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00:00Cronulla riots December 11 2005 changed us we want to think of ourselves as that
00:22friendly nation where all are welcome and we want to avoid a small ugliness that exists
00:30and with Cronulla riots we were forced to address it
00:40Cronulla riots were a turning point in Australia's history
00:47people think the Cronulla riots started on the day of the Cronulla riots that's completely wrong
00:52Cronulla was a weaponizing of the flag to represent certain politics that was anti-immigration
01:08a lot of the things that we saw that day we never showed on television we considered them too scary
01:15and it's only now 20 years on that we're seeing some of that vision
01:26but I don't know if any of us thought it would be as ugly as it was
01:31machine guns Molotov cocktails grenades
01:35gangs of men of middle eastern origin paying for revenge there was a very quick reckoning that
01:44forced us to question is that what we mean by being a multicultural society this is who we want to be
01:54we woke up to a different country
01:56we woke up to a different country
02:01Australia changed overnight
02:03there are very few things that still remain quintessentially Australian but the beach being
02:28a free place for everybody it's just a very very Australian idea
02:36Cronulla is a beachside suburb that would be just over 20 kilometers from the CBD of Sydney
02:44it's home to the Cronulla Sharks it's where former prime minister Scott Morrison had his electorate
02:52we sometimes joke calling it god's country or the insular peninsula because it tends to be the sort
02:57of place that if you're born there you never want to leave
03:02the demographics of Cronulla were very Anglo-Saxon very white very beach surfy orientated a lot of
03:11people worked and wanted to live and their lifestyle was the beach so young guys as it was the blonde
03:17hair blue-eyed we love the show we're proud of it and we're proud to be here i was at the surf club on
03:22that day and doing my patrols and observing everything that was going on at the beach
03:312005 what was i listening to there would have been some powder finger
03:37probably some spider bait a little bit of black betty
03:42black betty was a very masculine rambunctious and had that real rock and roll swagger
03:49i was definitely listening to a lot of that pop hip-hop rmb black eyed peas
04:00god it's actually a great time
04:09Cronulla is the only beachside suburb in Sydney that has the train line that goes to it so over the years
04:18there's been groups like westies bankies sharpies a large number of gang type groups that have come
04:25to Cronulla and got into conflict with the local surface
04:31and it's about territory it's about behavior down there and expectations
04:35because the surface can be quite territorial in their nature
04:38in 2005 i was i was the regional commander for area of Cronulla and all the cbd parts of sydney and so
04:48forth and no matter who you are if you turn up here and want to pull that sort of activity on you will
04:54be arrested so in the lead up to the actual Cronulla riots there was quite a build-up of tension and
05:00community issues and local angst where there was um uh lebanese muslim young youth coming from the
05:07western suburbs to the beach area you had some people who were coming from the western suburbs of
05:14sydney wanting to come and enjoy Cronulla beach as they should and there was a bit of a clash of
05:18cultures well basically if you come to the beach and you yell at people from a distance abuse then how
05:24can you demand respect that's just rude okay they come up to you and ask you for example if you root
05:29and they all laugh those sorts of quite offensive comments which were really taken badly by young
05:35girls but also their fathers their boyfriends husbands and and and so forth they come down here
05:40and they start with their mouth and they just bullshit everybody they harass our women it's their religion
05:54in the early 2000s it was the young muslims that were involved in the gang style behavior strutting
06:03through the malls in gangs fights with young local people standing over young local people for their
06:11money in 2005 i was elected to be the president of the la kimba sports club australian of the muslim faith
06:23we were under pressure we felt that all the bad things that happened by individual it will be put
06:32under the microscope and portray that person is atypical of all of us
06:41uh harassment the the stealing the theft uh was just all part and parcel of every summer
06:48i've been rolled i've been jumped i've been walking home from norvies just walking through the park i've
06:55had three dudes sneak up on me i don't believe there was any issue on the beaches of cronulla about
07:02lebanese gang or anti-social behavior i believe it was a beat up
07:08people think the cronulla riots started on the day of the cronulla riots that's completely wrong
