See no evil

As the first public figure to call for a royal commission into the Bondi atrocity, I initially thought making that case was redundant. Surely the federal government would act quickly along those lines? After all, how could there not be a royal commission following the worst terrorist attack on Australian soil?

Yet, three weeks on, despite public clamour, the government’s officially unmoved. It has instead thrown its weight behind a New South Wales state royal commission and an internal inquiry by former bureaucrat Dennis Richardson.

The former course doesn’t match a national security incident occasioned by national factors. It’s telling that the New South Wales government has still not said exactly what’s proposed, evidently hoping Canberra changes its mind soon. Ideally the prime minister would convene a joint royal commission with New South Wales to fully empower the resulting inquiry’s dealings with all relevant agencies (including state police) and ministers across jurisdictional boundaries.

As for the Richardson review, it’s only fair to note that internal inquiries are common when examining the intelligence community. Examples include the regular independent intelligence reviews carried out since the recommendation of the 2004 Flood Inquiry, itself an internal government response to the intelligence failure before the Iraq War of 2003. So too inquiries carried out by the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security.

But in other instances, intelligence-related matters of acute public and political relevance have been examined in public—most famously in the case of the Second Hope Royal Commission’s ‘reference (c)’ concerning the 1983 Combe-Ivanov affair. This included the very public examination of then prime minister Bob Hawke on the advice he received from the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and actions he took in response.

Government insistence that issues such as antisemitism can be considered by Richardson isn’t a fair reflection of the review’s narrow terms of reference. Most importantly, ‘who knew what, when’ ignores the fact that, when it comes to countering terrorism, police and intelligence agencies are simply the cap on a volatile bottle. What matters most is what’s bubbling within.

Far from allowing police and the intelligence community to escape scrutiny (or reflecting agencies’ self-interests), as some cynics suggest, favouring an internal inquiry over a royal commission, the highest form of official inquiry in Australia, serves instead to gag national security leaders. As a result, unpalatable truths—including that security intelligence can only partly mitigate threats created by decades of conscious and unconscious policies and attitudes (including failing to prioritise national unity over division)—cannot be aired publicly.

In this regard it’s important to understand that authorities are constantly evaluating—at specific points in time—capabilities and intentions of people of security concern. Unfortunately, there are many people in Australia who have an intention to do harm—ranging from worrying beliefs to dedicated commitments to violence. And those people have greatly varying capabilities to act on those intentions.

Because of the sheer range, there’s constant triaging and prioritisation to stay on top of the problem and necessarily focus investigative and surveillance resources. This is why we can’t just rely on agencies and police to always get judgments right. As a nation we need to reduce the number of people with worrying intent—by actively changing attitudes but also by limiting entry of (and if here already and not citizens, removing) those with beliefs unwelcome in Australia.

It’s important that ASIO and others have the opportunity to explain publicly (without prejudicing their work) how they deal with these challenges and make assessments in these circumstances. Circumstances that include the national terror threat level having been raised to ‘probable’ in August 2024.

It’s too easy for such a term to lose impact. ‘Probable’ means a ‘greater than fifty per cent chance of an onshore attack or attack planning in the next twelve months’. Chillingly, that’s a coin flip. And while this doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be a robust, informed examination of what was done or not done by agencies before 14 December, it does give a realistic sense of the threat being faced.

I believe this is why a broad-ranging royal commission is being opposed. In my view, many opponents fear senior officials being questioned publicly along the following lines:

Q: How many persons of interest similar to the Bondi terrorists (that is, people who have come to past attention of authorities via expressed extremist intentions, associations but have not hitherto demonstrated significant capability to act) are there?

A: Very, very many. Many more than the Australian public presently understands.

Q: And how many of those persons can you ensure don’t acquire that capability, even if you devoted all your resources to this one task, ignoring all the other pressing security challenges faced by Australia?

A: A fraction of that total.

Completely understandably, the public response would be outrage: ‘How on Earth did Australia—Australia!—end up here?’

Neo-nazis are rightly despised. Ever more restrictive gun laws attract easy electoral support. But, after Bondi, in the interests of national security and justice, and indeed sustainable social cohesion, we can no longer live with tenuous polite fictions obfuscating the more profound national security consequences of laissez faire immigration settings absent proactive national integration, and the coddling of political extremism and violence since 7 October 2023.

Relying on the Richardson Review in these circumstances is like responding to a city-wide arson spree with an inquiry into whether fire hoses are too short. Maybe they are. But maybe you should also do something about the arson.

This article was published by The Strategist.