A magistrate has heard that a 22-year-old man's grotesque mimicry of one of Australia's worst terrorist attacks amounts to little more than drunken misconduct, yet still indicated that imprisonment appears likely when the offender is sentenced next month.
Zayne Jason William McMillan was seen posing and moving his hands as though he was holding a long-barrelled firearm while on a footbridge at Bondi Beach on January 31. Two gunmen stood on the same bridge two months earlier and opened fire on a crowd celebrating Hanukkah, leaving 15 people dead and dozens injured in Australia's deadliest anti-Semitic attack.
The contrast between the two acts reveals a troubling question about how courts should respond when someone trivialises a mass shooting targeting a religious minority. McMillan's conduct was not merely offensive; it caused immediate, documented harm. While he was imitating their actions, court documents reveal McMillan shouted "f*** the Jews" before intimidating a man walking with his young daughters. The girls burst into tears.
McMillan presented himself to Waverley Local Court as remorseful. McMillan on Tuesday said he accepted he had been acting stupidly and wanted to apologise for his behaviour. He is due to be sentenced in April after pleading guilty to three counts of offensive behaviour in a public place and two counts of intimidation over an hour-long drunken tirade.
The competing pressures in his case expose fundamental tensions in sentencing philosophy. Defence counsel Glen Cremer argued that McMillan should be released from custody pending sentencing to address his alcohol and drug dependency. The Koori man had been drunk and influenced by others at Bondi when he embarked on the spontaneous offending, Cremer told the court. His framing was blunt: "It's not planned anti-Semitic ... terror activity. It's drunken stupidity."
Yet the prosecution presented a starker picture. The police prosecutor contended a jail term was inevitable, given McMillan's criminal history and the "pretty horrendous" facts before the court. McMillan had been on parole for multiple domestic violence offences when he mimed holding the gun and made racist remarks.
This history matters. McMillan's background of violence against intimate partners suggests that whatever his intoxication on January 31, his capacity for aggressive conduct is established. The magistrate agreed that a term of imprisonment appeared likely and declined to hear the bail application.
The incident occurred in the shadow of trauma that ripples through Sydney. On 14 December 2025, an antisemitic Islamic State (IS)-inspired terrorist attack occurred at the Archer Park area of Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, during a celebration of the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah attended by around 1,000 people. Beginning at 6:42 pm, two Muslim gunmen, allegedly Sajid Akram and his son Naveed Akram, killed a total of 15 people including 11 men, 3 women and a 10-year-old girl. That McMillan would choose the same location for his grotesque performance, just weeks after the atrocity, speaks to either profound insensitivity or worse.
What makes this case legally and socially significant is not the question of remorse or intoxication, which may bear on the sentence itself. Rather, it is whether society can tolerate conduct that weaponises a mass murder as theatre for antisemitic abuse. The offending occurred in a space where a community had gathered to commemorate the dead. The magistrate appears to have accepted that however spontaneous and alcohol-fuelled, imprisonment is the likely consequence.
McMillan will deliver an apology to the community when he is sentenced next month, the court was told. Whether words spoken in court can repair damage done on the bridge where 15 people died remains to be seen.