Original subtitles

(OVERLAPPING AGGRESSIVE YELLING)

Get the fuck out of Australia!

Get back!

Cronulla riots. December 11th, 2005.

Changed us.

We want to think of ourselves as that friendly nation

where all are welcome, and we want to avoid

a small ugliness that exists.

CROWD: Aussie! Aussie! Aussie!

And with Cronulla riots,

we were forced to address it.

(YELLING)

Cronulla riots were a turning point in Australia's history.

(OVERLAPPING YELLING)

People think the Cronulla riots started on the day of

the Cronulla riots.

That's completely wrong.

Cronulla was a weaponising of the flag

to represent certain politics, that was anti-immigration.

CROWD: Fuck off, Lebs! Fuck off, Lebs!

A lot of the things that we saw that day,

we never showed on television.

We considered them too scary.

And it's only now, 20 years on, that we're seeing

some of that vision.

It's on, it's on!

But I don't know if any of us thought it would be

as ugly as it was.

Who the fuck you hitting, bro?

Machine guns. Molotov cocktails. Grenades.

Gangs of men of Middle Eastern origin,

baying for revenge.

There was a very quick reckoning that forced us

to question, is that what we mean by being

a multicultural society?

Is this who we want to be?

We're back here for revenge! (INDISTINCT OVERLAPPING SHOUTS)

We woke up to a different country.

Australia changed overnight.

Never fucking come back!

There are very few things that still remain

quintessentially Australian, but the beach being a free place

for everybody, it's just a very, very Australian idea.

Cronulla is a beachside suburb that would be

just over 20km from the CBD of Sydney.

It's home to the Cronulla Sharks.

It's where former Prime Minister Scott Morrison

had his electorate.

We sometimes joke, calling it 'God's Country'

or 'the Insular Peninsula', because it tends to be

the sort of place that if you're born there, you never want to leave.

The demographics of Cronulla

were very Anglo-Saxon, very white, very beach/surfie orientated.

A lot of people worked and wanted to live

and their lifestyle was the beach.

So young guys, it was the blonde haired, blue eyed.

We love Australia. I'm proud of it.

And we're proud to be here.

I was at the surf club on that day and doing my patrols

and observing everything that was going on at the beach.

2005, what was I listening to?

There would have been some Powderfinger.

# Baby I've got you on my mind... #

Probably some Spiderbait.

A little bit of 'Black Betty.'

# Woah, Black Betty, bam-ba-lam... #

Black Betty was a very masculine, rambunctious

and had that real rock and roll swagger.

I was definitely listening to a lot of that pop, hip hop, R&B.

Black Eyed Peas.

# Let's get it started in here... #

It was actually a great time!

Cronulla is the only beachside suburb

in Sydney that has the train line that goes to it.

So over the years, there's been groups like Westies, Bankies,

Sharpies, a large number of gang-type groups that have

come to Cronulla and got into conflict with the local surfies.

And it's about territory and it's about behaviour

down there and expectations.

Um, because the surfies can be quite territorial

in their nature.

In 2005,

I was the Regional Commander for area of Cronulla

and the CBD, parts of Sydney and so forth.

And no matter who you are, if you turn up here and want to

pull that sort of activity on, you will be arrested.

So in the lead up to the actual Cronulla riots,

there was quite a build-up of tension and community issues

and local angst where there was, um, a Lebanese Muslim

young youth coming from the western suburbs to the beach area.

You had some people who were coming from the western suburbs

of Sydney, wanting to come and enjoy Cronulla Beach,

as they should.

And there was a bit of a clash of cultures.

Well, basically, if you come to the beach

and you yell at people, from a distance...

Abuse, then how can you demand respect? That's just rude.

They come up to you and ask you, for example, if you root,

and they all laugh.

Those sorts of quite offensive comments

which were really taken badly by young girls, but also their

fathers, their boyfriends, husbands and so forth.

They come down here and they start with their mouth

and they just bullshit to everybody.

They harass our women. That's their religion.

