The Bondi blame game

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them. – Spinoza.

4PR: Can you please introduce yourself?

Zach Sarra: My name is Zachary Sarra and I am currently a magistrate at Wynnum.

4PR: When were you appointed and who by?

Zach Sarra: I was appointed by Labor Attorney General Matt Foley in 1999.

4PR: Were you the first aboriginal person to be appointed as a magistrate?

Zach Sarra: Do you mean in Queensland? No Jackie Paine was the first, a few months before me.

4PR: What about Australia?

Zach Sarra: No, that was Pat O’Shane in New South Wales, quite a few years before Jackie and me  in the 1980s.

4PR: Didn’t you play for Australia?

Zach Sarra: Only as a schoolboy.  I played for my local Rugby League club in Bundaberg, then called  The Natives. I ended up playing for Wynnum Manly.

4PR: … with the King?

Zach Sarra: Yeah, I played with Wally Lewis in the early 1980s. We beat Redcliffe one time in the Brisbane rugby league. I scored a crucial try in the second half.

4PR: Who was the best player from your era of rugby league?

Zach Sarra: I have a lot of respect for both Wally Lewis and Gene Miles.

4PR: Do you have a drinking problem?

Zach Sarra: Get real, why do you say that?

4PR: Rugby league is a drinking culture.

Zach Sarra: Sure alcohol is a bonding mechanism in rugby league like in many sports that doesn’t mean I got a drinking problem. I abhor drink-driving it’s one of the main causes of the road toll which is escalating all the time. There’s been about 133 deaths on the roads in Queensland in the last few months. And it’s caused by dick-heads driving while drunk or under the influence of drugs.

4PR: Are you against drugs?

Zach Sarra: Of course I am opposed to drugs … Wynnum has become ICE central. Looking at the use of methamphetamines in Wynnum alone, it’s a catastrophe, and it’s causing a lot of problems.

4PR: Can you understand why people take drugs?

Zach Sarra: Of course I can, you take it, you take a truck driver working 12 and 14 hour shifts, dog tired … of course they’re gonna take methamphetamines. That doesn’t make it right or lawful.

4PR: For many years Australia has trained children how to use weapons in the army cadets and has conscripted 18 and 19-year-olds sending them overseas to die in wars initiated by the United States. On the 15 December 2025, you told the court that it would be better to send politicians to war zones: “I think if they got all the politicians and put them on a plane and flew them into a war zone, rather than sending young people, young children ...” Can you explain how that solves the problem of wars where Australia has committed troops to American wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Palestine?

Zach Sarra: We are still reeling from a mass shooting in Sydney yesterday. My grandfather was killed by the Germans,  and my uncle was shot in the leg and walked with a limp thereafter. So I have a pretty jaundiced view of war. As subsequent facts have shown, Howard was wrong to send us to Iraq. But I blame what happened at Bondi on people over there bringing their hate here.

4PR: That’s a pretty unresponsive answer.

Zach Sarra: Well that’s all you’re getting from me.

4PR: When you heard the case of a Palestinian man blocking the driveway of an arms factory in Tingalpa you said the following words: “What was the aim of the protest? Does anyone know? What, kill the Jews like they did in Bondi.” Do you wish to explain those remarks in the light that it shows bias against the accused?

Zach Sarra: It’s pretty straightforward really. I told that fella “You’re not gonna to use my court as a platform. I’m sick and tired of the protest voice. You’re here today because you have broken the law. Now you come here as a form of protest, but you’re not going to use this as a platform to espouse the whatever it is. Now we’ve got United Nations, we’ve got international courts that deal with these issues, and there are rules of law by you breaking the law and exposing yourself to criminalization. How does it help you or your family in this community? And I’m not talking about the Palestinian or the Jewish community. I’m talking about the Australian community.“

4PR: What is your understanding of the conflict in Palestine?

Zach Sarra: It’s all about land.

4PR: How so?

Zach Sarra: There’s been mass protests over the years, and it’s all about land disputes.

4PR: Are you speaking as an aboriginal person?

