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As details of the Bondi beach massacre started to emerge on Sunday evening, Andrew Hastie posted a video with his immediate reaction to his large social media following.
Standing at a beach, the sun yet to set over his electorate south of Perth, the Liberal MP said in a 60-second video posted to Facebook and Instagram: “I am angry, and I know you are too.
“What we saw at Bondi beach today was cold-blooded murder. We don’t know why it happened but we’ll know soon. And when we know more, I’ll have plenty to say, don’t you worry about that. I’m pretty sure we can guess what’s motivated this.”
At that very early stage, the New South Wales police commissioner, Mal Lanyon, was yet to declare the mass shooting at Chanukah by the Sea a terrorist incident and details about the alleged gunmen – including motivation – wasn’t yet known or publicly disclosed.
But it appeared Hastie’s mind was already made up.
As the Coalition focused in the hours and days that followed on trying to connect Anthony Albanese’s handling of antisemitism to the atrocity, Hastie quickly, explicitly and repeatedly sought to link it to something else: immigration.
The former soldier quit Sussan Ley’s shadow cabinet in October to wage a personal campaign to slash Australia’s immigration levels.
His arguments had been largely about the number of people entering the country, a volume he controversially claimed was making Australians feel like “strangers in our own home”.
But his response to the Bondi attack reveals the immigration agenda he shares with colleagues such as Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, rightwing lobby group Advance and even Pauline Hanson’s One Nation was always as much, if not more, about the “who” than the “how many”.
“The real question is, who are we letting into our country?” Hastie told Sky News’ Andrew Clennell on Monday night, ending in one sentence any pretence that his grievances might have been purely numerical.
“I know the Australian people have had a gutful, and I think we need to narrow, very dramatically, those who we let into our country. They need to support Australian values: faith, reason, inquiry, debate, persuasion. They need to support our country and our people.”
Hastie did praise Syrian-born Ahmed al-Ahmed, the man who rushed to disarm alleged gunmen Sajid Akram during Sunday’s rampage, as an “absolute hero”.
So where do we draw the line, Clennell pressed, asking Hastie if he wanted fewer migrants from Muslim-majority countries.
“I want to see people come to this country who speak English, who support Australian values,” he repeated.
Hastie went further in a second Sky News interview on Tuesday night.
“We have a problem with radical Islamic theology and I think one of the areas that we really need to look at is immigration,” he said.
“Numbers are one thing but I think who we bring into our country is really important. They have to sign up to Australian values, which are fundamentally Judeo-Christian values: equality, the rule of law, consent, democratic traditions – all those things are fundamentally Judeo-Christian.”
Price, who was sacked from the frontbench in September after wrongly suggesting Labor was manipulating Australia’s non-discriminatory migration system to favour Indians, responded to the Bondi shootings with her own Facebook video on Monday night.
In it, she called for, among other things, a ban on the keffiyeh being worn in parliament, the outlawing of the chant “from the river to the sea”, banning of pro-Palestine marches and cancellation of the visas of Gazan refugees.
“Our nation is changing for the worse,” she said.
Hastie and Price might sit on the opposition backbench but both are agents of influence in rightwing circles, capable of shaping the views of conservative voters and colleagues alike.
Hastie’s video on Sunday night has racked up almost 1 million views on Instagram, while Price’s Facebook post has been shared 11,000 times and “liked” and “love-hearted” a combined 56,000 times. For comparison, an Instagram video of Ley responding to the Bondi massacre has attracted just 20,000 views as of Wednesday afternoon.
Ley was this week planning to release the “principles” to underpin the Coalition’s immigration policy before the Bondi shootings.
Among the principles will be a commitment to force visa holders to comply with “Australian values”, a policy that Liberal MPs other than Hastie, including the shadow home affairs minister, Jonathon Duniam, have emphasised the need for after revelations of the alleged gunmen’s extremist links.
Delaying the announcement until the new year would be a sensible decision. But the immigration debate will soon resume.
And when it does, Hastie, Price and Advance will ensure it’s not just about numbers. It never was.
