Andrew Hastie revealed conservative Liberals’ true immigration agenda in the aftermath of the Bondi terror attack | Bondi beach terror attack
As details of the massacre on Bondi beach began to emerge on Sunday evening, Andrew Hastie posted a video showing his immediate reaction to his large following on social media.
Standing on a beach south of Perth as the sun had yet to set on his constituents, the Liberal MP said in a 60-second video posted on Facebook and Instagram: “I’m angry and I know you are too.
“What we saw today on Bondi beach was a cold-blooded murder. We don’t know why it happened, but we’ll find out soon. I’ll have plenty to say when we know more, so don’t worry. I’m pretty sure we can guess what motivated this.”
At this very early stage, New South Wales police commissioner Mal Lanyon had not yet declared the Chanukah by the Sea mass attack a terrorist incident, and details about the alleged gunmen – including motivation – were not yet known or made public.
But it looked like Hastie had already made up his mind.
As the coalition tried to link Anthony Albanese’s handling of antisemitism to brutality in the hours and days that followed, Hastie quickly, clearly and repeatedly tried to link it to something else: immigration.
The former soldier left Sussan Ley’s shadow cabinet in October to lead a personal campaign to reduce Australia’s immigration levels.
His arguments largely concerned the number of people entering the country; a volume he controversially claimed made Australians feel like “strangers in our own home”.
But his response to the Bondi attack reveals that the immigration agenda he shares with colleagues such as Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, right-wing lobby group Advance and even Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has always been about “who” rather than “how many.”
“The real question is: Who do we allow into our country?” Hastie told Sky News’ Andrew Clennell on Monday night, shutting down in one sentence any suggestion that his complaints might be purely numerical.
“I know the Australian people have courage, and I think we need to dramatically narrow the people we allow into our country. They need to support Australia’s values: faith, reason, inquiry, debate, persuasion. They need to support our country and our people.”
Hastie praised Syrian-born Ahmed al-Ahmad, who rushed to disarm alleged gunman Sajid Akram during Sunday’s attack, as “an absolute hero”.
“So where do we draw the line,” Clennell insisted, asking Hastie if he wanted fewer immigrants from Muslim-majority countries.
“I want to see English-speaking people coming to this country who support Australian values,” he repeated.
Hastie went further in his second Sky News interview on Tuesday night.
“We have a problem with radical Islamic theology, and I think one of the areas we really need to look at is immigration,” he said.
“Numbers are one thing, but I think it’s really important who we bring into our country. They need to conform to Australian values, which are fundamentally Judeo-Christian values: equality, the rule of law, consent, democratic traditions, all of these are fundamentally Judeo-Christian.”
Price, who was sacked from the frontbench in September after falsely suggesting Labor was manipulating Australia’s non-discriminatory immigration system to favor Indians, responded to the Bondi attacks with his own Facebook video on Monday night.
In this declaration, he called for, among other things, a ban on wearing the keffiyeh in parliament, a ban on the “river to sea” slogan, a ban on pro-Palestinian marches, and the cancellation of visas for Gaza refugees.
“Our nation is changing for the worse,” he said.
Hastie and Price may be on the opposition backbenchers, but both are influential operatives in right-wing circles and have the capacity to shape the views of both conservative voters and their colleagues.
Hastie’s video on Sunday night reached almost 1 million views on Instagram, while Price’s Facebook post was shared 11,000 times and “liked” and “loved” 56,000 times in total. By comparison, an Instagram video of Ley responding to the Bondi massacre had just 20,000 views as of Wednesday afternoon.
Ley was planning to publish “principles” to support the Coalition’s immigration policy before the Bondi attacks this week.
The principles will include a commitment to force visa holders to comply with “Australian values”; It will be a policy that Liberal MPs other than Hastie, including shadow home secretary Jonathon Duniam, have stressed the need for after the alleged gunmen’s extremist links emerged.
It would be a logical decision to postpone the announcement until the new year. But the immigration debate will soon start again.
And when that happens, Hastie, Price and Advance will ensure it’s not just about the numbers. It never happened.
