Rhian,

The Christchurch comparison is useful, but it can't do all the work being asked of it.

The New Zealand Royal Commission was commissioned quickly because there was an immediate, unresolved question about national-level intelligence failure in a unitary state with far fewer jurisdictional layers. It wasn't simply "a horrific atrocity therefore an RC". It was an atrocity plus a prima facie case that national agencies may have failed in ways that could not be examined elsewhere.

That distinction matters.

On timing, you're right that Royal Commissions don't always take years and that interim findings can be valuable. But speed isn't the core issue. The issue is whether the problem definition has stabilised enough to justify deploying the most disruptive instrument available. An RC launched before scope and responsibility are clear risks becoming a rolling referendum on guilt rather than a targeted fact-finding exercise.

Robodebt reinforces the point. That RC followed substantial evidence of deliberate illegality, document destruction, and institutional evasion at Commonwealth level. Again, evidence preceded escalation.

Where I still part company with you is here: that the explosion of antisemitism "appears to have led to" Bondi. Antisemitism is real and deeply concerning, but that claim bundles correlation, background conditions, and causation. Whether and how it connects to Bondi is precisely what needs to be established, not assumed, before an RC's terms are set.

You're right that the Richardson review won't examine the entire sociopolitical ecology of antisemitism. But that raises a prior question: are we investigating a specific act and potential failures around it, or a broad societal phenomenon with international, cultural, media, and state-level dimensions? Those are very different inquiries.

My position remains one of sequencing. Establish the facts first. Identify where responsibility actually lies. Then decide whether escalation is warranted. Refusing an RC now doesn't preclude one later. Treating refusal itself as proof of guilt would be corrosive.

John,

You're Albo's mouth on here, and a grub for not owning up to it. You might like to have a guess at who the expert was who advised Albo against a rc. You might also guess some of the groups and people Albo engaged with in his "wide consultation" before deciding on a review, because no one is owning up, and many are claiming they never heard from him.

As for saying I provide no reason or evidence, that's just your lying style here, but you can listen to an interview with Mick Keelty and a relative of one of the Bondi victims, both concerned with the shortcomings of Albo's proposed review and calling for a Royal Commission.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3k-2oWXAZo

No doubt you will claim that both actually supported the Richardson review.

Fester,

I've watched the interview. It doesn't establish what you claim it does. What the video shows is:

- a grieving family member arguing that only an RC can deliver accountability and answers, and
- Mick Keelty arguing that antisemitism is a national problem and that an RC would have broader scope than the Richardson review.

Both positions are understandable. Neither constitutes evidence of Commonwealth culpability, nor do they demonstrate that existing mechanisms are incapable of establishing the relevant facts.

Keelty's core critique is about scope preference, not proven failure. He repeatedly says the Richardson review looks at "one component" and that an RC could look at "a much bigger problem". That's an argument for breadth, not proof that federal agencies failed, concealed information, or acted unlawfully.

Likewise, the families' demand for an RC is framed entirely in terms of:

- independence,
- accountability,
- and reassurance.

Those are morally compelling reasons to want the strongest possible process. They are not evidence that the PM, or the Commonwealth, bears responsibility for the attack itself.

You keep making the same category error: treating fear, harm, and moral urgency as if they were proof of jurisdictional failure.

Regarding consultation, "people saying they weren't consulted" is not evidence that no consultation occurred, nor that advice was illegitimate. Governments consult selectively and confidentially as a matter of course. Suspicion is not proof.

Most importantly, nothing in the interview establishes the causal claim you keep asserting: that the rise in antisemitism "led to" Bondi in a way that implicates federal action or inaction. Keelty explicitly speaks in terms of concern, risk, and scale, not demonstrated causation.

So no, I'm not claiming Keelty supports the Richardson review. I'm saying something much simpler and much more basic:

Advocacy for an RC, even by serious people, is not evidence that the threshold for one has been met.

If you want escalation, the burden hasn't changed: show Commonwealth responsibility, show systemic federal failure, and show that existing mechanisms cannot establish the facts.

The video does none of that.

