Politics

Federal

Racism

Opinion

Australia’s cohesion is fraying. If we’re not careful, it may shatter

Peter Hartcher Political and international editor September 6, 2025 — 5.00am

Vic Alhadeff spends a lot of time calming people these days. Australia’s Jewish community is living in fear of the next act of hate. “People say to me, ‘should we be leaving, should we be thinking of leaving?’.”

Meaning leaving Australia permanently, out of fear of persecution. “We are in this awful spot where we’re getting bigotry from every direction,” the far right and the far left, the SBS director and former chair of Multicultural NSW tells me.

He wrote a piece in this masthead about his own recent encounter with antisemitic abuse in Sydney, one of more than 2000 such incidents in Australia ov

See Full Page