Bondi massacre: How the week after the December 14 attack has changed Australia

Families gather on the grass at Bondi having ice creams, jam doughnuts, hot chips and barbecued meat under a blue sky summer Sunday an hour before sunset.

Children get their faces painted, blow bubbles or play with goats, a llama and ducks. They are among the hundreds of Jewish community members at Archer Park on the northern side of Australia’s most famous beach.

The Chanukah by the Sea event, organised by Waverley Council and the Chabad House synagogue, was promoted as “the perfect family event to celebrate light, warmth and community”.

The festivities had begun shortly after 5pm on a perfect sunny afternoon just 11 days before Christmas. Admission was free. Market stalls under small tarpaulins sold necklaces. Children danced on the stage to traditional Jewish songs. Their grandparents watched from chairs.

On the sand youthful, toned beachgoers were getting in a last dip in the surf or a rockpool while there was still daylight. Others were dining at nearby cafes and takeaway food joints dotted along Campbell Parade.

In between buses, dropping off visitors from Sydney’s city centre and Bondi Junction, a father and son from the city’s south-west had arrived in a silver early 2000s Hyundai Elantra hatchback. They draped a black, homemade ISIS flag over the windscreen.

Carnage begins

Jewish couple Boris Gurman, 69 and his wife Sofia, 61, noticed them and courageously wrestled with the gunmen, becoming the first victims to die on that first day of Hanukkah, an eight-day Jewish festival of lights. On a day of darkness, their heroics were captured on a dashcam video.

At 6.47pm, police and emergency crews responded to reports of long-arm rifles firing shots from a car park footbridge at Campbell Parade.

The massacre would ultimately kill 15 innocent people - a 10-year-old girl Matilda among them - in Australia’s worst ever terrorist attack and Sydney’s first mass shooting since 1991. More than 100 shots were fired over six minutes.

“It’s just appalling,” survivor Wayne Miller told reporters, his emotion raw. “It’s a horror show. You know what it’s like to lie down on top of a daughter and there are gunshots and bullets going off and people dying? It’s inhumane.”

During the carnage, a mother grabbed her six-year-old boy in a harness, which he was wearing while lining up to scale the rock-climbing wall, and she ran with him and her two other children to a house nearby.

“They thought it was fireworks but she said, ‘No. Go’,” his aunt Chana Friedman said. “She just made them run. They were scared.”

Others escaped the awful fate because they were going for a swim after being at the festival.

A 43-year-old Syrian-born tobacconist, Ahmed Al Ahmed, managed to wrestle a shotgun off one of the gunmen, after hiding behind a car and sneaking up behind him, possibly stopping further carnage that killed two rabbis, including London-born Eli Schlanger, and 87-year-old retired engineer Alex Kleytman.

Few police

Unarmed Jewish security guards were powerless to shoot back and Premier Chris Minns later confirmed to Sky News only three police officers were on the scene, including young constables who had only been on the job for a matter of months.

Sajid Akram, 50, was shot dead by police, with Commissioner Mal Lanyon the next day revealing the man who came to Australia from India in 1998, on a student visa, had six licensed firearms and belonged to a gun club.

His 24-year-old Australian-born son Naveed Akram awoke from a coma on Wednesday to face 59 charges, which included 15 counts of murder and committing a terrorist attack and 40 counts of causing wounding and grievous bodily harm with intent to murder.

Australia’s domestic intelligence agency, ASIO, had investigated his links to extremist groups as far back as 2019, the year he appeared in a video with the extremist Al Madina Dawah Centre in Bankstown.

One of the centre’s preachers, Wissam Haddad, was so extreme a Federal Court judge, Angus Stewart, in July found his anti-Semitic comments describing Jewish people as “treacherous, vile people” after the October 2023 massacre in Israel would strike fear in the hearts of the Jewish community.

Intelligence failure

The Australian Federal Police on Tuesday alleged that Naveed Akram was inspired by Islamic State.

As more information emerged in the following days about his father’s gun licence, which was issued in 2023, and their four-week trip to the Philippines in November, victims, experts and regular Australians began to ask: did authorities miss a chance to prevent the attack?

“You don’t need to be an intelligence analyst to realise that a large Channukah celebration in a high-profile location, which is where IS attacks tend to occur, is going to be a risk,” a former senior federal law-enforcement officer told The Nightly Friday. “That is where the AFP and ASIO have failed to connect the dots. It should have been a red flag.”

Ten years ago, in the face of Islamic terrorism, joint counter-terrorism teams were established from members of state police forces, the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, to prevent attacks like Sunday’s.

The former law-enforcement officer said information about the Akrams should have been collected by the teams, prompting an investigation into their trip in November to the southern Philippines where Islamic separatists operate.

Albanese criticised

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been criticised by his own side of politics for being an “inadequate” leader during a crisis who was “almost afraid, distracted”. He was compared unfavourably with previous Labor leaders, in government and opposition.

“He doesn’t seem to be up to the job. He doesn’t understand how seriously to take it,” former Labor MP Michael Danby, who is Jewish, told The Nightly.

“Wishes he was somewhere else. I can’t imagine Julia Gillard, Kim Beazley, Bob Hawke being as dithering, indecisive and mealy-mouthed as he’s been. He’s not, in my view, prejudiced, he’s just inadequate.”

Josh Burns, a Jewish Labor MP whose electorate office was last year vandalised with “Zionism is fascism” graffiti, this week told the ABC “unfortunately, the Jewish community has been really worried about this for a long time”.

Former Liberal prime minister John Howard, who banned semi-automatic and automatic weapons following the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, on Tuesday hoped Mr Albanese would not use gun laws in the wake of the Bondi massacre as a cover for his failure to tackle anti-Semitism.

‘Not just inaction’

Mr Albanese was absent from funerals, including Thursday’s service for Matilda, as Mr Minns, Federal Opposition Leader Sussan Ley and Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek sat with mourners in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.

Most of the week Mr Albanese claimed he led “the first government to legislate hate speech”. But the Racial Discrimination Act, which bands prejudice on racial grounds, was introduced in 1975 by another Labor leader, Gough Whitlam. Paul Keating’s government added Section 18C to make it unlawful to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate on the basis of race, colour or ethnic origin.

The Albanese Government this week flagged laws making aggravated hate speech an offence, targeting preachers and leaders who promote violence.

There will also be harsher penalties for hate speech promoting violence and the development of a new framework for listing organisations whose leaders engage in hate speech promoting violence or racial hatred.

The Jewish community has endured a spate of anti-Semitic attacks since the October 2023 massacre in Israel, including last year’s fire-bombing of Melbourne’s Adass Synagogue. Jewish leaders had warned this would spark further violence. But instead, Foreign Minister Penny Wong this year formally recognised a Palestinian state run by Hamas. Labor electorates in south-west Sydney also have Australia’s highest concentration of Muslim voters.

“Not just inaction. It’s their actions that encourage this - unilateral without any concessions recognition of a Palestinian state,” Mr Danby said.

On Friday, Mr Albanese announced the biggest gun buyback since 1996 as Mr Minns announced new laws that would stop another anti-Semitic rally at the Opera House or a pro-Palestinian march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Bondi, a place where Holocaust survivors came to live after World War II, is now the site of the second-worst attack against Jews since the Holocaust, after the carnage at Israel’s Nova music festival two years ago.

“Albanese is weak. He hasn’t listened. You know what? He’s a politician that wants votes. He’s not a leader,” Mr Miller said.