In the early 2000s, it was the the young Muslims

that were involved in the gang-style behaviour,

strutting through the malls in gangs,

fights with young, uh, local people,

standing over young local people for their money.

In 2005, I was elected to be the president of

the Lakemba Sports Club, Australian of the Muslim faith.

We were under pressure.

We felt that all the bad things that happened by individual,

it will be put under the microscope and portray that person

is typical of all of us.

Harassment, the stealing, the theft,

was just all part and parcel of every summer.

I've been rolled, I've been jumped.

I've been walking home from Northies,

just walking through the park,

I've had three dudes sneak up on me.

I don't believe there was any issue on the beaches

of Cronulla about Lebanese gang or anti-social behaviour.

I believe it was a beat up.

People think the Cronulla riots started on the day

of the Cronulla riots.

That's completely wrong.

They started well before then.

It was something that was simmering away since 2001.

We were having conversations around terror, around migration.

I was experiencing that feeling, the sense

that I was an outsider, that our communities were outsiders

and that people weren't comfortable with us.

We were a multicultural nation.

We were becoming more multicultural.

But there are a lot of tensions, particularly around Australians

from Arab backgrounds.

There was this sense that the combination of their

ethnicity and their religion meant that they were going

to come to Australia, be in little huddles of people

and not become Australian.

And then we had a terrible series of gang rapes in Sydney,

perpetrated by people who happened to be Muslim

and were saying disgusting things about Aussie girls

while they were carrying out those attacks.

An 18-year-old girl gets off the suburban train

with some Lebanese Australian men,

when she has been sexually assaulted by 14 men and raped 25 times.

The victims were all Caucasian women

aged between 13 and 18.

Those convicted, all Lebanese Muslim youths.

I was, quote, "an Aussie pig," and these people

were making out that I was some sort of a lesser being.

So I think a lot of people would be hearing that

and feeling a degree of fear.

And in Cronulla, you don't have the same kind of mix

as you've got in other parts of Sydney,

where everyone's living alongside each other,

from all different walks of life, all different faiths,

all different cultural groups.

You get intimidated by them and you're in your own area

and you feel like you can't be safe.

Hassan Moghrabi, the Lakemba resident claims locals have

been taunting him, saying he's not welcome in Cronulla.

I'm just here to have fun, have a swim

and go home, and that's it. I don't want no trouble.

All of these tensions were there, and it was really

interesting to see what might actually make those kinds of

underlying tensions explode.

And all of a sudden, boom.

A major police hunt is underway for a cowardly group

of up to 20 men who attacked two surf lifesavers at Cronulla.

Lifesavers had just finished an eight hour patrol at

North Cronulla when they were abused by several men,

described as of Middle Eastern appearance.

The lifesavers and lifeguards were there, and a couple of

Middle Eastern guys who'd been kicking a ball around,

they came over and a couple of words got said,

and I think it became a little bit of the male bravado,

then became, you know, push me/shove you almost.

It then became very much in your face.

The lifesavers were bashed around the head,

were kicked and punched.

The media then turned that into an almost like,

circus-like event, where it was

the sons of Anzacs have been beaten by the Muslim Lebanese.

Almost from the 9/11 attack,

'the terrorists have arrived in Sydney.'

For anyone to attack our Aussie icons, our lifesavers,

who put their own lives at risk, is just un-Australian.

Something has to be done.

I don't feel safe to let my children

down on that beach again.

For many, this was not just a brutal crime,

but an act of sacrilege.

Young volunteer surf lifesavers bashed while giving up their

weekend to help others.

In all fact, it was a local assault and should have

been dealt with as such.

But it was a very, very big build up

in the media at the time.

The feeling that that erupted locally,

it was massive.

This attack is not Australian and is absolutely unacceptable

as far as we're concerned.

It's finally everyone's had enough of it.

People round here are gonna start doing something about it,

you know, like it's not going to be a one-sided affair anymore.

I was a court reporter in the newsroom at that time.

It was the outcome they dreaded.