07:19they started well before then
07:21it was something that was simmering away since 2001
07:40we were having conversations around terror around migration
07:45so i was experiencing that feeling the sense that i was an outsider that our communities were outsiders
07:53and that people weren't comfortable with us
07:57we were a multicultural nation we were becoming more multicultural but there are a lot of tensions
08:03particularly around australians from arab backgrounds there was the sense that the combination of their
08:11ethnicity and their religion meant that they were going to come to australia be in little huddles of
08:20people and not become australian and then we had a terrible series of gang rapes in sydney
08:34perpetrated by people who happened to be muslim and were saying disgusting things about aussie girls
08:40while they were carrying out those attacks an 18 year old girl gets off the suburban train with some
08:47lebanese australian men when she has been sexually assaulted by 14 men and raped 25 times the victims
08:56were all caucasian women aged between 13 and 18 those convicted all lebanese muslim youths i was
09:04quote an aussie pig and these people were making out that i was some sort of a lesser being
09:10so i think a lot of people would be hearing that and feeling a degree of fear and in crinola you don't
09:16have the same kind of mix as you've got in other parts of sydney where everyone's living alongside
09:23each other from all different walks of life all different faiths all different cultural groups
09:27you get intimidated by them and you're in your own area and you feel like you can't like be safe
09:35his son mcgravis the lakemba resident claims locals have been taunting him saying he's not welcome in
09:41crinola i'm just here to have fun have a swim and go home and that's it i don't want no trouble
09:47all of these tensions were there and it was really interesting to see what might actually
09:58make those kinds of underlying tensions explode and all of a sudden boom the major police hunt is
10:07underway for a cowardly group of up to 20 men who attacked two surf lifesavers at crinola
10:13lifesavers had just finished an eight-hour patrol at north crinola when they were abused by several
10:19men described as of middle eastern appearance the lifesavers and lifeguards were there and a couple
10:26of middle eastern guys had been kicking the ball around they came over and a couple of words got
10:31said and and i think it became a little bit of the male bravado then became you know push me shove you
10:36almost it then became very much in your face the lifesavers were bashed around the head were kicked and
10:42punched the media then turned that into an almost like circus like event where it was the sons of
10:48anzacs have been beaten by the muslim lebanese almost from the 9 11 attack the terrorists have arrived in
10:54sydney for anyone to attack our aussie icons our lifesavers who put their own lives at risk is just
11:06un-australian something has to be done i don't feel safe to let my children down on that beach again
11:14for many this was not just a brutal crime but an act of sacrilege young volunteer surf lifesavers
11:22bashed while giving up their weekend to help others in all fact it was a local assault and should
11:27have been dealt with as such but it was a very very big build up in the media at the time
11:36the feeling that that erupted out locally it was massive this attack is not australian and it's
11:41absolutely unacceptable as far as we're concerned it's finally everyone's had enough of it
11:46people around here are going to start doing something about it you know like it's not going
11:49to be a one-sided affair anymore i was caught reporter in the newsroom at that time it was the outcome they
11:54dreaded outraged by the sentence the father of one victim lashed out in the courtroom i was in my
12:02early mid-20s you could feel the tension building there were all these text messages going back and
12:11forth something like 270 000. locals have received a text message asking them to reclaim the beach this
12:21sunday every aussie in the shire get down to north crinola to help support lib and wog bashing day
12:30let's claim back our shire you look at the lead up it almost seems in a way like it was inevitable
12:39that it was going to happen or come to a head it's pretty much a turf war and it's in danger of spreading
12:45from the sand
12:59my suggestion is to invite one of the biker gangs to be present in numbers at crinola railway station
13:06when these lebanese thugs arrive it'd be worth the price of admission to watch these cowards scurry
13:11back onto the train for the return trip to their lairs australians old and new shouldn't have to put
13:17up with this scum when you've then got inflammatory voices in the media alan jones calling him middle
13:27eastern thugs and it just it kind of gave permission for this to play out as it did
13:34crinola is a very long beach and it's been taken over by this scum it's not a few causing trouble it's
