The royal commission into the Bondi attack should probe the uncomfortable question

The announcement of a Royal Commission into the Bondi attack is welcome. But in addition to focusing on the event itself, it should probe the uncomfortable question of what should Australia have done over the past two years to prevent this moment — and why was it not done?

Antisemitism in Australia has been increasingly overt in the two years since 7 October 2023. We have seen it in schools, on university campuses, in workplaces and on social media, and in successive mass protests in capital cities. Jewish Australians have reported harassment, intimidation, vandalism and vilification.

Much of this resurgent antisemitism has been documented by community organisations, recorded by the police, and tracked by our intelligence agencies. It didn’t emerge suddenly. It was a trend.

But in institutional terms, Australia treated it as episodic rather than systemic, as cultural rather than ideological, and as a social irritation rather than a security concern. This framing mattered because in shaping what governments thought the problem was, it led to four key failures in their response.

The first failure was that political leaders struggled to name the problem and to speak clearly about what was happening. Antisemitism was routinely folded into generic language about ‘racism’, ‘community tensions’ or ‘polarisation’. Instead of acknowledging that Jews were being targeted because they were Jews, politicians blurred the problem into a broader narrative of grievance.

What Australia needed was a clear and explicit political statement that antisemitism was a growing and distinct problem requiring a focused response, backed by a formal national definition, consistent ministerial language and a reporting framework that allowed it to be tracked properly across agencies. Failure to name led to failure to prioritise the problem.

And this led to the second key failure: a lack of institutional seriousness. Antisemitism was largely treated as a matter for education and community dialogue programs. While these have their place, they are not sufficient when hatred becomes organised, ideological and mobilised.

What was needed was a whole-of-government approach: a standing interdepartmental taskforce linking key government departments such as Home Affairs and the Attorney-General’s departments; regular security threat assessments that treated antisemitism alongside other forms of extremism; and political backing for law enforcement to use existing powers against intimidation and incitement.

Indeed, the appointment of a Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism and the submission of a national plan should have provided precisely the framework for government response. That it did not translate into coordinated action only reinforces the extent of the institutional failure.

We know, in the wake of Bondi, that security agencies had intelligence about threats, but there was no institutional structure to translate knowledge into action.

And failure to act led to the third key failure: that of setting appropriate boundaries. Liberal democracy depends on a clear distinction between legitimate protest and intimidation, between speech and coercion. Over the past two years, that line blurred as political leaders fudged a consistent enforcement of existing laws and failed to establish clear thresholds for policing protests.

What Australia needed was clear and unequivocal guidance from governments about where lawful dissent ends and unlawful intimidation begins. Instead, ambiguity became permissiveness, and permissiveness emboldened those willing to go further next time.

Failure to set clear boundaries was a result of the fourth key failure – that of political courage. There were moments when leaders – from the Prime Minister down – could have drawn lines, spoken plainly and taken political risks in defence of democratic norms. But instead, they chose caution.

They hesitated to name antisemitism clearly. They hesitated to confront extremist rhetoric directly. And they hesitated to insist that if multiculturalism is to succeed — which looks increasingly unlikely — it depends not only on coexistence but on acceptance of shared civic rules.

Underlying all four failures is the core problem: political leaders’ reluctance to make the hard decisions required for national security in a fraught geopolitical landscape. By treating ideological hatred as a mere ‘social irritation’, we have failed to put in place the robust, all-of-government approach necessary to protect our social cohesion, which is an essential foundation for our long-term economic prosperity and national well-being.

The current approach — heavy on rhetoric but light on genuine, integrated security strategies — risks further damage to public trust and national resilience; a classic case of policy drift in the face of clear and present danger.

This drift is an abdication of responsibility, the kind that ultimately comes with a high price tag, both in human lives and in the long-term health of our multicultural society. We have paid that price in the erosion of civic norms, the corruption of public discourse, and the normalisation of open hate-filled protest.

The rise of antisemitism in many Western countries shows that this crisis is not confined to Australia. Other democracies struggle with similar tensions. But that should not become an excuse for resignation.

Bondi was not inevitable. It was the product of a series of small failures — of language, of focus, of responsibility — accumulating over time and exploding in a sudden and shocking outburst of violence on a summer afternoon.

If there is a lesson to be learned, it is not that Australia needs more symbolism or more reactive legislation. Rather, the lesson is that it needs clearer moral and institutional confidence — the confidence to name problems early, to ensure institutional capacity for responding to them, and to enforce consistently the boundaries of our civic life.

And above all, it needs to accept the political cost of doing so. For the real danger is not only that we failed to act two years ago; it is that we have yet to admit that we should have acted.

Peter Kurti is Head of the Culture, Prosperity and Civil Society program, and Michael Stutchbury is Executive Director, at the Centre for Independent Studies.