‘She’ll Be Right’ Is Not a Strategy: How Australia Sleepwalked into a Crisis of Antisemitism

If you have ever lived in Australia for more than five minutes, you have heard it: “She’ll be right.”

To non-Australians, it can sound like a charming national habit, spoken with a shrug and an easy confidence. In plain terms, it means it will be okay, it will work itself out, don’t worry too much. For generations, that instinct has helped Australians get through droughts, floods, bushfires, recessions, and the ordinary knocks of life. But it is a disastrous approach to hate. Hate does not work itself out. It spreads when it is tolerated, excused, minimized, rationalized, or treated as someone else’s problem.

And that, in many ways, is how we got here.

Australia did not wake up one day as a country where antisemitism could operate in plain sight. We arrived here through thousands of small decisions to look away, to downplay, to avoid “making it worse,” to keep the peace, to pretend that a hard conversation was somehow more dangerous than the hatred itself. Even when voices inside and outside the Jewish community warned that the temperature was rising, the response from too many corners of public life was predictable: don’t overreact; don’t inflame tensions; it’s just protest; it’s just politics; she’ll be right.

But what happens when that reflex meets the modern ecosystem of radicalization, online incitement, imported ideological extremism, and a protest culture that learns it can push further, and further again, with little consequence? You get a country where hate preachers can operate openly, and where the enforcement line becomes so blurry that it ceases to function as a line at all.

A particularly stark example came when an Australian federal court found that Sydney cleric Wissam Haddad’s sermons breached racial vilification laws, with orders requiring removal of content and restraint on repeating similar racist statements about Jewish people. That was not a niche community dispute. It was a warning flare to the entire nation: incitement was being broadcast; it was crossing legal thresholds; and it was doing so in an environment where too many people still wanted to pretend it was either “controversial speech” or someone else’s problem.

One of the most corrosive dynamics in Australia’s public conversation has been the tendency to repackage antisemitic incitement as merely “speech,” and then to treat objections as evidence of intolerance. That rhetorical trick has done enormous damage. It allows people to avoid the hard question a democracy must face: what is our obligation when hatred is actively cultivated, when it targets a minority, and when it seeks not just to offend but to intimidate?

We do not lack a framework for answering that. Australian law and public standards distinguish political disagreement from vilification and incitement. In late 2025, the Australian government publicly responded to a plan to combat antisemitism and flagged measures including an aggravated hate speech offence aimed at preachers and those who use platforms to promote hateful antisemitism. Whatever one’s politics, the fact that government had to explicitly address “preachers” tells you where the line had drifted. That drift did not happen overnight. It happened through years of shrugging, excuse-making, and a preference for comfort over clarity.

Slogans matter in this context, not because words are inherently violence, but because words can be permission structures. They can normalize contempt. They can be recruitment tools. They can teach people which targets are legitimate. After October 7, Australians watched a pattern take hold: open hostility toward Jews, moral inversion, and rhetoric that did not aim for peace but for escalation. Chants such as “Globalize the intifada” were tolerated in protests and on campuses, even though they function as a call to export violence into Western streets. In the wake of subsequent events, commentators and security analysts have repeatedly warned that hate speech does not stay in the realm of slogans: it translates into intimidation, harassment, and sometimes violence, with the deliberate purpose of making communities afraid. Australia was warned in real time. Too many people chose to treat those warnings as exaggeration, or as an inconvenience to the national self-image.

Then it happened here.

On Sunday, 14 December 2025, Jews celebrating Chanukah at Bondi Beach were attacked. It is difficult to overstate what that meant. Bondi is iconic Australia, the postcard version of our national story. The target was not an abstraction. It was Jews gathered openly, publicly, celebrating their identity. The Commonwealth later recognised the national impact with formal reflection and commemoration. A royal commission was announced to examine the circumstances and failures around the massacre.

But here is the part that should make every decent Australian pause. A commission, however necessary, is not a substitute for cultural and civic accountability. And the most chilling detail is not only that this attack occurred, but that our public debate still struggled to speak plainly about the conditions that made it possible.

Because even after Bondi, the line kept moving. The instinct to rationalize, to relativize, to insist that “it’s complicated,” to reach for euphemisms rather than speak plainly, remained. If a society cannot draw a clear boundary after a mass casualty attack targeting Jews at a religious celebration, then the problem is not confusion. It is moral failure, and it is institutional cowardice.

This is where the “she’ll be right” mentality becomes dangerous. It tells decent people the adults will handle it, the institutions will self-correct, the extremists will burn out, the country will naturally return to balance. But extremists do not burn out when they are rewarded with attention, tolerance, and platform. They escalate when they learn there is no meaningful cost.

The media conversation, too often, has been trapped in a false binary: free speech versus censorship. That frame is convenient for those who want to avoid doing the difficult work of distinguishing legitimate political expression from incitement and harassment. It also obscures the cumulative reality. One sermon becomes a “controversy.” One rally becomes “passionate activism.” One antisemitic incident becomes “unfortunate.” One campus campaign becomes “student politics.” And then people act shocked when Jewish Australians say they no longer feel safe, when security becomes normalized around synagogues and schools, when families reassess what it means to live openly as Jews in a country that once felt uncomplicated.

Australia did not “suddenly” change. We were watching it change. We just did what we often do best.

We shrugged.

So where to from here? Australia has a choice. We can keep treating antisemitism as episodic, or we can confront it as systemic. That requires more than statements. It requires enforceable standards and the willingness to apply them consistently. It means drawing bright lines around incitement and vilification, and acting when those lines are crossed. It means refusing to launder hate through the language of “debate,” and being honest that dehumanization, intimidation, and calls to violence are not contributions to a pluralist society. It means treating Jewish safety as a national issue, not a niche concern, because Bondi was not only a Jewish tragedy. It was an Australian one.

And it means demanding institutional courage from universities, cultural institutions, and community leaders, rather than watching them outsource moral judgement to PR teams and crisis committees. A liberal democracy cannot function if it has no confidence in its own moral boundaries. Multiculturalism cannot survive if it becomes a cover for tolerating extremism. Social cohesion is not maintained by pretending the problem is smaller than it is. It is maintained by confronting what threatens it, early, clearly, and consistently.

Australians are proud of being laid-back. But there is a difference between being laid-back and being asleep.

“She’ll be right” might be fine when you are talking about a dented car door, a late train, or a rainy weekend. It is not fine when hatred is organizing, recruiting, preaching, marching, and escalating.

We got here because too many good people assumed someone else would stop it.

If Australia wants to be the country it says it is, then the next cultural reflex cannot be a shrug.

It must be resolve.

Michael Gencher is Executive Director of StandWithUs Australia