13:42all of them you hear people respected are in command behind the microphone influencing young people
13:52saying these terrible things it was awful
14:02issuing a final and blunt warning police have told troublemakers to stay away from crinola tomorrow
14:09and avoid a showdown with frustrated locals you will end up with warfare in the street so let's just cool it a bit
14:15i think we were prepared for something bad to happen but i don't know if any of us thought it would be as ugly as it was
14:28a mostly sunny day for the state sydney fine with sunny periods and night to moderate southeast winds
14:47down at crinola there was definitely trouble brewing
14:49it was really hard situation to de-escalate and i think there'd been a shift that the this was no
14:59longer a policing matter and the community wanted to send a very clear signal on terms that they
15:04wish to express themselves so you could definitely feel that escalation
15:09i was at the surf club on that particular day the day started off overcast and very much of um i
15:23thought well this is going to be a bit of a dud day
15:30sunday december 11 looked like any other sunday at crinola beach
15:34people turning up going for a swim probably a few more people there than normal but not in the morning
15:48and then more and more people coming australian flags wrapped around people's heads
15:58my recollections now of a lot of young men a lot of shirts off
16:01um tattoos australian flags um so it's definitely like a humanity and a crowd
16:08people having parties on balconies
16:17so it felt like an australia day there were eskies there were flags
16:26there was there was a soundtrack a pub rock australian soundtrack
16:31so on the actual day of the crinola rights my role i was the police commander in charge of the
16:39whole situation it was more like a carnival atmosphere if you like um this fight about a
16:44crowd of about 5 000 people had turned up there
16:46so it was a protest um it was primarily a protest um it was a protest against the assault on the lifeguard
17:04it's about those three lifesavers that got bashed and it's not cool doing their job down here doing
17:13their job saving lives you know like they go out they risk their neck every week
17:20and it was a protest about reclaiming the beach from the
17:23they believe locally terror terrorizing almost of their suburb um by youth from the western suburbs
17:31we're sick and tired of just being harassed on the beach they don't come with their beach towels
17:36they don't come down to have a swim they haven't got their borders on they come down to harass
17:39and they've been coming down here hanging out at the wall making it unsafe for people to walk around
17:43here at night mate it's just enough we just had enough we love everyone we're not righteous we've
17:48had enough
17:59most people who went there were getting on the cans and then before you know it one knucklehead
18:05leads to two knuckleheads leads to three you know a lot of the things that we saw that day
18:11we never showed on television we considered them too scary too incendiary the decision was made
18:29that we wouldn't inflame the situation any further
18:32let's get out of my head and it's only now 20 years on that we're seeing some of that vision
18:46and it was just getting bigger and bigger
19:08and louder and louder
19:17as people were getting drunker and drunker and the day was getting hotter and hotter
19:21boys get down here help us out it's all on so it was growing
19:29yeah i remember in some of the where the massive people were just people sort of standing around it
19:33reminded me of like being at a gig right like at a music festival
19:38there was like an aimlessness
19:51it was peculiar
19:52people will not tolerate muslims in our society they do nothing all they do they harass our women they
20:06come here in groups groups of 10 15 they harass and intimidate women but if they're going to harass us
20:12then they're not welcome they need to show respect they don't show us any respect we're sick of the disrespect
20:18they did and they're trying to get on us and we just don't like it and we've one guy asked for a cigarette and he didn't even smoke
20:24so yeah pretty much we just want them to leave us alone and just and get the
20:39so
20:49early afternoon the crowd had become
20:52hostile drunk whipped up revved up
20:57and i remember the moment when the chanting started
21:00and that felt like a real turning point everything changed in that moment when no one was safe
21:15i think the words f off lebs was really shocking
21:23hysteria is hyping up dramatically
21:31and i think he's going to blow
21:36it's all on, let's go
21:4111
22:00What's really strange about the Cronulla riots is it was a one-sided riot.
22:11It was just this huge mob of mainly young Aussie blokes.
22:15It wasn't like you've got a gang here and a gang here and they're fighting in the streets
22:19of Cronulla.