Outraged by the sentence, the father of one victim

lashed out in the courtroom.

I was in my early/mid-20s.

You could feel the tension building.

There were all these text messages going back and forth.

Something like 270,000.

Locals have received a text message asking them to reclaim the beach.

(READS)

You look at the lead up.

It almost seems, in a way, like it was inevitable,

that it was going to happen, or come to a head.

It's pretty much a turf war.

And it's in danger of spreading from the sand.

Breakfast with Alan Jones on 2GB 873.

When you've then got inflammatory voices

in the media, Alan Jones calling them "Middle Eastern thugs"

and it just, it kind of gave permission

for this to play out as it did.

You hear people respected are in command

behind the microphone, influencing young people,

saying these terrible things.

It was awful.

Issuing a final and blunt warning,

police have told troublemakers to stay away from Cronulla

tomorrow and avoid a showdown with frustrated locals.

You will end up with warfare in the streets,

so let's just cool it a bit.

I 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.

A mostly sunny day for the state.

Sydney, fine with sunny periods and light

to moderate southeast winds.

Down at Cronulla, there was definitely trouble brewing.

It was a really hard situation to de-escalate and I think

there'd been a shift that this was no longer a policing matter,

and the community wanted to send a very clear signal

on terms that they wished to express themselves.

So you could definitely feel that escalation.

I was at the surf club on that particular day.

The day started off overcast and very much, I thought,

'Well, this is going to be a bit of a dud day.'

Sunday, December 11th looked like any other

Sunday at Cronulla Beach.

People turning up, going for a swim.

Probably a few more people there than normal,

but not in the morning.

(CAR HORN)

And then more and more people coming.

Australian flags wrapped around people's heads.

My recollections now are of a lot of young men.

A lot of shirts off, tattoos, Australian flags.

So it's definitely like a humanity and a crowd.

People having parties on balconies.

('LAND DOWN UNDER' PLAYS IN DISTANCE)

It felt like an Australia Day. There were eskies, there were flags.

(GENERAL COMMOTION)

There was a soundtrack, a pub rock Australian soundtrack.

(ROCK MUSIC PLAYS)

So on the actual day of the Cronulla riots,

my role, I was the police commander in charge of the whole situation.

It was more like a carnival atmosphere, if you like.

It's about a crowd of about 5000 people had turned up there.

Go, you Aussies.

Up the boys! Aussie!

You gotta be proud.

Initially, it was primarily a protest.

Um, it was a protest against the assault on the lifeguards.

It's about those three lifesavers that got bashed,

and it's not cool. They're doing their job.

Down here, doing their job, saving lives.

You know, like they go out, they risk their neck every week.

It was a protest about reclaiming the beach

from the...they believed locally terrorising almost of

their suburb by youth from the western suburbs.

We're sick and tired of just being harassed on the beach.

They don't come with their beach towels.

They don't come down to have a swim.

They haven't got their boardies on.

They come down to harass.

And they've been coming down here, hanging out at the wall,

making it unsafe for people to walk around here

at night, mate, it's just enough.

We've just had enough. We love everyone. We're not racist.

We've had e-(BLEEP)-nough.

(CROWD CHANTING) Aussie! Aussie! Aussie!

Aussie! Aussie, Aussie, Aussie!

Oi, oi, oi!

Most people who went there were getting on the cans.

And then before you know it, one knucklehead

leads to two knuckleheads, leads to three.

You know, a lot of the things that we saw that day,

we never showed on television.

We considered them too scary. Too incendiary.

This is our beach and we want it back!

Fuck these (MUTED). We want our fuckin' beach!

We have taken enough shit from these fuckin' Lebanese!

The decision was made that we wouldn't inflame

this situation any further.

Let's fuckin' get 'em! (CHEERS)

And it's only now, 20 years on, that we're seeing some of

that vision.

If you don't love Australia, get fucked!

As the sun then came out,

all the young fellows arriving

were all carrying packs over their shoulders of beer.

Oh, mate.

And it was just getting bigger and bigger.

And louder and louder.