John

I used “appear to” deliberately. We know at least one of the murderers came to authorities’ attention several years ago for their extremist views, before the recent explosion of antisemitism.

They brought ISIS flags to the massacre. ISIS terrorists worldwide are particularly keen on murdering Jews, but they have also killed Christians, Kurds, tourists, concert-goers, cartoonists, Starbucks customers, gay nightclubbers, and Christmas market shoppers, among many other targets. Most of their victims globally are fellow Muslims.

We will probably never know if the Akrams would have attempted mass murder regardless of the recent upsurge in antisemitism, or if they would have targeted some other group/s. But we know for certain that this Government has been warned repeatedly about the growing prevalence and vehemence of antisemitism and support for violent Islamism since October 2023, and the risks these posed to Jewish Australians (and indeed all Australians), and that we have just seen the worst terrorist attacks ever recorded in Australia directed at Jews practicing their faith. We need to find out how these issues are linked, and what to do about them. It is precisely the need to identify “correlation, background conditions, and causation” that makes a RC so important

Rhian,

I take the point about your use of "appear to", and I agree with the underlying caution you're exercising there. You're right that ISIS ideology is not reducible to antisemitism alone, and that its targets globally have been varied, with Muslims themselves often the primary victims. That matters, because it underscores precisely how careful we need to be about causal claims.

You're also right that we may never know whether the Akrams would have attempted mass murder regardless of the recent upsurge in antisemitism, or whether the timing and targeting were shaped by it. That uncertainty is real, and it shouldn't be minimised.

Where I still diverge is on what follows from that uncertainty.

You say that because we need to disentangle correlation, background conditions, and causation, a Royal Commission is therefore required. My concern is that this conclusion skips a step. The need to identify those relationships doesn't, by itself, establish that only a Commonwealth RC can do so, or that such an instrument should be invoked before narrower mechanisms have clarified the factual terrain.

There are at least two analytically distinct questions here:

1. What failures, if any, occurred in relation to this specific attack, including intelligence, policing, and threat assessment?

2. How should Australia respond to the broader rise in antisemitism and violent Islamist ideology as social and security phenomena?

Those are both serious questions, but they are not the same inquiry. Treating them as one risks producing a commission that is vast in scope but unclear in findings, especially while prosecutions, inquests, and targeted reviews are still live.

I don't dispute that the government had been warned about rising antisemitism, nor that this warrants serious national action. I'm questioning whether escalation to a Royal Commission now is the correct procedural move, rather than something justified once existing processes establish where responsibility actually lies and what gaps genuinely remain.

In other words, we agree on the problem space. We still disagree on sequencing.

"We will probably never know if the Akrams would have attempted mass murder regardless of the recent upsurge in antisemitism, or if they would have targeted some other group/s"

'upsurge in anti-semitism'?
You mean 'a community reaction towards specific religious and ethnic groups after Israels response to October 7' and it's been fairly minimal actually in my opinion given the footage I've seen since then of Israeli's killing Muslims, and we'd see a lot worse footage if Israel wasn't assassinating journalists, and focused on speaking shite and censoring the truth.

You see when you start assassinating journalists and their families in airstrikes, sudden;y you can't in any way accurately quantify the potential rage and frustration you're creating, because not only do people see a genocide unfold with their own eyes, they see an active attempt to hide it from worldview, as well as Israel lying and making every possible argument to deny or minimise or justify what they're doing.

'Mr. Netanyahu, why does your nation support raping Palestinian children and why did you allow a pro-rape protest in Israel?'

None of the Western presstitutes would dare to ask that.

And fyi, that phrase 'a community reaction towards specific religious and ethnic groups' was used in government documentation to describe Cronulla Riots.

We have a million Muslims in Australia, if you accept that Australians themselves had a community response to terrorist attacks and other events in the Cronulla Riots, if you accept that Jews had a community response to the Bondi terrorist attacks, emotions were running high in both cases, then why not accept that Bondi itself is a response to events in Gaza? We saw that anger and frustration cross a line with the 2 nurses who said they'd kill Israeli patients.