22:21Anyone who didn't look like them, anyone who didn't have blonde hair and white, the crowd
22:28was turning on them.
22:29These are not thugs, these are just poor innocent people who probably didn't even know what's
22:37going to be happening in Cronulla that day.
22:44I mean how frightening for some of these people who had nothing to do with what was going on.
22:56But they looked different, so they were chased.
23:05Go fucking home, go fucking home!
23:14Go fucking home, go fucking home!
23:22I had in a real time moment of, oh my goodness, this is what racism looks like.
23:37When it's right there in front of me being played out in violence.
23:42Don't have a fucking gun back!
23:46Don't have a fucking gun back!
23:51Although 2005 doesn't seem that long ago, when you look back at that time, we really didn't
23:57understand that we did frame ourselves as a white Australia and an other.
24:06I see myself as an Aussie, but I never really saw that reflected back to me.
24:21But what Cronulla did was really put that up in lights and really put it on the main stage.
24:30Hey girls, can you tell us what's going on over there?
24:32What's going on?
24:33Leb bashing, mate.
24:40At one stage, even in the crowd, there was a couple of young men from Bangladesh that turned
24:46up in their vehicle and inadvertently end up among the mob.
24:51They were from Bangladesh, not even from the Middle East.
25:12The crowd sensed that there was something happening, there was a trainload of people supposedly
25:16coming in from the western suburbs, so suddenly you've got this mad crowd rushing towards
25:25the station.
25:36When they got to the station, they got onto a train which had just arrived.
25:45And there were two young Arabic boys on that train who had no real knowledge of what was
25:55even occurring.
25:59There was an extremely violent attack by the drunken crowd on those two young men.
26:08Craig Campbell, who was the sergeant in charge of the commuter crime unit at the time, he pulled
26:13out his baton and he single-handedly took on that entire carriage full of drunken yobbers.
26:23Now that's one of the bravest things that I've ever seen.
26:33No doubt he saved the lives of those two young men on the train that day.
26:50Really quickly after that, people left the station and they returned down to the beach.
27:00You know, as a photographer, I've photographed a lot of war zones, but this was a little bit different.
27:11So in the corner of my eye, I noticed a man running out of a stairwell and there's like three or four people chasing him, just giving haymaker
27:20a king hits. And I realised, I've got to keep clicking. The victim in this case ran onto a street and then sought refuge on the back of a ute.
27:30And so he was covering his head and blocking the blows. More and more people piling in.
27:37The fists turned into beer bottles and they're slamming these beer bottles on his head.
27:42But at that moment, a police officer came in with capsicum spray.
27:50But I quickly realised this ain't over.
27:54And this could actually get a whole lot worse.
28:17People started throwing stubbies.
28:24And I think one of the first ones that came in managed to hit me on the head.
28:30Because I was covered in blood.
28:36I think that's where probably where the policing had then stepped up and started organising crowd control.
28:48It eventually quietened down.
28:55But any thought that that was the end, we were so wrong.
28:59There was so much more to come and it was going to get really ugly again.
29:04I lived with my community and I know they're not going to take it lying down.
29:08And that's the message that I've told the people in authority.
29:13This is not going to go without a reaction.
29:28I think one of the untold stories of Cronulla riots is the revenge attacks.
29:33Retaliation.
29:34There was so much anger in the community.
29:40The people in the outer suburbs of Sydney have now watched the TV news and seen people who look like them being chased and bashed.
29:49They then decided to get their revenge.
29:53So they jumped in their cars and they headed towards Cronulla.
29:57The public are probably not aware to this day of the actual level of threat and the level of violence that was occurring.
30:06Gangs of men of Middle Eastern origin baying for revenge.
30:10This 45-year-old man randomly selected by a gang as he put his garbage bins on the footpath.
30:17He survived the beating but has broken ribs and head injuries.
30:23Residents throughout Sydney South are literally living in fear.
30:26No one knows where or who these roaming gangs will strike next.
30:30The most serious incident came outside a golf club when a car pulled up alongside Daniel Gray and his friends.
30:37The car doors flew open and four guys started running.
30:42One of the guys called, yeah, get those Aussie sluts.