As people were getting drunker and drunker,

and the day was getting hotter and hotter.

Boys, get down here. Help us out. It's all on.

So it was growing.

Yeah, I remember a mass of people,

just people sort of standing around.

It reminded me of, like being at a gig, right.

Like at a music festival.

(GENERAL COMMOTION, CHANTS)

There was like an aimlessness.

CROWD: Aussie! Aussie! Aussie!

It was peculiar.

CROWD: Aussie! Aussie! Aussie!

People will not tolerate Muslims in our society.

They do nothing. All they do, they harass our women.

They come here in groups, groups of 10, 15.

They harass and intimidate women.

If they're going to harass us, then they're not welcome.

They need to show respect. Yeah.

They don't show us any respect.

We're sick of the disrespect.

Sickening.

And they try and hit on us. And we just don't like it.

And one guy asked for a cigarette

and he didn't even smoke.

That's why we're all here today. Yew!

Hey, you're a sicko! Get away!

That's it.

So yeah, we just want them to leave us alone

and just... And get the fuck out of...

Go home!

Woo!

Yee-ha!

So by early afternoon, the crowd had become hostile,

drunk, whipped up, revved up.

CROWD: Fuck off, Lebs! Fuck off, Lebs!

And I remember the moment when the chanting started.

CROWD: Fuck off, Lebs! Fuck off, Lebs!

And that felt like a real turning point.

CROWD: Fuck off, Lebs! Fuck off, Lebs!

Everything changed in that moment, where no-one was safe.

CROWD: Fuck off, Lebs! Fuck off, Lebs! Fuck off, Lebs!

I think the words "F off, Lebs" was really shocking.

CROWD: Fuck off, Lebs! Fuck off, Lebs! Fuck off, Lebs!

Hysteria is hyping up dramatically.

Fuck off, wogs!

Go, Australia!

I think that it's going to blow.

(WHISTLING, YELLING)

CROWD: Fuck off, Lebs! Fuck off, Lebs! Fuck off, Lebs!

What's really strange about the Cronulla riots

is it was a one-sided riot.

It was just this huge mob of mainly young Aussie blokes.

It wasn't like you've got a gang here and a gang here

and they're fighting in the streets of Cronulla.

Anyone who didn't look like them, anyone who didn't

have blonde hair and white, the crowd was turning on them.

(BOTTLE SMASHES, YELLING)

These are not thugs.

These are just poor, innocent people who probably

didn't even know it was going to be happening in Cronulla that day.

(OVERLAPPING AGGRESSIVE YELLING)

I mean, how frightening for some of these people.

(OVERLAPPING AGGRESSIVE YELLING)

Start sprayin' 'em!

Who had nothing to do with what was going on.

But they look different.

So they were chased.

Get back, get back!

(OVERLAPPING AGGRESSIVE YELLING)

Go fucking home!

(OVERLAPPING AGGRESSIVE YELLING)

Back out of there, mate.

(OVERLAPPING AGGRESSIVE YELLING)

I had in a real time moment

of, oh my god, this is what racism looks like

when it's right there in front of me being played out in violence.

Don't ever fuckin' come back!

Although 2005 doesn't seem that long ago, when you look

back at that time, we really didn't understand that we did

frame ourselves as a white Australia and an other.

(OVERLAPPING AGGRESSIVE YELLING)

Stay the fuck out!

Don't fuckin' come back! Fuckin' dogs!

I see myself as an Aussie, but I never really saw

that reflected back to me.

But what Cronulla did was really put that up in lights

and really put it on the main stage.

Can I ask you fellas what's going on?

What's going on? Leb bashin', mate.

At one stage, even in the crowd, there was a a couple

of young men from Bangladesh that turned up in their vehicle

and inadvertently end up among the mob.

They were from Bangladesh, not even from the Middle East.

(OVERLAPPING AGGRESSIVE YELLING)

The crowd sensed that there was something happening.

There was a train load of people supposedly coming in

from the western suburbs.

