Stubborn and obstinate, Anthony Albanese channels his inner ScoMo
The Australian Prime Minister is refusing Jewish victims a Royal Commission into Bondi
Anthony Albanese retreated to process and meaningless politics-speak with his initial wooden response to the Bondi terror attack, when a father and son from southwest Sydney fired upon Jews celebrating the first night of Hanukkah at Bondi Beach, killing 14 people.
Now the Australian prime minister is indulging in stubbornness and obstinacy, as he continues to turn a deaf ear to the pleas of the families of those slain on Bondi Beach. They want a Royal Commission into the murder of their loved ones.
‘Announcements made so far by the federal government in response to the Bondi massacre are not nearly enough,’ 17 families of the victims wrote this week.
‘Prime Minister, how can you not support a Royal Commission into the deadliest terrorist attack on Australian soil? Royal Commissions have been established for banks and aged care.
‘We have lost parents, spouses, children and grandparents.
‘You owe us answers. You owe us accountability. And you owe Australians the truth.’
It is a brave political leader who sets himself up as the prime minister to look the victims of Australia’s worst terror attack in the eye and say that their pain, their trauma, their tragedy, does not warrant the nation’s most powerful and thorough style of investigation.
Yet that, inexplicably, is the political calculation Albanese, his advisors and Cabinet have chosen.
If the prime minister continues with his outright opposition to the nation’s highest form of inquiry, he will enter the new year not as a newly-married, 94-seat-winning, Coalition-destroying prime minister on top of his game, but as a weakened figure.
He will remind Labor MPs of the leader he used to be, the one who called and lost the Voice referendum and only just squeaked through his first campaign after a run of unforced errors.
Albanese had appeared to overcome his first-term poor performance with an overhaul of his team and communications style in the lead-up to the election campaign.
But the last fortnight has seen a revival of those old traits, the testiness, the inability to generate and deliver a cut-through line that means something.
Those advising him against a Royal Commission are providing him with poor counsel, as the prime minister’s many excuses to defend his decision show.
They grow more numerous and insulting by the day. If it weren’t a matter of life and death, they would be laughable.
First up, he complains that a Royal Commission will take too long.
‘More than a hundred areas of investigation have been called for in a Royal Commission by the Coalition if you go through them all,’ Mr Albanese claimed just before Christmas.
‘That would report in many years to come. And there hasn't been a Royal Commission held recently that has not had an extension of time.
Firstly, the terms of reference are set by the government, so it is ridiculous to suggest the ones being proposed by the opposition would be carried. Secondly, the very point of a Royal Commission is that it is meant to be comprehensive. It does not preclude other snap inquiries being carried out at the same time, such as the one the prime minister has already commissioned into the intelligence agencies. Or is it that the prime minister means ‘just before the next election’ when he references the ‘years’ that a Royal Commission would take?
Providing a second excuse, Albanese said: ‘I just note that there was no Royal Commission called by the Howard Government after Port Arthur. There was no Royal Commission called by the Abbott Government after the Lindt Siege.’
Yet the family of Katrina Dawson, who was killed in the 2014 Lindt Cafe attack, is appalled at Albanese using that tragedy as a reason to avert an inquiry into the carnage on December 14.
They said the ‘one devastating incident’ at Lindt could not be compared to the build-up of antisemitism across Australia that serves as the backdrop to Bondi.
‘We are appalled that the prime minister, seeking to avoid a much-needed royal commission into antisemitism and Islamic extremism, would say that we don’t need a royal commission because there wasn’t one into the Lindt siege,’ Dawson’s parents and brother said in a statement.
‘The Bondi massacre is just the latest of so many attacks on Jewish Australians that have taken place over the last two years and two months. And there are now more anti-Jewish demonstrations taking place. Our country has become divided and we must do everything possible to heal that division.’
This same comparison applies to the 1996 Port Arthur massacre. There were no warnings about Martin Bryant, nor did then prime minister John Howard face accusations that he was risking a dangerous event if he did not crack down on gun control ahead of the attack taking place.