30:45At that stage I had one on either side of my head, kicking my head.
30:50The next thing Daniel knew, he'd been stabbed in the back so forcefully that the knife's handle had snapped.
30:57Anyone Caucasian on the street were bashed for no other reason than the fact that they were Caucasian.
31:04Violently bashed, some with weapons including baseball bats.
31:08Driven by hatred, the Middle Eastern mob was on the move for the second straight night and they were true to their word.
31:23At least 30 carloads of men managed to make it into the Shire.
31:27The men adopted the tactics of smashing and then running.
31:31I was walking back from the 7-Eleven, just going to get a can of drink.
31:41I heard some yelling and screaming across the road, looked across.
31:45Next thing I know, some guy had run across from me, I heard running and like a screaming.
31:50I turned up with the first guy that throws the beer bottle at me.
31:53I backed into this alcove here.
31:55And next thing I know, there's 20, 30 guys hitting me.
31:59Hit, hit, hit, just getting hit in the head.
32:03And next thing I can remember, there was a steel bar coming up and hitting me.
32:08And I don't know what happened from there.
32:11Police found knuckle-dusters, iron bars, baseball bats, other clubs, knives, guns, shootings into buildings and shop windows.
32:29Really violent revenge attacks occurring in multiple suburbs and sometimes at multiple places at once.
32:35And inexplicably, it wasn't just Caucasians who were the targets.
32:39Lebanese man, six, seven car, get up in the street in my shop and tried to hit me and said I'm going to kill you and hit my shop.
32:48I was thinking I'm going to get killed.
32:51I didn't think I could get away with it.
32:54It was kind of a scary time where it didn't matter where you lived, you didn't want to go out at night.
33:01I'm not sure that any police force in the world that I'm aware of had before experienced these marauding and rampaging mobile gangs.
33:12One of the boys, I was there and he said, Doc, come on, I want to show you something.
33:18Took me on the side, opened the boot of his car and he had a blanket, removed the blanket and he had a couple of machine gun and all that sort of things.
33:29And I said, listen, close it down. We don't want to have any of this.
33:35The police are on our side.
33:37We cannot respect the law.
33:39Because if it is, all it's got the bigger guns, all it's got is more violent.
33:44That's not the way you build a society.
33:50The revenge attacks were so confronting, but I think what people don't know is they could have been a whole lot worse.
33:58I think the police did a great job of keeping that quiet.
34:01And it's taken a long time for those facts to come out.
34:04Police were receiving very high level intelligence from our own intelligence sources.
34:11For instance, information, the following weekend, there is going to be a drive by shooting using machine guns at the end of the beer garden of the North Cronulla Hotel.
34:20We conducted a covert undercover police operation that was run that took a hand grenade off the black market that was attempted to be thrown into that beer garden from a moving car going past.
34:35And we literally took off the streets, truckloads of weapons.
34:40Five people have been arrested for the possession of Molotov cocktails.
34:44And we believe that they were intending to use those weapons.
34:48They found machine guns.
34:50The police found Molotov cocktails, grenades.
34:55Another one was Westfield's at Miranda in the Thursday night before Christmas.
34:59We had very good intelligence that there was going to be an attack done on that.
35:02And we saw recently what happened with one offender at Bondi.
35:06Well, there was going to be 50 people pull up out the front and rampage through the shopping centre with knives, guns, baseball bats.
35:13Can you imagine had any of those attacks gone ahead in our country?
35:23This is Australia.
35:28For a good chunk of Australians, it made them realise that the kind of anti-Muslim sentiment that they'd started to get used to in the media could actually have real serious impacts.
35:43It's my view that the Cronulla riots were a turning point in Australia's history.
35:58Police eventually got on top of it, as they always do, but not without special new powers that had to be introduced and given to the police.
36:08Unprecedented powers where they were able to stop vehicles, check licences.
36:13At least 30 carloads of men managed to make it into the Shire.
36:17Several were stopped and searched by police.
36:21You could not get into that suburb unless you went through a police block.
36:25Submit yourself to a search and your vehicle to a search.