(OVERLAPPING AGGRESSIVE YELLING) (CAR HORN)

So suddenly, you've got this mad crowd

rushing towards the station.

(OVERLAPPING AGGRESSIVE YELLING)

When they got to the station,

they got onto a train which had just arrived.

And there were two young Arabic boys on that train...

..who had no real knowledge of what was even occurring.

There was an extremely violent attack

by the drunken crowd on those two young men.

Craig Campbell, who was sergeant in charge of

the Commuter Crime Unit at the time,

he pulled out his baton and he single-handedly,

he took on that entire carriage full of drunken yobbos.

Get out! Get out!

Now, that's one of the bravest things

that I've ever seen.

(OVERLAPPING AGGRESSIVE YELLING)

No doubt he saved the lives of those two young men

on the train that day.

Really quickly after that, people left the station.

And they returned down to the beach.

You know, as a photographer, I'd photographed a lot of war zones,

but this was a little bit different.

So out of 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 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.

And so he was covering his head and blocking the blows,

more and more people piling in.

The fists turned into beer bottles and they're slamming

these beer bottles on his head.

But at that moment, a police officer came in

with capsicum spray.

(COMMOTION)

But I quickly realised, this ain't over.

And this could actually get a whole lot worse.

(OVERLAPPING AGGRESSIVE YELLING)

Leave him alone!

You need a back up, mate!

(OVERLAPPING AGGRESSIVE YELLING)

People started throwing stubbies.

And I think one of the first ones that came in

managed to hit me on the head.

'Cause I was covered in blood.

Bring on the fucking Lebs!

I think that's where, probably where the policing

had then stepped up.

Stop it!

And started organising crowd control.

Fuck off.

It eventually quietened down.

But any thought that that was the end,

we were so wrong.

There was so much more to come and it was going to get

really ugly again.

I lived with my community and I know they're not gonna

take it lying down.

And that's the message that I've told the people in authority.

This is not going to go without a reaction.

I think one of the untold stories of Cronulla riots

is the revenge attacks. Retaliation.

There was so much anger in the community.

The people in the outer suburbs of Sydney

who have now watched the TV news and seen people

who look like them being chased and bashed.

They then decided to get their revenge.

So they jumped in their cars and they headed

towards Cronulla.

The public are probably not aware to this day of the actual

level of threat and the level of violence that was occurring.

Gangs of men of Middle Eastern origin

baying for revenge.

This 45 year old man, randomly selected

by a gang as he put his garbage bins on the footpath.

He survived the beating but has broken ribs and head injuries.

Residents throughout Sydney's south

are literally living in fear.

No-one knows where or who these roaming gangs will strike next.

The most serious incident came outside a golf club

when a car pulled up alongside Daniel Gray and his friends.

The car doors flew open and, um, you know,

four guys started running.

One of the guys called out, "Get those Aussie sluts!"

At that stage, I had one on either side of

my head, kicking my head.

The next thing Daniel knew, he'd been stabbed in the back

so forcefully that the knife's handle had snapped.

Anyone of any... Caucasian on the street

were bashed for no other reason

than the fact that they were Caucasian.

Violently bashed, some with weapons,

including baseball bats.

Driven by hatred, the Middle Eastern mob was on the move

for the second straight night.

We'll bash you...

And they were true to their word.

At least 30 carloads of men managed to make it

into the Shire.

The men adopted the tactics of smashing and then running.

I was walking back from the 7-Eleven,

just going to get a can of drink.

I heard some yelling and screaming across

the road. I looked across.

Next thing I know, some guy had run across from me.

I heard running and like a screaming. I turned up.

That's the first guy that throws the beer bottle at me.

I backed into this alcove here and next thing I know,

there's 20/30 guys hitting me.

Hit, hit hit. Just get hit in the head.

Next thing I can remember was a steel bar coming up and hitting me,

and I don't know what happened from then.

Police found knuckledusters.

Iron bars, baseball bats, other clubs, knives,

guns, shootings into buildings and shop windows.

Really violent revenge attacks occurring in multiple suburbs

and sometimes at multiple places at once.

