Melbourne has a way of making public life look orderly even when it is doing something far less flattering. On Monday, mourners filed into the Timber Yard for the state funeral of Derryn Hinch, the broadcaster and former senator who died earlier this month after a long battle with poor health. The arrivals list read like a roll call from Australian television: Greg Evans, Ray Martin, Denis Walter, Jennifer Keyte and Rhonda Burchmore were among those seen paying their respects.
Elsewhere in the city, the mood was less ceremonial and more bruised. Mark Dreyfus, the federal MP for Isaacs and former attorney general, appeared before the royal commission on antisemitism and social cohesion to describe what he called a breach of safety for Jewish Australians since 7 October. The fifth block of hearings, held in Melbourne this week, is examining security arrangements for the Jewish community, including the role of community security groups and how they work with law enforcement.
The commission was told at the outset that the threat is not a matter of sentiment or symbolism. Counsel assisting Richard Lancaster SC said the evidence would show a substantial and ongoing threat to the safety and security of the Jewish community in Australia. Dreyfus, whose father fled Nazi Germany in 1939 as an 11-year-old before being joined by his grandparents, linked that family history to the shock he says many Jewish Australians have felt since Hamas’ 7 October attack. Australia once offered refuge, he told the commission in substance, and that is precisely why the recent deterioration has landed so hard.
He also described abuse directed at him personally. In April 2024, outside Victoria’s state library, a man approached him and called him a genocidal Zionist. In May 2024, his office was covered in red paint and a message was written on the pavement asking who Mark Dreyfus served. He said the attack invoked old antisemitic tropes about dual loyalty and treachery, and he described it as deeply wounding. The language may be familiar to historians; the damage is done in the present.
Dreyfus said he now feels freer as an MP to speak for the Jewish community after being replaced as attorney general by Michelle Rowland. While he was in cabinet, he said, the constraints of office limited how fully he could respond to attacks and demands from some Jewish Australians. Since leaving cabinet in the reshuffle after the 2025 federal election, he said, he has been able to speak publicly, appear in the media, make speeches and raise concerns with ministers about what the government might do. Bureaucracy, as ever, is very efficient at explaining why urgency had to wait.
The burden on community security volunteers was spelled out just as plainly. A Victorian Community Security Group volunteer, speaking under a pseudonym, said they felt always on call after the escalation of antisemitic incidents since October 2023 and discouraged family members from attending Jewish community events when they were working in a security role. Another witness said the requirements had nearly doubled since 7 October, with volunteer hours rising from 86,000 in 2024 to almost 114,000 in 2025, staff numbers tripling and the number of synagogues protected rising to well over double the previous figure.
That is the uncomfortable backdrop to a day that also included the polite rituals of remembrance. A state funeral can honour a public figure. A royal commission can lay out the scale of a problem. What neither can do is restore the sense of normality that Jewish Australians have plainly lost, or answer why a country that prides itself on tolerance now needs so much private security just to keep communal life going.
Written by Freya Stensrud freya.stensrud@alpineweekly.com