36:27And it's very draconian level of powers that have never been seen before.
36:35A special strike force made up of 500 officers is to be set up.
36:39It will be on standby night and day to deal with the specific problem of racial unrest.
36:43I covered courts and the police did an extraordinary job in their investigations in the days afterwards.
36:58So I saw a lot of them from both sides.
37:00Police allege he was part of the mob which stormed a train bashing two Middle Eastern men.
37:06And you hear their backstory and never been involved in anything like this before.
37:12Ashamed of their involvement in it.
37:15Would swear to the magistrate that this is not the person they were.
37:19And I always just felt like going, look what you've done to your mother.
37:21Did you have a chance to speak to your son?
37:24Sorry, no comment.
37:26Hattie Khawaja had a handful of supporters in court.
37:29They didn't take kindly to the cameras waiting outside.
37:32What the f*** are you doing?
37:34What the f*** are you doing?
37:37On the night of the December 11 riots, 24 year old Khawaja climbed Brighton La Sands RSL and stole an Australian flag.
37:45Then in front of 150 Lebanese men set in the light.
37:51The magistrate said it was incomprehensible that Khawaja burnt the Australian flag three days after being sentenced to 500 hours community service for embezzlement.
38:02He described the crime as extreme vandalism, sentencing him to three months jail.
38:10I think a lot of people felt uneasy about the fact that the Australian flag was so present.
38:14Hosey! Hosey!
38:17What was pronounced to me was how the Australian flag was used as a kind of call to arms for all those people who were really angry.
38:24Fight for police! Fight for police! Fight for police! Fight for police!
38:29For a time, I feel the flag represented a racist, white Australia.
38:38I think there was such ugly connotations that went with anyone who carried a flag.
38:43For me, the flag that was representative of the country that I was born in, you know, I once wore the flag to celebrate Australia Day as my hijab.
39:01It was something that, you know, if nothing else represented my country suddenly became a tool of fear for me.
39:10Hosey! Hosey! Hosey! Hosey! Hosey!
39:16And so there was, I think, a very quick reckoning that something horrible had happened here, that this was a questioning of who we were and looking to those institutions, police, courts, to stabilise this.
39:31Post-Cronulla, we had politicians, we had media even, and we had community leaders stepping in.
39:41It's about finding out where we're heading and how we can work together.
39:46We could see a 60 minutes grapple with an audience on the issues.
39:51There's never been anything quite like it, not in my lifetime anyway. Nothing as ugly or as shameful, nothing as un-Australian.
39:59This could have been any beach between Newcastle and Wollongong because this obnoxious, criminal, thuggish behaviour has been underway for 10 years.
40:10So what you're trying to tell me right now, that if we were to grab our community, all these so-called thugs, how you put it, and keep denouncing these kids and lock them up, you think that's going to be a solution?
40:20Listen there, are you serious?
40:24I'm an Australian-born Lebanese Muslim, and to be told by another white Anglo-Saxon to go back to my country, well, this is my country, where do you want me to go?
40:36Lady in front, what do you want to say?
40:38We can walk to school for our five days a week, we can get stopped, three out of the five days get harassed for being Australian, walking to school.
40:45I'm Lebanese, and I'm Muslim, and I also get harassed. So it's not just the Aussies. I really, really get angry when Aussies think that they're targeted just because they're white. That is not true.
40:55We keep coming back to who belongs and who doesn't. And that conversation has never gone away, and we don't come up with answers.
41:05Aren't we sick of coming back to this conversation over and over again? We still ask ourselves, are we racist? We still ask ourselves, who are we as a nation?
41:15I don't think we've moved beyond that yet.
41:24It was not racially motivated at all. It was more to do with the behaviour that was being exhibited that was then racially badged by local people who had had detentions were building up and they'd had enough of it.
41:38We lived through the coronary days. We lived through before coronary days. And now we are talking 20 years afterwards, without any doubt. It was racially based.
41:57You're not welcome. This is our land. Get the hell out. And it was targeted against people of Middle Eastern appearances and targeted against people that they look anything different except white, blonde, blue eyes.