And inexplicably, it wasn't just Caucasians

who were the targets.

Lebanese men, six/seven car get up in the street

in my shop and try to hit me and said,

"I'm going to kill you" and hit my shop.

I'm thinking I'm gonna get killed.

I didn't think I can get away with it.

It was kind of a scary time where it didn't matter

where you lived, you didn't want to go out at night.

I'm not sure that any police force in the world

that I'm aware of had before experienced these marauding

and rampaging mobile gangs.

One of the boys, I was there and he said, "Doc, come on,

I want to show you something."

Took me on the side, open 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.

And I said, "Listen, close it down.

We don't want to have any of this."

"The police are on our side.

"We're gonna respect the law.

Because if it is, All it's got, the bigger guns."

It's more violent.

That's not the way you build a society.

The revenge attacks were so confronting.

But I think what people don't know is

they could have been a whole lot worse.

I think the police did a great job at keeping that quiet,

and it's taken a long time for those facts to come out.

Police were receiving very high level intelligence

from our own intelligence sources.

For instance, information the following weekend,

there is going to be a drive-by shooting using machine guns

into the beer garden of the North Cronulla Hotel.

We 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,

and we literally took off the streets

truckloads of weapons.

Five people have been arrested for the possession

of Molotov cocktails.

And we believe that they were intending to use those weapons.

They found machine guns.

The police found Molotov cocktails. Grenades.

Another one was Westfields at Miranda in the Thursday night

before Christmas.

We had very good intelligence that there was going to be

an attack done on that.

And we saw recently what happened with

one offender at Bondi.

Well, there was going to be 50 people pull up

out the front and rampage through the shopping centre

with knives, guns, baseball bats.

Can you imagine

had any of those attacks gone ahead in our country?

This is Australia.

For a good chunk of Australians, that 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.

It's my view that the Cronulla riots

were a turning point in Australia's history.

The report is 20 to 30 vehicles are headed

towards Cronulla.

Police 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.

Unprecedented powers where they were able to stop

vehicles, check licenses.

At least 30 car loads of men managed to

make it into the Shire.

Several were stopped and searched by police.

I know I've got nothing!

You could not get into that suburb unless you went

through a police block.

Submit yourself to a search and your vehicle to a search.

And it's very draconian level powers

that have never been seen before.

A special strike force, made up of 500 officers is to be set up.

It will be on standby night and day

to deal with the specific problem of racial unrest.

Go to the back of the truck over here.

I've done nothin' wrong!

Aussie, Aussie, Aussie!

I covered courts, and the police

did an extraordinary job in their investigations

in the days afterwards.

So I saw a lot of them from both sides.

Police allege he was part of the mob which stormed a train

bashing two Middle Eastern men.

And you hear their backstory and never been involved

in anything like this before.

Ashamed of their involvement in it,

would swear to the magistrate that this is not the person they were.

And I always just felt like going,

"Look what you've done to your mother."

Did you have a chance to speak to your son?

Oh, sorry. No comment.

Hadi Khawaja had a handful of supporters in court.

They didn't take kindly to the cameras waiting outside.

(BLEEP)!

Who the (BLEEP) you hitting, bro!

On the night of the December 11th riots, 24-year-old Khawaja

climbed Brighton-Le-Sands RSL and stole an Australian flag.

Then, in front of 150 Lebanese men, set it alight.

The magistrate said it was incomprehensible that Khawaja

burnt the Australian flag three days after being sentenced

to 500 hours community service for embezzlement.

He described the crime as extreme vandalism,

sentencing him to three months jail.

I think a lot of people felt uneasy about the fact

that the Australian flag was so present.

CROWD: Aussie! Aussie!

What 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.

CROWD: Fuck off, Lebs! Fuck off, Lebs! Fuck off, Lebs!

For a time,

I feel the flag represented a racist white Australia.

I think there was such ugly connotations that went with

anyone who carried a flag.

CROWD: Fuck the Lebs! Fuck the Lebs! Fuck the Lebs!