This week, Albanese returned to work with yet another excuse and a new tactic — gaslighting.
‘Where royal commissions are not as good, is to consider things that are not agreed, where people have differences of views and to enable, which is what it would do, a repetition of some of the worst elements,’ Albanese warned at his Monday news conference in Canberra.
Home Affairs Minister and Albanese loyalist Tony Burke claimed a Royal Commission would ‘effectively relive some of the worst examples of antisemitism over the last two years.’
In short, Labor thinks it would be too hurtful for the Jewish community to have an investigation into the explosion of antisemitic events across Australia since October 7, because they might be forced to hear the views and revisit the actions of the bigots who have been persecuting them.
Jews in Australia aren’t sending their children to sports and schools guarded by security and police because they are too frail to deal with the reality of antisemitism; they have been living with it every day since October 7. This is exactly why they want a Royal Commission.
Yet Albanese thinks he knows what’s best for them; it is gross political protectionism dressed up as paternalism. Or as Jenny Roytur, whose uncle Boris Tetleroyd was killed at Bondi put it to The Sydney Morning Herald, the act of a ‘coward.’
Overnight, there was yet another fresh justification — bureaucratic advice.
‘Our position is not out of convenience, it is out of conviction that this is the right direction to go in. And the actual experts, who are the current experts, have all recommended this course of action,’ Albanese said.
‘And we are following the advice that we receive from authorities who are in 2025 dealing with this atrocity.’
Royal Commissions are political choices, not ones outsourced to bureaucratic advice. And it is something Albanese knows well, given his Labor party over the years has variously campaigned for Royal Commissions into the former Coalition government’s welfare debt recovery Robodebt scheme, the banks, the Murdoch newspapers, (although this was never Labor policy it was relentlessly pushed by former prime minister Kevin Rudd, who Albanese subsequently appointed Ambassador to the US,) and the Australian Wheat Board scandal. Yet the party does not think a terror attack warrants.
The prime minister is obviously scared that an inquiry into antisemitism might blow back on him or elements of his Labor movement.
This was made obvious by the terms of reference that he issued in relation to the inquiry he started into law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
He wants former spy boss Dennis Richardson, who is widely respected, to investigate what the intelligence agencies knew and when, what judgements they made, whether they could have done more and if they need more powers to prevent a next time.
The words ‘antisemitism’ and ‘Jews’ don’t appear in the terms of reference. It is the inquiry you set up when you are searching for a scapegoat.
It is not just a failure of courage and moral clarity; it is also a political dead-end.
Because it means that every single antisemitic attack, like the Christmas morning firebombing of a Rabbi’s car bearing a ‘Happy Chanukah’ sign in Melbourne, will be laid at the government’s feet, as more evidence of a crisis that continues to pose danger to Jews and the public. And it will then be up to the government to defend these incidents, rather than simply refer them all to a Royal Commission already underway.
Anthony Albanese would love to be a Labor version of John Howard. But there’s a Coalition prime minister he’s starting to resemble, and it’s a far less flattering comparison — Scott Morrison.
The last prime minister to seriously bungle a national crisis was the Liberal Leader whom Albanese ousted in 2022, partly due to Morrison’s mishandling of the 2020 bushfires.
Morrison’s perceived abandonment of the country to holiday in Hawaii while bushfires raged at home, and his infamous ‘I don’t hold a hose, mate,’ in response, was an open and shut case of a politically disastrous gaffe.
Albanese’s handling of the Bondi terror attack has been a slow burn in comparison, reflecting his managerial, incremental and cautious style of government that has suited and benefitted him – until now.
But two gunmen hunting down Jews to kill them in broad daylight at Bondi Beach is not business as usual, or a domestic electoral issue that can be managed away, or forgotten about over the New Year period and with the passage of time.
Every day he delays and dithers is another day he adds to the pile of political problems mounting at his feet.
This is an adapted version of two articles first published by The Nightly. You can read them here and here.