women are the ones who get doxxed.

That brings me to my final point that although these laws are occurring in the context of unacceptable, virulent and rising antisemitism in this country, these laws will actually benefit everyone in this country. That, if there is a silver lining to this horror, is the gift of this moment. I thank the House.