For 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.

It was something that, you know, if nothing else,

represented my country.

Suddenly became a tool of fear for me.

CROWD: Aussie! Aussie! Aussie!

And 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.

Post-Cronulla, we had politicians, we had media even,

and we had community leaders stepping in.

It's about finding out, uh, where we're heading

and how we can work together.

We could see a 60 Minutes grapple with

an audience on the issues.

There's never been anything quite like it.

Not in my lifetime, anyway.

Nothing as ugly or as shameful.

Nothing as un-Australian.

This could have been any beach between

Newcastle and Wollongong.

Because this obnoxious, criminal, thuggish behaviour

has been underway for 10 years.

So 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?

Listen... Are you serious?

I'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?

Lady in front. What have you got to say?

We can walk to school five days a week.

We can get stopped three out of the five days.

Get harassed for being Australian,

walking to school. I'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.

We 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.

Aren'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?

I don't think we've moved beyond that yet.

(AGGRESSIVE YELLING)

It 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 tensions building up, and they'd had enough of it.

Fuck the wogs, fuck the wogs!

We lived through the Cronulla days, we lived through

before Cronulla days, and now we are talking 20 years afterwards.

Without any doubt, it was racially based.

You'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.

Get the fuck out!

Is there still a live debate in Australia around racism?

Yes, there always will be.

I absolutely think the Cronulla riots

could happen again in Australia.

Cronulla 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.

And with Cronulla riots, we were forced to address it.

Absolutely, the Cronulla riots changed Australia.

They 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?

You know what? As horrible as 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.

In a show of goodwill,

members of the Islamic community mixed with surfers this afternoon

at Maroubra and Cronulla.

There 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.

Their religions are different, but their beliefs are the same.

All they want is peace.

Violence is not to be tolerated.

It's never excusable, no matter who does it.

One 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.

And 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.

We recruited boys and girls from both areas.

We trained together for a couple of months.

We walked the Kokoda Track together, and it was the first time

a hijabi Muslim girl will walk the Kokoda Track.

And I went along with them on one of those treks

to the Black Cat Track in Papua New Guinea.

Yeah, I just came away from that trek with a really

good feeling about the young people of Australia.

Cronulla riots, it's 20 years this year,

and we haven't seen anything like it since.

But we shouldn't relax.

Given 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.

The neo-Nazis arrived in support of an anti trans rights speaker.

That group met with a counter-protest.

(OVERLAPPING YELLING)

I remember watching the January 6th riots in the US,

astounded by what I was seeing.

Going way back to what we saw

at Cronulla, to January 6th...

So unfortunately, that could happen again.

And in a way, that's enabled today by our social media,

it's far more connected.

We 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.

I think the conditions are there.

This could absolutely happen.

If Cronulla happened today,

I think we would be debating whether it was a riot or not.

We're in the fucking capital!

I don't think it would be any kind of

constructive conversation.

I think it would be each person's truth as they see it.

And it's really weird to look back at something like Cronulla

as a time that I now think,

wasn't it nice that we actually then

came together afterwards?

I kind of long for that.

I personally don't think that there would be that level

of racial violence in this country again, or I would

certainly hope not and hope the lessons have been learnt.

I came to Australia in 1984 and when I arrived in

Australia, I fell in love with Australia and its people.

In 2005, I felt it is a moment of Australia's

national building.

Australia has matured. Every nation, as we go by,

we go through these difficulties but we learn from them.

Cronulla gave us a moment and it showed us an alternative

future and we've rejected that,

and all that makes you really proud to be Australian.

Captioned by AI-Media ai-media.tv

MAN: 14 people had died.

And I said, "That can't be true."

It was true.

And then, the news just kept getting so much worse.

(SIRENS BLARE)

VOICEOVER: The monster...

WOMAN: A fire that was 100 Ks wide.

..that changed Australia.

We needed to know

how the hell something like this happened.

Black Saturday like you've never seen before.

If people had been told, "You have to get out,"

people would have lived.