Transcript - Sky News with Kieran Gilbert

KIERAN GILBERT: Welcome back to the program. I want to look now at some of the condolence motions yesterday. I'll start with Jason Clare, the Education Minister. Here's a little of his speech to the Parliament.

[Excerpt]

JASON CLARE, MINISTER FOR EDUCATION: My name is Jessica Chapnik Kahn. My five-year-old daughter and I are survivors of the Hanukkah Bondi Beach massacre. I realised I was no longer preparing to survive. I was preparing for how I wanted my daughter and I to die. I leaned into her ear and spoke the only words that came to me. “Go inside yourself, my darling. Go to your heart, where all the love is. Stay there, my baby. Stay there”.

[Excerpt ends]

GILBERT: Joining me live in the studio is the Education Minister, Jason Clare. That was a powerful address from you. It obviously has had a huge impact on you, as it has so many Australians. But that person that wrote to you, your friend, came so close to losing her life and her daughter as well.

CLARE: Like so many other people there. You know, when the shooting started, some people looked up to the sky because they thought it was fireworks. But Jessy knew exactly what it was straight away. And her little girl, Shemi, is five years old, so she did what, you know, what any of us would do. You just pick up your child and run and tried to find someplace where they could hide. And she jumped on top of her, you know, just like you would do as a mum or a dad, try to cover every part of her body to protect her from being hit, to the point where at one point she thought she'd stopped breathing because she was all over her and, you know, she could hear the shots getting closer. She could feel people being shot next to her and blood on her. And then it stopped. And then the police told her to run, and she ran across the other side of the beach. And by that time, her husband and her older son had made it to the beach. They'd heard the news, and you can just imagine what it would have been like.

GILBERT: And the son, you were telling me before we came on air, but he just said he didn't want to go as a young kid; otherwise, there would have been four of them there. And as young children do, they say, you know, tell their parents how to, what they wanted to do. He didn't want to go. Thankfully, him and his father were at home. It could have been a lot worse for that family, for your friends.

CLARE: Yeah. I wonder whether – Lev is 9 years old - I wonder whether he saved his whole family's life. You know, Shemi wanted to go to get doughnuts - the Jewish jam doughnuts that are part of Hanukkah, and Lev said, “Get me one”. And so, they went to get two. And, you know, when they went after all of it, when they got back together again, there was still a little bit of Lev's doughnut in Shemi's hand.

GILBERT: Oh, my God. Yeah.

CLARE: And she went to give it to him, and Jessy said, “No, you can't give him that”. It had unspeakable things in her hand.

GILBERT: Yeah.

CLARE: But she said she'll get some more doughnuts. And the next day, you know, we talk a lot about the awfulness and the evilness of what happened on that day, and then we talk about the heroes and the angels. The next day, a big box of doughnuts turned up at the house, delivered by school teachers. Not bad.

GILBERT: So, when you reflect on the events of, you know, about Parliament, pausing and your powerful contribution, I think of Julian Leeser's speech yesterday, too, where he made the point that in - almost unique in human history, Australia's been a safe haven for Jewish people. That compact was broken on December 14. That is such an appalling thing for our nation to grapple with.

CLARE: Without a doubt. Fifteen people were slaughtered on the beach at Bondi. And if not for the actions of the police, of the doctors and the nurses in the aftermath of all of this that saved the lives of people who were shot and injured but didn't die, of just ordinary Aussies that stood in the way of the gunmen, the terrorists, then more people would have died. It wouldn't have been 15. It would have been dozens and dozens and dozens. And to Julian's point, we've got to make Australia safe again. And that requires more than words. It's got to require action. You know, what Jess wrote to me, and she asked me to read out, was not just what she said to her daughter, and I think it was on the telly there just a second ago, to go to your heart and stay there, to go to where the love is. But she, you know, she said, “What I want you to tell the Parliament is that we all have to go to our heart, do what our heart tells us to do, be our best selves, and act in a way that we think is actually going to make all Australians safer”. And I hope, and I think I know, too, that the two things that we're doing today are an important part of that. The guns and the hate. You know, these people shouldn't have had guns in the first place. They shouldn't have had the hate in their heart that pulled the trigger. 

CLARE: And we do have to work on both.

GILBERT: Yeah, we do have to work on both. And part of the element of that hate component, the antisemitism, we know it's a shocking ancient scourge on humanity. Did the government respond - did Australia respond and the government respond sufficiently in the wake of October 7, when we saw the protests, the antisemitic, you know, violence on the streets, not just with the Adass Synagogue, those events in terms of the physical violence, but the vitriol, the antisemitic tropes, the language, the “Where are the Jews?” It was disgraceful in the wake of October 7.

CLARE: Fifteen people are dead, Kieran. So, you know, this is not a question. Of course, not enough has been done. Fifteen people are dead. The people responsible for this are the two psychopathic terrorists who killed those people that day. We've all got a responsibility here, government, Parliament, legislation that we've got to pass today. But it's not just us, it's not just the media either, it's everybody, right? You were just reporting a minute ago about young people yelling out ‘Heil Hitler’ at Jewish kids, I think in Melbourne. It's not just the monsters that are bred with antisemitism that we saw on the beach at Bondi. It's that casual acceptance in Australia that some people are just going to be treated differently to others, or that you can mock people or joke and that it's all light-hearted.

GILBERT: And it's also your - as Education Minister, I know the Gonski approach that you've adopted with David Gonski to do this as well, but just reinvigorate, to remind, to teach, you know, the Holocaust, but the history of antisemitism and where it can lead, the lack of, lack of humanity that really underpins that racism.

CLARE: That's the point I wanted to make, which is that, you know, kids aren't born racist. This is, you know, they're not born antisemitic or with hate or evil in their heart. This is something that's learnt, and it grows like a weed. There's lots of different things you've got to do, that we've got to do. But what we do in the education system is an important part of that, right across the board. You know, preschool, school, TAFE, uni.

GILBERT: Unis in particular, isn't it?

CLARE: Yeah, yeah. But not just that --

GILBERT: Because you’ve seen a lot of the academics, sort of cultural antisemitism that we've seen.

CLARE: But you just mentioned school, right? And we're talking about school kids yelling abuse at Jewish school kids. I do think that there's a need for us to look at the curriculum. There's education about the Holocaust in there at the moment, but there's more that could be done there about the evils of antisemitism, about the Holocaust, about real Australian values. And so that's one of the things that we've commissioned. That work's underway. It's part of a broader piece of work that David Gonski is leading with this Antisemitism Education Taskforce.

GILBERT: Well, that's good to hear. And obviously the higher education sector, is that something as well that your attention is turning to? 

CLARE: Yeah. 

GILBERT: Because we've seen students, Jewish students, not able to go to class.

CLARE: Jewish students have been made to feel unsafe, pure and simple. And I've said to Vice Chancellors, “That is not on. You have to implement your codes of conduct”. But what's been made clear to me through all of this is that the university regulator needs more powers. You know, they've got the power at the moment to shut a university down, but it's very unlikely they're ever going to shut down a university with 60,000 students. They've got that sledgehammer, but every other power's a bit of a feather, and so they need other powers and penalties to be able to act where universities don't. I've committed to introduce legislation to do that, but I've also written to the Higher Education Standards panel, asked them to review the threshold standards, which are the rules that universities need to comply with, to make sure that they're meeting the requirements they need to when it comes to antisemitism and racism more generally.

GILBERT: Education Minister Jason Clare, thanks for your time. I appreciate it.

CLARE: Thank you.