DVIR ABRAMOVICH: What Albo doesn’t understand about the Bondi attack

I heard the Prime Minister’s announcement about new hate-speech laws, new visa powers, new taskforces, and new regimes to tackle anti-Semitism.

I felt nothing like relief.

I felt rage.

Not the hot, shouting kind. The colder kind that settles in your chest when something essential has been broken, and someone asks you to admire the repair manual.

I was thinking about the funerals. About parents burying children. About families trying to work out how they will breathe through the next week.

It also felt disbelief. Because everything being announced now is what Jewish Australians begged for before the blood was on the ground.

This announcement does not arrive in a vacuum. It arrives in the space left by the delay. It comes after years of warnings, after a report that sat untouched, after antisemitism was allowed to grow louder, cruder, more dangerous.

It arrives after Bondi.

The Prime Minister spoke of moving forward

But I am not ready to move forward.

Jewish Australians are not willing to move forward.

We are still counting who didn’t come home.

I am standing at Bondi, in my mind, where Jews were murdered for being Jews at a Hanukkah celebration, and I am staring at the cost of what was not done when it mattered.

I am not writing this from a distance. I am writing it from inside the wreckage. From the place where grief and anger sit together and refuse to be separated.

What happened at Bondi did not just break hearts. It broke assumptions. It broke the idea that the government will protect us. It broke the trust that warnings will be heard before they become funerals.

That kind of break doesn’t heal with words. It demands accountability.

When the Prime Minister says now that he accepts responsibility for not doing more, I want to ask: what is responsibility after funerals? What is accountability once children have been buried?

When the Prime Minister speaks now of new laws, I do not hear ambition. I hear lateness.

I hear the sound of a Government responding after the fact, after the warning signs were debated, balanced, deferred, and explained away.

When the Prime Minister now says we need tougher laws, he is acknowledging what Jewish Australians have been saying all along: words matter. Incitement matters. Inaction matters.

But here is the truth that hurts: those words are arriving after the bullets.

Jillian Segal delivered her report months ago. It did not call for poetic language or symbolic gestures. It called for action in education, in immigration settings, in public institutions, and in enforcement.

It warned that if you tolerate anti-Semitism, you are feeding it, and it will come back for blood.

That report sat while the atmosphere grew darker.

We also have to say something that has been tiptoed around for too long. Radical Islamic hate preachers have been allowed to operate in this country, spreading anti-Semitism under the cover of religion, teaching that Jews are enemies, and teaching that violence is righteous. This is not faith. It is grooming. And when it is tolerated, it doesn’t stay theoretical. It produces action. Bondi is the proof.

Let us be honest with ourselves: laws are only as strong as the will to use them. Australia does not suffer from a shortage of condemnations. It suffers from a shortage of consequences.

If the people who spent years promoting hatred face no real penalties, these reforms will be theatre.

If universities and institutions are “encouraged” rather than compelled to act, nothing will change.

If immigration powers exist on paper but are applied cautiously to avoid controversy, the danger remains.

And there must be a royal commission, not as a distraction, but as a reckoning.

We need to know how warnings were missed, how incitement went unpunished, how radicalisation took root, how licensed weapons ended up in the hands of men who set out to massacre Jews.

Without full exposure, this country will repeat its mistakes and call it bad luck.

I am asking the Prime Minister and his Government to do something hard.

Stand still. Look at what happened. Look at what was tolerated. Look at what was delayed. And understand that leadership is not measured by how quickly you announce reform after tragedy, but by whether you acted when acting was needed.

If this moment becomes another exercise in managing fall-out rather than confronting failure, then Bondi will not be the end of something terrible. It will be the beginning of something worse.

If this package becomes another promise that fades once the cameras leave, then Bondi will not be remembered as a turning point. It will be remembered as a warning ignored too long.

And warnings, when ignored, don’t repeat themselves gently.

They come back louder.

I am not asking for perfection. I am asking for urgency worthy of the dead.

Dvir Abramovich is the chair of the Anti-Defamation Commission