mhaze,

No, it doesn't "point in that direction". That's still inference dressed up as moral insight. Preferring one investigative mechanism over another does not imply fear of truth, and asserting that it does simply pathologises disagreement.

Wanting the truth is not synonymous with wanting a royal commission. Different tools serve different purposes, and reasonable people can disagree about sequencing, scope, and risk without being accused of protecting "fondest held beliefs".

At this point, your position isn't evidentiary at all. It's moralised: those who agree with you want truth; those who don't must fear it. That's not an argument, it's an assertion of virtue.

If an RC is the right tool, that has to be shown by its merits, not inferred from suspicions about the motives of anyone who disagrees.
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Fester,

You've just reintroduced the urgency framing that others have been trying to retreat from. An "existential threat" is, by definition, immediate.

Royal commissions are retrospective and years-long. They are about accountability, not protection. Treating them as the responsible response to an ongoing threat collapses two very different functions into one.

Minns authorising a state RC into policing conduct is not comparable to a federal RC into national security and intelligence, and pretending they're morally equivalent ignores jurisdiction, timing, and operational risk.

If the threat is existential now, explain how the slowest mechanism available addresses that reality.

Ipso Fatso,

Fifteen innocent people were murdered at Bondi. The killers believed themselves justified because their victims were Jewish. It was Australia's largest terrorist attack and followed years of failure by governments, state and federal, to act against rising antisemitism.

Wanting a comprehensive investigation into what happened, why it happened, and how best to protect Australians in future, is not an ostentatious or grandstanding exercise. Australians deserve to have this issue properly investigated.

The Royal Commission into home insulation was brought about by the deaths of four installers. Do you think that the cold blooded killing of nearly four times as many people at Bondi does not warrant the same attention? No, of course you don't. It's ostentatious and grandstanding, isn't it?

Albo is a disgusting coward.

John,

As one of Albo's trolls here, I expect nothing but dishonesty from you, and you never disappoint in that regard.

"You've just reintroduced the urgency framing that others have been trying to retreat from. An "existential threat" is, by definition, immediate."

No, that is crap (as usual). Existential means a threat to your life. It doesn't necessarily mean an immediate threat. For example, humanity faces an existential threat as the Sun gets warmer, but that eventuality might be a billion years away.

You're just an Albotard trying to justify his pathetic cowardice. Much was made of the three suicides that possibly resulted from robodebt to justify a Royal Commission, yet five times as many killed and many more wounded at Bondi, and all we we need is an emasculated investigation?

Fester,

Abuse aside, your reply actually helps clarify the problem. You're now explicitly detaching "existential threat" from urgency in order to preserve a conclusion you'd already reached.

In policy and security contexts, existential doesn't just mean "something that could, in principle, end lives at some indeterminate point". It refers to a threat that is structural, ongoing, and plausibly capable of eliminating a group's ability to live safely as such. That is precisely why the term is invoked alongside immediacy and prevention, not billion-year hypotheticals about stellar evolution.

Your sun analogy proves the opposite of what you think. It shows that when a threat is remote and non-actionable, we do not respond with emergency instruments. We plan proportionally. That is exactly the point being made.

Regarding Robodebt, the Royal Commission wasn't convened because of a body count. It was convened because there was prima facie evidence of systemic, deliberate government illegality, document destruction, and institutional evasion across multiple departments. None of that is remotely analogous here.

Invoking victim numbers as if Royal Commissions are triggered by arithmetic rather than jurisdiction, evidence, and scope is emotional accounting, not governance.

Finally, calling an inquiry "emasculated" before it has even reported gives your game away. You're not asking whether failures occurred - you're asserting that they did, who is responsible, and that any process not validating that claim is illegitimate.

That is not an argument for truth-seeking. It's an argument for a show trial.

If you want a Royal Commission, the burden is on you to demonstrate:

1. federal responsibility,
2. systemic failure that cannot be examined by existing mechanisms, and
3. evidence that precedes your conclusion.

So far, you've done none of that.

Those calling for an RC are already convinced of Albanese's guilt, and would reject the findings of the RC if it concluded otherwise anyway. That's a very long, expensive, and resource-diverting gamble just for some support for a position that you clearly don't even need.

Let that sink in.

John

You say “Those calling for an RC are already convinced of Albanese's guilt”. They include the victims’ families, every leading Jewish organisation in Australia, Former High Court Justice Robert French, former GG Peter Cosgrove, former Labor defence minister Mike Kelly, former AFP commissioner Mick Keelty, former Department of Home Affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo, senior Labor figures Peter Beattie and Ed Husic, and more than 100 senior barristers and judges.

If all of these are “convinced of Albanese’s guilt” then they may be onto something. But I suspect most are not – they simply want an inquiry of the depth and with the powers that only a RC can muster.

You are right that other measures can be taken more expeditiously and focussed on particular areas that clearly warrant attention. I think both reform of gun laws and an inquiry into police and security responses are good ideas. But we also need something more far-reaching to examine in detail how we came to this situation. They are not mutually exclusive.

Rhian,

You're right that the calls for a Royal Commission have broadened. That said, I would add the following addendum:

"…or are reacting to a media environment, driven by Murdoch outlets, that has persistently framed a Royal Commission as urgent, morally compulsory, and obstructed only by federal cowardice."

The public pressure for a Royal Commission has been driven primarily by a framing that presumes Albanese's culpability, and that this framing has done much of the work in generating urgency around an RC before key procedural thresholds have been demonstrated.

The list of eminent figures you cite is important, but it doesn't establish what it's being asked to establish. It shows that many serious people believe a Royal Commission could be appropriate. It does not demonstrate that the evidentiary or jurisdictional threshold for invoking a Commonwealth RC has already been met, nor that existing mechanisms are incapable of establishing the relevant facts.

Regarding the families and community organisations specifically: their fear, anger, and desire for the strongest possible response is entirely understandable. But moral urgency and evidentiary necessity aren't the same thing. Governments cannot collapse that distinction without turning process into a plebiscite driven by grief and outrage rather than by scope, responsibility, and proof.

You're right that reforms and inquiries are not mutually exclusive in the abstract. In practice, however, Royal Commissions reshape incentives, slow operational change, and reframe every interim finding through a prosecutorial lens. That is precisely why governments normally exhaust targeted reviews and jurisdictionally appropriate inquiries first, and only escalate if those mechanisms demonstrably fail.

So the disagreement isn't about whether truth matters or whether systemic issues should be examined. It's about sequencing and burden of proof.

Refusing a Royal Commission now doesn't preclude one later if evidence warrants it. What would be corrosive is treating the refusal itself as evidence of guilt.