Mourning Bondi. Australia’s hierarchy of grief

Australia does not suffer from a lack of empathy. Suffers from selective empathy. And nowhere is that clearer than the way our political and media class decides who is allowed to mourn. Andrew Brown with story.

A masterclass in elegiac performance was held at the Opera House on Thursday night. The prime ministers, the opposition leader and the prime minister lined up, kippahs in place, voices lowered, faces serious. The cameras rolled. Explanations were made. Condolences were neatly piled up. This was not an isolated moment. It was the final act of a month of national suffering.

Seizures. Ceremonies. Bondi Beach meetings. Flags were lowered. Monuments were illuminated. Front pages were flooded. Four or five pages a day. Every day. For weeks.

The deaths of fifteen people were tragic. No debate there. But tragedy alone does not explain the scale, intensity and unanimity of the response. What explains this is something much less noble.

A rigid hierarchy of grief that decides whose pain is sacred and whose is negotiable.

Approximately ninety thousand Australian Jews engaged in uninterrupted national mourning. Meanwhile, between seven hundred and fifty thousand and eight hundred thousand Aboriginal Australians are being told that they do not even have the right to mourn publicly on the day that marks the beginning of their dispossession.

When Aboriginal Australians say that January 26 is not a birthday but a funeral date, occupation, mass death, cultural destruction, they are told to stop whining and start celebrating. When they call for a day of mourning instead of fireworks, they are branded as separatists. He’s not Australian. Troublemakers.

Their grief is treated not as pain but as a political disturbance.

This hostility is not spontaneous. It is being cultivated. And it is ruthlessly amplified by News Corp Australia, which has perfected the art of celebrating some suffering and ridiculing others. Jewish mourning is framed as a moral obligation. Aboriginal mourning is framed as an attack on the nation.

Ask a simple question. Will we fly Aboriginal flags at half-staff on January 26? Are our leaders lining up wearing Aboriginal symbols to apologize for genocide? Do we darken national monuments to the tens of thousands killed and millions dispossessed over the generations?

The answer is no. Always no.

But we will take down the flags of a foreign nation. We will illuminate the monuments of another country. While we deny Australian national symbolism abroad, we will transform it into elaborate forms of solidarity abroad.

Hypocrisy deepens as we move from symbolism to power.

Aboriginal Australians are not a special interest group. They have been the protectors of this continent for seventy to eighty thousand years. After decades of consultation, they published Uluru’s Statement from the Heart. The demand was modest by any democratic standards. A Voice to Parliament. A permanent advisory body so they can talk about the laws that govern their lives. Not a veto. Not superiority. Just a voice.

Australia said no.

The people rejected it in a referendum. Loud. Definitely. Aboriginal Australians are told that their history can be accepted symbolically but never structurally. Their voices would remain optional.

Then, without a vote, without a referendum, without even asking the public, the government appointed a special envoy for Australian Jews.

We were not consulted. We were informed.

This ambassador now shapes policy on universities, visas, funding and law. Institutions adapt instantly. Policies are being rewritten. The boundaries of speech are narrowing. Laws are changing rapidly. Political leaders fall into line without hesitation.

Protection is automatic.

This is not an argument against protecting Jewish Australians. They deserve safety and dignity like everyone else. What emerges is double standards. For a community to have its voice heard, it must survive the referendum.

Another has institutional authority by ministerial decree.

And there is a question that no one in politics or the media dares to address honestly. Many of the people for whom Australia declared national mourning clearly identify primarily with Israel. Dual affiliation is not secret. It is claimed. But while Australia refuses even a single day of mourning to its own First Nations, it lowers flags and displays national grief for this foreign nation.

This is what Aboriginal Australians see.

They see leaders wearing religious symbols for others but refusing even symbolic recognition. They see weeks of wall-to-wall mourning news, while deaths in custody are barely enough for a paragraph. They see laws being passed overnight to combat some form of racism, while their own laws are endlessly debated, watered down or rejected.

They see a country that knows exactly how to mourn, but chooses not to do so when the dead belong to them.

This is not unity. This is hierarchy. This is moral cowardice disguised as compassion. And this is enforced every day by a political class addicted to optics and a media class that decides whose pain matters.

There is no lack of empathy in Australia. He lacks integrity.

Until this country applies to Aboriginal Australians the same standards of grief, symbolism and institutional respect that it effortlessly applies to others, all talk of unity is hollow.

And most Australians, if they’re honest, already know this.

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