Zach Sarra: Aboriginal people have been here for 60,000 years, and they are still, even to this day, trying to reconcile land rights issues. But you don’t see them burning down buildings, shooting people, setting bombs on people. That’s what happens overseas. That sort of conduct is really not warranted in Australia. Stay away. That’s my message to these people.

4PR: If its about land, how can it be resolved given that Aboriginal people have not yet obtained land rights after nearly 250 years?

Zach Sarra: The ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine that’s been going on for eons, (Prosecutor interrupts: “since the dawn of time, your honour). But people come here because over there you have bombs going off, get people … getting shot at, and they have been doing that for centuries.

4PR: Isn’t blocking a driveway from an arms factory a legitimate protest?

Zach Sarra: The accused escaped all that over there. He comes to Australia, where he should find peace in Australia, which is a multicultural society where all persuasions are embraced and encouraged. We’d like to get the best out of cultures, to enhance the quality of the melting pot that we have in Australia, when people come here with their hatred and their vitriol and do nothing but contaminate the community, that’s not on.

4PR: But the defendant is trying to stop Australia’s arms trade with Israel.

Zach Sarra: You know the recent event in Bondi, where the father, generally, you have a father raising a son, you have a difference in mentality, where dad has certain generational issues. They call it a generation gap, where the kids should be taking the best of their father’s generation becoming more independent in their thinking. But in that case, yesterday at Bondi, would appear sadly that a father’s poisoned the mind of his son, and the poisonous vitriol now is seen as death of the father. I feel sorry for the mother, actually, because she’s lost both the father, husband and a son, and yet, what does it achieve? We see dead children. We see old people shot, all because of what, some concept.

4PR: All the defendant wanted was to stop an arms company only a few kilometers away from your courthouse … Ferra Engineering is sending F-35 weapons parts to Israel used to bomb children.

Magistrate Sarra: There’s some integrity to that. But these people don’t give a toss about the other people who live in the community. There are people who go to Ferra to work. They don’t even know where Palestine is. They just go there because they’re paid to go to work there. They do a day’s work. They get paid. They go home, put food on their table. They don’t know why some clown was on a bloody … hanging off a bamboo pole.

4PR: One of the metal workers at Ferra has a personalised number plate on his car that says F-35. Why aren’t you guilty of apprehended bias against the Palestinian defendant?

Zach Sarra: Regarding the worker at the factory, he doesn’t know anything.  He don’t even know what they were all prancing on about or carrying on about at the protest on the 10th November, and the defendant is not getting support from workers like him, but the rights of … the rights of the people who own that property are just simply put to one side, and yet, you know … regarding bias, it is my court, and if I think a defendant has broken the law, it is my job to reflect community values.

4PR: So what are the people opposed to the genocide supposed to do?

Zach Sarra: If they were to petition the commissioner of police, they can get access to a permit to allow them to conduct a lawful assembly. That’s where people go crazy. They don’t bother about that. The matter was before the High Court recently they wanted to march on the Harbour Bridge in Sydney …

4PR: So how do you see your role in this matter before the court?

Zach Sarra:  I gave him a low range fine. I do still submit that a good behavior bond is still within range. However, given his honest comments, I submitted a fine of $900 plus court costs of $150. But I want him to know that next time, he would have C-R-I-M-I-N-A-L written all over his forehead, if he comes before me again.

4PR: I think we should leave it there.

We should bear in mind that there have been thousands upon thousands of Bondi massacres in Gaza over the past two years alone, and half of the people murdered by Israel  are children .

Before we go, Queensland Magistrates Courts have a long history of being wild places where the most unlikely verbal by police was accepted without question. I have got to say that Zach Sarra may be a little confused with his role in life. He is guilty of apprehended bias against the Palestinian defendant.

I think Sundays events at Bondi have tipped the Magistrate over, like it has a lot of other people. Based on his unhinged performance in court on Monday, Zach Sarra should be disqualified from hearing any cases relating to Palestine or protests in general. Be mindful that this performance was in the context of the New South Wales government banning assemblies, a direct attack on democratic rights.

[ This interview is played by voice actors and all of the quotes in italics are taken from magistrate Sarra’s comments during the sentencing of a Palestinian man trying to stop weapons parts from being used by Israel to kill children in Gaza.]