42:17Is there still a live debate in Australia around racism? Yes, there always will be.
42:32I absolutely think the Cronulla riots could happen again in Australia.
42:47Cronulla changed us. It was something we hadn't seen or had to deal with before. But I think we want to think of ourselves as that friendly nation where all are welcome and we want to avoid a small ugliness that exists.
43:14And with Cronulla riots, we were forced to address it.
43:21Absolutely, the Cronulla riots changed Australia.
43:25They gave us a moment in time within a place with people who acted in ways that have forced us to question and reflect and to ask, do we want to go back there?
43:35You know what? As horrible as that day was and everything it represented, something good actually came from it, believe it or not. And that is how different groups right around Sydney came together and said no.
43:55In a show of goodwill, members of the Islamic community mixed with surfers this afternoon at Maroubra and Cronulla.
44:02There was such a concerted effort and it came from the right place. It was heartfelt to actually stamp our foot and go, this is not who we are. We can always overcome our differences.
44:15Their religions are different, but their beliefs are the same. All they want is peace.
44:22Violence is not to be tolerated. It's never excusable, no matter who does it.
44:28One of the other things that came out of Cronulla is just this idea that, you know, the beach doesn't belong to the locals and everyone should be able to enjoy it.
44:40And some very enterprising person came up with the idea of the burkini to allow women of the Islamic faith to be able to enjoy the beach in the same way that the rest of us can.
44:51We recruited boys and girls from both areas. We trained together for a couple of months. We walk the Kokoda track together. And it was the first time a hijabi Muslim girl will walk the Kokoda track.
45:08And I went along with them on one of those treks to the Black Cat track in Papua New Guinea.
45:17Yeah, I just came away from that trek with a really good feeling about the young people of Australia.
45:28Cronulla writes, it's 20 years this year and we haven't seen anything like it since, but we shouldn't relax.
45:39Given recent anti-Semitic attacks and even just some of the scenes we've seen from neo-Nazis in Melbourne of late, the tension is still there.
45:51The neo-Nazis arrived in support of an anti-trans rights speaker. That group met with a counter-protest.
45:58I remember watching the January 6th riots in the US, astounded by what I was seeing.
46:08Let's go guys!
46:10Going way back to what we saw at Cronulla to January 6th.
46:14We are taking our house!
46:15Yes!
46:16Yes!
46:17So unfortunately, that could happen again.
46:19We won't win!
46:20We won't win!
46:21We won't win!
46:22And in a way that's enabled today by our social media is far more connected.
46:27We had text messages around the Cronulla time, but as you saw with January 6th, the amplification of Trump's message and how that gets shared.
46:38I think the conditions are there. This could absolutely happen.
46:41Listen to the people!
46:44If Cronulla happened today, I think we would be debating whether it was a riot or not.
46:49We're in the fucking capital!
46:51I don't think it would be any kind of constructive conversation.
46:56I think it would be each person's truth as they see it.
47:01And it's really weird to look back at something like Cronulla as a time that I now think,
47:08or wasn't it nice that we actually then came together afterwards?
47:12I kind of long for that.
47:15I personally don't think that there would be that level of racial violence in this country again,
47:20or I certainly hope not.
47:21I hope the lessons have been learnt.
47:25I came to Australia in 1984.
47:28And when I arrived in Australia, I fell in love with Australia and its people.
47:33In 2005, I felt it is a moment of Australia's national building.
47:44Australia has matured.
47:48Every nation, as we go by, we go through these difficulties, but we learn from them.
47:56Cronulla gave us a moment and it showed us an alternative future, and we've rejected that.
48:03And all that makes you really proud to be Australian.
48:0614 people had died.
48:18And I said, that can't be true.
48:21It was true.
48:23And then the news just kept getting so much worse.
48:25The monster.
48:28A fire that was a hundred Ks wide.
48:32That changed Australia.
48:35We needed to know how the hell something like this happened.
48:40Black Saturday, like you've never seen before.
48:45If people had been told you have to get out, people would have lived.
48:50Next Sunday, 8-10 on 9.
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