Victorian Premier apologises to Jewish community
On the third anniversary of October 7, Ben Carroll tells Mount Scopus students 'we did not do enough to help you'
Victorian Premier Ben Carroll has apologised to the Jewish community, telling students at Mount Scopus Memorial College on the third anniversary of October 7 that governments had failed them.
“I want you to know that as a country, and as a state, we did not do enough to help you,” he said on Wednesday. “I want you to know that I am sorry.”
Speaking at the Besen Centre on the school’s Gandel Campus, Carroll said the Hamas attack had been “an attack on Victoria” as well as on Israel, because what followed “didn’t stay overseas. It came here.”
He traced a line “from the fields and towns of Southern Israel, to a synagogue in Ripponlea, and to a Sydney beach on a summer’s day”, referring to the Adass Israel Synagogue arson and last December’s Bondi Beach terror attack.
Carroll, who has been Premier for 72 days, said the attack on Israel’s existence had been followed in Australia by an attack on Jews’ connection to it. “Whatever the name, the target is the same: the bond between Jews and their homeland.”
He told students no one should be forced to choose between their identities. “No one should ever have to choose between being Jewish and feeling Australian. That is not the country we accept.”
Carroll said his government’s $6 million grant to the Community Security Group (CSG) was the largest single government investment the organisation had ever received, and stressed it was “long-term funding”.
“One day we hope we won’t need CSG anymore, but until then, I want them to have everything they need to keep the community safe,” he said.
He recalled laying a wreath at Yad Vashem and visiting Hadassah Hospital in 2023, and writing Israel on his arm when he ran the Melbourne Marathon in the days after the attack.
The Premier also referred to protesters who chalked slogans outside the NGV last year because of its association with the Gandel family. “The rain washed that chalk away. The Gandel name is still there, as it always should be.”
Carroll said recovery had to mean more than survival. “It means a young woman in this audience growing up to be a professor at an Australian university,” he said. It also meant “one of you boys wearing your kippa on a tram in Melbourne, Victoria”.
“I stand with you on October 7, I stand with you on December 14, and I stand with you every day in between.”
The speech comes seven weeks before the 28 November state election.