Australia is not a nation familiar with massacre on its streets, and we must never become one

• Follow our live coverage of the Bondi Beach shooting here

It is counter-intuitive and possibly wise on a day like this to reflect that Australia is not a nation familiar with massacre on its streets.

The appalling scenes on what is a quintessentially Australian place of ease, Bondi Beach, are shocking not merely for the unthinkable human tragedy visited upon families and a community that was doing nothing but celebrating a sacred festival.

It has rocked Australia because it is so desperately abnormal.

There have been mass shooting murders over the past 40 years in Australia – the Hoddle Street and Queen Street massacres, both in Melbourne in 1987, come to mind, and massacres of Aboriginal people were common in early colonial times – but there is only one modern Australian horror that can be compared to the Bondi bloodbath.

The killing of 35 people and the wounding of 23 others by Martin Bryant at Port Arthur, Tasmania, on April 28, 1996, remains lodged deep in the Australian consciousness.

That the Port Arthur massacre retains such dominance in the national memory almost 30 years after it occurred is not simply because of the horrifying toll of dead and injured.

It remains remarkable because Australia’s leaders chose to confront the fact that Bryant used semi-automatic weapons to carry out his senseless carnage, and to do something momentous about it.

Then-prime minister John Howard took opposition leader Kim Beazley and the leader of the Australian Democrats, Cheryl Kernot, to mourn side by side with him at Port Arthur within days of the massacre.

He then used the resulting bipartisanship alongside his large store of political capital, having just won a big majority at the 1996 election, to outlaw semi-automatic weapons, with courageous cover provided by the leader of the National Party, Tim Fischer.

In short, Australia’s political leaders employed their combined leadership to turn a tragedy of immense proportions into lasting change, despite a backlash from some sections of the community, particularly in Fischer’s rural constituency.

It might be argued that the gun laws and the resulting wide community change in attitude towards guns are significant parts of the reason that the terror at Bondi is such an aberrant episode in the modern Australian story.

This time, however, the massacre was perpetrated not as a random act, but a merciless attack on Jewish Australians.

That guns were used is secondary in gravity this time to the identity of the targets and the presumed motives of the attackers.

The killings come amid a swirl of antisemitic behaviour that has injected fear into Australia’s Jewish communities over recent years.

Members of this community, and those who have come to torment them, live in Australia, a world from the Middle East.

Yet, it has become all but impossible in many quarters to separate in normal discourse repugnance at the slaughter of Israelis by Hamas attackers on October 7, 2023, from revulsion at the overwhelming retribution visited upon the people of Gaza by Israeli forces.

There is obvious potential for the Bondi massacre to morph into a deeper, insuperable divide in Australian society if inspired steps are not taken now to convert the immense tragedy into lasting change.

There is an opportunity and surely a duty for Australia’s political leaders to act together to harness the national shock and mourning to try to lead Australia out of this cultural and religious quagmire.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, like Howard all those years ago, has a large store of political capital and a big parliamentary majority to expend on such an effort.

Whether he and other leaders are up to the task is less clear.

A blame game has begun, despite fine words of comfort and support for the Jewish community from the prime minister, the opposition leader and the leader of the Greens.

Opposition Leader Sussan Ley inserted the following political jibe into her otherwise supportive statement: “We’ve seen a clear failure to keep Jewish Australians safe. We’ve seen a clear lack of leadership in keeping Jewish Australians safe. We have a government that sees antisemitism as a problem to be managed, not evil that needs to be eradicated.”

Within hours of the massacre, Pauline Hanson, leader of a party said to be on such a rise it may yet eclipse the Liberals and Nationals, issued a media statement blaming Albanese for “failing to heed the warning signs” of antisemitic protests, plus “hate speech from certain religious clerics, what’s happening in our obnoxious universities and the probable terrorist threat alert”.

It seems a long stretch from the considered and sombre reaction to the Port Arthur massacre, when leaders of all Australia’s major political parties mourned together and took Australia with them to reduce what they saw as the danger that had killed so many innocent citizens.

More coverage on the Bondi terror attack:

• Watch: Incredible footage shows the moment a hero bystander tackles one of the gunmen
• What we know so far: All the details of the mass shooting
• How the world reacted: Global leaders condemn ‘deeply distressing’ attack

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