‘Are we going to be safe?’
Julian Leeser urges mandatory IHRA definition at universities and stronger action on campus antisemitism.
Federal member for Berowra and Shadow Minister for Education Julian Leeser has urged the Royal Commission to recommend the government legislate to require all universities to adopt a single definition of antisemitism.
Giving evidence last Friday, Leeser described attending the Chanukah on the Green event at St Ives when a rabbi pulled him aside to say shots had been fired at Bondi. His then seven-year-old son overheard adults discussing the shooting.
“He cried inconsolably – the sort of cry that you see when a child is in deep pain,” Leeser said. “He sat with his legs crossed, saying, ‘Dad, are we going to be safe? … How do you know they won’t come for us?'”
The fear had lingered, he said. At a recent bar mitzvah, his son asked how he knew they would be safe, even with a police car outside. “What sort of Australia are we setting up, where an eight-year-old child doesn’t feel safe going to a place of worship?” Leeser asked.
Leeser, who is Jewish, also described antisemitic attacks on his election materials – posters defaced with swastikas and Hitler moustaches in 2019, and a $35,000 banner graffitied and seized by police in 2025.
Leeser said he had been concerned about campus antisemitism since before October 7, 2023, having launched a survey by the Australasian Union of Jewish Students in August 2023 with fellow MPs Josh Burns and Allegra Spender, with whom he went on to co-found the Parliamentary Friends of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).
As Shadow Education Minister, Leeser set out a series of recommendations on university antisemitism. He urged the government to legislate for all universities to adopt the IHRA definition and for universities to audit what was being taught about Jews and Israel and remove antisemitic materials.
Courses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he said, should draw on credible sources on both sides. University governing bodies should be responsible for antisemitism-free campuses as they were for workplace safety.
He closed on a note of solidarity, recalling a church that brought flowers and strangers who hugged him after October 7. “Ordinary Australians are with the Jewish community,” he said. “This isn’t the Australia that they want for their kids either.”