I am late! I am late and want to talk about Jewish matters.
The Australian Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion has just released the total number of submissions and it’s a lot higher than anyone expected. I predicted 10,000 submissions and everyone around me said that 5,000 would be a lot and would reflect what was happening in our country a lot more. Even 10,000 was considered an overprediction because of the way most people saw antisemitism in Australia, in other words. So what does 20,000 mean? That things matter. That people have things to say.
What the submissions give us is something amazing, especially given that this is a census year and that we can fit those submissions into a snapshot of Australia in 2026 (the last census was in 2021, and you can see what it shows about jewish Australia here: The-Jewish-Population-of-Australia-Report_2021-Census-1.pdf . There are issues with the way data was collected and how unsafe the collection made Jews, and that Judaism was not listed as a religious or cultural option ie people had to write it in manually, but it still gives some indication of who we are in Jewish Australia. We have a surprising number of old people, for instance, and an unsurprisingly high average level of education.
Put these 20,000 submissions into analysis the way that Mass Obersvation Project has done for the UK, and it becomes an enormous data base for research into one aspect of Australian life: how people see Jewish Australia and how Jewish Australia sees itself. What we are. Who we are. How we deal with hate. This will lead to insights into how Australia sees other cultural and religious groups in the country. It has the capacity to change Australia’s self-knowledge.
What’s really interesting is how silent the far left is about the number of submissions. We don’t yet know if those submissions reflect their views as leading or typical. I strongly suspect that their views are bigoted and hateful, but I’m willing to wait and see how the data presents itself. And I want to know what Australia does with all this information about how we think and feel.
Given that the trigger was the Bondi murders and there is a very strong likelihood that those murders were caused by links to certain terrorist groups, we can’t exclude the outside world. But we can take a close look at ourselves and find out who we are and what we want to be.
Australia is in a strange place politically. Everything’s changing. I suspect those 20,000 submissions are part of that change. Who we are and how safe we are and the paths we take are all up for grabs in this very interesting year.