This massacre at Bondi Beach will change Australia in profound ways

14 Dec 2025, 10:37 by PETER VAN ONSELEN, POLITICAL EDITOR, AUSTRALIA · Mail Online

The shooting at Bondi Beach this evening feels like a grim inflection point for Australia’s sense of safety, one that will reverberate far beyond Sydney’s seaside eastern suburbs.

Reports suggest at least two gunmen opened fire near Campbell Parade during a Hanukkah celebration, turning a public, communal moment into panic and chaos as police scrambled to contain the scene. The death toll keeps rising.

Two people are in custody and the motive remains under investigation. But it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Australia may be confronting a form of targeted violence that sits uncomfortably close to terrorism, even if the legal labels come later.

If this was an attack directed at Australia’s Jewish community, it marks a chilling escalation.

The identity of the perpetrators is unclear. The identity of the victims is all too clear.

For decades, Australia has told itself that the sort of communal and religious violence seen elsewhere does not translate easily in our country. That assumption has been literally shot to pieces.

The social fractures exposed since October 7, through protests, online radicalisation and an increasingly toxic public debate about the Middle East, have been plain to see. What has changed is that those divisions appear to have crossed from rhetoric into bloodshed.

Australians are heartbreakingly familiar with the 2024 Bondi Junction stabbing, where six lives were taken in minutes in a crowded shopping centre. That attack forced a reckoning with mental health failures and public-space security.

One of the Bondi Beach shooters

A hero manages to wrestle a gun off one of the shooters

This is very different. A shooting at a religious celebration suggests ideology, identity and grievance are now colliding in ways that Australia isn’t used to.

The temptation will be to respond with more policing, tougher laws and visible security theatre. Some of that may be necessary.

But terrorism, particularly when it is locally incubated, is not defeated by bollards and patrols alone. This is a cultural problem in the making.

Australia now faces an uncomfortable choice. It can continue to pretend that global conflicts and cultural divisions stop at the water’s edge, or it can confront the reality that social cohesion is a national security issue right here in our own backyard.

How we respond will shape not just counter terrorism policy, but whether public life remains shared, open and resilient. More likely today’s horror will feed fears and further fracture our community.

FOLLOW DAILY MAIL'S LIVE COVERAGE OF THE BONDI BEACH MASSACRE AND ALL OF THE FALLOUT