Don’t Minns Your Words, Premier

Chris Minns received a standing ovation at the Bondi memorial last night. It was a moment of solemnity and shared grief. In such moments, applause is not performance. It is release.

But it is worth asking, what, precisely, was being applauded?

The Premier is being hailed as a voice of moral clarity. Not because he led, but because others abdicated. In a political culture where hesitation has become default, even mild firmness passes for courage.

Let us be clear, moral authority is not earned retroactively.

On 8 October, just one day after Hamas’s atrocities in Israel, the Sydney Opera House was allowed to become a backdrop for chants that did not express grief but glorified hatred. While Jewish Australians were still absorbing the horror, the state sanctioned a gathering whose slogans came not from sorrow but from history’s darker chapters. That decision was not inevitable. It was deliberate.

And it set the tone. The bridge march followed. Then the weekly protests. The Hamas iconography, the euphemisms for violence, the chants that needed no decoding. Again and again, the state erred on the side of permissiveness and reassured itself that restraint equated to virtue.

Only later, when the climate turned unmistakably toxic, did the rhetoric change. Only after acts of intimidation, vandalism and threats multiplied did the Premier speak more firmly. By then, silence had already signalled licence.

That is why the applause matters. Not because it was wrong to honour a moment of mourning, but because there is a growing temptation to equate late words with early action. We must resist it.

Minns is not being compared to Churchill. He is being compared to Albanese, who has turned equivocation into policy. Faced with an unambiguous evil, the Prime Minister offered ambiguity. In that vacuum, any Premier who speaks plainly appears Churchillian by contrast. But that is not heroism. It is relativism.

None of this diminishes the grief of the Jewish community. We are not asking for oratory. They are asking for consistency, for safety, and for leadership that arrives before the threat marches through their neighbourhoods.

The danger is not that Minns spoke too late at a memorial. The danger is the growing idea that speaking late is the same as leading early. It is not.

There will be time to scrutinise records, time to ask why the vilest expressions of antisemitism were treated as free speech exercises and not as what they were, warnings. For now, let the grief stand. But let no applause crown a record that was defined more by delay than decisiveness.

Words matter. But they matter most when spoken before hatred is emboldened, not after it has done its damage.